And it did. The more they thrashed him, the vaster the private spaces he created. He always carried his private universe, then and for the rest of his life. Apart from Katy Bevan, he made few friendships. To the others around him he was always an outsider, indifferent to their shifting cliques. They learnt to leave him alone, because of his physical prowess and his strangeness.
But don’t always turn away, she said, on another occasion. I didn’t, from you. I had to reach out to you to make you turn inwards. She laughed and said, That’s ironic. He laughed too, then quietly consulted a dictionary. He didn’t completely understand the word then, but would later.
Two years passed. Puberty came late to him, because of his circumstances. But when it came, it mated with his obsessiveness and created a monster. He started looking at the box-pleated skirts. He liked their swing and sway, and the shape and regularity and tidiness of the pleats: inviolate, and symmetrical. He longed for them with the same fastidiousness and thoroughness which he carried into adulthood. He longed to lift them and see what was underneath. To lift them slowly and carefully, without resistance. When Katy Bevan resisted him, it all became untidy and his hands became more urgent and afterwards he couldn’t meet her gaze and he went away from her.
She refused to tell the Principal who raped her. That was a more serious crime than the rape itself, because she was deliberately putting herself beyond the community, denying the community its absolute right to help one of its own, and they thrashed her. When Aaron Foord burst into the Principal’s study there were five of them, each one about three times her size, five massive adults thrashing a small private person who’d made a small private act of rebellion. She was bent over a desk (the second time he’d seen what was underneath her skirt) while two held her down and the other three thrashed her with their rulers, even taking turns and deferring to each other, You next, No you next. What, he screamed, do you believe in which makes this right? This is what we believe in, they said, that we love her so much we’d even do this for her, and he knew they meant it. He was one fifteen-year-old against five adults but he discovered instincts he would keep for the rest of his life (the Principal was right about that) and he killed two of them with his hands, wishing he could find a Sakhran who might teach him how to kill more of them, more efficiently.
Days later, the Department heard of it and called for his psychological and physical and academic records, which they studied. Then they recruited him.
Years later, Katy Bevan became Director of State Orphanages, kicked out the priests, and gradually made things better; not perfect, but better. The priests were still embedded in other State institutions, but she stopped them sniffing around the classrooms and playgrounds of the orphanages. By then Foord had at last met a Sakhran and knew more about the meaning of Irony, so he was able to ask himself, Which of us has made the most of our years? Which of us has been the most use? He never asked questions to which he didn’t know the answer.
Also years later, he had learnt enough to know that the Commonwealth was not an Evil Empire. Most of it was not corporatist or authoritarian; in twenty-nine solar systems, planets like his were a small minority. The Commonwealth was not the same as the Department, either; it sometimes needed the Department to do certain questionable but necessary things, that was all. He added all that to his private universe, under Nothing Is Simple.
Foord only returned once to his planet and was not made welcome. He wanted to see Katy Bevan again, but didn’t; he had already intruded on her once, and knew that he’d hurt her as viciously as the priests. More viciously, because his love for her wasn’t as genuine as theirs.
•
Half an hour passed. Still neither ship moved.
Foord had fallen silent and seemed, for a couple of minutes, almost to have died. The others studied him, noting details with the quiet precision they’d learnt from Foord himself, and putting a value to each of them: voice inflexions, broken sentence constructions, repetition of unanswered questions. They assessed him in the same way as his own ship assessed him, ascribing values. Perhaps they should have considered discarding him; the ship had that on its list of options, but the ship was only partly alive. And when he fell silent, none of them felt equal to filling the empty space; except, unexpectedly, one.
“…And,” Joser concluded, “Her position is 17-14-16 and holding. She’s still shrouded, of course, but we have a reliable fix on Her position, which is probably what She intended.” (A provocative assumption, which like others before it provoked no response from Foord.) “She’s outside our beam range, of course, and no doubt She’ll use Her superior low-speed acceleration to stay outside.”
Joser’s mouth had wandered into Commander’s territory, but still Foord stayed silent.
“We do,” Cyr snapped, “have weapons other than particle beams.”
“Yes,” Joser said, “but we can’t use them if we can’t catch Her.”
Why, Cyr thought, is he saying this? He’s supposed to be just a Department stooge. So why this? Is he cleverer than I thought?
“We can catch Her!” Cyr insisted. “Our top speed on ion drive is higher.”
“Maybe. But She’ll have calculated that.” Joser paused, but still Foord stayed silent. “She can choose where we catch Her, and what She does about it.”
“Not,” Foord said suddenly, “if we catch Her sooner than She expects.”
“Commander?”
“If we catch Her. Sooner, Joser. Than She expects. Don’t you follow?”
Looks were exchanged around the Bridge. At that stage they didn’t, except for Smithson. Insofar as his structure allowed it, Smithson went rigid at the thought of what Foord might mean.
“You’re right, Commander,” Joser said confidently (he had discovered that he liked defining a static subject, even if it was their own possible destruction). “But you see, Her superior low-speed acceleration…”
“If we start after Her on ion drive,” Foord mused, “and then switch up suddenly to photon drive, just long enough to get Her back in range…”
“Commander!” Smithson bellowed. “This is a fucking asteroid belt! Ships don’t engage photon drive in asteroid belts, not even this ship! Ships have to go slow in asteroid belts, Commander, because if they go fast, the asteroids bang into them. I have a better idea. Why not just invite Her to surrender?”
“…and it needn’t be for long, or at full photon speed. Just ten percent on photon would be way above her top speed on ion drive. About…..I’d say, about eleven or twelve seconds at ten percent photon would catch Her.”
It was not possible that Foord could have done the necessary mental arithmetic amid the uproar which engulfed the Bridge, unless he had simply not noticed it.
“Commander, we wouldn’t last three seconds,” Joser stammered. He had not done that calculation but he did know, quite accurately, the effect on everything he had just defined—thoroughly defined—of a new variable, even if it was a variable which tended towards their survival rather than destruction. “It’s not an acceptable risk. It can’t…it won’t…”