"Oh, Dajeil, come on; this isn't anything that matters. We never swore to be faithful, did we? It was just a friendly… it was politeness, for fuck's sake. I didn't even think it was worth mentioning… Come on, I know this is a tough time for you and there's all these hormones and shit in your body, but this is crazy; you're reacting… crazily…"
"Fuck off! Fuck off and leave me alone!" Dajeil spat, her voice reduced to a croak. "Leave me alone!"
"Dajeil," Byr said, kneeling down beside her. "Please… Look, I'm sorry. I really am. I've never apologised for fucking anybody in my life before; I swore I never would, but I'm doing it now. I can't undo it, but I didn't realise it would affect you like this. If I had I wouldn't have done it. I swear. I'd never have done it; it was she who kissed me first. I didn't set out to seduce her or anything, but I'd have said No, I'd have said No, really I would. It wasn't my idea, it wasn't my fault. I'm sorry. What more can I say? What can I do…?"
It did no good. Dajeil wouldn't talk after that. She wouldn't be carried to her bed. She didn't want to be touched or be brought anything to eat or drink. Byr sat at the screen controls while Dajeil whimpered on the floor.
Byr found the recording the camera drone had taken and wiped it.
IX
The Grey Area did something to his eyes. It happened in his sleep, the first night he was aboard. He woke up in the morning to the sound of song birds trilling over distant waterfalls and the faint smell of tree resin; one wall of his cabin impersonated a window high up in a forest-swathed mountain range. There was a memory of some strangeness, a buried recollection of some sort; half real, half not, but it slipped slowly away as he came fully to. The view was blurry for a moment, then slowly came clear as he recalled the ship asking him last night if it could implant the nanotechs while he slept. His eyes tingled a little and he wiped away some tears, but then everything seemed to settle back to normal.
"Ship?" he said.
"Yes?" replied the cabin.
"Is that it?" he asked. "With the implants?"
"Yes. There's a modified neural lace in place in your skull; it'll take a day or so to bed in properly. I hurried up a little repair-work your own systems were taking their time with near your visual cortex. You have hit your head recently?"
"Yeah. Fell out of a carriage."
"How are your eyes?"
"Bit blurred and smarted a little. Okay now."
"Later today we'll go through a simulation of what happens when you've interfaced with the Sleeper Service's Storage vault system. All right?"
"Fine. How's our rendezvous with the Sleeper looking?"
"All is in hand. I expect to transfer you in four days."
"Great. And what's happening with the war?"
"Nothing much. Why?"
"I just wanted to know," Genar-Hofoen said. "Have there been any major actions yet? Any more cruise ships been taken hostage?"
"I am not a news service, Genar-Hofoen. You have a terminal, I believe. I suggest you use it."
"Well, thank you for your help," muttered the man, swinging out of bed. He had never met so unhelpful a ship. He went for breakfast; at least it ought to be able to provide that.
He was sitting alone in the ship's main mess watching his favourite Culture news service via a holo projected by his ter minal. After the first flurry of Affront Orbital and cruise ship takeovers with no obvious Culture military reply but talk of a mobilisation taking place (frustratingly, almost entirely beyond the news services" perceptions), the war seemed to have entered a period of relative quiescence. Right now the news service was running a semi-serious feature on how to ingratiate yourself with an Affronter if you happened to bump into one — when the dream he had had last night — the thing he had half remembered just after the point of waking — suddenly returned to him.
X
Byr awoke that night to find Dajeil standing over her with a diving knife held tightly in both hands, her eyes wide and full and staring, her face still puffy with tears. There was blood on the knife. What had she done to herself? Blood on the knife. Then the pain snapped back. The first reaction of Byr's body had been just to blank it out. Now she was awake, it came back. Not the agony a basic human would have experienced, but a deep, shocking, awful awareness of damage a civilised creature could appreciate without the disabling suffering of crude pain. Byr took a moment to understand.
What? What had been done? What? Roaring in ears. Looking up, to find all the sheets red. Her blood. Belly; sliced. Open. Glistening masses of green, purple, yellow. Redness still pumping. Shock. Massive blood loss. What would Dajeil do now? Byr sank back. So this was how it ended.
Mess, indeed. Feel of systems shutting down. Losing the body. Brain drawing blood to it storing oxygen determined to stay alive as long as possible even though it had lost its life-support mechanism. They had medical gear in the tower that could save her still but Dajeil just stood there staring as though sleep-walking or mad with some overdone gland-drug. Standing staring at her standing staring at her dying.
Neatness to it, still. Women; penetration. He had lived for it. Now he died of it. Now he/she would die, and Dajeil would know that he had really loved her.
Did that make sense?
Did it? she asked the man she had once been.
Silence from him; not dead but certainly gone, gone for now. She was on her own, dying on her own. Dying at the hand of the only woman she/he had ever loved.
So did it make sense?
… I am who I ever was. What I called masculinity, what I celebrated in it was just an excuse for me-ness, wasn't it?
No. No. No and fuck this, lady.
