There were hundreds of Ativahikas behind it. Thousands maybe. The sky was as full of them as it was the disks of the Baomind.
I could not see where the Defiance had been flung. Perhaps it was still flinging. But Jothari and Freeport ships were winking into white space in every direction, and I could only assume they were skittering away as fast as their coils could carry them.
I wondered if the Ativahika would hunt them down.
It sounded disappointed when it said, Those who come to realms they cannot live in will always be vulnerable to those who are at home there.
Perhaps that ripple of its many filamentary appendages was the Ativahika equivalent of a shrug.
I looked left and right. Why didn’t you stop them before?
They preyed on the singular. At great distances. It took us time to . . . learn. The voice that wasn’t a voice and the words that were not words were hesitant, as if it were having difficulty expressing concepts that it took for granted as self-evident.
And is this the justice you promised us, little mind?
Under the circumstances . . . best I could do.
Its enormous eye regarded me, close enough to touch.
The best you could have done, under the circumstances.
I held my tongue. It didn’t seem like there would be much point to arguing.
I was ready to be knocked aside as easily as the Defiance. I hoped it would not harm Cheeirilaq.
My friend is not guilty of anything— I began
It was, the great voice that wasn’t a voice exactly said. Underneath it, the music of the Baomind agreed. It was the best you could have done.
Like a giant offering a fingertip to a mouse to sniff, it extended the long, narrow tip of its face toward me. Its snout? Some sensory organ? I didn’t know. It reminded me of the very tip of an elephant’s trunk, but forty times bigger and without breathing holes.
It stopped a decimeter away.
Say hello, Friend Haimey, Cheeirilaq murmured in my backchannel. It’s not polite to keep people waiting.
I somehow managed to hold up my hand. I remembered not to use the one the gun was webbed to.
I touched an Ativahika. I touched the Ancient One.
It touched me back. For a moment, I knew its name. But the name of an Ativahika is not something you can remember and recall later, because it’s at once too complex to hold in your mind all at once, and it’s ever-changing—so as soon as you know it, it’s gone.
But I knew it once. For an instant. And it was like knowing the location of every star in the endless sky.
What it said to me before it lifted away was, Here is your ship, little mind.
Then it drifted aside. And what I saw behind it was the Prize, flanked by I’ll Explain It To You Slowly and a dozen other Synarche Interceptors and Cutters; deep-space patrol boats that could hold their own in a fight or a rescue situation.
They held a loose formation as the Ativahikas disengaged.
Connla’s voice broke into my com. “Hang on, Haimey. We’re— Just hang on.”
The Prize began to move in fast. Something caught my attention, rising up from the bottom periphery of my visor.
A faint red mist.
Oh. Bleeding ag—
? ? ?
That was when I fainted.
Cheeirilaq got us both inside. I imagine it swarming through the airlock on segmented legs, two bodies draped over the spikes on its raptorial legs, like something directly pulled from atavistic Terran nightmares. I’m glad I slept through that part.
To catch up on the part I missed: as you’ve probably guessed, I’ll Explain It To You Slowly was coming back to get us. She had encountered an encoded beacon at a waypoint that allowed her to deduce the location of and catch up with a Synarche fleet commanded by SGV I Can Remember It For You Wholesale outbound, in pursuit of the Prize and whatever had hijacked her. I’ll Explain It To You Slowly explained the situation to her sister ships, and the now-combined Synarche operations continued on toward the Baostar coordinates.
Where they met up with the Prize, running away. Connla and Singer managed to explain the situation to the satisfaction of Memory and her captain . . . who told them to turn right back around and come get us, with all the support a girl bleeding to death in a space suit could desire.
The whole fleet came to save us.
That turned out to be handy, because Zanya Farweather and I were about as badly in need of a cryo tube as it’s possible for a human who is not actually already clinically dead to be.
? ? ?
We think of forgiveness as a thing. An incident. A choice. But forgiveness is a process. A long, exhausting process. A series of choices that we have to make over, and over, and over again.
Because the anger at having been wronged—the rage, the fury, the desire to lash out and cut back—doesn’t just vanish because you say to someone, “I forgive you.” Rather, forgiveness is an obligation you take on not to act punitively on your anger. To interrogate it when it arises, and accept that you have made the choice to be constructive rather than destructive. Not that you have made the choice never to be angry again.
Of course, I could have rightminded the anger out. But it’s a mistake to put one’s anger down too soon.
Anger is an inoculant. It gets your immune system working against bullshit.
But anger can also make you sick, if you’re exposed to it for too long. That same caustic anger that can inspire you to action, to defend yourself, to make powerful and risky choices . . . can eat away at you. Consume your self, vulnerabilities, flesh, heart, future if you stay under the drip for too long. The anger itself can become your reason for living, and feeding it can be your only goal. In the end, you’ll feed yourself to it to keep the flame alive, along with everyone around you.
Anger is selfish, like any flame. And so, like any flame, it must be shielded, contained, husbanded while it is useful and banked or extinguished when it is not.
But flames don’t want to die, and they are crafty—an ember hidden here, a hot spot unexpectedly lurking over there. Sure, you can turn the feelings off, and I had done that before. But turning off the anger doesn’t lead to dealing with the problems that caused the anger.
Forgiveness is not easy. Forgiveness is a train with many stops, and it takes forever to get where you are going. And you cover a lot of territory along the way, not necessarily by the most direct route, either. That’s why forgiveness is a process, and as much a blessing for the person who was wronged as for the person who did the wronging.
And it’s hardest when the person you most need to forgive is yourself.
I had been very bad at forgiveness, after the terrorists. But I had also been very bad at feeling anger. Feeling angry made me feel guilty. Flawed.
I hadn’t been raised in a place where I was allowed to be angry. Anger was antisocial. Anger was regulated against.
Boundaries of any sort were regulated against, come to think of it. By regulating us, the clade members, the children in the crèche. You can’t mind what you’re not allowed to mind.
? ? ?
I next saw Farweather as the crew of SJV I’ll Explain It To You Slowly were prepping us to slide our failing bodies into cryo tanks on the chance we might survive the long ride home. She turned her head and looked at me. I only noticed it because she spoke, because I’d been ignoring her as hard as I could. Connla was standing beside me in his dapper pilot suit, his ponytail draping in that weird gravity way. He was trying to look unconcerned. It wasn’t working.
So I wasn’t looking at her when Farweather said, “I’m sorry.”
I didn’t look then either. Connla squeezed my hand.
“I’m sorry,” she said again.
“I bet you are,” I answered as the tank lid closed.
CHAPTER 30
I WOKE UP IN THE HOSPITAL. Core General, in fact, because that was how fancy I was now.
I met a nice doctor there. Her name was K’kk’jk’ooOOoo, and she had beautiful gray eyes and was sleek and fast.
Unfortunately, she was a dolphin-like K’juUUuuU who came from a water world, so it never would have worked out. But it turns out that sonar is a really useful sense for an internist.
Also, it tickles.
K’kk’jk’ooOOoo was a specialist in fox interface problems, and she’d been brought in to figure out how to fix the malfunctioning connections in my much-abused one, or replace it if necessary. The rest of my body was already fixed. They’d grown me a new liver and colon while I was asleep in a tank. Good idea. Who wants to be awake for that?
The first thing I asked about was the Baomind, and I was assured that rescue operations were under way. The first wave of Baomind mirror disks had actually been elected by the collective for evacuation and brought to the Core huddled inside the white coils of the Prize and the other ships in the rescue fleet. More ships were en route to bring back the next wave, and as far as anybody could tell from this far away, its primary had not exploded.
Yet.