Элизабет Бир - Ancestral Night

Forgiveness is not easy. Forgiveness is a train with many stops, and it takes forever to get where you are going. And you cover a lot of territory along the way, not necessarily by the most direct route, either. That’s why forgiveness is a process, and as much a blessing for the person who was wronged as for the person who did the wronging.

And it’s hardest when the person you most need to forgive is yourself.

I had been very bad at forgiveness, after the terrorists. But I had also been very bad at feeling anger. Feeling angry made me feel guilty. Flawed.

I hadn’t been raised in a place where I was allowed to be angry. Anger was antisocial. Anger was regulated against.

Boundaries of any sort were regulated against, come to think of it. By regulating us , the clade members, the children in the crèche. You can’t mind what you’re not allowed to mind.

I next saw Farweather as the crew of SJV I’ll Explain It To You Slowly were prepping us to slide our failing bodies into cryo tanks on the chance we might survive the long ride home. She turned her head and looked at me. I only noticed it because she spoke, because I’d been ignoring her as hard as I could. Connla was standing beside me in his dapper pilot suit, his ponytail draping in that weird gravity way. He was trying to look unconcerned. It wasn’t working.

So I wasn’t looking at her when Farweather said, “I’m sorry.”

I didn’t look then either. Connla squeezed my hand.

“I’m sorry,” she said again.

“I bet you are,” I answered as the tank lid closed.

I WOKE UP IN THE HOSPITAL.Core General, in fact, because that was how fancy I was now.

I met a nice doctor there. Her name was K’kk’jk’ooOOoo, and she had beautiful gray eyes and was sleek and fast.

Unfortunately, she was a dolphin-like K’juUUuuU who came from a water world, so it never would have worked out. But it turns out that sonar is a really useful sense for an internist.

Also, it tickles.

K’kk’jk’ooOOoo was a specialist in fox interface problems, and she’d been brought in to figure out how to fix the malfunctioning connections in my much-abused one, or replace it if necessary. The rest of my body was already fixed. They’d grown me a new liver and colon while I was asleep in a tank. Good idea. Who wants to be awake for that?

The first thing I asked about was the Baomind, and I was assured that rescue operations were under way. The first wave of Baomind mirror disks had actually been elected by the collective for evacuation and brought to the Core huddled inside the white coils of the Prize and the other ships in the rescue fleet. More ships were en route to bring back the next wave, and as far as anybody could tell from this far away, its primary had not exploded.

Yet.

But any minute now.

The second thing I asked about was getting the war crime removed from my dermis. K’kk’jk’ooOOoo told me regretfully that she didn’t think it could be done without killing me. I hoped she was telling the truth, and it wasn’t just that the Synarche wanted to study me. I mean, of course the Synarche wanted to study me. I hoped they might be close enough to what I still hoped they were not to lie to me about it.

There were good surprises, too, and the best surprise was that Singer was here, in the hospital. He was functioning as a subsidiary wheelmind, operating systems in human resources and logistics, as a compassionate gesture. When I was well enough, we were both to be seconded to the Prize investigation team: me as an engineer, and he would take over as the Prize’s permanent shipmind. Along with our cats.

We’d be stationed right here in the Core. And not too far from Connla, who had a new job flying ambulance ships.

He was really happy about it. You get to go as fast as you want, and other vessels are supposed to get out of your way but are bad enough at it that the flying is challenging.

And apparently, he was good.

After many boring medical adventures, it turned out that the problem wasn’t the fox at all, but the connections.

Functional connections in the brain are based on use. The longer my fox spent as a doorstop, the more the brain-device connections had degraded. Therefore, I needed more therapy and practice afterward before I could work with it properly again.

So playing immersion games in my fox was… technically… part of my mandated therapy.

I found out from Cheeirilaq, who was also now stationed in the Core, taking care of various legal difficulties, that Farweather had also survived the transition home. She was in a different wing, however, and under guard. The Prison Wheel, as it was colloquially called.

It had a different staff. Most of the Core General doctors wouldn’t serve there unless it was a matter of life and death, because they could not bring themselves to treat their patients as prisoners.

The doctors who could manage it had installed a suppressor in Farweather’s midbrain to keep her from activating her Koregoi symbiote, acting under Singer’s advice and direction.

I shuddered to think of it. She had not consented to that. But I shuddered worse to think of what she’d do in a hospital full of sick systers whose very existence she despised.

Moral compromises don’t stop happening even when everyone involved is trying to do the right thing.

Which left that offspring of a compost heap, Colonel Habren. The gardener. Who—Cheeirilaq informed me— had filed every charge in the book against us.

Discredit the witnesses. Why not? What do you have to lose?

Well, the charges didn’t stick. We might have been able to sting them for filing punitive charges, but the fact remained that we had driven a little recklessly. And our charges against them didn’t stick either.

Farweather apparently wouldn’t snitch. And we had absolutely no proof.

We knew. And the Synarche knew. And Singer knew. And Cheeirilaq knew.

And their attitude, apparently, was “That’s nice; do something about it.”

…Maybe tomorrow.

As an experiment, I got my hormones formally turned back on.

It turned out I still wasn’t in love with Farweather.

Thank everything holy, the Way and the Path and the bright and dark and iron gods of Entropy and Irony, the Gods of the Ark that protected generation ships and hell, probably protected the Baomind also. My taste was terrible, but it was not that bad.

Once they were on, well. I discovered I’d kind of missed them. They scared me… but I decided I didn’t have to act on feelings.

They were just feelings.

They didn’t have to run my life.

The last time I saw Zanya Farweather, she was being loaded onto a transport, having been deemed well enough to stand trial. I put in a request to meet with her before she went. It was, to my surprise, approved.

I suspect Cheeirilaq put in a word for me.

She’d wasted in the tanks, and in treatment. So had I, but it was more evident on her, with her planetary muscles. She looked like a rail, clavicle and jawbone and cheeks projecting, breasts slack, a little fleshy potbelly showing where her body was keeping what fat it had managed to hang on to while consuming all its muscle.

It hurt me to see the crescent of brilliantly reflective chrome adhered to the bottom arc of her skull. The damper.

Well, it was awful. But I accepted that it needed to be there.

Galaxies danced across her drawn skin. Mine moved in reflection.

She was still beautiful. I still wasn’t in love with her.