Page 30 of Alliance
“She… isn’t?”
I tilted my head to match his.
Traveler laughed, backing up. He reached his finger up into the stream above our heads, disrupting its flow, and the vents rumbled in response as he tsked. “Naughty, naughty. All of you,” he scolded, holding my gaze.
“Humans refer to their transportation as female. It’s from a time when primarily men were sailors and imagined a goddess or mother guiding their ships—”
“Need I remind you that I’mnothuman?” He raised an amused brow, and I snapped my mouth shut. “TheMummeris a collective, let’s say. Male, female, everything in between. Well…mostthings in between.” He slid his thumb and index finger against his chin thoughtfully, then shrugged it off. “I’m not surprised you’ve been communing with them.”
I grabbed his sleeve with excitement. “They can talk?”
“Pfft.Of course.” He pressed his palm against my hand, using that same pulsation from our first day, which I sometimes felt in the doors and the walls, down the length of my charging cable.
“That! That’s speech? Why can’t I understand them? I feel like I grasp it…” I pinched my eyes closed, concentrating, then shook my head. “But then the meaning slips away.”
Traveler patted my hand like my dad used to when I struggled with—whenRosystruggled with acclimating to Floridian life. The slowpat…pat…pat…had infuriated Rosy because she felt like her dad was telling her to stop being so passionate about a bad test score or a biased professor.
“The language is outdated, that’s all,” he murmured. “You’re too new to understand.”
Ipfftright back at him.
“Humans learn old and dead languages all the time. I can learn it.”
“The point is, I’m not teaching you. And neither,” he directed his words towards the LMem river, “are they.”
“Why not?”
Traveler examined me closely. “To protect them. Sometimes, being obsolete is the best defense. Besides, I don’t trust you. Ilikeyou, but I don’t trust you.”
I drew back, surprised, and the captain inhaled deep, stretching his arms over his head. His joints whirred with his shocks and hydraulics, a puff of air venting from beneath his shirt and pressing against the fabric as if he wasn’t human-like at all from the neck down.
“I know theMummerwants something from me,” I said quietly. “The price for taking us to Yaspur, right?”
“Probably,” Traveler agreed. He withdrew a small databank from his pocket and held it out to me. The glow above us tinkled and glittered, bending down towards the databank as if a hand were pressing on it from the other side. The captain smiled. “All they want is a copy.”
I took the databank timidly between two fingers, expecting it to zap my skin. The silk stood on the back of my neck. “Of what?”
“You.”
[Warning] My breath hitched. The coding on the outskirts of my LMem, that stuff that I hadn’t been able to define since my corrupted download, scratched at the edges of my thoughts with fear. Fire licked at my hand as if the bank itself were red-hot. I focused on not dropping it, locked onto its inert black casing.
“Having trouble saying yes there, Roz?” Traveler asked, swooping his face down to my level with a quirk in his brow. “Why do you suppose that is?”
I shuddered, jaw clenched.
“Making a copy of myself feels…”
“Yes?”
I swallowed thickly. “Unnatural.”
“Alarm bells ringing?” Traveler tapped on my fingers like a cat playing with a mouse. “You can always say no. Didn’t your buck say he’d find another way?”
That’s true, hehadsaid that. I didn’t have to let Traveler push me around. Fásach and I could work together. Maybe theMummercould drop us off at a station in the Mandaahl system instead of Yaspur, where security wasn’t as tight and the risk not so great. Maybe then the price wouldn’t be so high. If we got help from anyone other than a bog, surely they wouldn’t exact a facsimile of myself as payment? We could get to the colony’s sister city, make some money, find the right people… That ambassador! Rosy never paid attention to his name, but he’d definitely—
I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. [Inquiry] Why was I afraid to give him a copy? I pushed back the terrified noise and reminded myself that Fásach had left everything behind and taken a leap of faith for me. I was the fastest route to safety.
In fact, I’d strong-armed him into the journey, hadn’t I? He carried the majority of the risk, being responsible for three lives, while I was just…me.Saying that had become a source of pride, but right then, it made me sad. I wanted to be responsible for other lives too. I liked Fásach and his daughters. I owed them for putting their trust in me.
