“Judicial Recon,” she said, with a one-shouldered shrug of emphasis. “Don’t you ever wonder what they Reconned over?”
“Reconstruction,” I said, “means putting something back the way it was supposed to be, with repaired damage.”
She slurped a noodle, though I couldn’t see what was different about that one that she’d picked it out specially.
“Repaired or excised.”
I bumped to glide over a memory of Niyara’s blood on my hands, sticky-slick and already congealing. “Oh, I’m pretty sure all the damage is right where it ought to be.”
She laughed lightly. I found a noodle of my own, and ate it despite the fact that I didn’t have much appetite.
“See,” she said, “I think the real reason why you’re such a goody-two-shoes is because this is your Judicially constructed personality. The you you know is Judicial Recon, because you were a juvenile when what happened, happened. So they gave you a clean slate and a clean bill of health.”
A chill crawled through me. It was possible. The clade and Justice between them would have had the right to make decisions about reconstructing my personality. And then to conceal those decisions from me if they determined it would produce a healthier outcome.
I tried to keep my feelings off my face and eat my noodles.
“Don’t you want to know who the real you is?”
I didn’t lift my eyes from my bowl, as if the broth and its appetizing skim of flavorful oil droplets were completely fascinating. “I was raised in a clade. There is no real me.”
CHAPTER 20
I WASN’T GOING TO LET FARWEATHER see that she’d gotten to me. It was a white-knuckled couple of moments until the tuning really kicked in, however, and when it finally did I realized that I’d overdone it. I was, in fact, a little stoned on my own endorphins.
But I also wasn’t anxious, or reactive, or freaked right out, and I could think clearly—admittedly, through a haze of general goodwill and fondness for the universe intense enough that it even included murderous, amoral bad girl pirate rogues.
Why did it have to be bad girls? Moreover, why did they seem to have such a taste for me? I’d rendered myself more or less bulletproof. But they still seemed to be able to smell me coming. Even after all the rightminding and Recon.
I wondered if, in all the stuff she knew about me, Farweather knew about the time I’d spent out of my mind on deva. That probably would have bothered me if I were less chemically elevated. I almost laughed out loud when I realized how many of my precautions and anxieties about rightminding had to do with having been dependent on deva and never wanting to go back there.
What if she was right? I didn’t think Farweather was telling the truth; I didn’t think Farweather generally told the truth, unless it served her own very specific purposes. But I was also now able to think about her claims without anxiety or denial. It was an interesting perspective. I could see the reactivity and defensiveness rising up self-protectively inside my own brain, like an armored space marine ready to take on some kind of dangerous interstellar dragon.
The image made me giggle.
Farweather gave me an odd look from across the cabin.
I ignored her. Yep, if I was mixing my metaphors like that, I was definitely in an altered state. It felt good, though—like I was finally getting a chance to relax a little.
And I knew it would wear off soon. I didn’t want to tune back toward baseline, because I was enjoying actually feeling a little bit good for a change. But as generations of lazily plotted thrillers tell us, it’s rarely a good idea to get shit-faced while guarding a jail cell if you want your prisoner to be where you left them when you check later.
Once I knew she wasn’t under my skin anymore, it occurred to me that I could certainly use her expectation of being under my skin. Especially since I’d been quiet for so long.
I settled down on my mattress, cross-legged, back to the wall, easing my slightly sore afthands. I’d been going around without my boots a bunch, and my afthands were better acclimated than I would have thought possible, but it did stretch the tendons in funny ways. Also, I thought they kind of freaked Farweather out, based on her sidelong glances, and I was all for anything that might put her off her stride.
I said, “So since you know all about me and Niyara, why do you think she did it?” I probably didn’t quite succeed in not sounding hostile, but that probably made it seem more convincing that she had gotten to me.
Farweather gave me that are you an alien? stare, which I think was unfair, because I suspect most systers wouldn’t have been surprised or confused by my question.
“To get at the Synarche,” she said, as if it were patently obvious. “To protest their mind control practices. And some reasons of her own. You really are a babe in the woods, aren’t you?”
Her dismissal niggled at me. I wanted to say, as if to a child, How did she expect that to work out? I recognized the urge, identified it, and then held my breath until it passed.
Good modeling of rational behavior there, Dz.
While I was looking at Farweather, and Farweather was looking at me, the Koregoi ship’s lights and gravity fluttered briefly, never quite going off, but dimming (and lightening) significantly for a few seconds, in quick pulses. Well, that wasn’t unsettling at all. Especially when we were reliant on that power source for life support, and when it was, conservatively speaking, probably a few millennians old.
Well, okay, maybe less than that in its own timeframe, what with having been put on ice at the edge of a black hole, where the subjective passage of time might have been only a few decans. Or a few dozen decans. I wished bitterly that Singer were here to figure out the physics and do the math for me.
Grief is stupid and hard.
And a centad is still a damned long time to go without a lubricant change and an overhaul.
I looked away from Farweather and then looked back, on the off chance that she would be wearing a calm expression, indicating that she knew what was causing the fluctuation and everything was under control, thank you.
Unfortunately for my peace of mind, she was biting her lower lip and frowning.
She didn’t say anything, though, so I decided against giving her any information by implication about what I did or did not know about the status of the power systems on board the Koregoi prize, and instead just kept talking.
I said, “How do you think the Synarche feels about you?”
She did that shrugging thing I was learning to find so infuriating. “People just naturally hate things that are different from them.”
The way you, and Niyara, hate us. Because our existence—and functionality as a community—threatens your identity.
What I said was, “People just naturally get eaten by big cats or die of disease before their eighth solar, too, but nobody has ever felt like that was a good-enough reason not to take preventative measures against leopard attacks and tetanus, once they were technologically able to.”
“Synarche imperialism—”
“An argument that would hold more atmosphere if you could show me where the Synarche has done more to the Freeports than move against them when the burden of piracy got heavy enough to demand action. Hell, we don’t even rightmind pirates without their consent.”
“Coerced consent. If they don’t agree, you just lock them up forever.”
“That’s just self-defense,” I said cheerfully. “There’s nothing wrong with enforcing reasonable boundaries through the application of consequences.”
“You’re pretty smug for somebody who’s afraid to remember what she really did, and who she was before she got Reconned.”
“How do you know about the Recon?” I wish I hadn’t asked again. It was a vulnerability to care.
“You were interesting,” she said, as she had said before.
“Information is for sale, is that what you’re saying?”
She made a noncommittal noise. I guessed I would probably never actually know everything about this mess.
“You’re pretty certain of yourself.”
“Let me into your fox,” she said, “and I’ll show you who you were.”
“If I let you into my fox, you can show me anything,” I answered. “Machine memory is programmable. And unlike Justice, you don’t need my consent for any changes, and you don’t have any ethical guidelines.”
She just laughed. “Dark and cold, you’re naive.”
She did get under my skin that time. But the soothing brain chemicals were still working, and I looked at my irritation, inspected it. Then I decided to say exactly what I’d thought about saying when I was defensive and reactive, just with intent this time.
“You know,” I said lazily, “that’s just atavistic anxiety and fear behavior, and it’s pretty easy to regulate chemically. Then you can practice being afraid of things that might actually hurt you.”
I’d managed to derail her into arguing in circles for a change, I realized. It felt . . . pretty good.