Until she grew up, maybe? Or until Pluummuluum’s pattern of business altered? She never got so far as to pose such questions. Obviously, it couldn’t go on that way. The pattern was not, after all, something one could recognize as a life.
After a while, she played out the repartee of negotiation more easily and even somewhat skillfully, and the negotiations all blurred into one another. She knew time passed only by the length of her hair, which she let grow without hindrance, barring occasional trims to shape and layer it. She learned a few things about her bonder and the environment it chose to maintain on its ship, enough to exemplify Meno’s Paradox, which Taylor Wiggins had taught her on her sixth birthday. For instance, she began to notice that it grunted at certain times in such a way that she knew the grunt must have semiotic significance, while a specific significance eluded her. She knew that when it was passing dead time with her it preferred to sit staring at blank walls, and that it detested threedy displays and wallpaper, as well as VR entertainment, because threedy images gave it blinding headaches and distorted its vision, though she had no idea whether such a response was characteristic of Corolhans or a personal weakness. Most baffling, it seemed never to look at her—or even to see her. Did it find her ugly? Or did it simply not perceive the gaze as an important means of communication?
Thinking about how it seldom looked at her, Azia would remember long conversations with her father, her gaze locked to his, their mutual gaze more important than anything they said. She would remember babbling to her mother about any slightest triviality that came into her head, talking on and on while her mother’s gaze remained fixed on her processor’s threedy display or rechecking her navigational commands, occasionally saying hmmm-hmmm, totally on automatic pilot with Azia’s chatter, simply—infuriatingly and now, it seemed, wonderfully—there, inattentive to Azia’s words, yet somehow still available. And she thought, now nostalgically, of how Audrey Clare would lecture her about every tiny thing one could imagine, as though Azia’s learning what she knew was the very point of her existence. The only time Azia felt any real contact with her bonder was when it was massaging her feet, her ankles, her calves, or her shoulders. Something would happen then, as if by osmosis, perhaps, or so Azia fantasized, imagining that the creamy green glop her bonder used as a massage oil was a medium of transmission, what her mother called “essential interpersonal lubrication.” She never got any sense of her bonder’s being really present to her when looking at (one never felt as if one were looking into) its eyes, but that special sense of presence came to her often from its many kinds of touches on her skin, especially the pressure it exerted on her bone, muscle, and tendons during massage. She thought—really, she felt—that it likewise really perceived her as she did it only when it was touching her—through her every slightest reflex and response to its touch, as though in some strange, epidermal exchange equivalent to the exchange that humans effected through the gaze.
Azia’s hair had grown past her shoulders when Gerson Culley disrupted the seemingly timeless, flowingly blurred repetition of the pattern. Pluummuluum had arranged for her to be given a series of new vaccinations and boosters, including the Key vaccine, following two sets of negotiations at Astrea Station. Since the health shop it had contracted required that clients receiving the Key vaccine remain under shop supervision for four hours after administration, Azia was edgy about having it done. When awake, she rarely let her bonder out of her sight. But she could not persuade it to spend the time in the shop with her.
The medical protocol, performed by a robotic arm supervised by a medic, took less than a minute. The medic warned her that she would very shortly be feeling nauseated and later, rather fatigued, but that if she had any other symptoms, she should tell the monitor. She then left Azia lying on the treatment couch.
Idly, Azia surrounded herself with the station’s human-language news menu and flicked restlessly from story to stoiy. She never occupied herself with news menus when with Pluummuluum; but for some reason she could not name to herself, she felt a restless curiosity she thought such programming might be able to satisfy. And yet the stories she sampled left her dissatisfied. It was their packaging, she knew. She caught herself speaking aloud the sarcastic, pointed questions and comments her parents would have articulated if they had been present. She could not keep herself from consciousness of the aspects omitted, the questions not raised, about even the most trivial stories. Their framing in the grammar of What Is made her wild with frustration. Dupes of the Feds, she scathed silently. Though she knew, of course—for her parents had explained it— that there was no conspiracy, there was no explicit duping, there was only the unaware acceptance of the herd, from one station to another, one planet to another, across all of human space.
When Azia thought of it this way, it made her want not to be human— though it wasn’t clear to her whether any other species was any different. She dwelled among Corollians, but she had no idea what kind of grammar they lived in, except that it was, apparently, nonvocal.
As Azia’s body was taken over by nausea, she grew more and more vexed by the programming. Its sounds abraded her ears, its visuals assaulted her eyes and even seemed to prickle and itch against her skin. Fretfully she killed story after story. When she broke into a fierce sweat and the voices of the programming began buzzing in her ears like bad connections, she killed the display entirely. It would be better, she thought, to call up some entertainment—and she would, if she weren’t so tired. The very thought of choosing something, when so much was intolerable, made the effort seem beyond her strength.
“Azia?”
She had been dozing intermittently and so heard the voice without having noticed anyone entering the cubicle. Now she jerked abruptly awake, automatically identifying the voice as the flat, nearly uninflected tone of someone raised in Federation Central. Such voices always rubbed her the wrong way. She kept her eyes shut, hoping the person would go away.
“I thought you might be interested in some company, Azia. Human company, for a change.”
In spite of herself, Azia’s eyes flew open. She glared up at the woman standing at the side of the couch. “Who are you? And how do you know who I am?” she said, suspicious of another having information about herself that she herself had not divulged—and recognizing the tension in the overly casual posture, the watchfulness of the eyes, the complacency and inflexibility of the mouth.
The threedy display behind the woman ht up with her Federation identification. Gerson Culley, Azia read. Special Agent, Federation Security. The image matched the person. “People like you don’t care what people like me want,” Azia said. “So delete the bullshit, please.” She felt in the nauseated pit of her stomach that ugly spot of cold that had been with her for most of her juvie detention. In all her new experiences of fear, she had actually forgotten what that particular kind of fear felt like. (Worse, somehow, than the fear of Pluummuluum abandoning her.) Supposedly they had finished with her when they handed her over to it. So what could they want? Could it be that they were going to tell her what they had done with her parents, or that something had… happened to them?