Ancestral Night
Page 20
“I’m sure,” she said mockingly.
I felt scathed, struck. Disemboweled. I opened my mouth to defend myself, and nothing came out.
She said, “But you’d be giving all your skill and talent to a corrupt system that would exploit you, and not give you anything in return.”
“I don’t think that’s fair—” I started.
She interrupted me with a snort. “Spend your whole life running errands for the Synarche, and what do you get out of it?”
“Stability?” I said. “Adventure? Contributing to the well-being of the commonwealth? Giving back something in exchange for your oxygen ration and livelihood? Feeling useful?”
“ ‘Feeling useful,’ ” she mocked.
The skin on my face felt dry and tight. I was angry, but I didn’t really know what angry was, or what to do with it.
“I think you mean ‘being exploited,’ ” she continued.
“If you say so.”
But the seed of doubt was in me, doing seed-of-doubt things—sending out curling green tendrils and raveling down threadlike roots. I grew up in a clade. What did I really know about whether or not the Synarche exploited its citizens? I was coming to the conclusion that the clades did, which left me deeply uncomfortable and unsettled in my identity and existence.
“But what’s the better system, then?”
She guffawed. “If you have to constantly alter your natural mental state to survive a situation, doesn’t it follow that the situation is toxic?”
“It might follow that your brain chemical balance is maladaptive,” I countered. “We didn’t evolve to live in a galaxy-spanning interdependence. Are you going to argue we should leave psychopaths untuned in order to let them prey on the rest of us because our species somehow evolved to have a certain number of self-eating monsters in it?”
It had felt like firm ground when I started the argument, but Niyara shaking her head and frowning at me made me trail off in insecurity.
“We evolved to be competitive and hierarchal,” she said, pitching her voice so it sounded like she was agreeing with me and felt sorry for me at the same time. “We evolved to excel in order to increase our own status and desirability.” She shrugged. “Denying that doesn’t change it.”
“Indulging it doesn’t make it right!” I shot back.
“Like I said”—she shook her head sadly— “naive. But you’re willing to go do something that is a total betrayal of my feelings?”
“So I should care about your feelings in a way you never cared about mine? It’s my life. I’m the one who has to live it.”
“I care about your feelings. There are lots of things you could do to have adventures, to explore!”
“You give my feelings a lot of lip service,” I admitted. “In between trying to control me.”
I have no idea where I found the spunk to stand up to her. And managing the conflict reasonably was beyond me at that point in my life. I got up, turned around, and walked away from her, because the alternative was starting to shout and throw things, and I was much too thoroughly socialized and programmed against what my linemothers would have called “displays” to create such a scene as that.
♦ ♦ ♦
Five hours later, when I was lying on my bunk resisting the urge to tune and even more strongly resisting the near compulsion to send her a long, sorrowful mail, she texted me.
I’m sorry. I was a jerk. Meet me for dinner and I’ll make it up to you.
I wasn’t sure I believed her, but I was sure that I felt miserable when we were fighting, so I messaged back: Tell me where.
CHAPTER 12
SO WE WERE ON A date when Niyara blew up.
Actually blew up. Literally on a date.
After the fight, we’d met at a cafe in the outer ring of Ansara Station. That was one of the bigger ones, and there were shops and bars and places to eat or relax and chat with friends—or chat up potential new friends—lining the hull on either side, in between the docking tunnels. She’d picked out a place that did Ethiopian food, which is an old Terran specialty and amazingly delicious—and it was the sort of joint where you had to bring in your own wine if you wanted it.
We hadn’t brought any, so she sent me down the block to pick up a bottle. I was paying for a nice-enough white when the concussion wave hit me and the decomp doors came down. Luckily, I was still standing by the counter, or I could have been severed. Those doors don’t stop if an unlucky sentient is in the way; other lives depend on it.
All I could think of was getting back to her. It was nine long mins before the breach was declared stabilized and I could get out of the wine shop.
I still had the wine in my hand when I reached her. I dropped it. The bottle bounced a couple of times and rolled a little bit away. Then I dropped myself, to my knees beside her, and gathered up the scraps of my lover into my arms.
Her lips shaped a word. Senso picked up her intent and relayed it to me. “See?” she was saying, dying. “I do care about you.”
I had been about to say something comforting. It got stuck in my throat, and while I goggled at her, she bubbled a laugh.
“I sent you out of the blast radius, didn’t I?” she said, and died.
She didn’t have to die. The injuries weren’t severe enough to kill her if she got on life support. But she’d taken time-release poison before she blew the station hatchway. And that was the end of that, for Niyara Omedela, the love of my life, whose entire existence as I understood it was a lie.
I . . . spent a lot of time being interrogated, and eventually cleared. I’d been a dupe, I guess. Used to make her seem normal, connected? As a cover for her other intrigues? The Synarche doesn’t care if you’re sneaking around because you’re having an illicit assignation, and one sneak is as good as another.
Or maybe she needed . . . an outlet. Somebody who wasn’t part of the inner workings of her cell.
