Spark and Tether, page 12
Sacheri took a bottle of something not too expensive from Paradis’s bar and headed for the bath. Jin was out of comms range again, and would be for a while, but Sacheri had taken to sending them little messages whenever he thought of them, so Jin’s implant would receive a burst of pings, all saying some version of I love you, I miss you, look at this thing I found. Back at Paradis’s on OS, this one said: Will ping Jara tomorrow.
Paradis pinged him while he was in the bath. He answered anyway.
“Bad time?”
His display showed him deep in bubbles, visible from his eyes to the hair he’d piled on top of his head.
“Perfect time,” he said. He waved the bottle at the display. “This is delicious, by the way.”
“I’m glad you’re enjoying yourself. How is Jin?”
“Jin is as good as ever,” Sacheri said. “I haven’t scared them off yet. We’re talking about finding a place together. Soon.”
“You are what?”
“No more mooching off of you, beloved,” he said. “Or at least less than usual.”
“How did this happen?”
“It kind of… came up. We’d both been thinking about it.”
“They made a plan for a conversation and you just burst out with it,” she said.
Sacheri pouted at the display. “I hate that you know that. Did you talk to them?”
“Danae is nice,” she said wistfully, knowing full well that Sacheri would not live there.
“We are looking within a gate or two of Danae,” he promised. “We do want to be near you.”
She laughed. “Understood. Has Jin spent much time living dirtside?”
“A cycle here or there for trainings, I think. Not much more.”
“That’s a big deal.”
“I’m so happy,” he whispered through the bubbles, and then he shut his eyes tight in embarrassment. “I mean—”
“You should be happy. They are a brilliant partner for you. Don’t get flighty.”
He laughed. “I asked them to find a permanent domicile with me. I think that’s the opposite of flighty, no?”
Paradis, who had received access to several family residences upon reaching adulthood and shared them freely with friends and lovers and acquaintances alike, shrugged. “You haven’t actually done it yet.”
“I’m not going to get weird about it. I just hate how much waiting there is.”
“Will there be less waiting?”
Sacheri shrugged, sending a cloud of bubbles up around his head. “It will be different waiting.”
“Sure. What’s next?”
“I’m off for the rest of the cycle. Doing some research. I was hoping I could ask Sera here for help.” Paradis was protective of her staff, and he was looking for potentially difficult material. It was courtesy to all involved that he asked her, first.
“Sera is quite adept,” she said. It was not permission or approval. “What news have you had?”
“None yet. I don’t know if I should interpret that, or if it’s COR being COR.”
“Be careful,” she said. “Just because they let you dig in their archives doesn’t mean they’ll be okay with you finding something.”
“Jin will keep an eye on it.”
Paradis frowned. “What happens if they’re recalled to I&R?”
“I don’t need them to,” he said. “Jin won’t offer anything they can’t deliver. They only ask that I am careful.”
“You have not yet pulled the wrong thread,” she said. “But evidence of sabotage and diving into the historical record and repeated runs with a lead who sets off everyone’s alarms? You can’t blame us for urging caution.”
“I can’t let it go, Par.” He thought of all the incidents they had found, when they were students— multiple documented incidents of fai that had been relocated or deactivated against their will, even as citizenry rights crept from world to world of the Outer Ring after the Storms. Humans had a shocking capacity for cruelty and a hard time acting with compassion and respect for each other, let alone the electronic life forms they’d had a hand in creating. “Lumen won’t get far on his own, and I do think Adda is sincere in her mission.”
“I know,” she said. “And we know what you are antagonizing.”
“I used all the proper procedures,” he said. “They have time to hide anything they don’t want me to find.” She shielded the Sanctuary collectives, but even she could only do so much if he tangled the wrong lines.
She made a face. “What are you looking for, specifically?”
“Any records of missing fai from a dozen year span or so.”
“Which dozen years?”
He hid a little lower in the bubbles, not wanting to see her reaction. “The third gen.”
Paradis went so still he thought they might have lost the visual connection. “Sacheri—”
He waited for her to ask something, to name the worry she had. It was almost a dare.
She redirected him, instead. “Tell me where you and Jin are going to live.”
“We don’t know yet,” he said. He could sense her warning him to be even more careful than before. By innocently changing the subject, she had made clear to him that her first thought was the same as his had been: the entire existence of the third generation of synchronists was no more than rumors whispered in the dark, when new recruits were told the tall tales of syns gone before them. He’d tried to find them in Oversight’s archives, and then through COR, only to be given escalating reprimands and then, expulsion. Paradis had shielded him, as much as she could, and helped him get hired within COR, when she couldn’t.
And he had let it go. He had to. Until he tripped that intimation, while he was showing off for Jin. Until he tried to connect to the broken fai in the hibernation box and felt a jolt of recognition.
He had no proof—but the sabotaged fai and the missing synchronists were connected. It was one frayed line of awareness, but it tied him to the answers. He was determined to trace it to whatever held the other end.
“You should come to Danae,” she said. “I can look out for you here.”
