“What do you mean?”
“You were blaming yourself for what happened on Ansara before you even knew the truth,” she pointed out, conveniently forgetting—or erasing—that she’d been blaming me herself a very few minutes before. “You keep trying to . . . I don’t know, redeem yourself through service. You need to let go of that desire, Dz. Stop trying to make amends for things that are not and never were your fault.”
“I built a bomb.”
“Four bombs.” She grinned. “Actually. But that wasn’t you. Not exactly. That was somebody Nyumba Yangu Haina Mlango made up out of whole cloth, right? Somebody exactly like the rest of them.”
I settled back and stared at her, realizing that I had crossed my arms defensively but not having much in the way of will to uncross them.
She said, “There’s a weird power dynamic at work in here, too, right? If you, Dz, have to make amends for things even if you couldn’t control them at the time, then in some way you, Dz, get to feel that you’re not powerless. If you have to make amends for things that happened against your will, then you reclaim some power over those events.”
I didn’t answer.
“Look,” she said. “My people aren’t real comfortable with modifying yourself into a new species, but I have to admit that your people are reactionary even by my standards. A bunch of retro-gendered radically cis-female separatists who brainwash their unmodified, baseline-DNA clone children into absolute obedience and oneness with some primitive group mind? That’s a little fucking perverted.”
“You’re saying my guilt is inappropriate.”
“I’m saying I’m glad you got out. Got some freedom. You didn’t have that freedom when you were with Niyara, even though you thought you did. You didn’t have that freedom when Justice’s legacy juice was running your head.”
“So I’m free now.” I kicked an afthand. “You set me free; that’s what you’re saying.”
“I’m saying that you didn’t make the choices, so your assuming responsibility for the outcomes is a little unrealistic, don’t you think? Even if it is a means of asserting some agency over the course of proceedings.”
“Somebody’s responsible. And I’m the only person likely to step up to it, so I guess it is my job, yes.”
“I’m absolving you,” she said.
“I’d be more inclined to accept that if it didn’t come from a mass murderer.”
If I’d expected her to flinch, I was disappointed. She inclined her head, and the smile flickered back for a moment before vanishing again. Touché.
It takes one to know one, babes.
“Besides,” I said. “The only absolution is in balancing the action. Exactly as if it were a debt from a past life.”
“Do you believe in past lives?”
“I believe in past selves,” I said. “I sort of have to.”
“And you think you can carry the debt of what a dead woman did?”
“Is that what you’d call my past? A life lived by a dead woman?”
She made an eloquent, lazy gesture with her neck and shoulders. She changed the subject. “So your little Utopia—”
“Not so little.”
“—what do you do about people who exploit the system?”
“You mean, people like you?”
She ignored my attempt to needle her. I suppose, given her life in a primitive society and her own ability to needle me, she had some practice. “Malingerers. People who don’t pull their weight. How do you drive them to work harder?”
“Why do they need to?”
She blinked at me. I thought she was honestly puzzled. She shook her head and said, “But if they don’t work—”
I said, “Busywork, they used to call it. There’s absolutely no value to it. Economic value, or personal. There’s value in work you enjoy, or that serves a need. There’s no value in work for its own sake. It’s just . . . churn. Anxiety. Doing stuff to be doing stuff, not because it needs doing. There’s enough for everybody.”
I could see her getting angry, and honestly I didn’t actually care if she understood what I was trying to say. I suspected it would take a full course of rightminding and ans of talk therapy to make a dent in Farweather and her ossified, archaic belief patterns. And I was bored with arguing with her.
My turn to change the subject. “Do you want some more coffee?”
“I’d be a fool to say no.”
I made the coffee. She didn’t speak. Her chain rattled lightly; when I turned around she’d wiped the bowls out with a sanitizer and stacked them neatly. The bowls had come with the ship, and as far as I knew they were hats or shoes or alien commodes, but they did okay in holding porridge. The coffee I brewed in bulbs, because that was the way it came prepackaged. All you had to do was obtain or create boiling water, and then inject it. The bulb would expand, stretching from the size of a thumb joint to large enough to hold a good-sized portion. The filter was built right in.
The power flickered again while I was boiling the water—but since all I was doing was boiling water, and I was using Farweather’s power-cell operated probe to do it, that didn’t really affect anything. I would go looking for the problem again todia, I decided. None of my previous attempts had borne fruit, but persistence was a virtue, and it wasn’t like I had a whole lot of other things to be getting on with.
I handed Farweather her second bulb.
“I’m going to vibrate this chain right off me. And wind up in caffeine withdrawal again when you cut me off.”
It was a joke. I didn’t laugh. She was trying to mend fences, though. So that was something.
She cupped the bulb in both hands, enjoying the warmth while she waited for it to cool enough to be drinkable. She looked down at it and turned it gently in her hands.
She said, “?‘Human life. Duration: momentary. Nature: changeable. Perception: dim. Condition of body: decaying. Soul: spinning around. Fortune: unpredictable. Lasting fame: uncertain. Sum up: The body and its parts are a river, the soul a dream and mist, life is warfare and a journey far from home, lasting reputation is oblivion.’?”
“That’s grim,” I said.
“That’s Marcus Aurelius,” she answered.
I drank my coffee. It was too hot, but I managed not to scorch a blister on my palate. This time.
“So given that,” she said, “why don’t you be somebody you want to be, instead of somebody you think you need to be in order to make reparations? Why not pick your own purpose in life?”
“You said it yourself,” I told her. “That wasn’t me. I don’t exist.”
She blinked at me with her head cocked as if what I was saying was in an untranslatable language.
I said, “I never existed. There was the me the clade made, and the me Justice made. There’s no real me in here at all. So I can’t want anything. And I can’t have any purpose in life, other than to make amends.”
She shook her head. I decided I didn’t want to hear whatever was about to come out of her opening mouth, because it would all be lies and self-contradiction anyway. So I got up and I stalked off, and when she croaked, half laughing, “But that doesn’t make any sense at all!” I pretended I hadn’t heard her and kept walking.
? ? ?
I went up to the observation deck, and tried to talk to the ship again. Sometimes, I thought I might be getting somewhere.
Sometimes there was almost a sense, a flicker of some awareness at the edge of my own. Like, maybe the Prize was out there, but I just didn’t know how to reach it.
“It can’t be too hard if Farweather pulled it off,” I said bitterly to thin air.
But that presence, or that awareness, felt familiar rather than alien. So I wondered if I wasn’t just experiencing the sort of sensory fill-in that your brain provides in total darkness. Hang out where there’s absolutely no light for long enough, and your memory will start painting pictures out of the random firing of your visual cortex neurons while they try to make sense of a blackness they were not designed for.
So if I felt something out there, I guessed there was a pretty good chance that I was imagining it.
I tried for more than a stanhour and got nowhere. Again.
? ? ?
Of course, I came back eventually. To be honest, I came back sooner than I really wanted to. And not just because while it was a big ship, there wasn’t much to do on it beyond exploring, going through cabinets for neatly stowed gear with more or less mysterious purposes, and being painfully aware of how Synarche archinformists would be pitching a fit at me for contaminating their site with my presence and microbes and skin cells and air currents and relentless rearranging of stuff. But unless I actually managed to trace the fault in the power system—assuming there was a fault, and flickering occasionally wasn’t something that the Koregoi considered a design feature (who knew? maybe it was their idea of wall art?)—I didn’t have anything to fix, or fix on. I was just . . . kind of hoping I would come up with a way of getting the ship away from Farweather by understanding it better.