Chapter 6
Azyr of Veyathi
I found the holes in her network the way I find thin ice. I didn't go looking, and then I couldn't stop seeing them.
She'd asked me to look over the pilot program's support maps between sessions.
Forty matched humans, each with a web of names meant to hold them through the counseling and the leaving and the long strange after.
And in the web, the gaps. Nine of the forty had one advocate and no backup, so a single bad month would leave them with nobody.
Two support routes dead-ended at an office that had closed.
At the center of it, drawn nowhere and load-bearing everywhere, was the one node the whole structure couldn't survive the loss of.
Her. Doing the work of four people and calling it a job. Plus her job was now inside her home. Priya came to Astoria's home since the office had been eliminated.
So I redrew it. My hand was moving before I decided anything, laying a clean version of her own system over the broken one, the gaps marked, three fixes that cost nothing but rearrangement. I put it in front of her at the next session instead of answering her question about export documentation.
She went still. Then, in a few seconds, furious, the particular fury of a competent person watching a stranger point at her load-bearing wall. Then she looked at it properly, and the fury drained out.
“You did this between sessions.” She didn’t look up from the page.
“It took eleven minutes.”
“It would have taken me a week.”
“You do not have a week.” I put one finger on the dead-ended route. “That is the first hole. You are the second.”
Her head came up. “Excuse me.”
“Nine of your forty depend on a single person each. You depend on no one, because you are the single person for all forty. If you become ill , the Pacific Northwest loses its entire human-support layer until you recover.” I moved my finger to the blank center of the diagram, the space where she was not drawn.
“There is no version of you on this map. You built a system to catch everyone and left yourself out of it.”
She opened her mouth. Closed it. Pulled the file across the desk, turned it toward herself, and read her own absence off the page, and I understood I had said a thing I couldn't take back.
“Fix it, then.” Her voice had gone quiet. “Since you can apparently see it.”
So we fixed it. Which was the mistake, or the start of it, because fixing it meant working, and working meant hours.
We got stuck on one. A matched human named Colleen, one advocate, the advocate who’d stopped answering.
“Assign her a new advocate.” She was already reaching for the roster. “That’s the fix. Who’s free?”
“Why did the avocate stop?”
“People get busy. That’s not the puzzle. The puzzle is who catches Colleen now.”
“The avocate is on three other maps.” I turned the file so she could see. “All four lost contact in the same month. We should find out why, but meanwhile the backup cannot depend on her being available.”
She stared at the three names for a long moment. “That’s four people I have to re-cover. Not one.”
“Yes.”
“I hate you a little.”
“That is the correct response to a survey. Nobody thanks the man who charts the reef.”
She almost smiled. She fought it down, the way she fights everything down, and then she dragged her chair around to my side of the desk, close enough that her sleeve sat against mine. We re-covered all four. She didn't move the chair back, and I didn't mention the chair.
She made a small triumphant noise when the last fix clicked into place, then caught herself making it.
“Did you just cheer for a support diagram?”
“I didn't.”
“You made a noise. There was a distinct noise.”
“There was no noise.”
“I’m putting it in the file. Subject celebrates spreadsheets.”
“You do not have a file on me.” She looked at me and didn't answer.
“You’re doing it again.” An hour later, eyes still on the page.
“Doing what?”
“Watching me instead of the file.”
“You are more interesting than the file.”
“It’s a spreadsheet, Azyr. That is a low bar, and you have cleared it insultingly.”
“You do the thing I do.” I nodded at the mess of names between us. “You see the whole system at once. You just aim it at people instead of coastlines.”
She went still, the way I was learning meant I’d landed too near something true, then pulled the file back to her side. “Coastlines don’t file complaints.” She went back to work, and the deflection was so exactly the move I would have made that I had to study the table a while.
That became the pattern as days passed. She’d bring me the broken piece, I’d find the fracture, she’d find the person caught in the fracture, and somewhere in the third hour one of us would say a thing that had nothing to do with the work.
The other would pretend not to notice. She learned to read the blue at my wrists.
I learned she brewed her tea too strong on purpose, to have something to wince at.
