Kanagen

  I don't deserve this.

  That was the thought that leapt into Haven's head when she saw herself in the mirror.

  I'm trash. Trash doesn't deserve to feel good.

  But she did feel good, for the first time in her life, about what she saw. Though the sarcortesta was still mimicking a shape she'd never belonged in, the dress that Anix had picked out for her, a soft and airy thing of many shades of pink, camoufged its ck of curves surprisingly well. The wig she'd compiled along with it added to her silhouette, brown locks resting in wavy sheets on her shoulders. The sarcotesta let her feel it all — the gentle tickling of the hair, the delicate fabric of the dress, even the way that the sarcotesta's feet felt ever so slightly off in the wedge heels.

  And true, the sarcotesta itself was still in the picture, an ivory-white hole in the ensemble, as if someone had simply erased the girl but left the dress and her hair behind. But then, Haven didn't mind being erased; if anything, it improved what she was looking at. After all, it was a girl she saw when she looked in the mirror, a girl who raised her hand along with Haven's reaching it out to rest it against the impcable surface of its own reflection.

  That can't be me, Haven thought. I can't let it be me. I don't deserve it.

  "I, for one, think you look very lovely," Anix said, her vines coiling gently around Haven. "What do you think?"

  "It's nice," Haven whispered, barely able to muster sufficient will to make the sarcotesta talk for her.

  "Nice, hmm? Well, as I understand it, there is one particur ancient Terran ritual we haven't yet conducted for situations like this. Don't worry, petal, I won't let you fall." Before Haven could even utter a single confused sylble, Anix's vines tightened around her body, around her legs, and began to turn her around. It was all Haven could do to keep the sarcotesta's feet moving in time. Around her, the dress began to billow up as centrifugal force acted upon it. "Skirt go spinny!"

  "Wh-what?!" Anix brought her to a stop, but the skirt continued, sailing along for a brief heartbeat before gravity caught up with it and dragged it, ever so gently, to a rolling stop along her thighs. It was one of the most wonderful sensations Haven had ever felt, and once more she found herself feeling such joy that her inability to cry was the only thing keeping her from doing so. She clutched at the skirt with one hand, her chest with another.

  "Is everything alright, petal?" Anix did not crouch down next to her so much as bend, like a particurly flexible tree in a strong wind.

  "Just. Wow." Haven could still set a watch by her medically stabilized heartbeat, but there was no ignoring the rush she was still feeling. "Can I...do that again?"

  Anix ughed. "Of course you can. Slowly, though, alright?" Haven nodded, and with Anix's vines at the ready, she began to clumsily spin herself around. Once more, the skirt went airborne, suspended around her as if upon an invisible cloud, and no matter how much she didn't deserve to feel this joy, she felt it nevertheless.

  Don't get used to it, she told herself as she stumbled to a halt. Good things don't st, and I wouldn't deserve them even if they did.

  "Good girl, Haven," Anix said, giving her a gentle pat on the head; the sarcotesta was somehow clinging to the wig, so it didn't even shift as she did so. "Well, now that we've addressed that issue, let's move on to the others, shall we? The sarcotesta's caloric store, and by extension your own, is getting a bit low. I dare say it's time we topped you up, hm?"

  "Uhm." Haven reached up, her fingers resting on the empty space where her mouth would have been. "Slight problem with that."

  "You really think we'd put you in all that without thinking about how to feed you?" Anix curved her face into a reasonable approximation of a wry smile. "Come along, I'll show you."

  From the bedroom (a bit bare, and not so grand as some of her other rooms, but still more than she needed or deserved) to the kitchen was only a few steps for Anix — she took them slowly, so Haven could keep up with her clumsy gait. Like most of Anix's hab, it seemed close enough to Terran standard, but with floral flourishes everywhere and hardwood construction that made Haven wonder if the whole thing hadn't been grown from a single enormous tree. This included the table, its surface taller than Haven stood; Anix lifted her up and pced her in a tall chair next to it.

