Blind. Kiu blinked, moving slightly; true to her suspicion, his head turned to keep his ear angled toward her. Why someone would choose – with the number of augments and prosthetics available – to remain deprived of such a primary sense –
Of course, though, the same could be said about her, and everyone like her. She had no augments to increase her awareness of electromagnetic fields; no augments to expand her visual spectrum. That was her choice. It was every bit as much a choice as this man’s probably was.
And the network of filaments laced through her brain like capillaries didn’t even tie into the social web of the station, the system, the entire Erhat cultural organization. That had made her suspect here, long before she’d murdered someone.
“Kiu Alee,” he said. His accent was strange, all rounded vowels and soft consonants, with an undertone of resignation. “I am Tarsul. You are a long way from home. Do you really intend to die here? I can give you a chance to live.”
Kiu jerked back. “Me?” she said. “Why? For what?”
“Because you have an artificial neural framework,” he said, and her surprise fell again. Of course – her augmented brain, her implanted-in-vitro augmentation, the neural scaffolding too integrated and expansive for any post-maturation implant to match. That made her special. This man arrived because she had a technology he needed; beyond that, he probably didn’t give a whit about her.
And yet, she still wanted to live. What was a little indignity: if her life was only worth anything because of her brain, it was still better than it being worth nothing, without it.
“I’ve spoken with the authorities,” Tarsul said. “They’ve agreed to release you if you never return to their territories.” And why not – no further resource cost to house her, to destroy her body, to update the judicial records any further. And the Erhat government cared very little for any problems faced by those outside its borders. “This suits me, as if you agreed to come with me, you could not return, in any case.”
Kiu had already agreed in her mind by the time that he finished talking. Still, for appearances sake, she hardened her voice, and repeated, “And for what?”
“I need you to pilot a ship,” he said.
THE SHIP, AS it turned out, wasn’t so much a ship. More of an engine rig.
More of an engine rig, burrowed into the side of a wandering planetoid, with access corridors and neural interfaces spidering across the surface.
Tarsul had said very little – in her cell, escorting her through the Erhat station’s corridors, bringing her onto a transport which didn’t look like it belonged in any of the territories she was familiar with. Though the transport, at least, had felt as though it wasn’t completely alien; when they docked at the rig, the transport fit into the docking moors like a foot fitting into a glove, and they descended into smooth black halls, ambient light which seemed to glow from the air itself, a gravity which tugged more lightly than the Erhat station and more strongly than a planetoid of this kind should have merited, and a persistent low hum which modulated and changed in a kind of cadence, almost like distant voices. Kiu regarded it all with mistrust.
Tarsul closed the transport up behind them, fingers fluttering over the airlock console, which murmured back a long sequence of slow melodious notes. At length they petered out, and Tarsul laid his hand flat on the console. It didn’t respond in any way.
“The transport has been disabled,” he said. “Its engines and communications are no longer functional. I can explain where we’re going, if you’d like to know.”
Kiu raised an eyebrow, aware that he wouldn’t be able to see it. He might hear the skepticism in her voice, though. “All right. Tell me.”
He turned back to her, as though he’d expected her not to care – to be so grateful to get out of an execution that she’d sashay off anywhere at all, without a question or a second thought. Too bad; she had plenty of second thoughts. The fact that she had no options didn’t stop her from having second thoughts.
Well, there had been the one option: to die. But she wasn’t so principled that she thought that was an option at all.
“My home,” Tarsul said, “is in the black. Interstellar space. It was built by refugees of the Three Systems’ War.”
Kiu frowned, and searched her memory for the war he named. She had the vague impression of learning about it at some point – some incidental bit of history, consumed more for idle interest than relevance. “Is that ancient history?”
Tarsul hmmed, deep in his throat. It didn’t sound like he was disagreeing, though. “We have a long history,” he said. “A long, very isolated, history. My arcology” – the word he used sounded ancient – “was designed to be impossible to track. Impossible to find. Utterly self-sufficient in every degree. It almost was.”
Kiu had never heard of any permanent settlement outside a star system. Settlements in interplanetary space were uncommon; some of the larger stations might have held their own stellar orbits, like the Agisa Station Network where she’d grown up, but if anyone had asked her prior to this, she’d have said there was nothing of consequence drifting in the interstellar medium. Some ships in transit, maybe some ancient lost exploration vessels, or probes, or unfortunate failures of experimental engines. Not a – an arcology, some kind of station she’d never heard of.
“Why?” she asked. Tarsul looked surprised; maybe he was expecting her to care more about what had gone wrong. She didn’t. “Refugees, yeah, I get it. But you had the materials to build a new station? And you didn’t just... go to another system?”
“A cultural complaint,” Tarsul said. “Believe me, if interrogating our history were to do any good...”
He let out a long, long breath, and apparently decided not to explain.
“The arcology was meant to be a closed system,” he said. “No resource loss.”
Kiu snorted.
Tarsul inclined his head. “It almost was.”
“So... this.” Kiu spread her hand out toward the consoles and the interface bay, indicating by implication the planetoid they were connected to. Tarsul’s head shifted – tracking the sound of rustling sleeves, maybe. “We’re delivering raw materials?”
