by Exurb1a
Almost all of us in the camp were original sapiens, in the places that counted anyway. We ate and shat, smiled and cried.
I had been on Last Stop perhaps a century and a half. I started every day with a few cups of coffee, took a walk around the old city ruins, stared at the sun a bit. Then it was time for racing boxcars around the huge arena we'd had the helper spheres construct. Sometimes we held a small championship. The aim was to run your opponents off the track and into the stands, or to bust up their boxcar, or just all out injure them. Injuries were rare though and the hospital took care of everything fine.
After the races we'd all get blind drunk in the bar in our camp. Sometimes we put on a movie or a connectome, but most of the time we just drank and smoked and talked. If it was a nice evening—and it usually was—then we went outside and laid on the sand with our drinks and quietly slipped into our own fantasies of how things were back when the empire was still humming along.
That was life. It was fine.
Maybe you're thinking racing boxcars and drinking is a baseless existence, but to that I'd say: well, what's the purpose of your life then? Look deep enough into whatever it is you love, and you'll find the black nothing at the bottom too.
One day a load of us were in the bar. Rosen peered out of the window and said, “My my…”
“What is it?” I said.
“Voidsphere, big one too.”
I raced out with the others and we watched the sphere setting down at the edge of town, perfectly silent, maybe the height of twenty men. No door opened. Instead someone pushed out of the hull like a shoe's heel through rubber; a woman.
Her clothes were metafabric. They faded from colour to colour, then looped back around and repeated the pattern.
She was thin and pale. Her eyes were almond-shaped and very wide. She appeared entirely unruffled about being among a group of men in the middle of nowhere. Either this meant she was heavily armed, or she'd travelled quite a bit and could handle danger.
Genly raced up to her offering a hand and she took it and they exchanged words. Rosen introduced himself next, trying to play it cool.
Then she and I greeted each other. I estimated she was around seven hundred Standard Years. She appeared about twenty-five, but faces have long been untrustworthy in establishing true age. The hands though, look to them and examine the skin on the back. Hers didn't look old but they didn't look too natural either, pocked in places and with enough wrinkles to put her over the half-millennia mark.
The woman was called Lysithea as it turned out. Her Galactic accent wasn't strong. Her grammar was great.
When all the pleasantries were over she said, “What do you all do around here?”
Rosen said, “Not a lot, I'm afraid.”
She looked about at our camp. Patches of her skin warped slightly in the light. Her dress did the same. I decided on caution.
“What's the news from the out?” Rosen said.
The girl shrugged. “You're the first populated orb I've come across in…” She glanced at her voidsphere. “A while.”
“That's a strange vehicle you have there. Where's it from?”
“It was abandoned on an orb called Tibble. I tell it where to go and it goes there.”
“Sounds like a good system.”
It had been half a century since our last visitor. He'd been a man called Tomlin and he smoked all our cigarettes, drank all our scotch, pissed on the bar floor, then took off in his crappy voidship during the night.
Lysithea’s face warped a little again and she said, “Is there a Fifth emissary on your world?”
Was that what she was here for?
“Yes,” I said.
“Would one of you like to take me to them?”
“I will,” Genly said a little too enthusiastically.
“No,” Rosen said. “You're on water duty today.” He looked to me. “You take her if you're not busy.”
“I'm not,” I said.
“Well gentlemen,” Lysithea said. “Thank you for your hospitality.”
“There's a house half a mile away if you need somewhere to sleep,” Rosen said.
“Thank you, but I'll live in the ship while I'm here if it's all the same to you.”
Rosen nodded.
“Shall we?” Lysithea said to me and we set off for the emissary.
She followed behind and we didn't say anything for a few minutes as she took in the ruins. There were the towering stone heads, the great crashed ships on the horizon, the matterscape, and the filament tip of the accelerator rising all the way into the sky and onto the lip of space.
When she finally spoke she said, “How's my Galactic?”
“Your grammar is great.”
“Thanks. It's the first time I've used speech in a very long time.”
I suppose the obvious question was, How the hell else would you talk? but to be honest I didn't really want to know. I'd noticed small crystalline bumps on the back of her head, peeking through her hair. Perhaps that was a technology of some kind.
“Were you born here?” she said.
“No, I came a while ago.”
“From where?”
“The empire called the planet Minnith.”
“You lived alone?”
“No, with my family.” There was a pregnant silence and I filled it with, “They're gone now.”
“You don't have to tell me.”
“It's okay, really. Did you have a family, if I can ask?”
“No. I'm from Ertia.” She bent to the ground, plunging her hand beneath the soil. “I love earth,” she said. “It's different on every orb.” She rubbed a few clods of dirt between her fingers. “Yours is…very coarse.”
I wondered if I should apologise. Instead we just walked on.
“There's an orb called 'Annie's World'. They have the best soil there. It runs through your fingers like water. It smells like lemons,” she said.
“What's a lemon?” I said.
