Nebula Awards Showcase 2019 Page 21
Then being in the big hopper, as it was lifting up. I could tell from the drive noise, the flashes of the feed, that the pick-up transport was bringing it onboard.
That was a relief. It meant they were all safe, and I let go.
Chapter Eight
I came back to awareness in a cubicle, the familiar acrid odor and hum of the systems as it put me back together. Then I realized it wasn’t the cubicle at the habitat. It was an older model, a permanent installation.
I was back at the company station.
And humans knew about my governor module.
I poked tentatively at it. Still nonfunctional. My media storage was still intact, too. Huh.
When the cubicle opened, Ratthi was standing there. He was wearing regular civilian station clothes, but with the soft gray jacket with the PreservationAux survey logo. He looked happy, and a lot cleaner than the last time I had seen him. He said, “Good news! Dr. Mensah has permanently bought your contract! You’re coming home with us!”
That was a surprise.
◉ ◉ ◉
I went to finish processing, still reeling. It seemed like the kind of thing that would happen in a show, so I kept running diagnostics and checking the various available feeds to make sure I wasn’t still in the cubicle, hallucinating. There was a report running on the local station news about DeltFall and GrayCris and the investigation. If I was hallucinating, I think the company wouldn’t have managed to come out of the whole mess as the heroic rescuers of PreservationAux.
I expected a suit skin and armor, but the station units that helped us out of processing when we had catastrophic injuries gave me the gray PreservationAux survey uniform instead. I put it on, feeling weird, while the station units stood around and watched me. We’re not buddies or anything, but usually they pass along the news, what happened while you were offline, what the upcoming contracts were. I wondered if they felt as weird as I did. Sometimes SecUnits got bought in groups, complete with cubicles, by other companies. Nobody had ever come back from a survey and decided they wanted to keep their unit.
When I came out Ratthi was still there. He grabbed my arm and tugged me past a couple of human techs and out through two levels of secure doors and into the display area. This was where the rentals were arranged and it was nicer than the rest of the deployment center, with carpets and couches. Pin-Lee stood in the middle of it, dressed in sharp business attire. She looked like somebody from one of the shows I liked. The tough yet compassionate solicitor coming to rescue us from unfair prosecution. Two humans in company gear were standing around like they wanted to argue with her but she was ignoring them, tossing a data chip casually in one hand.
One saw me and Ratthi and said, “Again, this is irregular. Purging the unit’s memory before it changes hands isn’t just a policy, it’s best for the—”
“Again, I have a court order,” Pin-Lee said, grabbed my other arm, and they walked me out.
◉ ◉ ◉
I had never seen the human parts of the station before. We went down the big multilevel center ring, past office blocks and shopping centers, crowded with every kind of people, every kind of bot, flash data displays darting around, a hundred different public feeds brushing my awareness. It was just like a place from the entertainment feed but bigger and brighter and noisier. It smelled good, too.
The thing that surprised me is that nobody stared at us. Nobody even gave us a second look. The uniform, the pants, the long-sleeved T-shirt and jacket, covered all my inorganic parts. If they noticed the dataport in the back of my neck they must have thought I was an augmented human. We were just three more people making our way down the ring. It hit me that I was just as anonymous in a crowd of humans who didn’t know each other as I was in my armor, in a group of other SecUnits.
As we turned into a hotel block I brushed a public feed offering station info. I saved a map and a set of shift schedules as we passed through the doors into the lobby.
There were potted trees twisting up into a hanging glass sculpture fountain, real, not a holo. Looking at it I almost didn’t see the reporters until they were right up on us. They were augmented humans, with a couple of drone cams. One tried to stop Pin-Lee, and instinct took over and I shouldered him off her.
He looked startled but I’d been gentle so he didn’t fall down. Pin-Lee said, “We’re not taking questions now,” shoved Ratthi into the hotel’s transport pod, then grabbed my arm and pulled me in after her.
It whooshed us around and let us out in the foyer of a big suite. I followed Pin-Lee in, Ratthi behind us talking to someone on his comm. It was just as fancy as the ones on the media, with carpets and furniture and big windows looking down on the garden and sculptures in the main lobby. Except the rooms were smaller. I guess the ones in the shows are bigger, to give them better angles for the drone cams.
My clients—ex-clients? New owners?—were here, only everybody looked different in their normal clothes.
Dr. Mensah stepped close, looking up at me. “Are you all right?”
“Yes.” I had clear pictures from my field camera of her being hurt, but all her damage had been repaired, too. She looked different, in business clothes like Pin-Lee’s. “I don’t understand what’s happening.” It was stressful. I could feel the entertainment feed out there, the same one I could access from the unit processing zone, and it was hard not to sink into it.
She said, “I’ve purchased your contract. You’re coming back to Preservation with us. You’ll be a free agent there.”
“I’m off inventory.” They had told me that and maybe it was true. I had the urge to twitch uncontrollably and I had no idea why. “Can I still have armor?” It was the armor that told people I was a SecUnit. But I wasn’t Sec anymore, just Unit.
