“Sweet eternity,” I said reverently.
“Bitch, you’d better share,” said she.
I smiled sweetly at her over my shoulder. “Teach me how to access the ship’s drive functions, and how to navigate her, and we can have a conversation about it then.”
“Fuck you,” she said.
So I made myself an exceptionally good cup of coffee, and set about trying to figure it out for myself.
♦ ♦ ♦
It turns out that caffeine is a highly addictive substance with really unpleasant physical withdrawal symptoms, if you’re not bumping your brain chemistry to compensate, and that one of those withdrawal symptoms is an evil, splitting headache. Which Farweather told me all about, in excruciating detail, except when she was sleeping, or just curled up suffering on the floor.
I had no idea there were that many filthy insults available to the average speaker of Galactic Standard. Well, learn something new every dia; that’s what my clademothers used to tell me. Which was more productive advice on the whole than most of what I was getting from the pirate.
So I learned a lot about my theoretical sexual, spiritual, and menu habits—all of it revolting. What Farweather didn’t tell me about in detail, sadly, was how she’d been operating the Koregoi ship, even when I offered her coffee and a headache pill if she shared.
I’m not sure if I consider this a relief or a disappointment, but it either pleases or saddens me to report that it turns out I’m too well rightminded or just too socially aware to make much of a torturer. I pushed the issue as much as I could, but I have to be honest: it didn’t get me anywhere, and I thought if I pushed her harder, she’d probably just lie to me. Not that lying to me would work for long: I could tell just as well as she could where we were in the universe, and which way we were going. So I’d know if she’d actually taught me how to steer the Prize or not almost immediately.
This isn’t how it works on the holoserials.
And so we sailed on into the darkness, me trying to come up with a plan in case I didn’t manage to divert us before we got to the Freeports, and going through her stuff—carefully, in case of booby traps. I found and disabled two, which left me with a good opinion of my own engineering skill. There were a lot of useful things in her luggage: I organized them neatly while I took an inventory. She filled her time with a robust suite of hobbies that included cursing, whining about her headache and shaky extremities, and napping extensively.
It was a long, long flight from the Core to the Republic of Pirates. Even at the relative-v the Prize reached and maintained, it would probably take us at least a third of an an or more to get there.
So I passed the time coding the projectile weapon to me, then taking it apart and hiding all the bits in various places where they wouldn’t be speedy for her to reassemble, and trying to figure out how to get her on my side. That seemed the most productive use of her as a resource, since I hadn’t had the intestinal fortitude just to murder her.
Maybe that was why she didn’t take me seriously, come to think of it. On the other hand, it was hard to imagine how I would have gotten any information out of her if I had just up and slaughtered her.
♦ ♦ ♦
Farweather slept a lot for the first couple of diar, in part definitely because I dosed her with a sedative every time I needed to rest, for safety’s sake, and in part probably because of the caffeine withdrawal, and in part probably because she was making up lost blood volume. Which she could do, because I (grudgingly) fed her, and made sure she was adequately hydrated. She wasn’t wearing a full suit the way I was, so—expiation for any wrong I’ve ever done, I swear it, and some karmic debt paid forward—I even helped her hop to the head and use it, though I made her figure out how to deal with her own hygiene, taped hands or no taped hands.
I was glad I’d figured out what the waste disposal closets looked like already. After my own experience with adapting to the space nori diet, I’d made a small study of how the Koregoi handled waste disposal. A toilet was a toilet was a toilet, it turned out, whether it was a zero-g litterbox or just a vacuum tube.
Everybody really does poop, no matter what their species is. Well, except for the plant people. They just outgas a lot of oxygen and water vapor.
Surprisingly, she didn’t seem particularly grateful.
After a few diar, she was a little more functional. I had used the time to up my guard and create various precautions, and I’d figured out how to use her bolt prod. It wasn’t biometrically coded to her, which was a—pardon me, ha ha—shocking oversight.
I hung it on my own belt. I could almost hear the scraping of her eyes in their sockets as she followed it around with her gaze, thinking about how to get control of it and the situation. I may have neglected to mention in there anywhere that while she was unconscious I’d built a lock for it that I coded to my own pheromones and DNA signature.
I’d also been continuing to try to meditate my way into the ship’s control systems. Now that I had the run of the place, I’d used it, and I’d determined that there was nothing of the sort that we human types would consider a bridge, or a control room. Apparently the blasted Koregoi just navigated their ships by Zen. Or maybe turned them over to shipminds, vast and curious, but if that was the case then it seemed really likely that any shipmind once inhabiting this vessel was long corrupted, quiescent, or purged.
I still had time to come up with some kind of solution to the Kidnapped By Pirates problem, if I thought fast. And I still didn’t have any books. I could access Farweather’s stuff, because Freeporters didn’t run to foxes and senso, so all her VR was in an external. But Farweather’s taste in entertainment leaned to the kind of immersive sandbox VR exploration games with a lot of gun- or swordplay that left me cold. Connla had been a fan of that sort of thing, and even more so of large-scale military tactics simulators. Maybe he should have been the sole survivor. He’d have been less bored.
