Followers

We went to the park in the afternoon, Carys, Ava and I. The light in New Copernicus is more gentle, and the temperatures more even than on the surface. Up there, it’s still not long after noon and the hottest part of the long Moon day. Down here it was quiet, grey and painterly, the air warm and soft. I could see why people had taken to living underground.

Ava and Carys were earnest, discussing why we had really come here.

‘To experience being one of the ancient humans,’ was Ava’s view. ‘To feel, to behave, just like they did.’

Carys thought it was to experience their art, ‘otherwise why did we decide to spend the whole time walking the Art Trail?’

Listening to them, I realised that although they had a huge amount more continuity with the Company we had been than I did, their understanding of what we had been, what it was to be a Company, was almost as lost as mine.

‘Did you know I have followers?’ I asked them.

They didn’t. So I showed them: the man who claimed to be a relation (or a corruption?) of a pre-Expansion religious leader. The multi-faceted being who had turned the simple English language, the same as we were using, into an image of symmetry disrupted, with meanings that overlapped, tripped each other, were foggy. The man who documented conversations between objects (decorative, artistic, of the very earliest days of the Expansion Era).

‘This “Faded Houses Green” is interesting,’ said Carys. ‘He seems to be several people, yet he says he’s one person, and they’re all expressing themselves at once.’

‘Is that the same as a Company?’ I asked.

Carys frowned. ‘No, it’s the opposite. He has many entities inside him, all with their own images, but he says he’s just one person. A Company is one entity, but it has many persons, generated when they’re needed. Like now.’

The explanation didn’t quite make sense to me, however much I thought about it.

‘I like the paintings, too,’ said Carys.

‘Don’t you want to stay a person? Become your own entity?’ I was looking at Ava as I said it, Ava in a long green dress with her feet trailing in the shallow water.

But it was Carys who replied. ‘People don’t do that any more, my friend. Unless they’re at the frontier of Expansion. And that’s past the edge of the galaxy by now.’