Till the Mountains Turn to Dust (The Chronicles of Eridia)

by J. S. Volpe

Reynard sat on a white metal chair at a white metal table in a white room devoid of any other people or furniture. Bulging from the center of the ceiling like a necrotic pustule was the blackglass hemisphere of the Eye, a 180° lens that recorded all that went on in the room.

  He leaned back in his chair, tilting it till it nearly toppled over. He lifted his feet from the floor and let the chair slam back down. He rested his chin on the tabletop. He sat back up. He examined his fingernails. He drummed tunes on his kneecaps with his open hands.

  He had resumed leaning back in his chair when the door in the far wall slid open. The officer on duty, a chunky middle-aged man whose nametag read “Rixl,” stood just outside, gesturing for someone beyond Reynard’s line of sight to enter the room.

  Reynard straightened up with a friendly smile that hid how scared shitless he really felt.

  The fear wasn’t due merely to his incarceration here in Giv-Golos Repository (“repository” being this era’s euphemism of choice for “prison”). He had been in supposedly escape-proof prisons before, and he had found a way out of every one. True, Giv-Golos was an artificial planetoid constructed by geniuses with unlimited funding and millennia of prison history to draw on, and true, it was surrounded by a parsec of space that was empty of anything except monitoring systems and security drones, and true, it had technology so cutting-edge nobody outside the United Planets Welfare Administration had ever heard of it, and blah and blah and blah. The plain truth was, if a place existed, it was escapable. All you had to do was figure out how.

  No, the really scary thing was the recent widespread acceptance of personality adjustment as a means of dealing with those inmates seen as unresponsive to normal methods of rehabilitation. Personality adjustment—another splendid modern euphemism for what might be more honestly labeled “mind rape”—was when a psychomage, one of those rare individuals blessed with powers over others’ minds, altered your thought patterns to give you a more “socially constructive attitude.” All the facts and memories in your brain remained the same. What changed was your outlook.

  Reynard knew someone it had been done to. Bones Teh had been a mad, cackling, take-no-shit, take-no-prisoners DNAura counterfeiter who saw the world as a bastardly place in which you had to be a bigger bastard than everyone else to survive. Then he got arrested and spent a week in the UPWA’s Titan Repository. The man who came out was someone else entirely.

  The one time Reynard saw Bones after the change, he almost didn’t recognize him. Bones’s posture was upright, his eyes bright, and his face free of most of the lines that had once seamed it, facts that led Reynard to realize just how tense and worried Bones had always been underneath his crazy bluster. Reynard watched and listened in mingled horror and fascination as the disturbingly serene and constantly smiling Bones urged him to change his ways. Being a bastard, Bones argued, was self-defeating since it only increased the amount of unpleasantness in the universe, a universe Reynard himself had to live in.

  “I mean, why make your own home more awful?” Bones had asked. “It’s much wiser and more rewarding to think and act positively, to help people instead of taking advantage of them.”

  Of course, part of the point of this sunny-side-up lecture had been to keep Reynard occupied while the UPWA closed in. Only a combination of quick thinking and dumb luck had permitted his escape.

  Fortunately personality adjustment was rare. Stringent regulations limited its use to only the most irredeemable criminals, whom the UPWA employed specially trained psychological evaluators to identify. Supposedly the evaluators had it down to a fine art, able to spot candidates for adjustment with only a few dozen properly asked questions.

  And today, Reynard’s fifth day here at Giv-Golos, was the day of his evaluation. If the evaluators were as adept as their reputation suggested, he was fairly sure he would be labeled irredeemable. His very existence was antithetical to the insipidly amiable mores of this modern-day space-faring society, and there was no way he would ever change without being forced.

  His only chance was to con the evaluator into thinking he was something far different than he was, perhaps a poor, desperate soul who had gone a little overboard in an attempt to raise fast funds. It was doable. Evaluators were fallible just like anyone else.

  Even so, the dread of failure squirmed in Reynard’s every cell. The stakes were so high. The stakes were everything that made him who he was.

  Muscles rigid, heart pounding so hard he felt the thrum of each beat in his ears, he faced the open door, ready for his evaluation, for this critical battle of wits.

  Solace strode into the room. Reynard’s face went slack with surprise, and all his careful plans vanished from his brain.

