Periphery (11 page)

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TS:
Very shortly, I will have been a civil servant for 20 years. You do less time for committing murder. Combine that premise with a love of science fiction, and “Mind Games” was born.

Once upon a time…
. That’s how stories are supposed to start, or at least that’s how Mam’Sook started them when I was a little girl up in Coldwater. Except this story can’t start that way, because in this one, Once and Time don’t meet. Maybe I knew her, once, maybe then she knew me back, but time itself got fractured, broken apart and badly mended, when our ship wrecked and lost us, and in the process we lost ourselves. So…maybe sometime I loved a woman, and her name was Tisha Rho.

I have all the notes on my log, which I kept because my daddy, Prosper Sr., told me always to keep a journal in case you got lost in the sweet-not-yet; what the cosmologists call the adjacent possible, and the workhorses code in screaming fire-panic red. Daddy had sailed the sweet-not-yet himself, which is why I’m an only, and why I’m Prosper Larkin, Junior, even though I’m female. He’d earned the christening-right, taking the chances he did, and I’m proud to bear his name. He was time-lost just after my fifteenth birthday, came back chronophagic, a burning, wasting shell, died of old age at forty-one, and left me the bond that paid for my wires and my training, access to space and beyond.

Which was how I met Tisha Rho. I’m from Coldwater, up on the northern edge of the Reclamation; we’re farm folks and shipbreakers from forever. Tisha was from Charity-the-city, and all her family worked in water. She was the first one to get her wires, first one to go into space since the family came to New Corinth, and they didn’t know quite what to make of her. They did know exactly what they made of me, and they didn’t like it one bit. It’s a funny thing, because Charity has a reputation for looseness, and the Edge Townships are generally hard-shell observant, but it was her family that got queasy about her loving a woman, and mine that shrugged and said, well, so long as you’re happy… We met on the work lines at Jefferston Port, both of us working nights so we could go to school days for the coding skills we’d need to go into space. When we graduated, the sorters paired us up right away, and we went up to the rock belts that had been the moon called Charity.

New Corinth had three moons, Faith, Hope, and the greatest, Charity, and the plan at settlement was to bring them all down and use them to build the systems that would reclaim the planet. We were one of the last planets where terraforming was begun, and one of the ones where terraforming was banned before it was finished, so what’s left of Charity-the-moon spangles New Corinth’s skies, and Charity-the-city straddles the artificial channels that tame the Big River, and send water and fertilizer north as needed. But there’s still a lot of raw minerals left in the debris ring that fills Charity’s old orbit, and there are plenty of companies willing to stake you to a job in the ring. Of course, with jump-and-jostle, JSTL, just-slower-than-light, you flip in and out of the sweet-not-yet, and every time you run the risk of getting time-lost.

Mostly we were lucky, or so my log says. We had our minor dyschronias, like the chronorrhea that made your hair fall out and finger and toenails shed; once a brief, scary bout of chronal sclerosis, where the old words and memories choked the new, so I could remember everything except the thing I wanted, but even that had faded fairly quickly. We had a good workhorse, out of the Petesider lines, and regular clients in Glasstown and Jefferston and Comfort, so we were able to make a steady job of it. Not a bad life, really, or at least that’s how the log showed it. There were other entries, too, that didn’t say anything outright, but somehow sent ripples of emotion through me, echoes of passion, of love, of simple comfortable togetherness. That’s the kind of achronic I was: I’d lost access to a bunch of forebrain memories, mostly recent ones, but the emotions were still there, feelings without context, and I had my log to give me most of that.

Tisha Rho was the other kind. I don’t know why it hit her harder—maybe it was that I’d been tied into the horse when the jump went wrong—but she’d come out of the sweet-not-yet full-blown achronic, unable to form new memories or access old ones without the help of a prosthesis. And while I was in the hospital, trying to get my own brain back in order, her family came and spirited her away, and when I saw her again, she looked through me like she’d never seen me before. I asked around, bribed a nurse’s aide, and found out her family had written me out of the prosthesis’s programming. They could do it, too, because they held her proxy, something that made me stop a bit when I found out about it. If Tisha Rho hadn’t given me her proxy—and I hadn’t given her mine, come to that—then maybe this relationship wasn’t all I thought it was. But when I went back and read the log, the feelings were all there, rolling and strong as a river under the surface of the words, and I knew what I had to do.

