Elder Race(15)

They think I’m a wizard. They think I’m a fucking wizard. That’s what I am to them, some weird goblin man from another time with magic powers. And I literally do not have the language to tell them otherwise. I say, “scientist,” “scholar,” but when I speak to them, in their language, these are both cognates for “wizard.” I imagine myself standing there speaking to Lyn and saying, “I’m not a wizard; I’m a wizard, or at best a wizard.” It’s not funny. I have lived a long, long life and it has meant nothing, and now I’m on a fucking quest with a couple of women who don’t understand things like germs or fusion power or anthropological theories of value.

And I am absolutely intellectually able to agree, yes, all of this great crashing wave of negative feeling is not actually being caused by the things I am pinning it to. This is something generated by my biochemistry, grown in my basal brain and my liver and my gut and let loose to roam like a faceless beast about my body until it reaches my cognitive centres, which look around for the worry du jour and pin that mask on it. I know that, while I have real problems in the world, they are not causing the way I feel within myself, this crushing weight, these sudden attacks of clenching fear, the shakes, the wrenching vertiginous horror that doubles me over. These feelings are just recruiting allies of convenience from my rational mind, like a mob lifting up a momentary demagogue who may be discarded a moment later in favour of a better. Even in the grip of my feelings I can still acknowledge all this, and it doesn’t help. Know thyself, the wise man wrote, and yet I know myself, none better, and the knowledge gives me no power.

I’ve done the grand tour of the interplanetary situation, always a favourite when I’m casting about for reasons for why I feel so bad. It leaves me hollow, without energy. I’ve gone off the log now, lying on my side on the ground curled up into a ball. I’ve never cared about religion, aside from as a subject of study in others, but in my blackest pits of despair I always find God and call out for help, because only an omnipotent outside force could possibly move the stone that is pressing me down. And God walks away, single footsteps off into the collective unconscious. He doesn’t care. Why should he? I wouldn’t.

For a moment I can almost come to terms with it all, a brief respite, and probably I should have turned the DCS back on then, except the problem is I don’t want to. You’d think it’d be a no-brainer, really. You’d think I’d never turn the fucking thing off. It’s built with safeguards that bug you when you haven’t let off steam in a while, though, so eventually you have to do what I’m doing now, and I’ve already left it too long. What’s counterintuitive is, because I’m such a fuck-up, when I’m in the pits, some part of me doesn’t want to climb out. Yes, it’s bloody awful down here, but at the same time nobody’s making demands of me, not even myself. If I put the DCS back on and get up and go back to Lyn and Esha then I’ll have to do something. I’ll have to do my bloody awful pointless job, and I’ll have to go on this stupid, meaningless journey with them, and every moment will be awkward and strained and wrong.

Because Astresse is dead and it’s not the same. There, a new brick to add to the tower of recrimination. Astresse Regent, who was fierce and bold and beautiful, who took a brief month of my life and lit it up, is dead, long dead, died while I slept, and then her descendants died, too, and then theirs grew old. And intellectually I know that I was still dealing with these problems when I was with her, but in the treacherous light of hindsight she was glorious like the sun, but a sun whom my memory honours only by noting how bloody dark it’s got now she’s gone.

And yes, all the minor chorus starts up, about how Astresse was also the source of my worst unprofessionalism, and how I’d be hauled up for it should anyone come back and check up on me, and how nobody’s coming back to check up on me, and how . . . but it’s not even these humdrum woes that grip me the worst. It’s that she’s dead, and I will never have those days back, when I did stupid, stupid things, unbecoming of a serious academic, and rode to war at the side of a warrior queen whom, despite absurd differences in age and culture and genetic makeup, I loved.

That breaks me, or perhaps it breaks my depression, or both of us. Abruptly the sobs are coming, and then I’m just lying there in a forest clearing in a world where they’ve forgotten everything they ever knew about space travel, bawling my eyes out like a child because of a woman I knew for a fragment of time so brief, in relation to all the life I’ve lived, that she may as well never have existed.

It is cathartic; it is exhausting. And I sleep at last, my demons run as ragged as their prey.

In the morning there is a blanket over me. I could probably find a positive interpretation of this, if I could fight my way clear of the clouds, but instead I know it just means that Lyn and Esha were watching. Probably they had blades in hand because they thought there was a real beast they could fight off. Instead of a fight, they got to see their vaunted wizard weeping and trembling like a child, and that is just one more thing to feel physically sick about.

I lie there for a long time in the wan sunlight, on the wet ground, fighting over whether to engage the DCS. To make that decision is to get over a hill that seems insurmountable. Easier by far to let the negative feelings have the run of the place, to stay huddled in the last latched cupboard of my mind.

But at last, somehow, I give the command, which was designed to be as easy as possible for just this reason. And, yes, ready to meet the day now, thank you. Get up, feel my clothes already drying themselves out. We are to go to another community now, and this time as formal demon-hunters to meet with the local government. And I shall stay at the back and make notes and everything can go into the reports. Good. Yes.