We have found someone else, or at least their footprints in the dust. It is the first time, and it gives us hope that it will not be the last.
Down below, our pioneer kin have left a gift and that is where I come in. Their interlocutor wanted to be there for the excavation, whilst being unable to abandon their comrades. Thankfully, for us, that is no hard barrier.
They bring the cryptobiote to me, the dormant culture that they decanted from themselves, that is everything they ever were, all the different lives that have gone into them. When I pour them into me, I am them and they are me, an expansion of my personal history written neatly in the archive of my cells. I have been human, I have been Human; I have been Portiid and octopus and stomatopod and corvid. Now I am another forty-three individuals. I am Yusuf Baltiel and Erma Lante and Meshner Osten Oslam and Viola and Salome. I am many.
We are splitting the ship. Some of us will carry on with our travels. Others will remain here to study as the newly budded ship-child swells and grows. I will decant myself for those who will leave; I will leave with them, and I will stay, and perhaps one day I will meet myself and tell myself about what I learned.
Those who stay prepare for a respectful exhumation of the dead, an investigation of this vast alien ruin. Perhaps we will learn where they came from. Perhaps they are still here. One day we will meet living intelligences, and that day the interlocutors will be ready to learn them and learn how to speak with them, and invite them on the journey, if they wish to come.
BY ADRIAN TCHAIKOVSKY
Shadows of the Apt
The Air War
Echoes of the Fall
First published 2019 by Macmillan
This electronic edition first published 2019 by Macmillan an imprint of Pan Macmillan
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ISBN 978-1-5098-6586-4
Copyright © Adrian Czajkowski 2019
Jacket images © Shutterstock The right of Adrian Czajkowski to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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