? ? ?
The biggest question in my mind was Where am I, and right after that was Who’s following us and Where is the rendezvous, and what Freeport assets are waiting there? But just asking this persnickety peripheral that had infected my body for a direct answer never seemed to work. (Of course not.) So instead, I sat with it, thinking about my breathing, letting whatever thoughts wanted to arise or descend do their thing.
Mostly they were thoughts of grief. At first, anyway. I leaned back against a bulkhead and let the sorrow rise as I imagined Connla cuddling the cats to him as space opened up all around them. Maybe fate had been merciful, and all three of them had been caught in the initial particle blast. The emotions came with tears, and a pain that hitched my breathing, and I didn’t tune to lessen it. Pain still had to be processed eventually. You could use rightminding to manage it, and to manage the sequelae of trauma. But you couldn’t just make those things go away.
Not and expect people to have healthy brains and healthy psyches afterward. It was the equivalent of putting somebody with high blood pressure on rectifiers and not addressing the physical causes of the problem at a systemic and maintenance level as well.
I would have given anything to find Bushyasta sleeping in the beverage heater and have to pick fur out of the little cubby before making myself a beverage that didn’t taste like cat dander. If we had a beverage heater, I would have killed for a cup of cat-dander tea. If we had any tea.
I was cautious. So cautious. I didn’t reach out. I just . . . sat still. Held to myself. And let the universe come to me.
The idea is to breathe, and not actually think about anything complicated with intention. Think about the breath, sure. Think about the blood carrying the oxygen through your body. Picture the pathways of your arteries and veins.
Other thoughts will arise. Some of those thoughts will be sorrow. Some will be anger. Sometimes, there will be a flare of white rage directed at somebody close, somebody whose actions have harmed you or those you loved. Sometimes that fury might subside into grief. Sometimes it might flare into a craving for vengeance.
The thing was, a lot of people—people in the clade I grew up in, for example—have the idea that when you seek no-mind, or what the Wake-Seekers and those who follow the Path of the Unfinished Work call waiting awareness, you are not conscious, somehow. But that is not the case. What you are doing is trying to accept what you think and feel as simply events that are occurring, rather than as intrinsic parts of who you are, demanding immediate action. You experience the emotion or thought, and you choose not to judge it or yourself, or your relationship to that emotion or thought. And when it’s done, you experience the next emotion.
Your self-ness is defined as something different from what you feel or think at the moment—something that can be made serene and thoughtful, careful of yourself and others, respectful of community. This is not dissimilar from rightminding, to be frank, and in a more religious time, after the Eschaton that left humanity so shattered and vulnerable and nearly destroyed us, it was a philosophy that many of my ancestors adopted, which led eventually to our acceptance of—and membership in—the Synarche.
There is an ancient concept of dharma, which means, essentially, right behavior. It includes such seemingly basic concepts as not taking more than you need, not deceiving or stealing, contributing to the well-being of other people, and not harming others in any other way as well. A number of religions and philosophies have grown up surrounding it, but I realized a long time ago that those mostly do not concern me. I’m not a religious person, though I dabbled for a while.
When I left the clade and after I was done burning myself up on synthetic deva, though, I realized that the world was a lonely place, and that it helped to have a philosophy, if nothing else, to help with the task of finding an identity.
Bloody vengeance, unfortunately, was not dharma. So when that showed up—with annoying regularity—I needed to let it go, and work on more socially beneficial tasks. Such as coming up with that set of directions.
I didn’t want to let the fury go, though. Not yet. I didn’t want to imagine ever letting it go, just yet. That rage, that loss—they had become integral to my identity. Letting go of them would be letting go of a piece of me, because that rage and grief . . . that rage and grief were my family, and all I had left of that family.
All the irony of unfinished business. I’d been so afraid of losing them because life is change, and the tide was drawing us apart. And now they were gone permanently, and I was still here, and I hadn’t just lost the future I had planned for and gotten invested in (a future that had never, of course, been real, but only what seemed to me the most desirable of likely outcomes).
The authentic experience is an illusion. Safety is an illusion too.
So some of my fury was selfish: the fury of having been robbed of my family. The fury of being made to experience this grief, this pain, by someone else’s carelessness.
I reminded myself that pain and grief did not have to be suffering. That loss could just be that, loss, and experienced as such, and released because the world was change and you could not hold on.
The distinction seemed pretty academic to me just then.
I knew I needed to let go.
I was not ready to let go now.
I was not ready to release my strong attachment to my friends.
But maybe I could be ready to put the rage and sorrow away for a little while, so that I could get some work done.
Once I had first experienced them for a little while. And by experienced, I do mean “wallowed.”
Eventually, with a lot of practice, I did calm my mind, and fill it with the sound and sensation of my breathing and the tiny sounds rattling through the Prize’s hull. I still didn’t reach out—it was probably ridiculous, but I was concerned that the more aggressive I was in seeking information, the more likely it was that Farweather might notice me, or be able to pick up on what I was doing. The Koregoi senso sometimes fed me information about her. It was only reasonable to suppose that, likewise, it fed her information about me.
And she was better at using the stuff than I was. Still.
When I had finally managed to bore my persistent, argumentative brain into silence, though, what filled it was not a sense of Farweather’s presence, or even echoes of her intentions or her own senso ghosts. What I felt was, instead, what a stone might feel if dropped into a cool and limpid pool.
I seemed to drift, and there were currents all around me. I could perceive them, and moreover I could see through them. I again had that sense that I had had earlier of being able to feel the shape of the galaxy, of the universe, as if I were stretched out on a hammock, the fabric conforming to the outlines of my body—if my body were infinite, and extended to the very edges of everything. And if my capacity to sense detail were likewise infinite, and extended to the very edges of everything.
Our ship was a heavy place in the sky, one of many. Where we had been, the weight of the Well far outstripped it. And where we were going—
Farweather, or the ship, was taking us no place very interesting, I realized—partly in relief and partly in disappointment. We were headed for a Freeport—we had to be, because there was nothing Synarche in this corner of the galaxy—which was bad for me. There would not be very many opportunities to bust out if we were surrounded by pirates and occupied by more pirates.
Well, at least that encouraged me to act sooner rather than later.
Strangely, though, the flooding of information into my receptive state was not limited to vectors and directions and potential destinations and clusters of atoms and dark gravity and other things that bent the world. There was something else out there, something I was noticing now rather than previously because . . . Well, I could come up with a lot of theories. Because I was in an extraordinarily receptive state of mind. Because the Koregoi ship was feeding me data subconsciously. Because using the Koregoi senso while sitting inside the Koregoi ship caused a lensing property.
All kinds of explanations, as I said. But the fact of the matter was that I did not know why I was seeing what I was seeing—which was a grossly but not exactly repeating pattern of variations encoded in the dark gravity structure of the universe, on (in absolute terms) a very tiny scale.
“Dharma in the Well, Singer,” I said under my breath. “That looks like somebody has been scratching crib notes on the cosmos. I don’t suppose you can read them, can you?”
There was no answer, of course.