  "Now then," Anix continued, tapping away at a cquered panel on the wall, "your artificial stomach is still geared for maximum digestive efficiency, since it's not as if you can chew at present, but that does mean solid food is out. I have a highly nutritious and calorically dense food repcement I'm going to give you, but the good news is, it can taste like whatever you want. So: what would you most like to taste at this moment, my dear?"

  "Uhm." It wasn't a question Haven was prepared for. Before, she'd simply eaten as little as whatever had been pced in front of her by her father's staff as she could get away with before retreating for what little solitude she could find. Requests weren't something she'd earned, and weren't something she'd have felt comfortable making in any case — she was already such a burden on others, she couldn't stand the idea of adding to that burden by making demands. "I don't know."

  "You don't know?" Anix tilted her head to one side curiously. "You don't have a favorite food? Something that gives you warm, fuzzy feelings inside just thinking about it? Something you always wish you could have a second helping of, even if you're full?"

  Haven grasped at a fistful of her skirt. "Not really." Whether it was true or not didn't matter.

  "Haven." Anix leaned forward, her voice firm but kind. "I am going to compile you a meal. There is practically no bor involved in this act, and I will happily indulge whatever preference you have. I would do so even if there were."

  Haven experienced the sensation of her gut clenching even though she was pretty certain that she no longer had a gut to clench. How did-

  "You're not exactly hard to read, petal," Anix said, winking one of her four eyes. "You're holding back, and while I understand that this is likely a habit that served your needs in the wild, you are no longer in the wild. You must learn that your wants and needs are as important as anyone else's, and this is an excellent time to start. So: what would you like your meal to taste of?"

  An impulse flitted into Haven's mind. "I, uhm-" No, no, no, she thought, that's too much.

  "Yes? Come on, petal, spit it out."

  Shame boiling up inside her, Haven squared her shoulders and said, "A b-banana. But those are absurdly expensive and-"

  "One banana fvored meal, coming right up~" Anix said, tapping away at the panel again, "and my dear, we really must work on that reflex. Expensive is a technical term used in logistics and other complex pnning disciplines; it has no bearing whatsoever on the life of any given sophont." The wall began to hum softly, and Anix turned to lean in close to Haven. "Say it with me, little one: Scarcity no longer exists."

  "Scarcity no longer exists." Haven didn't think the sarcotesta's cheeks could flush, but if they could she was sure it would be incredibly visible against its usual stark white color. She tried not to think about that. Instead, she focused on Anix's eyes, which were so much easier to look into than another terran's. Colorful, swirly, impossibly deep...

  "I do not need to pay for things."

  "I do not need to pay for things," Haven repeated.

  "I am a good girl and I deserve to have the things I want."

  "I am a good girl and I deserve to have the things I want." Haven paused, the spell broken by resurgent guilt, frustration, and self-loathing. "H-hey!"

  Anix giggled and straightened up. "I quite agree, Haven. You are a good girl, and you do deserve to have the things you want! Such as, for example-" From behind herself, Anix's vines produced a rge pstic-looking bag, transparent and full of a yellowish substance that seemed to be not-quite-liquid. "Your meal, fvored just as you asked!"

  "You're... you're going to put all of that in me?" The bag was enormous, at least two feet long. Haven couldn't imagine swallowing the whole thing.

  "Your phytotech stomach is rather a lot more capacious than the one you evolved with," Anix expined, "and for various reasons it's best that we limit how many times a day we feed you. Such as this, for example. Hold still, little one." With her hands, she reached forward and cupped Haven's cheeks. Her fingers explored just behind her jawline, and Haven both felt and heard something click.

  And then Anix pulled her face off.

  Really, she only removed the lower half of the sarcotesta's facepce, like a piece of eggshell being removed from a boiled egg. It was thin but rigid, its inside covered in some kind of lichen-like membrane. "Th-the fuck-?!"

  "Language, petal," Anix said gently. "I'm just accessing your feeding port, alright? Would you like me to give you some xenodrugs to offset any anxiety or discomfort this might be causing you?"

  "F-feeding port?"

