Tessa raised her eyebrows. ‘Opal was involved in this?’ She didn’t even try to keep the edge out of her voice.
Aya nodded hard. ‘Palmer, too. I hate him also.’
Aya’s most frequent playmates – or they had been, before this. Their parents were going to get hell incarnate on their doorsteps before the day was out, but for the time being, Tessa put her arm around her daughter’s shoulders and squeezed. ‘Tell me what they did,’ she said.
‘Opal told everybody that I’m scared of – that I’m scared of outside. Etty told me that was stupid, and Palmer said I was a baby, and – and they kept being mean, and I told them to stop it but they didn’t, and then—’ The sobs started again.
Tessa put both her arms around Aya now, and let her cry. She knew what had come next. The little bastards had shoved her in a cargo drone port, closed the door, and made her think they were going to pop the hatch. They didn’t have the auth codes for it, but Aya didn’t know that. Her screaming was what brought one of the nearby mech techs running.
‘I hate them,’ Aya said again. ‘I’m not going to school anymore.’
That . . . okay, that wasn’t on the table, but Tessa didn’t think it was the time to argue. ‘They did a horrible thing to you, honey,’ she said. ‘I am so, so sorry.’
‘Why did they do that?’ It was a genuine question, brittle with betrayal.
‘I don’t know. Sometimes . . . sometimes kids think it’s funny to be mean to each other.’ Tessa reached back to the times she’d been teased, to the times she’d teased in response or for no reason at all. ‘I don’t know why.’
‘It wasn’t funny.’
‘No, it most definitely was not funny.’
‘And I hate living on a ship.’
Tessa blinked. This turn wasn’t entirely unexpected, but it surprised her nonetheless. ‘I know you’re scared of outside, but our home is so good. Yeah? It’s safe here. You’re safe with me, and your grandpa, and our hexmates, and our friends—’
‘I hate it.’
‘You know those kids couldn’t have opened the hatch, right? There are codes that—’
‘I don’t want to live on a ship anymore. I want to live on a planet.’
Tessa sighed. ‘Planets have dangerous things, too.’
Aya wiped her nose with her sleeve. She pulled close to her mother, away from the walls, away from the emptiness outside. ‘Not like here.’
Tessa searched for the right response, the right comfort, some of that motherly instinct bullshit you were supposed to just have. She found nothing.
Aya sniffled mightily and said: ‘Can I say a swear word?’
Tessa remembered a couple tendays prior, when she’d knocked a mug of mek onto her workbench while repairing a cleanerbot. A cascade of profanities had exited her mouth before she’d noticed the kids had entered the room. Don’t say stuff like that, Tessa had told them at the time. I only said it because I was mad. She’d spent several days after trying to make Ky stop gleefully chanting ‘son of a bitch’ – and had won that particular skirmish – but hadn’t realised Aya sponged up a lesson from the exchange, too. ‘Yes,’ Tessa said. ‘This is a time when a swear word is entirely appropriate.’
Aya took a breath. ‘I fucking hate them,’ she said. ‘I’m gonna kick all their asses.’
Tessa smothered the laugh pressing against her lips. She gave a serious nod. ‘That was two swear words.’
‘Well, I’m really mad.’
‘And you know fighting solves nothing, right?’
‘Ugh, Mom.’ Aya rolled her bloodshot eyes. ‘I didn’t mean like that. I just meant . . . I meant . . .’
‘I know.’ Tessa put her arm around her daughter and kissed the top of her head. ‘I want to kick all their asses, too.’
Eyas
Sunny had become a habit, and Eyas didn’t know what to make of that. It wasn’t romance, she knew that much. Romance had never been her thing. She watched him as he traced the path back from the bed to where his pants had ended up. He picked up the rumpled pair and dug around in a pocket. ‘Do you mind if I . . . ?’ he asked, holding a retrieved redreed pipe and an accompanying tin.
Eyas shook her head. ‘Not at all.’ He’d never done this before, and she found it endearing. This wasn’t part of a seductive script. There was nothing in this for her. The man wanted a smoke. On the clock though he was, something had shifted enough for him to feel comfortable not spending every second entertaining her. They were just . . . hanging out now. She liked that.