  She stopped just inside the entrance, her back to Officer Rixl, her eyes on Reynard. Her scrutiny was remote, clinical. If she recognized him, she gave no sign. She wore a gold-embroidered white sherwani, a narrow white salwar, white shoes, and small rectangular glasses with gold bioplastic rims. Her long hair was held back with a plain white triangular clip. In her left hand was a paperback-sized white Databoard with the UPWA’s twelve-pointed star logo embossed in gold on the back.

  “You sure you don’t want some accompaniment, Ms. Desidáre?” Officer Rixl said.

  “Thanks, but I’ll be fine. This one has no record of violence.”

  “I don’t know, I’ve heard he’s pretty tricky.”

  Solace, aka Ms. Desidáre, half turned toward Officer Rixl and grinned.

  “I doubt he knows a single trick I haven’t seen before.”

  Officer Rixl chuckled, then gave a crisp nod and shut the door.

  Solace once again turned her cool gaze on Reynard.

  “Mister…” With a twitch of a frown, she raised the Databoard and studied its screen. She pressed a button. “Mister Fuchs.” She granted him a stiff, formal smile. “A pleasure to make your acquaintance.”

  “Likewise.”

  She sat down across from him, flicked out a stand at the bottom of the Databoard, and set the Databoard upright in the center of the table, its screen facing her. She pushed a few buttons on the screen. Glowing patterns of color flashed in her glasses, reflections from the screen’s changing images. Reynard tried hard to discern any meaningful content in the reflections, but the images were too small and distorted for decipherment.

  She looked up at him. “Do you understand why you’re here?”

  “Yeah, this is one of those speed-dating things, right?”

  She blinked at him a couple of times, then returned to her Databoard. After pushing a few buttons, she scowled, then picked it up off the table and punched the buttons harder.

  “This stupid thing’s buggy. I knew I shouldn’t have upgraded until they’d worked out all the kinks.”

  Reynard held out a hand. “Let me have a look. I might be able to fix it. I’ve got a degree in MiniZip Systems.”

  “Thank you for the offer,” she said, not even deigning to look at him, “but that won’t be necessary.”

  She tapped the screen a few more times, then smiled with relief.

  “Ah. There we go.”

  She looked at him over the top of the Databoard.

  “I have been tasked with performing a full psychological evaluation of you to determine if you are an appropriate candidate for a personality adjustment.”

  Reynard smiled. “You seem far too lovely a person to be engaged in such a morally dubious practice.”

  Ignoring this, she returned her attention to the Databoard. “I will ask you a series of questions. Simultaneously I will show you a series of images and I would like you to tell me your immediate impression of each image in a single word.”

  “What, at the same time I’m answering your questions?”

  “Yes.”

  “What’s the purpose of that?”

  “Studies have shown that dealing with multiple tasks such as these reduces the possibility of deception, always a large risk with individuals with your background.”


  He felt his guts slithering about. So now she knew. She knew who he was, the sorts of things he did. He wasn’t sure how much she knew. Certainly not everything. If the UPWA knew everything, they wouldn’t bother with an evaluation; they would just go ahead and adjust him without a second thought. But they knew enough.

  And now she did too.

  She set the Databoard back on the table and looked at him over its top, her expression still blank and professional. It crossed his mind that maybe this wasn’t really her. Maybe it was a descendant, a clone, an android—something with her form but not her memories.

  But no. It was her. It had to be. The smell was hers, and that was something that couldn’t be duplicated, not even by a clone.

  “The images will appear on this.” She swiveled the Databoard around on its stand so he could see the display. Several rows of fingertip-sized pastel-pink sense-field buttons hovered a millimeter above the surface of the Databoard’s screen, which showed a bright blue sky through which puffy white clouds adorned with smiling faces were slowly drifting. The buttons were marked with various symbols denoting their function.

  It was a top-of-the-line Acme Databoard, one of the newest models with fractal memory storage and infraquantum shift-state encryption. Old hat to Reynard, of course. He had known how to hack those things to do everything except cook his dinner practically from the moment they were off the assembly line. If he could get his hands on it for just twenty seconds, he should be able to blunt-serve a message to someone who could bust him out of here. He had a few favors to call in. Then again, that damn Eye was watching everything…

  “You are here,” Solace said, “for tampering with a jump gate, endangering countless lives through the unlawful operation of a pair of Class-B starships, inciting a system-wide panic while concurrently wasting valuable UPWA time and resources by staging a fake chitii invasion using black-market morph gel, entering restricted Tholjaheim space, possession and usage of unregistered nano-gas, and breaking into the Forbidden Ziggurat with intent to rob it. Further investigation revealed evidence of drone-tampering, theft, fraud, and countless other crimes, including…” She paused, as if to muster the nerve to say the rest of it. “Including, post-apprehension, recoding your UPWA liaison officer’s desktop holocube to broadcast visuals from the Man-2-Man Erotica Network.”