I hadn’t been out of rehab all that long myself when I heard from friends that Tisha Rho was out of the hospital and home with her family in Charity-the-city. I was down on the breaker beaches, working any job to make enough of a stake to get myself back into space, but when I heard that, I put in my notice, picked up my pay, and hitched a ride to Charity with a nephew of my sister’s husband. He dropped me off at the midlevel entrances, and I started the long climb to find my cousin Bubba Hassan.

It’s always wet in Charity-the-city. Wet and loud. The channeled river roars through the lower levels, spinning the turbines that feed the city, pooling in the great holding basins to mitigate the summer droughts. Condensation drips from the arched ceilings and little streams collect and murmur under the grates; sometimes, at the equinoxes, the lowest levels generate their own rain, and you can hear it tapping under your feet and gurgling away down the drains. It’s not until you get to Deck Fifteen that things start to dry out. That’s where Tisha Rho’s family had their shop, and where my cousin Bubba had his office-apartment.

Everybody has a cousin like Bubba Hassan. He’s the one the family deplores—the one who ran off to space, or went into a brokerage, anything with a lot of risk and a faintly shady reward. He’s also the one you turn to when things get weird. I’d called him from the dock, and he was waiting for me at his open door; a broad shouldered, dark-eyed man about my own height, with a belly that was starting to strain his loose shirt. We embraced—here in Charity, the observances are less strict, and anyway, we’re family—and he flipped the sign on his door to closed as he beckoned me inside.

“So you’re back from the beaches, Junie,” he said. “What brings you to me?”

“I need your help,” I said, as if he hadn’t guessed, and Bubba gave a crooked smile.

“Tisha Rho?”

“I heard she was out of rehab,” I said. “I need to see her.”

He waved me on ahead of him, through the little office where he brokered the spoil from the wrecked and salvaged starships that landed on the beaches of New Corinth’s southern sphere, through the tiny, formal reception room, and on into the kitchen that was at the back of the apartment. It was crowded, homey, smelling of peppers and the oil a chicken had been fried in. I took a seat at the work-scarred table. He turned to the stove, moving a copper pot from a back burner to the front, and I smelled coffee and chicory and the coarse black sugar they grow in Moss Point. He made the coffee without speaking, concentrating on the rhythm as it boiled and subsided and boiled again, then finally poured us each a tall glass and set them, foam-topped, on the table.

“Tisha Rho,” he said, and I nodded.

“I need to see her.”

“What if she don’t need to see you?” he asked, and wrapped his big hands around the heavy glass.

“They had no right to write me out,” I said. “We were lovers, she and I, and they can’t change that—”

“Even if she don’t remember it?” Bubba asked. “That makes it the same as it never happened.”

I stopped, scowling, silenced by a fear I hadn’t dared to name. Suppose she didn’t want to remember? Suppose she wanted to be the person her parents made her? She’d said, before, that she was sorry sometimes to have disappointed them. Was I right to try to change that? But she’d chosen me as much as I’d chosen her; we’d been happy together. Surely I had the right to try for that again. “They edited it out. It still happened. Not saying so doesn’t make it disappear.”

Bubba nodded slowly. “All right, I grant you that. But she still don’t remember.”

“I’ve been doing research,” I said. That was a small word for the hours I’d spend in the women’s dormitory at Allie’s Point hunched over a pocket pod, plugs stuffed in my ears to drown out the constant chatter. I’d had to learn to read the medical files, and then learn to understand them, but I’d finally found an answer that gave me hope. “Achronia is the inability to form new memories, right? And the inability to access memories previously formed. But achronics usually show some ability to care for themselves, to walk and talk and dress themselves, things like that.”

Bubba nodded. “Yeah.”

“It varies, of course. Some people have more skills left than others, but nearly all of them have some; it’s called implicit memory. It’s a connection made in the brain a different way, usually for things that you’ve done so often that you don’t even think about knowing how to do them. When I was in therapy, doing jump-and-jostle in the sims was like that for me. So I’m thinking, we were together long enough—ten years, almost; if we get together, meet face to face, she’s going to know she knows me. Somewhere down inside she’s going to know me, and she’s going to love me like she did before.”