“Now I think about it I'm not so sure.”
The sun came out from behind the clouds and warmed us. The grey ruins were shining white. The insects hummed and sang. A thing was actually happening. Or, it felt like it.
“What do you want with the emissary?” I said.
“I've never met one,” she said as though to herself. “I've heard lots about them. Is it true they can levitate?”
“I don't know. People could do that with technology not so long ago.”
“Hm,” she said.
I've fucked it all up with stupid sense, I thought. “Did you come to ask him a question?” I said. “The emissary, I mean.”
“Him?”
“Yes, he's a young boy. I don't know why.”
“Strange. I heard they were all old women.”
“They're neither really…” I said quietly and there was another silence. Stop with the fucking sense, I thought.
We passed over the main plaza of the city and into the bar quarter. There was a small cafe open on the high street. “Are you thirsty?” I said.
“I don't really get thirsty.”
“Well, would you like a drink maybe?”
“Sure.”
There were perhaps ten folk inside, a few I recognised. We sat out on the street. Two older men were sat opposite, having a conversation in some exotic dialect of Galactic Standard I couldn't place. We ordered wine and a sphere brought it out.
I said, “You don't get thirsty?”
She shook her head.
“Hungry?”
She shook her head again.
“Are you…”
“Sapien?” she said.
“Yes.”
She pursed her lips and made an mmmmm sound, and said, “No, not really. Not how you mean it. Do you mind?”
“I don't mind, I'm just curious.”
“That's good then.”
One of the men from the other table leant over and said something in what I later learned to be Ertian, recognising her origin somehow.
Lysithea chatted with them a while and they regressed back to young boys.
“They're Ertian too,” she said after a while.
“And proud!” one of the old men chuckled. “Just joking, we hate the place.”
We talked about Ertia for a while, then the weather, then Last Stop, and everyone was very careful not to raise the obvious matter. No one talks about the obvious matter. I think if we did then all the cafes would close and people would stop going to work and the sky would collapse.
One of the old men said, “Are you two married?”
“Yes,” Lysithea said.
“Forty years,” I said.
“That's marvellous,” one of the men said and seemed to mean it.
“Where was it we married?” Lysithea said, loud enough for the old men to hear.
“Samsara,” I said.
“Ah, so it was. We had elephants and clowns.”
“And jam and scones.”
“Jam and scones!” one of the old men laughed.
Along with the surprise of this little intimacy I was reminded of another emotion; The Fear. In those rare moments when another human piques your interest, it is accompanied by the quiet panic that you, and only you, are invested so deeply and so quickly. Maybe for them it's just a passing game or fancy, and in an hour or so they'll go back to their life and never think of you again.
“Go on,” Lysithea said, just to me. “I know you're curious.”
“What?”
“Everyone wants to know about the babies thing when they hear I'm from Ertia. Ask.”
I hadn't thought about it to be honest, but I said, “All right. How do they have babies on Ertia these days?”
She took a sip of her wine and said very formally, “They grow them. They grow them like plants, from the ground. In special greenhouses.”
“Bullshit they do.”
She pulled up her jumper a little. She had no belly button.
“Well. That's different. Are you all hybrids too?” I said.
“We weren't before, but recently yes. Sapiens and protos.”
I wasn’t too sure what a proto was so I didn’t say anything. They were extraterr, I knew that much.
People used to hunt down extraterr-sapien hybrids once, my father told me. Now no one gives a damn.
It’s funny, you don’t convince the living to behave in a proper way, you just wait for them to die and hope their children grow up a little kinder and wiser than their parents.
She said, “And you? What's Minnith like?”
I thought about lying, but what was the point?
“It’s dull,” I said. “Water, sky, you know.”
“And soil?”
“Yes, lots of soil. Your favourite.”
We finished our glasses and said goodbye to the Ertian men and continued on through the city. When we reached the old crashed voidship she just stared a long time.
I said, “It crashed before the collapse, I think. It was only carrying jaja fruit.”
The ship had come in at a forty-five degree angle and appeared a sort of great fulcrum. It was glinting like chromium, no lips, no doors, just curves and shine; five times the height of her voidship at least.
She went to approach it. “Don’t,” I said. “Some arties came by a thousand years back and put a field around the thing. Galactic heritage preservation, they said.”
She ignored me and walked up to where I knew the fieldlip to be and passed straight through without comment. Small wisps of shimmering blue tailed after her jumper, then evaporated. She turned back to me and put out her hand.
“How did you do that?” I said.
“My mother taught me.” She beckoned. I took her hand and she pulled me in, straight through the field.
And there we were, standing in the lap of this great, forbidden behemoth.
“How did you do that?” I said again.
“Shall we go inside?”
I looked about. No one.
She said, “I know what you’re thinking. The arties will know somehow. They’ll come back and wreak nastiness. They won’t. The arties are gone.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I’ve travelled and I know. They all went inwards on a theoretics project. Something about leaves.”
