his long face, smearing the skin and stretching his eyes out long and crooked. He let his hands fall and looked at her, the monster countenance vanishing back into the lined features of a familiar man. “Caithness scared him more than anything. I wanted to give him a sense of control; he was always better when he felt he had control.” He sighed. “I was wrong. I made mistakes. There’s only so much culpability I can admit to.”
She looked down at her hands. This was harder than she had imagined, rehearsing it in her head. It wasn’t a lie; she had to believe it. “We all made mistakes,” she said. “I wanted you to fight him more, to be more like Cate. But you’re here and she’s not, and I’m here, and—” She shrugged. “I’m ready to put the mistakes away.”
He was silent a long time, but she could hear him breathing as his chin sank down to his chest. Thinking; considering. She knew the posture. He was phlegmatic by nature. When he finally spoke, it was slowly. “I’m not sure I’m ready for your forgiveness.”
She shook her head. “I’m not sure I’m ready to offer it. But I also know we have too much to worry about, and we need each other too much, for me to hang on to that anger. So I’m working on it, okay?”
She held out her hand. He stared at it for a moment before, tilting his head in acquiescence, he took it and they helped one another to stand.
It wasn’t too many days later when, sitting across the breakfast table from her, Benedick Conn remembered beheading his other sister.
Benedick’s flesh, and his colony, were replete with recollections that he would have preferred to erase, undo, or lose forever. Human memory was fragile, malleable. Merciful. It had a tendency to protect the rememberer from the worst excesses of his own guilt or folly. Benedick was a bred eidetic, but even that eideticism was imperfect knowledge contained in flesh, vulnerable to conflation, confabulation, and plain, old-fashioned forgetting.
Machine intelligence was not so clement. It was precise and perfect, photographic. Unforgiving. But it could be edited by choice, and that was the temptation that Benedick found himself doing battle with more often than he cared to admit. Because, while the memories might be painful, it seemed wasteful to sacrifice the experience hard-won through that pain in the name of comfort or self-respect.
Cynric and he were not alone in the small spare room, cramped around a transparent table littered with fixings for a hasty first-watch meal. Their sister Caitlin Conn, the Chief Engineer—and the (estranged) love of Benedick’s life—stood at the front wall. To Benedick’s left was the Astrogator, Jsutien, and on beside him, passing him notes on her slate, was another sister—the youngest, Chelsea.
The Captain, Benedick’s daughter Perceval, and the First Mate, his brother Tristen, were available by remote, but not currently engaged in the conversation. They had their own problems.
Benedick lifted the table knife and dipped it in olive oil spread, which melted to herbs and oleaginousness on contact with warm lentil-flour bread. It was a metal handle with a flat blade attached, small and unthreatening. But his hand closed on the knife as if around the hilt of a sword—the sword he had wielded to execute his sister. The sensory memory was vivid and sharp—the weight of Mirth in his hand, so unlike the non-presence of an unblade, which had seemed appropriate. An unblade would have killed with no feeling of contact as the sword parted bone and flesh, but there should be resistance when a life ended. The resilience of flesh, the density of bone.
It should be harder to kill someone. The ease of unblades made their purpose somehow more terrible.
So he had chosen Mirth, which was not an unblade at all. And considerably safer. Unblades, engines of entropy that they were, required fanatical care in handling and training if they were not to be more of a danger to their wielder than her enemy.
Though Cynric the Sorceress had begged for the favor of her death at his hand, he understood now that it had all been pursuant to her master plan and that the death hadn’t been quite … permanent. Something was lost in translation, surely, when machine memory alone remained, patterned electricity without chemical context. But he hated it when Cynric came back to Engine, when he was forced to remember killing her—with memories of flesh and memories of silicon.
Benedick found irony