“So why am I here?” Khayyam asked me, patting his stomach and leaning back against the cool, slimy wall.
“Are you asking me or is that a rhetorical question?” I replied. I’d heard of rhetorical questions—strange beasts that few of us could command, and I was interested to know if this was an example worth remembering.
Khayyam didn’t help me out here. He lifted and dropped his shoulders as if he was suddenly struggling for breath. He looked past me, as though I no longer held any interest for him, and stared once more at the wall.
I tried to break him out of his reverie.
“I’ve heard about your Terran gods. Do they provide consolation at times like these?”
Khayyam didn’t answer at once. I listened to the soft dripping of condensation from the high windows down onto the concrete floor where we sat. Nobody touched the water that accumulated there, not for fear that it had been poisoned but because, deriving as it did from the life support modules, it was at the very least contaminated. One only has so many livers one can go through.
Khayyam’s delayed reply came as a hushed whisper.
“It has not been to any gods that I have turned during these bad years,” he said, his beard trembling. “Rather, I have turned to the past for consolation, to my memories. Luckily, nobody has yet torn these from me.”
And then the corners of his mouth rose subtly and a sheen of liquid formed across his eyeballs. He returned his gaze to the opposite wall. I looked there with him, but I could see nothing special about the brickwork other than it was slowly crumbling.
During the next few lunars our lives collapsed like a beaten lung into a dull monotony. Even torture becomes dull when it is habitual. What the interrogators did was a travesty of a real interrogation. Questions were asked, but so halfheartedly one knew that no answer was expected. Limb breakages were rare, more often a case of inattention than malice. I had two in that first half-lunar, a small finger and a wrist, but I recovered with ease and then the interrogators switched to other measures that were more profoundly psychological, that we were not supposed to even be aware of.
The Terran, it transpired, was tortured too, but only twice a lunar. His frail body could stand up to so little punishment, it was forever a wonder to me how he had escaped his own planet. How did he cope with the solar radiation in our system? How did his body not succumb to the rapid accelerations that came with flying past black holes? I asked, but Khayyam himself offered no explanation.
“I’m no astrobiologist,” he said before turning back to his wall and half-closing his eyes.
Apart from the beatings, the hardest part of every rotation was dealing with the boredom. The only window was the one that looked down on us, reminding us with its view of an unchanging star field that there was no chance for escape. Were we somehow able to break out of our cell, and out of our block, and out of our prison, we would all be dead in milliseconds. There was no atmosphere on this moon, after all.
I dealt with the quiet hours by meditating and formulating plans for my literary journal. They couldn’t keep me here forever, I reasoned. Possibly I was being naïve –they certainly could keep me here indefinitely if that was what the Imperial Police wished. Hask told me that he spent his time composing poetry in his head. Poems, he said, were easier to fabricate in the mind than stories, because you built the poem up one line at a time, adjusting the words, choosing only those that fit best, and then you memorised the result.
Hask told me he had memorised sufficient poetry since his incarceration to fill a book.
When invariably I grew despondent, and this was happening with increasing frequency, I took to watching Khayyam. From him, I heard no sobs, no moans, and I envied him his composure. When the third Thosk had been shovelled away, his body leaving a greasy stain for us to clean up, we were joined by a new arrival who took an immediate dislike to Khayyam, but even this seemed not to upset him.
“By the Leader!” the third Thosk, an ugly creature by the name of Krashen, remarked. “Did something die in here or is it just the Terran making that great stench?”
He approached Khayyam and stuck his nose right up in his face. To his credit, the Terran did not even flinch.
“You’re wasting your breath, Krashen,” I said. “He doesn’t speak our tongue. But if you know some Arabic, you’re welcome to start up a conversation with him.”
“Arabic?” Krashen spat violently on the floor. His spit fizzled on the bare concrete. He’d used his acid gland to do that, I observed; how long would it be before he turned his corrosive spit on the Terran?
I wondered if protecting Khayyam was now my personal responsibility.
I asked Hask what he thought.
“Do as you please,” he said. He was having a bad rotation—well, a bad lunar really. He spoke with a lisp. His lower lip had been cut away and then stitched back on during an extended interrogation session, and the swelling had yet to subside.
“I hate it when our own people resort to threats and violence,” I said, entirely unironically. Yes, the Imperial Police used violence as readily as my writers did the semi-colon; but they were a breed apart, and could be forgiven. For anyone else, violence was a low sin, and causing a fellow intelligent creature to suffer or to perish was unconscionable.
“I hate it too,” Hask said. I patted him on the shoulder and he began crying.
“That’s all right,” I said.
“Oh, look at the two lovers!” Krashen muttered, turning away in disgust. Maybe there were times when violence could be justified.
Khayyam, though, I knew would never turn violent in our cell. He didn’t have much of a choice. His attacking any one of us, even in self-defence, would end badly—fatally, I would say. He was tiny compared to each of us, and had muscles less evident than in the smallest Thosk infant. All he had was his mind.
I’d heard rumours that it was possible for Terrans to live wholly in their heads. I had always dismissed such gossip as preposterous, but now when I closely observed one who had need of his mind as an escape, I began to see the truth of it.