  Reynard chuckled at the memory. “It’s just a matter of resetting it to the right frequency.”

  She swiveled the Databoard toward her, pressed a button with her thumb, then turned it back toward Reynard. The screen now showed a photo of a nude man striding out of a bedroom toward the viewer. In the bedroom behind him, a young blonde woman, also nude, sat on the bed with a pillow clutched to her chest. Her lowered gaze was dark, haunted.

  “In a single word, please describe the feelings this photo evokes in you.”

  “Uh…”

  “Now!”

  “Um, aroused.”

  “Thank you,” she said. “Now, why did you do what you did?”

  “I never admitted to—”

  “Please don’t insult my intelligence. We have irrefutable proof of your culpability on every count. What I want to know now is why.”

  “Why?” He shrugged. “I needed the money.”

  “You needed the money,” she said.

  “Well, yeah, why else does anyone commit a robbery?”

  She heaved a sigh, as if she had been expecting better. “First of all, there are countless ways of illegally obtaining equivalent if not greater sums of money without insanely elaborate plans involving starship crashes and hoaxed invasions of malignant life-forms. Second, and more importantly, we have records of at least some of your MyCred accounts, which show combined balances of over seventeen million credits. Thus, you did not commit any of these crimes for the money. So, I ask again: Why?”

  Okay. So the act-of-financial-desperation ploy wasn’t going to work. Time for Plan B. If necessary, he had Plans C through X prepped as well.

  “All right,” he said with mock reluctance. “I confess. It was the challenge.”

  She frowned in puzzlement and shook her head. “The challenge? What do you mean?”

  “To see if I could do it. The Forbidden Ziggurat is legendary as the most heavily guarded and inaccessible trove of ancient treasures in this entire galaxy. Over the years, countless thieves, conmen, and madmen have tried their hardest to get inside that place. So, yeah; the challenge. I almost succeeded, too. Which is more than everyone else who’s ever tried can say.”

  She stared at him for a minute, then grunted and swiveled the Databoard around to face her. She began tapping away at the sense-field buttons.

  “You’re still lying,” she said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Even if what you say is true, you needed only to stage a simple collision between a pair of starships to create the debris shower required to mask your entry into Tholjaheim space. Why make one of the vessels infested with chitii?”

  He shrugged again. “To keep everyone too panicked and preoccupied to notice me.”

  She shook her head as she continued punching buttons. “No. That doesn’t make sense. The collision took place outside of Tholjaheim space, and the Tholjaheim don’t care a whit about what happens beyond their borders. If anything, they’d track down every last bit of debris if they thought it was in any way a threat. In other words, the whole chitii infestation was extraneous to your needs, even antithetical. So, once again: Why?”

  He watched her tap away at the Databoard for a minute, his eyes slits. Fine. She asked for it.

  “I did it for the amusement,” he said.

  Her hand froze in mid-tap, index finger pointed at the screen as if in accusation. She looked up at him over the top of the Databoard.

  “Amusement?” She sounded incredulous.

  “Yep.”

  She blinked, then returned to the Databoard. She tapped, frowned, then tapped some more, the taps growing harder and faster until each jab made the Databoard rumble a few millimeters backward across the tabletop.

  “Buggy little thing,” she grumbled. As she continued tapping, she said, “So, is it feeling smarter than others that amuses you? Or is it the power?”

  “Uh…”

  “Ah, here we go.” She swiveled the Databoard toward him. On its screen were the words, “Pretend there is a picture here. By the way, you are an asshole.”

  For the second time in less than ten minutes he could only gawp in surprise.

  “Your reaction,” she said. “In one word.”

  His surprise winked out. He fixed her with a frown. “Annoyance.”

  She gave a single terse nod, then swiveled the screen back toward her.

  “You didn’t answer my question,” she said as she resumed pushing buttons. “What is it about doing these things that amuses you?”

  “I don’t know. Why does anybody enjoy anything? I just do. I guess I find the chaos entertaining.”

