The Blind Gods
Copyright© 2025 by Wau
Chapter 80: Slow Drift
The Phebus had dimmed its lights. After an unknown number of hours of sleep, during which Ada dreamed of immense inhabited planets that lit up and went dark like Conway’s game, she got up to relieve her bladder and make a circuit of the ship like a cat on patrol.
Alpha was neither in Ada’s room (as usual), nor playing with Kukth in front of the viewport, nor standing in contemplation of the stars.
Ada saw Salman lying on his back, his body a little twisted because he must have dropped off suddenly and had kept his oxygen device on. The natural beauty of the human face in sleep was here marred by a furrowed brow: he was having nightmares. For an instant Ada felt desire for him and thought to move closer to make love to him. He began to snore like an animal and the urge vanished.
She resumed her round. The Abandoned was humming in his bathtub.
“Are you awake?”
“I never really sleep, you know, Ada.”
“In front of Salman, you should call me Gorylkin. Tell me, where is Alpha?”
“He’s gone.”
Ada went pale, like on her first days on the Shareplace. She trembled.
“What?”
“He’ll come back. He has something to do.”
“But how did he leave?”
“I think he can travel from one world to another without a ship. Ah, if mine had that faculty ... we wouldn’t have had to unite like ... the inverted Babel of your nightmares.”
“What has he gone to do?”
“I don’t think I can tell you. It’s his business. He’ll come back, that’s certain. Ada, Alpha can’t really love you the way you love sentient beings ... even if, to my taste, you have a somewhat rare kind of love for a species with such empathic potential. Feelings have another texture in Alpha’s kind. But in contact with you, he has developed human cultural elements. He’s attached to you and he’s afraid for you. However, if he came into the HS network, it’s because he had a mission to accomplish, in a certain place, at a certain time. And that moment will arrive imminently. I reminded him of it yesterday.”
“Why - are you his boss?”
“No, but I read his inner conflict and I helped him make a decision.”
Ada felt anger rising in her. She grabbed whatever was at hand: anthologies and bottles, and threw them while screaming. Salman woke up, stunned, seized his breaker. But he quickly understood the, let’s say, domestic problem, and said nothing, his gaze fixed on the dawn-planet.
When Ada calmed down, the Abandoned continued:
“Lots of violence.”
“Don’t complain, you didn’t get hit.”
“You are immature.”
“I’m sick of you and your shitty opinion.”
“You should not say that. You are the saint of the Xenos.”
“Then respect me!”
“I respect everyone, saint or not. I am too well read about the customs of intelligent races, and humans in particular, to understand what it is to be a ‘saint’ of the Xenos. It’s a title that will draw attention to you. But it will be as useful to you as a carafe of water to a fire if you let yourself give in to childish violence.”
She shot him a furious look and decided to ignore him. She sat down forcefully on a couch facing Salman’s. He had the vague eyes of a man who was still dreaming.
“Tell me about your nightmares.”
Salman did not answer so she added:
“One day, when I was ten or twelve, my adoptive father chased me with a shovel to kill me. After that I lived through lots of dangerous situations, battles, sieges. I even killed people for real. So that story about a killer shovel is a bit lame, right? And yet I dream it every night. And when I don’t remember my dreams, I know I dreamed anyway.”
“A shovel? I thought you came from a station.”
“I come from a Shareplace around Caliban. But the shovel was on Clelia. A LE asked me to undergo therapy, but LEs are manipulative whores.”
“Caliban, the war planet...,” murmured Salman.
“And you?”
“Nothing truly nightmarish, really. I was born on Jiaozi, a spherical space station around Dante ... you know what Dante is?”
“The HS says it’s a prison planet, Sashko says not really.”
“It’s a prison planet. A place of exile. They put people there whom they no longer want, and sometimes they come to fetch them. It’s cold there, people starve, violence is everywhere. Sometimes a tough leader - often a political exile - shows up and there is a year of social structuring, but it collapses quickly. The planet was chosen because there is an anomaly at its core. Basically you can’t get any lift nearby. So the only way to take off is with reactors, and there is no fuel on site. The ideal prison. But anyway I was on Jiaozi. It’s one of those many Antioch stations that produce and export food in bulk. In the center of the station, where there is no gravity at all, there was a huge meat globe several tens of meters in diameter that was constantly growing, fed by ... well, our waste.”
“You mean...,” Ada suggested.
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