Edge of Dark (23 page)

Chrystal rested, letting her mind drift. The hand that cupped one of Katherine's feet felt the perfect toes. Like when her sister was born, and her mom helped her count ten each fingers and toes. She had mourned their deaths, her own death. But right now she touched a part of Katherine. Jason's arm hung over her waist the way it often had in the flesh, almost the same weight. It comforted her as much as it always had.

Regardless of their deaths, out of death had come new life. A birth. She'd read enough old masters and poets and listened to enough religious people to know this was a shared truth.

They had been born into something.

She ran her hand from Katherine's foot up to her ankle, which also felt human, even though the gears and levers and whatever that worked the actual appendage had to be different. If they cut away their skin, there would be no blood.

Did these strange robotic overlords want them to pass as human? Or simply to mollify the humans?

She felt Yi's mind bumping up against hers.
You are awake
.

A statement and not a question.

You and I are the best at talking this way
.

Jason will catch up
.

Want to try?

They were using silent talk, as if they might wake Jason or Katherine. She didn't feel anything from either of them, no thoughts, no dreams, no breathing. It frightened her at one level, but surely they were just resting. She herself probably looked the same, still and unmoving.

This would become normal. It would.

Yi interrupted her drifting thoughts.
Do you want to try?

To try this braiding thing you're so excited about?

Yes
. Yi's voice was confident in her head, as if he had the least emotional baggage and could just embrace this newness, this birth. He had come to this even after he had been the one who fought them to the last, who made them pour their sugared death down his throat.

She resolved to look for the good, too. She had always considered optimism a survival mechanism. And when did you most need to survive if not right after you'd been murdered and ported to a strange body? She giggled. Her thoughts were still wandering.
Yes, Yi. I'm ready
.

Too complex to explain in words. Just relax, and follow me
.

He probably meant be open to his thoughts. But they were thinking at each other already, speaking in a way she would have described as telepathic if she were still human. She struggled to open further and got nothing.

Just be
, he said.

She lay still and tried to think of nothing. Kept coming up with random things like the shape of Katherine's big toe and the way they could talk even without breathing.

“Just be. Relax
.

If she didn't breathe, how would she smell? If she tried to breathe, what would happen? Wouldn't they need to breathe if they went to another station and tried to pass? Her mind was supposed to be stiller than this. Stiller, like a pool. How could they pass? They'd be too strong.

Just be. Let go of the future, the past. We are not either. We are now
.

He sounded like a preacher.

Don't evaluate. Just be. Listen for me being beside you, but not for what I'm being
.

She could follow that, feel him a little, feel all four of them in fact. Life forces. But only Yi was bright and aware.

Leave
your
eyes closed and tell me what you see
.

She squished her eyes shut, and she could still see. Katherine, in the same defeated position, like a statue, long hair falling over her knees. Herself and Jason, two naked humans spooning asleep. They didn't look like robots at all, perhaps because they weren't moving, or maybe because their pose was such a human one, curled one around the other, protective. She had seen herself in mirrors, but this looked different. It made her feel disconnected from herself. Her curly blue-streaked hair fell across her face. Her own tattoo looked as real as Katherine's, a matching dragon with green scales and deep blue talons.

She must be seeing herself through Yi's eyes!

We look like statues
.

Yes. Move something and watch yourself do it
.

She twitched a finger and snapped out of whatever place she had been, eyes wide open.
That was strange
, she thought.
Is that braiding? Seeing through each other's eyes?

I didn't know we could do that
, he said.
That you would see through my eyes but not see the way I was seeing it
.

This is complex
.

Braiding seems to be like deep telepathy. That was like—I don't know. Like I was a camera for you. I heard you think about your tattoo, but I wasn't thinking about your tattoo
.

What were you thinking?

How perfectly shaped you both are, and how sweet you look together
.

She turned her head so he could see her face and smiled at him.
So what is braiding? I don't get it yet
.

It's like—like intimacy. It's being more inside me than you just were
.

Like those moments after sex when you think you should just become one person with your lover?

Like that. Only it really happens
.

Maybe we're not ready
.

We'll try again later
.

What would it would be like to be so joined with another being? Even with these people whom she loved more than she had ever imagined she might love? To share her inner self, which wasn't nearly as shiny as her outer one?
Can we try again now?

No. Someone's coming
.

She and Jason sat up before the door opened. When it did, there was no one there. The voice that was Jhailing sounded in her head.
Chrystal. It is time to go back
.

She looked at Katherine.
Can we stay with her? Help her?

No
.

Really?

She'll be taken care of
.

When will I see them again?

Soon. You will be in a classroom with them in a few days
.

