Beyond the Rift (9 page)

“
Human
empire.
Our
empire.” Suddenly Dix’s hands have stopped twitching. Suddenly he stands still as stone.

I snort. “What do you know about humans?”

“
Am
one.”

“You’re a fucking trilobite. You ever see what comes
out
of those gates once they’re online?”

“Mostly nothing.” He pauses, thinking back. “Couple of—ships once, maybe.”

“Well, I’ve seen a lot more than that, and believe me, if those things were
ever
human it was a passing phase.”

“But—”

“Dix—” I take a deep breath, try to get back on message. “Look, it’s not your fault. You’ve been getting all your info from a moron stuck on a rail. But we’re not doing this for Humanity, we’re not doing it for Earth. Earth is
gone
, don’t you understand that? The sun scorched it black a billion years after we left. Whatever we’re working for, it—it won’t even
talk
to us.”

“Yeah? Then why do this? Why not just, just
quit
?”

He really doesn’t know.

“We tried,” I say.

“And?”

“And your
chimp
shut off our life support.”

For once, he has nothing to say.

“It’s a
machine
, Dix. Why can’t you get that? It’s
programmed
. It can’t change.”

“
We’re
machines, just built from different things.
We
change.”

“Yeah? Last time I checked, you were sucking so hard on that thing’s tit you couldn’t even kill your cortical link.”

“How I
learn
. No
reason
to change.”

“How about acting like a damn
human
once in a while? How about developing a little rapport with the folks who might have to save your miserable life next time you go EVA? That enough of a
reason
for you? Because I don’t mind telling you, right now I don’t trust you as far as I could throw the tac tank. I don’t even know for sure who I’m talking to right now.”

“Not my fault.”
For the first time I see something outside the usual gamut of fear, confusion, and simpleminded computation playing across his face. “That’s
you
, that’s
all
of you. You talk—
sideways. Think
sideways. You all do, and it
hurts
.” Something hardens in his face. “Didn’t even need you online for this,” he growls. “Didn’t
want
you. Could have managed the whole build myself,
told
Chimp I could do it—”

“But the chimp thought you should wake me up anyway, and you always roll over for the chimp, don’t you? Because the chimp always knows best, the chimp’s your
boss
, the chimp’s your fucking
god.
Which is why I have to get out of bed to nursemaid some idiot savant who can’t even answer a hail without being led by the nose.” Something clicks in the back of my mind but I’m on a roll. “You want a
real
role
model? You want something to look up to? Forget the chimp. Forget the mission. Look out the forward scope, why don’t you? Look at what your precious chimp wants to run over because it happens to be in the way. That thing is better than any of us. It’s smarter, it’s peaceful, it doesn’t wish us any harm at—”

“How can you know that? Can’t know that!”

“No,
you
can’t know that, because you’re fucking
stunted
. Any normal caveman would see it in a second, but
you—
”

“That’s crazy,” Dix hisses at me. “
You’re
crazy. You’re
bad
.”

“
I’m
bad!” Some distant part of me hears the giddy squeak in my voice, the borderline hysteria.

“For the mission.” Dix turns his back and stalks away.

My hands are hurting. I look down, surprised: my fists are clenched so tightly that my nails cut into the flesh of my palms. It takes a real effort to open them again.

I almost remember how this feels. I used to feel this way all the time. Way back when everything
mattered
; before passion faded to ritual, before rage cooled to disdain. Before Sunday Ahzmundin, eternity’s warrior, settled for heaping insults on stunted children.

We were incandescent back then. Parts of this ship are still scorched and uninhabitable, even now. I remember this feeling.

This is how it feels to be awake.

I am awake, and I am alone, and I am sick of being outnumbered by morons. There are rules and there are risks and you don’t wake the dead on a whim, but fuck it. I’m calling reinforcements.

Dix has got to have other parents, a father at least, he didn’t get that Y chromo from me. I swallow my own disquiet and check the manifest; bring up the gene sequences; cross-reference.

Huh. Only one other parent: Kai. I wonder if that’s just coincidence, or if the chimp drew too many conclusions from our torrid little fuckfest back in the Cyg Rift. Doesn’t matter. He’s as much yours as mine, Kai, time to step up to the plate, time to—

Oh shit. Oh no. Please no.

(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
Eri
’s hull, a hail-Mary emergency crawl between. They made it back inside but not before the blue-shifted background cooked them in their suits. They kept breathing for hours afterwards, 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 backwards, eyes wide as telescopes, the blood already blooming on his mouth.

“
Said
I could come back—!” he squeals, scrambling backwards 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 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 towards 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 lightyears, and I am so very lonely.

“I’m sorry,” I whisper, and lean forward, and lick the gore 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 antilibidinals 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?