Krashen tried again and again to provoke Khayyam into a misguided act of retaliation, but it never happened. Khayyam would narrow his eyes and stare with renewed vigour at the wall, or sometimes he would get up and with his misshapen fingers trace the bumps and scratches once more.
I had to find out why.
One revolution, Krashen and Hask clashed over their food. Hask had stumbled and knocked both his meal and Krashen’s to the ground, and the fight that followed was brief and vicious and attracted the attention of the guards. They thrust open the cell door and immobilised both Thosks, and then a giant came in and lifted the sleeping men onto his shoulders. Then they were gone.
Khayyam and I were alone.
I crawled over to the Terran and propped myself up against the wall where he leant, ignoring the fuss, still staring at the wall.
“I’m dying to know what it is you see when you look at that wall,” I whispered.
“I hope you don’t mean that literally,” he replied.
“Was that a joke?” As with rhetorical questions, I didn’t feel on safe ground when it came to the Terran sense of humour.
“Everything is a joke if you consider it the right way,” Khayyam said. He drew in a deep breath; I could hear the rattling of his lungs as clearly as if they were outside his body. “Do you really wish to know what is there on the wall?”
“Absolutely.”
“My life is on that wall. Everything about me: who I am, where I have been, what I have done. Nothing is omitted.”
I looked again at the brickwork, but still I was mystified.
“I don’t understand,” I admitted.
“That’s good, in its way. If it was easy for anyone to understand I’m sure it would have been ripped from me as surely as my clothes were ripped away when I was arrested. Come.”
He rose, his knees cracking as they came to support his weight. He led me to the wall.
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br /> “Place your finger here,” he said. I did as I was told. “This is us. We are here. Can you feel this indentation? A bigger one, only a few millimetres away. That’s the planet where I was arrested; presumably it’s yours.”
“Yes, it was my home. Is my home, I ought to say.”
“And here, the next bump, is the sun that resides at the heart of your system.”
“Ah yes, I can feel it now.”
Suddenly Khayyam’s secret became clear to me. The wall, the crumbling brickwork, the scratches and dents and grooves cut into its surface: it was all some kind of map.
Startled, I stepped back to appreciate the whole. What Khayyam had shown me so far was as tiny as the thumb against the entire body. It was magnificent.
“Did you do all of this? Yourself?”
“Yes,” Khayyam said. I could discern the pride in his voice. “It took me a long time. I could not work when I was being observed, only at moments like this when I was paid no attention. After a disturbance, a fight, something like that. Each hole might take an hour, depending on what it represented. Moons less time, suns more. And these lines,” he said, taking my hand and leading it in the dimness to a groove scratched between large divots, “show the courses I followed to reach each system.”
“But there must be more than forty systems here!”
“Ssh, keep your voice down! But yes, forty, forty-five, and in every one of them an adventure that my memory has fastened on to. So you see, I am not really trapped here. I am free to wander among the stars of our galaxy, to remember what they are like and what I saw in each place.”
We heard footsteps. I withdrew and took up my meditations away from Khayyam. The Terran retraced a line here, a line there, his eyes closed; anyone watching us then would have seen the same thing as on any previous rotation. But now I knew: when he closed his eyes, Khayyam was travelling on his map, away from our prison cell and into the pristine waters of his memory.
Our exchange that rotation was like a tipping point in our relationship. I could divide my time in the cell to the lunars before the map and the lunars after the map. Once his secret was out, Khayyam seemed to lose any remaining fear he had of us, and he became our storyteller. Krashen was morally opposed to listening to anything the Terran had to say, so he kept to himself when we talked, but whenever we had the opportunity, Khayyam would sit down facing the wall, and whisper stories to me in Arabic. These I translated in the roughest terms so that Hask could understand.
“They’ll make for fine poems,” Hask explained. The rest of the time he sat in silence, transfixed.
“This dent here,” Khayyam said, “was the fourth planet in a system of ten. I don’t know your name for the system, but in Terran we call it the Spican system. It’s part of the Virgo constellation, a grouping of stars that, from Earth, look like they form a picture. It’s only when we got into space and began to see these stars first hand that we realised that they look nothing like what the ancients perceived.
“Anyway, the Spicans are all pirates of the worst sort. I was transporting a shipment of crystals when I was ambushed. They shot out of nowhere, whizzing up towards me like so many mosquitoes.
“Time was short. They’d be on top of me in minutes, and Spicans do not take prisoners. I cut the engines, sending my ship dark, and fired off flare missiles in every direction to confuse their heat sensors. This bought me about an hour, which was enough for what I had in mind. I coasted towards the gravitational well of the fourth planet, a supermassive gas giant. When I was close I fired the thrusters, briefly but strongly enough to have me in a dive that would clip the edge of the well. I could feel the heat burning through the hull already, and knew it would get much worse before I was out the other side.
“I was picking up speed and getting so hot that I could turn on the engines without drawing the Spican mosquitoes towards me, though what I didn’t know was that they were already there on my tail, swarming about in my slipstream.