Byr stuck both hands over the wound and the awful, heavy flap of flesh and swung out of the bed on the far side, dragging the blood-heavy top sheet with her. She stumbled to the bathroom, holding her guts in and trying all the time to watch the other woman. Dajeil stood staring at the bed, as though not realising Byr had gone, as though staring at a projection she alone could see, or at a ghost.
Byr's legs and feet were covered in blood. She slipped against the door jamb and almost blacked out, but managed to stagger into the room's pastel fragrance. The bathroom door locked behind her. She sank to her knees. Loud roar in head now; tunnel vision, like wrong end of a telescope. Deep, sharp smell of blood; startling, shocking, all by itself.
The life-support collar was in a box with the other emergency medical supplies, thoughtfully located below waist level so you could crawl to it. Byr clamped the collar on and curled up on the floor, clamped and curled around the fissure in her abdomen and the long gory umbilical of shiningly red sheet. Something hissed and tingled around her neck.
Even staying curled up was too much effort. She flopped over on the tiles" soft warmth. It was easy, all the blood made it so slippery.
XI
In the dream, he watched as Zreyn Tramow rose from a bed of pink petals. Some still adhered, like small local blushes dispensed upon her pink-brown nakedness. She dressed in her uniform of soft grey and made her way to the bridge, nodding to and exchanging pleasantries with the others on her shift and those going off-watch. She donned the sculpted shell of the induction helmet, and — in half an eye-blink — was floating in space.
Here was the vast enfolding darkness, the sheer astringent emptiness of space colossal, writ wide and deep across the entire sensorial realm; an unending presagement of consummate grace and meaninglessness together. She looked about the void, and far stars and galaxies went swivelling within her field of vision. The view settled on:
The strange star. The enigma.
At such moments she felt the loneliness not just of this fathomless wilderness and this near-utter emptiness, but of her own position, and of her whole life.
Ship names; she had heard of a craft called I Blame My Mother, and another called I Blame Your Mother. Perhaps, then, it was a more common complaint than she normally allowed for (and of course she had ended up on this ship, with its own particular chosen name, fo
rever wondering whether it had been one of those little conceits of her superiors to pair them so). Did she blame her mother? She supposed she did. She did not think she could claim any technical deficiency in the love attending her upbringing, and yet — at the time — she had felt there was, and to this day she would have claimed that the technicalities of a childhood did not cover all that might be required by certain children; in short, her aunts had never been enough. She knew of many individuals raised by people other than their natural parent, and to a man and to a woman they all seemed happy and content enough, but it had not been that way for her. She had long ago accepted that whatever it was she felt was wrong, it was in some sense her fault, even if it was a fault that derived from causes she could do nothing to alter.
Her mother had chosen to remain in Contact following the birth of her child and had left to return to her ship not long after the girl's first birthday.
Her aunts had been loving and attentive and she had never had the heart — or worked up the hurtful malice — to let them or anybody else know the aching void she felt inside herself, no matter how many times she had lain in tears in her bed, rehearsing the words she would use to do just that.
She supposed she might have transferred some of her need for a parent to her father, but she had scarcely felt that he was a part of her life; he was just another man who came to the house, sometimes stayed for a while, played with her and was kind and even loving, but (she had known instinctively at first, and later admitted rationally to herself after a few years of self-delusion) had played, been kind and even loved her in a more cheerily vague and off-hand sort of way than many of her uncles; she imagined now that he had loved her in his own fashion and had enjoyed being with her, and assuredly she had felt a certain warmth at the time, but still, before very long, even as an infant, before she knew the precise reasons, motives and desires involved, she had guessed that the frequency and length of his visits to the house had more to do with his interest in one or two of her aunts than in any abiding tenderness he felt towards his daughter.
Her mother returned now and again, for visits that for both of them veered wildly between painful feelings of love and furious rages of resentment. Somehow, later, exhausted and dismayed by these sapping, abrasive, attriting episodes, they came to a sort of truce; but it was at the expense of any closeness.
By the time her mother returned for good, she was like just another girlfriend; they both had better friends.
So she had always been alone. And she suspected, she almost knew, that she would end her days alone. It was a source of sadness — though she tried never to wallow in self-pity — and even, in a subsidiary way, of shame, for at the back of her mind she could not escape the nagging desire for somebody — some man, if she was honest with herself — to come to her rescue, to take her away from the vacuum that was her existence and make her no longer alone. It was something she had never been able to confess to anybody, and yet something that she had an inkling was known to the people and machines who had allowed her to assume this exalted, if onerous position.
She hoped that it was secret within herself, but knew too well the extent of the knowledge-base, the sheer experience behind those who exercised power over her and people like her. An individual did not outwit such intelligence; he or she might come to an understanding with it, an accommodation with it, but there was no outthinking or outsmarting it; you had to accept the likelihood that all your secrets would be known to them and trust that they would not misuse that knowledge, but exploit it without malice. Her fears, her needs, her insecurities, her compensating drives and ambitions; they could be plumbed, measured and then used, they could be employed. It was a pact, she supposed, and one she did not really resent, for it was a mutually beneficial arrangement. They and she each got what they wanted; they a canny, dedicated officer determined to prove herself in the application of their cause and she the chance to seek and gain approval, the reassurance that she was worth something.
