It grew out of self-delusion and toxic secrecy and the fear of dying. The fear of change. It grew out of a last-ditch defense against the inevitable.
It grew out of an unwillingness to face facts.
I guess I understood that, too.
I didn’t get to say goodbye.
“I still don’t know why I like you, Carlos,” I said.
That’s okay, I imagined him replying. I still don’t know why I like you, either.
“Dwayne Carlos,” I said softly. Historians and archinformists might be furious about the loss of information his death represented. I was gonna miss the man. “He came so far, against such odds. To wind up here.”
Same as we all do.
I looked at Rilriltok. “More or less,” I agreed. “Helen, do you want to say a few words?”
She turned her eyeless face from Calliope to Oni. Neither of them spoke up. Helen held out her hand. When I put the cenotaph in it, she didn’t react to the weight at all.
“He didn’t like me,” she said. “He thought I was an abomination. And he gave his life to preserve my existence.”
A coil of microbots spiraled around her, lifted the cenotaph off her hand. It rose until it was nested among the roots that spread across our ceiling, Starlight’s soil. Tiny rootlets freed themselves, coiled around the stone. Held it in place.
The machine—Helen’s peripheral—fell back into her body, and was gone.
If I tilted my head back, I could read the name on the stone.
[He saved the hospital,] Starlight said, all around us and in our senso. [We will not forget.]
From there, we went to watch the next shipment of cryo pods coming in on Ruth and Singer and the other transport ships. A procession of them, antlike. Even more antlike, because they moved on wavering lines around the open floor panels in the ED, where gravity generators were still being installed.
Then I escorted Calliope back to her room. She still—usually—thought she was part of Helen’s crew. That was why we’d made it possible for her to attend the funeral. She’d also been moved from the Judiciary ward into neural repair, as the Goodlaw had decided that she was a victim, and not a criminal.
As I waved her through the door, she turned to me and said, “Dr. Jens, where have you been?”
Exactly as if our last conversation, the one where she’d accused me of being a monster, had never occurred.
I wondered if she knew she was a Trojan horse. Could she be so cheerful and open if she knew? Without a fox to regulate her behavior? Were her damaged memories coming in waves of conflicting recollections?
I was glad it wasn’t my problem to sort it out. I was glad she wasn’t my patient anymore. Not because I didn’t like her. Because I still liked her far more than I should.
Well, K’kk’jk’ooOOoo would sort it out.
I wondered who she would be, when the sorting out was done.
Plenty of time to worry about that after, I supposed. When she was integrated. When she was self-aware.
So I made a joke of it.
“Doctors are often pretty bad at maintaining personal friendships,” I said with a shrug. “Work-life balance problems. That can’t have changed that much in centians.”
She frowned at me. She might have said something, I supposed, except exactly then Dr. K’kk’jk’ooOOoo swam up through thin air. Her three-meter-long, iridescent purple-and-green body shimmered in the overhead lights like mermaid scales. She waved a flipper at me cheerfully as she brushed by, the grav belt that supported her body out of the water winking happy blue telltales as she passed.
“Your patient, Doctor,” I told her, and took myself away.
Cheeirilaq found me in the cafeteria, where I was eating something that wasn’t spaghetti. It pinged me first to make sure I was available for company, so I was expecting it, and had gotten up and dragged the opposite bench out of the way.
It squatted down across from me with a triple-sized portion of the same simulated land prawn that Rilriltok seemed to enjoy so much, and busied itself with eating.
Sentients who don’t use their mandibles to vocalize generally don’t have a prohibition on eating and talking simultaneously.
Mouthparts busily nibbling away—I was used to it and didn’t have to avert my eyes—the Goodlaw said, Your shipmates have agreed to stand trial for their crimes, rather than accepting private remediation.
I winced on their behalf. It was a brave choice that Sally and Loese were making. There would be a public outcry. There would be scandal. There would be an enormous mess.
It was, I supposed, what they had been aiming for all along. Considering the tragedy they had provoked, it was also the very, very least they could do. “What about the rest of the conspirators?”
We’ll find them, Cheeirilaq stridulated. Its quiet confidence carried even through translation. Sally and Loese will likely be remanded to remediation and reconstruction, assuming they are found culpable.
We both knew that they would be found culpable, unless a gross miscarriage of justice occurred.
In another era, they would have served a penal sentence, perhaps even been executed. There was, in my heart, an angry atavistic spike of desire for revenge. To see them punished. The civilized part of me knew the truth, though.
Retribution never healed a wound.
They’d done what they thought they had to do. And now they would pay the price for it: they would be monitored, and they would accept Judicial intervention and oversight in their rightminding.
And they’d be paying off their obligation to the Synarche, I imagined, for quite some time. Restorative justice is a better system, all in all, than the old standard of cutting off hands and putting out eyes and locking people up for lifetimes. It acknowledges, among other things, that structural miscarriages of social justice are often at the
