I left her coffee where she could just reach it with her fingertips if she stretched, and retreated.
I said, “I think I figured out why you needed to be on the Jothari ship. And why you didn’t load the Koregoi senso until you were ready to blow the Jothari ship.”
“Oh?” she said companionably.
“Because you needed to manufacture it. You needed to refine the senso parasite from devashare, right? Or from the cadaver byproducts, or something. You needed a dead Ativahika.”
“See?” she said. “You’re pretty bright when you allow yourself to be.”
God, you disgust me.
I didn’t say it, though. I bit my lip, and remembered that I needed her, and that the clock was ticking and time was running out on me.
What I said was, “That’s some real audacity. And your coffee is getting cold, Zanya.”
♦ ♦ ♦
“Let me into your fox,” she said.
“Are you high?” I said.
“Let me in,” she said, “and I’ll teach you how to control the ship.”
“I don’t trust you,” I said.
She held up her hand. The bandages were long off the wrist it was attached to. She crooked a little finger at me.
“Pinkie swear,” the pirate said.
I laughed in her face and went back to constructing a kind of couch or sofa out of rolled and tied bolsters of soft fiber I’d scavenged from various places around the ship. Better than a pile of packing material, maybe. I should move into a different cabin, and figure out how to lock her into this one. But I didn’t trust her unless I had my eyes on her.
I was sleeping elsewhere, anyway. And if I spent too much time away from her, I found that I got unbearably lonely.
♦ ♦ ♦
“Show me how to change our course,” I said, “and if you can explain why you want to get into my fox, I just might let you do it. After I chain you up so you’ll starve in your own waste products if you kill or incapacitate me.”
“That’s the kind of trust that bespeaks a successful long partnership.”
“It’s the kind of trust you’ve earned.”
She sighed. “I can’t change our course.”
“Won’t.”
“Can’t,” she said. Then she paused as if to consider. “Well, in the sense that I am absolutely unwilling to suffer the repercussions of carrying out your request, yes, won’t.”
“Repercussions.”
“If I don’t report on time, the biomine wired into my central nervous system will explode, and that’ll be it for me, you, and this lovely piece of functional archaeology.” She patted the deck of the Prize with what looked like affection.
I blinked but managed not to glance at her, surprised as always to be reminded she was human. And stunned, as well, by what she’d just revealed.
Of course, whether I could trust her or not was an open question. She’d lie like she was in the plane of a planetary formation disk if it suited her, and never bat a transplant-augmented eyelash either.
I folded my hands over my arms. “Where’s my lecture on how the Republic of Pirates is the last guardian of human freedom?”
“Freedom includes the freedom to be an asshole,” she said, and shrugged.
“Asshole and criminal are different things.” Despite myself, I was outraged. Not at her; on her behalf.
She stretched, shrugged. Bent down and touched her toes and hung there, stretching her spine and thighs. I imagine she was still working on getting the kinks out from the time that I’d had her more closely chained.
She had a good two meters of range of motion, now. And I’d carefully marked a caution circle on the deck in the same yellow grease pencil I used for marking up repairs while I was planning them, because I had no intention of straying inside her range.
“So,” I said. “My best course of action seems to be to toss you out an airlock, then. And try to figure out how to divert this thing with you safely elsewhere.”
“Good thing for me you’re not a murderer.”
I smiled. “I could learn.”
♦ ♦ ♦
“Let me into your fox,” she said, “and I’ll restore your memories.”
“My memories are just fine.”
She laughed curtly. “Babes, if you say so.”
Her mattress rustled as she stretched out and folded her hands behind her head. I turned around to look at her. Within instants, she was snoring.
♦ ♦ ♦
“What did you mean?”
She poked around in her bowl of noodles, looking for the dehydrated green onion scraps. “Sorry?”
“What did you mean about restoring my memories?”
“Judicial Recon,” she said, with a one-shouldered shrug of emphasis. “Don’t you ever wonder what they Reconned over?”
“Reconstruction,” I said, “means putting something back the way it was supposed to be, with repaired damage.”
She slurped a noodle, though I couldn’t see what was different about that one that she’d picked it out specially.
“Repaired or excised.”
I bumped to glide over a memory of Niyara’s blood on my hands, sticky-slick and already congealing. “Oh, I’m pretty sure all the damage is right where it ought to be.”
She laughed lightly. I found a noodle of my own, and ate it despite the fact that I didn’t have much appetite.
“See,” she said, “I think the real reason why you’re such a goody-two-shoes is because this is your Judicially constructed personality. The you you know is Judicial Recon, because you were a juvenile when what happened, happened. So they gave you a clean slate and a clean bill of health.”
A chill crawled through me. It was possible. The clade and Justice between them would have had the right to make decisions about reconstructing my personality. And then to conceal those decisions from me if they determined it would produce a healthier outcome.
I tried to keep my feelings off my face and eat my noodles.
“Don’t you want to know who the real you is?”