Such trust, and the multiplying opportunities to provide proof of her diligence and exercised wisdom, ought at last to be enough for her, but still sometimes it was not, and she yearned for something that no fusion of herself with any conglomerative could provide; a need to be reassured of a personal worth, an appreciation of her individual value which would only be valid coming from another individual.
She went through cycles of admitting this to herself and hoping that one day she would find somebody she could finally feel comfortable with, finally respect, finally judge worthy of her regard when measured against her own strict standards… and then rejecting it all, fierce in her determination to prove herself on her terms and the terms of the great service she had entered, forging the resolve to turn her frustrations to her and their advantage, to redirect the energies resulting from her loneliness into her practical, methodically realisable ambitions; another qualification, a further course of study, a promotion, command, further advancement…
The enigma attracted her, no less than the impossibly old star. Here, in this discovery, might eventually lie a kind of fame that could sate her desire for recognition. Or so she told herself, sometimes. Here, after all, was already a strange kind of kinship, a sort of twinning, even if it was that of an implausibility and a mystery.
She directed her attention to the enigma, seeming to rush towards it in the darkness, swelling its black presence until it filled her field of vision.
A blink of light focused her awareness near its centre. Somehow, without much more than that single glimmer, the light had a kind of character to it, something familiar, recognisable; it was like the opening of a door, like gaining an unexpected glimpse into a brightly lit room. Attention drawn, she looked closer automatically.
And was instantly sucked into the light; it erupted blindingly, exploding out at her like some absurdly quick solar flare, engulfing her, snapping around her like a trap.
Zreyn Enhoff Tramow, captain of the General Contact Ship Problem Child, barely had time to react. Then she was plucked away and disappeared into the coruscating depths of the falling fire, struggling and trapped and calling for help. Calling to him.
He bounced awake on the bed-field, eyes suddenly open, breath fast and shallow, heart hammering. The cabin's lights came on, dim at first and then brightening gently, reacting to his movements.
Genar-Hofoen wiped his face with his hands and looked around the cabin. He swallowed and took a deep breath. He hadn't meant to dream anything like that. It had been as vivid as an implanted dream or some game-scenario shared in sleep. He had meant to dream one of his usual erotic dreams, not look back two thousand years to the time when the Problem Child had first found the trillion-year-old sun and the black-body object in orbit around it. All he'd wanted was a sex-simulation, not an in-depth inquisition of a bleakly ambitious woman's arid soul.
Certainly it had been interesting, and he'd been fascinated that he had somehow been the woman and yet not been her at the same time, and had been — non-sexually — inside her, in her mind, close as a neural lace to her thoughts and emotions and the hopes and fears she had been prompted to think about by the sight of the star and the thing she had thought of as the enigma. But it hadn't been what he'd expected.
Another strange, unsettling dream.
"Ship?" he said.
"Yes?" the Grey Area said through the cabin's sound system.
"I… I just had a weird dream."
"Well, I have some experience in that realm, I suppose," the ship said with what sounded like a heavy sigh. "I imagine now you want to talk about it."
"No… well… no; I just wondered… you weren't…?"
"Ah. You want to know was I interfering with your dreams, is that it?"
"It just, you know, occurred to me."
"Well now, let's see… If I had been, do you think I would answer you truthfully?"
He thought. "Does that mean you were or you weren't?"
"I was not. Are you happy now?"
"No I'm
not happy now. Now I don't know if you were or you weren't." He shook his head, and grinned. "You're fucking with my head either way, aren't you?"
"As if I would do such a thing," the ship said smoothly. It made a chuckling noise which contrived to be the most unsettling sound it had articulated so far. "I expect," it said, "it was just an effect caused by your neural lace bedding in, Genar-Hofoen. Nothing to worry about. If you don't want to dream at all, gland somnabsolute.
"Hmm," he said slowly, and then; "Lights out." He lay back down in the darkness. "Good night," he said quietly.
"Sweet dreams, Genar-Hofoen," the Grey Area said. The circuit clicked ostentatiously off.
He lay awake in the darkness for a while, before falling asleep again.
XII
Byr woke up in bed, hopelessly weak, but cleansed and whole and starting to recover. The emergency medical collar lay, also cleaned, at the side of the bed. By it lay a bowl of fruit, a jug of milk, a screen, and the small figurine Byr had given Dajeil, from the old female "Ktik called G'Istig'tk't', a few days earlier.
The tower's slave-drones brought Byr her food and attended to her toilet. The first question she asked was where Dajeil was, half afraid that the other woman had taken the knife to herself or just walked into the sea. The drones replied that Dajeil was in the tower's garden, weeding.
On other occasions they informed Byr that Dajeil was working in the tower's top room, or swimming, or had taken a flier to some distant island. They answered other questions, too. It was Dajeil — along with one of the drones — who had forced open the bathroom door. So she could still have killed Byr.
Byr asked Dajeil to come visit her, but she would not. Eventually, a week later, Byr was able to get out of bed by herself and walk around. A pair of drones fussed at her side.
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