Tarsul made a soft, affirmative noise. “Though it took me less time to locate this planetoid than to locate a pilot.”
“I’ve never seen this kind of ship before.” Kiu looked again at the composite walls, at the console. “Who made it?”
“A state secret. One which has not been shared with me.” Kiu’s eyes narrowed; Tarsul’s tone cooled. Still, Kiu could recognize some of herself in that tone: a faint undernote of resentment, more well-hidden than she’d ever managed.
Or maybe that was just her imagination, painting commonalities where none were to be found.
“How am I supposed to fly it? I’m not licensed to fly –”
Anything. She had the basic safety certifications for automatic craft in Erhat and Agisa, but that mostly consisted of knowing how to set a distress beacon and fire the maneuvering thrusters if a collision was detected. And she’d never used any of those skills.
“Are you planning on teaching me?”
“The accelerator flies itself,” Tarsul said. “It only needs to be reminded of where to go. As for that, you’ll have a better idea of how to do so than I will.” He brought his hand up, gestured to his own head. “It’s not... precisely the same technology as the neural frameworks I’m familiar with. But they seem compatible enough. This is the third time someone has made this journey. Neither of the previous attempts encountered any difficulty.”
Encouraging.
“We can begin, if you’d like,” he said. “After bringing this planetoid out of this system and setting its trajectory, there will be very little to do. The accelerator is well-provisioned, and there’s stasis if you’d prefer it. Perhaps an hour of your effort, and in return, I and my people will make sure you’re accommodated for, in perpetuity.”
Desperation made odd promises, Kiu though
t. Lucky for her. “All right,” she said. “Show me what I need to do.”
THE PILOT’S INTERFACE was a little alcove, tucked away down a winding corridor studded, irregularly, with doors. No door separated the interface, though; Kiu had to wonder what design sensibilities this place had been made to accommodate.
The alcove was moulded into a kind of recumbent chair, with a webbing of wire connectors and something that looked like a scanner module near the headrest. The module lit up when Kiu approached, and Kiu could feel it ghosting over her augments. She cast a glance at Tarsul, but Tarsul gave no indication that he felt anything, or knew that anything was going on.
“So, no...”
Ceremony? Nothing I need to know? Evidently not. Kiu breathed in, and lowered herself into the chair.
She’d used neural interfaces before. This was a different model, but... compatible enough, Tarsul had said. She leaned her head back, reached a hand up to take hold of the interface wires, and felt them coiling, responsive, toward the ports on her scalp. A moment of cool intrusion, warming into connection – and then, abruptly, Kiu wasn’t herself any more.
She was –
Much older, hands on the smooth black composite, not for any interface, just to feel the substance of the accelerator. A cold, clear purpose underlaid with urgent anger. Turning her head, a jangle of strange senses moving within her, seeing Tarsul standing beside her, expression sad. Seeing –
Someplace different. Long corridors, not as winding as the accelerator’s. No windows; what few windows graced the arcology’s walls faced the sweep of the Milky Way’s arms edge-on, not the much sparser starfields orthogonal. The space filled with voices. Footsteps. The scent of green growing things. The sound of –
Someplace different. The accelerator, but not a part she’d ever seen. Argumentative tones, not in a language Kiu had ever learned. Her voice – not her own – responding in kind. Kiu –
Kiu snapped her head back.
The accelerator –
– flooded her.
Remembered.
And through it all, existing in clear pinpoint precision, knowledge without history or context, a location – nothing more than the endpoint of vectors and accelerations, no fixed point because it had no fixed referent, or possibly the one fixed point in a universe where everything else, including the engine, was moving in the ordered cacophonic chaos of orbital motion, stellar drift, universal expansion.
As soon as that hit her, she was rolled over into a flood of need – not desire, not yearning, but a compulsion as inexorable as every indrawn breath, as unconsidered as a heartbeat. That was where she needed to go. Somewhere in that was home. Home for this engine rig which had burrowed into the side of a planetoid; home for Tarsul, for some pilot who had come before. Kiu reached, and the whole of space seemed to shudder around her. The accelerator snapped into motion.
And then Kiu came dislocated, like a joint wrenched out of socket, and shoved herself away from the interface. She flew in the low gravity; hit both knees and her forehead and palms on the cold composite of the hall, and then twisted, snarling, her entire sense of self ricocheting against the walls of her skull.
Tarsul was there. His hands hot on her arms, and she twisted in the microgravity, lashing out.
“Calm,” he urged her.
She snarled. Tried to shake him off.
Everything felt wrong in the low gravity. Kiu had lived her entire life in the real gravity of a planet, or the centrifugal gravity of a station – out here, she felt dislodged, disconnected, like her entire life had become illusory when she had become weightless. That only made her angrier.
They have gravity on the arcology, some fragment of memory – not her own – reminded her. Minded her? Could it be a reminder, happening for the first time? Not centrifugal. Experimental?
Like the planetary accelerator she’d just plugged into? Like –
Tarsul’s gloved hands, curling against her sleeves, colder and more rigid than they should have been. A soporific calm beginning to infiltrate her consciousness.
