A Question of Grammar
by L. Timmel Duchamp
Illustration by Darryl Elliott
1.
When he said, “Pay attention, you silly little girl,” the shift in the tone of John Shea Velikovsky’s voice, which had been droning on interminably, sliced right through Azia’s daze. Her condition had been explained to her. She knew it involved a newly dedicated neuroreceptor as well as a couple of different kinds of specially tailored protein receptors in her epidermal tissue. But she thought of it, simply, as a chemical bond—her chemical bond. It worked in only one direction and impacted no one but herself. At the moment, its effects were making awareness of anything else almost impossible. She knew, she felt, she perceived, only wanting. She wanted her bonder not to ignore her in the particular way it was doing. She wanted it to be not indifferent, as it so obviously was. She wanted… something—from it, she did not know what.
John Shea Velikovsky said, “Azia!” His voice kept growing sharper and sharper, as though his impatience were a whetstone he was honing it on. “Get with the scene. Pluummuluum has hired me solely to teach you your job. Understand right now, it expects better discipline of you than to sit there indulging in some rank little daydream.”
Azia flinched; her cheeks stung with shame. She had a pretty fair idea of what “daydream” was a euphemism for that John Shea Velikovsky so openly scorned, and she realized that Pluummuluum, whose attention she so desperately wanted, was apparently displeased with her. And in the meantime, her brain was awash with chemical reactions that were making her crazy. Neither the bonder nor the trainer even noticed she— a living, sentient entity—was there, much less cared who she was or might be. She could as well be a threedy image. She would have been feeling irked and trapped by home if she had never been taken from it, but at least there she had been real. She couldn’t contain the new surge of emotion that battered her. Her eyes brimmed with tears.
“I’m in trouble,” Azia said, making herself look at John Shea Velikovsky, wanting them both to believe that she was at least trying to pay attention. “It’s a chemical thing. I’m not used to it. It makes me…” She stopped herself. The last thing she wanted to do was expose the extremity of her emotional state to the trainer. Sold out of juvenile detention, she felt sure he’d already pegged her. Meaning she’s either a sociopath or the kid of Big-Time felons.
“You don’t have to tell me. I’ve trained plenty of others,” the man said, his attitude sheer cold cermet and vacuum. Azia felt sick looking at his face; the pinched way he held his mouth, the very flaring of his nostrils, reeked superiority and boredom. “The sooner you discipline yourself, the greater the level of mastery you will be able to achieve. And since it’s as much to your own benefit as to your owner’s, I’d suggest you make the effort. Assuming you don’t want to become a one-woman freak-show for the perversely curious?”
If only shame canceled desire. Rather, it combined potently with it, hollowing out her stomach, making her skin bum even hotter, urging her to throw herself at the Corollian in total abjection. Shame was useless. It couldn’t bring her body into line, but only make her hate herself. Azia glared at John Shea Velikovsky, glared resentment at him, resentment for his indifferent, judgmental complicity in the scene. “I wonder why you bother training others to do your job,” she said. “You’re just giving yourself competition. I guess you must get some big strokes from doing it, ’cause of the way it gives you a chance to flaunt your superiority in not being bonded yourself.”
The pinched mouth folded into a flat, lipless line. “What an ignorant brat you are,” that ugly, contemptuous mouth said. “You’re wasting not only Pluummuluum’s time, but mine as well. It’s paying me a flat sum to train you. Since explaining the elementary facts of the business isn’t in the specs, I’m going to complain to it if you don’t make a visible effort at once.”
Pluummuluum supposedly could understand their speech, even if it couldn’t produce it. John Shea Velikovsky was acting like it couldn’t. Or maybe it only listened selectively? Azia knew she mustn’t look at it, because looking heightened the intensity. (To think that one single touch had been enough to decouple her!) Azia kept her eyes on his hateful face, concentrated on his hateful words—in particular, on that one word complain.
(Which must mean that he could get its attention, even if she couldn’t.)
Suddenly, she took his meaning. Complain in order to have Pluummuluum punish her? (She was slow this afternoon.) The thought sent a surge of rage spiking through the shame, self-hatred, and desire. The rage felt good. For a few seconds it granted her the illusion of being separate, directed, and self-concentrated. It made her want to spit in the jerk’s face, gouge his eyes out, kick his balls blue. But then the threat tickled the cold, lonely fear ever lurking in the pit of her stomach. Her hands began to tremble; her vision blurred. She felt, suddenly, wildly out of control. She tried to remember the “focusing” exercise the therapist had taught her after the bonding receptor had been “fixed” and her DNA altered for the production of a variety of new proteins designed for olfactory reception. She hadn’t paid much attention because she hadn’t believed him when he said the intensity that would be triggered on her first encounter with Pluummuluum would be nearly psychotic. “You think it’ll be just a Big Attraction, a little bit stronger maybe than anything you’ve experienced. Like being in love.” Well, yes, that’s exactly what she’d thought. Like an infatuation with a loyalty mod thrown in. “In fact, you’re going to find it difficult to find a solid center for docking. Even after the initial period of adaptation passes off, you’ll be at risk of psychic disintegration. And unless you can find a way to keep a modicum of control, you’ll be useless to your bonder.” The trick was to find a controllable focus in her own body. The best site for focusing, he said, was the breath. You controlled it by listening to it and thinking about it filling your lungs and refreshing your blood. You thought about it having a relationship with your body that needed breath but was ontologically prior to it.
But how could she do the focusing exercise at the same time she was supposed to be paying attention to John Shea Velikovsky? Extreme feelings were continually coursing through her, feelings of violence, anger and helplessness. Her trouble, she thought, must be the bond. The bond must be making her crazy. Which was something any reasonable being should be able to understand and make allowances for…
2.
She had experienced “Reception” once before. It had been the reason for her having been bonded to a Corollian and the only reason Pluummuluum wanted her. “You’re lucky,” the outtake official had said to her, congratulating her for having passed one of the “talent” tests given to juvie detainees.
They had removed her from the tranqs before testing her, so she had lost her dreamy submission to what her parents called “the human grammar of What Is” and become fully submerged in the anguished consciousness of having lost access, forever, to the “human grammar of What Will Be.” In the unaccustomed rawness of the moment she burned with anger at her parents for having so heedlessly indulged their aggressive inclination to live totally in the grammar of What Will Be, burned with anger at the Federation cops for having taken her parents from her and chosen to ruin her life simply for having been their child, and burned with anger at herself for having lost them, for being trapped in “bad” grammar, as her family had taught her, the grammar of “do-nothing helplessness.” So she did not feel particularly “lucky,” as the official would have it, though in detention she had seen enough entertainment promoting the grammar of What Is to know exactly what the official meant, so that the reference and its sly, superior implication made her sick to her stomach. Obviously, What Is sucked—as much, even, as her parents had always said it did. But maybe being caught in What Is wouldn’t have been so bad for her if they had taught her to live in that grammar like most of the rest of their species chose to do. What Is was normal grammar.