Over the following years Payzar became very familiar with that tiny red dot. He’d take the time to visit it alone at least once a day, even if only for a minute or two, if only to tell Jambo of the day’s events, of which there were often far too few. Sometimes it gave him a feeling of warmth and sometimes it was a block of ice in his stomach that could only be melted with Lixor9 or perhaps, when he could afford it, a touch of Sekkol.
The bunks on Deck Fourteen were not luxurious, but there was a community. Far from letting the past weigh on them they stepped day by day into the future, doing what they had to do to get along, to find some hope in the chrome and sterile quarters designed for a third of their number.The boy in the bunk above Payzar was called Hoji. He had been fascinated by the hot energy of their starship’s engines, but when Payzar began describing the soft warmth of wood and what a craftsman could make of it he turned forever from that fire, propelled towards the gentle textures of the elm, the pine and the oak.
Payzar was a good tutor, describing which wood was used for what purpose. He spoke of how to mix veneer, how to brush down a surface ready to be worked, and the importance of a tidy workshop.
At first his audience was just Hoji. Then those on the nearest bunks began to listen too. Pretty soon, he was holding classes, once in the morning for those good with their hands, and once in the afternoon for those who sought solace in sincerity and love.
The philosopher Jaynest Cano came to listen. As she wept at the tide of Payzar’s voice he would lean back, eyes closed, imagining he was talking to Jambo, so hard to please but when he hit that spot, well, there was nothing like it.
Payzar told his collected students which tools Jambo preferred, and on which woods. How Jambo would often make a task three times as hard but the results would be twice as good. He regaled his audience with the time he planed a curve so smoothly, so correctly, in one swift movement that he and Jambo were compelled to just sit and gaze at it for a full minute. Something perfect, new born, gifted to the world with his own hands, under Jambo’s supervision.
Everyone in that room yearned to carve wood in that moment, would have given a week’s rations for a modest piece of plank and a second hand tool.
“I bet Jambo praised you for that,” one student said, breaking the silence. Payzar just shook his head and laughed.
“What was the wood for, sir?” one of his newer followers asked and even Jaynest Cano let out a tut at the stupid question, despite her kindly disposition. Payzar looked lost for a moment and then shrugged.
It was not the Cosandeer way to pay for services. They believed that it was an honour and a privilege to be allowed to use a talent. That it was a chance to become something that otherwise you could never have been.
So even as Payzar’s audience swelled full, his belly grew empty as he had less and less time to earn, with all the work he was doing. His brother, Kopec, on the other hand, spent his days at Vizigear staring at a blank screen, finger poised above a single blue button. When a red spot appeared, he was to press the button once, immediately. When an orange spot appeared, he was to press the button twice. If a green spot appeared (and it never had) he was to call his supervisor.
This week he’d pressed the button three times, the week before just the once, but never was he to take his eyes from the screen lest a dot appear and the button remain unpressed.
No one had ever explained to Kopec what his job was for, nor what it would mean if he forgot to press the button, except for the obvious fact that he would lose this job. It kept the family in hard bread, soft cheese and sweet gel that you weren’t meant to eat but everyone did.
Each night Kopec came home pale, unable to speak, drained of life. He’d pass a bag of gilder to his mother and crash onto his bunk, asleep before his body hit the blanket. His father would pull away Kopec’s boots and socks, gently wash his skin and fold his son into his bunk, rebuking anyone within earshot who spoke too loudly or clattered around “like a wild horned gallomph”.
Payzar’s mother found work in the Stitch Mine for a while but found it impossible not to call the supervisor a cunt. On her fourteenth infraction they had to let her go; still, a week’s pay was better than nothing.
Jaynest Cano was not blind. Nor was she ungrateful. A year into their journey she brought the family a large bowl of Kvetch. She claimed that she was learning to cook but needed mouths willing to taste what she’d made. She would consider it an honour if they would sample her Kvetch.
Payzar sat in his bunk and watched his parents eat, tears in their eyes.
“I have never tasted anything so good,” his father said, spraying crumbs and herbs towards their benefactor.
His mother asked what kind of salt Cano had used, and when she explained that she had used blue salt, his mother rebuked the woman for her extravagance. Yellow salt was good enough for the likes of them. Indeed it was all they had ever known.
Payzar reminded his parents to set aside the largest portion for Kopec which they, reluctantly, did.
Cano asked why Payzar was not eating and Payzar smiled, as he always did, then shook his head. “Sadly, tomatoes do not agree with me.”