I didn’t lift my eyes from my bowl, as if the broth and its appetizing skim of flavorful oil droplets were completely fascinating. “I was raised in a clade. There is no real me.”
CHAPTER 20
I WASN’T GOING TO LET FARWEATHER see that she’d gotten to me. It was a white-knuckled couple of moments until the tuning really kicked in, however, and when it finally did I realized that I’d overdone it. I was, in fact, a little stoned on my own endorphins.
But I also wasn’t anxious, or reactive, or freaked right out, and I could think clearly—admittedly, through a haze of general goodwill and fondness for the universe intense enough that it even included murderous, amoral bad girl pirate rogues.
Why did it have to be bad girls? Moreover, why did they seem to have such a taste for me? I’d rendered myself more or less bulletproof. But they still seemed to be able to smell me coming. Even after all the rightminding and Recon.
I wondered if, in all the stuff she knew about me, Farweather knew about the time I’d spent out of my mind on deva. That probably would have bothered me if I were less chemically elevated. I almost laughed out loud when I realized how many of my precautions and anxieties about rightminding had to do with having been dependent on deva and never wanting to go back there.
What if she was right? I didn’t think Farweather was telling the truth; I didn’t think Farweather generally told the truth, unless it served her own very specific purposes. But I was also now able to think about her claims without anxiety or denial. It was an interesting perspective. I could see the reactivity and defensiveness rising up self-protectively inside my own brain, like an armored space marine ready to take on some kind of dangerous interstellar dragon.
The image made me giggle.
Farweather gave me an odd look from across the cabin.
I ignored her. Yep, if I was mixing my metaphors like that, I was definitely in an altered state. It felt good, though
—like I was finally getting a chance to relax a little.
And I knew it would wear off soon. I didn’t want to tune back toward baseline, because I was enjoying actually feeling a little bit good for a change. But as generations of lazily plotted thrillers tell us, it’s rarely a good idea to get shit-faced while guarding a jail cell if you want your prisoner to be where you left them when you check later.
Once I knew she wasn’t under my skin anymore, it occurred to me that I could certainly use her expectation of being under my skin. Especially since I’d been quiet for so long.
I settled down on my mattress, cross-legged, back to the wall, easing my slightly sore afthands. I’d been going around without my boots a bunch, and my afthands were better acclimated than I would have thought possible, but it did stretch the tendons in funny ways. Also, I thought they kind of freaked Farweather out, based on her sidelong glances, and I was all for anything that might put her off her stride.
I said, “So since you know all about me and Niyara, why do you think she did it?” I probably didn’t quite succeed in not sounding hostile, but that probably made it seem more convincing that she had gotten to me.
Farweather gave me that are you an alien? stare, which I think was unfair, because I suspect most systers wouldn’t have been surprised or confused by my question.
“To get at the Synarche,” she said, as if it were patently obvious. “To protest their mind control practices. And some reasons of her own. You really are a babe in the woods, aren’t you?”
Her dismissal niggled at me. I wanted to say, as if to a child, How did she expect that to work out? I recognized the urge, identified it, and then held my breath until it passed.
Good modeling of rational behavior there, Dz.
While I was looking at Farweather, and Farweather was looking at me, the Koregoi ship’s lights and gravity fluttered briefly, never quite going off, but dimming (and lightening) significantly for a few seconds, in quick pulses. Well, that wasn’t unsettling at all. Especially when we were reliant on that power source for life support, and when it was, conservatively speaking, probably a few millennians old.
Well, okay, maybe less than that in its own timeframe, what with having been put on ice at the edge of a black hole, where the subjective passage of time might have been only a few decans. Or a few dozen decans. I wished bitterly that Singer were here to figure out the physics and do the math for me.
Grief is stupid and hard.
And a centad is still a damned long time to go without a lubricant change and an overhaul.
I looked away from Farweather and then looked back, on the off chance that she would be wearing a calm expression, indicating that she knew what was causing the fluctuation and everything was under control, thank you.
Unfortunately for my peace of mind, she was biting her lower lip and frowning.
She didn’t say anything, though, so I decided against giving her any information by implication about what I did or did not know about the status of the power systems on board the Koregoi prize, and instead just kept talking.
I said, “How do you think the Synarche feels about you?”
She did that shrugging thing I was learning to find so infuriating. “People just naturally hate things that are different from them.”
The way you, and Niyara, hate us. Because our existence—and functionality as a community—threatens your identity.
What I said was, “People just naturally get eaten by big cats or die of disease before their eighth solar, too, but nobody has ever felt like that was a good-enough reason not to take preventative measures against leopard attacks and tetanus, once they were technologically able to.”
“Synarche imperialism—”
“An argument that would hold more atmosphere if you could show me where the Synarche has done more to the Freeports than move against them when the burden of piracy got heavy enough to demand action. Hell, we don’t even rightmind pirates without their consent.”
“Coerced consent. If they don’t agree, you just lock them up forever.”
“That’s just self-defense,” I said cheerfully. “There’s nothing wrong with enforcing reasonable boundaries through the application of consequences.”