He returned to bed, leaving the pants where they’d been. ‘Do you want some?’
‘Not really my thing.’ She reached for his bottle of Laru kick, an ever-present part of these evenings. ‘This, however, is.’
Sunny nodded as he filled his pipe. ‘Help yourself.’
He puffed; she poured. They sat side by side, leaning against propped pillows, close enough to feel the warm brush of the other’s bare skin but nowhere in the realm of a cuddle. Eyas felt perfectly at ease. No pretence, no bullshit. No ‘M.’ She felt like herself, nothing more or less. Judging by the content neutrality on Sunny’s face, he felt the same.
It was really nice.
‘Is this what you always wanted to be?’ Eyas asked, cupping her glass in the palm of her hand. Sintalin benefited from a bit of warmth, she’d learned.
Sunny exhaled. The smoke twisted up toward the air filter above. ‘You mean, a host?’ His face shifted into a far-away smile. ‘Not my first choice. I was going to be a Monster Maker.’
‘A what now?’
‘A Monster Maker! Didn’t you play that sim?’
‘Oh, stars.’ Eyas shut her eyes and laughed. ‘I’d forgotten about that. Where you go around the galaxy scanning different animals to . . . collect their DNA, or something.’
‘Yeah! And then you smash them together to make hybrids!’
‘This was for some superficially educational purpose, right?’
‘Yeah, yeah, you did it to solve problems. Say, like – say you’ve got to cross a flooded area. You’ve got DNA scans for something with long legs, and scans for something that can move through water. You punch ’em both into your Monsteriser—’
‘Your—’
‘Your Monsteriser. Eyas, please, this is serious technology we’re discussing.’
‘Of course, I’m sorry.’ She swallowed her smile. ‘Please explain how a Monsteriser works.’
‘Well . . . I can’t, but that’s beside the point. The point is, it makes a monster. It is the most crucial tool a Monster Maker has.’ He bowed his head. ‘It was a very, very hard day when my dad broke the news that none of it was real.’
Eyas patted his shoulder. ‘My condolences.’
Sunny scrunched his face into a parody of grief. ‘Thank you.’
‘So once you got over the shock,’ she said, ‘you decided the only thing left for you was a life of getting people off.’
Smoke shot out of Sunny’s nose as he laughed. ‘There were a few more steps between that and this. I bounced around for a while. I thought about being a doctor, but I’m a lazy student. I spent some time in one of the festival troupes—’
‘You play music?’
‘No, I sing. It was fun, but . . . I dunno. Wasn’t what I wanted to do forever, y’know? Then one of my friends, she started her host training, and she was telling me about it – not just the physical side of it, but all the ethos and whatnot. I was like, hey, that sounds pretty cool. And it was, and here I am.’
Eyas sipped her drink. ‘You found something that incorporates everything else you tried. You perform, you make people feel better.’ She took another sip and smiled. ‘And maybe sometimes you help people with their monsters.’
Sunny’s pipe paused on the way to his mouth. ‘Huh,’ he said, seeming pleased. ‘Huh.’ He took a drag and angled himself toward Eyas. ‘So what about you? I mean, seems fair to ask, but I know you don’t like talking about work, so it’s cool if—’
�
�No, I don’t mind,’ she said. I don’t mind talking about it with you, she meant. It was different with Sunny. Backwards. Usually, people had to get past what she did in order to get to know her. Sunny had come at it the other way around. Explaining her work wasn’t a chore with him. She wasn’t teaching; she was sharing. ‘I always wanted to be a caretaker. Seriously. I went to my aunt’s laying-in when I was six. She died very suddenly. Exosuit accident.’
‘Stars. I’m sorry.’
Eyas nodded in acknowledgement. ‘The caretaker who conducted the ceremony, he was so kind and so . . . impressive. I was upset and confused, and the adults around me were a mess, but he was this . . . this calm in the centre of it. I remember watching him, watching the ritual, absorbing everything he explained to me – me, directly – about the science of it. It was beautiful. Magic, almost. That was it for me. That was what I wanted to do.’ She took a pensive sip.
Sunny watched her even though she wasn’t looking at him. ‘And?’ he asked.
