“So. Talk,” says Verdigris, refusing the bait, always the better of them both. “What do you have for us then, grandmaster?”
Rita flashes a winning smile down at the dog she calls Maya and good mutt that she is, Maya is immediately suffused by joy, chemical opiate of the chronically co-dependent. In Rita’s approval, she trusts. “Later. First, we get to Rochelle and we bring her onboard. We need someone to handle the demolition work.”
Murmured ill-ease. Had she been listening? Or is she prescient? Hard to say and god knows, Rita will never tell. The scientist traces a complex iconogram on the wall, the pebbled steel coming alive with an overlay of a map, its borders framed with coordinates and on-going computations. The display shimmers. It is substituted by an aerial capture of a large homestead, its backyard opening into tilled fields.
“Here,” she says, tapping the screen. “This is where she currently lives. It’s a few systems away, but it won’t take too long.”
“Is that a farm?” says Constance, who’s been silent up till now. The air in the steerage has irrevocably altered. If before it had felt like a homecoming, it is dust and distance again in the humid atmosphere, everyone reverted to professional etiquette. “You know, of all the places I imagined she’d end up, a farm . . . wasn’t one of ’em.”
“How do we know it’s hers?” says Verdigris.
Rita taps at a splotch of black in the visual. “Lots of old vehicles.”
“Doesn’t mean it belongs to Rochelle,” says Constance. “Lots of people have a thing about refurbishing old machines.”
“I bet your precinct had a lot of ‘old machines’ in the evidence locker,” says Ayane.
“No one’s ever going to let me live the cop thing down, huh?”
“Nope,” says Verdigris, bright as a song.
“I’ll go check it out,” Maya declares to her own surprise, all at once exhausted by the bickering, the layered maneuvering, the history which refutes all attempts to keep it entombed. Give her a gun, give her a war, give her bodies to line the floor. Maya’s unrepentantly basic, a murderer with no nuance, and these interpersonal politics? She doesn’t want them, thanks. The realization of how much she loathes this closes around her throat like a fist and she’s dyspneic by the next sentence. “I can’t deal with all the bitching anymore.”
“Aren’t you worried we’ll take a swing at your favorite person while you’re out?” says Constance with detached ritual.
“No,” says Maya, without hesitation, because like Circe, like any witch from any old fairy tale, Rita has them all under her spell, and until someone can kiss the wickedness from Rita’s teeth, they’ll be her dogs until the world breaks like a heart.
“Not at all.”
Rochelle
“Rochelle here?”
Maya cranes a look over the boy’s head. Inside, the homestead is maximalist indulgence: carpeting and jubilant wallpaper, paleolithic accoutrements: photographs—actual fucking analog photographs—in a hodgepodge of twee frames, an umbrella stand in the shape of a gargantuan rabbit’s foot, a rattan pendant lamp, antique Venetian masks, half-wilted plants bereft of automated care but fecund nonetheless despite their ailments, spilling over countertops and greenly frothing in poorly lit corners. An aesthetic borrowed from millennia past. The scent of sandalwood and incense wafts forward.
Fuck Rita. Fuck the rest of them for capitulating to her bad temper. Maya is so far out of her element, she’s treading entropy.
“You must be one of Mom’s old students. I’ll tell Mama you’re here.”
“Wait.” Maya snakes a hand out to grab his shoulder. The boy is arresting in his resemblance to Rochelle. Lean, in the way she was, with a coyote’s lilt to the shape of his posture, his predator leanness. With her eyes and her unsubtle smile rupturing across his narrow face. Her sigh and her micro-expressions, identical to the shadowing beneath the temporal bone. “Mama?”
The smile closes up like a tomb. The boy bobs his chin, rolls his eyes with injurious similarity to how Rochelle once did the same. Maya feels her chest tighten, unable, for a second, to sift between the present and the long-deceased past. Even reality unmoors, becomes porous, so much so that a flash of motion from the kitchen commands the immediate expectation that Rochelle—alive, smiling, unchanged from that bitter day—might step out to berate Maya for manhandling her child. “Mama. Because Rochelle’s Mom.”
“How old are you?”
