I’m alone in the nest, still trying not to sleep—too many bad dreams—but drifting off anyway, when I feel a light touch on my wrist and open my eyes with a startled moan. Ishida hangs on a stretched cord a meter away, her metal arm and the metal half of her face gleaming in the light from a strip outside the round opening. Her hand hovers over my wrist, shining fingers suspended, silent, no quiver or betrayal of flesh—steady hand, steady body. One of the most steady of our Skyrines.
“What’s it like?” she asks after a murmured apology for waking me.
“What’s what like?”
“Being dosed with tea.”
I stretch a little. Exercise is difficult under these conditions, consisting mostly of choosing a partner—usually Tak or Joe—and trying to run in a circle inside a nest, or wrestle while hanging on to canes. I feel stiff and unsure. This isn’t the first time I’ve noticed Ishida paying attention to me, and I’ve certainly paid attention to her, but there was a kind of lost cause about the whole situation, the attraction, for so many reasons, and now I’m embarrassed that she’s made the first move. We haven’t exactly violated any code, but I always thought a beautiful woman should have the luxury of not having to make the first approach—if this is an approach.
Truth is, she is beautiful—strange and strong and beautiful. I’ve never known what to make of her or her situation. But now she’s neatly reversed the puzzle.
“Kind of like dreaming while awake,” I say. “There’s a part…” I pause, not sure she wants details.
“Go on,” she says, not actually touching my wrist.
“There’s a part that’s separate.” I tell her about the sensation of word balloons being filled, which was true for both Captain Coyle and often enough for Bird Girl. “But they aren’t actually word balloons, just parts of me that aren’t really from me.” I shrug.
“I get it,” she says. “Can I tell you what I feel, sometimes?”
“Sure,” I say.
“After I was hurt—in training on Socotra—I was taken to a field hospital and things sort of blanked out.”
I nod. “Yeah,” I say.
“When I woke up, the surgeons and the mechanics were eager to talk to me. They were Japanese, and very proud of what they had done.”
“It looks like fine work,” I say. “And you’re still here.”
“But everything felt different. They’d saved most of my internal organs, but hooked them up to a layer of what they called false tissue, to pad the metal parts when I bumped around. Plastic buffers and slings. Combat-ready, they said. I could do anything I wanted. I’d live a good, long, active life.”
“Wow,” I say.
“Felt strange to move.”
“I bet.”
“But none of them wanted to spend much time with me,” she says. “Always busy. Moving on. They spoke Japanese, not English, but used an inflection, like they were speaking to a servant, an untouchable. A Korean. That made me sad, but I had seen it before. Female soldiers… We get kind of lost, even in the new Japan.”
“Wow,” I say. Tak had never mentioned such attitudes, but we’d heard about them.
“Do you have things that protect you, cushion you, when you speak with Bird Girl or the bugs?”
“I don’t speak with the archives now. That was back on Titan, and we—I mean, humans—pretty much wiped out those voices.”
“I always thought that part was fascinating. Captain Jacobi gets weirded out, but we—the Japanese sisters—we feel a little more familiar with the idea—with being hooked up to kami. Maybe just from anime, but… more familiar.”
“I remember the markings on your suits. Senketsu and Junketsu. Anime?”
“Old anime, old-fashioned. Lots of jiggle. Nothing like that in Japan now. Mostly heroes and history and emperors and such.”
“Right,” I say. Oddly, my sense of discomfort is fading. I’m next to her, she’s talking to me, more than ice has been broken—a new protocol is being established.
Technically, Skyrines are not supposed to open up to the possibility of anything sexual or romantic, but of course we do. Some of us get in trouble, but usually only when rank is involved, or one of a pair or team gets out of bounds, professionally and emotionally, and feels left out, badly used. Because of that, and because my stations have been hard and desperate, I’ve never established anything I could call a romance with a Skyrine. I’ve thought about it in a vague way, of course, but it’s never come up.
And now it seems to be coming up, starting out as a letting down of the barriers, telling stories—enjoying company. While alone. Which I am. My roommates have all cleared out, or I’ve left them in the other cubbies and set out on my own. Maybe they knew before I did.
Other than to DJ or Joe or Tak, I haven’t talked much at all about the links, what it’s like to be dosed with the tea… not much at all.
Ishida asks, “When you interact with Bird Girl, what do you see?”
“Mostly hear, rarely see,” I say. “Sometimes there are hints of deep stuff, but mostly it’s what she wants me to hear. When Captain Coyle faded, she handed me over to Bird Girl, and she served as bug steward, hooked me up to the archives on Titan, which she knew pretty well by then. DJ got hooked up to her as well, but Bird Girl seems to favor dealing with me.”
“I like DJ, but you’re different,” Ishida says.
“DJ is okay,” I say, as if giving her an out. “We’ve served together a long time. He’s a real friend, and he’s funnier than me.”
“But you’re the one I’m talking to,” Ishida says. My level of embarrassment returns. It would be very bad for my long-term opinion of myself if I said something awkward to this fellow Skyrine, either about her being Japanese, about those difficulties—we hear so many stories, and not all of them are true, probably—or being a Winter Soldier. Same there. So many points where I could get things very wrong. I do know it’s hard for female soldiers in Japan now, as everything has gotten so conservative, reverting to historical norms—but I have no idea what to say about that, what I know, and what crap I’ve just heard that’s all wrong.
And then her being half-metal. Sort of. Metal and colloid and plastic and all kinds of synthetics. Half-organic. She’s almost like an angel from Fiddler’s Green, most of her organs intact, saved, stuffed back in, fully functional.
I’m far more ignorant about all that.
So I stop talking and just tilt my head, big eyes, sad smile, like a real asshole. She skips past all this, cutting me substantial slack, and gets to her point.
“I need to talk to somebody who’s male and who I respect,” she says, “and who knows what it means to hook up with something that isn’t you. Something essential—but really different.”
“I’m listening,” I say. I’ve always preferred listening. The last girlfriend I had, back in Virginia Beach—and where is she now?—left me because she thought I didn’t care. I just listened more than I talked, and it turned out she took that all wrong. So off she went. We’d been together for two weeks. Longest I’ve ever been involved. Joe always seems to do better with women.
“Don’t take this wrong, the wrong way, but I’m not all there,” Ishida says with a kind of hiccup. “Not yet. I’m scheduled to be attached—that’s what they call it, but it hasn’t happened yet, there hasn’t been time. Does that bother you?”
I don’t know whether it does or not. Again, what boundaries can I cross and cause pain by so doing?
“You’re beautiful, I know that much,” I say.
She keeps staring at me, with one natural eye and one mechanical eye.