The arcspace interface couldn’t connect to my skull through the survival suit. I tinkered anyway, trying to jump some sort of connection to the interface to see if I could patch a call across the dark, reaching out to some other Pilot, somewhere else. My experience with the Tryphon had been less than promising in that regard, but perhaps I’d get lucky. Perhaps somewhere there was someone listening.
The work kept me occupied for a while.
Then my suit warned me that my oxygen was running low, and my fingers were starting to go numb and my mouth was dry, so I stopped, sank back into the Pilot’s chair.
I knew I should feel something.
I wasn’t sure what.
I considered the med kit, contemplated shooting myself up with a sedative, or maybe a hallucinogenic, go out with a real bang.
It seemed quite likely that in this place, I would die, and then I would live, and then I would die, and then I would live, for the rest of eternity. I would freeze and suffocate, then reset, and no one would find me, and that would be my for-ever.
I wondered if I deserved it.
Concluded that the answer was somewhat mixed, but probably no. In the grand scheme of things.
Chatted with Gebre. Said: “Well, it’s been a rough few years. I don’t know if I’ve done right with my time, not really, though I did try. There were always reasons not to try harder, reasons not to imagine I could do more – but then I’d see all these people desperate to help, desperate to be the heroes, and where are they now? Where are they now? So I suppose what I’m saying is I don’t know what the answer is. I don’t know how you’re meant to be this small in a universe this big, this insignificant in a galaxy where every decision matters, where every life is precious. I don’t know how to feel so huge and so loud inside, and so small and quiet before the dark.”
Gebre didn’t answer, and we were tiny, and the vastness around us was so impossibly vast, so unfathomable in its blackness, that suddenly being tiny felt OK, like a very normal kind of thing to be.
I sang a bit.
Half-remembered tunes from Adjumir, which I was almost certainly botching.
Tonal languages found across the Accord: Eekullee, Maihangjo, Redland Spirit-Speech.
Redland Spirit-Speech is a sacred language, taught to only a handful of people on a small subcontinent of a not especially densely inhabited planet. Children are chosen at birth to speak it,trained in seclusion, and often, when they hit maturity, run away, flee from the imposed bonds of duty that were thrust upon them, only to pop up some forty years later, tired and haggard, at an archivist’s door to say:This thing I cannot forget, others should know before I die.
Strangers can learn it now, there are resources available, but doing so is considered profane, and so it sits, trapped in binary bits, on an untouched databank somewhere in a dusty corner of the galaxy.
The kekekee of B48TCLM1 are born in the clouds and live their entire lives without touching the ground. Their sentience was initially missed, leading to an awkward moment when planetary investigators realised that not only had they revealed themselves to a moderately advanced civilisation, they’d also revealed the existence of interplanetary travel and atomic energy. The kekekee however didn’t seem to mind. The rest of the galaxy sounded awful, they said; but if people wanted to visit, that was understandable, given how wonderful their world was.
would be nice not to also be gasping now; try to stop it, slow my breath, but my lungs are beyond my control
The kekekee language is a language of clicks and songs, of puns captured in the tiniest shift of a note, a quarter-tone, of hilarious jokes expressed by turning a major to a minor key, in outrageous syncopation and heartbreaking flutters of atonal staccato. Many efforts have been made to learn it by many gifted scholars, and at every attempt the kekekee have tapped their beaks and smoothed their feathers and explained: well, it’s nice that you tried.
gasping is panic panic is death and I know this and it does not make a difference
Wheeze out some words, Black Mountain Adjumiri, a language that will probably be dead not long after me, in the grand scheme of things. Ditties designed to teach children the sounds of the mountain:The lounging lorellel lopes languidly.Harpy hepenes hophomeward hopefully.The eponymous Black Mountains are gone, of course. Perhaps clinging on is a mistake.
It’s not the death that scares me; it’s the coming back and coming back and coming back and coming back and coming back and coming back and coming back and coming back and coming back and coming back and coming back and coming back and
An alarm sounds somewhere.
It is almost certainly symptomatic of CO2poisoning that I don’t feel inclined to check on it.
I should be worried, and am not. This is the best kind of poisoning, I conclude. The absolute best way to have your blood burn.
I think about waking Maolcas up. Something about not denying choice, about giving agency blah blah blah blah
But no.
Don’t see the point of it.
At least when Maolcas dies, they will die only once.
I try to tell Gebre that I love ter.
