Chapter 4
Azyr of Veyathi
They put me in a narrow room over the office, and by the fourth night I could have walked it blind.
Nine steps from the bed to the window. The board that gives under the sixth step.
The radiator that kicks on at four in the morning with a sound like a man clearing his throat to say something and then deciding not to. I had not unpacked.
I came for a week. I told myself this at intervals, the way you keep pressing a sore tooth to confirm it still hurts.
A week. Downstairs, Astoria ran our introduction sessions across the desk with a printed agenda and a clipboard she held like a small shield, and I answered her questions about Veyathi custom and off-world logistics in the plainest words I could find.
I watched her carefully avoid looking at the backs of my hands, which had a great deal to say and I couldn’t always keep under control.
She was very good at the frame she’d built.
She held it up between us every session, this was a formality, we were officer and cartographer.
I let her, because lowering it clearly cost her something and I had no wish to make her pay.
But everything inside of me wanted to convince her to give us a try.
The trouble started at night. Through the floor.
My room sat directly over her office, and in that old house sound carried up through the boards.
Most nights it was nothing, or something small like a chair, or her kettle.
Her footsteps made the same six-step loop from the filing cabinet to the window and back.
On the fourth night it was her voice, low and steady, then a long silence.
She spoke again, and I worked out after a while that she was on a call.
While listening for a little while, I realized I should stop listening.
Except I didn’t stop listening. I should be honest about the kind of man I am. I didn't even try.
She was talking to someone who was afraid.
I couldn’t hear the other side, only her half of the conversation, and it was not what I expected. She wasn’t comforting the person, and she wasn’t telling her it would be fine. Or that the fear was small, or that the leap was safe. She was doing something much harder.
For forty minutes, Astoria helped a frightened woman name what she would keep by staying: the mother she saw every Sunday, the job that fit her like a well-worn coat, the familiar shape of her days.
Then she asked what the woman wanted from going.
She laid out both lives without pretending she could guarantee either, so whatever the woman chose would belong to her.
Then the call ended, the house went quiet, and I heard her say it to the empty room, the way people only say the truest thing when they’re certain no one’s listening… “You deserve to know the real size of your own life.”
I sat on the edge of a bed hundreds of light-years from the nearest person who had ever known my name, and something that had been in motion in me for years came to a dead stop.
I had heard a great many beings try to talk other people into leaps.
Recruiters. Officers. My own service, which was very good at the brochure version of the future.
Astoria refused to sell it. She couldn't promise the far side would be worth it.
She could make certain this woman heard her own reasons before answering.
And I lay in the dark room over her office, understanding that this is a woman who has spent years making certain everyone else got to choose with their eyes open, and had not once, I would have bet the ship I traveled here on, done it for herself.
That was what got to me. Not that she was kind. Kind was common. That she was fair, ferociously, to every person in the program except the one doing the being fair.
I got up and crossed the nine steps to the window. The streetlight caught my hands. Below me, her garden occupied one narrow sill. Eleven systems, and I had nothing I tended daily except the next route.
So I opened the terminal on my handheld, because I couldn’t sleep. I opened the Survey Corps channel, and I filed for an extension of leave.
The form wanted a justification. I looked at the empty field for a while. There was no true thing I could put in it. So I typed a false thing. Cartographic anomalies detected in the Pacific Northwest region. Additional survey time requested.
There are no cartographic anomalies in Portland.
Earth was one of the most thoroughly mapped places in the settled galaxy.
Every atom of it has been charted by better instruments than mine.
I read the sentence I’d written and understood two things in the same breath…
that it was a lie to the service I’d dedicated my entire adult life to, and that it was the truest sentence I’d logged in a decade.
Because there was an anomaly. It was me.
And there was no survey that got you out of yourself.
I submitted it. The channel accepted it the way it accepted everything, without comment or opinion, and gave me eleven more days.
Eleven more days. I had put a lie through a government channel, stamped and filed, because I wanted to remain near a woman who had declined my match. Her decision was not mine to revise. The question was whether I could stay without turning my wanting into a demand.
There was a Veyathi word for that. It didn’t translate.
The nearest the machine offered was lintel, the beam that carried the weight of the wall so the opening could exist at all.
I thought of the woman Astoria was on the phone with and thought…
she was a lintel, and she had been load-bearing for years, and nobody had once asked what it costs the beam.
I didn’t tell her about the extension. Once I sorted this strangeness, I’d leave. Except, I’d found somewhere I didn’t want to leave and had absolutely no idea how to stay.
The house made a groaning noise I’d become familiar with and broke me of my thoughts.
I returned the nine steps back to bed, and I lay down even though I knew I wouldn’t sleep.
A man who is content to lie awake somewhere has started, without permission, to think of it as his. Or so my Veyathi elders always said.
I turned that over until the window went gray, and then struggled my way through the human bathroom Astoria had shown me.
A long bathing session in the warm artificial waterfall did wonders.
Aches from lying on the bed without sleeping eased.
Once I was done, I used my body’s own internal heat to dry off quickly, then resumed a normal temperature.
Back on Veyathi, our species had adjusted to warm and cold climates.
This was one of those normal things my species did that others thought was odd.
Two words: not yet. I said them to my suitcase in a borrowed room, and headed downstairs where the kettle was already on.
Downstairs, I would be a formality for a woman I had already, quietly and catastrophically, decided I didn't want to leave.
In every way that would eventually matter, I was already unpacking.
Touching the case would take more courage than I had this morning.