She kicked out, and Tarsul let her go. He floated back toward the opposite wall, head canted.
He wasn’t wearing gloves.
“What,” she pronounced, “the fuck?”
“You’re more equipped to answer that question,” he said. “Did something go wrong?”
Kiu spluttered. She dragged the back of her hand across her mouth, glaring murder at Tarsul. Her hands itched for violence. Worthless drifting piece of debris – dragged me out here to make a fool of me –
“Who were those people? Where was that – those weren’t my memories!”
Tarsul considered that. Then he said, “Ah.”
“Ah?”
“The accelerator gleans memories from each of its pilots,” he said. “I believe it was also intended as some form of... archival device, perhaps? As an ancillary function. I was told it was quite pleasant. Reassuring, in a way.”
Kiu spat. “Reassuring?”
“Especially for a history as contentious as ours.”
Kiu didn’t know enough to unpack that. Didn’t know Tarsul enough to interpret it. Still, she could have sworn he looked amused.
And that –
That was too much. The rage closed over her like a fist, like plunging into the water by a sulfur geyser, noxious and hot and filling her lungs. She lunged.
Tarsul’s amusement vanished in an instant. And, fast – too fast, with the kind of rapid-twitch motion that spoke to muscular augments, reflex enhancements, he sidestepped her attack, and put his hand out to catch the back of her neck. In another second he had her forehead against a wall, one of her wrists caught and pressed against the small of her back.
“It’s adaptive to fight when one’s life is at risk,” he said. “You are not under threat. Despite what you may feel. This, particularly, is maladaptive action.”
Humiliation coiled at the pit of her gut. Tarsul was treating her like a child, or like some kind of a toy – pick her up from the cell because she was convenient, right, bring her here and plug her into the engine like she was a spare part, lecture her like she was some idiot. “Let me go,” she warned.
To her surprise, he did. “I like you,” he said. Then, an incredulous noise from Kiu: “My policy is to like all people until I have a reason to dislike them. Because I asked you to join me, I have a duty to... situate you. I’d ask you, as a kindness, not to make this job more difficult.”
Kiu spluttered.
“Of course, I knew I took a risk when I found you.” Tarsul turned his back to her, which only made the rage spike higher. “But people with artificial neural networks as advanced as yours tend not to be the kind of people who would leave their homes forever, with very little explanation. You were the culmination of seven years of searching.” He turned his ear back toward her. “I’m curious how you came to be where you were.”
Yeah; most of the people with her kind of augments weren’t sad-sack drifters, weren’t murderous detriments to society. She got that; she was special. “I don’t want to talk about my past,” she growled.
“Of course not. But our pasts influence our futures.” Tarsul rolled one shoulder. “I also have a duty to the arcology. Bringing this planetoid to them ensures their resource security for another thousand years, perhaps. But you, Kiu Alee –”
He turned his whole body back to her, head canted, as though he could pin her with his listening the way someone else might pin her with a gaze.
“I also want to know that I ensure their security by bringing them you.”
KIU AVOIDED TARSUL as much as she could, given the confines of the ship. It wasn’t as difficult as she’d feared; the accelerator sprawled, replete with odd closets and rooms which had been mostly, but not entirely, cleared of detritus. Kiu made a room for herself out of the provisions that Tarsul had, apparently, bought on Erhat: a sleeping cocoon, listening materials on a tablet, a selection of meals, all with their own containment and heati
ng units, so she didn’t have to run the risk of encountering him whenever she wanted food.
She’d refused suspended animation. After the interface, she didn’t relish the thought of going back down into her brain, even if she wouldn’t be conscious to experience it.
Still, after a while – without anything that served to delineate the time, either to a trade standard or a local schedule – she started wondering just how long she could manage. The accelerator’s black walls were depressing and disorienting, like she was both adrift in starless space and confined in a space where the walls were too close. She could reach out and just barely not touch the walls of the room.
So eventually, she started wandering.
It was strange, how easily her body adapted to moving through the gravity of this place. As though her body was also accessing memories that weren’t hers.
And eventually, she encountered Tarsul.
He was at rest, reclining on a little bench which may not have been a bench, in design. His hands were folded on his chest. He wasn’t moving, but he was breathing deep and even; his eyes were open, so he wasn’t sleeping. Kiu paused in the doorway to the little room.
“What are you doing?”
Tarsul tilted his head. “It’s been a long time since I’ve been home,” he said. “It’s strange to realize I’m finally returning.”
Kiu grunted. She let herself in, a few more handspans. Still kept a good distance between herself and Tarsul. “How long?”
Tarsul was silent.
Kiu narrowed her eyes at him, but she kept silent as well. Even so, Tarsul exhaled, sounding like he was disappointed in her. “I’m not sure, exactly.”
“How many times have you made this trip?” Kiu asked.
At that, Tarsul actually looked surprised. He turned so that his whole body was facing her, head canted to one side.
“Me?” he asked. “The last time we sought resources from a star system was over a hundred twenty standard generations ago. How old do you think I am?”
“I remembered you,” Kiu said. “You were there, in the accelerator’s memory.”
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