Her wife exploded too, over in H sector. Killed five people for no good reason except some political philosophy from the dark ages.
So I guess they were still an item after all.
♦ ♦ ♦
There was a trial.
I was tried as an accessory. And I was acquitted, because having revolutionary ideas and associating with revolutionaries is not a criminal offense, and nobody could prove I did more than that. Because I hadn’t, I told myself, but it’s hard to shake the guilt. The sense that if I’d been paying attention, I could have stopped that from happening. That those eight lives—not counting Niyara and her wife—were on my conscience.
Because I was a juvenile—under twenty-five standard ans—my name was never released to the senswebs and my identity was legally protected from all but my family. Or in my case, the clade. When I was acquitted, I was absolved. The records were sealed. My . . . “family” knew.
It worked out in one way. My clade didn’t really want me back after that, and who could blame them? I had mostly decided to leave before Niyara killed herself. After Niyara, I mostly contemplated coming home because I couldn’t figure out where else to go. And their obvious reluctance—their distaste for the association—
If it hadn’t been for Niyara, I probably wouldn’t have stayed away as long as I did. If it hadn’t been for what Niyara did, I would have asked to go home when I realized she was never going to love me back the way I loved her. She gave my happiness a lot of lip service, but that’s all it ever was. Her actions never supported what she said, and I flatter myself that I would have figured it out eventually and had the courage to walk away.
As it was, I was still blaming myself for her not loving me, and then blaming myself for not seeing that she was a monster. And then blaming myself for a clade I didn’t care about not loving me enough to take me back joyfully even though I’d become a liability. I mean, they sued for custody, and they would have made me one of them again. They’re supposed to let you walk away whenever you want.
In practice, that’s not how it works.
So I wanted to go back in order to feel like part of something again, and in order to not feel terrible, and I would have done it if they would have not made me feel like they were taking me on charity. Maybe I’d had enough of guilt and manipulation by then.
The judge decided I wasn’t culpable. It took two suicide attempts and a lot of rightminding before I started to be able to contemplate that they might have a point.
I’m sure I’m better now.
She got under my skin, I guess. Looks like letting things under my skin is a lifelong failing of mine.
♦ ♦ ♦
Anyway, if my clade had wanted me, they would have wanted me to find a mate and for each of us to birth a couple of offspring for the crèche, and . . .
I could have had myself adjusted to do that, of course. Rightminding is amazing stuff. If I’d chosen to, I could have gotten tuned right back into the perfect clade member, and I would have liked the life I was leading. I would have been perfectly satisfied to give up adventure and settle down and take up my appointed tasks in the community of people who all thought exactly the same things I did, so we never argued.
I would have been utterly content. No restlessness, no hollowness, no sense of searching. No sense of anything missing, which I wake up with pretty much every dia and which follows me around while I wonder where the hell my pants are and if there’s any toothpaste left. No existential angst, no ontological dread.
No striving.
Anyway, I stayed out in the universe and found a way to keep exploring, finding new things. Being useful and scratching that hunter’s itch both.
I could have had the guilt turned off. But sometimes tough feelings are there for a reason: so you can learn from them. They’re your endocrine system’s way of saying don’t do that again. So I decided to listen to what my conscience was telling me, learn a few things, and grow up.
And I got all that romance shit turned off at the root. I’m obviously not somebody who can be trusted with strong emotions.
♦ ♦ ♦
It took me a lot of soul-searching to get to where I could let him do it, but I told Singer he could put the details of what happened to me on the Jothari ship in his packet. He was right, and if anything happened to us, somebody had to know. Much as that level of exposure and vulnerability terrified me. We got our information back, and buggered out into white space as fast as we possibly could.
There was no BOLO, which was almost more threatening than if there had been. Did that mean our malfeasance had gone unreported? Because the stationmaster wanted to keep the hunt private? Because the Goodlaw did? Because they weren’t pursuing us?
We traveled on.
♦ ♦ ♦
Haimey.
Fist-sized bees were tangled in my hair. Never mind my hair is short and tightly curled and sometimes shaved right off; in the dream it was a long fluffy cloud and there were bees in it, tugging me every which way as their wings found purchase in atmosphere and pulled me across a habitat. I couldn’t control my trajectory; there was nothing to push against and nothing to grab. I went at the whim of the bees.
Haimey.
Their buzz was a bass line; their wings tickled my ears. They pulled me along a station corridor, toward a shadowy figure silhouetted against a viewport that glowed with a suffusing light. The broad shoulders and solid frame revealed her identity, however. It was Farweather. She drifted, anchored by the fingertips of one hand, and turned slowly toward me.
Haimey. Don’t you think it’s time you charted your own path?
I wanted to stop, to back away. The bees in my hair pulled me along the corridor, tugging harder—left, then right, then left again, surging by turns, yanking at the roots of my hair. I couldn’t reach the walls to slow myself.
As your bee friends are letting me do now?
