That was over. “I am capable. I may not be the great revolutionary who saved our family single-handedly, but I am full-up of legends about Ruby. I grew up eating legends about her for fucking breakfast, and hearing songs about her as if they were lullabies and hearing her sing in the kitchen every frigging morning, long after she was dead.” Words spilled out of her one by one. Staccato. “I am full to the brim with Ruby Martin. If the dead can rub off because there’s a memory of them in a room, she’s stuck all over me.” She stopped, almost panting. She took a sip of stim. “The real thing I learned down there, with my feet in the dirt looking up, the real thing I learned was that I need to make my own choices.”
Satyana regarded her with a flat but thoughtful expression.
“What is it to you anyway? You yourself said it’s my ship. You have dozens more. Maybe more than that. You have everything. I am taking this thing, this chance, this ship, and I am going to fly after my friend.”
Satyana looked she was going to tell her no, so Nona was surprised when she said, “You have no idea what you’re getting into. You’re stupidly naive, and so is Charlie the animal man.”
“And you know everything?”
Satyana stopped. “Okay.”
“Okay what?”
“Okay you can go.”
Nona went still and quiet. Oh my. She looked up at Satyana. “Will you help me?”
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHRYSTAL
Chrystal remembered the sweet taste of the drink, the thickness of it in her throat. She had been certain she was drinking death. And now, at this moment, she felt nothing. No regret, no pain, no hope, nothing. A dull sort of curiosity, at most. Perhaps she was dead.
She tried to move her arms, to stretch.
“You can’t move yet,” a voice said, startling her. “You aren’t connected to anything you can move yet.” It was a silky voice, the kind of voice dreamed up to take her away when she practiced yoga.
She tried to open her eyes.
“You can’t do that either. Be patient.”
She wondered what had happened to her, but the disembodied voice didn’t tell her.
Something about becoming a robot. Maybe she was really at the end of a yoga workout, in savasana, and she had been dreaming it all.
Maybe she was always a robot and she had been dreaming she was in savasana.
She was awake enough to recognize that last thought was fucked up.
She tried to speak.
“Patience.”
How the hell did the yoga voice know what she was trying to do? She wanted to feel something. She should be cold. She should be groggy. Some part of herself should feel something. Anything. A foot, a leg, a little toe. Oh shit. Oh shit. Oh shit. She tried a deep breath.
“You don’t need to breathe. You have everything you need.”
Didn’t she have to breathe every second? Or at least a few times a minute? She hadn’t taken a breath since she woke up.
“You don’t need to breathe. You have everything you need.” The words were going over and over, like a chant. Soft and crisp. “You don’t need to breath.”
She started to panic, and then warmth flooded her brain, and fuzziness, and she drifted away, certain she should be panicking but unable to gather the energy to scream.
The yoga voice drew her partway out of a long sleep. “Can you speak to me?”
Chrystal tried. Hello. Even to her it sounded tentative. Hello. Hello. Hello.
Nothing. She couldn’t hear herself. Her lips didn’t move, her breath didn’t flow through her lungs and fill her chest.
“Try again. It’s about coherence of thought, not the words. Think about greeting me.”
She tried. Again and again she tried.
She couldn’t do something as simple as saying hello to a robot.
She had known what was going to happen but hadn’t been able to stare it in the face. Katherine had unpacked it. She remembered Katherine waving, the feel of her cheek when she kissed it, the warm weight of Jason’s arm over her shoulder.
She was . . . not human. Anymore.
Would she ever feel—anything—again?
“Are you trying?” the voice asked.
Fuck you, she thought.
“I heard something.”
Fuck you.
“What?”
Fuck you.
“Be polite.”
Chrystal tried to laugh, but she didn’t seem to have the apparatus to laugh.
“Simple words work better. We’ll teach you about expressing emotions later.”
So she had emotions. She was a robot but she had emotions. It didn’t make any sense. Maybe she wasn’t dead yet. Maybe there was still time to change this thing that had happened. Why would a robot feel? she asked.
“Emotions are an important part of understanding the world. Early on, we attempted to get rid of them, but that created psychopaths.”
You are a psychopath. You put me into a robot’s body. That makes you a psychopath. You don’t care that you murdered me.
“Excuse me?”
Where are the others?
“Who?”
Family. The yoga voice was playing her. It had to know what she meant. Who she meant. Katherine. Yi. Jason.
“So far, they are all alive.”
By what definition? Like she was alive? She thought the question at the voice, but it didn’t seem to understand.
Chrystal reached deep inside herself and came up with her next question. A simpler one. What did you do?
“We gave you the joy of ourselves. The freedom of being more.”
You killed us.
“Think of it as burning away everything that kept you small and insignificant. As taking away only what you no longer needed.”
Murder, Chrystal responded.
A brief silence ensued. “Maybe. It’s true that we gave you no choice. But there was no time to convince you to volunteer for this. We are on our way to the inner system now. We needed some of us who would know people in the inner worlds. A bridge. To show compassion.”
