. . . Unless she was, and my fragile, discombobulated memories were recoalescing around the seed she’d planted. Confabulating.
Well and Void, meat brains were useless things!
I had no way of knowing which version of events might be true. But now I remembered—thought I remembered?—additional details. We had gone to the Ethiopian cafe in order to run reconnaissance for a suicide bombing mission. Now I remembered having known about the mission, and I remembered having been an aware and willing participant.
At the time, I’d been a rebel. I’d thought I was striking back against the people who had raised me in a bubble. I’m not sure why I thought that. Except it seemed perfectly logical at the time. And my thinking that certainly cleared the clade of any culpability, didn’t it? If I should happen to be interrogated.
But in retrospect, it seemed obvious that my clademothers sent me to Ansara specifically to meet up with Niyara and her cell, to join them, and to provide technical expertise for their mission of destruction. It was absolutely intentional, a blow against a Synarche that my clade deemed a threat to its existence and way of life. The Synarche insisted that individuals be granted personal freedom and autonomy of choice and body; my clade believed that the path to universal happiness was obedience to authority. Not even obedience, exactly; just allowing yourself to be subsumed by the authority, to become a part of it, to accept its decisions and program as your own.
Ansara was one of the bigger stations, and I believe I also mentioned the shops and bars and places to eat or relax with friends or potential friends or potential sex partners, for that matter, that blanketed the hull between the docking tunnels.
I’d built the explosives. We weren’t supposed to be carrying them that dia, however. That dia, we were only supposed to be checking out the restaurant and estimating when its peak crowds would be. I decided I wanted a bottle of wine, since it was probably the last one we would ever drink.
Did I decide that?
No.
Niyara suggested it.
Let us eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we most definitely die.
I picked out that nice-enough bottle of white—actually, it was a very good bottle, because there was no point in saving up against a holed hull at that point.
And while I was away from the table, Niyara detonated the bomb she had been wearing under her tunic, destroying herself and the restaurant and leaving me behind.
I knew instantly what had happened. The concussion wave hit me, and the decomp doors came down. I avoided decapitation because I was paying for the wine and I wasn’t anywhere near the shop entrance. I remember standing by the doors, numbed, staring up at the pressure readout until the outside ring stabilized and the decomp door went up again. I scuttled under it hurriedly, thinking that if there was a seal problem or the pressure otherwise fluctuated while I was under the hatch, well, that was that for me.
Why did she do that? I wondered. Why did she leave me behind?
We had been going to change the galaxy together.
I still had the wine in my hand when I reached her. I dropped it. The flask bounced a couple of times and rolled a little bit away. These bottles were not made of glass. Then I also dropped, to my knees beside her, and gathered up the scraps of my lover into my arms.
Her lips shaped a word. Senso picked up her intent and relayed it to me.
“See?” she was saying, dying. “I do care about you.”
I had been about to say something comforting. It got stuck in my throat, and while I goggled at her, she bubbled a laugh.
“I couldn’t . . . You didn’t have a choice. . . ,” she said, and died.
She didn’t have to die. The injuries weren’t severe enough to kill her if she got on life support. What was enough to kill her was the time-release poison she’d taken before she blew the station hatchway. And that was the end of that, for Niyara Omedela, the love of my life.
I lunged to my feet. Grabbed the flask of wine, because I was thinking that it had my fingerprints on it. I smeared blood on the neck and the label. I wasn’t thinking really clearly; I guess I was hoping that any security feeds would have been damaged by the blast and wouldn’t have shown me clearly enough for immediate identification.
She’d worn one suicide harness. Two explosive bottles. There was another one at her apartment storage locker. If I ran, I could get there. It would open to my passcode. I could collect the other harness, and follow Niyara into glorious oblivion.
It was the most stunning protest I could think of, dying to oppose the Synarche, doing a little damage along the way. Self-immolation plus.
Surely her sacrifice, my sacrifice, could not be in vain.
When I got to her apartment and crashed into the tiny workroom where I’d assembled the bombs, it was empty. There was nothing on the desk at all.
I washed my hands and recycled my bloody clothes. I slid back into the crowd still holding the wine and tried to plan what to do next. My heart was racing in a frenzy that even my fox could barely control. Did the fact that my harness was missing mean that the constables were on to us? On to both of us? Or just her?
I could build another harness. I could—
There were monitors going everywhere, full of the news of the attacks. Attacks. Plural.
As in, more than one.
That was how I found out that in addition to the suicide bombing of Niyara Omedela, there had been a second suicide bombing that dia as well. Her wife, Amelie Omedela, exploded over in H sector. Used the explosive harness I’d built for myself to do it. Killed five people for no good reason except some political philosophy from the dark ages.
One that I subscribed to, too. Or that my clade subscribed to for me, and which I had never questioned, because we were not built to question such things and we never really learned how.
I hadn’t known she had a wife.
I didn’t build a harness. I got very drunk, finishing that flask of wine all by myself.
The constables had picked me up before I got sober.