She didn’t wait for my reply, just walked off towards the ship. I followed. We paused at the hull and she put a hand to it.
“Ketterish design,” she said. “It didn’t crash, you know. It didn't even come from the black. It's a building. It was made here.”
“What? Why?”
She pushed her hand straight into the hull and her arm along with it.
“Wait,” I said.
She disappeared inside, leaving only her hand behind. The fingers wiggled and I followed them.
There was no sensation of passing through, just the coolness of the air outside suddenly replaced with temperate warmth.
We were standing in an enormous circular room, at least ten times wider than the hull had been.
“Is this a projection?” I said.
She shrugged. “Not really.”
Above was a second level, a balcony. Along it grew plants of various shining hues, some of them carnivorous looking.
The air had a pure quality to it, like the kind found at the tops of mountains. The light was dim and reverent.
I said, “Who were they? Who built this?”
She ran her fingers along the wall. “Very clever engineers. This orb was called Dannika a very, very long time ago. Before the collapse and the war.”
“Which war?”
And she caught me with a look that was both pity and disbelief and walked on. We passed through another wall and found ourselves in a gigantic cubic cavern full of shards of light that intersected and refracted.
Through another wall and we were on a hillside. The sky was a burnt red. There was no sign of the wall we had come through, no sign of any walls at all.
Beside us was some enormous floating object shaped like a teardrop, not natural, but hardly manmade either.
She sat down near the thing and beckoned me over. I joined her and we gawped up.
“The building is called Ik’Sayat,” she said and her voice echoed somewhat mystically. “She was built very early on, when the fifth science was getting started.”
“How do you know this?”
“She told it to me. There are other ways of speaking, you know.”
She squinted up at the teardrop. It was a marvellous thing, feminine and deadly in appearance.
“This place was a meeting hall, back in the long before. The Fifths would come here looking like people. They’d talk with regular men and women. These days they just use emissaries, of course.”
“Why talk to us at all?”
Darkly she said, “To stop another war.”
“What damn war is this?”
She took something from her pocket, dust. She threw the dust into the air and it took the shape of little ships, silver arrows with bulbous spherical tips where I suppose lanterns once sat.
She said, “I have an interest in family history. My great, great, great grandfather was called Elvar Clements, a famous empire general. He led the last assault on the Fifths, over three thousand years ago. He and his squadron were wiped out in seconds. That was the beginning of the end. When they realised fleets didn’t work against the Fifths, they sent new ships. The new ships carried bombs, just like this one.” She nodded to the teardrop. “Bombs strong enough to wipe out entire systems. Kill the Fifth and take space with it.”
“Who’d be scared of a Fifth?” I said, more to myself. Every day I woke to the sun and stared at it a while, tried to see some meaning in the thing, spy an intention or a smile. I know that it is alive in some sense, whatever that sense might be. I know that it knows things. I think that it thinks.
Lysithea said, “The Marquis is gone. The councillors are gone. The sages and readers are gone.”
“Gone?” I said.
&n
bsp; “Gone Fifth. And I'm the distant granddaughter of the last empiral general. That makes me the last living galactic official, sort of. I speak for the New Empire now, and all that’s left of it.” She reached out to stroke the teardrop. “This thing was a bomb. If the Fifths tried anything, it would be fired by the human folk here right into the Fifth star itself, the one at the centre of your system now. It was a sort of deterrent, back when we played those games. After a while though the Fifths made it clear that wasn't a winning strategy. They swatted away a few planets like wasps.”
“What?” I said. “Wasps?”
She said, “Do you have wasps on Minnith?”
“Sure.”
“If they get in the house, you wipe them out, right?”
“I don’t think that’s a fair analogy.”
She said, “Anyway, that was before people started going in, millions of them. Maybe you know about that. Ah, the technical term is agglutinate. Most of us just called it ‘leaving’ though.”
“What happens then?” I said. I had always been curious and no one on Last Stop knew a thing about it. I thought of Mum and Dad.
She got up and traipsed around the teardrop, barefoot now. “I don’t know. They’re there and then they’re not. My family all went through, a Fifth called 3BN4 — Miranda, by the empire name.”
I thought of Minnith. The years had been pleasant but dull, and my mother and father aged without taking the treatments. They saw no point in living longer, even if they never said it. One day they came out into the field to tell me they were going, that they had an appointment, as they put it. I cried. I hugged them. I asked them not to go.
“My parents went in,” I said.
“You can see them again,” Lysithea said.
“What?”
“Which Fifth was it they left for?”
“A red dwarf called Ubik.”
“Do you think if you took my voidsphere to the system, and approached the star, it would let you in?”
“They say the Fifths take anyone.”
She stared at me from behind a big, dark thought. “Yet here you still are.”
“I’m not ready.”
“Will you ever be?”
“I don’t want to talk about it. Why are you still here then? You haven’t gone in either. Some of us like the way things are. I like boxcar racing. I like shooting. I like beer.”