Murder is not compassion.
“Good. That was a complex expression. You are doing quite well. We will work on your motor control next. But first, sleep again and dream of becoming. Dream of us and all we are making you. Someday, you will dream our dreams.”
Never.
Warmth flooded over her again. She tried to fight it, to hang on to being conscious, but she faded from nearly-nothing to nothing, to formlessness and the void of death.
Chrystal woke again, still floating, still unable to feel a thing. She strained for an emotion. A sensation. Her foot. She might as well be a ghost in fog. An ineffable sadness fell over her, a sadness greater than she had felt when her father died in an accident when Chrystal was only fifteen, a sadness so heavy that she needed to cry to release it or else it could consume her, burn her to ash.
“Are you awake?”
The hated voice was better than nothing, better than sadness. I’m sad.
“That’s normal at this stage of becoming. You have not yet let go of the things you lost, and you do not yet know what you have gained. You will begin with a tight link to a body, one that will allow you to feel somewhat normal.”
How?
“You are already in that body.”
What?
“You are in a body.”
I can’t feel it.
“I’ll turn you on. Be prepared. Time will change. You have been moving very fast through becoming and healing because you have not been limited by the physical. When we turn you on, you will slow down to the speed at which your old body thought.”
A hum gathered her attention, something quiet and barely noticeable, but the only sensory anything besides the disembodied yoga voice that she had heard since . . . since she died. Fuck!
“A single pathway has been turned on. You should be able to feel fingers.”
The voice didn’t say she would feel her fingers.
“Try it.”
She tried to wiggle her fingers.
Nothing.
She tried again.
“Keep trying. Sometimes it takes a while to touch the physical world.”
She tried again. Thought about quitting. If she didn’t try would they just let her die? Would that be better?
“Katherine is struggling and she needs help from one of you. You are the closest to being able to help her.”
She hated being so easily manipulated. Hated the voice. Hated being dead and being taken advantage of. She hated the idea of doing anything for her killers. But she could still remember Katherine’s wave, and the tone of her voice when she sang and when she drummed and when she was bent over something in the lab, murmuring. She remembered the curve of Katherine’s waist, and she could still hear Katherine’s infectious laugh.
Katherine was the first person to choose her as family.
She spent a moment being still and quiet, and then she tried for a finger again.
Her left pinky twitched.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHARLIE
Charlie looked up from the couch in the Sultry Savior’s passenger quarters to find Nona standing and watching him silently. She wore a uniform—the colors of the ship were red and black with touches of bright blue near the neck and down the front. She looked good in it, too. If there was anything of the Nona he’d been squiring around Lym in the person standing here, it was that the uniform looked big on her even though it wasn’t. If he understood the complex rank system here, she was second in command. She looked more like a ranger trainee than anyone with real authority.
Or maybe he was just being uncharitable. He had expected to be one of a third—that he and Nona and Satyana would fly the ship home.
He hadn’t expected a ship the size of the Savior. It would hold a hundred skimmers, maybe a hundred times a hundred. Satyana had led him to a rather small cabin in the passenger area and pretty much abandoned all private contact with him.
He missed Cricket terribly. And Jean Paul. Wind. Air that smelled of spring flowers and fresh water. He knew better than to blame Nona for the fact that he was trapped on the Sultry Savior, but that didn’t make it easy to see her right now.
He used his own silence to force her to break hers first.
“Would you join us for lunch?” she asked.
He’d been invited to two captain’s dinners. To his surprise, Satyana had held the head of the table and Nona the foot. Ten people on each side, all of them from stations. He had felt awkward at both meals. “Will there be a crowd?”
“Just us.”
“When?”
“In a half an hour. Come to the bridge.”
He showered and chose his cleanest clothes, a pair of work pants and a casual shirt. Boots. All the shoes he had, and nothing like the soft boots people wore on the space station.
It took so long to find the command center that he arrived five minutes late. But when a young officer led him in, he forgot everything—boots and small rooms and planets alike. This was a fantastical place with screens on every wall: stars and status, Lym, a map of the whole system and exactly where they were and where other ships were, various views inside the Sultry Savior. He turned slowly, twice, trying to take in every image on every wall.
Nona came up to him and cleared her throat. “This is the center. I can get this data anywhere, but here we can see it all at once.” She pointed to a round circle in the middle of the room that was full of crash couches and seats and people. Satyana herself sat in the very center. Her huge bodyguard, Britta, stood just behind her.
“Wow,” he said. “Just wow.” He could fly almost any class of skimmer with the best of them—when he was younger he’d won races. But this? So much complexity, so much to learn. “Are we going to eat there?”
“No. We only allow food in the command center in an emergency, and then it’s just tubes and squares. Unless that’s what you want for lunch?”
She was teasing him. “No.”
“But you can come up and see it. Follow me.”
He did. Satyana looked happy to see him, downright pleased. She smiled and held out her hand. “Welcome to the center of Nona’s ship.”