♦ ♦ ♦
Somehow I fell asleep. This surprised me, when I woke up from it and realized that my eyes were crusty and my mouth was dried out like space.
I had no idea how I’d managed to unwind enough to go under, and no idea how long I’d been asleep for. Possibly I was too exhausted with memories and the volatile tears that memories seemed to drag from me at every opportunity now. Lability. That was the old-fashioned term. People under stress—physical, emotional, hormonal—used to be labile, before rightminding and before more primitive tech like mood regulators and so on.
I was labile now.
I was also still full of images and recollections, and they seemed the clearer for sleeping on them. Perhaps I had been dreaming, processing and refining old memories in the way you’re supposed to process and refine newer ones. And I felt, for the first time perhaps, the full impact of what Farweather’s booby trap had done to me.
That, all by itself, made me want to peel my own skin off with my fingernails. It was in me, this terrible history. It was a part of me, and I could not get it out.
But maybe I owed justice to the Ativahikas, if I could manage it.
If I could even keep myself alive.
I remembered now. I . . . had spent a lot of time being interrogated, and eventually went before Justice, where it was decided after a lengthy series of hearings, held in camera because I was a legal minor, that Nyumba Yangu Haina Mlango had brainwashed and controlled me, and that I—and all other minor children—were to be removed from their care.
The clade itself was to be disbanded, and its members subjected to incarceration or Recon.
They were given eight hours to surrender themselves and their children to Justice.
♦ ♦ ♦
You can probably guess how this ends. They didn’t turn themselves in.
They committed suicide en masse, making the decision as one. If they couldn’t be together, and content; if they couldn�
�t avoid being unhappy, even for a little while; if they were expected to take individual responsibility for their collective decision and suffer consequences for it . . .
. . . they did not wish to.
They killed the children, too.
CHAPTER 22
AS FOR ME? I SURVIVED.
Because I was in custody, I survived.
I was the one who lived.
My machine memories were edited. Because meat memories tend to be subsumed to outside narratives, the basic result was that my entire memory of events was . . . repaired. Replaced with memories that suited a past I was deemed able to live with, as part of my rehabilitation process. I hadn’t ever been supposed to find out what happened to my clade, but it came out at the trial, so out of kindness Justice took it away again.
I consented.
Wouldn’t you?
I was given the opportunity to have input into constructing a personality that the court deemed socially acceptable. Then I received intensive rightminding and became the new, improved Haimey Dz.
I had built myself from a kit. With some extensive professional assistance, naturally.
It was better to think my clade had cut me off after I left them than to remember what they had actually done. I wish I still had no idea what had happened to my crèche-sisters. The fact that I hadn’t realized that I didn’t know what had become of them until I was trapped in a runaway alien starship headed far up and out from the Milky Way—that I had, in fact, more or less forgotten all about them, categorizing them with the rest of the clademothers and other relations I thought I’d left behind or who had frozen me out—was a fresh and scouring little grief right up inside me, like a bubble behind my ribs.
I’d been a dupe, all right, but I hadn’t been Niyara’s dupe. She’d actually done something to protect me. Something she didn’t have to do.
Something that indicated that she knew what was going on, what my clade had done, and that she actually cared about me. And for almost two decans, I’d been blaming her for everything. When my own family had been the ones to dupe me. To sacrifice me. And to make me think it was my own idea.
And then to leave me holding the bag, and the whole moral weight of everything they’d done.
Who was it who said the truth would set you free?
Freedom tasted a lot like choked-back vomit.
♦ ♦ ♦
You never want to puke in microgravity if you can help it, and so I hung on to my bile, though it was a narrow triumph and a dubious one.
When I, itchy-eyed and somewhat the worse for exhaustion, came back into our impromptu habitation chamber, Farweather was awake and alert. She was doing calisthenics to the rattling of her chain, and she looked calm and cheerful and well rested. I wanted to kick her in the chin, but instead I emptied her slops, then went over to the mess kit and knocked together coffee and two bowls of porridge. Farweather was watching me, bird-bright. I neither looked at her nor spoke until the food was done, and she didn’t say anything either.
I brought her a bulb of coffee and a bowl of porridge (algae and creamed grain . . . delightful) before stepping back to the pad-couch opposite to eat my own breakfast.
I didn’t have much appetite. Hers seemed to be fine.
I said, “You wanted me to remember that I made the bombs.”
“I did,” she said.
“It’s my fault all those people died.”
“Pretty much,” Zanya said. “Are you going to stop condescending to me now?”
I still didn’t look at her. I drank my coffee. The porridge wouldn’t go down on its own. I mean, it was a struggle on my best dia. Todia, it was actively nauseating. Or maybe I just didn’t feel like eating.
“Look,” Zanya said, “I do feel like I know you, a little.”
I snorted. “We’ve been sleeping on the same deck plates for decians now.”
“I told you I had an ayatana from Niyara.” She stretched, both hands above her head, lifting one shoulder and then the other. I heard her spine crack. Gravity.
“I told you I didn’t believe you. Twice, I think.”
She smiled at me. “Fact doesn’t care if you believe in it.”
