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?
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.