The air-taxi delivered them directly to the boarding platform. On seeing the shuttle, Azia wished she could borrow the feather. She often got sick on shuttle flights and was always afraid. The human body wasn’t designed for heavy G-forces, Audrey Clare had liked to say, to explain the discomfort of shuttle travel.
The queue for the automated gate moved quickly. When their turn came, Pluummuluum inserted its ID disk and the gate beeped verification of their reservations and clearance and let both of them pass. But the humans in Federation Security uniforms, who Azia had noticed simply standing there watching passengers board, stopped them and demanded identification. Azia looked at their hard, indifferent faces and saw that it was she they were interested in. She was sure John Shea Vehkovsky didn’t often get stopped just for being with a Corollian. She was sure they were singling her out because her head had been shaved.
Pluummuluum handed over its ID disk, which the male officer inserted into his pocket reader. The other officer, a woman, said to Azia, “And your ID?”
Azia flushed. She thought of the officers in the same uniforms who had boarded her family’s ship and gone through their possessions—including her possessions—and dumped most of them into boxes and sacks for confiscation. They had taken her private data disk, that had years of her diary on it, besides her favorite songs, books, and threedys. No one but she had ever touched that disk, until they took it, just because they felt like it. She said, frightened and resentful, “I don’t have ID. I don’t have a legal existence.”
“She belongs to the Corollian,” the first officer said.
The second officer said, “Bonded, are you?” And her eyes raked scornfully over Azia from the crown of her stubbled head to the hem of her robe.
“Yes, ma’am,” Azia said in a small, shamed voice, aware that a group of people passing—staring with open curiosity—must have heard the officer’s question.
The officers required a retinal scan of Azia, then waved them through the hatch.
Though Azia was relieved to find herself seated next to Pluummuluum, her sense of persecution didn’t abate, for even as she fumbled to fasten the straps, she became aware of the woman settled directly across from them gawking at her. As if I weren’t a person at all, as if I were an animal. Nobody watches people in that way. She was still watching with that same judgmental and voyeuristic stare when Azia got the straps right. Azia glared at her. “I hope you’re enjoying yourself?” she said in the vexing, sarcastic way human adolescents have always used to challenge adult superiority.
The woman’s eyes widened, and her eyebrows went up in surprise; a red tide of embarrassment crept from her neck to her cheeks; but finally her mouth tightened in annoyance. Her chin lifted, and she flicked a face-full of disdain at Azia, then looked away.
Azia became aware of Pluummuluum watching her. She glanced sideways at it, then stared down at her hands in her lap. She could make nothing of its facial expression, nothing of its eyes (which always looked detached and remote), nothing of its body language. She thought about the contempt of the officer and the woman opposite and realized it felt oddly different from John Shea Velikovsky’s. And then it struck her, that there was more that was different today than the humans around her. She was different. She had touched Pluummuluum—had embraced its legs—and yet hadn’t gone wildly out of control. Her body had already started adjusting. The therapist had said it would, had said that the first few hours would be the most intense. Casual touches would not have that effect on her once her hypothalamus had figured out how to stabilize her brain chemistry. Which meant that she would—yes, yes, yes!—be able to do her job.
Azia looked straight across at the woman (whose eyes—caught in the act of staring—darted off to the side), and smirked. That woman would be just as miserable coping with the flight’s G-forces as she. She was as human as Azia, and in this they were equal.
Azia closed her eyes and concentrated on her breathing. Focus, she thought fiercely, focus. She would please it, she would. And then it would never leave her, and nothing any other human thought would matter in the least.
8.
Like the obnoxious woman seated across from them, like every human, in fact, on the shuttle, Azia puked her guts out for most of the flight and suffered weeping, cold sweats, and nose and ear bleeds besides. Again and again she thought, My insides are all coming out, my body is everting. And flecks of blood and tissue did come up, following the first easy expulsions of half-digested breakfast. She walked out into the space station so exhausted, lightheaded, and wobbly that she seriously doubted she would make it to their suite. But as far as she could tell, the Corollian suffered no discomfort at all. Some species, she knew, could take big G-forces without strain, but she had no idea if Corollians were among them. Pluummuluum was a total blank to her. She had yet to distinguish even one sure sign of expression in its face, gestures or posture. In that respect, it might as well be a threedy icon as an organic entity.
When they reached the suite Azia at once inflated a couch and sank feebly onto it, though her bladder was crying out for relief. The main room had the standard threedy wallpaper, playing the vividly colored and varied abstract that must be the station default, but before closing itself into the facilities, Pluummuluum killed it. Azia stared uncomfortably at the bare, soundproofed tiles. Without the wallpaper, that’s all there was, besides the manual wall terminal and the little plastic knobs of deflated furniture attached to the soundproofed tiles on the base. This was how it had kept the room she had been trained in—to preserve her from distraction, she had thought. This room had even less substance. The sight and feel of the stripped infrastructure made her already tender stomach heave. She might not have the serious phobias people raised on worlds suffered off-planet, but she had seldom ever had to face the cramped naked infrastructure of places even the most minimalist of humans ordinarily made graceful and spacious.
It seemed to Azia that Pluummuluum stayed an excessively long time in the facilities. She began to wonder if it was all right. Of course, even with her eyes closed, the stripped state of the room made her feel trapped, closed in, caught in some weird kind of freeze-frame. She supposed it was possible it had objectively been in the facilities for only two or three minutes. By killing the wallpaper, it had removed the only display of time now accessible to Azia, since, having no legal identity, she needed Pluummuluum’s authorization for a minimal station connection that could grant her a display of the time on her retinas.
Her eyes flew open at a sudden, bizarre thought. Pluummuluum had killed the wallpaper. Since meeting it, she had seen it do other things as well, by both neural connection and manual terminal. Which meant, she realized, that it would have no trouble communicating via computer interface with any party it wished to trade with. So why did it need her to do business?
Only seconds after she posed this question to herself, her bonder came out of the facilities. Her skin crawled with the suddenly irresistible conviction that for all everyone said Corollians couldn’t read human thoughts, it had just read hers. It came and stood over her and without warning lightly touched her forehead.
The dream lasted a second, maybe less, a visual experience so fleeting it reminded her of the quick flash of rapid hypnagogic images breaking into consciousness, but densely saturated with a sense of the Corollian’s will and intention, which felt to her like intuition, but which she knew, from what John Shea Velikovsky had said, was Deep Reception. “You want me to eat and rehydrate quickly, and then get straight down to work?” she said hoarsely, pleased at her technical breakthrough though dismayed at the prospect of trying to work when her body was literally trembling with fatigue.