He lived, he’d told them, in his carapace and his clothes, which were tattered and motley but raggedly impressive, decorated with carefully painted panels depicting stars, planets and moons, preserved flowers from dozens of CloudPlant species and the polished carbon bones and gleaming, socketed skulls of various miniature gas-giant fauna. It was a slightly larger-scale and more feral collection of what Dwellers called life charms compared to the sort of stuff Valseir had worn save when there was some sort of formal event to attend.
When Fassin had first seen the Dweller tramp it had even occurred to him that Oazil was Valseir in disguise, come back in some attempted secrecy to taunt them all, see how they would treat a poor itinerant before revealing himself as the true owner of the house come to reclaim his lost estate. But Valseir and Oazil looked quite different. Oazil was bulkier, his carapace fractionally less symmetrical, his markings less intricate, his voice far deeper and his quota of remaining vanes and limbs quite different too. Most marked of all, Oazil’s carapace was much darker than Valseir’s. The two were of roughly similar age — Oazil would have been slightly junior to Valseir had he still been on-sequence: a Cuspian-baloan or Cuspian-nompar to Valseir’s Cuspian-choal — but he looked much older, darker and more weather-beaten, almost as dark as Jundriance, who was ten times his age but had spent much of his life as a scholar in slow-time, not wandering the atmosphere exposed to the elements.
Oazil towed behind him a little float-trailer — shaped like a small Dweller and similarly bedecked — in which he carried a few changes of apparel, some sentimentally precious objects and a selection of gifts which he had made, usually carved from OxyTreeCloud roots. He had presented one of these, shaped to resemble the bubble house itself, to Nuern, to pass on to Jundriance when next he left his depths of slow academe.
Nuern had not looked especially impressed to receive this small token. However, Oazil claimed that Valseir’s house had been a stopping-off point for him during his peregrinations for the last, oh, fifty or sixty thousand years or so. And there was anyway, especially away from cities, a tradition of hospitality towards wanderers that it would be profoundly kudos-sacrificing to ignore, certainly when there were other guests around to witness the insult.
“Will you stay long, sir?” Nuern asked.
“Yes, will you?” asked Livilido.
“Oh, no, I’ll be gone tomorrow,” Oazil told the younger Dweller. “This is, I’m sure, a fine house still, though of course I am sorry to hear that my old friend is no more. However, I become awkward when I spend too long in one place, and houses, though not as terrifying to me as cities, provoke in me a kind of restlessness. I cannot wait to be away when I am near a house, no matter how pleasant its aspect or welcoming the hosts.”
They were outside on one of the many balconies girdling the house living spaces. They had originally convened for a morning meal to welcome Oazil in the net-hung dining space. But the old Dweller had seemed uncomfortable from the start, edgy and a-twitch, and before the first course was over he had asked, embarrassed and plaintive, if he might dine outside, perhaps beyond a window they would open so that they could still converse face to face. He suffered from a kind of claustrophobia brought on by countless millennia spent wandering the vast unceilinged skies, and felt uncomfortable enclosed like this. Nuern and Livilido had swiftly ordered their younger servants to strike table and set the meal up on the nearest balcony.
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.