Her mother returned now and again, for visits that for both of them veered wildly between painful feelings of love and furious rages of resentment. Somehow, later, exhausted and dismayed by these sapping, abrasive, attriting episodes, they came to a sort of truce; but it was at the expense of any closeness.
By the time her mother returned for good, she was like just another girlfriend; they both had better friends.
So she had always been alone. And she suspected, she almost knew, that she would end her days alone. It was a source of sadness — though she tried never to wallow in self-pity — and even, in a subsidiary way, of shame, for at the back of her mind she could not escape the nagging desire for somebody — some man, if she was honest with herself — to come to her rescue, to take her away from the vacuum that was her existence and make her no longer alone. It was something she had never been able to confess to anybody, and yet something that she had an inkling was known to the people and machines who had allowed her to assume this exalted, if onerous position.
She hoped that it was secret within herself, but knew too well the extent of the knowledge-base, the sheer experience behind those who exercised power over her and people like her. An individual did not outwit such intelligence; he or she might come to an understanding with it, an accommodation with it, but there was no outthinking or outsmarting it; you had to accept the likelihood that all your secrets would be known to them and trust that they would not misuse that knowledge, but exploit it without malice. Her fears, her needs, her insecurities, her compensating drives and ambitions; they could be plumbed, measured and then used, they could be employed. It was a pact, she supposed, and one she did not really resent, for it was a mutually beneficial arrangement. They and she each got what they wanted; they a canny, dedicated officer determined to prove herself in the application of their cause and she the chance to seek and gain approval, the reassurance that she was worth something.
Such trust, and the multiplying opportunities to provide proof of her diligence and exercised wisdom, ought at last to be enough for her, but still sometimes it was not, and she yearned for something that no fusion of herself with any conglomerative could provide; a need to be reassured of a personal worth, an appreciation of her individual value which would only be valid coming from another individual.
She went through cycles of admitting this to herself and hoping that one day she would find somebody she could finally feel comfortable with, finally respect, finally judge worthy of her regard when measured against her own strict standards… and then rejecting it all, fierce in her determination to prove herself on her terms and the terms of the great service she had entered, forging the resolve to turn her frustrations to her and their advantage, to redirect the energies resulting from her loneliness into her practical, methodically realisable ambitions; another qualification, a further course of study, a promotion, command, further advancement…
The enigma attracted her, no less than the impossibly old star. Here, in this discovery, might eventually lie a kind of fame that could sate her desire for recognition. Or so she told herself, sometimes. Here, after all, was already a strange kind of kinship, a sort of twinning, even if it was that of an implausibility and a mystery.
She directed her attention to the enigma, seeming to rush towards it in the darkness, swelling its black presence until it filled her field of vision.
A blink of light focused her awareness near its centre. Somehow, without much more than that single glimmer, the light had a kind of character to it, something familiar, recognisable; it was like the opening of a door, like gaining an unexpected glimpse into a brightly lit room. Attention drawn, she looked closer automatically.
And was instantly sucked into the light; it erupted blindingly, exploding out at her like some absurdly quick solar flare, engulfing her, snapping around her like a trap.
Zreyn Enhoff Tramow, captain of the General Contact Ship Problem Child, barely had time to react. Then she was plucked away and disappeared into the coruscating depths of the falling fire, struggling and trapped and calling for help. Calling to him.
He bounced awake on the bed-field, eyes suddenly open, breath fast and shallow, heart hammering. The cabin’s lights came on, dim at first and then brightening gently, reacting to his movements.
Genar-Hofoen wiped his face with his hands and looked around the cabin. He swallowed and took a deep breath. He hadn’t meant to dream anything like that. It had been as vivid as an implanted dream or some game-scenario shared in sleep. He had meant to dream one of his usual erotic dreams, not look back two thousand years to the time when the Problem Child had first found the trillion-year-old sun and the black-body object in orbit around it. All he’d wanted was a sex-simulation, not an in-depth inquisition of a bleakly ambitious woman’s arid soul.
Certainly it had been interesting, and he’d been fascinated that he had somehow been the woman and yet not been her at the same time, and had been — non-sexually — inside her, in her mind, close as a neural lace to her thoughts and emotions and the hopes and fears she had been prompted to think about by the sight of the star and the thing she had thought of as the enigma. But it hadn’t been what he’d expected.
Another strange, unsettling dream.
“Ship?” he said.
“Yes?” the Grey Area said through the cabin’s sound system.
“I… I just had a weird dream.”
“Well, I have some experience in that realm, I suppose,” the ship said with what sounded like a heavy sigh. “I imagine now you want to talk about it.”
“No… well… no; I just wondered… you weren’t…?”
“Ah. You want to know was I interfering with your dreams, is that it?”
“It just, you know, occurred to me.”
“Well now, let’s see… If I had been, do you think I would answer you truthfully?”
He thought. “Does that mean you were or you weren’t?”
“I was not. Are you happy now?”
“No I’m not happy now. Now I don’t know if you were or you weren’t.” He shook his head, and grinned. “You’re fucking with my head either way, aren’t you?”
“As if I would do such a thing,” the ship said smoothly. It made a chuckling noise which contrived to be the most unsettling sound it had articulated so far. “I expect,” it said, “it was just an effect caused by your neural lace bedding in, Genar-Hofoen. Nothing to worry about. If you don’t want to dream at all, gland somnabsolute.”
“Hmm,” he said slowly, and then; “Lights out.” He lay back down in the darkness. “Good night,” he said quietly.
“Sweet dreams, Genar-Hofoen,” the Grey Area said. The circuit clicked ostentatiously off.
He lay awake in the darkness for a while, before falling asleep again.
XII
Byr woke up in bed, hopelessly weak, but cleansed and whole and starting to recover. The emergency medical collar lay, also cleaned, at the side of the bed. By it lay a bowl of fruit, a jug of milk, a screen, and the small figurine Byr had given Dajeil, from the old female ‘Ktik called G’Istig’tk’t’, a few days earlier.
The tower’s slave-drones brought Byr her food and attended to her toilet. The first question she asked was where Dajeil was, half afraid that the other woman had taken the knife to herself or just walked into the sea. The drones replied that Dajeil was in the tower’s garden, weeding.
On other occasions they informed Byr that Dajeil was working in the tower’s top room, or swimming, or had taken a flier to some distant island. They answered other questions, too. It was Dajeil — along with one of the drones — who had forced open the bathroom door. So she could still have killed Byr.