… and slowly turned their faces away.
Back on the Spindle, I died, of course.
Not for very long.
There were enough people in the area who knew how unlikely it was that I was really dead for my death to stick for more than a few hours. The medics who declared me deceased had my body put in cold storage, unwatched, unobserved, until Cuxil stormed into the infirmary and declared that this was incredibly dangerous, incredibly cruel, and had my corpse transferred back to my room on theEmni, the door closed, the lights turned down and a firm injunction placed on all who’d seen this to try not to think too hard about it.
Thus, a return to life.
I do not regenerate, as the Sxil do. Bones do not reknit, flesh does not slowly crawl back up from the broken vessels of my body.Rather, in the dark, when I am unobserved, things that once were become again. It cannot happen when I am watched, is slowed even by people thinking about it, wondering what it might be. But leave me alone long enough, forget me hard enough, and things reset, always, back to how they were on theMyrmida, all those years ago. It is not that my body is not human; it is simply that it is made of that one, briefest snapshot of what human should be, caught in a single moment.
Some people have said they envy that.
I have told them that they are mistaken, for if my body cannot change and grow, what might that say for my mind?
By the time I was myself again
whatever myself means
whatever it is to be this me
The Executor was long gone.
Cuxil prepared breakfast, and together we sat in the galley of theEmnias she said: “I’m afraid that when you were declared dead, your visa was automatically revoked. Bit of a bureaucratic hiccup.”
This was not a bureaucratic hiccup; the Spindle wanted me gone, and my death was the simplest way to achieve this outcome. Strange, how the shock of shame landed, even after all this. But then again, I am in the habit of feeling ashamed of who I am, even when it seems like there are more important things to feel. “That seems fair,” I mused.
“There will be war,” she added, almost an afterthought, her mind elsewhere, as it so often was. “As expected. War.”
“Will the Consensus fight?”
“Almost certainly. War hurts. Of course, it hurts everyone – everyone suffers in war. But we of the Consensus feel every death, every cry of pain. We all know how it feels to die, to suffer, to be afraid, and it is… terrifying to us. It is soul-stopping. But so many whose lives are already hurting, already bleeding, have joined with our thoughts, and there comes a point where we must say: the painwe ignore is greater than the pain we will receive. We cannot stand by and let these things unfold. Of course, it helps that ours is a distributed sentience. There is no one place the Shine may target where we all will die. Rather, we will die everywhere, anywhere, wherever it is that we choose to fight.”
How strange it seems, for those who understand how death feels, to keep on fighting regardless.
“Maw,” she murmured. “What will you do?”
“I don’t know. I want to go home.”
“You can. You have that freedom.”
“I don’t know what the point of any of this is, Cuxil. Any of it. I have lived, and I have seen… and what is the point? What was any of this good for?”
She put her hand on mine, gave it a squeeze. The Consensus are famously prone to hugging, to kissing, to pressing their lips into your skin, to running their hands through your hair, sometimes misunderstanding that other peoples may not be as open, as direct in their physicality as those who have shared everything. It is not that minds who join the Consensus feel no shame – shame for their hearts, shame for their bodies; rather that in being joined, in being known, in being completely and utterly seen, shame has no choice but to be washed away.
“This life will be gone soon,” she breathed. “It will not be remembered. It will not be, as the Adjumiris say, sung in the stars. We are the seeds of the forest, are we not? Where we fall, others may grow. So live, Mawukana na-Vdnaze. Live. Before all is dust: live, and blaze bright.”
I departed the Spindle before the second dawn.
PART 4
The Size of Infinity
Chapter 46
The day the Edge reached Cha-mdo, some thirty-three years after the death of Adjumir and forty years after Lhonoja exploded, there were roughly 1.2 billion people on the planet.
Cha-mdo was one of the first world the Shine conquered during that initial expansion out of the wastelands of Ko-mdo. Every natural resource it had had been largely drained, the atmosphere tainted to the point of being stifling. Since the first message of the Slow, it had become something of a Unionist hotbed, with riots and protests against its largest Venture, Blue Land, an almost daily occurrence. Though rehabilitation of the planet could have been achieved with a little time and investment, the Executorium concluded it was better to write down the loss of the world as an acceptable cost, rather than waste the resources required to save it.
