Now we’re in the middle of another vicious storm, surrounded by even more death, and I can’t find the right thing to say to make her open up.
So instead, I talk to Bianca about the Hydroponic Garden Massacre, when her ancestors killed mine onboard the Mothership. The Nagpur compartment was all but wiped out, thousands of people, and the survivors were “integrated” into the other six populations, their children raised to forget. There are no pictures, no firsthand accounts, but I sneaked inside the library at Betterment University and found one slender sociology monograph written in Noölang, full of bland statistics that made my heart go cold.
“Everybody talks plenty about what happened with the other compartments, both good and bad,” I say in Xiosphanti. “But nobody ever wants to talk about Nagpur.”
“That’s because it’s not constructive,” Bianca replies in Xiosphanti for once. “We can’t focus on building a better future if we spend all our time agonizing about things that happened a long time ago. And you won’t get people to help you change the world by telling them they’re descended from criminals. We all spend too much time caught up in the past already, and looking backward all the time is killing us.”
“But everything is different now because of what happened then,” I say. “Everyone is here, and alive, because the people from Nagpur aren’t. My people.”
“Your ‘people’ are the Xiosphanti,” Bianca says, “and they’re still suffering right now. There are plenty of atrocities and selfish decisions to worry about without having to reach so far back in time. So many mistakes, just since the start of the Circadian Restoration.” She speaks Xiosphanti as if the red-and-blue smoke just erupted, and addresses me as a fellow student.
“Ahmad says that everything that’s wrong with us is because of things that happened on the Mothership,” I say. “Maybe the past is all we are. The same people who flushed thousands of bodies into space went on to invent Circadianism.”
Even though Bianca is trying to tell me that the mass murder of my ancestors doesn’t matter, that wild creature inside me is climbing all over itself with happiness, because at least Bianca and I are debating again, like in our dorm room.
Bianca gropes and finds a hidden control on one wall that causes some privacy screens to roll down, covering the window and blocking our view of the dead bodies hissing in the rain. Now the two of us perch behind shuttered windows, and this feels even more like old times.
“What would it even look like for Xiosphant to be fair?” I ask.
“I don’t know.” Bianca snaps a little, like she’s not in the mood to talk anymore. “I suppose we would need to redefine how we think about ‘work.’ Like, some jobs you can’t do your whole life. Some jobs are almost twice as hard as others, and maybe those shifts need to be shorter. Some people have a higher capacity than others. Work is more complicated than people realize.”
Bianca still has the look of someone who hasn’t slept, more than a nod here or there, in forever. Her head darts, like a cat searching for prey, and she stares, as if she needs to see things for a while before the image settles.
“Who makes those decisions, though? How do you create a system that allocates—”
“I don’t know. Stop asking me weird questions. I don’t know if you noticed, but we’re in the middle of a killzone. I tried to warn you that Argelo was about to stop being fun.” Bianca gets up and pours herself another drink, grimacing. She tries to make one for me, too, but I push it away.
I can’t hear the fighting outside, because this restaurant has next-level soundproofing.
Bianca comes and sits next to me, touching my shoulder with one palm. “I know that you went and did something reckless. I saw the windburn on your neck, and I heard that Reynold is dead. Why didn’t you tell me what you were doing?” She’s switched back to Argelan, as if to say the schoolgirl conversation is over. “You said you trusted me, but you really don’t.”
“You’re right, I did something dumb,” I say in Argelan. I can’t keep all of the bitterness out of my voice. I’ve held a million inquests inside my own head, but this guilt remains as fresh as ever. “People died, and it was my fault. I was trying to do something good.”
“I’m sorry,” Bianca says, still touching my shoulder. I feel myself relax into her side. “I know what it’s like to want to make things better, and to have it turn to shit. That’s how we got here, right?”
She goes to get herself some more liquor, and I say, “I do trust you.”
Bianca looks at me, drink in hand, and seems to reach a decision. “When this fucking rain stops, if it ever does, I’m going to show you everything. You can see what we’ve been working on. Fuck the timetable.”
I feel like I’m starting to hallucinate from lack of sleep, so I lie down on the one couch next to the bar, across from the window. I don’t expect Bianca to join me, but then I feel her grudgingly work herself into the space beside me. I feel safe, as though her decelerating breath on my face is a hopeful sign that we’re still sleepmates, and also road buddies. Our breathing synchronizes into slow iambs, and I drift off.
Then I jerk awake, panting as though I’ve run a hundred kilometers and I’ll never be able to force enough air into my lungs. I don’t even remember the dream I was in, but I’m drowning, bloody choking, and then I realize that next to me Bianca is screaming.
Bianca’s voice comes in a high rattle, much too loud. She pummels the cushion next to her with both fists. I can’t hear what she’s screaming, but it’s in a rhythm with her punches.
Bianca wakes too, and we both just breathe for a moment, looking opposite ways. She gets up to fetch herself another drink, and smoothes out her shimmering dress.
She sits beside me again, but neither of us goes back to sleep.
We sit without talking, long enough for her drink to disappear and our dreams to feel like places we visited long ago. I hear sounds from the kitchen. I think either the fighting or the rain has stopped. Maybe both.
Maybe this is our last chance to have a conversation, just us two, before whatever is going to happen. “I miss you,” I say.
“Me too,” she says, staring at the reflective panels on the other end of this enormous space. We are two tiny blobs in a swirl of muted color.
“I really hoped that you and I would reinvent ourselves together,” I say, “when we came to Argelo. Everyone said you can be whoever you want here. I thought it would be just you and me, and we could make our own lives, without worrying about anyone else.”
“I never would have been happy.” Bianca shakes her head. “I can’t let go of what happened before. I lost everything, and I was forced to leave Xiosphant, and I couldn’t let that be the end of it.”
“You didn’t lose everything. You didn’t lose me.”
I feel the way I did when the boat flipped almost on its side, on the Sea of Murder: shivering, my insides going sideways.
She acts as if I didn’t say anything. “I never would have been satisfied living a small life, after everything I lost. And now I’ve found a way to make my life count for something. To be the person I was always meant to be.”
“I wish I had been enough for you.”
“I miss our old friendship just as much as you do, but that was a long time ago.” Bianca takes a breath, and her face closes up. “You died, and you made the decision to stay dead to me. And so I spent too long turning you into a perfect human being in my mind. A martyr, you know? The one good person in this shit-eating world. I hated myself for stealing that money and letting them take you, and I hated everyone who had anything to do with sending you into the night. I wanted to make them pay for what they took from us. I still want that. It’s all I think about.”