Asimov's Science Fiction (9 page)

She spoke to him from her private communications room in her captain's suite, the same room where she had spoken to Coop night after night after night.

She didn't miss the sexual side of her relationship with Coop—that had happened only a few times per year—but she missed the friendship, the ability to consult with someone who had a similar job but a different point of view.

She felt all alone now, in a way she had never felt alone before.

But she didn't tell Zeller that.

Instead, when his disapproving face appeared on her screen, she actually smiled at him.

"I'm finally going to do what you want, General," she said, after the initial niceties ended.

His gaze kept moving away from her image, as if something else in the room interested him more than any conversation with her could. "And that would be?"

"I'm resigning my commission. I'm stepping down as captain of the
Geneva."

His entire posture changed. His gaze snapped forward, meeting hers.

"That is not what I want," he said. "You have become one of the best captains in the Fleet. You proved me wrong long ago, Captain Sabin, and even on this most difficult mission, you kept your focus on the task at hand, setting your personal problems aside and rising to a standard that few captains achieved."

She had waited years for praise like that from him. Her cheeks warmed as her face flushed. But the praise was no longer relevant.

"Thank you, General," she said, "but I realized on this last trip that you were right: my father's disappearance has haunted me. It still does. We don't entirely understand what happened—"

"We're pretty sure that the ship collided with something in foldspace as it arrived," Zeller said. "Every captain's nightmare."

"Yes," Sabin said. "It is, and they're probably right. But I want to know."

"You can get reports. Your talents would be wasted working on the remains of the
Sikkerhet.
Let the technicians do it—"

"General," she said gently. "I've acquired a new ghost on this trip."

To his credit, he stopped speaking and frowned. "Someone on the
Ivoire?"
he asked, keeping the question both professional and delicate.

"Captain Cooper and I were good friends," she said, unwilling to explain more. "I believe if I return to foldspace and
anacapa
research, I might be able to find him."

"We've lost one excellent captain on this trip," Zeller said. "We can't lose you as well."

A month ago, these comments would have angered her. She would have wanted to know why he hadn't said such things to her before, why he had kept his evaluations to himself.

Or she would have demanded to know why he believed her good now, instead of earlier. She could almost hear her own voice, strained, angry:
Am I a better captain now that you're short a captain, General? Or are you supposed to say this to keep me in line?

But she didn't have the energy or the desire for that kind of confrontation.

"General," she said gently, "my full attention will never again be on the
Geneva
and that, by definition, will make me a bad captain. I'm going to resign my commission, and you can't talk me out of it. If you value my work, please help me secure a good spot on the teams investigating the
Sikkerhet
and the disappearance of the
Ivoire."

His expression was flat. Only his eyes moved, as if he could see through the camera into her soul.

"I have never understood you," he said. "I always thought I did, but I don't."

"I disagree, General. You believed me obsessed with my father's disappearance, and I was. When I realized I could learn no more, I put myself in a position to emulate him. And now that we have information again, I want to return to research."

Zeller shook his head. "Your father wouldn't understand this."

"Probably not," she said. "I think it would make him angry."

She didn't add the rest. She had finally realized that she was her mother's daughter as well as her father's. Unlike her mother, Sabin thrived in a military environment. But unlike her father, she had to choose her own path, and if that path deviated from the norm, she had to follow the new path instead of trudging along the old.

Amazing that a double loss—learning her father was truly dead and suspecting that Coop was as well—would help her discover who she really was.

Perhaps that was what living was all about, using the good and the bad to determine the essence of one's self.

"I'll be more useful in research," she said. "Of course, I will remain on the
Geneva
until the Fleet can provide a suitable replacement."

"I don't think anyone has resigned a captain's commission after such a success, Sabin," Zeller said. "Not in all the years of the Fleet."

She didn't believe that was true. There were centuries of Fleet history, and so much had disappeared into legend.

"I don't consider what happened in foldspace a success, sir," she said. "We lost the
Ivoire."

"And found a ship that we had thought gone forever, Captain," Zeller said. "We wouldn't have found it without you. The foldspace rescue team says they might have dismissed that blip on their equipment. They think you and Captain Foucheux saw things they did not, and they must change their algorithms accordingly."

This was one of the reasons that Sabin had to return to research and foldspace investigation. The method of doing things had become more important than the purpose for doing those things.

The teams no longer thought of the lives hanging in the balance. They thought about the probabilities for success.

And with that realization, she finally understood what Zeller was telling her.

There was only one person who could have found the
Sikkerhet
on this mission, one person whose thinking was both rigid enough to conduct a grid search and creative enough to explore all the possibilities.

That
was why he considered her mission a success.

"I am going to see if we can invent a new position for you, Captain," Zeller said.

"We need something better in investigations, and we need someone of command rank who can run that new system. Tell me you'll keep your captain's commission and accept the reassignment."

"Only if I may focus on research, sir," she said.

"Research, investigation, and the technology itself. I'll see if we can change the
Geneva's
designation so she can be the ship in charge of that part of our team."

"Sir, the
Geneva's
not equipped for the kind of work we would need to do," she said.

"We would need a newer ship, one outfitted especially for us."

His eyes narrowed, that disapproving look she knew so well. He had once accused her of taking what little she was offered, and ungratefully asking for ten times as much.

She had just done so now.

But she didn't take back her request.

"My instinct is to say no, Captain," he said. "But I have learned that my instinct always discounts you. So I will see what I can do."

"Thank you, sir," she said as he signed off.

She sat in her small back-up control room for several minutes afterward, staring at the blank screen.

