5.
Although Pluummuluum did not touch her after she relinquished the feather, Azia had a difficult time falling asleep. Her bonder slept in a cabinet, and just that small amount of distance from it, or perhaps the barrier blocking its chemical emissions from her receptors, made her physically uneasy. Fragments of the day’s many dreams, images of those unreadable faceted eyes, and the clarity of John Shea Vehkovsky’s contempt for her condition kept her conscious mind too busy to relinquish its dominion. Pluummuluum had not told her they would be leaving the system once they’d finished their negotiations on the station, but she believed that they would. The thought pleased her. She had no attachment to Siliconia; it was simply the nearest Federation world to the piece of space in which her family had been busted. Her brother might be on the world still, but she doubted her parents, or Taylor Wiggins, or Audrey Clare were. And Seth was so young that Azia supposed that the authorities had probably decided to risk raising him as a displaced juvenile rather than classifying him as incorrigibly contaminated. If that were so, his name had already been changed, and his whereabouts would be particularly concealed from her and her parents.
She hated Siliconia. She tossed and turned, thinking about how fiercely. To her it was a marker of disaster and nothing more. She didn’t care if she ever set foot on it again.
One other thought dug itself in, perhaps the most important thing she had learned in the whole fucking long day: her bonder deeply mistrusted humans. To deal with them, it needed her, because the thing that made humans untrustworthy had been altered in her. Which meant, she thought, that it trusted her only because there was something in her no longer human. It sounded simple, like a tautology, but she knew there was something about the insight that she hadn’t yet grasped.
6.
Azia dreamed she was back on board the Emma G., playing handball with her father. There had been no arrest, there would be no arrest. While they leaped about the court, slamming the ball as hard as they could, her father gasped out one of his favorite mini-lectures. “Life is a feast of choices, kid. Freedom is having the vision to see it and the boldness to risk choosing. And that’s the biggest secret I know.”
She woke up crying. Headache, nausea, and muscle cramps were new additions to the post-arrest psychological pain of waking and remembering. Something that felt like hunger gnawed at her; she knew it was caused by physical separation from her bonder even before she recalled the therapist telling her that even a few hours’ withdrawal would make her physically uncomfortable. (The discomfort, he’d said, would get progressively worse the longer the separation, such that an entire day’s withdrawal would make her vomit anything she tried to eat or drink.) She blinked deliberately three times for the time and discovered that Pluummuluum had been in the cabinet for almost twelve hours. She staggered up from the sleeping mat to stand before it. Could it have left without waking her? Had it decided she was too inept to keep? Had it abandoned her?
Her throat closed up. Her body trembled violently, and she had to struggle for breath. If it had left her, she would die—painfully, horribly, in utter degradation. She felt as though she were suffocating. She had to know, she just had to know whether it was in the cabinet, whether it had left her. Frantically she pounded on the door, pounded and pounded and pounded until, her strength exhausted, she slid down onto her knees, bumping her head into the cold, ungiving metal, bracing her palms against the door.
It had gone. It had left her. She was alone in this bare, stark, threedyless room, utterly alone. Did it understand she would die without it? Did it even care?
She cared, she realized. She cared to live. If it meant restriction to the grammar of What Is, she would accept that. What she wanted was to live, even if it was her only choice—except that now, she saw, it wasn’t her choice at all, but its.
Azia shrieked and cried herself into total emptiness. Her loud sobs gave way to silent, gasping weeping. She felt as though she were the most negated being in the universe.
When the cabinet door opened without warning, Azia flopped in, over the threshold. Shocked—relieved—thrilled—Azia stared first at the legs before her—which, she discovered, had tentacles bifurcated from the knees, just as the arms did from the elbows—and then up, at her bonder’s face. “You’re here,” she said, and started crying again. She threw her arms around its legs and tentacles and pressed her face against its knees (or whatever Corollians called such joints). Azia noted that the tentacles were slimy—that even the fur on the legs was slimy—and that being in the interior of the cabinet was like being inside a cloud.
Pluummuluum reached down with an arm and tentacle and pushed her off its legs, then stepped out of the cabinet and walked across the room to the hygiene facilities. She stared in fascination at its body. She had never seen a naked Corollian before. The gnawing in her insides, the sweating, the nausea, had all gone away, she realized as her bonder closed the door after it. But staring at the closed door between it and her, she felt a little sick at the thought that it had not responded to her—perhaps because it couldn’t speak, perhaps because it didn’t even realize she was upset (or if it realized, didn’t care), perhaps because it had communicated something to her in its own body language, and she simply hadn’t gotten it.
7.
They bathed and dressed, Pluummuluum in the robe it had been wearing the previous day, and she in a robe it gave her to wear, similar in appearance to its, except that it had only two armholes and displayed an enormous logo embroidered on both its front and back, as well as in a repeated pattern of miniatures running along the bottom, neck, and sleeve hems. The colors looked all the richer for the depressing absence of three-dy in their quarters. From the service hatch in the wall Pluummuluum ordered a breakfast of cooked grain and fruit for her and a bowl of something unidentifiable for itself. Azia grew giddy with ebullience. She longed to do something for it, to please it. She glowed at it and made bubbly small talk. She thanked it for the robe, which she liked ten thousand times better than the juvie detention garb in which she had been delivered to it. It refused her overtures, refused her efforts to please it; it gestured her to be silent. Azia wondered if it were grouchy in the morning, or if it didn’t like the sound of her voice, or whether it simply thought that verbal communication was of no interest unless it concerned matters of importance. The slight anxiety this caused her barely touched her elation. Rather, it pushed the swinging pendulum of her mood even harder, filling her with manic, nearly out-of-control energy. She found it difficult not only to keep calm and quiet, but even to eat.
In the air-taxi taking a number of the hotel’s guests to the shuttle port, Azia drew curious stares and sneers. Though Pluummuluum was the only nonhuman in the taxi, it was Azia the other passengers stared at. Was it because of the robe and the logo marking it? Or because her head had been recently shaved? Or did they guess she was bonded? Her face burned with self-consciousness; but rather than damping her pleasure at being seated beside Pluummuluum, her self-consciousness twisted it, so that her pleasure felt perverse. They didn’t matter, she told herself, not compared to how it made her feel—and closed her eyes to concentrate her senses on all that could possibly matter to her.