‘And, nothing. It’s what I always wanted to do.’
‘Is it exactly what you’d thought it would be?’
She glanced at him. ‘Perceptive,’ she said, surprised but unbothered.
‘Literally part of that training I mentioned.’
Eyas leaned her head back into the pillows, taking her time. ‘The caretaker I encountered that day, he was a . . . a symbol to me. This symbol of fearlessness, of . . . harmony. He took a terrifying thing I barely understood and he showed me it was okay. It was normal. And that feeling was reinforced by the way adults treated him. They didn’t pull away. They weren’t repulsed. They embraced him – in both senses of the word. He was life and death walking as one, and they wrapped their arms around him and gave him gifts, and by extension, showed me I did not have to be afraid of our reality.’ She paused again. She’d never talked about this with someone outside of her profession, and certainly not to this degree. ‘I am that, now. I am that symbol to others. It’s exactly what I wanted, what I worked for. But there’s this other side to it I didn’t expect. I’m a symbol, yes, but a symbol wearing my face and my name. Myself, but also not. Mostly not. People know, when I walk through my district, who I am, what I do. Doesn’t matter if I’ve got my wagon or am wearing my robes. They know. And so I always have to be Eyas the symbol, the good symbol, because I never know who’s looking at me, who needs to see that thing I saw in a caretaker when I was six. It doesn’t matter if I’m having a bad day, or if I’m tired, or if I’m feeling selfish. They look to me for comfort. I have to be that. And that is me, in a sense. That is a genuine part of me. But that’s just it – it’s a part. It’s not—’
‘It’s not the whole,’ Sunny said.
Eyas nodded. ‘And that aspect of my work, I wasn’t ready for. I never thought about who my aunt’s caretaker was when he went home.’
Sunny held the bowl of his pipe in his palm. The smoke ascended as if he were conjuring it. ‘Sounds lonely.’
Eyas weighed that word. Lonely. Was she? She pursed her lips. ‘Not exactly. It’s not like I work alone, or live alone. It’s more that I feel . . . I feel . . . incomplete. Or stuck, maybe. Like I can only ever be this one thing. Like this is the only side of myself I’ll be able to express. Like there’s something more I could be doing.’ She shrugged and sipped. ‘But then, I’ve never wanted to do anything else, so I have no idea what it is I want to change.’ She paused, her mouth twisting.
‘What?’
‘That’s not entirely true.’
‘What’s not?’
Oh stars, was she really going to tell him this? Why not, she thought. She was already naked as naked could be. Eyas looked away with an embarrassed smile. ‘There was a brief period in my teens when I went off on a Gaiist kick, but other than that—’
‘Wait, wait, wait.’ Sunny laughed. ‘You can’t fly past that. You. You went on a Gaiist kick.’
Eyas laughed right along with him. ‘I did. Drove my family crazy.’
Sunny was gleeful. ‘Were you going to go to Earth, or . . .’
‘No, it’s so much worse than that.’ She made an exaggerated grimace. ‘See, I got this info chip at a spaceport—’
He cracked up. ‘Oh, stars, you were going to be a missionary. Oh, fuck. That’s so much dumber than Monster Makers.’
Eyas flicked his thigh. ‘Shut up,’ she said. ‘I was fifteen.’
‘And that’s why it’s forgivable,’ he said. He took a deep breath. ‘Hoo. Congrats on growing out of it.’
She raised her glass in salute.
‘So what steered you away from that truly amazing life goal?’
‘I don’t know. Not one specific thing.’ She pursed her lips. ‘The problem with Gaiist philosophy is . . . well, my work.’
He spread out his hands, inviting her to continue.
Eyas considered. ‘You’re fine with me digging into what I do? It won’t ruin the mood?’
‘Yeah, it’s cool.’ He rearranged himself on the mattress, facing her fully now. ‘It’s interesting. Just . . . part of life, right?’
