It hurts because he was a friend.Yan’s voice came to him again, summoned from the part of Iris’s mind he usually kept under close watch. In the brief time he knew the boy, yes, Tev was a friend. Tev hadn’t grimaced when he found out Iris had a construct riding shotgun in his brain. Tev didn’t shy away from him like others often did. Iris sat up and hung his head on his chest. His bloody hands rested by his sides, fingers dripping.
“He’s just a kid,” Iris whispered. Tev had decided to work with Yan so he could improve communication between AI systems and humans. Tev had wanted to help. “He’s just akidand I’m—what am I doing?”
Only thing that’s left to do.
“How could this happen? How could I have allowed it to happen?”
As it always happens. The Light does not love.
The Light did not love. The Light did not care. That was a universal truth, one that the Starlit would never reveal, one that Iris had arrived at by himself. The Light had no children it watched over, no one’s well-being it cared for. The Light was there to birth them all into being and to welcome them back after their passing, and everything that happened in between was up to chance. It was up tothem. No grander will to follow. No ultimate being to place blames and hopes upon. Only people, doing the necessary thing.
His hands trembling, Iris made another incision just below the ribs and removed Tev’s heart and lungs. If this were a proper burial, he would fill the cavities with a synthetic foam to keep the shape, but this wasn’t a proper burial, and this wasn’t his temple. When Tev’s body had been relieved of all its organs, Iris placed them all neatly inside the jumpsuitand walked the makeshift satchel to an adjoining corridor, where he left it for the crabs and the mice to feast on. He took little solace in knowing that at least a part of Tev would return to the ecosystem; others would surely fail to see it that way. When he returned, Iris was met with Ishtan’s wide eyes staring at him only for a moment before the archaeologist shut them again and wrapped himself into a tighter ball on the ground. The moss around the archaeologist had been disturbed.
Iris wanted to reassure Ishtan that he knew what he was doing and was doing it with nothing but respect for Tev. But that explanation would need many words, and Iris had none left. Many words brought many troubles with them. They formed cracks in the meaning through which misinterpretations could flow, flow to favour anyone who drank them.
Iris had discovered this in the sutras he had spent the better part of two decades reciting, learning, embedding them so deep within his mind that they were now moulded to it. Parts of the words weaved through his bone marrow; others nestled between the fibres of his muscle. How many pages were now written into his fingertips? How many glyphs were burned into the blacks of his eyes? What meaninghehad taken from the sutras had been wrong, he was certain, for it brought him no comfort, no relief. Mother Nova had instructed him to read, to study, and so read and study he had, while doing little else, until he had read and studied it all. And none of it had made a difference. The damned meaning that had seeped from the spaces in the words, the damned meaning that Iris had drunk feverishly from the day he was given his first scripture was this:None of it mattered.
None of it mattered. He couldn’t deny that awful truth any longer.
Iris knelt beside Tev’s body and cut along the seams of his robes to make a large rectangle. As gently as he could, he moved Tev’s body on top of the fabric. His eyes ran across the singed bullet wound in Tev’s side.None of it mattered.Iris made the first fold across Tev’s chest. The rites, the tradition, the careful choreography followed by every Vessel, every Beacon to ever leave a temple, all of it was fluff. All of it was a distraction from the inevitable. The second fold draped across Tev’s legs, and Iris tightened the fabric around them. And now, the inevitable was before him. He had little to give to the living. He had little to give at all save for some words, and what good were words? What good would his words do for Yan?
Iris made the third fold.
You shouldn’t blame yourself.
Whom should I blame then?Iris snapped back. He tightened the fabric roughly, his fingers staining red what little white was left. The copper of old blood left ugly smears against the heavy white silk.
Why must there be blame?VIFAI asked softly.
“Because blame points the anger. It gives it a target,” Iris hissed. His fingers seized as he tied the final knot on Tev’s chest. Clenched in a fist, he pressed them against the floor to silence the fatigued muscles.
Why must there be anger?
“Because there’s nothing else!” Iris shouted. Ishtan shot upright from his shallow sleep, and his hand was at once on the gun. He glared at Iris, eyes wide in terror.
“I thought we’d been attacked again,” he muttered and retreated into himself with a shudder.
Iris bowed. “Forgive me, I’ve gotten myself worked up. Forgive me, Ishtan.” Iris bowed again, this time deeper. “I will stay silent. Please get some more rest.”
But Ishtan was already crawling to his feet. With a groan, he stood upright and staggered over. “When I saw what you had done to him”—the archaeologist gestured to Tev—“I didn’t have any words for you. I thought you’d desecrated the body, but now I see there was reason to that. It will be simpler to transport him this way, won’t it?”
Iris gave him a single nod.
“What have you done with the …?” Ishtan couldn’t bring himself to say the words.
Omissions. Iris knew those well. Silences that filled in for the words he was too weak to say out loud. “I’ve left it all out for the crabs and whatever else lives in these corridors. It will be appreciated. There’s still much good he can do, even after his passing.”
Ishtan thought for a while, tugging at his beard. “And that’s important, doing good after you’ve passed?”
Iris could do nothing more than shrug. He held his hands before him, dry blood lodged beneath his nails, more blood caked on his palms and knuckles. “Nothing is important, really, Ishtan. You have to understand that. Nothing has a given purpose. In the scale of the Light, it is simply that one thing becomes another. Tev’s heart will become a crab’s meal, and the crab may become our meal, and then when we pass, we will become something else’s meal. We will become energy, passed from one thing to another in an endless cycle of the One Beginning. It all becomes something else. Always.” Finished, Iris sank his face in his hands.
“Oddly, I find that comforting,” Ishtan muttered and crouched beside Iris. “When I pass, there will be no big funeral rites for me. No family will grieve me, few friends will come. I’ve led a solitary life that I have very few regrets about. But knowing I will be of some use, even when I am no longer me, is of some comfort. Thank you, Iris.”
Face still in his hands, Iris forced out a small, weeping chuckle. “You willalwaysbe. That’s the whole point, Ishtan. You will be as you are, the Light itself, watching itself play a different part in each different life.”
“Well,” Ishtan said, “I suppose that’s all right too.”
RETREAT
