A raised eyebrow. “So I’ve seen.” Long Chau considered the cup for a while. The Shadow’s Child’s bots climbed up onto her face and head again. She let them, without even so much as a reaction. The dense, urgent pattern of her brain activity was now available to The Shadow’s Child. She’d had enough time now to build a model of what Long Chau considered normal, and nothing there was surprising.
“It’s not poisoned.” The smell of honeydreamer saturated the room, bringing back, for a brief moment, memories of The Shadow’s Child’s first disastrous attempt at cooking it, when the bots had failed to remove the carapaces and they had popped in the heat, sending shards flying all over her compartment.
“Of course it’s not,” Long Chau said, with a hint of annoyance. She raised it to the light, lips slightly parted; stared for a while longer. “It’s fascinating, isn’t it, that a few herbs and chemicals can have this effect?”
Hours of poring over Long Chau’s metabolism and brain patterns, reconstructing the drugs in her system—trying to find out which compounds would keep her functional, guessing at what she might call “slow thoughts”, wondering if the mixture would flat-out short-circuit her neurons, make her suicidal or, more likely, even more reckless and over-confident, with the risk she’d endanger her own life on a whim ... “Are you mocking my work?”
“On the contrary,” Long Chau said. Her face was set in a peculiar expression, one The Shadow’s Child couldn’t read. “Merely appreciating the value of localised miracles.” She sounded... utterly earnest, in a way that disarmed the angry reply The Shadow’s Child would have given her.
Silence stretched, long, uncomfortable. The Shadow’s Child became aware again of her core in the heartroom, of the steady beat that sustained her—pulsing muscles and optics and brain matter, holding her connectors in an unbreakable embrace. One two, one two...
In the cabin, Long Chau appeared utterly unfazed. She merely raised the cup to her lips after a long while, and drank from its thin rim in one long, slow go—didn’t even seem to breathe while doing so—and set it down on the table. “Shall we go?”
The Shadow’s Child didn’t need to move to dive into deep spaces. She’d already asked for permission from Traffic Harmony, and within deep spaces it wouldn’t matter if they overlapped another ship. She watched Long Chau, because it was her job.
A centiday since she’d taken the blend—fifteen outsider minutes—and no visible effect yet. The tea The Shadow’s Child had given Long Chau was a mix of a downy white Dragon Quills with a stronger, more full-bodied Prosperity Crescent, with fried starvine root and crushed honeydreamer, scattered among the downy leaves. She watched Long Chau’s vitals, saw the minute changes to breath and heartbeat. The hands moved a fraction faster as Long Chau got up and stared at the walls—through the walls.
“I’m not there,” The Shadow’s Child said.
“You’re in the heartroom. I know.” Long Chau’s voice was mildly irritated. “I’m familiar with shipminds, though I’ve seldom had the occasion to go into deep spaces.”
While she was speaking, The Shadow’s Child plunged into deep spaces—not far in, just enough on the edge that she could see Long Chau’s reactions. “Tell me about the corpse,” she said. Around her, the corridors shifted and changed. A faint, trembling sheen like spilled oil spread across the walls, always in the corner of one’s eyes. Outside, the same sheen stole across the habitats, the sun and the distant stars—a distorted rainbow of colour that slowly wiped them out. Her hull was awash with faint cold, the brisk flow of stellar wind around her replaced by a faint, continuous pressure. It should have felt like coming home—like a fish diving into a river at the end of a long, breathless interval onshore—but all she could feel within her was tautness, and the rapid beat from her heartroom, everything pulsing and contracting in ways she couldn’t control.
It would be fine. She wasn’t where it had happened. She wasn’t deep in—just at the very edges, just enough to keep Long Chau satisfied. It would be fine.
“You said any corpse would do,” she said.
“Of course.” Long Chau appeared utterly unfazed by deep spaces. The Shadow’s Child would have liked that to be a front, but Long Chau’s heartbeat, even and slow, said otherwise. “I’m writing a treatise on decomposition. How the human body changes in deep spaces is a shamefully undervalued area of study.”
“I can see why you’d be a success at local poetry clubs,” The Shadow’s Child said, wryly.
It didn’t seem to faze Long Chau. “I would be, if I had anything to do with them.” She looked around her. The walls had caved in now, receding in what seemed a long and profound distance; the table was folding back on itself, showing the metal it had been made from, the bots that had hammered it into shape—the broken scraps of what it’d be, when it finally broke down, every moment existing tightly folded on top of one another. “How deep are we?”
Two centidays since she’d taken the blend. She seemed fine. Unfair. Heartbeat normal, veins slightly dilated but not past the expected top of the range, pupil constriction slowly easing up—the activity map almost a match for when she’d sat in The Shadow’s Child’s office. The Shadow’s Child tried to calm herself down. She stretched her core in the heartroom, slowly and deliberately, away from Long Chau’s prying eyes. A good thing she hadn’t boosted up the arrogance: it was an easy way to keep people functional in deep spaces if they had enough self-confidence to start with, but she didn’t think she could have borne the result for long.
“Not very deep,” The Shadow’s Child said. “I’d rather keep you in safe areas.” It was untrue.
“And yourself from unpleasant memories,” Long Chau
