The sylph was sorting through a pile of nuts and bolts when Kata approached, and without looking up, her free hand reached out to turn on a lamp.
“Thanks,” Kata said, pulling out a stool from under the counter and perching on top of it. “How’s business?”
“You shouldn’t be here,” Maria said. Her voice was a feminine chirp, modulated like a human voice, but with a distinct robotic character to it all the same. “And you should not return until after the trials, whatever their outcome.”
“They know me here,” Kata said.
“I didn’t mean just here, in the sylph quarter,” Maria said, still sorting. Her fingertips were a marvel of engineering, capable of quick, delicate movements that Kata still found mesmerizing. “I mean the entire outpost. I’ve heard there is violence brewing among your kind as well as ours, toward… people like you.”
“Did you hear this from your sylph government friend?” Kata smiled.
“Perhaps.”
“If that’s the case, there’s not many places I can go where humans won’t feel that way. Can’t yank out my skeleton, Maria.”
She couldn’t remove the parts of her that humans hated when they were the same parts keeping her alive. And moreover, she didn’t want to.
“I suppose that’s true,” Maria said. “But perhaps now is the time for an extended scavenging mission.”
“You’re worried about me,” Kata said. She looked down at her prosthetic hand, glinting in the light. “I wonder if your worry feels the same as mine.”
“What do you mean?”
“Fear is… mammalian. Essential to survival for any organism that has natural predators,” Kata said. “You don’t have predators, not really—so why did you program it? Why not write it out of your programming entirely?”
Maria’s voice was flatter than usual when she replied. “If I was never afraid, how would I know to protect myself? If I was never angry, how would I know to fight for what I want?”
“Yeah, I just… wonder if we’re using one word for two different feelings. If the way fear feels, to me, is the same as the way it feels to you.”
“You are wondering if I am as real as you are,” Maria said.
“No, that’s not—” Kata shook her head. “That’s not what I meant.”
“Yes it is. You are wondering if my feelings ‘count’. If I am as worthy as you are of existence.” Maria pressed too hard on one of the bolts, and it shot away from the countertop, hitting the opposite wall with a ding! “Let me make this clear, then: I am not human, and I have no desire to be. Your kind is not an ideal to which I aspire.”
“I—”
“Please leave,” Maria said.
Kata didn’t argue. But, before leaving, she paused in the dark doorway to say, “I’m sorry.”
Back on the ship, Kata sat at the table in the galley. She had lined up all the Echoes she had retrieved from all their hiding places, on Earth as well as its moon. The first one, she had found while unpacking her parents’ things on the moon colony. When she had asked her father about it, he had said something about Erszi’s friend leaving it behind after one visit. That one had led her to the next, which she bought on the gray market at the outpost on the way to Mars. The third, she had gone to Berlin to scavenge. Then Budapest for the fourth.
She rested her chin on her hands and stared down at the Echoes. Together, they made an airtight case for the Minos Trials—just not for the right side, the human side.
One of them hinted at the idea for the weapon Ütközet had developed, and another at the hours spent engineering it. The third detailed how they had disguised their activity from anyone who might be watching. But no Echo established the intent to use the weapon as clearly as Erszi’s did.
“What will you do with them now?” Drobo asked her.
Kata rolled Erszi’s Echo toward herself and back, a few centimeters at a time.
“I don’t know,” she said.
“If you send them to the Earth Justice Commission, what will they do?” Drobo said. “Drop their case?”
“I don’t think so. I think if I send them there, they will be destroyed,” Kata said. “Without them, the sylphs have no proof that their initial attack on Earth wasn’t a war crime. All it takes is one corrupt person and the whole thing falls apart.”
“Because it is a war crime,” Drobo said, “to attack without cause.”
“To attack only to kill, and not to defend yourself,” Kata said, nodding. “Which is what they were doing—defending themselves against Ütközet. Against Erszi.”
“Ütközet—”
Kata laughed. “Your Hungarian pronunciation is horrible.”
“I don’t have lips, so it is difficult for me to articulate those particular vowels.” Drobo sounded irritable. “Ütközet’s virus—you believe it actually could have killed the sylphs, if your sister had been able to hack through their defenses?”
“Say what you like about the sylphs, but they’re careful,” she said. “They wouldn’t have attacked Earth if they didn’t think it was their best chance of survival.”
“Indeed,” Drobo said. “So, if you don’t want this evidence destroyed… what do you want instead?”
“I want…” She laughed a little. “I want to remember my sister as the one stashing cigarettes in a teddy bear, not the one plotting to commit genocide. I want my family’s name to be unsullied by what she’s done. I want to run up the hill to the Hotel Belvedere without a helmet on and scold the teenagers for making out on all the benches. I want to go home.”
She sighed.
“That is impossible,” Drobo said, quietly.
“I wish this could be bigger than it is, that it could be about righteousness, or truth. But it’s not.” Kata shook her head. “It’s about where I was, when Erszi was planning this attack. I was in a sylph workshop, and a sylph cybernetics expert was saving my life with the same tech that Erszi was trying to destroy.”
She put her head down on her arms. The Echoes clinked together like a wind chime.
“You have to fight for the ones who fight for you,” Kata said. “And you don’t get to pick who they are.”
“Erszi,” Kata said to the ghostly image of her sister, standing before the window in the galley.
Erszi turned, and offered a watery smile. She had never been beautiful. Neither had Kata, really. They had the look of people constantly on the verge of argument, like a couple of twittering birds, beaked and fierce. But there was something lively in Erszi’s eyes that appealed, regardless.
“Do you remember when I was twelve, and you told me we would go on an adventure?” Kata said. “You asked your friend, the burly one—”
“Ábel,” Erszi said, nodding. “With the mustache.”
“Yes, him. You asked him to carry me out to the river with you.”
Erszi smiled. “I had blown up that inflatable raft I bought at Polus Mall and dragged it down to Kis-Szamos so we could float under the stars. Only I failed to account for Ábel’s weight—”
“So ten minutes in, we sank, and we had to abandon the raft, and I almost died because I couldn’t move my legs—”
Erszi shook her head. “I almost killed you.”
“Sure,” Kata said. “But you just wanted to give me an adventure.”