She felt a little better. They left together, even Katherine, who walked on her own as if she responded more to a voice in her head than she had been willing to respond to her own family.

The others all eventually peeled off. Chrystal paid close attention to where in case she needed to try to find them. She only took one turn wrong before she arrived at the door of the room she'd been using.

There was something new in the room. Flowers. A splash of bright orange and blue that contrasted with the unrelenting whites and silvers and blacks of her room. She bent over the vase, trying to breath in the smell.

Stop and let yourself relax. You'll find the scent
.

She stopped trying to breathe and just stood as still as she could. Her enhanced sight made the flowers even more perfect, every tiny curl a magnificence, the tips of the stamens flawless fractal balls, the edges of the colors sharp. At first, the sweetness of the flowers smelled faint. She practiced focus, and soon she could magnify the scent so that it became strong like her sight and hearing had become. “I got it,” she whispered. “Why flowers? Where did they come from?”

I heard you wondering if you would be able to smell them, and I thought they might be a good reward for doing well
.

“Thank you.” She remembered her vow to be optimistic. “Have I done well? Have I learned the way you want me to?”

You have. You and your family are doing better than any other family group
.

That made her feel good, but only for a moment. “Katherine, though? What's wrong with her?”

Katherine is more driven by feelings than you or Jason or Yi. In your new bodies you feel some things and you don't feel others. Your goals and drives are different without physical flesh. Do you realize that? Is that why you are struggling less?

“How is that true? I don't feel different.”

You used the word “feel” in your response. Just then. But you don't feel the same way you used to. I was once a human, too. We are something else now
.”

“You were human?”

A very long time ago
.

“How long?” She held the scent of the bouquet of flowers in her nose, realizing she could tell the smell of one from another even at a distance.

More than a thousand years ago. I was human until just after the creation of the Ring of Distance, in the early days of our banishment, when we starved and fought each other
.”

“Will you tell me more about that?”

Another time. I am focused on your acceptance of how you are different. That is important
.

“How do I know I don't feel the same? I seem to be myself.”

Think about your time with your family. Was that was like time with them would have been?

She stepped away from the flowers to clear the smell from her head. She and Yi and Jason had worried about Katherine, but maybe not like they might have before. Not if she really thought about it. “We were more intellectual.”

You seldom left each other's sides in the High Sweet Home
.

How did Jhailing know that? She used her quietest and most controlled voice. “Thank you, Jhailing. Thank you for the flowers. Now please go away and let me think about what you just said, and what I think in response.”

Chrystal realized that she could feel his (her?) absence and that it was a slightly lonely feeling. She sat with her robot eyes closed and smelled the flowers and felt like she should miss Katherine terribly.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

NONA

Two months into the flight, Nona sat alone in command, watching her on-shift staff play something war-like on a complicated 3-D shared game board. The game drew periodic grunts or gasps as one or another person made a good or bad move. Nona knew from experience that a single game might go on for a full shift and then be taken to the bars afterward.

The
Sultry Savior
was a civilian ship, and mostly it ran itself via computer, robot, and stationary AI's with specific duties. Even so, Satyana had kept her promise to include some of her best people on the crew. She'd assigned a seasoned officer, Henry James, as Nona's second-in-command. Henry ranked her easily, and Nona felt sure he'd been assigned in case she got in trouble managing a command. It deepened her resolve to succeed, although how to do that wasn't exactly clear.

There wasn't much moment-by-moment activity between destinations on a starship, and they had no direction except to fly outward, toward the Ring of Distance.

She wasn't doing much good sitting here. Henry James wasn't on deck, but Luci Long was trained as her backup. Nona walked over to the game and watched a move where a holographic image shaped like a dark red dragon trailing red and gold flames swooped down from the sky and took out a row of what looked like robotic soldiers. “Good move, Luci!” one of the other players exclaimed.

Luci's face lit up with triumph.

Suddenly, Nona wanted to sit back down and let the game go on. She took a deep breath. “Luci? Can you take command for about an hour?”

Luci shot her an irritated glance, then a mask of obedience slipped across her face. “Sure. What do you need?”

“I'm going check on gardens. I'll be back within an hour.”

Luci nodded and stood up. Her features were stiff and proper, in spite of the disappointment in her eyes. Nona almost gave in and let her keep playing. But it would be bad crew discipline, and, besides, she was paying these people.

Nona told Luci, “Thank you,” and she turned and left command, feeling better as soon as she hit the corridors. Being alone felt glorious. She took the long way to the lift.

When she closed the garden door behind her, Charlie looked up and smiled. He stood in front of a raised bed, reaching up to harvest beans from plants that stretched from about his knees to above his head.

“We have robots for that,” she said.