Would they even care if she knew? Of course not. They’d basically kicked her out of the human species. They’d pulled her identification. They’d bonded her to an alien. Officially, she didn’t exist.
“You’re so young to be so hard,” the woman said softly, sighing that fake-sympathy sigh that signified only matronization.
“You mean kids as young as I am don’t usually have a reaction when a machine like the one you’re a cog in does monstrous things to them?”
Zap. Gerson Culley looked nettled—for a moment. Only for a moment. But Azia was good at reading adult human faces. She could tell. She could see the agent carefully waiting a few seconds before answering— taking a careful, calming breath, to keep her focus. “What is monstrous,” the agent said evenly, “is when people unfit to be parents corrupt their children, teaching them to be terrorists, twisting their view of reality. That is monstrous. Because it means that it’s unlikely that such children can grow up to be full, responsible citizens of the Federation.” She sighed again and shook her head. “Honey, it’s tragic. But until you can understand just how skewed your perspective is, you won’t be fit for citizenship.”
Like she should be ready to give a course in self-correction, to point an accusing finger at her parents and call them monsters and terrorists for not wanting to live in the grammar of What Is, for not wanting to submit to this woman’s grammar of What Must Be. Like she should want to assimilate, and forget her differences from the dominants. Like she should believe that all humans have to be what the dominants say they are, or be unfit for being citizens.
“I spit on citizenship,” Azia said through her teeth. Her head was fairly swimming with anger. Unable to think about her parents or Seth, she thought about the Federation agents going through her personal belongings, about the officers who had stopped her when she was boarding the shuttle.
Gerson Culley tsk-tsked. “It’s not wise to be so childish, even at your age,” she said. “It could be construed very much to your detriment, you know.” She folded her arms across her chest. “Even if it is a case of sour grapes. Naturally you think you scorn citizenship—because you can’t have it. Or rather, you think you can’t have it.”
Azia rolled her eyes. Classic mindfuck. Here comes the carrot. Cynically, she kept quiet.
“Since during your detention on Siliconia you tested out with a respectably high complex intelligence rating, Azia, I’m assuming you can understand what I’m about to tell you.” The agent leaned forward, so close that Azia could feel the heat of her breath warming her cheek. Azia fingered the tiny point of crystal she wore in her ear to carry the medical data she needed to keep physically on her person now that she no longer had an identity. She suddenly grasped that the Feds could seriously hurt her, just by abducting her and holding her a day or two.
That anyone could.
“The Federation Council has some concerns about the recent trades of your bonder, Pluummuluum.” Azia’s breath hissed in. All the trades she had negotiated had been legal—and with humans. “The record of these trades suggests a troubling, ah, profile. The trades in themselves violate no station laws or galactic treaties. But we’ve modeled possible trajectories for such cumulative trades, and we don’t like most of them.” The agent touched Azia’s wrist. “And then our suspicions were exacerbated when we learned of one of the vaccines your bonder ordered for you. There are only five sites for which the Key vaccine could possibly be necessary. And only one of them is a Federation-approved trade center.”
Azia swallowed. She said, “My bonder tells me shit! It tells me only what I have to know to carry out a trade.”
“We assume that,” Gerson Culley said, her we rather brutally endowing her with the aura of Federation power.
“Anyway,” Azia said, feeling threatened and resentful, “Corollians aren’t Federation citizens, so they aren’t under any obligation to avoid trading at stations that aren’t approved.” And I’m not a Federation citizen, either.
“We realize you can’t tell us what your bonder’s plans are, but there are other ways you could help us. Namely, in seeing if you can learn which one of those worlds or stations you need the vaccine for, and later, if you do go to that place, the real story on exactly what trades your bonder makes.”
“You want me to spy for you,” Azia said coldly. “When my very life depends on staying cool with my bonder. How typical of the machine to want me to stake my life for it, when it’s just a monster that exists by eating up people’s will and liberty.”
Gerson Culley sighed. “Azia, you are warped. The Federation is the only guarantor for freedom in the universe and the only safeguard against our species’ devolving into dozens of subhuman races.”
Azia said nothing.
“If you help the Federation, the Federation will help you. Not only will we confer citizenship on you, but we’ll remove the receptors bonding you to the Corollian.”
Azia snorted.
“You’re being given a second chance, Azia. A second chance to live among humans. By now you should know you can’t have any decent kind of life living with aliens. You can’t afford to blow it.”
Azia blazed with rage. “A second chance? I never had even a first chance!”
“Your parents blew your first chance,” the agent said quietly. “Which is something you’ll have to come to terms with if you want full citizenship.”
“What I want is for you to leave me alone!”
The agent straightened. “I don’t think so.” The threedy display behind her suddenly showed an image of Azia with John Shea Velikovsky and Pluummuluum. Azia was slumped on her knees, rocking herself back and forth, crying “Mommy, Mommy, I want Mommy.”
Azia squeezed her eyes closed and pressed her hands over her ears. “You jerk,” she said loudly, trying to drown out the sound from the display. “You slimy scummy disgusting piece of vermin! You shithead, you virus, you puddle of diarrheic excrement!” On she went, venting and venting the rage that had been boiling inside her since the family’s bust. When she finished, exhausted and shaking, and heard no sound coming through her hands, she lowered them and opened her eyes to find the agent seated cross-legged on the floor, watching her.
The agent rose to her feet. “I can understand your outburst. Unlike your bonder. It’s a human kind of thing. Think about my offer. Think about what your life will be like if you don’t accept it. I know, I know, you’re more into self-destruction at the moment than being open to taking hold of your life and turning it around. But think about it in your more rational moments. In any case, we’ll be in touch.”
The agent was out the door before Azia could speak. She felt sick. Because of the vaccines, she knew. But she also felt that hollowed-out kind of sickness that made her shake and shiver all over. Don’t confuse humane with those who claim to speak for all humans, her mother had often said. The two are polar opposites.
Yeah.
16.
The pattern resumed, but with a difference. Before Azia’s conversation with Gerson Culley, time stretched endlessly before her, in the way of childhood, and she had been waiting, in a sense, for “real” life, for adulthood, for “reality,” to happen. Now, though, she was waiting for something specific, for some unknown thing she had only clues to, but which she felt as clearly real; and she realized that she was already in the adult world, that she was already playing a real role in real events. Pluummuluum meant those events to go one way, Gerson Culley (and the Federation Council) another. And from being empty and dead, from something to be waited out, time had become an arena for finding out just what both sides in the struggle intended.