He cocks his head as Maya lets go. She places him in his mid-teens, lacking still in the ruggedness which personifies grown masculinity, but not completely bereft of such architecture. “No offense. But you’re asking way too many questions for someone who ain’t family.”
The bite in his statement; it startles a baying laugh from Maya’s throat, a sound that lances through the ambient cello music soaking through the small homestead. There is a screech of a bow dragged roughly over indignant strings, the slap of a palm upon wood. A punctuation, an objection to the intrusion of Maya’s histrionics. It shuts her up. Huh, Maya thinks, piqued by the artistry she’s disrupted, the not-yet-revealed cellist so exquisite Maya had believed them to be artificial.
A movement. Her attention flits again to the boy.
“You sound just like her,” Maya whispers, and she means it in a way that’d take the kid at least another two decades of heartache to internalize. Being alive means being aware you’ll inevitably lose people, Death being the laziest but most implacable apex predator yet. But nothing fucking readies anyone for seeing the beloved dead captured like this—just for an attosecond, only in the right light, the right moment—in a stranger’s face, not even clonetech, not even blowing your brains out a hundred times over because that particular flesh-chassis was too inconvenient to keep.
“Please tell me you’re not my older sister or something like that.” Another eye-roll, this one conducted with more emphasis. “Mama, there’s someone really fucking weird here.”
A reply—Turkic etymology, although Maya’s onboard-translator blanks on the origin of its exact phonological system, substituting exact data with the hypothesis that this was a language someone once tried to bury—billows from around a corner. “I told you once, I told you again, and I hope to hell I don’t have to tell you again: watch your language.”
Again, an eye-roll, but unlike its predecessor, it entreats Maya to be a co-conspirator. Youth apparently respects no loyalties, at least when they’re from the parent cultivar. Offshoots like clone kids, well, those have their allegiances baked in. The impertinence elicits a grin nonetheless, and Maya motions toward the interior, her head and one eyebrow cocked.
“Yes, Mama. I know, I know.” The boy harmonizes with his mother, switching to that same beautifully agglutinative tongue. “She wants to come in. Can she?”
“Sure.” Spoken with exceeding flippancy, but Maya’s sensors collate proof that, at minimum, twenty-five scans are currently in motion. She does not object to the cross-examination, stands there patiently until something further inside the house goes ding. “Don’t forget to take off your shoes.”
“You sure? My feet fucking stink,” says Maya.
“We have facilities. Wash them.”
Mama, as it turns out, is a woman named Reyha, six feet exactly according to Maya’s internal telemetries, and built broad. Wide shoulders, hips of similar scale, a laddered belly, muscular legs. Her mouth too: the lips generous even when pursed with distrust.
“You’re from Rochelle’s old crew, then. You know, she told me about you girls. I wasn’t sure if I believed her.” Reyha studies her without reservation, her expression nakedly interrogative, and Maya almost grins. Of course Rochelle would shack up with someone like Reyha, measured and allergic to anything even resembling fear. “The wild heists, the crazy shit she did. Man, she wasn’t anything like that when I met her.”
It brings Maya up short. Already, she has been having trouble mulling over the idea of Rochelle’s life abbreviated, this declension of a grand existe
nce; all that hype, all those acrobatic crimes, the history they shared, swept under a prettily adorned table and forsaken for domesticity. Maya, though she tries, cannot pretzel her mind around Rochelle’s decision. To elect mortality was one thing, but to choose such an anonymous descent into the good night. The fuck was Rochelle thinking?
But what she says is: “What was she like then?”
Reyha gives her a once-over. Whatever she surmises from that brisk appraisal can’t be bad because Reyha allows them both the glory of a slow, thoughtful smile. And at the sight of it, Maya thinks,Yyes, I could see giving up living forever for someone to smile at me like that. An image of Rita—gloveless and in crew overalls, the artistry of her smoothed away, worn down to a plain sweet humanity—flashes into active thought, and Maya shoots it down, but it’s nothing compared to the speed with which she shotguns into extinction a sudden vision of Verdigris. No point deluding oneself with sentimentality. Fuck that shit. Fuck both of them.
“Rochelle?” Reyha exhales and there is a whole lifetime of memory in that bridge of sound, all of it good somehow. “She liked cars. Terrestrial vehicles. Rovers, short-range land gliders. Those sorts of things.”
