“A magnetic shield won’t be enough, not at forty light years from Lhonoja” was the professional assessment of any even halfway-informed observers. “And though the population could go underground, it’s unlikely the biome will recover, so all they’d really be doing is deferring death for a century at most. Even if they do survive the initial radiation burn, it’ll only be a few hundred years before the neutrino blast arrives, and while it will be significantly weaker than the destruction wrought on Adjumir, it shouldstill be enough to eradicate what little is left of the atmosphere, and so, you see, it’s really evacuation or nothing.”
To which the Shine chose…
… nothing.
They got Managers out, of course. Senior Executives and any high-skilled Middlemen who could be of service to them. A few million here, a few million there. The rest of the population was politely informed that at T+40 they would be absolutely safe from the blast, nothing to worry about here, and though the Unionists railed and roared and raged, cried out no, no, no, this is how we die! – generally speaking, it is easier to believe a comforting lie than a terrifying, unstoppable truth.
“We will send ships!” the Accord proclaimed, when at T+38 it became apparent that the Shine really, really wasn’t going to evacuate its own people. “We will send transports, we will help…”
But the worlds of the Accord had denounced the Shine’s invasion of Nitashi, imposed an economic blockade. Thus, their ships were refused passage, and thus the people of Cha-mdo were left to die.
Can’t have it both ways, the pundits said. You can’t condemn the Shine for murdering millions on Nitashi while simultaneously offering to send humanitarian aid. Because of course, the war on Nitashi still blazed, a constant guerrilla battle between occupying armies and the blockaded population. There had not been much in the way of resistance to the initial landings, all of seventeen years ago – Nitashi did not have the resources to resist – but skirmishes still raged and violence flared across the planet, fuelled, the Shine proclaimed, by Accord vessels secretly smuggling in arms and supplies to the terrorists below.
“Thank you for your offer of assistance,” the Executorium replied to the Accord as the Edge washed closer to Cha-mdo, burning everything in its path. “But our scientists say the people of Cha-mdo will be absolutely fine.”
What do you do when someone lies to your face so calmly, so repeatedly, so blithely?
The Accord were hardly about to go to war to save the lives of millions who did not care enough to want to be saved.
I was on the command deck of theDuty’s Watch, a light-transport-turned-smuggler, when the news of Cha-mdo arrived.
“Well,” said Pitt, “I guess that’s that, then.”
Pitt was, like most of the crew, Nitashi-born. His skin was the silken, almost translucent pale of the southerners of his world, where daylight was a cool, fleeting thing, and he preferred the hand-speak components of Normspeak over the verbal, when he deigned to speak it at all. He wore his braid of twisted dark hair on the left side of his head, woven with red silk; to those who knew how to read them, its twinings could tell you not merely his culture, but also his clan, a little bit about his parentage and something of his sexual preferences. The art of reading this weave had been previously kept contained to Nitashi-born, though as the war on the planet raged, some refugees were starting to break the taboo and whisper its secrets to historians on other worlds.
What if we die? they asked.
What if we all die, and the meaning is lost?
One of the first acts of the Shine, when it invaded Nitashi, had been to enforce head-shaving, and ban the writing of soul-names in any and all places. It was an expression of power, naturally, but also the first step in breaking the link between the past of that world and the future they intended to create.
The Nitashi crew of theDutywere prone to those same great outbursts of emotion and sentiment that confused more restrained cultures. Life in space, years of exile had not dented this primal cultural urge, but rather adapted it so that it fell into one of two categories – either raging, roaring fury that screamed itself out across the command deck, or utter, dismissive, total contempt.
The death of 1.2 billion citizens of the Shine on Cha-mdo was met with the latter, and given everything, I did not think it was appropriate to explain that they were innocents, that they werechildren and parents and lovers, that they had been lied to, they had been lied to, and now they were burning. It would not be a quick death, the end of Cha-mdo. As with Adjumir, the light of Lhonoja would grow hotter, brighter, brighter, hotter, and then go out, but the relatively quick boiling of the seas and burning of the skies would not be as it was on Adjumir. Enough time had passed for the Edge to weaken, and so on Cha-mdo the people would die from radiation sickness, over days, maybe weeks, depending on where they were relative to the poles, or how deep they managed to burrow beneath the planet’s surface. They would sicken slowly, their organs dissolving, their skin sloughing off like water, hair falling out, teeth falling out, but still awake, watching those they loved perish – a terrible, terrible death, happening across a whole world.
“Fuck them,” my Nitashi crewmates declared. “Fuck them if they think we fucking care.”
Big emotion is not the same as big empathy. Indeed, I have often observed that it leaves little room for anything but itself, driving out all nuance or space to feel anything else at all.
In contrast to Pitt’s contempt, Jahen and Krill withdrew to their quarters to scream and wail at the futile, insufferable, pointless grief and horror of it all. This was a pastime they often practised, and though I had initially found it disconcerting when I came on board, you grew used to it. They invited anyone else who was feeling overwhelmed with it all to join them, and Ceitdh, the nearest thing we had to a qualified medic on board theDuty, endorsed it as a good idea.
“Studies have shown that a crew that is in touch with its emotions – even its most destructive, hurtful feelings – will perform better in combat conditions,” xe explained. “So long, that is, as the emotional experience is honest and thoughtful, rather than a mere performance for social standing or born from unresolved internal confusions.”
“What if you can’t tell the difference?” I’d asked. “Betweenpeople actually feeling something and people simply performing a thing? Or is the difference irrelevant? What if people think they’re feeling one feeling, but they’re actually feeling another?”
“Well then,” xe mused, “I imagine you’re going to find navigating social relationships really rather difficult.”
Xe was not wrong.
In my little quarters on theDuty, I scanned the commnet, trying to find something – anything – to express the grief of the death of a planet.
The Shine, of course, had nothing. All comms from Cha-mdo had been severed long before the Edge arrived. The people who died there would die unseen, unheard. No one would know if they were brave, frightened, in pain. Perhaps in a few centuries, archaeologists would return to the world and start picking through the corpses, but when the dead number in the millions, all talk is generic. So many children’s bodies found here; so many pets shot before they could burn; so many bunkers where the people suffocated as they died, having forced the doors to get too many people inside, having clawed at each other in their efforts to stay alive.
A few Accord commnet channels tried their best to treat the event with solemnity, but in the absence of actual data from Cha-mdo, all they could manage were best-guess reconstructions of the likely events. One drama imagined what it might be like to be a family with a child, and the agony of making a decision about whether to end that child’s life before it could die in slow, excruciating pain.
I thought of Zanlan then. Wanted to write to the producers, tell them,This is what I saw, this is how it went, but the idea filled me with shame.
In the end, I turned off the commnet and went to bed, as did the rest of the galaxy, while Cha-mdo burned.