  “Causing it, you mean. Surely you don’t like it when your own life is in chaos.”

  “Sure I do.” He shifted in his seat, uncomfortable. He hated analyzing his motives. He simply did things he enjoyed and avoided those he didn’t. Why did people want to make it more complicated than that?

  Alas, that was exactly what she wanted him to do. Indeed, his very freedom, both physical and psychological, might depend on it.

  “Unpredictability is…exciting,” he said, allowing the words to pour forth, but not allowing himself to think about them too much or ask himself whether they were really true or only sounded true. “The unknown path. The unexpected twist. The endlessly complex configurations a vigintillion things can make. All of that is much better than routine, stasis, predictability. Life is chaos. Chaos is life. The alternative is death.”

  “The alternative to chaos isn’t death. It’s order.” She turned the screen toward him again. This time it read, “I am going to try to get you out of here. It won’t be easy.”

  “In one word
,” she said.

  He resisted the urge to sigh in relief and simply said, “Happy.”

  She gave a nearly imperceptible nod, as if he had given the expected answer, then swung the Databoard back toward her.

  He admired her craftiness. The Eye overhead saw and recorded a fish-eye view of the room, but Solace was keeping the Databoard perpendicular to it so that the Eye could see only its upper edge. And she had accomplished this in a way that would arouse no suspicion. Smart girl. He entertained a brief fantasy of her joining him at his work, being his partner in crime….a notion her next words thoroughly quashed.

  “I fail to see how you can enjoy chaos,” she said. “Most people abhor it. Rightly, I should think.”

  “Chaos is just…it’s the way of things. It’s the way the world is.”

  “You sound like a Nünite.” The way she said this latter word, Reynard could practically see the icicles depending from it.

  “No. I don’t hold with them at all. They make it a religion. A duty. An order.”

  She swung the Databoard around. Now it read: “If you play along, I think I can guarantee you won’t get adjusted. But I’m not sure yet of anything beyond that.”

  “Comforted,” he said.

  With a nod, she swiveled the screen back around, then resumed jabbing it with her finger, occasionally frowning and grumbling about tetchy mechanisms to maintain the charade.

  “So,” she said. “What’s your take on it, then? On chaos, I mean?”

  “I don’t know that I have a take on it, exactly. I mean, I haven’t made some kind of religion or philosophy out of it or anything. I just accept that it’s the way things are. I don’t think it’s good or bad, right or wrong, divine or demonic. I just go along with it because it’s there and it seems stupid to me to deny its existence. Everything is chaos. Clouds shift. Species mutate. Lives begin and end, and sometimes those lives end exactly where they started and sometimes a billion miles away. Nations are founded, struggle, thrive, fall, get forgotten, get rediscovered. Universes turn and end and begin again and spawn new ones. It’s all just time happening.” He paused, recalling his excursion into the Black Cathedral. Hadn’t that crazy old woman said something similar? No, wait. That had been something about sound and time, hadn’t it? Or was it all connected somehow?

  “That strikes me as a fairly disempowering worldview,” Solace said and turned the screen to face him again. It read: “You need to sound at least a little contrite. Give me something to work with here. I have to convince them you’re not irredeemable.”

  “Contrite,” he said, with a small smile like a pupil who knows he’s said exactly what his teacher wished to hear.

  There was a brief moment where her eyelids tightened and her eyeballs fluttered in place, and he realized she was trying not to roll her eyes.

  She turned the screen back toward her. “Interesting response,” she said. A pause, then: “So time is chaos?”

  He shrugged, disgusted with the conversation. It was ridiculous. They were trying to parse things that defied analysis.

  “It’s all just words,” he said, flicking up his hand as if tossing something into the air. “And words are lies. Words aren’t reality. Reality is a messy thing that our words can never fully describe. It’s a sloppy, unpredictable, recalcitrant bitch of a thing that defies all theories and vocabularies. It’s bigger than us and stronger than us and pisses on all our silly attempts to understand it. It will outlive all our words and concepts and doings. It will outlive us. And anything we can say about it is complete and utter bullshit that says more about us than it does about reality. All we can do is try to understand our puniness and lack of understanding, and accept reality’s incomprehensible vicissitudes, its chaos.”

  Solace was staring at him with an expression both thoughtful and impressed, which was gratifying. He wondered how long it would take her to spot the inherent contradiction of his statement that all words are lies.

