The power flickered again while I was boiling the water—but since all I was doing was boiling water, and I was using Farweather’s power-cell operated probe to do it, that didn’t really affect anything. I would go looking for the problem again todia, I decided. None of my previous attempts had borne fruit, but persistence was a virtue, and it wasn’t like I had a whole lot of other things to be getting on with.
I handed Farweather her second bulb.
“I’m going to vibrate this chain right off me. And wind up in caffeine withdrawal again when you cut me off.”
It was a joke. I didn’t laugh. She was trying to mend fences, though. So that was something.
She cupped the bulb in both hands, enjoying the warmth while she waited for it to cool enough to be drinkable. She looked down at it and turned it gently in her hands.
She said, “ ‘Human life. Duration: momentary. Nature: changeable. Perception: dim. Condition of body: decaying. Souclass="underline" spinning around. Fortune: unpredictable. Lasting fame: uncertain. Sum up: The body and its parts are a river, the soul a dream and mist, life is warfare and a journey far from home, lasting reputation is oblivion.’ ”
“That’s grim,” I said.
“That’s Marcus Aurelius,” she answered.
I drank my coffee. It was too hot, but I managed not to scorch a blister on my palate. This time.
“So given that,” she said, “why don’t you be somebody you want to be, instead of somebody you think you need to be in order to make reparations? Why not pick your own purpose in life?”
“You said it yourself,” I told her. “That wasn’t me. I don’t exist.”
She blinked at me with her head cocked as if what I was saying was in an untranslatable language.
I said, “I never existed. There was the me the clade made, and the me Justice made. There’s no real me in here at all. So I can’t want anything. And I can’t have any purpose in life, other than to make amends.”
She shook her head. I decided I didn’t want to hear whatever was about to come out of her opening mouth, because it would all be lies and self-contradiction anyway. So I got up and I stalked off, and when she croaked, half laughing, “But that doesn’t make any sense at all!” I pretended I hadn’t heard her and kept walking.
I went up to the observation deck, and tried to talk to the ship again. Sometimes, I thought I might be getting somewhere.
Sometimes there was almost a sense, a flicker of some awareness at the edge of my own. Like, maybe the Prize was out there, but I just didn’t know how to reach it.
“It can’t be too hard if Farweather pulled it off,” I said bitterly to thin air.
But that presence, or that awareness, felt familiar rather than alien. So I wondered if I wasn’t just experiencing the sort of sensory fill-in that your brain provides in total darkness. Hang out where there’s absolutely no light for long enough, and your memory will start painting pictures out of the random firing of your visual cortex neurons while they try to make sense of a blackness they were not designed for.
So if I felt something out there, I guessed there was a pretty good chance that I was imagining it.
I tried for more than a stanhour and got nowhere. Again.
Of course, I came back eventually. To be honest, I came back sooner than I really wanted to. And not just because while it was a big ship, there wasn’t much to do on it beyond exploring, going through cabinets for neatly stowed gear with more or less mysterious purposes, and being painfully aware of how Synarche archinformists would be pitching a fit at me for contaminating their site with my presence and microbes and skin cells and air currents and relentless rearranging of stuff. But unless I actually managed to trace the fault in the power system—assuming there was a fault, and flickering occasionally wasn’t something that the Koregoi considered a design feature (who knew? maybe it was their idea of wall art?)—I didn’t have anything to fix, or fix on. I was just… kind of hoping I would come up with a way of getting the ship away from Farweather by understanding it better.
Which, admittedly, was not such a bad idea.
Still, if I was floating through maintenance tubes I wasn’t talking to Farweather, and if I wasn’t talking to Farweather I stood half a chance of getting my head on straight eventually and even keeping it that way. Rightminding or no rightminding.
Okay, straighter.
I knew that my worrying about archinformists was a kind of denial. Because it had at its base the assumption that I would beat the odds and somehow manage to pry the ship out of Farweather’s control and fly it back to Synarche space. The conquering hero.
Which seemed… okay. Possibly like something I shouldn’t count on being able to pull off. But it was a nice life goal for the time being. And if I wound up kidnapped by space pirates… well, I wouldn’t be the first woman to have been.
Who knew? Maybe I could even thrive as a space pirate, if I played my cards right. I could reinvent myself again. Invent an entirely new identity. Again.
What did I have to take me back to the Synarche, anyway, now that Singer and Connla and the cats were gone?
Except I still thought the Synarche was right, and I still thought the Synarche was home. My affections were not alienated on that front. So I guessed whatever Farweather thought she was doing when she fried my fox, it wasn’t really working. Because what I wanted more than anything was to do the right thing.
I wished I had Singer with me to tell me what the right thing was. But I could make some guesses as to what he’d say. I’d known him pretty well. The right thing was to figure out how to get control of the Prize away from Farweather, turn it around, and begin the very, very, very long trip home. Fortunately, there was an entire inhabited galaxy between me and the Core, and the Prize was fast. But I would still be on short rations until I could find someplace to resupply.
So much algae.
Assuming she did not literally blow up, and take me and the Prize with her.
Well, if I had to toss her out an airlock to save the ship and myself…
…I’d span that void when I came to it. Especially since I had in fact been trying to wrest control of the ship and it just had not been working.
I wondered if she knew what kind of a time limit she was operating under. And if she did know how long she had, I also wondered if there was some way to leverage relativistic effects to keep her alive long enough to get her to a surgeon who might be able to remove the bomb (if there was a bomb).
The woman had blown up my head. Why was I even still considering what might be good for her?
At least in my avoidance I was learning a lot about the ship’s systems. In particular, I was learning a great deal about its electrical grid, which was less like a grid, frankly, and more like a circulatory system. Not in the sense of being alive, per se, but in having trunks that diverged and spread apart in a branching fashion—treelike, fractal—until they cycled and returned.
I’d managed to figure out how to get into the engine room, or what I thought of as main engineering, and I supposed if I really needed to I could just sabotage something. But the random power fluctuations were already scary enough. The Enemy was out there, vast and cold and full of not much at all except the occasional random particle, and we were sweeping those up into our white field as we went.
The engines were definitely alien, but they also made sense, and I was an engineer. And these were not my first set of alien engines, either, though they were the first ones I couldn’t just pull up a manual for, even if that manual was in badly translated Novoruss.