Eyas studied him. ‘Yeah.’ She smiled. ‘Okay. So. Gaiist philosophy. “Our souls are tied to our planet of origin.” That’s their central tenet, yeah? Our souls are tied to Earth, and they essentially get sick if we go elsewhere. Since there’s no hard-and-fast definition of soul anywhere, we’ll go with what I interpret that to be: the quality of being alive. The thing that separates us from rocks or machines. By my definition, every organic thing has a soul – it’s not just for sapients.’ She gestured around the room. ‘According to Gaiists, the Fleet should be a place chock-full of diseased, malnourished souls. This is as far from organic as it gets. We live inside machines. We’ve replicated the systems on Earth. There is no wind to move our air, there is no water cycle, there is no natural source for photosynthesis. This is a lab experiment. A biologist could make no real conclusions about our natural behaviour. They’d have to add the caveat “born in captivity” to everything they recorded.’
‘That’s . . . oof. Okay.’
‘See, I told you I was going to ruin the mood.’
‘You haven’t, but I would like some of that,’ he said, nodding at the bottle. ‘Seriously, I want to hear this.’
‘Okay.’ Eyas poured him a glass. ‘I promise things look up from here.’
He nodded. ‘I trust you.’
Eyas inwardly noted that, and kept going. ‘So, despite everything about our environment, there is a natural cycle that remains, and it’s one that we can’t escape, that we couldn’t leave behind. It’s completely beyond our technological grasp to alter or replicate.’
‘You mean death.’
‘I mean life and death. Can’t have one without the other. If my work has taught me anything, it’s that death is not an end. It’s a pattern. A catalyst for change. Death is recycling. Proteins and nutrients, ’round and ’round. And you can’t stop that. Take a living person off Earth, put them in a sealed metal canister out in a vacuum, take them so far away from their planet of origin that they might not understand what a forest or an ocean is when you tell them about one – and they are still linked to that cycle. When we decompose under the right conditions, we turn into soil – something awfully like it, anyway. You see? We’re not detached from Earth. We turn into earth. And it’s an entirely organic process. We can’t substitute anything artificial. I can’t make a corpse compost without adding batches of bamboo chips to get the carbon–nitrogen ratio right. If I don’t remove the corpse’s bots, they’ll disrupt the bacteria the entire process relies on. Likewise, I have to take out any implants or mods the person had installed, or they’ll contaminate the finished product.’
‘But isn’t the core artificial, too? I’m not being contrary, I’m just trying to understand.’
‘It is,’ Eyas said. ‘But think about it: it’s an artificial system set up to accommodate something that would happen without it. We would still die and rot if the core wasn’t there. We’d rot dif
ferently, yes, but you could say that about someone who died in a desert versus someone who died in a swamp. In both cases, rot is inevitable. So all we’ve done is provide conditions that encourage the kind of rot we want, and facilities that ensure we’re not tripping over corpses all day. Sorry for the visual.’
‘That’s okay.’
Eyas nodded. ‘Despite growing up in an environment that is utterly artificial, we default to the rawest, purest state at the end. So you can’t tell me that our souls are sick and broken when they’re inextricably linked to a force that powerful. Whatever soul we got from Earth – whatever that even means – we took it with us when we came out here. And that’s why I do what I do. Yes, I’d love to see a forest, a real forest. I’d love to stick my hands down into the humus and touch saplings growing out of stumps. I’d love to see a system of decomposition and growth that just happened without any need for Human tending. But the system we built here does need tending, and that means it needs caretakers who understand the magnitude of that.’
‘It needs you.’
Eyas paused, considering the line between hubris and honesty. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It needs me. And I do believe that. I do love what I do. So I don’t know what this . . . this discontent is. I don’t know why I’m conflicted about it lately.’
Sunny swished his drink around. ‘Can I ask you a weird question? And I’m not trying to be disrespectful or negative, honestly. I just want to pick your brain.’
‘Go ahead.’
Her companion shifted his jaw in thought. ‘Is it the most efficient thing? Composting, I mean. In terms of resources, is it still the best thing for us to be doing?’
Eyas had been preparing herself for a question about funeral preparation, or states of decay, or what bodily functions a corpse can still perform. Those questions, she was used to. This, she was not. ‘What alternatives are there? You want to just space them?’
‘Of course not. You could fly people into the sun, though, right? Like we did after the Oxomoco. Wouldn’t that be easier? Less work?’
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