I stood and watched them come. And for all my determination not to live in the past, here I was. Poking around the ragged edges of Niyara, and losing Niyara, and missing Niyara, which was the most terrible thing. Because she didn’t deserve my grief, or my sorrow. She didn’t even deserve my anger, and yet here I was, struggling with letting that anger go.
Neither did my clade, come to think of it. And yet, there was some pain there too. Funny and distanced, just like the pain around Niyara was weirdly attenuated. Not just by time, but because I was a different person than I had been then—Judicial interventions, and therapy, and getting myself taken out of the clade consensus. All of it had left a mark.
This would leave a mark, too, but I thought about it, and I decided that I didn’t want to get over it by turning myself into a different person this time.
I liked who I was now. It wasn’t entirely comfortable—I knew there were places where I chafed and rubbed and prickled, against my shipmates and against myself—but overall, I liked who I’d been with Singer and Connla.
And time and experience were starting to paper over the holes in my memory around Niyara and around leaving the clade, the things I hadn’t been permitted to remember because they were clade secrets, or secrets about how terrorists could manage to blow up half a recreation deck.
I didn’t want to reinvent myself again. Even if hanging on to myself hurt.
Was this what having an identity felt like? Was this being someone? Feeling like there was a core of who you were beyond which you could not be altered?
Feeling . . . continuity. Feeling like you existed as a real, solid thing, apart from your trauma.
Did other people have this? And not just a set of rules and chemical settings, tunings and rightminding, that they’d decided bounded the parameters of their actions?
It explained some things about people’s behavior. And their defensiveness surrounding certain antisocial aspects of their personalities.
I had never really felt like I existed apart from the clade, and apart from Niyara. The person I was now was Judicially constructed. Who was I really?
“Haimey?” Singer said. “Are you all right?”
“Sad,” I admitted.
“I can sense that. Should you bump?”
“No!” I made myself jump with my own vehemence. “Sorry. I mean, no, it’s natural sadness. Earned. I’m going to miss being a team with Connla and you. And I’m going to miss the cats.”
“It might not be permanent,” Singer said.
“I know. But I can’t hold on to that.”
That was the future. And the future was gone.
“I know.” A pause; then he said, “I’m putting together the beginnings of a schematic, if you want to explore a little bit more.”
“Nah,” I said. “My afthands hurt. I think I’m just going to lie down here and watch the Synarche come.”
? ? ?
I made myself comfortable on the decking and propped my ankles on a little bump in the floor. The gravity shifted directions there, so it felt like my lower extremities were floating, which helped with the pain relief. It was awfully weird, experiencing space as up, and anyway craning against gravity was doing a number on my neck by then.
The little ships grew until they were as big as Singer, then bigger. They were still farther away than he was, which gave me a pretty good indication of their size. We’d offered no indication of lack of cooperation, but they weren’t taking any chances that we might hit a bout of independence or antisocialism or just plain sophipathology and light out for the territories in the archaeological discovery of the century. And to be honest, if we’d had a better idea of how to make it go, I might have done just that.
Also, I bet most of them wanted to be in on the adventure. Every syster within striking distance would want a taste of and a claim on this discovery. And even putting materialistic and status motives aside, how would you ever live it down with your great-great-grand-nestlings if you passed up the opportunity to be present at a piece of history like this?
“How many of them are there?” I asked Singer.
“Twenty-three,” he answered.
“Wow,” Connla said. “I can’t remember the last time I felt this important.”
“Oh,” I said. “I bet you had a line around the block to ask you to dance at your graduation ball.”
He snorted. “I’m not that much younger than you, old lady.”
Actually, he was a few ans older. But I let it slide.
I thought about my breathing, and found a kind of peace. Melancholy but not miserable. I’d probably cry myself to sleep for ages, and every time I saw a cat, if I didn’t tune, but I could survive this.
I would survive this. I would stay friends with Connla and Singer, because there was no reason not to.
And I would go on to have new adventures, besides.
The Synarche ships were coasting to a matched velocity, and I was feeling . . . not exactly good about the galaxy, but at least not catastrophic. Singer’s tug turned, moving back to allow them in toward the Koregoi vessel . . .
. . . and exploded into a thousand flaring firework sparks.
CHAPTER 16
I CHOKED IN DISBELIEF, AND CLUTCHED my throat—or my suit, over where it felt like my throat was closing. The sparks spread, dying quickly as they ran out of oxidant, already beginning to fall into orbit as they felt the powerful draw of the Well. A cloud of vapor puffed into void and froze, sparkling as the flakes of oxygen and carbon dioxide and nitrogen and water vapor turned, expanding and tumbling with the momentum of decompression.
Larger chunks of what had been a ship broke apart, trailing cables and linkages and sparkling sprays of debris. I saw a big piece of the aft hull—identifiable by the stump of a derrick—blown off at a high rate of speed, tumbling end over end.
“Singer!” I choked on it, but I got it out.
No answer.
Singer. Connla.
The cats.
Ice spiked through me, a moment of sheer panic, and then my own body clarified the adrenaline rush and settled me into a perfect, terrible calm. No tuning needed; this was the atavistic survival response in a situation for which it had evolved, through millions of ans of trial and error where the errors got you eaten.
“Connla?”
Reaching out into the senso toward where he should have been felt like trying to grab a rope with an amputated hand. I had no coms, and access only to the fox in my wetware; no uplink at all. And looking at the sky overhead, I didn’t think there would be an answer.
I had a pretty good view of what remained of Singer . . . and it wasn’t promising. A sparking hulk turned in space, white coils snapped into an arc and unraveling like a sliced, fraying segment of hose. The tug was dark except for the silent sizzle of electricity, already fading. There would be electron beams I couldn’t see, invisible because they were bridging gaps in vacuum, in addition to the blue and green and yellow arcs formed where there was something made of atoms for the electricity to excite.
The other Synarche ships were there. Within sight now. I could try to reach them. I had to try to reach them, although with nothing but my naked suit com, broadcasting from inside the Koregoi prize . . .
Let’s just say I didn’t fancy my chances.
But other than those Synarche vessels, I was completely alone, and I had no idea if Singer had informed them that he had crew aboard the salvaged vessel before he . . . before the explosion.
What had happened to Singer? What the Well could have gone so terribly wrong? There had been no sign that the Koregoi ship was taking any automated action. I hadn’t felt any tremor though the hull, as if a mass driver had been activated, and there had been no visible trace of energy weapon. A ship built by people who could manipulate gravity at a whim might have other weapons, though—weapons out of fantasy, repulsor rays and rattlers.
I realized that I wasn’t lying down anymore. That somehow, without realizing it, I had rolled upright and run to the arched dome of the observation pod.
I leaned on the transparent shell and looked around for something that I could jury-rig to in order to make an antenna. That simple tech; a pre-space juvenile could build one with a bit of wire. I just needed something conductive that extended into the outside, or that connected to something else conductive that likewise extended.
The adrenaline was wearing off, and behind it came the grief and horror I didn’t have time to feel, slicking up my palms and eyes. I shut it down, tuned harder than was possibly safe, knowing that if I pushed myself as hard as I needed to it was likely to destabilize my brain chemistry for diar unless I spent a long, careful time coming down off the bump I was giving myself. Dumping a lot of brain chemicals into yourself abruptly tends to send the system into wild spins. And I wasn’t as good at tuning this stuff as . . .
. . . as some people.
I got myself together with a couple of deep breaths and didn’t look at my air gauge. There was plenty of atmosphere in the Koregoi ship if the option became breathing it, or suffocating. Then I began quartering the edge of the dome, looking for something I could use to boost a signal.