by Robin Banks
I see her with Asher and she’s so fucking beautiful, so fucking kind. She always does and says the right thing, even when it’s hard. Nobody gives a fuck about people being nice other than to use it as a tool to fuck them over, and that’s such bullshit: it takes strength to be nice, really nice, the kind of nice that means that sometimes you make someone their favorite food and sometimes you scream at them until their brains get jarred back into place, or into a new place.
I want to know she loves me because of who I am and what I do. I want her to know me and love me, but how could she? What the fuck is there to love about me, the way I am right now, the way I’ve been?
I want to be something good in her life, something that makes her smile when she thinks about it. If I had all the time in the world, maybe I could learn how to be that. That’s a big maybe, but I’d try, I’d try as hard as I fucking could. I’d probably still fuck it up, but she wouldn’t need to know that. She wouldn’t even need to know that I was trying: I’d just stay in the background and do my thing until I was good enough for her, good enough to tell her that she’s been a guiding light, good enough that maybe she’d just notice me like that and I wouldn’t have to say anything, do anything, it’d just happen. But I don’t have all the time in the world. Even if the fucking prophecy didn’t hang over my head, I don’t have long enough to unfuck myself enough to be good enough for her. She’d tell me to fuck right off way before then, for sure. She already has, so many times. I don’t blame her.
What do I want? I want what I can’t have. Nothing new there. So it fucking hurts: big deal. What do I want that I can do something about? I want to be more like her. I want to try as hard as I fucking can to make the people I love happy in the time I’ve got. I want them to remember me and smile, or forget me and smile, I don’t care: I just want them to smile.
I wipe the snot off my face and I start to get my shit together. I know what I want. I spend the rest of the night working out how to get it.
When morning comes, I know what I’ve got to do.
I hit the kitchen first. Raj is already up, looking unusually unhappy. I nudge him away from the counter and take over the cooking.
“Is Alya up?”
“She went straight to her office.”
“Is she ok?”
“Yes and no. She’s not taken this route thing terribly well.”
“Don’t worry. I’ll fix it.”
He eyeballs me. “Beg pardon?”
“I have an idea.”
“Are you going to tell me what it is?”
“I’ll tell you if it works.”
When I’ve made up a bunch of blinis, I load them on a plate.
“Can you fix the rest?”
“What? You trust me with that?”
I shrug. “You’re the one who’s gotta eat them. You and the guys, if they turn up. I’m going to Alya’s office. Give us a half hour, ok?”
“Alright, I guess.” He looks stunned, but I don’t know at which bit.
I walk down to Alya’s office, knock, and barge in without waiting for a response. She scowls for a second, then she sees the plate in my hand.
“Thank you, but I’m not hungry.”
“I did the best I could with the available data.”
“What?”
“I didn’t have enough information to get it right. I did my best. Nobody could have done any better. Nobody did, in fact.”
“Kid, I know that.”
“It’s not my fault I got it wrong.”
“Of course it isn’t!”
“You can’t blame me for getting it wrong.”
“I had no intention of doing that!”
“And for precisely the same reasons you can’t blame yourself either.”
She’s about to say something when her brain catches on. I can practically hear the cogs grinding. After a few moments, she nods.
“Yeah. You’re probably going to have to keep telling me that, though.”
“I know. Now eat your fucking food.”
“But…”
“I made it for you.”
“That’s unfair.”
“It’s the last of Kolya’s jam. I can eat it all if you want.”
“You’re an asshole, you know that?”
She gets down to eating, though. When I reach out to take a blini she threatens to stab me with her fork, so I guess she likes them well enough. When she’s finished I take the plate off her.
“How bad is it?”
She shrugs. “It is what it is. We’re almost certainly going to miss one, probably two, but we’re also almost certainly going in the right direction now. Or not. We can only do our best. If this keeps happening we may have to switch to Raj’s backup plan, but it’s not time for that yet.”
