Chapter 10
Azyr of Veyathi
I watched her take a Council intake committee apart from the back of the room, and that is when I understood I was not falling. I had landed some time ago and only just now understood.
She’d asked me to come, which was the first strange thing.
Officers didn't bring their matched cartographer to a Council review. She'd declined my match. Now, I was just a work task. There is no line on any form for an emotional support alien. But she’d stopped at the office door that morning in coat and looked at me. “I want a witness in that room who isn’t on the committee’s side.
” So I followed her across the city to a building full of people who decide other people’s lives with a stamp.
“You’re nervous.” The lift doors had closed on just the two of us.
“I’m never nervous.”
“Your hands are doing the thing my hands do.”
“My hands are fine.” She put them in her pockets. “It’s Renata. She’s ready, and they’re stalling her out of pure cowardice, and I have watched exactly this kill the leap in three people who should have gone. Not this one.”
The matter was small on paper. A matched couple, a human named Renata and her Thyren, cleared by the algorithm, the counseling, and every audit the reformed agency runs, held up now at the last gate by a subcommittee that had discovered a form.
Not a problem. A form. A residency attestation that had never been required until eight days ago, invented by a functionary who liked the power of his own signature.
Renata sat in the front row with her hands folded so tightly the knuckles had gone white, three weeks from the rest of life and stopped by a piece of paper.
Astoria didn't sit. She stood at the rail dressed in nice clothes, and she was quiet for exactly as long as it takes to make a room lean forward. Then she went to work.
“I want to read you something.” She read them their own protocol.
Chapter and verse, the reformed charter, the section she wrote, the promise the agency made to the planet after the first women were taken without being asked.
She read it back to the people who were supposed to be keeping it, and she didn't raise her voice once.
“You are not protecting anyone with this form,” she told the subcommittee.
“There is no one to protect. Renata is an adult who has been counseled for four months by a licensed officer—that is me—and who has read every word of the disclosure, twice, out loud, in this office, because I made her, because that is my job. She knows exactly what she is choosing. What you are protecting is your own comfort, and you are spending her life to buy it, days at a time, and I am not going to let you.”
A man on the committee said something about procedure.
“Procedure.” She let the word sit there and rot.
“I have driven people to a transit hub and stood on the tarmac, watched the sky take them, and not one of those goodbyes was exactly to procedure. If you think the paperwork is the point of this agency then you have misunderstood the agency so completely that I am frightened to leave you in charge of a stapler. Sign the clearance. She has waited long enough for people who were afraid on her behalf.”
A woman on the committee, kinder, tried a different tack. "The attestation was a new policy," she offered, "and policy applied to everyone, and surely the liasons could appreciate the need for consistency."
“I appreciate consistency enormously. Here’s some.
” Astoria didn’t blink. “Every human this agency ever cleared was cleared under the rules that existed when they applied. You do not get to invent a hurdle eight days before the finish line and call it fairness. That’s not policy.
That’s a man who found a stamp he likes.
” She turned, finally, to the front row, and her whole voice changed, dropped into the register she keeps for the frightened.
“Renata. Do you understand everything you’re choosing?
All of it? The distance, the delay, the sister you’ll write to on an eight-month lag? ”
“Yes.” Barely a sound.
“Say it to them. Not to me. Them.”
Renata stood up, shaking, and said yes to a room full of bureaucrats, and it was the bravest thing I saw on Earth that week. Astoria stepped back and let the woman own it, because she hands people their own courage with the price tag off and never takes the credit.
They signed the clearance.
Renata got to Astoria in the hall before I did, threw both arms around her, and cried. Astoria held her and got something too low to hear into her ear that made the woman laugh through it, and then sent her off to her whole enormous life with a hand on her shoulder and a joke.
I wondered whether Astoria could ever defend her own wanting with the same certainty.
I love her. And I have spent my entire adult life proving that loving a fixed thing is how a man gets destroyed when it is taken, which is what happened, in eight weeks of fever, to everyone whose names I do not say.
Keep moving. Stay untouchable. A horizon cannot die on you. It didn't work. I didn't want the horizon. I wanted the woman at the rail with the good coat and the merciless quiet voice, and no distance I could put between us was going to fix that, because the distance was the disease, not the cure.
She found me in the corridor after, lit up and shaking, the adrenaline of a fight just won burning off her in the cold hospital light of the Council building.
“Was that too much?” She was still vibrating with it. “That was too much. I told a committee I was afraid to leave it in charge of a stapler. Priya’s going to make me apologize.”
“It was not too much.”
“You have to say that. You watched me threaten a subcommittee.”
I reached up and turned the translator off.
I didn't know why I kept doing that around her, except that the machine made me fluent, and I didn't want fluent, I wanted her to hear my words. So I said it in my own bad English, slow, hunting each word down and setting it in front of her.
“You were.” I searched for the word. “Extraordinary. Eleven systems. Nothing like you.”
It came out plain and halting. She went still, looked away, then looked back. She was no longer talking about the committee.
“You turned it off.” Her eyes came back to mine.
“Yes.”
“You keep doing that.”
“Yes.”
“Say the rest of it.” Not a demand. Almost a dare. “Whatever you turn the machine off to not-quite-say. I can see you not saying it. You go this specific color.”
I could have said it there. I love you. I have loved you sinceI first heard you spoke.
I am lying to my own service to stay in your city and I do not know how to stop.
The translator was off. There was nothing between my mouth and the truth but fear.
I gave her the extraordinary again instead, which was true and also a coward’s substitution, and she heard both.
“That’s not the rest of it.”
“No.”
“Okay.” She let me keep it, the way she lets me keep everything, which is its own mercy and its own trap.
She didn't finish the thought, and I didn't make her. We stood in a Council corridor a beat too long, and then she laughed, unsteady, and said she needed a drink and possibly a new career. We went back out into the wet city, and I didn't tell her.
We got coffee she didn’t finish and I couldn’t taste, at a place she likes because the owner argues with her about the weather. She came down slow off the fight, and somewhere in there she bumped my shoulder with hers.
That night the channel pinged. My leave was up again.
I sat at the terminal in the dark office and didn't file the honest paperwork, the paperwork that says reassign this officer, he is compromised, he has stopped being able to survey his way out of himself. I filed the lie instead. Cartographic anomalies in the Pacific Northwest region. Additional survey time requested. There are no anomalies. There is a woman who defends strangers’ leaps with her whole chest and cannot see her own path.
I was extending a falsehood through a government channel to stay near her, and the specific cruelty of it didn't escape me.
I would rather be a coward standing next to her than an honest man alone with a clean conscience and a clear horizon and no one, anywhere, reading the color of my hands.
I closed the terminal. Upstairs, a floorboard squeaked under her foot. I sat in the dark and let myself love her. The form would need another answer soon. So would she.