The others were so quiet. She said, even and calm, “We can arrange that, as long as you think you need it.”
I didn’t know if I thought I needed it or not. “I don’t have a cubicle.”
She was reassuring. “You won’t need one. People won’t be shooting at you. If you’re hurt, or your parts are damaged, you can be repaired in a medical center.”
“If people won’t be shooting at me what will I be doing?” Maybe I could be her bodyguard.
“I think you can learn to do anything you want.” She smiled. “We’ll talk about that when we get you home.”
Arada walked in then, and came over and patted my shoulder. “We’re so glad you’re with us,” she said. She told Mensah, “The DeltFall representatives are here.”
Mensah nodded. “I have to talk to them,” she told me. “Make yourself comfortable here. If there’s anything you need, tell us.”
I sat in a back corner and watched while different people came in and out of the suite to talk about what had happened. Solicitors, mostly. From the company, from DeltFall, from at least three other corporate political entities and one independent, even from GrayCris’ parent company. They asked questions, argued, looked at security records, showed Mensah and Pin-Lee security records. And they looked at me. Gurathin watched me, too, but he didn’t say anything. I wondered if he had told Mensah not to buy me.
I watched the entertainment feed a little to calm down, then pulled everything I could about the Preservation Alliance from the station’s information center. No one would be shooting at me because they didn’t shoot people there. Mensah didn’t need a bodyguard there; nobody did. It sounded like a great place to live, if you were a human or augmented human.
Ratthi came over to see if I was all right, and I asked him to tell me about Preservation and how Mensah lived there. He said when she wasn’t doing admin work, she lived on a farm outside the capital city, with two marital partners, plus her sister and brother and their three marital partners, and a bunch of relatives and kids who Ratthi had lost count of. He was called away to answer questions from a solicitor, which gave me time to think.
Supposed to want.
I’d have to pretend to be an augmented human, and that would be a strain. I’d have to change, make myself do things I didn’t want to do. Like talk to humans like I was one of them. I’d have to leave the armor behind.
But maybe I wouldn’t need it anymore.
◉ ◉ ◉
Eventually things settled down, and they had dinner brought in. Mensah came and talked to me some more, about Preservation, what my options would be there, how I would stay with her until I knew what I wanted. It was pretty much what I’d already figured, from what Ratthi had told me.
“You’d be my guardian,” I said.
“Yes.” She was glad I understood. “There are so many education opportunities. You can do anything you want.”
Guardian was a nicer word than owner.
I waited until the middle of the offshift, when they were all either asleep or deep in their own feeds, working on their analysis of the assessment materials. I got up from the couch and went down the corridor, and slipped out the door.
I used the transport pod and got back to the lobby, then left the hotel. I had the map I had downloaded earlier, so I knew how to get off the ring and down toward the lower port work zones. I was wearing a survey team uniform, and passing as an augmented human, so nobody stopped me, or looked twice at me.
At the edge of the work zone, I went through into the dockworkers’ barracks, then into the equipment storage. Besides tools, the human workers had storage cubbies there. I broke into a human’s personal possessions locker and stole work boots, a protective jacket, and an enviro mask and attachments. I took a knapsack from another locker, rolled up the jacket with the survey logo and tucked it into the bag, and now I looked like an augmented human traveling somewhere. I walked out of the work zones and down the big central corridor into the port’s embarkation zone, just one of hundreds of travelers heading for the ship ring.
I checked the schedule feeds and found that one of the ships getting ready to launch was a bot-driven cargo transport. I plugged into its access from the stationside lock, and greeted it. It could have ignored me, but it was bored, and greeted me back and opened its feed for me. Bots that are also ships don’t talk in words. I pushed the thought toward it that I was a happy servant bot who needed a ride to rejoin its beloved guardian, and did it want company on its long trip? I showed it how many hours of shows and books and other media I had saved to share.
Cargo transport bots also watch the entertainment feeds, it turns out.
I don’t know what I want. I said that at some point, I think. But it isn’t that, it’s that I don’t want anyone to tell me what I want, or to make decisions for me.
That’s why I left you, Dr. Mensah, my favorite human. By the time you get this I’ll be leaving Corporation Rim. Out of inventory and out of sight.
Murderbot end message.
Wind Will Rove
Sarah Pinsker
There’s a story about my grandmother Windy, one I never asked her to confirm or deny, in which she took her fiddle on a spacewalk. There are a lot of stories about her. Fewer of my parents’ generation, fewer still of my own, though we’re in our fifties now; old enough that if there were stories to tell they would probably have been told.
My grandmother was an engineer, part of our original crew. According to the tale, she stepped outside to do a visual inspection of an external panel that was giving anomalous readings. Along with her tools, she clipped her fiddle and bow to her suit’s belt. When she completed her task, she paused for a moment, tethered to our ship the size of a city, put her fiddle to the place where her helmet met her suit, and played “Wind Will Rove” into the void. Not to be heard, of course; just to feel the song in her fingers.