For the first time in their careers, neither Zeller nor Sabin had won the argument with each other. They had compromised in a way neither of them would have thought possible two decades before.

She was starting something new, remaking something old into a brand new part of the Fleet.

And, sadly, the first thing she wanted to do was tell Coop. He might not understand her choice, but he would give her an intelligent and lively discussion. He would let her know what she hadn't thought of, and what she needed to do to make the experiment work.

She closed her eyes for just a moment.

She would remain a captain, and the loneliness would still be a large part of her life.

Maybe even larger now, without Coop.

As a young girl, she had needed her father back. She couldn't imagine life without him.

As an adult woman, she wanted Coop back. But she could easily imagine life without him. It just wasn't something she would have chosen. None of this was.

And here was the difference between her childhood and now: If her research found Coop alive, she still would retain a job in research and foldspace investigation. If they had found her father before she quit school, she would have become someone else.

Funny how the events of one's life changed that life.

Coop understood that. He seemed to fathom how wisdom was hard-earned, not something someone else could impart and believe that another person would get.

Maybe that was why the Fleet's insistence on stepping into life in other cultures bothered him so much. Because he hadn't even been certain he understood his own life.

She wished she could tell him that she'd finally realized what he had been telling her all those months ago.

And, in acknowledging the feeling she had, she realized also that she believed, deep down, she would never get the chance to tell him. Even if her research led to his ship's discovery forty years from now, she suspected Coop would not be on it, just like her father hadn't been on his ship.

Hard-won understanding.

It wasn't quite the death of hope—part of her still hoped that Coop was alive somewhere.

It was more like the application of hope.

She wanted to make sure that no one else—child, adult, crewmember, captain—would ever lose a loved one to foldspace again.

It was probably a vain hope.

But it would keep her going, for at least another forty years.

www.gwendolynclare.com
> has a BA in Ecology, a BS in Geophysics, and is in the process of adding another acronym to her collection. She enjoys practicing martial arts, adopting feral cats, and writing specific when she's supposed to be writing her thesis. Her short stories have appeared in
Clarkesworld, Daily Science Fiction,
and
Bull Spec,
among others. In her second story for
Asimov's,
two young men living on a planet far from us in time and space take off on a desperate attempt to outrun their destiny.

The message arrives attached to the leg of a trained bird, some native species with drab greenish-brown plumage. I untie the datachip, impressed with Santiago's ingenuity. Transmissions can be intercepted and decrypted, but who would think twice about a bird landing on a windowsill? No one suspects technology from some bygone century.

"Is that it?" Duyi says behind me, and I turn. He's tense, I can see it in the line of his shoulders, though he does his best to hide it behind a cavalier facade.

I hand the datachip to him. I can't risk reading it myself—my NeuroLogic use is monitored. His, of course, is not.

He lifts his black hair off the back of his neck with one hand and inserts the datachip into the NeuroLogic slot. He's been letting his hair grow out these past few weeks; watching him, I worry reflexively that the regent will disapprove. As if what she thinks still matters. I run a hand over my own black hair, kept military-short according to the regulations of my status, and wonder what I should do with it now.

Duyi sees the gesture and grins. "You worry too much, Brother."

"I don't worry enough," I say. "A dereliction of duty."

His eyes glaze over as he begins mentally sorting through the data. I find some comfort in his bravado, not because I need him to be the strong one, but because covering his fear with derring-do is so perfectly characteristic of him. He is still my Duyi.

We'll soon find out exactly how far I can go to keep him that way.

"Symrock,"
Duyi swears, coming out of the reading trance. "Santiago scheduled the raid for tonight. We won't have any time for a practice run."

I shrug. To leave without testing my ability to leave is risky, but to delay would also be risky. We have only five days left before the ceremony—before the regent de stroys him—and his escape will only become more difficult as the final hour approaches. Every possible plan has strengths going hand-in-hand with weaknesses.

Duyi fumbles at the back of his neck, removing the datachip with nervous fingers. "Will you... will you be okay, defying the regent?"

I look at him steadily. "My Imperative binds me to you, not her. I don't think it occurred to her that
you
might disobey."

He flinches when I mention the Imperative. He hates it—mine specifically, but also the general concept of neuro-reprogramming. "Leaving will put me in danger. Can you do that?"

"In a sense, leaving will also protect you. There's enough vagueness and plasticity to the Imperative. I can work around it."

His lips pinch tight, as if it pains him to discuss my programming so openly. Under normal circumstances we avoid the topic, but these are not normal circumstances. "You need to be sure you can follow through."

"I am," I say. "I can convince myself to do anything for you."

The regent gave me to Duyi as a present. He was nine and I was ten when we met. Looking back, it was perhaps the only definite show of kindness I have ever witnessed the regent perform. At the time, of course, I had a somewhat different perspective. I was fresh from the NeuroLogic installation lab, still reeling from a thorough memory wipe, and the last thing on my mind was observing the interactions of Duyi and his much older half-sister, Regent Junmei of Moseroth III. What I remember best is how she referred to me as if I weren't in the room, as if I were a toy instead of a person standing there. I have a few earlier memories, but none so sharp as this one.

Then Duyi stepped close, and the floor seemed to shift under my feet, as if the whole world were forcibly reorienting me. I felt a pressure behind my eyes, and I knew with the sudden, precise certainty of a programmed Imperative that I must keep this boy safe, and more than that, I must make him happy. Duyi stared at me, his dark, almond-shaped eyes wide with curiosity, and I had to hold myself stiff to keep from backing away.