  "Mmhmm. Nothing gruesome, just a grafted socket for this." She held up the end of the bag, which tapered into a hose and a little nozzle. "This goes into that, and then in it goes. We'll be doing this about once per day. Really, you could probably manage this yourself, but I think it's best I do it the first few times, yes? Now, hold still." Her vines made it clear that holding still was not optional — though they were gentle, Haven couldn't budge as Anix carefully levered the tip of the bag in. It slipped past her range of vision and-

  click

  -snapped into pce. "Good girl," Anix said, stroking Haven's head gently and beginning to squeeze the bag with her vines. Immediately, Haven felt a creamy texture, and her mind lit up with the sweet, rich taste of a banana. None of it was happening in her mouth or on her tongue — the parts she was feeling the nozzle with, feeling the whatever-it-was sliding down the tube that passed for her throat, didn't seem to map to those — but she felt and tasted it all the same. It was utterly bizarre, strangely mechanical, and yet somehow she found it comforting. No need to chew, no need to swallow. She could simply experience the essential nature of the meal as more and more of it was pushed into her.

  "It's...really good," she said, somehow unsurprised that she could speak with perfect crity while what passed for her mouth was tched onto a nozzle.

  "I'm very gd to hear that," Anix said, giving Haven a squeeze and slowly loosening her vines' grip on her. The impulse to struggle had completely vanished, and Haven allowed herself to sink into the steady rhythm of squeezes Anix was giving the bag. "Of course, in the future, we can compile a proper dispenser for you. Then we could alter the fvoring on the fly, instead of giving you a meal all of one taste and texture, and I imagine it would be much easier for you to handle a dispenser hose than this big bag, hm?" She rolled it as she squeezed, as if it were a tube of toothpaste and she was trying to squeeze every st bit out — and soon, she had. "There we go!"

  The nozzle came loose with another click, and soon Haven's face was back where it belonged. She explored it tentatively with her hands, unable to find so much as a hint of a seam where it had separated. She felt pleasantly full, the memory of the fvor almost as strong as the fvor itself. "Thank you," she said. "Though, uhm...that was a little weird."

  "You'll grow accustomed to it, I'm sure," Anix said, pcing the tube back in the compiler. "Of course, it won't be too long after that until reconstruction of your jaw, esophagus, teeth, and tongue takes pce — then it'll be back to solid foods. But I look forward to that! Terran cuisine is so interesting and varied, I'm not sure what I'd prepare for you first. Something fun, I think. But we've plenty of time to worry about that. Now that we've got you fed and settled in and properly attired, let's head over to the veterinary hospital so we can begin the process of recoding your sarcotesta."

  Yet something else I don't deserve. "L-like this?" Haven took the hem of her skirt in one hand. "It's just, I've never... and this is so-"

  "You look lovely, and I'm sure you'll attract plenty of positive attention," Anix said, gently draping a heavy vine around Haven's shoulders. Its weight, and the way it seemed to pulse as it shifted back and forth, was strangely soothing. "I know that if I were out and saw you going about your business, I'd feel absolutely obligated to come over and inform you just how cute you are."

  Haven buried her face in her hands. No, no, no, fuck, shit, fuck! It was just too much. Good things like this didn't happen to her, and people didn't say nice things that she actually wanted to hear. All of this was going to crash and burn around her — the scales would inevitably bance themselves. Nothing good happened without ten times as much bad. Who knew what the world would throw at her to do so?

  "You never opened any of them?"

  Cass and Trish together filled most of the standing room in Trish's bookbinding workshop, the walls of which held shelves of books, tools, boxes full of miscelneous supplies, and more. The desk, apart from it's usual disarray, now hosted one of those boxes, an old shoebox full of unopened letters, each and every one bearing the familiar, flowing hand of Cass Hope. When she wanted to — when she wasn't hurriedly scrawling down a millennia-long strategy to save humanity — she could make her writing very lovely indeed.

  Trish let out a sigh. "The first few, it was still too hard. And then-" She paused, shook her head. "You weren't you. After I read the third book, I couldn't bring myself to read more of what they put in your head. But at the same time, I couldn't just throw them away. They were still from you, even if you weren't you anymore."

