Nevertheless, I jerked back defensively. Helen recoiled like a cat who had touched something hot.
“You thought?”
“This might be a control chassis.”
We were both, I realized, running full-on into a wall of culture shock and miscommunication. Except Helen probably didn’t even have the concepts to express the dislocation and lack of basic knowledge she was feeling.
I tuned myself back until I stopped hyperventilating. “It’s an adaptive device to help with a pain syndrome. My exo helps me move, and it helps me manage my discomfort.”
Discomfort. That clean medical term that helps you separate yourself from what you’re feeling. Or what the patient is feeling.
Pain.
I didn’t tell her that without it, I wouldn’t be able to stand up under gravity. I didn’t tell her that without it, either I would have to lie around in a haze of chemical analgesics, unable to focus my mind, or I would have to tune my body out to the point that I wouldn’t have been able to rely on my proprioception—and I also wouldn’t have been able to feel it when I nailed my foot into something and broke a toe.
Hell, I wouldn’t have been able to feel it if I nailed my foot to something, full stop.
In the moments when I was struggling to get my reactivity under control, Helen had not spoken. When I looked at her again, she continued as if she had not lagged: “You’re… defective?”
Carefully, I unclenched my fist. She was an archaic, damaged AI—worse, one programmed for utterly different cultural constraints and with hundreds of ans of experience in an environment where those assumptions were never challenged. Where there were no outsiders, and no outsider ideas.
I was starting to think it would be a good idea to look up the backstory on Big Rock Candy Mountain’s crew demographics, though.
“I have a congenital condition. Would your crew consider me defective?”
“You won’t reproduce, of course,” she said, turning aside. Whoever had programmed her body language had done a good job. Her dropped shoulder and bowed head clearly telegraphed distress and dismay. And submission.
I forced my voice to remain quiet. I would have had to tune to keep it calm. “I already have. My daughter lives on Wisewell with her other mother.”
Life is a funny, terrible thing. We laugh at it because the utter banality of its tragedies renders them constant and unremarkable.
I hadn’t seen my daughter in person since she was eighteen standard months old. My ex-wife did not approve of me accepting a tour of duty rotation that would take me offworld for the whole ten ans. I felt I could not turn it down. For reasons of service and obligation—justifying my existence, if you like, when I’d been told for so long I was a drain on society—and also because I was interested in exomed, and a billet on a Judiciary ship was the best way to get that experience. And to get better medical care. And because getting out of a gravity well for a while seemed like a dream come true, if I were honest.
I’d promised I’d come back at the end of the tour.
I took the reassignment to Core General instead, because I felt like that was a place where I could really be useful. I can’t blame Alessi for cutting me loose when she did. I’d deserved it.
So I talk to my daughter in packets, as much as possible, though sometimes I go a long time without hearing from her. It seems Rache has grown up to be a fine young adult. I might have gone back to Wisewell and sued for partial custody. I might have. I could have gone back after my stint in Judiciary.
But it turned out… I couldn’t.
Not when Core General approved my request for an exo rotation. That was a dream come true, and the opportunity of a lifetime. So few doctors even get to train at Core General—let alone come on staff.
And I’d come to believe deeply in that place, but even so, I was more surprised when Starlight—the ox-sector administrator—requested I stay on and join the pilot ambulance program.
Alessi made the right choices, I think, when she cut me loose. She could have waited for me, been patient and self-sacrificing. She could have followed me into space and dragged Rache along.
But she’s right. I’m a terrible mother.
I’m a very good doctor, though. And maybe it’s good to concentrate on the things you excel at.
It doesn’t mean that I’m okay with being a terrible mother. Or that we never regret the sacrifices we make to get what we want, or what we think we need. I had all of that piled up behind me, all those feelings surging under a brittle layer of chemical calm as my fox tried to compensate for sudden, massive emotional deregulation.
The conversation didn’t get any better.
“You’re female,” Helen said.
“Yes,” I said.
“How is it that your daughter lives with her mother, if she does not live with you?”
Oh. Big Rock Candy Mountain was one of those ships. “Because I contributed half her genetic material. But Alessi is considered to be her custodial mother under Synarche law because of legal technicalities. And none of this is really any of your business.”
“Oh,” Helen said. Then: “Yes, in my crew, you would not be considered a viable member. I understand that there is some emotional impact for you to that statement?”
It certainly doesn’t inspire me to help you save them. It doesn’t make me want to safeguard their lives and assign resources—and my precious time—to their care.
I drew a deep breath and held it until it hurt. Helen could be enlightened. Her crew could be educated, if they survived. It was not their fault that their society suffered deep-rooted sophipathologies.
Their ancestors had fled Terra when Terra seemed to be in its death throes. My ancestors had been too poor or stubborn or inessential to go in that first desperate refugee wave of emigration. But one thing about people is that we are remarkably bad at lying down to die. So my ancestors had adapted: adapted to managing limited resources, adapted to controlling their own atavistic urges through technology.
Adapted themselves to adulthood as a species.
Helen’s crew might have a hard time getting used to that, coming from a society that was at once more individualistic and less accommodating. Maybe they would all run off and join the pirates. It sounded like they would fit right in.
But no, they were my species, and therefore after a fashion it was my responsibility to help them not embarrass the rest of us. I had to help them, as I had to help any other syster—because I valued their lives. But moreover, they were humanity’s lost scion, stuck forever in adolescence, and so it was humanity’s job to raise them right and teach them how to fit into a multicultural, multispecies civilization.
Oh, and the historians and archinformists were going to flip their lids with joy. But none of this was really my field of endeavor. I might let the hospital’s psych specialists do the heavy lifting with regard to helping them adapt.
So as viscerally as I wanted to go space the lot of them, I was grateful for the calming influence of my fox keeping me more or less under control.
“Some emotional impact, yes,” I agreed, when I could make my voice calm. “I realize it is part of your program and your guiding ethos, Helen, but times have changed a great deal since Big Rock Candy Mountain left Terra. And some of your crew’s ethoses were, I suspect, considered fringe beliefs even at the time. There are some changes worth internalizing. Eugenicism is an oft-repeated sophipathology of… previous times. Occasionally it became very popular. One of those times was during the Eschaton, when the ships like yours left an Earth they thought to be dying.”