You won’t mind a ship inspection, then?
“We have no contraband.” A rush of relief: we didn’t have any contraband, and I was profoundly glad of it. “Our only interest in the factory ship we found was to bring it back and turn it in, and if we hadn’t encountered the pirates we would have probably brought it to the nearest Synarche Space Guard station.”
Then you will not mind a ship inspection.
I consulted with Singer. Whatever Connla was doing, he’d ducked out of senso, which made me just as happy, but in his absence Singer and I constituted a quorum.
“As long as our shipmind can observe the inspection and record it, of course not.”
That seems reasonable.
Either the Goodlaw was a lot less corrupt—or power-trippy—than the stationmaster, or it was a lot more subtle about it.
This appears to be artificial gravity.
“It does, doesn’t it?”
What you have shown me looks like magic, Synizen Dz.
I grinned. “There is no such thing as magic. There’s only physics we insufficiently understand.” I took a deep breath, and decided to trust it at least a little bit further. One way or another, it was likely to know about the pirate ship docked on the ring already. Whether revealing that we also knew, and had had a past encounter with said ship, was likely to get us into trouble . . . that, I couldn’t say.
So I gambled.
I said, “By the way, the ship that took a potshot at us is docked here.”
Fascinating. The mantid rubbed its raptorial arms together.
There was an awkward silence. Well, awkward for me, anyway. The Goodlaw spent it regarding me with compound eyes, utterly unmoving.
Well, maybe it was waiting for me. I decided to risk it. “Now, sorry to be so blunt, but Habren is playing games with me on the topic. Will this data pay for a refuel?”
Pay is an archaic concept. But yes, this justifies further resource allocation to your project. I will speak to Habren. I believe they will agree to a dispensation of fuel and consumables.
Without even a pause, it reached out with a manipulator and opened a com channel. Stunning me, Cheeirilaq patched me in as well.
There were some indistinguishable noises, and then a hum through the senso. I sat quietly and listened while Cheeirilaq spoke with Habren, demanding with infinite politeness that Singer and crew be expedited on our way as merrily as possible, and with as much alacrity.
If you insist, I can probably justify fuel for that, Habren admitted, after what I decided was a grumpy pause.
Of course you can, Cheeirilaq answered. It’s already been allotted, and Dz here is right; its tug is smaller than a mail packet and can travel faster on the same fuel allotment. I would encourage you to provide a generous bonus allotment, in fact, given that they are both performing a transport service for the Synarche and bringing in important information about criminal activities.
The translator wouldn’t quite let Habren sound grudging, but I projected it anyway. They spoke directly to me. You will have to obtain repairs to your derrick in the Core, however.
That will be acceptable, Cheeirilaq replied, before I could. I shall issue them a voucher.
♦ ♦ ♦
After all that, I found myself in strong agreement with Connla that now was a great time for a little rest and recreation. We were stuck here until we got our fuel and our clearances, and bumping around the tug being anxious about pirates was only going to annoy Singer. Besides, it wasn’t as if any of them knew what I looked like.
I wasn’t interested in strategy games or sex, though, so I ran a quicksearch on what I did want, then let Singer know where I was going. A few minutes later, I seated myself on a stool of a reasonably clean ring bar in a low-grav section of the wheel. Having eased off my station shoes and feeling much more comfortable with my afthands (clad in socks!) resting in perched position on the rail beneath the service top, I gave myself over to contemplating the nuanceless amber depths of a glass of printed whiskey. I hadn’t had my drink for two mins when a local bar-type, subspecies human, presenting masculine and on the make, crawled over.
He sidled onto the next stool, hooked flat feet under the rail, and said, “What are you hiding under all that paint?”
I didn’t look at him. He was wearing a spider-dress—a collection of jointed limbs and servos that formed a halo around his shoulders and were meant to respond independently to his skin conductivity, muscle tension, everything up to and including his brain radiation, broadcasting his mood and attention to everyone around. A pretty narcissistic piece of clothing, if you ask me, designed to make your interiority everybody else’s problem.
They made them in cobra and chameleon models too. I probably would have preferred an octopus. Colors and lots of limbs.
He waited for a moment, dress contracted like it had touched something hot, contemplating his evident failure to connect.
I was choking, freezing up. I could not think of a snappy put-down to save my life.
And the best part about choking is that once you notice you’re choking you choke harder. Because becoming self-conscious is the surest way to get worse at something.
Antisocially, he said, “I’m Rohn. Can I at least buy you a drink?”
“No thanks,” I said, this being a much less personal sort of question. “I have one, and I don’t need any more obligations.”
“Free and clear,” he offered.
I ignored him.
“So what are you here for?”
I tapped the rim of my glass. The bartender glanced over to see if I needed a refill already, then set the flask back when I shook my head.
My neighbor simmered down, but as I was getting to the bottom of my glass I could feel him revving up for a fresh approach, contemplating angles and flight trajectories. All his spider legs, one by one, were focusing on me. They had tiny lights worked into their structure, which looked like nanotube and was probably as strong as it was low-mass. I might be judging him unfairly; the dress would be useful for a lubber in low-g.