There are a number of things wrong with this story, starting with the fact that we don’t do spacewalks, for reasons that involve laws of physics I learned in school and don’t remember anymore. Our shields are too thick, our velocity is too great, something like that. The Blackout didn’t touch ship records; crew transcripts and recordings still exist, and I’ve listened to all the ones that might pertain to this legend. She laughs her deep laugh, she teases a tired colleague about his date the night before, she even hums “Wind Will Rove” to herself as she works—but there are no gaps, no silences unexplained.
Even if it were possible, her gloves would have been too thick to find a fingering. I doubt my grandmother would’ve risked losing her instrument, out here where any replacement would be synthetic. I doubt, too, that she’d have exposed it to the cold of space. Fiddles are comfortable at the same temperatures people are comfortable; they crack and warp when they aren’t happy. Her fiddle, my fiddle now.
My final evidence: “Wind Will Rove” is traditionally played in DDAD tuning, with the first and fourth strings dropped down. As much as she loved that song, she didn’t play it often, since re-tuning can make strings wear out faster. If she had risked her fiddle, if she had managed to press her fingers to its fingerboard, to lift her bow, to play, she wouldn’t have played a DDAD tune. This is as incontrovertible as the temperature of the void.
And yet the story is passed on among the ship’s fiddlers (and I pass it on again as I write this narrative for you, Teyla, or whoever else discovers it). And yet her nickname, Windy, which appears in transcripts starting in the fifth year on board. Before that, people called her Beth, or Green.
She loved the song, I know that much. She sang it to me as a lullaby. At twelve, I taught it to myself in traditional GDAE tuning. I took pride in the adaptation, pride in the hours I spent getting it right. I played it for her on her birthday.
She pulled me to her, kissed my head. She always smelled like the lilacs in the greenhouse. She said, “Rosie, I’m so tickled that you’d do that for me, and you played it note perfectly, which is a gift to me in itself. But Wind Will Rove is a DDAD tune and it ought to be played that way. You play it in another tuning, it’s a different wind that blows.”
I’d never contemplated how there might be a difference between winds. I’d never felt one myself, unless you counted air pushed through vents, or the fan on a treadmill. After the birthday party, I looked up ‘wind’ and read about breezes and gales and siroccos, about haboobs and zephyrs. Great words, words to turn over in my mouth, words that spoke to nothing in my experience.
The next time I heard the song in its proper tuning, I closed my eyes and listened for the wind.
◉ ◉ ◉
“Windy Grove”
Traditional. Believed to have travelled from Scotland to Cape Breton in the nineteenth century. Lost.
◉ ◉ ◉
“Wind Will Rove”
Instrumental in D (alternate tuning DDAD)
Harriet Barrie, Music Historian:
The fiddler Olivia Vandiver and her father, Charley Vandiver, came up with this tune in the wee hours of a session in 1974. Charley was trying to remember a traditional tune he had heard as a boy in Nova Scotia, believed to be “Windy Grove.” No recordings of the original “Windy Grove” were ever catalogued, on ship or on Earth.
“Wind Will Rove” is treated as traditional in most circles, even though it’s relatively recent, because it is the lost tune’s closest known relative.
◉ ◉ ◉
The Four Deck Rec has the best acoustics of any room on the ship. There’s a nearly identical space on every deck, but the others don’t sound as good. The Recs were designed for gatherings, but no acoustic engineer was ever consulted, and there’s nobody on board with that specialty now. The fact that one room might sound good and one less so wasn’t important in the grander scheme. It should have been.
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sp; In the practical, the day to day, it matters. It matters to us. Choirs perform there, and bands. It serves on various days and nights as home to a Unitarian church, a Capoeira hoda, a Reconstructionist synagogue, a mosque, a Quaker meetinghouse, a half dozen different African dance groups, and a Shakespearean theater, everyone clinging on to whatever they hope to save. The room is scheduled for weeks and months and years to come, though weeks and months and years are all arbitrary designations this far from Earth.
On Thursday nights, Four Deck Rec hosts the OldTime, thanks to my grandmother’s early pressure on the Recreation Committee. There are only a few of us on board who know what OldTime refers to, since everything is old time, strictly speaking. Everyone else has accepted a new meaning, since they have never known any other. An OldTime is a Thursday night is a hall with good acoustics is a gathering of fiddlers and guitarists and mandolinists and banjo players. It has a verb form now. “Are you OldTiming this week?” If you are a person who would ask that question, or a person expected to respond, the answer is yes. You wouldn’t miss it.
On this particular Thursday night, while I wouldn’t miss it, my tenth graders had me running late. We’d been discussing the twentieth and twenty-first century space races and the conversation had veered into dangerous territory. I’d spent half an hour trying to explain to them why Earth history still mattered. This had happened at least once a cycle with every class I’d ever taught, but these particular students were as fired up as any I remembered.
“I’m never going to go there, right, Ms. Clay?” Nelson Odell had asked. This class had only been with me for two weeks, but I’d known Nelson his entire life. His great-grandmother, my friend Harriet, had dragged him to the OldTime until he was old enough to refuse. He’d played mandolin, his stubby fingers well fit to the tiny neck, face set in a permanently resentful expression.