She'd been thinking about Tom, on that ship. Asking herself if Bowe would go so far as harming Tom. Asking herself if she cared, except in so far as she hated like hell Bowe getting any point against her.
Didn't know if that was a normal way to feel. Damned sure not the way the ballads and the books had it. Not the soppy way the child-besotted declared they felt it. If there was mother-love then there was a shadow-side of that instinct, a dark side the ballads and the books also had: the imperative to give birth and the imperative to destroy the life, in the wrong season, the ill season, the winter, the drought, the feud, the war—she'd studied the question, read prehistory and psych and civ. And understood what she'd done when she'd kept Bowe's offering inside herself, and sometime rejected it and sometime tried to deal with it until it became a him, then Tom, and lastly, God help her andhim, poor, damned, disaster-bound fool.
She'd mistrusted instinct. Mistrusted it and alternately ridden it in violent reverses of personal direction throughout her life. This time she was following it, from moment to moment scared to death, and from moment to moment wildly willing to take the risk, life or death, win or lose.
Getting Tom back… she wasn't so sure. She wasn't so sure she wanted back anyone who'd had to do with Bowe.
Unless Tom took up her cause and settled accounts himself, which, on the one hand, she'd wanted once, and then felt differently—because it wouldn't be her doing. Because Tom wasn't, as she'd thought once, simply her doing. Tom belonged to Tom, and you couldn't ever quite predict what he'd do.
What he'd do would probably be stupid.
No, foolish. Tom wasn't stupid. Ignorant. And ignorant people trusted people, or assumed they knew. She knew how to see through the illusions of human behavior, but Tom didn't. He'd proved that, persisting in a kind of loyalty to her, blind, gut-level, helpless. She'd tried to reason with it, kill it, drive it out of his head, but he could never see she didn't have what he was looking for. He couldn't understand the impulse she had when he screamed his baby screams to fling him out of her arms and against the wall, he couldn't understand the violence she felt when he looked at her and said, Marie, why? or Marie, why not? and he wouldn't take the answers when she gave them. She'd taken him home and stood the questions and the demands as long as she could and she always took him back to the kids' loft when she started wanting to hurt him, when she started to dream at night and fantasize by day about doing terrible, cruel things to him. The Family couldn't stop her. If she chopped him in small pieces, the Family wouldn't do anything: she was too important to the ship. The Family wouldn't do anything but keep the other kids out of her path, and that suited her fine, she hated kids, hated their noise and disorder.
Most of all she despised Tom, when he looked at her in stupid, hateful need, expecting her to give him what she'd gone out on Mariner dock looking for in her own blind juvenile instinct, the expectation of affection Bowe had betrayed and Mischa had, because nobody cared.
So now the kid wanted her to validate the worst lie she'd ever learned the truth of? The kid wanted to run the cycle all over again, and she wanted to kill him or detach him or beat the expectation out of his eyes—the way she wanted to kill him now for being where he was, and for changing the equation that was her and Bowe… Tom couldn't stay out of her life, one thought ran, couldn't stop screwing things up, and making what should be simple into a muddled, fucked-up mess; and meanwhile another thought ran, He didn't deserve having happen to him what had happened to her, didn'tdeserve where Bowe could send him, onto some damned Fleet dark-runner—the initiation stupid kids got into the Fleet was what she'd gotten at Mariner, what she'd learned too late to save herself. She'dknown then what Bowe was and understood the fuck-you gesture he'd made at Spriteeven when he'd turned her back to them, all full of violence, full of hate… she was a bottle full of demons, the sort of demons that existed in everyone, but Bowe had let her meet his, and she'd waked her own, that was the way she imaged it. The whole universe went ignorant of their own demons and denied they had them. But she knew. And Bowe knew. They'd been intimate with them for forty-eight hours.
And sometimes, sometimes when she dreamed in the deep between points of realspace, she made love with Bowe, real, sharp-edged, bitter love, not rape, except as shemade things happen in her dream, and he didn't have any say about it. It was love, and it wasn't. It was sex, and it wasn't. It was a power-trip, and it wasn't. It was screw-you and damn-you. It was the only place she could feel the sensations she'd looked to him to make her feel, and she only felt that when she let go her grip on the solid universe. Bowe was the only human she knew who understood the absolutes of the demons. The only one who could understand. Certainly not safe, clutch-on-reality Mischa. Not Saja. Not any Hawkins. The whole Family was delusional. The whole premise of their existence was desperately tied to a morality that earned them comforts they wanted. They lived in the grip of their demons without ever seeing the raw, real dark that drove them.
But she had.
Mischa talked about morality and necessity and respectability.
But she saw how all that worked, and how they kept a careful shield up and how they didn't look too long into mirrors, too deeply into their own eyes.
She did.
And maybe, she thought, in that deep dark behind her eyelids, maybe Bowe had been equally desperate. Maybe Bowe'd gone looking, too, that day on the docks, and maybe he'd let loose his demons and loosed hers and they'd always be bound… maybe it tied him and her in such a way they went on screwing each other in a non-biological sense, creative only when they were joined, locked in a reality that nobody else could see.
Sometimes she desperately needed to know Bowe was out there. Sometimes she wondered if he needed her in the same way.
And he took Tom to himself.
Why?
What did he want? What did he need? Of all his demons, which one was in the ascendant at that moment?
Or had Tom sought him out?
Don't hurt the kid, she wished Bowe, in the way she sometimes talked to him in absentia… he was a far better conversationalist than the Family offered. He's mine to kill, and I didn't. Don't you presume, you bastard. You haven't paid for him. I did.
Hurt him and I'll have your balls, you son of a bitch.
Until then, we can go on having these little talks. We can go on meeting in the dark.
Or I can turn up on your dockside. I can meet you at Pell, withmy ship.
Or I can track you across the universe, solo. You're my obsession. My life. My reason for living.
Thank God you exist. Otherwise I'd be stuck with Mischa, fighting on his scale. And I'd strangle for want of oxygen.
—iii—
DREAM OF A SPIRAL TO NOWHERE. Sometimes it had colors and sometimes not. Sometimes it had sound, like a humming machine, deep and powerful.
Sometimes it was the brig, but the walls and the bars came and went, tilted into polyhedrons and dimensional oddity.
Sometimes shadows passed very fast. He thought of nursery rhymes and the man that wasn't there. He'd been that man, that boy, not there. Cousins had taught him that rhyme and now it wouldn't leave his head. He'd gone to sleep with it, and with the shadows, that twisted and turned one into a shadow, a presence he felt more than saw, a breath of change in the air about him.