That moment passed, as with all things.
“Good luck,” I muttered, and turned to go.
“Heom,” he blurted, and the name stopped me. “Glastya Row.There’s a legend among the Unionists – a folk tale, if you will. After they killed Sarifi, one of her lieutenants – a lover, some say, her husband perhaps – either way, a rebel was taken from Heom, sent to Hasha-to. They say the dark did something to him. They say there were almost sixty Managers, Middlemen, security in the factory on Hasha-to, all armed, and they weren’t enough. In some corners of the Union – some rather impious corners – people pray to the ghost, beg it to come back, set them free. Have you heard of it?”
“Sounds like a nightmare,” I replied, and walked away with his gaze – or rather, no, worse, far worse, hisexpectations– on my back.
Chapter 38
Things people have expected me to be:
Mad, a gibbering wreck barely capable of speech.
A monster, stalking through the murderous dark.
Silent, alien, other – and by implication lesser, reduced, diminished, not a creature of sentience at all but rather an object, a thing to be studied.
Quietly dangerous. A monster hidden beneath a polite smile, to be kept on a leash, guarded, no matter what.
I do not know whether the darkness made it so that I follow expectation, or whether I have always been this way. Certainly I know that if a man expects me to die, then I will most likely stay dead for as long as they really put their attention to it. But if they forget – or worse, for even a moment start to believe – that my corpse may in fact not be decaying in the ground, may not be withering down to its constituent parts, but may in fact be that most terrible of things –coming back to get you– well then.
Well then.
Regrettably, I also somewhat expect myself to suffer, to feel agony, to suffocate, to choke, to lie bleeding upon the ground, to die. When I went with the Unionists in those early days back to Hasha-to – when we were instantly caught, instantly killed in our high-minded folly – the wardens there threw my body out intothe dark and forgot about me. It took me days to crawl back to the airlock, one fingertip at a time. Days of waking only to feel my flesh boil away again, my blood turn to gas within my veins, my skin bubble and burst as again and again and again I died. I tell myself that by the time I made it to the interior of that place I had gone quite, quite mad with dying, and that is why things fell out the way they did. Certainly the boundaries between what was real and what was not had been burned away, and flesh, matter, energy – they all lost a certain meaning as I burned through the halls of Hasha-to.
I am assured that of the many, many people I killed that day, hearts ripped from chests, nerves from bone, only two were debtors. Debtors held no interest to me; I already understood their pain and their fear. Rather, it was the warders, the ones who beat and killed and didn’t seem to care who I found fascinating, even if I didn’t learn a huge deal as they died. Disappointing, really, the whole thing. It would appear that when the fascination comes upon me, my methodologies of enquiry remain deeply flawed.
Some debtors did escape after I was done, hijacking a cargo ship and making it to the stars in the bloody aftermath of my passage. But well over a hundred stayed behind, certain that they’d just be punished more if they fled, that there couldn’t be anywhere for them to go. It wasn’t like they’d been given any reason to think there was. So much for the ghost of Hasha-to.
In the face of so many conflicting expectations arising from events such as these, I remain unclear who I am, who I would be if I were just left to my own devices. I wonder whether it is possible to exist as a person at all without measuring yourself against others. I wish sometimes that I was strong enough to be myself in company without company turning me into something else. I wonder who that person would be, and am sometimes grateful never to find out.
Later, I slept, and for the first time in a very long time dreamed of Gebre.
Te didn’t seem to approve of something, but I didn’t know what.
On Xihana, they had warned me I might dream of ter, after I returned from Adjumir that final time. The Major had wanted to impose a full quarantine on my island, just as she had when Yulin died. Rencki talked her down, though for a while no one was visited except remotely, a slew of psychologists all with variations of the same question – but how did the death of a planetfeel, and describe darkness as home and loss as curiosity.
I had done my best to tell my examiners about Gebre, hoped that someone would mention ter in a paper. A young anthropologist had bawled as I’d talked, which I’d found very confusing. “Sorry, sorry!” they’d blubbered. “It’s just all… I’m so sorry!” A far older professor had nodded and said: “Well yes, that all makes total sense.”
Now, here te is, sitting on the edge of my dreams again.
“Ah good,” te muses. “You do remember me.”
“Always. Always. Gebre. Always.”
If te heard me, te didn’t answer.
And then in the first morning, the earlier of the two sunrises that bloomed and withered daily on the Spindle, hé arrived.
Chapter 39
The conference opened, as all things did on the Spindle, with the building of the house.
This was an entirely ceremonial affair, taken from some half-forgotten tradition of some half-forgotten ancestors of the first builders of the Spindle. In the middle of the plaza, between a grove of fruit trees and a teeming lake of red and silver bio-grubbing fish, the framework of a house had been constructed and a pile of dried leaves plucked from the tallest trees of the oxygen farm laid out beside it. Each delegate was invited to approach the pile, choose a handful of arm-long, torso-wide leaves, and weave them into the walls, constructing with their fellow ambassadors the place of meeting.
“Sounds like a team-building exercise to me,” grumbled Jione, the ambassador from Xihana.
“I think it’s delightful,” Cuxil replied. Cuxil found most things delightful.
