Элизабет Бир - Machine

I was, as you have probably diagnosed, babbling. I was also grateful to Tsosie, for providing me with a distraction from the panic that wanted to overwhelm me. The least I could do was talk about trivialities in return.

If they really were trivialities.

He hummed a sound that made me wonder if he’d even heard the second half of what I’d said. “You mean religion, when you say faith? Because I meant, our crew and ship know what they’re doing, and we know that.”

“Nah.” I shook my head inside the hardsuit. And checked my battery levels. The suit had extra backups; it and my exo were still fine.

Tsosie pointed to a hatch in the side wall.

I nodded, and followed him. “Like trust. Like believing in people. Like believing that things will turn out okay. Like… what you said.”

The hatch was an access point. Beyond it was a tunnel that would need us to crawl.

“Let’s save those for after,” I said.

He nodded. “And after we get back in touch with Sally. And her sensor arrays.”

There it was again: that faith that we would get back in touch with Sally. I was having a hard time remembering that she even existed, that we weren’t stranded out here alone with no support.

“I want to put eyes on her,” I said.

“Next hatch. Let’s see if we can find a viewport.”

There had been windows. We’d seen them from the outside. Mirrored to reflect the potentially unforgiving light of space. There weren’t any here, because this was a corridor.

Or were there?

I started inspecting the control panels we passed more carefully.

“This is a personal question,” Tsosie said formally.

I glanced over at him and nodded. The hardsuits fit close enough that you can pick up even a little gesture like that.

“I consent,” I said, so it would be on Sally’s record. If Sally was still out there. If we ever got our link back.

Quit psyching yourself out, Dr. Jens. If you tell yourself something firmly enough, it’s almost as good as hearing it from a trusted authority. Especially if you can back it up by fiddling with your brain chemistry.

“Do you remember a time before the chronic pain?”

I could claim that wasn’t a perceptive question, but then I’d have to explain why I stood there silently for a good thirty seconds before I found an answer. “No,” I admitted. “There’s always been the pain.”

“So how would you, as a kid, have learned that things were going to be okay, or that adults could solve your problems? Why would you ever have cause to think things would turn out all right?”

“Huh,” I said, eloquently. While the tinkertoys went click click click.

I chewed on my lower lip inside the faceplate. It was a terrible habit; I was going to give myself a chapped lip in the dryness of the suit environment, and if it started to bleed in zero g or while I was under acceleration, that was going to be a bloody mess. Quite literally.

I ducked under one of those weird, trailing strands of tinkertoys. This one hadn’t peeled apart with the others to let us through. If they were as fragile as they looked, they should have been collapsed all over the decking, even under such light acceleration as this. “So you think I never learned trust because, as a child, I had nothing to believe in?”

“You trust, though. You trust Sally with your life—”

“That’s not what I mean.” I sighed. “Yes, I can decide to take a risk on Sally, or on you. But I know it’s a risk. Whereas I’ve heard people talk about the belief that somebody would never hurt them. Or the sense that everything will turn out all right in the end. I’ve never had those.”

“So why do you take risks?”

“Well,” I said. “Because if you don’t, you never gain anything. And, as I said, I believe in Core General. I believe in what we are doing there. I believe it’s a good thing. Worth risking myself for. So I trust… I guess I trust the mission.”

The tinkertoys were denser here, and less responsive to our presence. I gave up on crouching and ducking under them. I got down and crawled. By the way, the inside of a hardsuit isn’t any good for the outside of your knees.

Tsosie had come up beside me. He gave me a funny sidelong look and got down on his hands and knees as well, but he didn’t say anything for a minute. When he did, it was a change of subject—or a segue.

“So you trusted the mission when you were with the Judiciary?”

His kneeplates scraped irritatingly on the decking.

I knew he was talking so we wouldn’t think too hard about where Sally was, or Loese, or Hhayazh, or Camphvis, or Rhym. That was fine. There wasn’t anything we could do for them from here, right now. He was right—we had to trust them to take care of their part of the mission, even without communication.

They would be trusting us to do the same.

I shrugged. “Well. Not in the same way. I decided it was a good mission and that I could serve it. And it helped me get closer to the Core, where I could get better care. And it got me a military-grade exoskeleton, which is absolutely the bomb for mobility issues.”

One thing about the Synarche. It’s so big, and data and people move so slowly through it, that it takes a while for tech to disseminate. Medical tech along with all the other kinds. And backwater settlements on marginal planets are definitely at the bottom of the list, most of the time. There aren’t enough people there to make them a priority.

I shouldn’t say people move slowly. They move very quickly. Just… over ridiculous distances.

“Anyway,” Tsosie said. “Before I interrupted me, I was pointing out that once you got to Core General, you finally got to a place where people could take care of you. They took care of your pain.”

“Judiciary took care of my pain,” I corrected. “If they hadn’t, I would not have been much use to them.” I was managing my own pain now, which was a task I usually outsourced to Sally so I didn’t have to concentrate on it, but this didn’t seem the time to mention that.

“How effectively?”

I wobbled my head to emphasize my eyeroll of defeat, since the faceplate hid the eyeroll part. “All right, you got me.”

“And you probably weren’t taken seriously by medical people before then.”

“Well… It wasn’t that bad. I learned the lingo in the military, which never hurts. And people don’t dismiss you when you can prove your rightminding is effective.”

“People don’t love being presented with unsolvable problems, though.”

I chuckled. “Core General does.”

“I rest my case.”

“Are you suggesting, as my commanding officer, that I have some untreated medical post-traumatic response?”

“Mmm.” Noncommittal.

I turned my shoulder to him, concentrating on the medical panel on my forearm, looking up occasionally to make sure I wasn’t about to crawl into anything—or past one of the control panels without inspecting it.

“What’s wrong with me isn’t that complicated,” I said. “I grew up on the kind of planet where resources were limited, because the settlement was at the very edge of things. We got supplies, but sometimes we went a long time between drops. And medical relief was intermittent at best.”

“The last scarcity economy in the galaxy.” I could hear the smile.

“I mean, it was the Synarche. It wasn’t like I grew up in a Freeport, or totally outside civilization.”

“Civilization is not evenly distributed. Did you join the Judiciary to get away from your backwater homeworld?”

I was starting to get irritated with his obtuseness, but at least it distracted me from the hardsuit pinching and banging in uncomfortable ways. “I said it got me better medical care—”