Page 109 of Slow Gods
“A hundred and something. Eighty? Eighty-two? Yourself?”
“Something like that. I saw you at Glastya Row, when you bombed the city. Everyone said you were destined for great things.”
“Well, they were right, weren’t they? I’m sorry, is this part of your process? Do you need to talk, or should we just jump to the part where I try and kill you and you finally kill me? How does this work?”
“It helps if you imagine I am a monster.”
“Aren’t you? Isn’t that what you are?”
“My name is Mawukana na-Vdnaze, and I am a very poor copy of myself,” I replied. “I’m going to bed, assuming the rodents didn’t get in and eat my mattress.”
“You’re… what?” He rose, indignation and a sloshing of cooling tea over the side of his mug. “You can’t do that!”
“I think you’ll find I can. Kill me while I sleep if you want. It won’t make a difference, unless you watch my corpse. Even then, eventually, you’ll have to sleep, and the moment your concentration lapses, I’ll be back. There’s a lot to do on the island. A lot of tidying. I don’t really care where you sleep. You can leave the light on, if it helps.”
“Why would you do this? Why wouldn’t you—”
“It has been suggested,” I cut in, “that I have about me certain god-like qualities. The only god-like quality I can perceive is that I persist. I could persist for a very long time. And I am, it turns out, capable of understanding certain decisions. Cruel, cold decisions. Decisions about those who live and those who die. Those who are saved and those who are left behind. I left the person I loved on Adjumir, you see, when you sent your soldiers in to kill ter. I understand why the Slow let you invade Nitashi, why qe let the people of Cha-mdo burn. Qe balanced the equation, and it is the cruellest thing in the world, and it is also, in its way, born of love. A god-like kind of love. God-like. I think that is how people talked about you, no? Anyway, leaving aside for a moment what it is to love, and lose, and make those choices as to who will live andwho will die, the other thing I feel I have learned is that there’s no harm in occasionally taking your time to think about things.”
I sighed, shook my head, clicked one last time.
“So you see,” I concluded, “I’m going to bed. And tomorrow I’m going to sort out the pantry and make an inventory of supplies, and work out what to do with you. Perhaps I’ll kill you. But honestly, right now, the idea bores me. Perhaps I’ll turn you over to the authorities. I’ll probably do that. There’s a cliff you can throw yourself off if you really feel like it. We’ll work it out in the morning. Take a little time to think.”
“Is there anything,” he asked, words flopping like dropped bricks onto the floor at his feet, “I can do to induce you to change your mind?”
“Careful with that word – ‘induce’ – especially if you say it in Xiha. You should learn Adjumiri. They have five different ways of asking for help, and at least three ways of saying ‘mercy’. Mercy for one whose suffering should cease. Mercy for a foe; mercy that is a gift given without ever needing to be asked for.”
Another way too, a fourth definition on the tip of my tongue.
Trying to remember the sounds of it, shape it into some kind of meaning that would translate into Mdo-sa.
Mercy for yourself, when you have lived too long in shame.
Something of that nature, at least.
“Goodnight, Theodosius Rhode,” I said, and went to bed, leaving the last Executor of the Shine alone.
Chapter 65
Later – much later, the kind of many-years passage that makes people uncomfortable – I flew theEmnione last time.
He was getting old, my beautiful ship. Soon he would start to shed his final layers of bark, heat shield cracking and engines leaking into the capillaries of his system. Autumn was turning to a final winter, and so cool and dark we flew, the lights turned low and hull doors closed to all but the essential rooms and systems, back to the place where once the Lovers had been.
Back to Lhonoja, the graveyard of the binary stars.
The Edge had long since passed, and the subsequent neutrino blast was rippling through the galaxy, dissipating into the dark. Forests grew on Adjapar, and the magnetic shield above Tu-mdo had been dismantled many years ago. Two stars had collapsed into one and created a detonation that had scoured all life from the galaxy for light years all around – but if I wanted to, I could still take theEmnito a place hundreds of light years away and look back through time to see the light of the Lovers shining still.
Not now.
Now I sat in the dead-dark death left behind by the explosion, by the light that had killed two worlds and torn apart dozens more, and I poured out a cup of kol, and I sang the songs of lovers falling, and toasted those who were still alive.
The nothingness around the husk of these stars was not a complete nothingness, of course.
A black hole was coalescing in the remnant core, matter squeezed into matter into matter into matter, dragging the burning remnants of whatever was left behind into a point of darkness from which no light would ever escape. Not yet a fully fledged monster, a threat to me and my ship, but one day it would be a darkness deeper than even the stillest corners of arcspace.
A curious thought: could a ship escape an event horizon via arcspace jump?
I accessed the ship’s onboard databanks, there being nothing living within easy comms reach to supplement my system. A few papers cropped up – the most interesting was a two-thousand-word tract on whether the conservation of data, let alone energy, applied in arcspace. I ran a few calculations, tried to coax the computer into doing maths whose purpose it could not understand, and in the end decided this was not my experiment to try.
After all, there was a life to live.
A life to blaze brightly. A song to sing across the stars.
Instead, I raised my glass one last time, drained it down, then slipped into the Pilot’s chair.
Hello, I whispered, as the void reached out in familiar, silent embrace.Where next?
