“Fuck faith.” Clothes over flesh. “Give me time.”
“That’s the thing, boy. We don’t have time.”
“We—”
“You’ve been in here more and more often. People are starting to talk. They think that shit’s getting into your head. They think—”
“It’s already in my head. Where do they think it came from in the first—”
“We’re ready to strike. With Reynald in now, good leads on Zero-Four and the Windhams—”
“That’s the wrong way to approach this.”
“That’s the only way we can approach this.”
“I just need more time.”
“I know.” A tender, fatherly gesture: a reassuring grip of Paul’s shoulder. “But—”
“Tell them I’ll be out soon. Rest up.”
“Yes, sir.”
Paul grinned. “Don’t call me that, old man.”
Alina shifted in the sling from right to left, from sleep to wake. Sandwiching her, the West twins inhaled in unison, a slow, tentative feeler into consciousness quickly overruled by collapse back into dream.
She didn’t know why the girls were so drawn to her.
Their extraction had been unpleasant. The Mara had been deep within a fleet of shredded and disabled Judas vessels, a horde of Enemy projections flashing in and out and through them. Jade had been a simple grab from the exterior; Phire had had to be pried from the can with Arik Mandela’s deft touch.
Paul hadn’t helped on that run. He was taking a silver bath again.
Alina wondered if he
and stopped.
She guessed they liked her because she was the only really approachable human female operating in the inner circle of Judith ME. Jud certainly wasn’t nice to kids, and that’s what they were, a decade younger than her twenty-five standards, a year younger than their respective enemy line deaths, Jade uploaded into Program Seven, Phire taking her own life just before the first Jag war. They couldn’t have known, so she never told them.
They were both so skinny. Pale. Children of the space between stars and times.
Alina was losing her Ft. Myers sunwindburn.
Each night, they’d cuddle with her in Sam’s command chamber, away from the cold halls of the ME, the sterile rooms and flayed god, the birthing fields, the libraries upon libraries of catalogued nevers.
They’d never known West. Although he tried at first to communicate with them, he was nothing more than an alternate to the father they’d left behind with their silver mother in a swarmed When. He eventually gave up; he’d never known their West, their Patra. His yesterdays were Abigail and the farm and the war, a different war, silver skies and children.
They inhaled as one, exhaled as one. Al had never before seen a twin bond so tangible, such a blessing. Such a curse? She could tell them of histories of loss, of ruin.
It was better that she just hold them both in the sleeping egg until morning came, bringing with it new insertions, new faces.
They were safer in her warmth, in what little comfort and solace she could provide, knowing what they’d been extracted to do, knowing what tomorrows would bring to shatter that gentle breath of dream.
Alina fell back into sleep.
If the Self is defined in its interactions and oppositions to and through external stimuli, and those stimuli are grouped in contextual accordance to the shifting nature of existence, we can define the Self as the opposition to environmental stasis.
How can we delineate and nominate that particular stasis? What collection of sensations and memory compose a being? How do we define Home? Is it the place where one exhales and doesn’t fear for the next breath? Is it indeed easier when nowhere and no one feels like home? Is home a place, a collection of interactions, a veil of memory constructed solely within?
To Maire, the concepts of home and pain were one. When something such as the concept of home, something so traditionally regarded with quiet desire, respect, even reverence becomes intrinsically linked with a deep, inherent negativity, things happen. As we now know, things happened to Maire.
It wasn’t that her planet was a bad home, but in the vast scheme of intergalactic destiny and solar-systemic politics, bad things happened there.
Sometimes a species outgrows its collection of rocks.
Would she have defined home as I did, as a loose collection of images and sensations, centered on those who inhabited that same space? In the sterile cool of the ME, I tried not to think about home. Tried. Hard. Didn’t work.
Home was unappreciated farmers, those sixty- and seventy-year olds still working eighteen-hour days, permanent sun across noses and cheeks, burst vessels beneath the skin, white whiskers poking through until the weekly shave before going into town: a new fencer, ten rolls of sisal twine, doses of Today and Tomorrow, defined not as divisors of time, but by the product names of dry cow and fresh cow treatments, slow visits by neighbors, sharing forecasts and anecdotes, busting through frozen bolts, tearing flesh on rust, the scent of sweat and hay and milk spoiling from where it spilled on ancient jeans ten hours before, then exposed those ten hours to sunlight, to humidity, to manual labor. Grease guns and kittens, hay hooks and goldenrod and vetch.
Home was the desolation of a post-industrial world, abandoned paper mills, a population displaced from suburban hold by the necessity of the commute in too-big pickup trucks, status-symbol sports utility vehicles, the embarrassment of the family mini-van, the occasional Freudian commentary that was the convertible, men who’d drive to service jobs, mill work in other towns, re-education as a mid-life crisis when plants closed, environmental regulations tightened, their wives taking jobs, nurses and day care providers, pathetic local politics of heightened local importance.
Home was hick bars and dirt tracks, girls knocked up before high school graduation, sexual assaults in the nearby barracks, Canadian dance clubs, the polarization and fragmentation that the adolescent clique system embedded: some spoke with accents, some struggled to excel in sports, some wore only black, fancied themselves gangs, just white kids with access to drugs and knives. Four had stabbed a middle-school friend half a hundred times; I’d sat at the other end of their lunch table: the outcasts, and later, some would embrace the mythos of bisexuality, homosexuality, painted nails and dabbling in their own sex, as if it were the popular thing to do, anything to distance themselves from tradition: jocks and cheerleaders, band geeks, farmer’s kids, racecar drivers and those who chewed tobacco in the parking lot, spitting brown into the previous weekend’s collection of floormat beer cans, the cheapest yellow shit marketed widely, and there were the sneakers, by brand they judged worth. I wore Voits.
Home was bonfires in the woods, cool kids fucking in Daddy’s sedan; they never escaped those early designations, and as such became a part of home: unchanging, stagnant, dead already, those who never wished to escape, those who never tried.
Maire’s home? Interwoven with that particular brand of revision that torture induces in the tortured, it came to me in razor-edged shards, horrible images, many without a suitable vocabulary with which to describe them.
Maire’s home? Just a rock, far out from One, far enough so that the first machine wars had barely scratched its surface, but close enough to experience the desolation of the century-long Silence during which the victors re-engineered the inner worlds to suit their desires, abandoning the outer worlds to their own devices: the horrors of famine, drought, pollution, a cultural and political isolation so devastating that planets burned out there, their own squabbles raging into limited conquests, subjugated populations put to the sword, the light, the dinner table. Taboo became norm in that vast starvation, that vast cesspool of decaying genes, mutation and stench, moons spun out of orbit in desperate gambits to win wars the underlying flashpoints of which no one any longer remembered.