“And you’ve reviewed this putative recording.”
“I have.” The corners of her mouth curved down as she lost the smile. “She was one of ours, you know.”
“I figured that out eventually.” The possibility that she wasn’t lying left me agitated, edgy.
She sipped her coffee, savoring. “She cared about you.”
“I figured that out eventually, too.” I pushed my porridge at her, unable to waste resources no matter how badly I wanted her to go to hell. She took it with a look of surprise, but set the bowl inside her empty one and went to work polishing off the remains. She was as hungry as I ought to be.
Farweather finished the greenish, unappealing gruel and stifled a burp behind her hand, looking momentarily uncomfortable. Neither one of us was used to getting enough food anymore.
She set the bowls aside and picked the coffee back up. “Was this an apology?”
“Do I have something to apologize for?”
Echoes of a petulant, inadequately rightminded adolescent.
“It seems like you think you do.” She crossed her long legs and leaned back.
“What do you mean?”
“You were blaming yourself for what happened on Ansara before you even knew the truth,” she pointed out, conveniently forgetting—or erasing—that she’d been blaming me herself a very few minutes before. “You keep trying to . . . I don’t know, redeem yourself through service. You need to let go of that desire, Dz. Stop trying to make amends for things that are not and never were your fault.”
“I built a bomb.”
“Four bombs.” She grinned. “Actually. But that wasn’t you. Not exactly. That was somebody Nyumba Yangu Haina Mlango made up out of whole cloth, right? Somebody exactly like the rest of them.”
I settled back and stared at her, realizing that I had crossed my arms defensively but not having much in the way of will to uncross them.
She said, “There’s a weird power dynamic at work in here, too, right? If you, Dz, have to make amends for things even if you couldn’t control them at the time, then in some way you, Dz, get to feel that you’re not powerless. If you have to make amends for things that happened against your will, then you reclaim some power over those events.”
I didn’t answer.
“Look,” she said. “My people aren’t real comfortable with modifying yourself into a new species, but I have to admit that your people are reactionary even by my standards. A bunch of retro-gendered radically cis-female separatists who brainwash their unmodified, baseline-DNA clone children into absolute obedience and oneness with some primitive group mind? That’s a little fucking perverted.”
“You’re saying my guilt is inappropriate.”
“I’m saying I’m glad you got out. Got some freedom. You didn’t have that freedom when you were with Niyara, even though you thought you did. You didn’t have that freedom when Justice’s legacy juice was running your head.”
“So I’m free now.” I kicked an afthand. “You set me free; that’s what you’re saying.”
“I’m saying that you didn’t make the choices, so your assuming responsibility for the outcomes is a little unrealistic, don’t you think? Even if it is a means of asserting some agency over the course of proceedings.”
“Somebody’s responsible. And I’m the only person likely to step up to it, so I guess it is my job, yes.”
“I’m absolving you,” she said.
“I’d be more inclined to accept that if it didn’t come from a mass murderer.”
If I’d expected her to flinch, I was disappointed. She inclined her head, and the smile flickered back for a moment before vanishing again. Touché.
It takes one to know one, babes.
“Besides,” I said. “The only absolution is in balancing the action. Exactly
as if it were a debt from a past life.”
“Do you believe in past lives?”
“I believe in past selves,” I said. “I sort of have to.”
“And you think you can carry the debt of what a dead woman did?”
“Is that what you’d call my past? A life lived by a dead woman?”
She made an eloquent, lazy gesture with her neck and shoulders. She changed the subject. “So your little Utopia—”
“Not so little.”
“—what do you do about people who exploit the system?”
“You mean, people like you?”
She ignored my attempt to needle her. I suppose, given her life in a primitive society and her own ability to needle me, she had some practice. “Malingerers. People who don’t pull their weight. How do you drive them to work harder?”
“Why do they need to?”
She blinked at me. I thought she was honestly puzzled. She shook her head and said, “But if they don’t work—”
I said, “Busywork, they used to call it. There’s absolutely no value to it. Economic value, or personal. There’s value in work you enjoy, or that serves a need. There’s no value in work for its own sake. It’s just . . . churn. Anxiety. Doing stuff to be doing stuff, not because it needs doing. There’s enough for everybody.”
I could see her getting angry, and honestly I didn’t actually care if she understood what I was trying to say. I suspected it would take a full course of rightminding and ans of talk therapy to make a dent in Farweather and her ossified, archaic belief patterns. And I was bored with arguing with her.
My turn to change the subject. “Do you want some more coffee?”
“I’d be a fool to say no.”
I made the coffee. She didn’t speak. Her chain rattled lightly; when I turned around she’d wiped the bowls out with a sanitizer and stacked them neatly. The bowls had come with the ship, and as far as I knew they were hats or shoes or alien commodes, but they did okay in holding porridge. The coffee I brewed in bulbs, because that was the way it came prepackaged. All you had to do was obtain or create boiling water, and then inject it. The bulb would expand, stretching from the size of a thumb joint to large enough to hold a good-sized portion. The filter was built right in.
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