“I don’t think that’s fair—” I started.
She interrupted me with a snort. “Spend your whole life running errands for the Synarche, and what do you get out of it?”
“Stability?” I said. “Adventure? Contributing to the well-being of the commonwealth? Giving back something in exchange for your oxygen ration and livelihood? Feeling useful?”
“?‘Feeling useful,’?” she mocked.
The skin on my face felt dry and tight. I was angry, but I didn’t really know what angry was, or what to do with it.
“I think you mean ‘being exploited,’?” she continued.
“If you say so.”
But the seed of doubt was in me, doing seed-of-doubt things—sending out curling green tendrils and raveling down threadlike roots. I grew up in a clade. What did I really know about whether or not the Synarche exploited its citizens? I was coming to the conclusion that the clades did, which left me deeply uncomfortable and unsettled in my identity and existence.
“But what’s the better system, then?”
She guffawed. “If you have to constantly alter your natural mental state to survive a situation, doesn’t it follow that the situation is toxic?”
“It might follow that your brain chemical balance is maladaptive,” I countered. “We didn’t evolve to live in a galaxy-spanning interdependence. Are you going to argue we should leave psychopaths untuned in order to let them prey on the rest of us because our species somehow evolved to have a certain number of self-eating monsters in it?”
It had felt like firm ground when I started the argument, but Niyara shaking her head and frowning at me made me trail off in insecurity.
“We evolved to be competitive and hierarchal,” she said, pitching her voice so it sounded like she was agreeing with me and felt sorry for me at the same time. “We evolved to excel in order to increase our own status and desirability.” She shrugged. “Denying that doesn’t change it.”
“Indulging it doesn’t make it right!” I shot back.
“Like I said”—she shook her head sadly— “naive. But you’re willing to go do something that is a total betrayal of my feelings?”
“So I should care about your feelings in a way you never cared about mine? It’s my life. I’m the one who has to live it.”
“I care about your feelings. There are lots of things you could do to have adventures, to explore!”
“You give my feelings a lot of lip service,” I admitted. “In between trying to control me.”
I have no idea where I found the spunk to stand up to her. And managing the conflict reasonably was beyond me at that point in my life. I got up, turned around, and walked away from her, because the alternative was starting to shout and throw things, and I was much too thoroughly socialized and programmed against what my linemothers would have called “displays” to create such a scene as that.
? ? ?
Five hours later, when I was lying on my bunk resisting the urge to tune and even more strongly resisting the near compulsion to send her a long, sorrowful mail, she texted me.
I’m sorry. I was a jerk. Meet me for dinner and I’ll make it up to you.
I wasn’t sure I believed her, but I was sure that I felt miserable when we were fighting, so I messaged back: Tell me where.
CHAPTER 12
SO WE WERE ON A date when Niyara blew up.
Actually blew up. Literally on a date.
After the fight, we’d met at a cafe in the outer ring of Ansara Station. That was one of the bigger ones, and there were shops and bars and places to eat or relax and chat with friends—or chat up potential new friends—lining the hull on either side, in between the docking tunnels. She’d picked out a place that did Ethiopian food, which is an old Terran specialty and amazingly delicious—and it was the sort of joint where you had to bring in your own wine if you wanted it.
We hadn’t brought any, so she sent me down the block to pick up a bottle. I was paying for a nice-enough white when the concussion wave hit me and the decomp doors came down. Luckily, I was still standing by the counter, or I could have been severed. Those doors don’t stop if an unlucky sentient is in the way; other lives depend on it.
All I could think of was getting back to her. It was nine long mins before the breach was declared stabilized and I could get out of the wine shop.
I still had the wine in my hand when I reached her. I dropped it. The bottle bounced a couple of times and rolled a little bit away. Then I dropped myself, 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 sent you out of the blast radius, didn’t I?” 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. But she’d taken time-release poison before she blew the station hatchway. And that was the end of that, for Niyara Omedela, the love of my life, whose entire existence as I understood it was a lie.
I . . . spent a lot of time being interrogated, and eventually cleared. I’d been a dupe, I guess. Used to make her seem normal, connected? As a cover for her other intrigues? The Synarche doesn’t care if you’re sneaking around because you’re having an illicit assignation, and one sneak is as good as another.
Or maybe she needed . . . an outlet. Somebody who wasn’t part of the inner workings of her cell.
Her wife exploded too, over in H sector. Killed five people for no good reason except some political philosophy from the dark ages.
So I guess they were still an item after all.
? ? ?
There was a trial.
I was tried as an accessory. And I was acquitted, because having revolutionary ideas and associating with revolutionaries is not a criminal offense, and nobody could prove I did more than that. Because I hadn’t, I told myself, but it’s hard to shake the guilt. The sense that if I’d been paying attention, I could have stopped that from happening. That those eight lives—not counting Niyara and her wife—were on my conscience.
Because I was a juvenile—under twenty-five standard ans—my name was never released to the senswebs and my identity was legally protected from all but my family. Or in my case, the clade. When I was acquitted, I was absolved. The records were sealed. My . . . “family” knew.
It worked out in one way. My clade didn’t really want me back after that, and who could blame them? I had mostly decided to leave before Niyara killed herself. After Niyara, I mostly contemplated coming home because I couldn’t figure out where else to go. And their obvious reluctance—their distaste for the association—
If it hadn’t been for Niyara, I probably wouldn’t have stayed away as long as I did. If it hadn’t been for what Niyara did, I would have asked to go home when I realized she was never going to love me back the way I loved her. She gave my happiness a lot of lip service, but that’s all it ever was. Her actions never supported what she said, and I flatter myself that I would have figured it out eventually and had the courage to walk away.
As it was, I was still blaming myself for her not loving me, and then blaming myself for not seeing that she was a monster. And then blaming myself for a clade I didn’t care about not loving me enough to take me back joyfully even though I’d become a liability. I mean, they sued for custody, and they would have made me one of them again. They’re supposed to let you walk away whenever you want.
In practice, that’s not how it works.
I won the first court case. And I was saved from appeals. The Niyara thing hit the feeds, and they decided they’d had enough of me. Bad publicity. Otherwise I’d still be fending off lawsuits from my clade questioning my competence to make decisions for myself, and seeking protective custody.
So I wanted to go back in order to feel like part of something again, and in order to not feel terrible, and I would have done it if they would have not made me feel like they were taking me on charity. Maybe I’d had enough of guilt and manipulation by then.
The judge decided I wasn’t culpable. It took two suicide attempts and a lot of rightminding before I started to be able to contemplate that they might have a point.
I’m sure I’m better now.
She got under my skin, I guess. Looks like letting things under my skin is a lifelong failing of mine.
? ? ?
Anyway, if my clade had wanted me, they would have wanted me to find a mate and for each of us to birth a couple of offspring for the crèche, and . . .