Bees? she asked.
It wasn’t worth arguing about. How is following you charting my own path?
It’s better than buying the program, serving the Synarche, isn’t it? Working for the benefit of everybody but yourself?
Somehow, I felt like I’d had this conversation before. What does the Republic offer that’s better?
The Freeports offer freedom, she said archly.
It was funny, and I struggled not to laugh. I didn’t want to give her the advantage, even in points.
Right. I said. Freedom from responsibility. If you don’t mind, I was reading. You’re interrupting me.
As the jailer bees brought me almost within touching range of Farweather, I flailed wildly and swatted at them. My movements felt sluggish, impeded. Drugged.
Suddenly, I was falling away from her, as if acceleration had suddenly asserted itself and the ship I was in was gliding through space around me while I drifted, relatively stationary.
Have it your way, she said. This isn’t over.
She receded rapidly out of sight. I made contact with a bulkhead, which pressed against my back with reassuring force, and I almost started to relax until the bees, still tugging at my hair, began to sting.
♦ ♦ ♦
I jerked awake in the dimness of my sleeping cubby. Bushyasta had climbed inside my net and was curled against my head, claws snagged in my hair, purring loudly in her sleep and kneading, which explained the pinpricks in my scalp.
“Dammit, cat,” I said groggily.
Singer must have been correcting course, because she drifted against her anchoring grip, tugging painfully.
“Ow,” I said, reaching up to push her away. “Ow, cat. Dammit!”
“Good morning, Haimey,” Singer said. “If you’re awake, we’re coming up on a beacon.”
Extricating—ExtriCATing—myself took a few minutes. Once I’d gotten Bushyasta out of my hair and lobbed her gently across quarters (she made no appearance of waking up during any of this; I’m sure she eats but damned if I know when) I pulled on some soft trousers and a tank top and made my way into the control cabin.
Connla lifted a hand in greeting without saying anything or shifting his attention. He seemed busy, so I drifted back into the galley and fixed myself some coffee.
The parasite told me where we were without my having to look at a chart, or even out a viewport. I could feel the slope of the galaxy as we glided down it, the Well tethering us despite our distance. We’d popped out of white space and were cruising on EM drive, describing a gentle arc toward what must be the beacon.
“In range,” Singer said. “Transferring data.”
I flinched inwardly. No take-backs, now. I drowned my emotions in a swig of coffee and didn’t say anything.
“Interesting,” Singer said a moment later. “Haimey, there’s a message here from Goodlaw Cheeirilaq, for you.”
♦ ♦ ♦
The message in question was short, to the point, and encrypted. Fortunately, the encryption lock was coded to my DNA on file, which did two things: made it easy to read, and assured me that it probably had come from an official source. It was conceivable the Freeporters had a record of my DNA—I had been stabbed by a needle on a ship that wound up their prize, after all—and it was also conceivable that they had the DNA-datalock. But Singer didn’t think it terribly likely, and I trusted his judgment.
What Cheeirilaq told me was also reassuring, since I had decided to trust the Goodlaw; that my message had been received, and that Cheeirilaq was following us, and that it was in contact with Core authorities. I didn’t think it could make the kind of time we were making, not having the advantage of Koregoi senso. But it was still comforting to imagine that backup was on the way. Even if the backup in question was a giant low-gravity bug, it was better than nothing—and Cheeirilaq happened to be a giant low-gravity bug with the full force of
law on its side. Even at the frontiers of space that was worth something, and among the packed worlds of the Core it was worth something more.
Planets are one of the reasons we all have to work so hard to get along out here, despite the systers of the Synarche comprising an insane array of metabolisms and morphologies. We have to find ways to work together, because the consequences of war are so horrific.
Planets are fragile, and easy to break. They are complicated systems that suffer greatly from relatively minor upsets that are completely trivial to create. And while they are robust in that they can often recover from many catastrophes, the catastrophes themselves are trivial to engineer, and the recovery may take geologic ages.
And it is possible to engineer unrecoverable catastrophes.
Planets are hostages to fortune. And the time is going to come for every species when they’ll want friends.
One thing about the Freeporters: they mostly don’t have a lot of colonies. Possibly not any, unless they’re well hidden. They get what they need and want that can’t be found in space by taking it, not growing or creating it.
They are exploitational, because of that. People tend to be more invested in protective social structures and collective, collaborative government when they feel themselves at risk. When they have something to lose. The Freeporters, not having the same level of investment, also don’t have the drive to engage. They take what they can get and sequester it. They are outside the system.
Farweather, of course, would tell me that I was under the thumb of oppressive government, duped into complicity with my own enslavement. And I admit, it’s tempting to consider what it would be like to skip out on responsibility, accountability, and interdependence and live only for yourself—but the idea of being surrounded by people with the same sophipathology makes it somewhat less appealing.
Actually, I wonder if Farweather would tell me that—or if I’m just imagining what Niyara would say, and projecting it onto the Sexy Pirate Type because trauma recapitulates itself.