Perhaps qe doesn’t remember me. Perhaps I have been wiped from qis memory banks.
Perhaps qe remembers me perfectly, and that is why qe does not care.
I watch qim go with a mixture of jealousy and rage, my awkwardness and unease hot in my face, suddenly heavy in my borrowed clothes.
“Shall we speak of things under a certain star?” said a voice to my left.
Agran spoke Adjumiri with an unfamiliar accent – the sound of the Spindle, perhaps, the sound of someone whose first language is now becoming their second. I answered in Assembly Adjumiri, vowels tinged with something of the Black Mountains. “I am always open to honest conversation.”
Agran smiled, nodded – Gebre would never have nodded – slipped in to stand by my side, gazing round the room. She hadswapped her workaday garb for what I took to be the more formal dress of a Spindler – intricate swooshes of colour weaving in and out of each other in tangled layers, as if Mama Ryukch had turned from gas to cloth and been twined around her limbs.
“I must apologise if I came across as… brisk earlier,” she murmured, speaking slow, careful, forming Adjumiri as if dredging the sound from some half-lost memory. “You asked about Adjumir. About things that… that I have not thought about for a long time. Things that are from a dead place, you see? On the Spindle, it is unacceptable to be rude. We live too close for anything but the height of good manners. Please accept my humblest apologies.”
“I was thoughtless. I spoke without thinking.”
“Yes,” she mused, “you did.” At my look of unabashed surprise, she smiled, broader, brighter than the reserved affect of the Xi – a flash of her parents, perhaps, a recollection of another way of being. “On Hadda, I am certain you would have been considered honest, not rude.”
“The Adjumiris I knew were always very direct,” I conceded.
“You spent time on the planet?”
“Yes. Some.”
“I would like to hear about that. I was going to ask what it was like, but I do not think you would expect me to summarise life on the Spindle in a few choice words, let alone the memories of a planet that has burned.”
I clicked my tongue in acknowledgement, a linguistic habit that came with speaking Adjumiri, and to my surprise, her smile widened, and she clicked in reply, then laughed at the effect. “You should meet my kindler,” she exclaimed. “Xe’d like you.”
“It would be my honour. Although I have to tell you right now, I’ve never had a stomach for kol.”
“Goodness, no – foul stuff.”
“Have you told your kindler that?”
“Xe knows. Xe disapproves. Xe tries not to, but I know… Xe is incredibly proud of me, and also, there are things I do, ways Ispeak xe does not understand. Perhaps never will.”
“You are doing well for yourself.”
“I suppose I am,” she sighed, turning the glass in her hands just like Hulder might have twisted that flower – but Hulder knew what qe did. In Adjumiri, her voice was broader, a little louder, as if the language itself encouraged disinhibition. “There isn’t really much choice, is there? When you are not born in any place, when every day you are reminded that though you are welcome, you are different. Just… a little bit different. You have to do well for yourself. You have to do so very, very well, if you are to do anything at all.”
I tilted my chin towards the place where the commotion had been – the shouting man, the hush of diplomats closing ranks. “What was that about?”
“The ambassador from Nitashi? You don’t know?”
“I live on a very small island in a corner of a planet where not many people go,” I sighed. “And though with Cuxil I do… a great many things, the galaxy is vast, no?”
She studied me for a moment, trying to read whether I was joking or not. She was better, perhaps, at judging these things than most – Spindlers had to be. She clicked once more, a habit borrowed from her ageing kindler when bustling about xer home, then shook her head, a mannerism of which her kindler most definitely would not have approved. “They say the Shine are preparing to attack Nitashi. It’s outside Lhonoja’s blast zone, population of less than three hundred million. They say that the Executorium has already voted, decided that it’s better business – better Shine, would you say? – to conquer Nitashi than try to protect the worlds it already has. Everyone’s seen the fleet build-up. Nitashi wants the Accord to send aid, but it’s not a full Accord member, never signed the protocols, and anyway, the blackships…”
“The Accord won’t openly engage in war with the Shine while there are planet-killers pointed at its worlds.”
“Quite. I’m sure there’ll be a proxy war, if the invasion doeshappen. Arms and resources funnelled through whatever blockade the Shine puts about the planet. Perhaps they’ll ask you to help. They say the ghost of Hasha-to is the most accurate Pilot to ever cross the dark, capable of flinging a ship through arcspace and out the other side to within a mil of its intended destination. Perhaps they’ll give you a nullship, ask you to turn smuggler.”
“I had no idea people said so much.”
“This is the Spindle. Conversation is our business.”
“What else do people say, if you don’t mind me asking?”
Her eyes flickered across the other guests, wondering perhaps how many nearby might speak Adjumiri, understand our gentle murmurings. Fewer and fewer every year, I wanted to say. Soon this speech that should be sung between the spires will be a whispered code, muttered in gloomy places between dying friends.
