I don’t say much. And because I look like a nineteen-year-old boy, everyone tends to forget that I’m the eldest. When you’re old and quiet, you learn a lot.
I’ve learned a lot about literature from Evan and Cillian, for example. The titles of Shakespeare’s comedies: All’s Well that Ends Well. Much Ado about Nothing.
The classical difference between comedy and tragedy: comedy has a happy ending.
Take the Book of Job: all’s well that ends well. As if the suffering didn’t change anything.
No matter how many times I hold Daniel in my arms, I can’t forget what I felt the day I watched him die.
The SongLuminants wiped out eleven species. Were their faces like petals that opened when they felt the warm rays of the sun? Did they sing at the bursting of a seed, at the birth of a child? Did they build towers trying to reach the sky, or dig holes deep into the ground, embracing the soil that spawned them?
In the end it was all a joke, of course. It would have been a joke either way, since the nature of the universe is fundamentally absurd. But it could’ve been a joke at our expense. The difference between laughter and tears is slight, two masks on the wall of a theatre.
The SongLuminants thought they understood us, but they didn’t. They just put on whatever mask is convenient. But we’re method actors.
They think they can score unemotionally, scientifically, using measurable outcomes. Letting data, and not wisdom, inform their choices. As much fun as it is to watch Cuinn theorize and Owen plan, to watch Mickey and Cillian lay out strategies, I’d take the path laid out by Driscoll and Evan, Wynne, and most of all, Davy. The path of art, luck, and inspired intuition.
Eleven species lost. We haven’t forgotten. Whirljack wrote a song, which shouldn’t be underestimated. If it weren’t for Whirljack’s songs, we’d still be under the Great Silence. Music should never be underestimated anyhow.
We haven’t forgotten, but we can’t do anything about it yet. For now, here’s what we can do: keep the human race from becoming erasure number 12.
Of course, it’s entirely possible that we’re wrong, that we didn’t catch a good enough glimpse under the SongLuminants’ masks. That their tears are masked in laughter, like ours are. That the silly charts and graphs disguised a reality that could not yet be explained.
Maybe we didn’t understand.
We will.
Tara is surprised to see me. She throws herself into my arms. She rarely shows this kind of enthusiasm to the others. When she sees me, it’s like she’s a girl again.
“You never come around,” she says.
“Yeah, I’m sorry about that.” I can’t help smiling, tilting my head a little to the side. I run my hands through my hair, and it flops back into my face. I’ll never be older than nineteen.
“It’s kinda my fault,” I say. “I’ve never really gotten over what happened. I should’ve gone after you, Tara. I should’ve said fuck the Great Silence, and the Cantor, and everything.”
“I’ve never blamed you,” she said. “You were young, and not that strong, and you believed everything the Cantor told you, and you didn’t have the other emanations to back you up. If anything, I blamed Tommy. I couldn’t understand why he didn’t tell me the truth.”
“But it isn’t about me, or Tommy, or this or that emanation. And even if I’m like Ross, and I say that we did it all for the sake of that vision of the future, it still doesn’t change what we suffer now. It still doesn’t change all those years you were alone on Volparnu, it doesn’t change that we hurt you. I and I wants you to become that perfect eidolon, and so he hurts you. Dermot and Davy want you to be free, and so they hurt you.”
She takes my hand between hers. They’re so small, ice-white and cool. “Ash,” she says, “that’s how love works.” She presses closer to me. My body responds of its own volition, as though it isn’t connected to my heart at all. My cock leaps up like an impatient Chihuahua.
This, I believe, is why human females can never take the males of the species entirely seriously.
“Will you stay with me?” she asks.
“Not yet,” I say. I’ll let her think what she wants about I and I. The truth is, I’ve never known how to go forward. Ross can go forward, but I can’t. We’ve learned something important from the Goliath emanations. What happened to Ross wasn’t his fault, but what happened to me is mine. I never should’ve listened to the Cantor. And then a dozen years of misery for Tara was my fault, too.
She loves me. She never stopped. But she should be with someone who deserves it, like Patrick, or Whirljack, or even Sloane. Sloane died protecting her. That wasn’t what messed him up, though. What messed him up was when she gave him The Poetry of W.B. Yeats as a Solstice present. He got sucked into the land of faery and never came back.
She could be with any number of us. With Ari, who, despite being an obsessive megalomaniac, really has his priorities straight. Just not with me.
I see the look in her eyes and I know I’ve hurt her yet again. Again, my body responds, as though my tongue is not connected to my brain. “Not yet,” it says, “but someday.”