  "I was never not me, Trish," Cass said, and though she had a sad look in her eyes, Trish got the uncanny feeling that Cass wasn't sad for herself. "No wonder you're confused, though, if you don't know about anything that's happened since we left Solstice for the frontier."

  "I'm sure it's been an endless cavalcade of delight, conquering new species in the name of domestication," Trish said, putting the lid back on the box of letters.

  "It's more than just that, you know," Cass replied. "It's... life. It's existence. It's the small things. It's baking with Leah, or going to a reading with Brrd, or just walking down to Cliff's for a sandwich. Not all of that can fit in a letter, but I tried." She cast a sidelong gnce at the box. "I do wish you'd read them."

  "I'm sure the life of a pet is full of thrills." Trish didn't bother to keep the sarcasm out of her voice.

  "And the life of a rogue bookbinder is far more exciting, I'm sure." She ran her fingers along the shelf of bound-and-ready copies of Freedom's Ember, feeling out each spine one by one. "You stuck with the working title?"

  Trish shrugged. "It's a good title."

  "Well... you have my thanks for keeping up with it, even if I never meant for you to keep doing it for this long." She pulled one down, opened it, and began to leaf through it, turning each page slowly, half-gzed eyes traveling across it seemingly at random.

  "Someone has to. And someone will have to after I'm gone."

  "You always were the sort to commit." A smile snuck back onto Cass's face as she continued to peruse the book. "And you've become a very good bookbinder."

  "Practice makes perfect."

  "That it does. You should see Mistress; she's gotten very good at cooking. Makes perfect fesenjoon." She gnced up for a moment. "Maybe I'll ask her to make it, and you can come to visit, hm?"

  "I don't know about that," Trish said, looking away. "I don't think it's a particurly good idea."

  "Why not? You'd get to meet Leah properly, for one thing. She really does regret not getting to know you."

  "Cass, have you considered that I'm not particurly interested in breaking bread with the affini that brainwashed you into thinking you want to be a pet?" Trish said, meeting Cass's gaze with a gre. "Nor am I particurly enthused about the idea of humoring a floret who, even from a great distance, is so obviously drugged to the gills that she's completely out of it at all times."

  Cass held Trish's eyeline in a very un-Cass-like way. "That was an unkind thing to say."

  "But you're not denying it."

  "On the first count, I already have, multiple times, and I don't care to repeat myself." A bit of the old Cass Hope was creeping back in at the edges, the firmness, the focus. It was simultaneously heartening and heartbreaking to see. "And on the second...you don't know Leah. She's had challenges, and she's overcome them with the help of her loved ones." She let out a huff and looked back down at the book. "Frankly, I think she's probably better put together than I am at this point. I'm just an old floret who likes books too much. If you'd read my letters, you'd know all that. And maybe you wouldn't say things like that."

  "I've resigned myself to never seeing the other side of this occupation," Trish replied. Something in her chest twinged, and she felt a familiar tightness that she'd long since learned to ignore. "But that doesn't mean I have to be happy about it. Just because you've had your mind tampered with to make you enthusiastically in favor of the Compact doesn't mean I have to embrace it without reservation."

  "Clearly, the third book didn't get its point across as well as I'd hoped," Cass muttered, riffling through the pages and freezing up as she reached the end. "You left it out."

  "Of course I left it out! I'm not going to do their work for them!"

  Cass was still for a moment before closing the book and turning to set it back on the shelf. When she turned back to look at Trish, the pity was gone; her eyes bzed with anger. "You. Left. It. Out," she said, enunciating every word with maximum crity and barely suppressed rage.

  "The Cass you were would never have wanted Affini propaganda attached to her st-ditch hope for humanity!"

  "The Cass I was didn't understand." None of the usual signs of fury in a human were there — her shoulders weren't hunched, her hands weren't clenching into fists — but that only made her obvious anger all the more palpable, all the more dangerous. More than ever, ironically, Trish felt at home, like the Cass of old had returned. "I didn't understand the Affini, I didn't understand what the Compact represented, and I didn't understand florets. But now I do. And the third book is the full perspective!"

  "It advocates accepting domestication! Advocates surrender!"

