A Desolation Called Peace

POSTLUDE

TO think as a person and to not think language. To think fractal scatter-song, the shape of an unfamiliar body, an inclusion like a garnet in the matrix of a stone—stone, still, but otherwise, crystalline and complete. Inside that crystal language—like the mouth-cries of unpersons, but made singable—lodges and reverberates, isolated until necessary. We, singing all through us, singing harmonic variance, vibration on an almost-interfering frequency. This body, that body: this body had a call-sign when it wasn’t a person, and it is not the only one: this body was called LEAP! and that body greypattern, this body sweetling and that body Cleverer Than Littermates, and so, this new body, singing in the we: called Swarm, which is a laughing name now. Some call-signs are exactly like the person that is we, and that is glitter-sharp delight; the body LEAP! is a building-designing body, a structure-maker, whose structures are gossamer spaces for springing across. So too the body Swarm. To think that this body was a person before it was a person, and called itself appropriately even so!

We did not name this body, the unfamiliar body sings, we were named. We were known. The unfamiliar body sings the inside of a Teixcalaanli ship, a scatter of images and warmth: another body, a commander-body, a person-not-a-person in a thousand memory-points, reassembled. We-when-we-are-Teixcalaan are known without singing, Swarm tells the we. We-when-we-are-Teixcalaan are known with language only, and still clearly.

There is some disbelief, within the reaches of the we. To think language would be so transparent as to allow knowing!

Language is not so transparent, Twenty Cicada thinks—thinks out, a long reaching flicker through all of himself, which is all of the we together and still himself, ourselves. Language is not so transparent, but we are sometimes known, even so. If we are lucky.

Slide-shimmer query, the endless curiosity and want and reaching that is the we, thinking without language: Show us, then!

And on Peloa-2, in the desert night waiting for the shuttle that will take his body to a more hospitable environment, what remains of Twenty Cicada settles, cross-legged in the sand, and begins to try.