She thought about what the agent had offered and how questionable it was that she could be trusted, given the arrogant lack of honesty Federation people felt their duties entitled them to practice in achieving their ends, given their assurance that Federation actions were always justified by their ends, and their assumption that their ends were always Moral and Good, simply because they were their ends. Sure, Azia would like to be freed from the bond. She could not deny it. But what then? The agent had mentioned nothing more specific than “citizenship”—which, as things stood, would leave her homeless and without the means of feeding and sheltering herself. The agent hadn’t offered to restore the property that had been taken from her parents, much less to free her parents or give her a tenable place in life to occupy. Utterly vulnerable, she would be prey to being forced into another bond—with a human, yes, but of a character no doubt more degrading than the one she had, or forced into an inescapable trap of the unending drudgery always there to suck up the desperate.
The more she thought about the agent’s offer, the less point she could find in it. If she were to deal with the Federation, it would have to be for better terms than those she had been offered.
But there were other considerations for her to take into account, for she was, she kept realizing (as she had never done before all of them had been busted), her parents’ daughter. True, instinct told her she must be Gerson Culley’s enemy, because Gerson Culley spoke in the grammar of What Must Be. And yet, the grammar of What Is, which was what her bond with Pluummuluum had forced on her, was so repellent that she also felt the impulse to spite her bonder simply to spite that enforcement. Her daughter’s sense, however, told her that in consciously making the choice to play a particular role, she would be speaking in the grammar of What Will Be—unless, of course, her choice was made inauthentically, complicit with a self-deception that sought only to do what was safest and most comfortable in the immediate moment (if not in the future).
When she woke from her next stint in hypothermal stasis, she used her voice to speak to Pluummuluum (as she mostly, at such times, did not). It was massaging her feet in that wonderful way that its tentacles and four opposable thumbs made possible, and wrapped in the heating blanket with her eyes closed and a bulb of hot liquid in her hands, she was feeling something, some wordless communication intimating a bond beyond that of chemical reception (as if it were possible to separate the chemical reception from everything else!). At such times her mind seemed to float, without any thought more complex than recognition of her well-being—of having survived stasis, of being tended, of warmth seeping into her bones, driving out even the memory of cold. And yet this time, a distinct thought rose to the surface of her mind, compelling her curiosity and speculation. The thought mingled so successfully with her perception of sensual comfort that it seemed quite natural to expect that it could be voiced explicitly to her bonder, who was the main source of the sensual comfort, as though in such a moment of intimacy there could be no barrier of caution, risk, or mistrust between them. “So,” she said aloud, “did you trade some of those crystals and germ stocks you’ve been accumulating to non-humans while I was in stasis?” Being the daughter of traders, she knew that the main reason for holding onto one particular item of trade instead of turning around and trading it away at the first opportunity was a strategy of building up a stock to trade for an item of far greater value. What puzzled her—and what had likely raised the Federation Council’s suspicions—was that Pluummuluum apparently had an unusually large stock of the “feathers.” Her bonder’s trading practices could be made sense of only as some grand strategy it was following—or if it were making trades while she was in stasis, or if its crew members or some other agent were making trades that she didn’t know about.
Usually it ignored her questions, unless they involved instructions for negotiating trade. But now it sent her a dream like none it had ever given her. In this dream, she was split into two—into the watching consciousness, her typical location in such dreams, and into a figure whose consciousness she shared, who she knew was herself, with chin-length hair, wearing the robe marked with her bonder’s logo. The dream began with this figure of herself standing alone in a passage that reminded her a little of the living quarters of her family’s ship. The doors were a pale gray, solid in their upper halves, but printed with designs in dull red over their lower halves. As the figure looked at the doors, it knew that the upper halves were printed with a design, too, but in a color that her eyes lacked the appropriate light cones for perceiving. Corollian eyes could see that color, but to humans it looked, simply, pale gray.
This insight shocked the Azia who watched, not for itself, but because the figure of herself that she was watching knew this before her watching self did, though in these dreams her watching self always simply knew and understood everything that she was seeing. The figure went from door to door, touching the surface of each with her palm, and with each touch acquired an impression of what lay on the other side. Beyond the first door sat Gerson Culley, John Shea Velikovsky, and the horrid woman who had been seated facing Azia on the Siliconia shuttle. Beyond the second door lay the cabin her physical self now occupied—the recliner empty, Pluummuluum seated on a stool beside it. Beyond the third door lay an empty room lined on all six sides with mirrors. And beyond the fourth door lay dark vacuum and bright, distant stars.
The figure dismissed the fourth door. It knew it could not survive the vacuum beyond it, nor reach, alone, the stars. It glanced, briefly, at the first door. Azia’s watching self thought: They represent the Federation— or else humans—or human dominance—as a whole. And then took another hit of shock, as she realized she was seeing Gerson Culley in a dream sent to her by her bonder. The figure wavered between the third and second doors. What good could a room of mirrors be? it queried. But what good could going into a room representing her current physical situation do? Perhaps, it thought, there was something beyond the mirrors, in the way there was something beyond the four doors…
As soon as the figure decided on the third door, it slid open. The figure walked in, slowly, hesitantly, almost with its eyes closed. Azia saw at once that the images in the mirrors were not literal reflections of the figure. Instead, a set of images—repeated on the surface of each of the six sides of the room—greeted the figure, leaning forward, looking as though they might break through the barrier of the glass, so eager were they to embrace it. “Azia, Azia, Azia!” they sang out—Azia’s parents, tiny Seth, Audrey Clare and Taylor Wiggins. The figure rushed at the mirror opposite and pressed its body against it—as though hoping it, like the doors in the passageway, would grant access. But the mirror remained hard glass, cold in its clear solidity.
Azia’s watching self felt torn between longing for her family and distrust at their appearance in a dream sent by her bonder. It was an intrusion, she thought. But she was so hungry for the only people who had ever loved her, so needy of contact with them, and the figure of herself felt only the hunger, the need, the longing. Their presence—even as images in a mirror—delighted even as it frustrated the figure. It cried, “Mom! Dad! Taylor! Audrey! Little sweet Seth!”