  "Because we don't need to fight them. Not even indirectly, not even like the first two books outline!" She closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and let it out slowly. "Trish, Freedom's Ember is supposed to be a fire axe. Break gss in case of emergency. In case the absolute worst happens and we do have to fend for ourselves again! But leaving out the third book — you've turned it into a weapon!"

  "Because that's what it was supposed to be, what you wanted it to be before they ruined you!" In the silence after Trish spoke, she felt the tightness in her chest again, along with the queasy sensation that came when her mouth (or her hands) outpaced her brain.

  Cass stared back, the anger slowly draining from her eyes. "You really think of me as ruined?"

  "You were the single most badass person I've ever known," Trish said, wiping the moisture away from her eyes before it could coalesce into tears. "If it wasn't for them, I fully believe you'd have torn down the whole Accord."

  "We were starving to death on a frozen prison pnet four-hundred-and-fifty light years from Earth, Trish," Cass said quietly. "And that was only because the Cosmic Navy was too busy with the Affini to finish the job it started."

  "You'd have found a way!" Trish snapped. "You always found a way. You always knew what to do. You held us together. Stars, Cass, you got everyone from Marxists to democratic socialists to anarchists to fucking left liberals working together. How can you not see the difference between what you were and what they made you into?"

  "Of course I see the difference." She sighed, took the step and a half forward to cross the room, and took Trish's hand in hers, looking down at the floor. "I was hurting, I was angry, and all I wanted was revenge. I spent twenty years on pnning that revenge, and in the end all I could do was kick Osbourne-Crke off-pnet and get a lot of good people killed." She lifted her eyes, and a smile slowly broke across her face. "But we did win, in the end, sort of. The good parts of what we were doing, what we were fighting for. We live in a more just world now. No one is exploited. No one is made to suffer. No one has to burn their life on the pyre of capital just to survive. Thank God for the Affini. I wish they'd found us sooner." Something chirped, and Cass lifted her free arm to gnce at the, loose, jangly bracelet on her wrist. "Ah. Speaking of Him. Can we pick this up in about twenty minutes?"

  Trish furrowed her eyebrows. "Why?"

  "Time for prayer. I have a mat on the shuttlepod."

  She couldn't help but stare. "You never used to pray."

  "I never used to do a lot of things that fill my life with meaning." Cass gave Trish's hand a squeeze. "Do you need me to stay with you? I can make it up ter."

  Trish's brain slowly caught up with the moment. "N-no, go ahead," she said, still not entirely sure why the hell Cass Hope of all people would be praying. She'd dropped some religious references into conversation once or twice, but Trish had never once seen her go further than that. Yet here she was, smiling, giving Trish's hand one more squeeze, and slipping out of the workshop to return to her ship. The workshop somehow felt empty without Cass crammed into it alongside her.

  Her fingers slowly tightened on the edge of the desk, her teeth locked together. None of this was right. Cass was gone, had been gone, a ghost that only intruded into Trish's thoughts to remind her of why what she was doing was so important. If the Affini could destroy something as powerful and amazing as Cass Hope, humanity would have to fight to its st breath to maintain anything of what it once was.

  But now Cass was back. Not only was she back, but she actually recognized the name that the Affini had stolen from her, still dispyed even after sixty years so many of those qualities she was so sure the Affini would have ground out of her. It boggled the mind: how could someone who still had that kind of passion and righteous fury inside them simply knuckle under to the end of human freedom? How could she be so wrong about her own long-term pn of battle? It was all right there in Freedom's Ember: the purpose of the book, of the long-term resistance, of the critical need to maintain the human capacity for freedom and self-reliance. None of the third book's obvious propaganda undercut that.

  Funny. Here she was, sixty years older and theoretically wiser, and Cass Hope could still upend everything with just a few words. Void take it all, Trish thought. Why can that woman make me act like a fucking teenager at my age?

  But, with a chill down her spine, she realized that was the least of her worries. A chorus of ughter from outside broke through Trish's maise, and she realized with a start that she'd already made a critical mistake.

  She'd left Piper alone with four florets.