Six
SIX
—Agency handbook
Isako needs to get to work, but first, she has a lunch date. She hasn’t seen Maya in weeks. They’ve both been busy: Maya with final exams, Isako with dealing out death.
She’s going to have to explain to her daughter that she’s decided to resign and is thirty days away from following her client into the Vastness. This isn’t a conversation she was looking forward to having, and it’s happening too soon. She doesn’t feel prepared.
In the car ride over, she reads resignation letters.
Not everyone chooses to make their letter public, but most resignees take the opportunity to share their final thoughts.
Much of it is personal, expressing love and thanks to kith and kin, giving instructions as to the dispersal of their resignation bonuses, and making requests for their eventual nameplaces.
Isako reads it all but skims those parts.
She lingers on the last lines. She figures it’s only respectful to do so. The last thing a person says is important, the coda to their entire life.
Particularly good codas garner public admiration, are reprinted in collections and inscribed in nameplaces.
They pierce the heart with raw human emotion, illuminate the soul of the writer, and express truths that can only be fully surfaced by a peaceful and mature mind accepting of its own imminent oblivion.
The writer Quay Sooyong was said to have spent three years writing and rewriting his coda, happily resigning once he’d achieved what he deemed to be his best work.
Life is the sun
Death is the north star
Both illuminate the way home.
On a journey across the heavens,
what more are a few steps?
The coda of Crane Otto, an Astrocommunications information-systems specialist who resigned among the group of fourteen wagemen at Easthatch yesterday, reads: Jimmy, you still owe me a beer, you bastard.
Isako finds Otto’s and Sooyong’s final sentiments equally poetic.
Dew Loren’s simple coda doesn’t surprise Isako, although it makes her put down the screen for a moment. Love you, Tessa. See you on the other side.
The resignation letter of Director Forest Greves is very long, and Isako’s sure that some sections have been redacted by higher-ups in the Internal Relations division.
His coda is perfectly fine: Let us never forget that we came from the stars, and that they will guide us to our destiny , but it’s his last spoken words—“I resign in protest”—broadcast all over Tenacity, that’ll be remembered forever.
Just like the words of Glacier Janus Brady, who raised a middle finger to the sky before taking his last breath.
Thanks to good ol’ Captain Brady, Fuck Earth became the enduring way to express encouragement, to rally morale, to say Hell yeah , or You got this , or We’re standing on business and don’t need no stinkin’ help.
Her own coda, Isako decides, should be simple. She’s no poet and she doesn’t like to put on airs. But given the length of her career and reputation, people are going to be expecting her last lines to really hit.
The car pulls up to the triplex townhouse that’s home to CTH Isthmus.
With the income of an elite senior atier, Isako could’ve applied to transfer herself, Maya, and Tai to a bigger, wealthier Community what were they waiting for? The Company was raising its population targets for this registration period. The allowance was bound to go to someone, why not them?
Even though the two of them didn’t work out, she has no regrets, because without Tai, she wouldn’t have Maya, the one thing in her life she’s sure is good.
She pauses on the sidewalk, unsure if she can just walk up to the front door and enter it unannounced the way she would’ve a few years ago.
Of all the adults in the kith, she contributes the most income.
But she spends more time in her apartment near Astrocom headquarters than she does at the house.
She feels more like a visiting guest than a returning family member.
Maya saves her from the decision by opening the front door. “Hi, Mom!”
Isako hurries to close the space between them. She hesitates for a second. Do nineteen-year-olds object to being hugged in public? She throws caution aside and embraces her daughter tightly.
Maya hugs her back. She smells like citrus and vanilla—the same dry shampoo that Sondra uses.
She’s nearly as tall as Isako, but curvy in a way her mother never was.
She has Tai’s mouth and jaw—that full top lip and the dimple in the middle of the chin—but looking into her eyes is like gazing into a mirror.
She’s dressed in fashionable spring thermals and the expensive sunset-blue puffy coat that she purchased with the birthday money Isako sent her.
Sondra emerges from the kitchen, coming up behind Maya with a mug of steaming tea.
She looks good. Doesn’t even look like she’s in her forties.
Slimmed right back down after having Kyle and stayed that way, even while managing the household and wrangling all the kids as co-kithmother. Isako wonders how she does it.
“Won’t you come in, Isa?” Sondra holds open the door and smiles the polite smile of a friend who expects to be turned down. Isako feels tempted to accept the invitation into her own house, just to surprise the woman a little.
“Not this time, sorry. I only have a couple hours. Maya and I were planning on getting lunch. How about Yoshi’s?”
She regrets the suggestion immediately. They’ve been walking over to Yoshi’s since Maya was a little girl.
Good grief, she’s nineteen now, not ten.
She’s not going to want to go to the same neighborhood spot she’s been going to all her life, just to get the same noodle soup and a strawberry ice pop from the freezer like she used to.
Isako wants to kick herself. She should’ve asked Maya where she wanted to go.
Or come up with a better idea ahead of time and surprised her daughter with reservations.
Maya says, “Sure, Yoshi’s would be great.”
“We can go somewhere else. You’re probably tired of going there.” She racks her mind for ideas. She’s been to countless nice restaurants for business. Why can’t she think of a single one?
“No, I want to go to Yoshi’s. It’s close, and it’s tradition. Right, Mom?” Maya takes her by the elbow.
Isako relents. She knows Maya is gracefully managing her, overlooking her failings and making everything all right, the way Isako would manage a client, but she’s okay with that because it means Maya still wants to spend time with her.
“Don’t forget to leave enough time to get to your interview this afternoon,” Sondra calls after them.
“I know,” Maya calls back over her shoulder to her kithmother with the casual, confident disregard that children have for the caregivers they see every day and whose presence and love they take for granted. What a luxury, to be taken for granted.
If it weren’t for Sondra and Amie being a stable, loving couple and such a capable duo of kithmothers, Isako would never have had Maya, no matter Tai’s feelings on the matter.
All the years she was at the mercy of a client’s beck and call, pulled away on assignment at a moment’s notice, at risk of being killed while on the job or dismissed for failing, at least she harbored no worries for her daughter.
Maya was well cared for, she had loving kithparents and kithsiblings, she grew up just fine.
It’s how a productive society is meant to be.
The Founding Officers in their wisdom understood the vital importance of strong communities supporting specialization of labor.
It’s why CTH Services has always been a large, safe, indispensable division.
It would be staggeringly inefficient for people to work demanding roles while raising their own biochildren.
Isako barely knew her own biofather, who died in a mining accident when she was eight, but she had other adult role models in her life.
Besides, as much as she loves Maya, she would’ve been terrible at caregiving and domestic work.
Not that she doesn’t respect Sondra. She doesn’t begrudge the mandatory percentage of her earnings that goes to pay the wages of the kithparents, or Resident CTH Managers, as they’re called in Companyspeak.
She gives it over with far more ease than the part of her income that goes to the Agency.
Doesn’t mean she’s not jealous. She tried to come home often, to be present for as many meals and milestones as possible, but it was never enough.
Isako wonders if harboring resentment toward the person who loves and raises her child, who was there every minute she couldn’t be, makes her a miserable asshole.