  At the start of his monologue, she had been pushing buttons on the Databoard, but she stopped once he got rolling. Now she tapped at them frantically. He got the impression she was changing what she had written.

  “Interesting little speech,” she said. “But explain to me how that relates to your chitii hoax, not to mention all the other things you’re guilty of.”

  She turned the Databoard toward him again. It read: “I think if we make this ideologically based, a demonstration of philosophy, rather than harmful criminal intent, we should be able to shorten your stay here and keep you from adjustment.”

  “Glee.”

  The sides of her mouth twitched upward with an imperfectly suppressed smile.

  “Well,” he said, following her lead, “I guess I want to do more than just accept the unpredictability of things. I want to expose others to it and help them learn to accept it, too.”

  She lifted her head just enough for Reynard to see her face while limiting the Eye’s view to the top of her head and the tip of her nose. “Yes,” she mouthed, and gave him a wink. Then she went back to tapping on the Databoard’s buttons.

  “If you try to simply tell people these things,” he went on, “they don’t really get it. Sure, they say they get it, and maybe on an intellectual level they do, but people need to understand it on a deep, primal level, below the threshold of rational thought. They need to understand it in the gut.”

  She nodded and turned the screen around.

  “Nice!” it read. “Keep going! And if you can be more contrite, I think we might even have a chance at only some community service for you.”

  “Disbelief,” he said.

  She cocked her head and shot him a querying look, as if his response baffled her.

  But she couldn’t be any more baffled than he was; he didn’t understand how she could promise so much. After all he had done, why would they let him go with only a token punishment? Or was he underestimating this era’s obsession with embracing diversity?

  “I’m truly sorry if I hurt anyone,” he said, taking up her suggestion as she resumed tapping away at the Databoard. “I really am. If I had to do it all over again, I’d do it very differently, I assure you.”

  She glanced up at him over the rims of her glasses and flashed a small smile.

  Perhaps it was because of his ebullience that adjustment now seemed unlikely, or perhaps it was simply because he had been locked up and layless for nearly a week, but whatever the reason, he felt an unexpected jolt of lust at the sight of her like that, her eyes fixed on his over those cute little glasses, her warm brown face standing out starkly against all the sterile whiteness around her, her pink lips bowed in a smile. He remembered their kiss in Nioedo and was suddenly seized with the desire to lean across the table right here and now and smash his lips to hers, to hell with the Eye and the UPWA.

  His expression must have conveyed a hint of his thoughts, for her eyes widened a little and her smile drained away. Then she quickly whisked her gaze back down to her Databoard. She seemed unsure what to do with the board for a moment; her index finger wavered above the buttons while her eyes darted all over the screen, settling nowhere.

  “Um, yes. Um…” She cleared her throat. “You’re sorry, are you?”

  “Absolutely. I never meant to cause any real harm. I just think it’s good to unsettle people a little every now and then. People get too comfortable in their routines. It makes them soft, complacent. I think occasional challenges and discomforts are important for growth. It’s only by meeting and overcoming challenges that we can become stronger.” He nodded, head bobbing hard with the zeal of a proselyte. He didn’t know if he believed a single word of it, but it sure sounded good.

  “Interesting viewpoint,” she said. “But did it not occur to you that your staged collision could have caused widespread and possibly severe damage? The debris could have gone anywhere, especially since it was so close to a jump gate. Plus, the panic incited by such stunts is very real and damaging. And not just psychologically; the fright m
any people experienced when they learned about the apparent chitii infestation could have led to heart attacks, strokes, accidents.”

  “Honestly, that never even occurred to me.”

  “You need to work on your empathy.”

  He groaned inwardly. Empathy had become a cornerstone of society, a byword heard from every tongue and transmitter. Empathy, understanding, accommodation—all these mewling pleas for togetherness were absurd. Everyone believed that adhering to such ideals made them wiser, better. But all it did was create a society of sheep, coddled and trusting and stupid. Which was fine with him, of course. It meant his shears were always buzzing.

  But then he looked at Solace as she sat there awaiting his response—at her calm and assured bearing, at the small secure smile on her lips, at her white outfit that perfectly matched the white room—and he suddenly realized this was precisely the kind of world she preferred, the kind of world she came from and had yearned to return to ever since the Cataclysm. This was her element, her paradise.

  And in the wake of this realization, he was amazed to feel his opinion of that world change a minute amount. He still disdained it, but now his disdain was leavened by a grudging acknowledgement that it might harbor some value beyond his own easy enrichment.

