Providence - Max Barry Page 0,29
out of touch with what really mattered in life. Not you specifically. She wasn’t criticizing you for staying in to study interpersonal stress dynamics while she was out with Paul Anders, experiencing life. She was just saying, people should just, like, not assume things about other people. They shouldn’t think they knew what was real just because of what they saw on the surface.
Then Paul Anders never spoke to the girl again and she sat on her bunk and cried into the arms of her girlfriends, who said she would be okay, he was such an asshole, how could she have known, and glance at each other, and roll their eyes, and secretly wonder if/when they might be in a Paul Anders story.
Talia didn’t want to be too judgey, since this was exactly what everyone said before they fell into a Paul Anders story, but really: How stupid were these women? They were supposed to be Life candidates.
To be fair, that was part of the problem: You went into Life because you were open to people. You wanted to believe there was more to a person than anyone thought, and tease it out, and then, possibly, turn to an audience and take a bow. The thing about being Life was you were always asking other people to suckerpunch you.
One other thing about Paul Anders stories. Sometimes the girls were quiet. Twice, when she had hugged them after their Paul Anders story, they had seemed to wince. Once, a girl was absent from class for two days, and when she came back, there was a fading bruise beneath her eye. You could believe, if you wanted, that this was part of that reality-defining sex. But she didn’t. Talia didn’t believe that.
She assumed he’d never make crew. Even when it emerged that the selection process favored what you might charitably call media presence and less charitably call attractiveness, she couldn’t imagine he would be deployed on a Providence. The process was guided by AI, but not even software could be that perverse. “Can you imagine,” a girl had said, “being Life on a ship with him?” The girl wrinkled her nose but also inhaled through parted lips in a way that told Talia she was definitely imagining it, wielding nominal authority over crazy, sexy Paul Anders in a confined space for four years.
But it would never happen. Surely.
He ate like a slob. When they dined together (social! bonding!), he threw food in the general direction of his face. If something spilled, he left it, like a child. Sometimes he would pretend he hadn’t heard her. She would ask him a question and he would sit there chewing and staring at nothing until she repeated herself twice, three times, then he would turn and grin at her. It was so stupid she wanted to claw out her eyes.
She had found him choking to death in his cabin in the eleventh month, writhing on the floor, his lips blue, his eyes rolled back. She’d been coming to see him to check on a deterioration in his vitals and halfway there his numbers plummeted and she broke into a run. She used her override to access his cabin and rolled him onto his side and stuck her fingers down his throat and dragged out a thick, goopy protein cookie. He gasped and retched and lay in her lap, panting. When his color returned, he smiled at her like a moron. His breath stunk of hydrexalin, a smell like rusty roadkill. He said, “I like the way your face is arranged.”
“You idiot,” she had said. “You could have died.”
She thought about that comment later: I like the way your face is arranged. At first, she’d thought he was saying she was pretty. But on reflection, she changed her mind. He meant: I like the way you’re looking at me. When he was on the floor. When she was worried he was about to die.
* * *
—
Next engagement, there was Anders, but no hostiles. They checked in and ran through their basic checks as the ship approached two small hives. “Movement,” Gilly said. “Lots of workers. But no soldiers.” There was curiosity in his voice, which she liked. Gilly needed a good mystery.
“You want I should park us