No surprise there. Rochelle prided herself on balance. For every blown-up refueling station, she’d put together a house, a car, anything decayed into irrelevance. Because you had to have both sides of the equation, she’d said. Dark and light. Hope and ruin.
“Uh huh.”
“Used to have this thing about going between planets, picking up rusted piles of crap, things that people didn’t want anymore and, you know, fixing them up.”
“To sell?” Maya says, although she knows the answer.
A half-laugh that skirts deeper-running emotions. “To rehome, mostly. Rochelle believed wholeheartedly in rehabilitation, finding beauty in the mess. She’d repair whatever she found and ask around until she found someone who wanted to take it for their own.”
“What else did she do?”
“She liked baking sweets,” says Reyha, with no irony. “She was obsessed.”
Had that been Rochelle? Did she bake? Had there been profiteroles on a counter, malformed soufflés, failed mochi, cakes abandoned because they wouldn’t rise to the occasion? She can’t remember. Forty years, Maya realizes, is too much time to hold in its entirety. For all that clonetech does to preserve biological continuity, it can’t fuck with the inimical design. The brain, pressed to contain every life experience, knows better than to do so. Instead of retaining every memory, it makes composites, deriving assumptions from repeated examples, and flattens decades into annotated summaries.
What has she lost in those years? How much was elided for the sake of the chase? Forgotten, unwritten because Maya saw Rochelle as an accomplice rather than a person? How much of that was Maya’s own error? How much was it Rita’s fault? Rita’s say-so? Rita’s meticulous instruction on what to think, what to feel, what to do? Why is it so hard for her to remember what made Rochelle human?
“You all right?”
Fuck vulnerability. Maya straightens her stance, the set of her jaw, her spine, her little lopsided smile so it has the slice of Rita’s own poise, if it’d been grunged up a little first. “Yeah. I’m fine. I guess—I don’t know. I was expecting more? I don’t know. No offense. It’s nothing on you. But she could have lived forever, been a fucking god. And this was what she chose? A wife and a kid and a house on a moon. I don’t know. It just seems fucking anticlimactic to me.”
Reyha does not drop the beat. “Being old is a luxury of its own. It’s saying you’re willing to let go, to stop writhing with ambition. To just be. At least, that’s how Rochelle explained it to me.”
“I don’t know how any of that makes this sound better. It still fucking sounds like giving up.” Maya hesitates. “No offense.”
“What’s wrong with giving up?” Reyha leans back, sinking into the plum-blue loveseat, its cushions tasseled and the curlicues of its frame ornate to a fault. The wall behind her gleams with a thin lamina of liquid glass. On display: a rain-tumbled deciduous forest, fog-silvered, speckled with the shadows of birds in flight. Broadcasted by concealed speakers: the static murmur of such languid meteorological phenomena. “We navigate by capitalism. Always had, probably always will. And one of the things about capitalism is it demands we think of our lives as in deficit. Not enough time, not enough material possessions, not enough luxuries. Not enough anything. Because contentment doesn’t sell. Desire does.”
“I don’t understand—”
“Rochelle gave up on wanting more because she was happy with enough.” Reyha, unruffled by whatever blasphemies someone else might have read in Maya’s responses, stretches an arm to her right toward a bowl of sweets atop a palatial dresser. “It’s not that hard. She was happy here. With me, with Ehmet.”
“Then why not choose to stay alive? Why opt to die?” A light comes on in the adjacent room. Maya’s sensors take immediate note, reticules fixed on every exit. What enters her sights is no threat but Ehmet, casually embalmed in a tracksuit, pink headphones anchored around his throat. He throws them both a perfunctory wave. Maya swings her attention back to Reyha. “Doesn’t he deserve to always have his mothers?”
“Stasis teaches nothing to a kid.” Reyha undresses a crystalline sweet, pops it in her mouth.
A door closes. Ehmet is gone. Out, maybe, to run laps around a lake, run an errand, run lines of coke with a creche of friends. Who the fuck knows? Maya certainly doesn’t. It could be any of the pleasant banalities associated with being young. Maya is only cognizant of them third-hand, having been, in the infancy of her existence, a beast of labor as opposed to a beloved child. “You could have both had eternities to show him what the world means.”