  Then again, he reflected, perhaps his shift in attitude wasn’t so amazing: A world like this had created Solace, and Solace had just helped save his ass from adjustment. Thus, there was value to a world like this. Simple logical self-interest. That was all.

  “I’ll do that,” he said. “I’m sure my empathy can use improvement.”

  “Good,” she said, her smile broadening. As she returned to her Databoard she said almost off-handedly: “Empathy is important. We’re all in this together.”

  We’re all in this together. He had heard that tired phrase a million times and had always dismissed it as Pollyanna twaddle. Now, though, out of nowhere, he intuited the truth at its core. It wasn’t just the simpering love-thy-neighbor bullshit he and nearly everyone else imagined it to be, the latest iteration of good old Mogo Lobilozo’s “all one flesh, all one blood.” No, there was something more to it than that, something more akin to his own beliefs, shockingly enough.

  He and Solace were a perfect representation of it. He was a Trickster, a con man, a liar, a thief, the child of a crude and cruel medieval world where people wiped their asses with leaves and problems were solved with knives and swords. She was a Good Samaritan, a helper, a nurse, a teacher, the product of a high-tech utopia full of peace and quiet and unobtrusive machines. Two people could not be more dissimilar. Yet here they were, linked despite all logic and expectations.

  And that was the truth behind it: that he and Solace and everyone else were all just bits of debris adrift on the river of time, the vagaries of the current bringing some of these bits together in unpredictable configurations then wrenching them apart, perhaps to meet again one day, perhaps to remain eternally sundered; but all the while sliding forward toward no certain or meaningful end, the motion—the chaotic joinings and divisions and rearrangements—being all there was.

  He knew he had taken on a distant, spacey look, but he felt no great urge to change it, not even when she peered at him, her smile fading, the folds of a tiny frown forming between her eyebrows.

  “Are you all right?” she asked.

  “Fine,” he said quietly, his eyes never leaving hers.

  Her frown deepened. He realized she had no idea what was going on in his head. But had she ever? And had he ever really had any idea what was going on in hers? They were aliens, strangers, even though they had known each other for ten thousand years. They had shared comedies and tragedies; they had lied to each other and divulged awkward truths to each other; they had amused each other and angered each other and helped each other and failed each other. And yet they didn’t really know each other, because they couldn’t, because while we’re all one flesh and one blood, while we’re all in this together, adrift on the same river, we’re each of us unique, a solitary and remarkable soul sheathed in a numb casing of meat and blood, forever severed from true communion with another.

  All one, all alone. Forever.

  An itch on his right eyebrow broke the spell. As he grimaced and scratched it, she tore her eyes from his and frowned distractedly at her Databoard.

  “I’m thinking of joining the Nünites,” he said, returning to the thread of the world.

  “That fits,” she said with a slow nod, clearly still a little perplexed by his weird zone-out a moment earlier. “Would you like me to set up a meeting with a Nünite minister?”

  “I…” Of course he didn’t. In his opinion, Nünites were blithering idiots. Who ever heard of trying to codify chaos? It was stupid. But he had to play along to save his skin, the most valuable possession he owned. “Yeah, that’d be great.”

  She pushed buttons on her Databoard. “I’ll set something up, then.” She flashed him a bright, upbeat smile. “I’m happy to say, I think we can help you become a healthier member of society without having to turn to an unfortunate last-resort method like personality adjustment. It sounds as if all you require is the proper outlet for the expression of your personal value-system. Just to be sure, though, let’s do a few final tests.”

  She turned the Databoard around. It read “Awesome, Reynard! I predict you’ll be out of here in a couple of months if you keep playing along—and I know you can do that.”

  Was that last comment some kind of jab? He looked in her eyes, but saw only twinkling good humor therein.

  “Gladness,” he said.

  She gave a hearty nod, then swiveled the Databoard back toward her and began punching buttons again.

  “I’ll work out a program for you,” she said. “Regular meetings with the Nünite minister, some community service, and so on. You’re not irredeemable. You’re just in need of guidance.”

  She flashed him another upbeat smile, one of those smiles it’s impossible for even the crankiest curmudgeon to avoid returning, and then turned the Databoard toward him one last time.

  It read: “You’re still an asshole.”

  He stared at it for a second, his expression carefully blank, then looked up at her and with a small, pleasant smile said, “Bitchy.”