I pulled Farweather’s compact VR rig off my head, tossed it in a corner, and walked away while she yelled at me about how I was treating her stuff with disrespect and I hadn’t even asked her if I could use it.
Honestly, that was probably the closest she came to dying that whole trip, and I’m pretty sure she never even knew.
♦ ♦ ♦
I waited until my hands organically stopped shaking with fury before I came back, walking and walking in random loops through the ship because I was, frankly, too attached to my atavistic barbarian rage to tune it down. I hadn’t disassembled Farweather’s perimeter, in case I needed it myself later to repel boarders, but I had opened it up, and I walked for the better part of a standard hour before I stopped fuming enough to trust myself, and to want to not be angry.
I made myself safe and headed back to our little base camp. Farweather was where I’d left her, chained to a stanchion that I’d managed to coax the Koregoi ship to grow by meditating at it. It hadn’t grown me the chains, and anyway I was hesitant, because Farweather could probably unwitch anything I could witch together that way. Instead, I’d used chains I’d welded up myself out of her own oxygen tanks.
Technically speaking, I hadn’t had to do it. There had been a set of restraints in her gear, probably intended for me, if she caught me. But I wasn’t going to use those on her: there was too much chance she had some sort of biocode on them that would allow her to override the locks.
Thus: the spare ox tanks. If we had to do any spacewalking, well. Zanya Farweather was shit out of luck.
Her own fault, really.
♦ ♦ ♦
When I got back within sight of her, I stopped and folded my arms, leaning against the corridor wall at a cockeyed angle to her until she noticed I was there and shuffled around awkwardly to face me. The shimmer of copper-gold stardust in tendrils across her features had at some point stopped being unnerving, I noticed from the distance of my rage. Now it was just part of her face.
The only human face I’d seen in standard weeks. Because human br
ains are weird, I felt a little bit of affection for her at that moment. Disfigured like me; infested, like me. We were poisoned together.
I loathed her and I despised her and I thought I probably would have completely lost touch with myself by now if she had not been there. And somewhere on my long, furious walk, I had figured out what I needed to do, I thought, to try to get her to give me what I needed.
Well, if I didn’t have anything else to keep myself occupied with, I supposed there were worse hobbies than conversational salons with monsters. Even if I couldn’t think of any right now.
I was going to need all the supportive brain chemicals and electrical tuning that I could get.
♦ ♦ ♦
Farweather watched me carefully as I walked over and sat down. Not next to her; I wasn’t stupid. But across the corridor against the wall, and diagonally a meter away or so. Where she could see me comfortably, but not under any circumstances reach. I had a flask of carbonated water in my hand, and I sipped it, considering her.
She studied me right back. “Ooo, something pissed off the good little clade girl.”
She was lucky I was tuned. I gave myself an extra bump of GABA and took three deep breaths anyway.
I drank more water and didn’t answer.
“Are you enjoying being angry?” she asked me, cocking her head. Her hair had gotten long, and she tossed it out of her eyes. The tape residue was slowly wearing off her uninjured wrist, but the chain connecting her feet to her hands was short enough that she still could only reach her face if she was sitting or crouched down.
She was trying to get my goat. Okay then. Apparently my letting my tuning slip a little had made her think that she could gain an advantage over me by continuing to push that.
Well, that was my tactic too, then. It was like wrestling: one of us would eventually get the upper hand, but we both had to offer openings to encourage the other to grapple, or we’d just wind up circling each other forever. And when it came to self-control, I had the advantage of my rightminding.
How could I lose?
I stretched my legs out more comfortably. “What if I turned you over to the Jothari?”
Her eyes narrowed a little. Where did you learn that name? But she didn’t say it—didn’t say anything, just frowned, by which I presumed she was thinking.
I decided to make her think harder. “I admit, I wondered how a human managed to get onto the crew of such a famously xenophobic species.”
“The Synarche left them with good reasons to hate it,” she said. “That’s not xenophobia.”
“Still.”
She shrugged, chain rattling. “Lots of people don’t like the Synarche. You’d be amazed at what you can come up to talk about with somebody when you discover you’ve got an enemy in common.”
“Well.” I sighed, and as if discovering that I had a sudden taste for it, got slowly to my feet to collect the coffee makings. “You’re a Jothari mass murderer, Zanya. Are you telling me that an extralegal species that murders and disassembles sentients for profit wouldn’t have a nice, rich price on the head of a treacherous alien crew member?”
“You’d have to find them,” she scoffed.
I shrugged. “I bet if I put the word out they’d find me.”
“Ativahikas have never been proved to be sentient,” she said, which was as nice an avoidance of a subject as I’d ever seen.
I gave her my second-best pitying look. She couldn’t have the best one, because I had honed it on Connla. “Whatever lets you sleep at night.”
“I sleep fine at night,” she spat back. “And I don’t need to get my brain fiddled to do it.”
The rich smell of the brewing coffee arose around the probe. I saw her lean back and close her eyes, inhaling deeply.
“You want some of this?”
She cracked an eye. “You know I do.”
