(There are rules. And there are risks.)
Three builds back, it says. Kai and Connie. Both of them. One airlock jammed, the next too far away along Ert’s hull, a hail-Mary emergency crawl between. They made it back inside but not before the blueshifted background cooked them in their suits. They kept breathing for hours afterward, talked and moved and cried as if they were still alive, while their insides broke down and bled out.
There were two others awake that shift, two others left to clean up the mess. Ishmael and—
“Um, you said—”
“You fucker!” I leap up and hit my son hard in the face, ten seconds’ heartbreak with ten million years’ denial raging behind it. I feel teeth give way behind his lips. He goes over backward, eyes wide as telescopes, the blood already blooming on his mouth.
“Said I could come back—!” he squeals, scrambling backward along the deck.
“He was your fucking father! You knew, you were there! He died right in front of you and you didn’t even tell me!”
“I—I—”
“Why didn’t you tell me, you asshole? The chimp told you to lie, is that it? Did you—”
“Thought you knew!” he cries. “Why wouldn’t you know?”
My rage vanishes like air through a breach. I sag back into the ’pod, face in hands.
“Right there in the log,” he whimpers. “All along. Nobody hid it. How could you not know?”
“I did,” I admit dully. “Or I—I mean…”
I mean I didn’t know, but it’s not a surprise, not really, not down deep. You just—stop looking, after a while.
There are rules.
“Never even asked,” my son says softly. “How they were doing.”
I raise my eyes. Dix regards me wide-eyed from across the room, backed up against the wall, too scared to risk bolting past me to the door. “What are you doing here?” I ask tiredly.
His voice catches. He has to try twice: “You said I could come back. If I burned out my link…”
“You burned out your link.”
He gulps and nods. He wipes blood with the back of his hand.
“What did the chimp say about that?”
“He said—it said that it was okay,” Dix says, in such a transparent attempt to suck up that I actually believe, in that instant, that he might really be on his own.
“So you asked its permission.” He begins to nod, but I can see the tell in his face. “Don’t bullshit me, Dix.”
“He—actually suggested it.”
“I see.”
“So we could talk,” Dix adds.
“What do you want to talk about?”
He looks at the floor and shrugs.
I stand and walk toward him. He tenses but I shake my head, spread my hands. “It’s okay. It’s okay.” I lean back against the wall and slide down until I’m beside him on the deck.
We just sit there for a while.
“It’s been so long,” I say at last.
He looks at me, uncomprehending. What does long even mean, out here?
I try again. “They say there’s no such thing as altruism, you know?”
His eyes blank for an instant, and grow panicky, and I know that he’s just tried to ping his link for a definition and come up blank. So we are alone. “Altruism,” I explain. “Unselfishness. Doing something that costs you but helps someone else.” He seems to get it. “They say every selfless act ultimately comes down to manipulation or kin-selection or reciprocity or something, but they’re wrong. I could—”
I close my eyes. This is harder than I expected.
“I could have been happy just knowing that Kai was okay, that Connie was happy. Even if it didn’t benefit me one whit, even if it cost me, even if there was no chance I’d ever see either of them again. Almost any price would be worth it, just to know they were okay.
“Just to believe they were…”
So you haven’t seen her for the past five builds. So he hasn’t drawn your shift since Sagittarius. They’re just sleeping. Maybe next time.
“So you don’t check,” Dix says slowly. Blood bubbles on his lower lip; he doesn’t seem to notice.
“We don’t check.” Only I did, and now they’re gone. They’re both gone. Except for those little cannibalized nucleotides the chimp recycled into this defective and maladapted son of mine.
We’re the only warm-blooded creatures for a thousand light-years, and I am so very lonely.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper, and lean forward, and lick the blood from his bruised and bloody lips.
Back on Earth—back when there was an Earth—there were these little animals called cats. I had one for a while. Sometimes I’d watch him sleep for hours: paws and whiskers and ears all twitching madly as he chased imaginary prey across whatever landscapes his sleeping brain conjured up.
My son looks like that when the chimp worms its way into his dreams.
It’s almost too literal for metaphor: the cable runs into his head like some kind of parasite, feeding through old-fashioned fiberop now that the wireless option’s been burned away. Or force-feeding, I suppose; the poison flows into Dix’s head, not out of it.
I shouldn’t be here. Didn’t I just throw a tantrum over the violation of my own privacy? ( Just. Twelve lightdays ago. Everything’s relative.) And yet, I can see no privacy here for Dix to lose: no decorations on the walls, no artwork or hobbies, no wraparound console. The sex toys ubiquitous in every suite sit unused on their shelves; I’d have assumed he was on antilibinals if recent experience hadn’t proven otherwise.
What am I doing? Is this some kind of perverted mothering instinct, some vestigial expression of a Pleistocene maternal subroutine? Am I that much of a robot, has my brain stem sent me here to guard my child?
To guard my mate?
Lover or larva, it hardly matters: his quarters are an empty shell, there’s nothing of Dix in here. That’s just his abandoned body lying there in the pseudopod, fingers twitching, eyes flickering beneath closed lids in vicarious response to wherever his mind has gone.
They don’t know I’m here. The chimp doesn’t know because we burned out its prying eyes a billion years ago, and my son doesn’t know I’m here because—well, because for him, right now, there is no here.
What am I supposed to make of you, Dix? None of this makes sense. Even your body language looks like you grew it in a vat—but I’m far from the first human being you’ve seen. You grew up in good company, with people I know, people I trust. Trusted. How did you end up on the other side? How did they let you slip away?
And why didn’t they warn me about you?
Yes, there are rules. There is the threat of enemy surveillance during long, dead nights, the threat of—other losses. But this is unprecedented. Surely someone could have left something, some clue buried in a metaphor too subtle for the simpleminded to decode…
I’d give a lot to tap into that pipe, to see what you’re seeing now. Can’t risk it, of course; I’d give myself away the moment I tried to sample anything except the basic baud, and—
—wait a second—
That baud rate’s way too low. That’s not even enough for hi-res graphics, let alone tactile and olfac. You’re embedded in a wireframe world at best.
And yet, look at you go. The fingers, the eyes—like a cat, dreaming of mice and apple pies. Like me, replaying the long-lost oceans and mountaintops of Earth before I learned that living in the past was just another way of dying in the present. The bit rate says this is barely even a test pattern; the body says you’re immersed in a whole other world. How has that machine tricked you into treating such thin gruel as a feast?