He waited for the Truth to kick in, for the sim-run to end, and when it didn’t — as he’d known it wouldn’t but had almost hoped it would — he felt bitter, resigned and grimly amused all at once.
He told the little gascraft to tip back and seal him in again. The arrowhead angled backwards, closing the canopy and enveloping him once more, the shock-gel already moving to cushion and cosset him, tendrils of salve within it starting to heal and repair his flesh and soothe his weeping eyes. He thought the machine did it all with something like relief, but knew that was a lie. The relief was his.
“Ah, opinions differ as opinions should. Always have, do and will. Might we have been bred? Who knows? Maybe we were pets. Perhaps professional prey. Maybe we were ornaments, palace entertainers, whipping beings, galaxy-changing seed-machines gone wrong (these are some of our myths). Maybe our makers disappeared, or we overthrew them (another myth — vainglorious, overly flattering — I distrust it). Maybe these makers were some proto-plasmatics ? This, must be said, a pervasive one, a tenacious trope. Why plasmatics? Why would beings of the flux — stellar or planetary, no matter — wish to make something like us, so long ago? We have no idea. Yet the rumour persists.
“All we know is that we are here and we have been here for ten billion years or more. We come and we go and we live our lives at different rates, generally slower as we get older, as you good people have seen within these walls, but beyond that, why are we? What are we for? What is our point? We have no idea. You’ll forgive me; these questions seem somehow more important when applied to us, to Dwellers, because we do seem -well, if not designed, certainly, as one might say, prone to persisting, given to hanging about.
“No disrespect, do understand, but the selfsame questions applied to Quick, to humans or even — like-species apologies begged, dear colonel, accept — to oerileithe, have not the same force because you do not have our track record, our provenance, our sheer cussed, gratuitous, god-denying abidance. Who knows? Maybe one day you will! After all, the universe is still young, for all our shared egocentricity, our handed-down certitude of culmination, and perhaps when the Final Chronicles are written by our unknowable ultimate inheritors they will record that the Dwellers lasted a mere dozen billion years or so in the first heady flush of the universe’s infancy before they faded away to nothing, while the oerileithe and humans, those bywords for persistence, those doughty elongueurs, those synonyms for civilisational endurance, lasted two and three hundred billion years respectively, or whatever. Then the same questions might be asked of you: Why? What for? To what end? And — who can say! — perhaps for you, such being the case, there will be an answer. Better yet, one that makes sense.
“For now, though, we alone are stuck with such awkward challenges. Everybody else seems to come and go, and that appears natural, that is to be expected, that is the given: species appear, develop, blossom, flourish, expand, coast, shrink and fade. Cynics would say: ha! just nature, is all — no credit to claim, no blame to take, but I say huzzah! Good for all for trying, for taking part, for being such sports. But we? Us? No, we’re different. We seem cursed, doomed, marked out to outstay our welcome, linger in a niche that could as well fit many — yes, many! — others, making everybody else feel uncomfortable by our just still being here when by rights we should have shuffled off with our once-contemporaries long ago. It’s an embarrassment, I don’t mind admitting. I’m amongst friends, I can say these things. And anyway, I’m just an old mad Dweller, a tramp, an itinerant, a floatful plodder from place to place, worthy of nothing but contempt and handouts, both if I’m lucky, worse if I’m not. I try your patience. Forgive me. I get to talk to so few apart from the voices I make up.”
The speaker was an off-sequence Dweller of Cuspian age called Oazil. To be off-sequence was to have declared oneself -or, sometimes, to have been declared by one’s peers — uninterested in or apart from the usual steady progression of age and seniority that Dweller society assumed its citizens would follow. It was not by itself a state of disgrace — it was often compared to a person becoming a monk or a nun — though if it had been imposed on rather than chosen by a Dweller it was certainly a sign that they might later become an Outcast, and physically ejected from their home planet, a sanction which, given the relaxed attitude Dwellers displayed to both interstellar travel times and spaceship-construction quality control, was effectively a sentence of somewhere between several thousand years solitary confinement, and death.
Oazil was an itinerant, a tramp, a wanderer. He had entirely lost contact with a family he claimed to have anyway forgotten all details of, had no real friends to speak of, belonged to no clubs, sodalities, societies, leagues or groups and had no permanent home.
He lived, he’d told them, in his carapace and his clothes, which were tattered and motley but raggedly impressive, decorated with carefully painted panels depicting stars, planets and moons, preserved flowers from dozens of CloudPlant species and the polished carbon bones and gleaming, socketed skulls of various miniature gas-giant fauna. It was a slightly larger-scale and more feral collection of what Dwellers called life charms compared to the sort of stuff Valseir had worn save when there was some sort of formal event to attend.
When Fassin had first seen the Dweller tramp it had even occurred to him that Oazil was Valseir in disguise, come back in some attempted secrecy to taunt them all, see how they would treat a poor itinerant before revealing himself as the true owner of the house come to reclaim his lost estate. But Valseir and Oazil looked quite different. Oazil was bulkier, his carapace fractionally less symmetrical, his markings less intricate, his voice far deeper and his quota of remaining vanes and limbs quite different too. Most marked of all, Oazil’s carapace was much darker than Valseir’s. The two were of roughly similar age — Oazil would have been slightly junior to Valseir had he still been on-sequence: a Cuspian-baloan or Cuspian-nompar to Valseir’s Cuspian-choal — but he looked much older, darker and more weather-beaten, almost as dark as Jundriance, who was ten times his age but had spent much of his life as a scholar in slow-time, not wandering the atmosphere exposed to the elements.
Oazil towed behind him a little float-trailer — shaped like a small Dweller and similarly bedecked — in which he carried a few changes of apparel, some sentimentally precious objects and a selection of gifts which he had made, usually carved from OxyTreeCloud roots. He had presented one of these, shaped to resemble the bubble house itself, to Nuern, to pass on to Jundriance when next he left his depths of slow academe.
Nuern had not looked especially impressed to receive this small token. However, Oazil claimed that Valseir’s house had been a stopping-off point for him during his peregrinations for the last, oh, fifty or sixty thousand years or so. And there was anyway, especially away from cities, a tradition of hospitality towards wanderers that it would be profoundly kudos-sacrificing to ignore, certainly when there were other guests around to witness the insult.
“Will you stay long, sir?” Nuern asked.
“Yes, will you?” asked Livilido.
“Oh, no, I’ll be gone tomorrow,” Oazil told the younger Dweller. “This is, I’m sure, a fine house still, though of course I am sorry to hear that my old friend is no more. However, I become awkward when I spend too long in one place, and houses, though not as terrifying to me as cities, provoke in me a kind of restlessness. I cannot wait to be away when I am near a house, no matter how pleasant its aspect or welcoming the hosts.”
They were outside on one of the many balconies girdling the house living spaces. They had originally convened for a morning meal to welcome Oazil in the net-hung dining space. But the old Dweller had seemed uncomfortable from the start, edgy and a-twitch, and before the first course was over he had asked, embarrassed and plaintive, if he might dine outside, perhaps beyond a window they would open so that they could still converse face to face. He suffered from a kind of claustrophobia brought on by countless millennia spent wandering the vast unceilinged skies, and felt uncomfortable enclosed like this. Nuern and Livilido had swiftly ordered their younger servants to strike table and set the meal up on the nearest balcony.