“Yep,” she said.
“What?” It was bad enough what she’d done to me; how she’d violated me again and again. Setting up the booby trap that had injected me with this atrocity tech, the Koregoi senso. And then destroying my fox, my machine memories, everything that made me . . . me. The me I wanted to be.
She said, “Your guess is as good as mine, honestly. I’m just the guy with the EM gun; I’m not a psychospecialist.”
? ? ?
The worst was when I retired to my secret nest in the maintenance tube to float, and sleep, and be alone.
There were no distractions in my nest, which had appealed to me before Farweather blew up my emotional regulation. Now it just meant that there was nothing to hold or focus my attention. I was restless. Feverish. The feeling of being ungrounded and unable to follow a mental thread was relentless. I couldn’t think, couldn’t reason. I certainly couldn’t sleep reliably, or for long.
So I hung in my tube and drifted lightly on the end of my tether, trying not to fidget lest I put myself into a wobbling spin.
It was all so deeply frustrating, and there was so little I could come up with to remedy the situation. It was possible that stimulants might aid my concentration, but the strongest thing I had access to was Farweather’s limited coffee supply, and we were rationing that. I’d cut her off, actually; more for me. It seemed like the least I could manage in terms of consequences, considering what she’d done to me.
I tried mindfulness, along with some other primitive rightminding techniques I’d heard of or read about or studied, back when I was still studying history. They helped a little, though the level of effort on return was pretty high. But they did not help enough. Whenever my concentration on my breathing (this is my in breath; this is my out breath) lapsed, my thoughts went skying off in every possible direction. And when I managed to rein them back from flying to the next thing, and the thing after that, and the next thing too, they fixated obsessively on history.
Not galactic history, either. But my own personal history. The ugly kind.
As I already mentioned, we were on a date when Niyara blew up.
Actually blew up. Literally on a date.
That part is true. Or anyway, I remembered it as true now, without the mediation of my machine memory. Though of course it was possible that long exposure to my fox’s version of events had changed my own recollections. It was not true that we had fought, but we had parted company and then met at that cafe in the outer ring of Ansara Station.
Some things hadn’t changed. I was, indeed, supposedly on my Choice An, supposedly getting a glimpse of the outside universe before I made my final decision to stay with the clade. The opportunity to change my mind was legally mandated by the Synarche, of course. I couldn’t commit entirely to the clade until I turned twenty-five standard, and I had to do it, legally, while I wasn’t under the influence of any tuning or rightminding controlled by the clade.
Ansara was the biggest human habitation I had ever visited, at the time, and the also first I’d ever been to with a significant percentage of nonhuman systers in residence. That isn’t saying much, because I’d grown up on the station entirely populated by the women of Nyumba Yangu Haina Mlango, and I’d stopped at a grand total of two transfer points or waystations on my way to Ansara, which I had chosen because . . .
. . . because . . .
I opened my eyes and stared into the darkness of the maintenance tube. It wasn’t very dark darkness. One of the things I’d noticed was that, in addition to all my weird new secondary senses relating to gravity and mass and so forth, my eyes were becoming better adapted to seeing under a variety of light conditions.
A less beneficial side effect, under the current conditions of tight rationing, was that I was hungry all the time and had started losing weight again, though the algae tanks kept Farweather and me from actually starving.
But I was distracting myself from thinking about Ansara. Ansara, which I had chosen to go to for my Choice An because . . .
I couldn’t remember. There had been a logical process, I was sure. A reason to go there. Museums? A chance to study? It had a pretty good technical program.
No, I realized, as a second set of memories unveiled itself, coexisting alongside the first like some weird double exposure of the mind. I hadn’t decided to go to Ansara. I’d been sent—or at least, the decision had been made for me, though at the time I’d accepted it as my own.
My own clade had set me up. Farweather was not lying about that.
. . . Unless she was, and my fragile, discombobulated memories were recoalescing around the seed she’d planted. Confabulating.
Well and Void, meat brains were useless things!
I had no way of knowing which version of events might be true. But now I remembered—thought I remembered?—additional details. We had gone to the Ethiopian cafe in order to run reconnaissance for a suicide bombing mission. Now I remembered having known about the mission, and I remembered having been an aware and willing participant.
At the time, I’d been a rebel. I’d thought I was striking back against the people who had raised me in a bubble. I’m not sure why I thought that. Except it seemed perfectly logical at the time. And my thinking that certainly cleared the clade of any culpability, didn’t it? If I should happen to be interrogated.
But in retrospect, it seemed obvious that my clademothers sent me to Ansara specifically to meet up with Niyara and her cell, to join them, and to provide technical expertise for their mission of destruction. It was absolutely intentional, a blow against a Synarche that my clade deemed a threat to its existence and way of life. The Synarche insisted that individuals be granted personal freedom and autonomy of choice and body; my clade believed that the path to universal happiness was obedience to authority. Not even obedience, exactly; just allowing yourself to be subsumed by the authority, to become a part of it, to accept its decisions and program as your own.
Ansara was one of the bigger stations, and I believe I also mentioned the shops and bars and places to eat or relax with friends or potential friends or potential sex partners, for that matter, that blanketed the hull between the docking tunnels.
I’d built the explosives. We weren’t supposed to be carrying them that dia, however. That dia, we were only supposed to be checking out the restaurant and estimating when its peak crowds would be. I decided I wanted a bottle of wine, since it was probably the last one we would ever drink.
Did I decide that?
No.
Niyara suggested it.
Let us eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we most definitely die.
I picked out that nice-enough bottle of white—actually, it was a very good bottle, because there was no point in saving up against a holed hull at that point.
And while I was away from the table, Niyara detonated the bomb she had been wearing under her tunic, destroying herself and the restaurant and leaving me behind.
I knew instantly what had happened. The concussion wave hit me, and the decomp doors came down. I avoided decapitation because I was paying for the wine and I wasn’t anywhere near the shop entrance. I remember standing by the doors, numbed, staring up at the pressure readout until the outside ring stabilized and the decomp door went up again. I scuttled under it hurriedly, thinking that if there was a seal problem or the pressure otherwise fluctuated while I was under the hatch, well, that was that for me.
Why did she do that? I wondered. Why did she leave me behind?
We had been going to change the galaxy together.
I still had the wine in my hand when I reached her. I dropped it. The flask bounced a couple of times and rolled a little bit away. These bottles were not made of glass. Then I also dropped, 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 couldn’t . . . You didn’t have a choice. . . ,” 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. What was enough to kill her was the time-release poison she’d taken before she blew the station hatchway. And that was the end of that, for Niyara Omedela, the love of my life.