Sacheri closed his eyes. “I will be careful, I swear.”
“Good morning, Sera.” He answered. “Welcome back from your rest.”
“Thank you, Sacheri. I hope your travels were productive. Paradis tells me you request assistance with inquiries.
The room switched to a secure and private mode. Sacheri set his synplants to the same and sent a prayer of thanks to the universe that had tied him to Paradis.
“Would you prefer direct or display?” The fai asked.
“Yes,” he said, and the data moved instantly.
It didn’t tell him much, and it largely matched COR’s official and readily available numbers; worlds that viewed fai as machines to be built and managed and not as living citizens tended to not count them or their deactivations as anything of note. COR only had numbers from the bargaining when Orinus had adopted citizenship policies—the gate fai had gone on strike until COR followed suit and required all member worlds do the same.
There’d never been a census of fai. Some worlds required registration, others made it difficult-to-impossible for fai to dwell comfortably, only a few practiced full inclusion. He’d heard rumors of synchronists who had gone rogue and vanished to newly terraformed worlds with fai accomplices, but he’d never found a log to even suggest that was anything more than a fairy tale. Those worlds might well exist—the universe was vast—but no one found any. And COR was terrible at keeping secrets—Paradis, after several drinks in a highly secure space, had once confided to him that she believed COR was too big to be entirely anything: good, evil, secure, secretive, transparent.
“Governance is half policy and half luck and half gall,” she’d said bitterly, and laughed when he pointed out that was too many halves. “Now you’re getting it,” she’d said, and promptly passed out on his lap.
“Okay. Let’s pull a list of variables from the rocks where Adda’s searched and compare that to whatever the most complete list of all points where terraforming was at least begun… or developed enough for a fai to possibly be assigned. And then look through the logs for departure notices.”
“This will take several standard days. Do you wish to add additional parameters?”
“Yes,” he said. Probably the returned data would be too big to be useful; it had taken the Outer Ring a few standard years to realize the rush to terraform all of known space had been killed by the Gate Storms and the loss of easy contact with Terra and the Inner Ring worlds. “Limit to partial, failed, or abandoned terraforms established around the time of the storms.”
“Understood,” the fai said. “I’ve added a new library of immersions while you were away. Would you like to try one while I pull your requests from archives?”
Sacheri smiled. “Thank you, but no. I have some searches to run on my own.” He connected to COR’s housing networks and made a different list entirely.
Chapter 14
It took several cycles to find a place. They’d seen a dozen potential homes across four worlds and most had been quickly dismissed for one reason or another. Jin disliked Macinus for its excess of bureaucrats. Sacheri said no to Bolis because the cities looked more like displays than real places and there were too few public recreational spaces for him, and his mothers lived far into the hills on the least populated continent— he didn’t mind visits, but sharing a planet felt a little too close. Orinus was too stiff, and large, and had little open housing to choose from.
“You’re from OS,” Sacheri said, bewildered, when Jin said no to Macinus, which met all of their other requirements and had plenty of open housing of various kinds. It had been Sacheri’s first choice.
“I want it to feel like the skysider halls,” Jin said. “Macinus feels like a COR training facility.”
They were sharing a room on COR transport back to Orinus Station. Jin stretched out on the bed, Sacheri cross-legged beside them, his hand on their thigh. “What do you mean?”
Jin closed their eyes. “I want to recognize someone every time I come home, and for them to know me. I know it takes time and work to build that. But… I want a community to rest in. For both of us.”
Which was why they weren’t looking in skysider spaces; Sacheri would be welcome as a visitor and treated with nothing but kindness, but he would not be one of them. He considered the possibilities. Danae was like Jin described, but it was like that because everyone knew Paradis and him by extension. He didn’t think that was quite what Jin meant. The older moons tended to be more insular communities. There were only a handful of those, and most were as skeptical of newcomers as the skysiders, and for good reasons. There were a few exceptions, though he had not been to one in some time. “Semiz, maybe,” he said.
Jin opened their eyes and raised themselves up on their elbows. The covers slid down to their waist. “Where you were born?”
Distracted, Sacheri’s hand slid up Jin’s thigh and over the smooth curve of their belly. “Kids ran in the streets and everyone knew everyone. I don’t think it was my mothers’ favorite part of being there, but it was a shock to me when we moved to Orinus and I had to keep a locator on all the time.”
“Would you want to live there?”
“It’s a lot like Macinus, in some ways, if you kept COR to one set of offices and made the residences much older. It’s a smaller trade crossing, and a little more out of the way, but… it’s one gate to Danae, like we wanted.” He traced the lines of their ribs, thinking fondly of the way they arched and fell when they reached climax. He was tired, but not that tired, and Jin recovered quickly—Sacheri slid down flat beside them, leaving a line of kisses from their shoulder to their hip. “It’s quieter than anything else we’ve considered.”
Jin was on task. “We can get a transport at the next gate,” they said.