“Did he manage to reorganize his schedule?”
“Yeah. He might have pissed off a couple of people. Everyone acts so fake around him that there’s no knowing if they’re offended by his absence or relieved at not having to cater for him. He’ll try to make it up to them on the way back, if that’s the way we end up going. Don’t worry about it: it won’t help anyway. And yes, I’m trying to do the same. We’ve scheduled a few stops, but it’s going to be a long haul. Are you going to be ok?”
“On a ship with two of my three favorite people? I think I’ll manage.”
She smiles. It’s a good smile, too: it goes all the way up to her eyes.
“Kid, you’re going soft.”
“I must be. You should go see to your husband. He might wanna know you’ve managed to pull your head out of your ass.”
“You’re a charmer, you know that?”
“Yup. I didn’t even mention any alternative uses he may have for…”
She throws her cushion at me before I finish the sentence, so I get the hell out.
That was the easy bit, the bit with the path Quinn marked out for me. All I needed to do was follow it. The rest of it may be beyond me, but I want to give it a go anyway.
I want to make my people happy. That means that I have to try and do what makes them happy. I have to try and be what they want me to be, to do what they want me to do. It’s easier said than done: I don’t wake up in the morning and decide to be a fuckwit for the day. I’m gonna sort my shit out this time, though, and I’m going to do it systematically.
Alya wants me to be happy, or at least she doesn’t want me to be miserable. So what I have to do is act like I’m ok, like I would have done before the shit hit the fan. That’s not going to be easy, but I can give it a go. I don’t have to feel it: I just have to do it.
Raj wants me not to make Alya miserable, so fixing that is going to get me halfway there with him. He also wants me to play guitar. There’s no way in hell I can play anything that means anything to me, but I can practice pieces, and if they’re complicated enough he’s not going to be able to tell the difference.
Asher wants me to take better care of myself. That’s something else I can do without feeling like it. I just have to get on with it: sleep if I can, eat the right stuff, train with him, maybe even pick up the weights again. I feel fucking exhausted just thinking about it, but that doesn’t matter. It’s what I do that makes a difference to those around me. How I feel makes no odds. Nobody sees inside my brain, not even Quinn, thank the gods.
Quinn… Quinn wants me to fuck off and die, basically. I can’t blame her, but I can’t oblige her right now. I will soon enough, though, so that’s sorted. She wants to go home, and that’s also going to happen when the mission is over. Right here and now, she wants Asher to be happy. Asher is happy when he’s looking after his people, and when they’re happy. It all goes around in spirals with those two: they’re so wrapped together that the easiest way to make one of them happy is to do something good for the other one. I’m so jealous of that I could scream, but that’s definitely not part of the plan.
It’s not much of a plan, really, but it’s something. It’s only going to be any good if I get on with it, tho
ugh, so I try to forget about everything else and focus on that. I go to bed at bedtime, even if I can’t fucking sleep. I get up in the morning and cook breakfast for everyone. I eat with them and smile and talk and stuff. I train with Asher, watch threedees with Alya, chat with Raj, cook lunch and dinner. I practice guitar at least twice a day for an hour, leaving my door ajar so Raj gets to know. I know that sometimes Asher listens in and I really fucking hate that, but it makes him happy, so it’s another tick on my list. I try and read a bit but that’s no good: my brain uses that time to run around in circles and drag me down, and that doesn’t help me or anyone else.
Whenever all the crap inside starts to kick off again, I go and hit the weights. When stuff gets real bad and I think that I can’t do it, I think about Kolya, about how proud of me he’d be if he knew how hard I’m trying. Sometimes I think that’s bullshit, because what I’m managing is nothing but the bare bones of normality, and maybe if he knew how hard it is for me he’d be disgusted at the kind of person I am. When that happens, I hit the weights. I end up hitting the weights a lot.