“Sorry,” I said. “I’m a pervert. I only like girls.”
“You could get that fixed. Isn’t it kind of sophipathology to only respond to one gender?”
I shrugged. “It’s who I am, and I like who I am.”
Little white lies. They get us through.
“. . . When there are literally thousands of options?”
“I also only respond to people with boundaries,” I said. “So I wouldn’t like you either way. And I’m not getting that fixed, either. So I guess I am a bigot as well as a pervert.”
You’d think that would be rude enough to send him packing. But you would be wrong.
Before Rohn could speak further Connla walked through the privacy screen and stood there for a moment, scanning the very sparse mid-shift crowd until he spotted me. I could feel my neighbor’s back going up, and concealed a smile.
Connla’s not my thing, you understand. But by most human standards, he’s awfully pretty. His homeworld went in for a bunch of hypermasculine gene tweaks among the early settlers, and just about every male-ID from Spartacus is roughly two meters tall with a chin dimple and big broad shoulders. They’ve all got a partial myostatin block encoded, too, which means they tend to be strong as hell and hungry all the time, because they don’t lay down much in the way of body fat—they just convert it into muscles.
As you can imagine, this is useful in some circumstances, and less useful in a cramped, resource-limited environment such as a tugboat. Connla’s a good pilot, though, and normally we don’t have to worry about how much he eats.
He was looking a little wasted from the short rations on the way in, but heads turned nonetheless. And a couple of sets of shoulders slumped in disappointment when he grinned at me and started over. I made a mental note of which ones and marked them for him in senso, just in case he was interested later.
Just because I don’t care for the prowl myself doesn’t mean I can’t be
a pretty good wingperson.
My neighbor’s shoulders stiffened rather than slumping. His dress postured.
I continued my hard regime of ignoring him as Connla slid in beside me. He tapped the bar in front of him and said, “A double for me, please, and get my shipmate another of whatever she’s drinking. This a friend of yours?”
That last was directed at me, regarding Rohn.
I said, “Strategy club didn’t pan out?”
“Meets next shift,” he said. “We still going to be in port? Nice dress.”
“I’m Rohn,” said Rohn.
“Cargo inspection,” I said with a shrug. “And hull seal, I hope. Then we get our consumables. The derrick will have to wait for Core.”
“Won’t take long, seeing as how we haven’t got any cargo.” The drinks arrived. He downed half of his with a comfortable sigh.
I was still nursing the end of my first one.
“Anyway, I thought I’d come see if you’d found any action.” He touched my memory. “That one over there, huh?”
I didn’t answer. He was already looking through the senso.
Connla studied the young person appreciatively. I will say this for him: Connla likes his fun, but (unlike me) he’s not the least little bit biased by gender, augmentation status, or background. He likes wit and a pretty face, true—but who doesn’t? And at least one of those things is easy enough to buy.
Anyway, he’s got enough testosterone for the both of us, and he comes by it honestly—if you expand the definition of honestly to include “inherited it from grandparents who had it engineered in.”
Spartacus is an interesting culture. I’m rather glad he’s never brought me home to visit his parents.
I patted him on his arm. They’re touch-prohibitive where he comes from, but he’s mellowed a lot since we first started flying together. I suspect the conflict between skin hunger and social controls against admitting it is one of the reasons why he chases sex so much. “Go get ’em, tiger.”
He picked up his glass, gave me a sideways grin and a toss of his glossy black ponytail, and went.
Neighbor dude looked down at my untouched second drink. I picked it up and tasted it.
He smiled at me. “Are you and your shipmate . . . ?”
I rolled my eyes. “No. I told you, I don’t swing that way. Too complicated.”
“Don’t swing to shipmates, or to masculine-identified types?”
It was really none of his business. But I was getting irritated. And I’d already told him how I felt.
More irritated. This one had no manners, and could not take a hint.
“Don’t swing,” I said. “I had that stuff turned off. Too much of a pain in the ass, quite frankly.” I gave him a wicked grin. “But as I said, and you failed to internalize, if I did like dealing with hormone surges and getting pie-eyed, give me a nice, soft, curvy girl-type any dia. Or one of those squidgineers, with the cartilaginous limbs and as many boobs as they decided to pay for. Now that’s hot.”
He backed off, finally, and I sipped my second drink, feeling peaceful. The truth was, after all that damned closeness where I grew up, the vulnerability made me nervous. You let your guard down to one person, pretty soon other people started creeping in over the razor wire and around the force fields, too. And then they inevitably hurt you, and what might have been a few chips and dents if your deflectors were working turned, instead, into a full-sledged meteor storm, leaving behind cracked bones and big, meaty gouges.
Better to just shut down the whole shebang.
I wasn’t here for shenanigans, anyway. I was here for dancing. Low-g dancing.
And the band my research had promised was just now taking the stage.