“Sims ain’t real,” Bubba said. “And you weren’t as bad hurt as her.”

“I’m not just talking from me,” I said. “They’ve done studies; I’ve got the files—”

He waved them away. “No, I believe you. Aw, hell, you deserve the chance.”

I was quiet for a moment, not knowing how to say I was grateful. “What I’m looking for is a place I can meet her. Without her folks knowing and making a fuss.”

He nodded, thinking, then pushed himself up from the table. “You sit. I’ll see what I can do.”

In the end, it took him a couple of days to find the right event, but at last he called me with the news. I sat up cautiously in my cubby in the tube hotel—even in Charity-the-city, I couldn’t stay with him without scandalizing both our families—and squinted at the face in the communications screen.

“Tisha Rho is going to be at a Sisters’ Dance tomorrow night,” my cousin said. “I’ve got you a ticket if you want one.”

The Sisters’ Dances were usually for women who were too young for marriage or who were opting out for some other reason, a place to go and dance and have a good time without the pressure to make a connection. It wasn’t exactly the right place to try to remind Tisha Rho of who I was and what we’d been. In fact, it was exactly the wrong place; but, on the other hand, it was the one place her family was likely to let her go to on her own. I nodded before I could change my mind.

The dance was held at one of the old hotels on Level Eighteen, one of the ones built before the terraforming stopped, when we thought there would be tourists coming to New Corinth to see the amazing things we’d made. It had held up better than most, the carved facade that channeled a waterfall in nearly perfect repair, and the dancing lights that spelled out Manning’s Rainwater all intact, shifting from blue to green to gold and back again. I had dressed as best I could, fumbling with styles and makeup I hadn’t worn for fifteen years, never had worn, really; the Edge is nothing like Charity. I was nervous as I made my way under the bubbling water-arch and presented my ticket to the doorman. He touched two fingers to his forehead, and as I passed him I caught sight of my reflection in the polished stones behind him. A tall woman, with skin that said she’d worked out-of-doors in all weathers, short hair wrapped in a bright scarf. I looked country, and that was what I needed now. I managed a smile for the woman in the mirroring wall, and climbed the stairs to the ballroom.

My aunt Pete had sent me to the girl dances in Coldwater when I was twelve, and for an instant it felt as though I’d stepped back in space and time. The room was full of women, clustered at the buffet and along the walls. The air was full of music and bird-call voices and waving hands and scarves, and I was a girl again, new-wrapped in a woman’s scarf, eager and half afraid of desires I didn’t then know how to name. I’d always loved to dance—I’d met all my lovers at dances, except for Tisha Rho. I shook those thoughts away, and smiled at the nearest hostess, who advanced on me with outstretched hands.

We exchanged names and cool, cousinly kisses, half-shouting to be heard over the music and the clamor of conversation. She pointed out the buffet, much grander than anything the girl dances had managed, with an abstract ice carving and a service bar pouring tiny glasses of something thick and dark gold, then beckoned to another woman in from the breaker beaches. She asked where I’d been working, how I’d found it; the Sisters’ Dances are good for money if not for love, and I gave fair answers, but all the while my eyes slid past her, looking for Tisha Rho. The breaker woman sensed my inattention, made a polite excuse, and left me.

I wandered toward the service bar, not really wanting a drink, but needing to stay moving. The room was a whirl of color, bright scarves, bright dresses, a LaFate Township woman with her hair dyed peacock blue, a daring girl who’d let her scarf slip to her shoulders, baring sleek copper hair. The music pulsed through the conversations, the singer’s words lost in the wail of strings. And then I saw her. She was standing with a group of women, yet not part of them, looking away while they talked among themselves. A woman my own height, her skin faded from tan by her time in rehab. The rust-red of her dress, long-sleeved, like mine, to hide the hospital scars, had been bought to suit her darker skin. She looked tired, shadows smudged beneath her almond eyes, and yet she was unmistakably herself. I made myself breathe, and breathe again, and then I made my way through the crowd to her side.