It did smell amazing. It occurred to me that if I could get her to start cooperating in small things, and reward that cooperation, then eventually I’d find it easier to get her to cooperate in larger things as well. Just like training a cat.
Unrightminded humans basically weren’t that different from cats, were they?
Right? Maybe?
Maybe, in fact, I could get a psychological dependency going, and then she’d want to tell me what I needed to know: how to turn this Well-caught ship around.
It was probably my best chance of spending my retirement someplace more interesting than interment in a Freeport. And now that the options were a little clearer in my mind, it turned out that I would really much rather accept some semivoluntary service to the Synarche for a few ans, rather than be press-ganged by pirates who probably wanted me more for the stuff in my skin than my engineering skill anyway. I couldn’t imagine myself very happy with a life of using my alien parasite to hunt down and raid unsuspecting ships and their crews.
“Ask nicely,” I said, as if I were tired of arguing about it and looking for an excuse to say yes.
I was surprised that she managed to master the anger I saw bubbling up in her. Apparently unrightminded humans can in fact manage a little bit of self-control, though honestly you wouldn’t know that from the plots of those antique books I’m always reading. There’s not two of those imaginary ancient people with any forebrain activation between them.
Though I guess if they did have any, the plots would be pretty boring.
She chewed her lower lip for a moment. Then she said, “Please may I have some coffee?”
I gave her the coffee I was already working on, once it was strained and ready. I half expected her to throw the scalding fluid in my face, and was ready with the gravity if I saw her arm go back. But I guess she realized that even if she burned me, she’d still be chained to a stanchion, and she probably wanted that coffee a lot more than she wanted an empty gesture.
I mean, I know I would have.
There was a name for what I was trying to do to her, I was pretty sure. I wished Singer were here to remind me what it was.
Imprinting?
No, Stockholmification.
Right. From an ancient city name, back on Earth. Funny how words like that got into the language and never left. Stentorian. Colossal. Stockholmify.
All I had to do was make sure I didn’t accidentally Stockholmify myself.
Or let her do it to me.
CHAPTER 19
I BROUGHT FARWEATHER HER COFFEE AND a bowl of oatmeal enriched with space nori and sat down a few meters away across the corridor to enjoy my own breakfast. Enjoy was even the right term. It was so nice to be eating something other than algae, or algae with space shrimp, that I didn’t even mind that with the two of us sharing the food that had been meant for her alone—plus my gleanings from the algae tanks—we were on pretty tight rations.
At least my space suit had stopped expanding around me for the time being. And there was still a good quantity of coffee.
She sipped hers between taking bites of oatmeal—and pulling disgusted faces—and said, “You still haven’t managed to come up with an argument I find convincing, you know.”
“For the Synarche?”
She waved her spoon in the air. “For why you let an AI control what you think and feel, and can’t seem to survive without it.”
“Well for one thing,” I said calmly, “that’s a misrepresentation.”
“Oh?”
“Oh. Nobody controls what I feel except me, and rightminding lets me actually control what I feel, instead of being at the mercy of a whole bunch of very messy evolution. If anything, it makes me able to be more me, and less whatever random genetics and misadventure have installed.”
“Huh,” she said. She licked the back of her spoon. “Well, it’s nice that you think so.”
I ate my oatmeal.
“What about Judicial?”
“Recon?” I asked.
“If that’s what you want to call brainwashing, sure.”
“It heals people,” I pointed out. “When you’
re too antisocial to know you’re antisocial, society has to intervene. Like parents teaching children responsible behavior.”
I tried not to think about the fact that—angry at her as I still was, craving revenge as I still was, wanting to kick that spoon right up her smug, pert little nose as I found myself and being unwilling to correct that feeling, to let go of it—I was probably not currently in any position to decide what was and what was not antisocial behavior. At least not on an emotional and desire level.
She smiled at me condescendingly.
“We’re monsters,” I said. “Atavistic horror shows. We can’t exist in a civilized society without fixing the ways in which we are evolutionarily maladapted to that civilized existence. Not without constantly harming one another.”
“The Freeports and Freeholds do just fine,” Farweather said.
I gawked at her. I almost said, It’s nice that you think so.
“I turned out all right,” she said, with her most devilish smile.
I have my limits. “It’s nice that you think so.”
“If you’re so confident that you’d do better, I dare you to meet me on equal ground.”
“What do you mean?”
She smiled slyly, only half her mouth rising. “Turn it off.”
“My rightminding?”
“All of it.”
“That’s pathological.”
“Well,” she said, “if the way you were raised—the civilized way you were raised—produces so much better, better-adjusted people than the free-range upbringing I got, prove it to me. Without chemical or mechanical crutches. Turn it off.”
“I don’t engage in murdering sentients for commerce,” I said. “Case closed.”
“You’re programmed not to,” she admitted. “That’s not ethics. I want to know the real you.” There was a pause while she examined her fingernails. “Unless you’re afraid of what you’ll learn.”
Of course I was. I was terrified of what I might learn. And not just because of growing up in the clade and not really feeling like I had a me to fall back on. But also because of the Judicial oversight.
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