Cano held up her hands, “Where would I get a tomato? That’s fire pepper you can see there.”
“Ah,” Payzar paused, “in that case that’s even worse than I thought.”
Week after week Cano brought the family dishes of food. Eventually Payzar’s father stopped crying at every meal but he did, just once, lean forwards and whisper “Jaynest Cano, you are a good woman.”
She, being a moral philosopher by inclination as well as training, described her doubts at such a thing as objective goodness and Payzar’s father kept his thoughts to himself in future, but did not stop thinking them.
While Payzar grew more gaunt he found great joy in watching his parents eat. In knowing that Kopec had a decent meal to sustain him and that the bottle of Lixor9 Payzar had under his pillow would last him at least a few more days.
On the eighteenth month of the journey, as predicted, they entered the Sodium Storm. A ferocious hail of comets, ice and stone, through which all the Cosandeer ships had to pass.
The announcement came to all decks that the time had come, and that if they struck just one comet at this speed, they would be instantly vaporised.
When his mother asked why they didn’t tell them what there was to be done, how they were to prepare themselves, Payzar rubbed her back and said “There’s nothing that can be done. There never is.”
At this time more and more people were coming to Payzar’s classes. He insisted that they move to a higher deck in a room with a viewing port. The Authority tried to close the port in the “interests of public well-being” but Payzar refused.
Long gone were the days when they could hold him in a cell, beating his face with a broom handle. Today he was Payzar the carpenter, the gaunt and mournful teacher whose silences were as powerful as his words.
For the next four weeks Payzar described the nature of wood, the feel of it in your hands, rough and unhewn, smooth and turned a hundred times, all under the dark gaze of space. Its void an ever present heat upon the skin.
The boy, Hoji, was first to notice the change. During a discussion on the tidal nature of the grain, he raised his hand and waited patiently to be called.
“Hoji?” Payzar said, leaning back, eyes closed. “You have some thoughts?”
“I have a question, sir.” He always called Payzar “Sir” when he was teaching, “I’ve noticed you do not talk of Jambo these past days. Why is that?”
Payzar did not smile. For a long moment he lay with his eyes closed. Even though Hoji was used to these silences he felt the weight of the universe upon him but dreaded having to repeat the question.
At last Payzar opened his eyes and tilted his body forwards. Craning to see through the viewing port, he lifted a heavy arm and pointed to the darkness of space outside the viewing port.
“No need to speak of someone who is here with us. There. He’s looking straight at me.”
“The Alexos?” Hoji whispered – but Payzar had no answer to give leaving everyone none the wiser.
Payzar did not speak again that evening, but many of his students stayed there all night, staring into the black that might, at any moment, turn all they ever were, into dust, just like they had always been. But smaller.
In thirty-seven years time Hoji would tell his grand-children about that night, but they didn’t understand. Of course, they were at a particularly stupid age. As are we all.
The astute among you will have realised this means that they survived the Sodium Storm, as did the Alexos. Indeed most of them survived the sweet gel riots and the Hadrian Affair, where every drop of Sekkol was looted from the stores and Payzar’s mother was drunk for a fortnight.
During the riots Kopec was trapped in an automated gateway as he tried to pull a box of gel down into the Fourteeth Deck. His ribs smashed and splintered by the time his comrades prised open the doors there was little left of life except for parting words. As he lay in his father’s arms he described what a privilege it had been to be his son, but he was glad to be going. In fact, he felt that he’d been gone for some time now, swallowed by a blank screen with an occasional dot.
Payzar stopped giving his classes and instead started attending them. Hoji, Jaynest Cano and Cannida, a rakish gambler from the south, took it in turns to pass on everything that had been passed on to them.
Payzar let the tide of their words wash over him in those final few months. Hoji understood the wood, though he had never held a proper tool in his life, and Cano knew the delicacy of the human heart, even though she doubted its existence. Cannida told the filthiest jokes Payzar had ever heard and he loved her for it, while Cano tried not to begrudge the fact that Cannida’s sessions were always far better attended than hers.
Payzar, for the first time in years, felt that contentment was within touching distance, that one day soon, he would find his mind unlocked and open, ready to feel real air again and taste real food. While he dreaded the day they would land, he was ready to face what lay ahead, to know whether Jambo was aboard the Alexos or whether the Cosandeers had left him behind to die. Whether Payzar had left him behind.
In just weeks Payzar would know whether the hollowness within him had been grief or simply the mournful song of love interrupted.