Elder Race(14)

And I do not, truly, know why we are here. Is there actually a beast? Is there some warlord, even though the thing Esha had shown me had nothing of old colonial technology to it? Or is this some ritual venture that I have been brought along for, perhaps the youngest child proving herself by acting out some legend? Perhaps the demon is in her mind only. To say so is patently taboo, though.

We have been travelling through dense forest, along trails only Esha can see, and I suspect the lack of direct sun is adding to the general sense of oppression I am staving off, not to mention interfering with the recharging of my clothes and internal systems. I need to find a chance to get away from the others, even for just a night, so I can let the DCS up. My body has been working under the sour biochemistry of all those gut feelings, meaning that a considerable debt has arisen, a gap between mind and matter, so to speak. The longer I leave it before finding my own equilibrium, the worse the come-down will be. I can’t just keep staving it off. I find myself experiencing moments of panic and anxiety that have no immediate cause, because the prompt that generated them came and went hours or even days before. They arise and paralyse my mind for whole minutes, all the harder to deal with because they are shorn of context. I feel as though the emotional parts of my mind are like a cellar in which I have locked dead things, and when I open the door . . . maggots, carrion flies, flooding out. And yet I must, because the latch and hinges are strained already.

“Lyn,” I say at last. “I must . . .” I am going to lie to her. “I must go and study the stars.” A risible fabrication, but she nods, that strained smile on her face again.

“Of course, Nyrgoth Elder.” Her eyes creep sideways to find Esha. “Ahead there is Watacha, the city-state. Last we heard Elhevesse Regent still held power there, and may grant us aid or even troops. Study the stars tonight, seek your portents, and we will make Watacha by noon tomorrow. Does that suit your purposes, Nyrgoth?”

“Nyr,” I tell her. “My name is Nyr. Nyr Illim Tevitch.” Not even an abbreviation, but I don’t see why I should be saddled with a suffix like some winter coat if everyone else is doffing them.

That taut expression twitches and pulls tighter across her face. Apparently, that was the wrong thing to say, again. I am fighting off more emotional bleed, though, frustration and anger and sorrow, none of which are actually germane to what we’re talking about. Except that, perhaps, I just want to go by my real name, just once.

*

That evening I discover Esha really does know the land because, without ever having made any obvious diversion, we find a clearing in the forest, the first we’ve observed. This is man-made, some manner of timber felling or charcoal burning or some other pastoral pursuit. I said I wanted to observe the stars, and they took me at my word. I feel another block of guilt slot unacknowledged into the grand tower of hurt about to fall on me, that I’ve made them work on false pretences.

“I will need to be alone here, for scholarly reasons,” I explain to them. “Return to me after dawn.”

They exchange glances, and I cannot parse what passes between them. Lyn says, “What if the beast catches up with you?”

I am adrift. “Your demon?”

“Your beast, that follows you.” She is frowning, and the words come out a little like a recital. “That you spoke of.”

For quite a long time I have absolutely no idea what she is talking about, mind blank, and she and I just stare at each other. Then my linguistic helper systems kick in and I realise what she means.

“That is why I must be alone tonight,” I explain to them. “I need to confront matters before they grow too strong.” I am trying to recall my precise wording, speaking to her before, and now I am not sure if she thinks there is a literal beast or not, just as I am not sure if her “demon” is real or just symbolic. I want to sit her down and explain things to her, but the effort involved seems insuperable and I am becoming aware that my understanding of both language and culture here is simply inadequate, despite centuries of information gathering.

They leave me in the clearing, though, and at least I know that my defences are more than equal to any actual beast that might come along. So sayeth the disassociated intellectual brain with its vaunted objectivity.

I sit in the clearing’s heart, on the trunk of a fallen tree deemed, I assume, unsuitable for timber, and disable the DCS.

Ah, well, not so bad then. I can sit here and be quite philosophical about the whole business. I mean, it’s an adventure, isn’t it? More, despite the risk of cultural contamination, Rule One in the good anthropological practice manual we all had to sign, I’m learning more about my subjects of study than any amount of clandestine drone recordings and eavesdropping. When I get back to the outpost, I’ll have the mother of all reports to file. I can spend happy hours going over all my previous work and rubbishing it for my academic community of one, because what else is there, precisely? When this is done, what’s waiting for me but the echoes within that tower and the staticky silence of the comms, and the cold suspension bed, and the centuries?

Sutler and Bennaw and Porshai went home when they were called, but we all told one another it was a temporary matter. I can remember how excited we all were at how the work was going here. Better to leave someone to gather data so that we could all throw ourselves into the study when they came back. I was more than happy to volunteer. I had suspension and the satellite and it wasn’t going to be for long. A few wakings and sleepings for me, a few generations for the locals. But locals die, and that’s just a part of the study. We can see how they treat their dead and write bright little dissertations on what we think it means, and never actually know what it means or how it feels for them. Because that’s not what anthropology is for. It’s not for knowing how it is to live as a native of Sophos 4, or any of these diasporic human colonies flung out into the cold abyss of space by a desperately optimistic humanity. No, it’s for writing coolly academic papers, DCS engaged for maximum objectivity, about the possible meanings of the red stylised faces they put on cremation urns. I have written up seventeen different cultural pathways for this image to have taken, most of which take as a starting point the logo of one of the colonial contractors from way back when, which bears a distinct resemblance to the funerary marker. How did a manufacturer of clothing become a harbinger of death? Hmm, yes, all so academically interesting. And of course the one thing I wasn’t to do was go and ask because what could the locals possibly know about it? And I wrote great reams of nonsense, and now I can look back on it, with a very different kind of objectivity, and say, as my formal conclusion to the body of my academic work, that it’s all utter fucking nonsense. Most likely it would have been of no interest or relevance to anyone even had the others ever returned, even had the comms not just dwindled to goddamn silence and never spoken again. But now, now, what good is anything I’ve done and what good is anything I am, when nobody’s coming back for me, and when nothing I have is of any relevance to any other human being on this planet?