“And through what lens?” Finally, when Maya was so sure that Reyha’s composure is bulletproof, it fissures. It cracks along the bend of her mouth, her forehead. To Maya’s surprise, she experiences no triumph, only an apostate’s abashedness, like she’d defaced a god of small yet precious things. “Fear? An unwillingness to confront discomfort? Growth is married to loss. You know this.”
“It doesn’t have to be.” Sadly, that embarrassment is nowhere near enough to dissuade Maya from pursuing the argument to its bitter death as she is nothing if not a hunting dog when pressed: born to instinct, blessed for the kill. Maya scoots forward on her chair, hands out, a plea in the cup of her palms. “The tech exists now. Fuck, Rochelle was a perfect example of that.”
“She had no peace until she gave it up.”
“How do you know that? Maybe she was just doing it for you. We worked together for two hundred years, and—”
“Rochelle was miserable every fucking day.”
Maya recoils. “What?”
“That was what she told me. She was miserable every day of that life. She hated the rituals. She hated dying, coming back, scrubbing her memories of the trauma. That whole nonsense. Rochelle hated it.” Reyha tongues the inside of her cheek, a gesture shockingly prurient in its manifestation. “Just. Hated it.”
“She never told me.” Her voice startles her with how hurt it sounds, how soft; the loss implied in its dearth of volume surprises her enough to drag Maya out the other side where she emerges, bloodied and fucking enraged at having been kneecapped by emotion. Fuck. This. Shit. She cuts her blood with a flood of endorphins, dampens the cortisol output and sits silent as her editing renders her pain down to a non-issue. Ah, there we go. Finally. No more of that bullshit.
“This is what I’m talking about.” Reyha wags a finger at her. Funny how much like a child she feels here in the presence of an old-fashioned crone. Maya is older than the first sin, but she’s got nothing on Reyha, nothing on a life lived calm as deep water. Maya wishes Reyha’d lord that wisdom over her, get on a high horse, do something egregious, anything to merit aggression, because there’s a part of Maya scratching to fight. But she doesn’t. Reyha’s expression retains its unflinching compassion as she speaks, soften
ing even. “I saw what you did.”
“Calm myself the fuck down?”
“Yes.” Whatever ground Maya had won in her war against Reyha’s stoicism crumbles as Reyha, bold as love, extends a hand to clasp Maya’s own.
It fucking startles her, of course. Enough that Maya doesn’t immediately reciprocate by torquing herself loose and eviscerating the middle-aged matron in plain view of whomever is lucky enough to be strutting outside those wide casement windows. Instead, she stares, dumbfounded by the physicality of Reyha’s compassion. How many times has anyone touched her like that? Has anyone touched her like so? Without intent to manipulate, to seduce, to entreat, to delay execution? With nothing but milquetoast baseline human kindness.
Maya exhales in a razored hiss. “What are you doing?”
“It’s okay to not be okay.”
Her tongue, never so graceless when it comes to topics pertaining to aggression, is a wad of limp muscle in her mouth, too bulky to do more than help shape the word: “What?”
“It’s okay to not be okay,” Reyha repeats. Now, both hands have come to encircle Maya’s own and dimly, Maya thinks, Yeah, the placement of my fingers on this weapon is wrong, so this is a correction. Yeah, that’s what she’s doing. Except that hypothesis yields no new knowledge in artillery, the tactile contact void of education. Reyha is holding her because she cares. “Ehmet, he’s a good kid, and you’d think people’d have learned from when we were all still terrestrial, but that ‘toxic masculinity’ bullshit is everywhere. Boys get told they’re not supposed to cry, not supposed to hurt. But it happens, and blocking it out like that, it kills something in you. You get what I’m saying?”
With the two of them bunched up so close, close enough for Maya to be lanced through by a chill mineral attar of eucalyptus, an appropriate choice in fragrances, what with the plant’s reputation for healing and Reyha’s apparent predilection for healing anything within radius, Maya could headbutt the older—younger? Reyha has neither visible ports nor signs of vascular implants, no telltale cicatrices to hint, maybe, she’s on the clonetech merry-go-round—woman for the insult of this unsolicited affection, levy any measure of punitive measurements.
The All-Consuming World Page 14