Ask me about the irony of spending so much time working feverishly to assert my independence of mind only to discover that I never had a mind of my own. On second thought, don’t ask me.
We’d been hunting Farweather for the better part of a week, and were halfway to our destination. I’d asked Singer how he dealt with there being sections of his hull—his body, essentially—that he could not access. I’d like to say that I didn’t do it while digging my fingernails into my wrist, as if the abomination of a symbiote itched—which it didn’t—and trying to take comfort in my promise to the Ativahikas to seek justice for them.
He’d clucked at me and said, “The same way anyone with unrepaired neural damage does.”
The conversation left me feeling odd and embarrassed, and I withdrew.
? ? ?
I was totally unprepared when Farweather contacted me again.
I heard her voice in my head abruptly, while I was picking grease out from under my fingernails. I’d been in the middle of a sentence to Singer, and I just stopped.
She didn’t offer any pleasantries, just spoke, confident that I was receiving. My mind was racing—how had she managed to reach me despite her crippled Freeport senso? And then I remembered the work I’d done to tune us to each other, back before she’d blown up my head. It was a fuzzy memory, as if it were much older and farther away than a few decians. But it was there.
“You saved my life,” Farweather said. “Why did you do that?”
I reined myself in, controlling my first few responses. The best I could manage, even as an edited reply, was, “The weakness of my civilized stomach, probably.”
“It was . . . brave. You risked yourself for me. The Ativahikas might have destroyed us both. I won’t forget that.”
Empty words, of course. She’d forget it the instant it was convenient, or I was in the way.
“Well, don’t spread it around,” I told her. “I’ve already got a bad-enough reputation.”
“I haven’t blown up. So you’re still on the course I set.”
“Sure looks like it,” I said. I wasn’t giving her anything. I could feel her back there, lurking over my shoulder like a looming haunt. It didn’t feel like a normal senso connection, but then I was (virtually) racing around inside my head shutting down or throttling back anything that might give her any information on my whereabouts or what I was doing, and I hadn’t willingly accepted the link in the first place.
Not that she was great at accepting healthy boundaries on her best dia.
Once I was reasonably confident that my regulation senso was probably still secure for letting Singer know what was going on, I contacted him. His firewalls were good enough that I didn’t think somebody like Farweather stood a chance of using my uplink to backdoor him: that would have taken another AI. I didn’t try to hold a conversation with him, because I figured there might be bleed-through that could alert Farweather that I was ratting on her. I just patched Singer in, confident that the act itself would alert him, and that he’d realize that I wanted him to try to track her.
“On it,” I heard him say.
I turned my attention back to Farweather, total elapsed time under a second.
“Look,” I said. “I don’t actually want to talk to you. So maybe you could just cut to whatever emotional blackmail you have planned and we can both get back to our business.”
“Harsh,” she said.
“Unless you want to turn yourself in,” I suggested. “In that case, I can introduce you to the Goodlaw, and quite a few constables.”
Intentionally, I did not tell her how many constables there were. She might know already, of course. But I had grown morally opposed to letting her have any information at all.
“You’re very charming,” Farweather said.
I said, “You mean irritating, and I learned it from you. Look, Farweather. Maybe you could just tell me what the goal is, here? Because I feel like you’re wasting my time.”
“I’m not having any luck,” Singer said. “Your Koregoi senso isn’t helping me locate her, and she’s still got me blocked from about a tenth of the ship.”
“What I want,” Farweather said, “is to be allies.”
I actually laughed out loud. Connla gave me a funny look, and I held up my hand to indicate that I was busy and would explain later.
“That’s nice,” I told her. “Possibly you should have thought of that before you blew up my head.”
“I was doing you a favor!”
My fingers itched as if the urge to punch her were an allergic reaction. “Favors,” I said, using all my self-control to stay level and to present the illusion of calm, “are generally things people ask you for, or that you ask them if they might like.”
“But if I’d asked, would you have let me?”
“That’s exactly the nature of consent,” I said. “Consent means you might not get what you want.”
“But I need your help!” she said. “And you need mine. And if we work together we have a better chance of coming out ahead.”
I could feel her bewilderment through our connection as she forgot to guard herself for a moment, or perhaps the emotion was just that strong. She literally could not understand what it was that I was upset about, or why I would hold her accountable, and she seemed incapable of understanding why her self-interest was not a compelling reason for me.
“Don’t you want that?” she asked, when I was silent for a little while.
“What does coming out ahead mean to you?”
I could almost taste her confusion. “I don’t understand what you mean.”
The sad thing was, I believed her. She had no sense of other people’s motives as separate from her own. But I knew what I meant, and at this point I was pretty sure I could come up with an analysis of her motivations more detailed and sensible than she could.
“I think you mean gaining advantage and power,” I said.
“Okay,” she agreed. “But that’s what everybody wants.”
I said, “I want to help people.”
She scoffed, as I’d known she would. “There’s no one here to impress with that kind of performance. I don’t respect those kind of games.”
“I know,” I said. “And I don’t care.”
I may have been raised in a clade, and reconstructed by Judicial. And those things might leave anybody with a distrust of rightminding. But the fact of the matter was, if ever there was somebody who was an argument for it, that argument was Zanya Farweather.
In lights.
I couldn’t say she didn’t tempt me. Of course she did. But I wouldn’t like myself afterward. And for somebody who was built from a couple of different kits by different amateur modelers and not painted very well to match, well. I was determined that whatever I was from here on out, I was going to be proud of it.
“I don’t want what you want,” I said. “And I’m not going to help you. I don’t even want to argue with you, because while I know that human beings are capable of assimilating, adopting, internalizing, integrating, and identifying with new sets of ideas—because we have, multiple times in the history of the species—I’ve discovered that I don’t actually care what you think, because you are an awful person and you want awful things.”
I barely restrained myself from adding a so there! to the end of it. I knew I sounded about thirteen, and I honestly didn’t care, because I abruptly had the courage of my convictions.
I don’t know if she heard me, because there was no response. Which was just as well.
I rolled my eyes and sighed at Connla.
“What?” he said.
“Farweather just contacted me.”
“And?
“And. Singer is right. She’s still an asshole.”
? ? ?
Three diar later, we arrived.
We dropped out of white space well clear of the destination, in order to get a visual read on our surroundings before approaching. The destination had been growing vaster and heavier in my awareness for the whole time. Normally, something the size of a star would not have had so much presence, but there wasn’t much out here to compete with it—and it was the size of a very large star.
I knew from our prior observations that the object was dark, or occluded. But now that we were so close, I expected to see something when we gathered on the observation deck. The light of the Milky Way was off our stern, and before us there was . . . nothing.
Except not nothing, because I could sense it down there, in all its mass. We could also make out the curve of lensed light arcing to embrace one side of the object, the distorted image of some distant galaxy. But what, exactly, was it curving around?
We stared, Connla and Cheeirilaq and the various constables, with our eyes. And Singer without eyes—and with every one of the ship’s sensors that he could bring to bear—but also through our eyes as well. We stared, but at first all we saw was the darkness.
Abeam at an angle, the galaxy that held our home was a misty, crystalline arc of light, a road paved in stars, calling us back. I realized I was staring at the wrong thing and forced myself to look at the enigma instead, trying to feel scientific excitement instead of nostalgia.
“Is it a black hole?” I asked.