When I, itchy-eyed and somewhat the worse for exhaustion, came back into our impromptu habitation chamber, Farweather was awake and alert. She was doing calisthenics to the rattling of her chain, and she looked calm and cheerful and well rested. I wanted to kick her in the chin, but instead I emptied her slops, then went over to the mess kit and knocked together coffee and two bowls of porridge. Farweather was watching me, bird-bright. I neither looked at her nor spoke until the food was done, and she didn’t say anything either.
I brought her a bulb of coffee and a bowl of porridge (algae and creamed grain… delightful) before stepping back to the pad-couch opposite to eat my own breakfast.
I didn’t have much appetite. Hers seemed to be fine.
I said, “You wanted me to remember that I made the bombs.”
“I did,” she said.
“It’s my fault all those people died.”
“Pretty much,” Zanya said. “Are you going to stop condescending to me now?”
I still didn’t look at her. I drank my coffee. The porridge wouldn’t go down on its own. I mean, it was a struggle on my best dia. Todia, it was actively nauseating. Or maybe I just didn’t feel like eating.
“Look,” Zanya said, “I do feel like I know you, a little.”
I snorted. “We’ve been sleeping on the same deck plates for decians now.”
“I told you I had an ayatana from Niyara.” She stretched, both hands above her head, lifting one shoulder and then the other. I heard her spine crack. Gravity.
“I told you I didn’t believe you. Twice, I think.”
She smiled at me. “Fact doesn’t care if you believe in it.”
“And you’ve reviewed this putative recording.”
“I have.” The corners of her mouth curved down as she lost the smile. “She was one of ours, you know.”
“I figured that out eventually.” The possibility that she wasn’t lying left me agitated, edgy.
She sipped her coffee, savoring. “She cared about you.”
“I figured that out eventually, too.” I pushed my porridge at her, unable to waste resources no matter how badly I wanted her to go to hell. She took it with a look of surprise, but set the bowl inside her empty one and went to work polishing off the remains. She was as hungry as I ought to be.
Farweather finished the greenish, unappealing gruel and stifled a burp behind her hand, looking momentarily uncomfortable. Neither one of us was used to getting enough food anymore.
She set the bowls aside and picked the coffee back up. “Was this an apology?”
“Do I have something to apologize for?”
Echoes of a petulant, inadequately rightminded adolescent.
“It seems like you think you do.” She crossed her long legs and leaned back.
“What do you mean?”
“You were blaming yourself for what happened on Ansara before you even knew the truth,” she pointed out, conveniently forgetting—or erasing—that she’d been blaming me herself a very few minutes before. “You keep trying to… I don’t know, redeem yourself through service. You need to let go of that desire, Dz. Stop trying to make amends for things that are not and never were your fault.”
“I built a bomb.”
“Four bombs.” She grinned. “Actually. But that wasn’t you. Not exactly. That was somebody Nyumba Yangu Haina Mlango made up out of whole cloth, right? Somebody exactly like the rest of them.”
I settled back and stared at her, realizing that I had crossed my arms defensively but not having much in the way of will to uncross them.
She said, “There’s a weird power dynamic at work in here, too, right? If you, Dz, have to make amends for things even if you couldn’t control them at the time, then in some way you, Dz, get to feel that you’re not powerless. If you have to make amends for things that happened against your will, then you reclaim some power over those events.”
I didn’t answer.
“Look,” she said. “My people aren’t real comfortable with modifying yourself into a new species, but I have to admit that your people are reactionary even by my standards. A bunch of retro-gendered radically cis-female separatists who brainwash their unmodified, baseline-DNA clone children into absolute obedience and oneness with some primitive group mind? That’s a little fucking perverted.”
“You’re saying my guilt is inappropriate.”
“I’m saying I’m glad you got out. Got some freedom. You didn’t have that freedom when you were with Niyara, even though you thought you did. You didn’t have that freedom when Justice’s legacy juice was running your head.”
“So I’m free now.” I kicked an afthand. “You set me free; that’s what you’re saying.”
“I’m saying that you didn’t make the choices, so your assuming responsibility for the outcomes is a little unrealistic, don’t you think? Even if it is a means of asserting some agency over the course of proceedings.”
“Somebody’s responsible. And I’m the only person likely to step up to it, so I guess it is my job, yes.”
“I’m absolving you,” she said.
“I’d be more inclined to accept that if it didn’t come from a mass murderer.”
If I’d expected her to flinch, I was disappointed. She inclined her head, and the smile flickered back for a moment before vanishing again. Touché.
It takes one to know one, babes.
“Besides,” I said. “The only absolution is in balancing the action. Exactly as if it were a debt from a past life.”
“Do you believe in past lives?”
“I believe in past selves,” I said. “I sort of have to.”
“And you think you can carry the debt of what a dead woman did?”
“Is that what you’d call my past? A life lived by a dead woman?”
She made an eloquent, lazy gesture with her neck and shoulders. She changed the subject. “So your little Utopia—”
“Not so little.”
“—what do you do about people who exploit the system?”
“You mean, people like you?”
She ignored my attempt to needle her. I suppose, given her life in a primitive society and her own ability to needle me, she had some practice. “Malingerers. People who don’t pull their weight. How do you drive them to work harder?”
“Why do they need to?”
She blinked at me. I thought she was honestly puzzled. She shook her head and said, “But if they don’t work—”
I said, “Busywork, they used to call it. There’s absolutely no value to it. Economic value, or personal. There’s value in work you enjoy, or that serves a need. There’s no value in work for its own sake. It’s just… churn. Anxiety. Doing stuff to be doing stuff, not because it needs doing. There’s enough for everybody.”
I could see her getting angry, and honestly I didn’t actually care if she understood what I was trying to say. I suspected it would take a full course of rightminding and ans of talk therapy to make a dent in Farweather and her ossified, archaic belief patterns. And I was bored with arguing with her.
My turn to change the subject. “Do you want some more coffee?”
“I’d be a fool to say no.”
I made the coffee. She didn’t speak. Her chain rattled lightly; when I turned around she’d wiped the bowls out with a sanitizer and stacked them neatly. The bowls had come with the ship, and as far as I knew they were hats or shoes or alien commodes, but they did okay in holding porridge. The coffee I brewed in bulbs, because that was the way it came prepackaged. All you had to do was obtain or create boiling water, and then inject it. The bulb would expand, stretching from the size of a thumb joint to large enough to hold a good-sized portion. The filter was built right in.