After a few days it’s still hard, but it all starts to feel really familiar, like I’ve already lived this. I wake up one morning and it hits me that it’s just like being back home – not home in Anteia, home-home, my mom’s house. The way it all worked there was that I had a set role, I had to be a certain person, do certain things, and no matter what happened around me or what people did to me I had to stick to that role. How I felt didn’t matter. I had to stop my feelings from affecting my behavior so they wouldn’t affect the people around me. So, for instance, if someone wanted to give me something it didn’t matter whether I liked it or not: I had to smile and say thank you. If what they wanted to give me was a whack upside the head, same rules applied.
When my dad was still there it wasn’t too hard because him and my mom kept each other busy. I just had to make sure that I didn’t take up too much time and space, that I didn’t get in their way, that I didn’t get noticed. I had to be as small as possible, unless they wanted me to be there for them. I was like one of those toys in the box where you wind the handle to make them pop out. I just needed to make sure I wasn’t popping out at the wrong time.
When my dad croaked it shit got weird because my mom got suddenly super invested in me. It was like I was suddenly the most important thing she had, which was kinda cool, but also the only person she could lean on, and that wasn’t cool at all. She kept calling me ‘her little man’ and expecting me to step into my dad’s shoes, wanting me to do and be stuff I couldn’t manage. I tried, I really did, but I was four or five and I just didn’t know shit, so I kept fucking up and she kept being disappointed. Then I got sent to school and started falling behind so far and so fast that in no time at all I couldn’t even see where I was supposed to be trying to get to, and she kinda gave up on me.
That whole period sucked, but it didn’t last long. The motherfucker stepped in and my mom got busy again dealing with him. I thought at the time that she got with him ‘cause she decided I was never going to step up because I was too slow and too crap at everything. That kinda sucked but I couldn’t blame her for it. I’m still not sure that’s not true. Either way, things were ok-ish for a while, they were easier. When he started to notice me too much, that’s when shit got really fucked up.
All the way through it, though, one thing stayed the same: I had to perform a function. That was my duty. There were rules. How I felt didn’t matter. And now I’m fucking back to living the same life.
When my brain latches on to that, it decides to drag me through a re-run of the way I felt back home. It does that sometimes and I can never, ever stop it. All I can do is hold on and wait for it to end, wait to see if I make it to the other side, only this time there may not be another side because I’m right back to where I started, only able to interface when I’m not me and I don’t matter, even to myself, so this time the feeling may stay and I don’t think I can deal, I don’t think I can make it, ‘cause everything is fucked again and I can’t see a way out ‘cause I feel pushed and stretched all out of shape and I can’t even admit to myself that this is killing me because even thinking that is breaking a rule, because I should be glad of it all somehow and I can’t, I just can’t, and that’s when the shakes hit me and all I can do is pray to gods I don’t believe in that nobody will find me like this, because this shit won’t fly, because this is shit kids pull when they’re trying to get attention and we don’t stand for that nonsense, because if Alya finds me like this the whole fucking world is gonna come crashing on my head.
But Alya has never been like that. She hasn’t. Every time shit got bad, she had my back. Every time. I’ve fucking cried in front of her and been all incoherent and hurting and she’s been cool with that. She was there for me until I got over it and after. She’s still here for me, and she’s never made me pay for it, never turned it around and used it against me. And I’ve done the same for her, ‘cause of course I fucking would, ‘cause she’s my friend, so maybe this is actually how it works when shit is level between people. Maybe this whole thing isn’t a re-run at all, not really, because we actually give a fuck about each other and she genuinely wants me well.
Raj too. And Kolya. They don’t want me to suffer in silence: they want me not to suffer. They want me to be alright. They don’t want me to act like I’m alright so they can keep heaping shit on me. That’s not their game at all. I know that.
I take a deep breath, and then I take another one, and then I know I can deal. Eventually I get up, I get out, I do my best, and it doesn’t even hurt. Not much, anyway, not enough that it matters. Seeing it slowly work makes the hurting worthwhile.