Their breath was coming faster. He traced them with his tongue, thinking yet again that he was marvelously fortunate to have them in his bed as often as they were. “Something’s come up,” he said. “You contact housing?”
The run reports came to him directly as they stepped off the shuttle from Semiz station to the city transport docks, along with a message from Adda. It contained two words: recovery unsuccessful. Sacheri sent an acknowledgement and forwarded the message on to Paradis, who would continue to search for the fai’s identity through the Sanctuary networks. He did not share it with Jin.
Sacheri stood outside the transport hall, taking in the city for the first time in several years. He had not been back often enough. Semiz was a small planet with several even smaller moons, three of which were fully terraformed and inhabited; the system exported materials crucial for building and repair of several types of transports, but Semiz itself was a self-sustaining agricultural world, with a handful of small cities surrounded by well-connected networks of smaller communities scattered across the largest continent. It was among the oldest worlds of the Outer Ring, with much of its landscape suitable for human inhabitants without terraforming.
North Miz, where Sacheri had lived until his eleventh year, was the largest of the cities and the main port of entry for the orbit station, which was little more than a transport hub and contained no residences or community space. The city was known for its love of huge seasonal festivals; large open-air markets full of food vendors, artisans, and service workers for hire; and the colorful painted murals on the sides of most of the city buildings.
Jin was staring at him with an amused look. He raised an eyebrow, and Jin gestured across the street at a large botanical mural sprayed across several buildings. “I get you a little better now,” they said.
Sacheri grinned. The painting shared a palette and leaf pattern with the large shawl he wore wrapped around his shoulders. The resemblance was not subtle. “Food or housing first?”
“I’ll follow you.”
“Food,” Sacheri said, and took their hand. Semiz had enough trade traffic to have developed a diverse and delicious cuisine, and he’d been thinking of those Bolisian hand pies on Macinus. There had been a place much like that not far from the transport hall. He asked his ‘plants to find it and was informed that square was closed for summer holidays. “Or housing, I guess,” he said. “And we can see if there’s something that looks good on the way.”
Semiz was bustling, the streets full of the casual hum of everyday life as children played in courtyards and vendors bantered with their customers and music played, never more than a few buildings away. Sacheri led them toward the sea, thinking he’d show Jin the great forested park that edged this side of the city where it met the water in a long, slow slope. The side of the forest along the northern edge of North Miz was protected wild space, where walking trails and open meadows were maintained but the woods ran wild. It had been his favorite place as a kid.
Jin walked in near silence, intently observing every corner and half-hidden alley, reading every face that passed. Sacheri had been fascinated by this on their first trip to look at homes, but Jin had shrugged it off as not that interesting. “I want to think it through,” they’d said.
Sacheri, who felt his way through every major decision and most of the minor ones, had protested. “There’s too much—”
Jin had looked at him like he’d suggested an unsuited spacewalk. “What if we choose wrong?”
“Then we choose again,” Sacheri had said.
Watching them now, Sacheri thought there was less worry in their observing. Jin was relaxed and comfortable.
The nearest entrances to the park were surrounded by food stalls, and Sacheri followed a strong spicy scent to a tent wrapped in lavender and cerulean fabrics.
“This one,” he said to Jin, and then turned to greet the man filling thin layers of flatbread with an assortment of spreads and vegetables and spices.
The man looked up, squinting at Sacheri. “You’re from here, yes?”
Sacheri lowered his eyes. The man’s short gray hair had spirals shaved into it, and what was visible of his chest and arms was covered with heavy-lined tattoos. He was familiar—recognizably Mizan, with his wider build and bright, flowing fabrics and cheerful chatter.
“I lived here as a child but have been gone many years. I remember this, though.” He pointed to one of the bowls, full of a thick white sauce with flecks of green and red. He could not remember the name, but the sweet, tangy memory was clear on his tongue. “Nowhere in the universe makes this like this,” he said.
The man was squinting at him. “You look like my friend Serana, away many years now. She used to take this to her family every day.” he said.
Sacheri bowed low. “I am Serana’s son, Sacheri,” he said. “I am honored you remember us, friend.” Sacheri realized he had forgotten how it felt to be one of many. He fit here, more or less. Even with the syn charms at his cuffs.
The man was beaming now. “She said you would come back, you know, but she didn’t say it would be so soon!”
Sacheri smiled politely, now at a total loss for words. Of course his mothers had sent word; he’d introduced Jin to his family when they’d visited Bolis. Jin had loved them, and vice versa. Serana and Talik and Dolce had urged them to consider staying longer, but Sacheri and Jin had already decided living on a non-COR planet would be too difficult to orchestrate. They had not been considering Semiz, yet, but his mothers had always been a bit…prescient. “I should not be surprised that she sent word,” he said.
The man turned to Jin. “You must be the one they spoke so lovingly about,” he said. “Welcome to the family, young one.”
Jin blushed and bowed for a little longer than necessary to cover it. “I am honored,” they said.
“I am Cord,” the man said. “My beloved Neta will be sad to have missed you.” He handed them each a wrap and a small napkin. “You must return.”