“You’re pretty smug for somebody who’s afraid to remember what she really did, and who she was before she got Reconned.”
“How do you know about the Recon?” I wish I hadn’t asked again. It was a vulnerability to care.
“You were interesting,” she said, as she had said before.
“Information is for sale, is that what you’re saying?”
She made a noncommittal noise. I guessed I would probably never actually know everything about this mess.
“You’re pretty certain of yourself.”
“Let me into your fox,” she said, “and I’ll show you who you were.”
“If I let you into my fox, you can show me anything,” I answered. “Machine memory is programmable. And unlike Justice, you don’t need my consent for any changes, and you don’t have any ethical guidelines.”
She just laughed. “Dark and cold, you’re naive.”
She did get under my skin that time. But the soothing brain chemicals were still working, and I looked at my irritation, inspected it. Then I decided to say exactly what I’d thought about saying when I was defensive and reactive, just with intent this time.
“You know,” I said lazily, “that’s just atavistic anxiety and fear behavior, and it’s pretty easy to regulate chemically. Then you can practice being afraid of things that might actually hurt you.”
I’d managed to derail her into arguing in circles for a change, I realized. It felt . . . pretty good.
♦ ♦ ♦
Not the sort of good you want to get hooked on, however. Winning conversations is fine every once in a while, but getting in the habit of always having to win them is a hell of a way to run any relationship that isn’t already based on mutual antagonism. I told myself that I wanted Farweather off balance, and that it didn’t hurt if I could find ways to make her eager to impress me. I wished I knew more about neural programming and how to get people to do what you wanted without rightminding when you had to work on their preconceptions and patterned behaviors rather than more self-aware sets of motivations.
I mean, not that Farweather was entirely un-self-aware. She wasn’t childlike. She was just . . . self-justifying in funny ways.
Which made me wonder if I, too, was self-justifying in funny ways. Protecting my preconceptions. Defending my internal structures rather than being willing to challenge them.
Maybe I was a nice, safe little puppet of the Synarche, or Justice.
Or maybe I was a person who valued community and the well-being of the mass of sentient life over the individual right to be selfish. And I mean, that—by itself—was the one overarching and unifying belief that made the Synarche possible. I was free to be whoever I wanted, do whatever I wanted, as long as it wasn’t harmful to or exploitative of others, or profligate with resources. I would be assured livelihood and health and housing, and if my efforts benefitted the community, I would be allotted resources to pursue them.
But if I was needed to serve for a time, I was expected to serve for that time. And not everybody—for example Singer—came with that essential freedom installed; AIs were expected to serve first, and earn their freedom later.
That didn’t seem exactly right to me. But the resources to create them had to come from somewhere, didn’t they?
The resources to create me had come from somewhere, too. Which is why I owed the Synarche service if it needed me. But I didn’t have to pay off a debt just for existing. . . .
It was complicated. Maybe there are no really fair systems.
I don’t know.
♦ ♦ ♦
I didn’t sleep well. Even when I tuned the anxiety out, my brain wouldn’t be quiet: I was too deep in problem-solving mode to stop myself from assessing, contemplating, nagging at the relentlessl
y uncrunchable data.
If only intractable, nuanced, convoluted problems had simple linear solutions with a right and wrong answer, amenable to a little logical consideration. Of course, if that were the case, the entire course of human history would be different. And we probably wouldn’t need a Synarche, because any idiot could figure out what to do in any given circumstance.
I could have made myself sleep, but honestly I felt that my brain needed the time to work, and if I slept, I wanted it to be the chemically uncomplicated sleep that would allow my subconscious to keep plugging away at the problems it was chewing on. I knew letting Farweather at my brain—at my machine memory—was a bad idea. A catastrophically bad idea.
But she’d gotten to me, after all.
Who was I? What had I done?
Who had I been, if I wasn’t who I thought I was?
Or was she completely full of lies, saying anything she thought of to get me to wander into range? That was the most likely explanation, quite frankly. Probably everything she was telling me was balderdash. She knew an awful lot about me, though. Enough that I still suspected that she’d known it for much longer than she was admitting.
We’d all been traveling nonstop since we encountered each other near the murdered Jothari ship, so there wasn’t time for her to have researched me unless the information was already easily available to her. Information takes a long time to get from place to place. Nearly as long as people do. All the evidence pointed to our presence there having been part of some complicated plan.
Maybe they’d fired to disable our ship rather than destroying it on purpose. If Singer hadn’t popped us into white space, it’s possible the next shot would have taken out our coils, and then we would have been at their mercy. We’d have had no choice except to surrender.
What would have happened to Singer then? The Freeporters hated artificial intelligences as abominations. Would they have just left him adrift in space? Would they have destroyed him once they’d retrieved me, or me and Connla?
Then I remembered that Singer and Connla were dead, and it hit me like a gravity whip again. Obviously, I was not doing a very good job of processing my grief. I needed time to mourn. What I had was . . . a lot of crazy ideas that sounded more than a little narcissistic to me when I stared at them for too long.
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