16. Quinn
The only good thing about having stayed on a segregated tube is that it has given me a new appreciation for non-segregated ones. I still hate Fed tubes with every fiber of my being, but it’s a tolerable hate. It’s foolish on my part, I guess, because the class structure is just as real and as significant anywhere Fed-run, but I can almost stand it if at least the classes can mingle freely. The flipside is that on non-segregated tubes I get to see how the rest of the world lives. As it turns out, they live a lot better than us.
When you’re a grubber, if you can’t support yourself you’re dead. When you’re a rebel grubber like us, even more so: the Fed have a vested interest in helping out their colonies to a degree, but would gladly see ours wiped out. If we mess up or just get unlucky, we are over. Fed citizens living on a tube never have to face that fear. The level of protection they enjoy is class-dependent, of course. Third-classers who can’t support themselves better find someone to support them, because the line between forced laborers at a biomass recycling plant and the biomass itself can be very thin indeed. However, knowing that fucking up won’t inevitably lead to dying has a huge impact on tubers’ attitudes. They don’t even realize that: their privilege is so deeply woven into the fabric of their lives that they are wholly unaware of it. It can make them excruciatingly irritating.
That’s not what is bugging me, though. Were that the case; I could give myself the airs of a philosopher or a sociologist and pretend that I’m agonizing over the tragedy of the human condition. The truth is infinitely less impressive: I am worn out by the constant grind of being poor in a place where credit is the only measure of someone’s worth. I am mortified by having to live as a parasite – a well-respected, welcome parasite, but a parasite nonetheless. I am sick and tired of having to plan around our penury in everything we do. When we’re on-ship it’s not that bad. We can’t forget that everything we have comes from Raj, and at some point that debt will have to be calculated and paid off, but things are workable. Off the ship, though, the fact that we have no credit to our names can’t be ignored. If we’re away from the ship and there are no free ‘freshers, we can’t take a shit. It’s that bad. We’re that poor. And I discovered that I just don’t have the stomach for it.
There is a nice little café just down the roa
d from our docking bay. They make really good coffee, apparently, so Luke has forsaken his role as Lord and Master of the Coffee Machine and taken to going there for drinks. He practically lives there now. Raj and Alya followed suit; I don’t know if it’s because they’ve gotten so used to eating and drinking what he provides that the herd instinct prevailed, because they’re too lazy to cater for themselves, or because the coffee really is that good. As far as I’m concerned, coffee is coffee and is not a patch on tea. Asher, however, loves the stuff. He loves it too much to interfere with someone else’s equipment and supplies, so he won’t touch Luke’s stash, but he can’t afford the prices the café charges. We can’t afford the prices for anything, at any shop. Raj would cover for us, of course. He’d probably be shocked to find out that we’re not just putting everything on his tab automatically. However, neither of us can stand the idea of tapping him for anything less than essential, so Asher is just going without. It doesn’t seem to bother him half as much as it bothers me. He keeps telling me that it’s ok, that a handful of days without caffeine is not going to hurt him and may do him some good, but he’s deliberately missing the point. It’s not about the coffee: it’s about the fact that we are forced to think about it.
None of them – and when it comes to this kind of situation, there absolutely is an us and a them – seem to have thought about it at all. Our concerns are so beneath them that to them they are non-issues. That is what is eating at me.
I had to go to the café a couple of times. It would have been rude not to, as everyone was busy elsewhere and Luke invited me along. It was a pleasant occasion, all things considered. It reminded me of when Asher, Gwen, and I all worked at the Academy, before things got too dangerous for us to stay there. We all had enough credit in our pockets to treat ourselves and each other occasionally. Instead of cheering me up, though, it made me miss those days. That lead to me missing home, and then I was just miserable. In the end, I couldn’t even tell anymore what I was in a mood about, just that I was in a mood and I couldn’t shake it off.