He bounced awake on the bed-field, eyes suddenly open, breath fast and shallow, heart hammering. The cabin’s lights came on, dim at first and then brightening gently, reacting to his movements.
Genar-Hofoen wiped his face with his hands and looked around the cabin. He swallowed and took a deep breath. He hadn’t meant to dream anything like that. It had been as vivid as an implanted dream or some game-scenario shared in sleep. He had meant to dream one of his usual erotic dreams, not look back two thousand years to the time when the Problem Child had first found the trillion-year-old sun and the black-body object in orbit around it. All he’d wanted was a sex-simulation, not an in-depth inquisition of a bleakly ambitious woman’s arid soul.
Certainly it had been interesting, and he’d been fascinated that he had somehow been the woman and yet not been her at the same time, and had been – non-sexually – inside her, in her mind, close as a neural lace to her thoughts and emotions and the hopes and fears she had been prompted to think about by the sight of the star and the thing she had thought of as the enigma. But it hadn’t been what he’d expected.
Another strange, unsettling dream.
‘Ship?’ he said.
‘Yes?’ the Grey Area said through the cabin’s sound system.
‘I… I just had a weird dream.’
‘Well, I have some experience in that realm, I suppose,’ the ship said with what sounded like a heavy sigh. ‘I imagine now you want to talk about it.’
‘No… well… no; I just wondered… you weren’t… ?’
‘Ah. You want to know was I interfering with your dreams, is that it?’
‘It just, you know, occurred to me.’
‘Well now, let’s see… If I had been, do you think I would answer you truthfully?’
He thought. ‘Does that mean you were or you weren’t?’
‘I was not. Are you happy now?’
‘No I’m not happy now. Now I don’t know if you were or you weren’t.’ He shook his head, and grinned. ‘You’re fucking with my head either way, aren’t you?’
‘As if I would do such a thing,’ the ship said smoothly. It made a chuckling noise which contrived to be the most unsettling sound it had articulated so far. ‘I expect,’ it said, ‘it was just an effect caused by your neural lace bedding in, Genar-Hofoen. Nothing to worry about. If you don’t want to dream at all, gland somnabsolute.’
‘Hmm,’ he said slowly, and then; ‘Lights out.’ He lay back down in the darkness. ‘Good night,’ he said quietly.
‘Sweet dreams, Genar-Hofoen,’ the Grey Area said. The circuit clicked ostentatiously off.
He lay awake in the darkness for a while, before falling asleep again.
XII
Byr woke up in bed, hopelessly weak, but cleansed and whole and starting to recover. The emergency medical collar lay, also cleaned, at the side of the bed. By it lay a bowl of fruit, a jug of milk, a screen, and the small figurine Byr had given Dajeil, from the old female ‘Ktik called G’Istig’tk’t’, a few days earlier.
The tower’s slave-drones brought Byr her food and attended to her toilet. The first question she asked was where Dajeil was, half afraid that the other woman had taken the knife to herself or just walked into the sea. The drones replied that Dajeil was in the tower’s garden, weeding.
On other occasions they informed Byr that Dajeil was working in the tower’s top room, or swimming, or had taken a flier to some distant island. They answered other questions, too. It was Dajeil – along with one of the drones – who had forced open the bathroom door. So she could still have killed Byr.
Byr asked Dajeil to come visit her, but she would not. Eventually, a week later, Byr was able to get out of bed by herself and walk around. A pair of drones fussed at her side.
Across her belly, the scar was already starting to fade.
Byr already knew her recovery would be complete. Whether Dajeil had actually intended murder or just some insane abortion, she didn’t know.
Looking down into herself, in a light trance to further judge the extent of the damage that had been done and was now diligently repairing itself, Byr noted that her body had come to the decision, apparently on its own accord, while she’d been unconscious, to become male again. She let the decision hold.
Byr walked out of the tower that day with one hand still held over the wide scar in her abdomen. She discovered Dajeil sitting cross-legged and big-bellied on the egg-round stones a few metres up from the surf line.
The sound of the stones sliding under Byr’s unsteady feet brought Dajeil out of her reverie. She looked round at Byr, then away again, out to sea. They sat together.
‘I’m sorry,’ Dajeil said.
‘So am I.’
‘Did I kill it?’
Byr had to think for a moment. Then she realised. She meant the fetus.
‘Yes,’ Byr said. ‘Yes, it’s gone.’
Dajeil lowered her head. She would not talk again.
Byr left with the Unacceptable Behaviour a week later. Dajeil had told her, through one of the tower’s drones, that she would not be having the baby in a week, as expected. She would halt its development. For a while. Until she knew her own mind again. Until she felt ready for it. She didn’t know how long the wait would be. A few months; a year, maybe. The unborn child would be safe and unharmed, just waiting, until then. When she did give birth, the tower and its drones would be able to look after her. She did not expect Byr to stay. They had done most of the work they had set out to do. It might be best if Byr left. Sorry was not remotely enough, but it was all there was to say. She would let Byr know when the child was born. They would meet again then, if she wanted, if he wanted.
Contact was never told what had happened. Byr claimed a bizarre accident had happened at sea to make her lose the fetus; a predator fish attacking; near death and saved by Dajeil… They seemed well enough pleased with what she and Dajeil had done and accepted Byr’s leaving early. The ‘Ktik were a highly promising species, hungry for advancement; Telaturier was in for some big-time development.
Genar-Hofoen became male again. One day, going through some old clothes, he found the little figurine of Dajeil the old ‘Ktik had carved. He sent it back to Dajeil. He didn’t know if she received it or not. Still on the Unacceptable Behaviour, he fathered a child by Aist. A Contact appointment a few months afterwards took him aboard the GSV Quietly Confident. One of the ship’s avatars – the same one he had slept with – gave him a very hard time for leaving Dajeil; they shouted at each other.
To his knowledge, the Quietly Confident subsequently blocked at least one request he put in for a post he wanted.
Over two years after he had left Telaturier he heard that Dajeil, still pregnant, had requested to be Stored. The place was becoming busy, and a whole new city was growing up round their old tower, which was going to become a museum. Later still he heard that she was not Stored after all, but had been picked up by the GSV turned Eccentric which had once been called the Quietly Confident, and which was now called the Sleeper Service.
XIII
~ Don’t do this!
~ I am determined.
~ Well, at least let me get my avatar off!
~ Take it.
~ Thank you; beginning Displace sequence, the Fate Amenable To Change sent to the Appeal To Reason, and then continued: ~ Please; don’t risk this.
~ I am risking only the drone; in cognizance of your concerns I shall not remain in contact with it in-flight.
~ And if it returns apparently unharmed, what will you do then?
~ Take every reasonable precaution, including a stepped-intellect-level throttled datastream-squirt approach, a-
~ Sorry to interrupt, but don’t tell me any more, in case our friend is listening in. I appreciate the lengths you are prepared to go to try and ensure you remain free from contamination, but surely the point is that at any stage what you will find, or start to find, will look like the most valuable and interesting data available, and any intellectual restructuring suggested will look unambiguously like the most brilliant up-grade. You will be taken before you know it; indeed, you will cease to be in a sense, unless your own automatic systems attempt to prevent the take-over, and that will surely lead to conflict.
~ I shall resist ingesting any data requiring or suggesting either intellect restructuring or mimetic redrafting.
~ That may not be enough. Nothing may be enough.