♦ ♦ ♦
Sweaty, thrilled, feeling like my body was properly oiled and running like it didn’t need a tune-up for the first time in I didn’t know how long, I slid into the booth beside Connla and his new conquest. They were grinning at each other foolishly, but Connla had waved me over, so I figured I wasn’t intruding. Maybe it was Introduction Time, which meant he might like this one enough to keep in touch via packet after we shipped out. He’d expect me to remember which affair went with which port of call—which wasn’t too onerous of an expectation, given how much time we had to float around and gossip.
“Haimey,” he said. “Do you need another drink?”
“I’d love one,” I said. “Something long and not too poisonous.”
He ordered on the screen, and his new friend extended a hand. “I’m Pearl. So you’re a salvage engineer?”
Typically, he hadn’t picked the prettiest contender to move on, but one with a mobile face and an air of curiosity that made them charismatic. It’s hard not to like somebody who’s genuinely interested in you. Or genuinely interested in things, in general.
“I’m Haimey,” I answered, and took their hand. Their fingers were long and cool. “Since Connla is too busy to introduce us.”
“Too busy fetching you things, you mean.” He stood up and winked. “Be right back.”
“What is your vocation?” I said, since the subject of my work was already apparently well-discussed.
“I make reproductions of Terran Eastern Orthodox iconographic art.”
“That a religion?”
“They were very into gold leaf,” they said. “And I’m a recyclables engineer.”
“Diverse,” I said, impressed. “Not everybody has that much drive.”
“I bore easily,” Pearl answered. They grinned sideways at Connla, who had just appeared with our drinks and a bowl of crunchy soy-sim snack things.
“How did you come into engineering?” Pearl asked.
“I enjoy it,” I said. “Admittedly, I was tuned to enjoy it, to take my designate. But I didn’t see any reason to change that program when I struck out on my own.” I shrugged. I had the skills, and making myself hate them would have been a real waste of time and energy.
“Designate?”
Connla seated himself, kept his silence, ate a snack.
“I grew up in a clade.”
Pearl’s eyes focused more closely on me, but the question that followed came in a friendly tone. “How did you escape?”
“They’re designed to avoid conflict. How do you think?”
A silence—shocked? Startled? I knew what outsiders thought of the clades, and they weren’t entirely wrong. Join, sign the contract, be assured of being surrounded by like-minded individuals working tirelessly for your mutual benefit forever. Raise children who would never break your heart, never rebel. And you wouldn’t even have to sacrifice your free will, because you’d want just that, just what everyone else wanted. Because you’d be tuned regularly to assure that it was what you wanted and that you were happy with your life choices, and all the hard decisions were made in such a way as not to challenge anyone in the group, because everyone in the group held the same beliefs in common.
Once you signed the contract, you would never be alone again.
You’d never be different again, either.
But what good was difference when it made so many people so terribly sad, so lonely, destroyed so many friendships and families and romantic relationships?
The clades liked to point out that their choices were just a more extreme version of being and remaining a productive member of the Synarche—or any society dedicated to the common good. You made social choices, or you made sophipathic choices, and if you wanted to make sophipathic choices without consequence you went off and joined the Freeports.
Clade members were generally rated among the happiest individuals, when surveyed.
If you could really call them individuals.
“It’s not hard to escape,” I explained. “It’s just that almost nobody wants to. But there are rules about these things, and free choice, and adult responsibilities and so on. Well, parents are responsible for the education and well-being of their children, and as long as they meet certain standards the Synarche will not i
ntervene. The Synarche requires that upon attaining majority, every child be provided with one an of retreat, during which time they become responsible for their own tuning and rightminding, and at the end of that an they make their own decision whether to remain with the clade or choose another life.”
I shrugged, and wondered if Pearl could see in that simple gesture the pain of losing an enforced religion because somebody gave you the switch and you were curious enough to turn it off.
“Most of them go back?” they said.
“Almost all of them go back,” I answered. “Before the an is up, usually. Lonely-no-more is hard to put down, and harder not to pick up again.”
“Not you, though.”
“I . . . discovered I liked my own voice. So I stayed away, and then I requested another retreat an, which they were legally obligated to give. And then I decided I wasn’t going back at all.”
Connla nudged my drink at me, and I tasted it. Berries and some bright herb I didn’t recognize, and an intoxicant burn. It steadied my breathing. There were other, messier details in the story, but we didn’t need to go into those now, and here.
The full story was not for strangers in bars.
“They tried to enforce an obligation against her for her education,” Connla said dryly, while I watched Pearl’s eyebrows go up. “And force her to come back that way.”
“Did you pay it off?” Pearl asked.
“The Synarche ruled that the legal person Haimey Dz—that’s me—had incurred no debt, because the debt had been incurred by a unit of the clade due to a decision made by the clade and for services executed within the clade. You can’t owe yourself a debt. So. No. But I’m not exactly welcome home for the holidiar either. And once I stood up to them on that—well, and there was another thing after—they decided they didn’t want me back.”
♦ ♦ ♦
After that drink, I didn’t feel like dancing anymore, and it was getting on toward shift-end. Connla was taking his conquest to the strategy game club. I headed back to Singer, to see if he needed any help to get ready for the inspection. He didn’t, and I cleaned myself up and went to bed.
Ancestral Night Page 13