Nona’s ship? He barely managed not to say that out loud. “It’s bigger than I expected.”
Nona spoke from behind him. “Wait until you see the Deep.”
Satyana showed him many of the various information streams and allowed him to ask questions. It felt like a test, but he thought he did okay. There was no pilot in the way he’d come to think of one—computers did all of that work.
He’d never seen so much information in one place, not even at the ranger station where they monitored sensors from all over Lym.
After about an hour of explaining ship’s system after ship’s system, Satyana stood up. “You must be starved. Let’s eat.” She turned to Nona. “You have command.”
The look on Nona’s face suggested that she hadn’t expected to be left behind.
A brief look passed between Britta and Satyana, and Britta stayed behind with Nona. Charlie followed Satyana’s compact form out of the main area of the bridge and into a small galley that smelled of fresh bread and spices and cinnamon stim.
A pair of young women clad in white stood at attention as they walked through the kitchen into a formal dining room. A large wood (wood!) table sat in the middle of a square room where every wall contained screens showing some of the same data that displayed in the command center. He touched the table, as if he could feel the tree it had been. It was set with fresh salads and a plate of spiced rolls and, to his utter surprise, with fresh flowers.
He felt the flower petals. Real.
“We have a small garden,” Satyana said. “Nona likes flowers. She and Chrystal used to make daily bouquets in one of my gardens.”
Charlie made admiring noises about the food as they filled their plates. Satyana accepted them as compliments, waving them away with a polite facade of modesty. “I apologize for leaving you to fend for yourself. Nona and I had to prepare for our arrival. We’re halfway to the Deep; we’ll start to decelerate soon. We’ll arrive in three days. If you’re willing, I’d like for you to join us every afternoon. Come at noon for lunch and then we’ll start. You should understand the ship before I get off her.”
“That’s not much time to learn so much!”
“I’ll give you homework for the mornings.”
He tried to hide his irritation by taking a bite and finishing it before he answered. “Absolutely. Happy to, Captain.”
“We’ll get uniforms for you at the Deep.”
He thought for a moment before answering. “I’d rather not have a uniform. After all, you’re not paying me. I’m along to represent Lym.”
“I’ve been thinking of offering you a paid position.”
“No, thank you.”
She went silent for a moment, but she looked more contemplative than angry. “You’re certain?”
“Yes.”
“We’ll provide your air and water and food. I’ll chalk that up as a gift to Lym.”
It wasn’t a question. He had forgotten about the idea of paying for air. Instinct told him not to become beholden to Satyana Adams. “Can I earn air by helping to fly the ship?”
She smiled. “Yes.”
Maybe she had been testing him.
“You’ll need a uniform if you have any meetings with the people from the Edge. Do you have a uniform for Lym?”
“I have ranger uniforms. I brought one with me.”
“Bring it to me and I’ll have something made.”
He didn’t like the idea, but he also didn’t want to say no to everything. “The ice pirates? Are we expecting to meet them?”
“Maybe. But don’t call them that.”
He bristled. “Calling them the Next implies I believe they’re better than us.”
“And calling them ice pirates implies that you have no manners at all.”
&nb
sp; He took a deep breath, and then another. “I told you diplomacy isn’t my strong suit.”
“Then you’ll have to learn.”
She paused, evaluating him with her too-blue eyes. Small lines around them suggested she was far older than she looked. No one but the gleaners looked old until they were about to die, but he’d noticed lines like these near his grandfather’s eyes after Charlie’s dad died. They were still there, like exclamation points on an otherwise clear and youthful face.
“How many crew will we have?” he asked.
“It takes at least twenty-five people to keep this ship going. I’ll see that you leave with thirty.”
“I’ve managed ranger troops of about that many,” he said.
She looked relieved. “I’ll send some of my best crew.”
He covered his dismay by taking a bite of food. He’d expected this to be a smaller trip, a smaller spaceship, a crew of four to six. He didn’t want Satyana to figure out how uncomfortable all of this opulence made him, how it stripped his sense of knowing what to do at any minute and how to act. The uncertainty unbalanced him; he had been confident in his job and his life for a very long time. “So what do you know about the Next? What should I plan for?”
“They’re different. Not just from us, but one from another. As complex as human society. People forget that, lump them all together as robots. The ones I met were incredible—almost beautiful. And scary.”
He almost dropped his fork. “You’ve been past the Ring?”
“Before I established myself on the Deep. So, more than a hundred and fifty years ago. Far enough back my memories are fuzzy. But I do know they’re offended when we call them pirates. They’re like victims who have gotten over it and made themselves bigger and better.”
He frowned. “Victims?”
“We pushed them away from the sun. I suspect our ancestors thought they’d die off out there. But they didn’t. Yes, they raid us. But do you blame them?”
“Yes.” He realized it was a reflexive answer, something he had learned but didn’t know. “Well, maybe not. All my life, I’ve been taught to be afraid of them.”
She nodded, once more looking a little bit like he had passed a test.
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