Seth chortled and waved his chubby little fingers at the end of his long, thin arm. “Aza!” he screeched. “Aza!”
It was more than the watching Azia could bear. Though she had no physical self, she experienced the sensation of weeping—a weeping that did not cause her vision to blur. And the figure of herself did weep. And choke out, “What am I going to do? I’m in such a mess! What should I do? I don’t even know what the right thing is!”
“What should you do?” all the adults said in unison. “What should you do!!!” The image of Azia’s mother said: “What you should do, baby, is whatever you have to do to keep body and soul together! That’s what you should do!”
“Precisely!” Audrey Clare said.
“Listen to your mother, girl,” Azia’s father said.
“She’s speaking the truth!” Taylor Wiggins said.
“I miss you,” the figure whispered from a bottomless well of misery. “I miss you so much. And you’re all… gone. For good.” Azia’s watching consciousness thought how she never would have guessed how much she would miss her family. For the last couple of years all she had been able to think about was how much she wanted to live with different kind of people, people who weren’t always worrying about what kind of grammar they were living in.
“You’re seeing us because you’re looking in a mirror,” Azia’s father said. “And the reason for that is that we’re inside you. What you have to do is feel and remember that, even as you miss us. You can see that we are, can’t you? I know you can, or you wouldn’t be able to see us at all now.”
Azia’s watching consciousness thought furiously about how this conversation was a dream that Pluummuluum was sending her.
“You say I should try to keep body and soul together,” the figure said. “But I don’t even know what the best way to do that is. Is it staying with Pluummuluum? And not going along with the Feds? The Feds could just take me, and then I’d be dead meat. And how do I know what Pluummuluum is going to do with me when it’s finished using me? But if I betray Pluummuluum, how can I know it won’t abandon me, to let me die? Or that the Feds will keep their promise? You see the problem? I’m a tool to both sides. I can’t trust either. I mean, if I’m going to be risking my life in any case, I should at least try to do what’s right.” The figure was whining and wailing so pathetically that the watching Azia cringed with shame.
“Oh, Azia,” Audrey Clare said. She shook her head. “You’re confusing the results of an action with its motivations. You’re wondering what consequences your action will have and are trying to decide your ethical position according to what you think they might be. Instead, you need to ask yourself some questions. First, can moral good exist in a vacuum, outside a community of persons? Or, more abstractly, is an ethical determination identical with its moral consequences?”
The watching Azia felt a lurch of nausea. You can’t assess moral meaning in a void. Moral judgment is not an act of solipsism, but of community. An individual without a community is at the edge of survival. The only moral meaning in such a situation is just that: survival. All those discussions had been like hypothetical lessons for discussing other people’s failures. And now here she was—one of those persons who always sounded too fucking pathetic to believe. Or the other kinds of discussions—the sickening ones about how communities justified to themselves the atrocities they committed against those they excluded: which was why “human rights” had always been such an embattled issue for centuries, since the one thing most communities tended to agree on was that the totality of human beings did not make up one whole community, since never had any human community counted all human beings among its members.
“Second,” Audrey Clare said, “Identify your community.”
The figure swallowed hard. “You know I don’t have a community,” it said, fighting off tears. “You were my real community. Or, at least, my way into a community. I guess all those other independents like us—dispersed all over the galaxy—could have been my community, if we hadn’t been busted. I was too young to really be a member of it on my own… While the Feds—they took my identity away when they busted us. Those people beyond that other door—none of them consider me part of their community. And the Corollians—to them I’m merely an alien of temporary use.”
“The Feds did just get tired of us, I guess,” Taylor Wiggins said. “They planted contraband material on the ship when they searched it. Belonging is rather flexible with them, it’s true, though that doesn’t stop them from interfering with individuals and whole species who’d rather keep their distance…”
The watching Azia realized that Pluummuluum must know more about her than she’d imagined. (But in fact she’d come to assume that it had no interest in her background, much less knowledge of it.)
“Have you come to any conclusions, Azia?” Audrey Clare said.
The figure crossed its arms tightly over its chest. “Nothing I decide can have any moral meaning—in advance, at least.” The figure’s tone was flat and hopeless. “Since my decision is being made in a void.”
“This is no exercise in glory, baby,” Azia’s mother said.
The watching Azia felt utterly deflated.
“So the question is, what is the best thing for your survival? Or, to rephrase that, what is the best you can do for any future self, given the requirements of survival?”
The watching Azia understood: even if the exigencies of survival determined her moves, she wanted to avoid doing anything that she would find hard to live with later. That being a matter of ethics.
The figure of Azia lingered with the family, but finally, resolutely, withdrew to try the other room, to see what kind of answers might be gotten from Pluummuluum. It waited for her beside the recliner, which the figure, already shivering in the chill of the Corollian cabin, now stretched out in. “Of course one of the important questions is, what is survival?” the figure muttered half under its breath. “Is it this twilight existence I have, going continually in and out of stasis? And what if a lot of other people’s lives are at stake?”
As if anyone, the watching Azia thought, could be trusted to tell her the truth of that. The Feds would say whatever they thought would convince her to work for them. And Pluummuluum.… It could say, simply, that this scene was a matter of trade, and nothing to do with lives—at least not directly…
The watching Azia watched the figure of herself yield—simply, totally—to the pleasure of the bonder’s touch. Glowing green glop gushed out of the tips of the tentacles, stimulating delightful sensations wherever it touched the figure’s skin. The watching Azia felt these sensations intensely—while growing more detached from the figure than she had been in the space of the mirrors. Her vision seemed to get sharper, the green of the glop brighter, as the pleasure spread over areas of the skin Pluummuluum never in ordinary reality touched, until every millimeter of skin was inhaling the bonder’s scent and singing ecstatic sensation. Though the cabin was damp and cold, the body heat of the figure blossomed so profusely that the figure threw off the blanket entirely, revealing naked skin glowing with green where the hands and tentacles had touched and spectrally transparent where it had not. To the eyes of the watching Azia, the green-glowing skin shimmered with beauty, strong and vibrant and solid, and the figure of Pluummuluum leaning over the body—also suddenly naked—glowed just as vibrantly green in exactly the same parts of its body as Azia’s figure did, its skin singing, too, its voice merging and counterpointing the other’s song in a deep, lyrical humming, low and throbbing with some kind of emotion or message that Azia could not make out but that she felt as powerful and positive. They were speaking, it and she, the language of skin, speaking the grammar of union with the syntax of give-and-take. This is who I am, Azia’s watching self thought. This is who the bond makes me, what my self is becoming.