“That’s an interesting theory.”
I left her coffee where she could just reach it with her fingertips if she stretched, and retreated.
I said, “I think I figured out why you needed to be on the Jothari ship. And why you didn’t load the Koregoi senso until you were ready to blow the Jothari ship.”
“Oh?” she said companionably.
“Because you needed to manufacture it. You needed to refine the senso parasite from devashare, right? Or from the cadaver byproducts, or something. You needed a dead Ativahika.”
“See?” she said. “You’re pretty bright when you allow yourself to be.”
God, you disgust me.
I didn’t say it, though. I bit my lip, and remembered that I needed her, and that the clock was ticking and time was running out on me.
What I said was, “That’s some real audacity. And your coffee is getting cold, Zanya.”
“Let me into your fox,” she said.
“Are you high?” I said.
“Let me in,” she said, “and I’ll teach you how to control the ship.”
“I don’t trust you,” I said.
She held up her hand. The bandages were long off the wrist it was attached to. She crooked a little finger at me.
“Pinkie swear,” the pirate said.
I laughed in her face and went back to constructing a kind of couch or sofa out of rolled and tied bolsters of soft fiber I’d scavenged from various places around the ship. Better than a pile of packing material, maybe. I should move into a different cabin, and figure out how to lock her into this one. But I didn’t trust her unless I had my eyes on her.
I was sleeping elsewhere, anyway. And if I spent too much time away from her, I found that I got unbearably lonely.
“Show me how to change our course,” I said, “and if you can explain why you want to get into my fox, I just might let you do it. After I chain you up so you’ll starve in your own waste products if you kill or incapacitate me.”
“That’s the kind of trust that bespeaks a successful long partnership.”
“It’s the kind of trust you’ve earned.”
She sighed. “I can’t change our course.”
“Won’t.”
“Can’t,” she said. Then she paused as if to consider. “Well, in the sense that I am absolutely unwilling to suffer the repercussions of carrying out your request, yes, won’t.”
“Repercussions.”
“If I don’t report on time, the biomine wired into my central nervous system will explode, and that’ll be it for me, you, and this lovely piece of functional archaeology.” She patted the deck of the Prize with what looked like affection.
I blinked but managed not to glance at her, surprised as always to be reminded she was human. And stunned, as well, by what she’d just revealed.
Of course, whether I could trust her or not was an open question. She’d lie like she was in the plane of a planetary formation disk if it suited her, and never bat a transplant-augmented eyelash either.
I folded my hands over my arms. “Where’s my lecture on how the Republic of Pirates is the last guardian of human freedom?”
“Freedom includes the freedom to be an asshole,” she said, and shrugged.
“Asshole and criminal are different things.” Despite myself, I was outraged. Not at her; on her behalf.
She stretched, shrugged. Bent down and touched her toes and hung there, stretching her spine and thighs. I imagine she was still working on getting the kinks out from the time that I’d had her more closely chained.
She had a good two meters of range of motion, now. And I’d carefully marked a caution circle on the deck in the same yellow grease pencil I used for marking up repairs while I was planning them, because I had no intention of straying inside her range.
“So,” I said. “My best course of action seems to be to toss you out an airlock, then. And try to figure out how to divert this thing with you safely elsewhere.”
“Good thing for me you’re not a murderer.”
I smiled. “I could learn.”
“Let me into your fox,” she said, “and I’ll restore your memories.”
“My memories are just fine.”
She laughed curtly. “Babes, if you say so.”
Her mattress rustled as she stretched out and folded her hands behind her head. I turned around to look at her. Within instants, she was snoring.
“What did you mean?”
She poked around in her bowl of noodles, looking for the dehydrated green onion scraps. “Sorry?”
“What did you mean about restoring my memories?”
“Judicial Recon,” she said, with a one-shouldered shrug of emphasis. “Don’t you ever wonder what they Reconned over?”
“Reconstruction,” I said, “means putting something back the way it was supposed to be, with repaired damage.”
She slurped a noodle, though I couldn’t see what was different about that one that she’d picked it out specially.
“Repaired or excised.”
I bumped to glide over a memory of Niyara’s blood on my hands, sticky-slick and already congealing. “Oh, I’m pretty sure all the damage is right where it ought to be.”
She laughed lightly. I found a noodle of my own, and ate it despite the fact that I didn’t have much appetite.
“See,” she said, “I think the real reason why you’re such a goody-two-shoes is because this is your Judicially constructed personality. The you you know is Judicial Recon, because you were a juvenile when what happened, happened. So they gave you a clean slate and a clean bill of health.”
A chill crawled through me. It was possible. The clade and Justice between them would have had the right to make decisions about reconstructing my personality. And then to conceal those decisions from me if they determined it would produce a healthier outcome.
I tried to keep my feelings off my face and eat my noodles.
“Don’t you want to know who the real you is?”
I didn’t lift my eyes from my bowl, as if the broth and its appetizing skim of flavorful oil droplets were completely fascinating. “I was raised in a clade. There is no real me.”
CHAPTER 20
I WASN’T GOING TO LET FARWEATHER see that she’d gotten to me. It was a white-knuckled couple of moments until the tuning really kicked in, however, and when it finally did I realized that I’d overdone it. I was, in fact, a little stoned on my own endorphins.
But I also wasn’t anxious, or reactive, or freaked right out, and I could think clearly—admittedly, through a haze of general goodwill and fondness for the universe intense enough that it even included murderous, amoral bad girl pirate rogues.
Why did it have to be bad girls? Moreover, why did they seem to have such a taste for me? I’d rendered myself more or less bulletproof. But they still seemed to be able to smell me coming. Even after all the rightminding and Recon.
I wondered if, in all the stuff she knew about me, Farweather knew about the time I’d spent out of my mind on deva. That probably would have bothered me if I were less chemically elevated. I almost laughed out loud when I realized how many of my precautions and anxieties about rightminding had to do with having been dependent on deva and never wanting to go back there.
What if she was right? I didn’t think Farweather was telling the truth; I didn’t think Farweather generally told the truth, unless it served her own very specific purposes. But I was also now able to think about her claims without anxiety or denial. It was an interesting perspective. I could see the reactivity and defensiveness rising up self-protectively inside my own brain, like an armored space marine ready to take on some kind of dangerous interstellar dragon.