On the third late night she stopped mid-sentence, pen in the air. “Can I ask you something that isn’t on any agenda?”
“You have not respected the agenda since the first session.”
“Fair.” She set the pen down and turned her chair to face me instead of the desk. “The eleven systems. Do you ever go back to any of them?”
“No.”
“Ever want to?”
I considered lying. She’d have caught it, and catching me would have cost something. I didn't want to break trust. “There is no reason to return to a place I have finished charting. The map is complete. The place has nothing left to tell me.”
“Huh.” She sat with that. “That is the saddest thing anyone has ever said to me, and I send people off the planet forever for a living.”
“It was not meant to be sad.”
“I know. That’s the part that gets me.” She studied me the way she studies a file she suspects of lying. “So nowhere gets a second visit. Nothing’s worth going back for? Ever?”
“That has been the arrangement.”
“Has been.” She caught the tense. Of course she caught the tense.
She picked the pen up again before either of us had to do anything about it, which was a mercy, because the blank space where my answer should have gone felt less like discipline and more like a door I’d been leaning on that had come quietly off the latch.
It was that evening, walking the block because she wanted the air and I didn't want the night to end, that I made the second mistake.
“So.” Hands in her pockets, collar up against the wet. “Have you actually seen the neighborhood, or do you go room to office to room like a very tall, very blue ghost?”
“I have seen the neighborhood.”
“Prove it. What’s out here?”
I should have offered her something small.
I gave her the street. Fourteen gardens on the east side, eleven on the west, one dead and uncleared.
The crack outside the bakery that forks like a river delta.
The window box three houses down with the geraniums. The exact count of steps from the corner to her stoop.
I gave it to her flat and precise, the way I’d read back a coastline, and I was most of the way through before I felt her stop walking beside me.
“How long have you been here?”
“Twelve days.”
“You memorized my whole street in twelve days.”
There was a thing in how she said it that I understood and she didn’t, yet. I memorized every place I passed through. She was asking why I had chosen to hand this one back to her. The blue climbed my hands before I could get it down, and she caught it.
I could have told her the truth on the wet pavement. My leave had been for a week. I had already broken it. I had memorized her as I had never let myself memorize a home, and it frightened me. Second opening I’d been handed.
“It’s a Veyathi trait.” I kept my voice flat. “We hold spatial memory the way humans hold language. I couldn’t forget your street if I tried. It means nothing.”
“Right.” She didn’t believe me, and she didn’t push.
We walked on. The rain had stopped without committing to it, which made me wonder if that was an Earth or Portland thing..
“For the record,” she offered, “nobody has ever memorized my street and recounted it to me. People have trouble with my coffee order.”
“Your coffee order is objectively difficult.”
“It’s oat milk, Azyr.”
“At a temperature you enforce with menace.”
“So you memorized that too.”
I had. I didn't tell her I had.
It meant something. The man who inhabited nowhere had learned one place now stood in the middle of it lying about why.
She let the small answer stand. We walked the last of the block in a quiet that was not uncomfortable, and at her stoop she looked at me one beat too long.
I understood she’d just done to me the thing I do to a coastline.
She had looked at me the way she’d look at a place she meant to come back to.
The look stayed with me. I had spent years keeping nothing anyone could ask me to return to. My family had died while I was forty light-years out. By the time I reached the three graves, eight months had passed. I was twenty-two when I decided I would not make a home again.
And there I was on a street on Earth, owing a woman for the way she looked at me, and unable to make myself sorry about it.
“Goodnight, Azyr.” She had her key in the door.
“Goodnight.”
We went inside. The blue door shut, 4114 in brass I would be able to see with my eyes closed, and I stood in the entryway a while longer, my ridiculous perfect memory recording the exact click the latch made and filing it with the smell of her herbs, in the archive of things I keep and never use.
Then I climbed to the room where I'd been staying and lay down.
I counted the steps between her door and mine, which I already knew, which I would always know.
I didn't sleep. I had stopped minding the sleeplessness, which was the most alarming thing that has happened to me on this planet.
A man who stops minding the sleepless nights in a place might have found a place he would want to stay.