They’d all gone outside, and — after voluminous apologies for seeming to force his will upon them — Oazil had settled down, enjoyed his meal, and, subsequent to sampling some aura-grains and timbre-trace from the narcotics in the table’s centrepiece -modelled on a globular university city — he had relaxed sufficiently to share with them all his thoughts on Dweller origins. It was a favourite after-meal topic with Dwellers, and so one there was effectively nothing original to say concerning, though, to give Oazil some credit, the subject had been his academic speciality before he’d slipped the moorings of scholastic life and set float upon the high skies of wander.
Hatherence asked the old Dweller his thoughts on whether his species had always been unable to experience pain, or had had this bred out of them.
“Ah! If we only knew! I am fascinated that you ask the question, for it is one that I believe is of the utmost importance in the determining of what our species really means in the universe…”
Fassin, resting lightly in a cushioned dent across the ceremonial table from the old wanderer, found his attention slipping. It seemed to do this a lot now. Perhaps a dozen Nasqueron days had elapsed since the news of the Winter House’s destruction. He had spent almost all that time in the various libraries, searching for anything that might lead to their goal, the (to him, at least) increasingly mythical-seeming third volume of the work that he had taken from here over two hundred years ago and which had, supposedly, led to so much that had happened since. He looked, he searched, he trawled and combed and scanned, but so often, even when it seemed to him that he was concentrating fully, he’d find that he’d spent the last few minutes just staring into space, seeing in his mind’s eye some aspect of the Sept and family life that was now gone, recalling an inconsequential conversation from decades ago, some at-the-time so-what? exchange that he would not have believed he’d ever have remembered, let alone have found brought to mind now, when they were all gone and he was in such a far and different place.
He felt the welling of tears in his eyes sometimes. The shock-gel drew them gently away.
Sometimes he thought again of suicide, and found himself longing, as though for a lost love or a treasured, vanished age, for the will, the desire, the sheer determination to end things that would have made killing himself a realistic possibility. Instead, suicide seemed as pointless and futile as everything else in life. You needed desire, the desire for death, to kill yourself. When you seemed to have no desire, no emotions or drives of any sort left — just their shadows, habits — killing oneself became as impossible as falling in love.
He looked up from the books and scrolls, the fiches and crystals, the etched diamond leaf and glowing screens and holos, and wondered what the point of anything was. He knew the standard answers, of course: people — all species, all species-types — wanted to live, wanted comfort, to be free from threat, needed energy in some form — whether it was as direct as absorbed sunlight or as at-a-remove as meat — desired to procreate, were curious, wanted enlightenment or fame and\or success and\or any of the many forms of prosperity, but — ultimately — to what end? People died. Even the immortal died. Gods died.
Some had faith, religious belief, even in this prodigiously, rampantly physically self-sufficient age, even in the midst of this universal, abundant clarity of godlessness and godlack, but such people seemed, in his experience, no less prone to despair, and their faith a liability even in its renunciation, just one more thing to lose and mourn.
People went on, they lived and struggled and insisted on living even in hopelessness and pain, desperate not to die, to cling to life regardless, as if it was the most precious thing, when all it had ever brought them, was bringing them and ever would bring them was more hopelessness, more pain.
Everybody seemed to live as though things were always just about to get better, as though any bad times were just about to end, any time now, but they were usually wrong. Life ground on. Sometimes to the good, but often towards ill and always in the direction of death. Yet people acted as though death was just the biggest surprise — My, who put that there? Maybe that was the right way to treat it, of course. Maybe the sensible attitude was to act as though there had been nothing before one came to consciousness, and nothing would exist after one’s death, as though the whole universe was built around one’s own individual awareness. It was a working hypothesis, a useful half-truth.
But did that mean that the urge to live was the result of some sort of illusion? Was the reality, in fact, that nothing mattered and people were fools to think that anything did? Were the choices either despair, the rejection of reason for some idiot faith, or a sort of defensive solipsism?
Valseir might have had something useful to say on the matter, Fassin thought. But then, he was dead too.
He looked at Oazil and wondered if this self-proclaimed wanderer really had known the dead Cuspian whose house this had been. Or was he just a chancer, a blow-hard, a fantasist and liar?
Thinking like this, circling round his studied despair, Fassin only half-listened to the old Dweller with his theories about gas-giant fauna development and his tales of wandering.
Oazil told how once he had circumnavigated the South Tropical Band without seeing another Dweller in all those hundred and forty thousand kilometres, how he had once fallen in with a gang of Adolescent Sculpture Pirates, semi-renegades who seeded public RootCloud and AmmoniaSluice forests, him becoming their figurehead, mascot, totem, and how, many millennia ago in the little-travelled wastes of the Southern Polar Region, he had wandered into a vast warren of empty CloudTunnel. (The work of a troop of rogue Tunnel-building machines since disappeared? An artwork? The lost prototype for a new kind of city? He didn’t know — nobody had ever heard of this place, this thing.) He was lost inside this vast tree, this giant lung, this colossal root system of a labyrinth for a thousand years, exiting eleven-twelfths starved and nearly mad. He had reported the find and people had looked for it but it had never been found again. Most people thought he’d imagined it all, but he had not. They believed him, did they not?
The tapping noise was there again. He had been vaguely aware of it but had ignored it, not even getting as far as dismissing it as some function of the house’s plumbing or differential expansion or reaction to some brief current in the surrounding gas. It had stopped after a while — he had half-noticed that, too, though still thought no more about it. Now it was there again, and slightly louder.
Fassin was in Library Three, one of the inner libraries, speed-reading through the contents of a sub-library that Valseir appeared to have picked up as part of a job lot untold ages ago. From the earliest date that anybody had bothered to note, this stuff had been lying around uncalled-up and unread for thirty millennia, dating from an era several different species of Slow Seers ago, long before humans had come to Ulubis. Fassin suspected this was traded material, data — second-hand, third-hand, who knew how many-hand — dredged from who knew where, possibly auto-translated (it certainly read like it whenever he dipped into the text itself, to make sure that the contents were what the abstracts claimed), bundled and presented and handed over to the Dwellers of Nasqueron by some long-superseded (possibly even long-extinct) species of Seer in return for — presumably — still older information. He wondered at what point most of the data the Dwellers held would become traded data, and if that point had already been reached. He was not the first Seer to think of this and, thanks to the absolute opaqueness of the Dwellers’ records, he would certainly not be the last.