His smile was thin and empty, and he didn’t answer.
I tried again, blurted: “Cuxil had to… I cannot imagine what she promised to get the Tryphon for you. There are people who died for this device. They would have died anyway, but the manner of it – it has been a source of distress. The way it happened. Was distressing. And I am… curious.”
“Which are you more?” he asked, with a level of polite interest that showed no fear. “Distressed, or curious?”
The light in this room is low. A flicker in the power supply and it would go out altogether, and then who knows what I might be. I can feel the shadows moving, almost taste the terminator linebetween day and night as it races across the Spindle, the great black storm spinning on the surface of the planet below. I think if I wanted to I could step out from between these walls and fall for ever into it, plummet into the planet’s liquid core. How strange it would be to go swimming in a gas giant. How peculiar it would feel to be at once lifted up and crushed.
Binary stars swinging in brass behind his head; I am driving away from Kiskol, away from Gebre again and again and again, caught in the storm, leaving ter behind, Rencki is a ship now, fancy that, qe is burning qis way between the stars, and I have not changed, two scars on my ear, one scar on my hand, my leg aching where it is broken/not broken from the fires of Hasha-to and…
A polite cough.
The light in the room is stretching, growing a little thin. It is a thing that is unnatural – I know that is the word for it, “unnatural”, a behaviour that is not of this world. Usually at this point people start running in terror, scrambling away from me in fear, calling out monster, monster, plague of the dark and so on and so forth.
Not Ulannad. The Lordat sits before me, hands folded over his belly, watching with the same curiosity that I know is reflected in my eyes, and suddenly I feel…
… incredibly tired.
And not curious at all.
The light slithers back to its normal state, no cruel magics cast unnatural shadows up the walls.
I stood, brisk and fast. Muttered: “I should go.”
He rose too, touched his fingers to his chin in greeting and farewell. Said: “You are always welcome here,” and seemed, remarkably, to be sincere.
As Ulannad walked me to the door, the moments before seemed to fade like yesterday’s dreams. My bag hung empty at my side, the last thing that Gebre had given me now in a stranger’s hand. In the door, a thought, a question that I couldn’t keep down. “Haveyou seen Corpsec? If the Executor is coming, then Shine security will be here too.”
“They’re here,” he answered with an easy ripple of shoulder, tilt of head. “We had one lad come by a few turns ago, said he was a refugee from the undersea mines, spoke all the right words, talked about revolution, freedom, the binary suns. All too good, too convincing. Most people who come to the Union are terrified, find it impossible to trust, won’t even whisper the words –freedom,change– in case they get bitten. Corpsec sometimes swallows its own propaganda, I think; imagines we’re all raging ideologues.”
“I’ve met plenty of Unionists these last ten months; there are more than a few of you who can get worked into a passion about collective action.”
He laughed. The laugh was strange, neither the tight, chest-held-in chuckle of the Shine nor the great rolling bellow of Xi, who do not laugh until they do, and then are almost incapacitated by their passions. I wondered if this was how people experienced merriment on the Spindle – with a soft drift of irony, a sideways quirk of humour that skewed all it saw. “Absolutely!” he proclaimed. “There are some tedious rebels out there, pumped up with purpose. Most of us don’t start that way – most of us start tiny, frightened and alone.”
“Your accent… Cha-mdo?”
“Theymem Group, born and bred. Yours?”
“Tu-mdo. Antekeda Venture. Heom.”
“Right. Heom. Makes sense.” His eyes sparkle; he is an intelligence-master at the end of the day, set on the Spindle for precisely the same reason as everyone else – to hear the gossip of the galaxy. “There was a rebellion there, over a century ago. Sarifi im-Yyahwa, martyred – complicated word, ‘martyred’, but a good one for feelings, for making people feel – martyred for her ideas. Not many of her words survived, and they’re somewhat problematic in some of their reasoning, but that doesn’t matter. People don’t really need the reality, just the stories, and she… Glastya Row… If theyhadn’t bombed it, maybe people would have forgotten all about her.”
“Perhaps.”
“City’s still paying off its debt, they say.”
“I wouldn’t know.”
“No. I suppose not. Management’s good at making you pay, without telling you what for.”
This is the place where we should ask each other, as all who speak the language of the Mdo do, how the other one got out. How did Ulannad come to be here, so far from the Shine, singing the endless chant? He has five scars on his left hand – marks of an engineer. But no – it is not acceptable to ask these things at a first encounter. First there must be small talk, an establishment of safety. Later, there will be a sharing of food and drink, and maybe after that – many hours after that – we will share our tales of horror and pain, lives lost and blood shed, and the guilt of being among the few – the very, very few – who made it out alive.
I am curious, of course. But I am also ashamed, and for a while now my shame has been greater than the lure of fascination.
“Are there many Unionists? On the Spindle, I mean?”
“Enough. Every year, more and more come to us from the Shine. The Union is growing, the Executorium can’t stop every transmission – people know that the Edge is coming. Cha-mdo is less than twenty light years from destruction, and they haven’t done anything. Nothing. Some talk about a magnetic shield, but at that distance it won’t be enough, will burn out within a week. That’s one point three billion people, and they talk about twenty years as if it’s enough time, as if it’ll all be fine – but it’s just talk. Talk and talk and talk so as not to be scared. We’re going to stop these bastards. Well – we’re going to try.”
He seemed so certain that for a moment I almost believed him.