“I almost lost control of the ship when I hit the upper atmosphere, but by angling my heat shields and firing the thrusters at just the right moment I skipped like a stone on water before slingshotting round the planet. Over the next hour I accelerated to five times what my thrusters alone were capable of, and because none of the Spicans had matched my trajectory I lost them on the other side. They were blinded by the atmosphere and the heat so once more I cut power to propulsion and sent it all to the cooling system, and when the gas giant was behind them they couldn’t see me against the dark coldness of space.
“So I’d beaten the Spican pirates. Not many have. I like to think that, when they realised their prey had slipped their grasp, they might even have tipped their hats in my direction. When I feel defeated, I look at that patch on the wall and I see it again in my mind, the chase, the escape, the thrill of it all.”
Translating Khayyam’s stories was the most fun I’d had in longer than I could remember. His anecdotes were so full of Terran sayings and metaphors that stretched and tested my own understanding that I felt my brain was being liberated by the workout. I could tell Hask felt the same way; he would suggest words that fit the context better, or that he might later coax into another line in his poetry.
We rationed Khayyam’s stories. It wouldn’t do to have him talk all day, though that’s what Hask and I wanted. Talking for too long, and with animation, was the first step to renewed pressure from the guards, and more serious interrogation sessions. But not only that, we knew that we were stuck in the cell, and would be for many solars. If we’d burned through the stories we’d have had nothing to look forward to with each passing revolution; Khayyam was our consolation.
“Look down there, in the corner,” Khayyam said one revolution. Hask couldn’t see it at first and asked permission to go and inspect the brickwork.
The circle Khayyam had scratched out was the largest on the wall, and by quite some measure.
“That’s Bellatrix,” he said proudly. “I was piloting a team of scientists around the system. They wanted to see the death of a star, and Bellatrix was approaching that moment. Compared to our own sun it’s massive, and hot too. So hot that it burns a bright whitish-blue.
“Uki was the woman who taught me all about the star. I’d never been that interested in science—people fascinated me more, and besides, I was the pilot and navigator, not an astrophysicist. But she was determined that I would learn something about the systems we explored together, and like us now, there was a lot of empty time to fill. You had to talk about something, so the universe is what we discussed.
“She was a magnificent woman. The most magnificent woman I ever had the good fortune to meet, and also the sad good fortune to leave behind when our time ended. It would never have worked between us—we were too different. When we got together the whispers on the ship became intolerable. You’d have thought that scientists wouldn’t care so much about a man’s background, but clearly that wasn’t true on this particular ship. One, an American, came right up to me and told me to back off, to mind the ship and not the girls. I could have struck him across the face for the way he spoke to me, but that would have just meant more trouble for Uki.
“We understood each other. We were both outsiders. There have never been many Arabic cosmonauts, and Uki I think was the only Inuit I ever met, on Earth or otherwise. She taught me about her culture, and I remember how on our last day before the hyperspace leap back to the solar system, she told me about the significance of Bellatrix and Betelgeuse.
“On Earth, even in the days of computers and spaceships, the heavens have always been the first place we look to know where we are in the year. My family would always remark, with the same surprised voice, that the days were growing longer as summer approached, and when the nights grew in closer and closer announcing the looming winter they would be just as innocently astonished. Every year was the same.
“Well, in Inuit culture, spring is marked by the appearance high in the southern sky of the two stars, Bellatrix
and Betelgeuse. They would flash brightest after sunset, before the light from the other stars in the sky could be seen with the naked eye, and seeing them would always be a cause for celebration. The Inuits had a word for the two stars when they showed together. Akuttujuuk. It means, ‘those two placed far apart.’
“When Uki told me about this legend she cried, silently but with two silver tears crossing her dark cheeks. We shared a kiss full of love but empty of passion, and then she went with the other scientists to the sleep chamber.
“She woke when we were orbiting high above the Earth. She’d told me to program her machine for one day’s extra sleep, and in that extra day I left. I took a berth on a merchant carrier shipping mining tools to one of Neptune’s moons. I worked as a deck hand, rather a step down from my previously exalted position, but I was desperate to get away and needed to bury myself in work to escape the sadness.
“There are many days when the loneliness I feel is crippling. It is some consolation for me to have that scratch on my map to study when it hits hardest. I think of Uki and of Akuttujuuk; the sadness does not disappear, but it is transformed into something transcendent.”
When Khayyam wasn’t telling us stories, he was answering our questions. Neither Hask nor I knew the first thing about the people of Terra. I had learnt Arabic because it was trendy and an easy way to secure extra credit during my studies. English was popular in trade circles and literary ones, too, thanks to its magnificent simplicity. It possessed only twelve tenses, and these could be mastered in a lunar period. No Terran was fluent in Thosk; we have forty-two tenses to describe real, imaginary, and metaphysical time, and it’s simply too complex for their miniscule frontal gyrus.
The tales held us to such a degree that I began not to notice the interrogations. That could have been a trick of the mind, or it could have been that the interrogations were shorter and greatly reduced in frequency. It was a suspicious change to our routine.
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