atavism
Being debriefed on the Immigrant Fleet population of Miltia and those of its origin who had infiltrated U-TIC, Suou had been told time and time again, each time more gravely than the last, of the dangers of religious zealotry. You cannot reason with a man or woman who believes he or she is the hand of some god, the department chair at F.S.I. had told him in the quiet boardroom, the dossier on his assignment open in front of him on a half-dozen screens; you cannot convince such a person that his or her actions are misguided, because every negative consequence, every atrocity, every error in judgement, each is incorporated naturally into the evolving framework of constant divine intervention with which he or she overlays the world. Holy writings are constantly referred to as a justification for and ordering narratives of events in the lives of individuals, and life is understood to imitate scripture. The fanatic, because of his faith, is always right, while the rest of the world is wrong, and he or she will execute dizzying shifts of perspective and feats of rationalization to preserve this unbalanced viewpoint whenever it is in crisis. And perhaps most importantly, there is no threat from without with the capacity to dissuade a zealot from his or her course. How can one fear death who believes that God and eternal reward await the faithful in the next life?
And Suou had listened to all of this at the time, and taken it in all the seriousness with which it was delivered, but having operated for some time now in the company of a truly staggering number of genuine religious zealots -- far more than the F.S.I. in its wildest dreams ever imagined were occupying the Organization, and far more deeply rooted -- he thought he could shed a little more light on the issue now, if pressed, if he had anyone to tell such things besides his son, with whom he normally had more important secrets to discuss. Fanatics, he would have said, even if they are always dangerous in theory, tend to pall a bit in practical application. Yes, they'll throw away their lives for the sake of God and faith, and they obey their own internal logic which the rational debate of outsiders will be unable to influence, but that same faith has a tendency to make them enormously predictable -- and, ultimately, manipulable, provided you take the time to understand its basic tenets. Margulis, the woman Pellegri Jin couldn't seem to speak of while making eye contact, those who worked under them... none of them, once Suou had begun to understand the basic patterns of their beliefs and desires, had ever made a move or a decision that he (or anyone else in his position) could not have deduced ahead of time. They only worked toward a single end, and while he was still working out the details of what, exactly, it was, that single-mindedness of purpose was, while undeniably a formidable weapon, also their most crippling weakness. Even Mizrahi, though not particularly sharing the divine inspiration of his colleagues, was nonetheless similarly hobbled: his daughter had always been his obsession, instead of some ancient faith, his altar on which he'd burn everything, and for him she would serve just as well.
No, he would tell the chair if he saw her again, if he ever had the chance to see anyone from a higher level of Federation government again while alive and whole, the ones to really be careful of, as far as he had determined, were the ones who seemed to believe in nothing at all. It was they who couldn't be predicted, couldn't be controlled, and ultimately, couldn't be understood. If anyone were to bring this whole conflict to a bloody, boiling head, he found himself telling his nonexistent audience in the back of his mind as one day passed into its even more sordid neighbor, his bet was on them.
"She's pretty," Winnicot said, apropos of nothing, disrupting his concentration and raising his head from the waveform readout with a frown between his brows. He didn't even know where he expected the young man's attention to have been drawn -- couldn't be predicted, indeed -- but it was still a surprise to see his gaze resting on Aoi. "How long have you been married?"
Don't react. Don't give him anything. It was the best he could do; Winnicot was never consistent enough for him to develop any general rules of conduct, and neither of his own children had ever behaved in a way that might have prepared him. He turned his eyes back to the readout. "I thought you were monitoring Febronia."
Winnicot shrugged, leaning back in his chair at the terminal. "She's fine. The staff could do this in their sleep by now. You didn't answer my question."
"I don't feel comfortable discussing my personal life with you, Winnicot," Suou said evenly. From the corner of his eye he could barely see some expression pass on Winnicot's face -- some kind of smile or snarl. The daylight caught in the narrow glass cylinder of Aoi's blood sample, throwing stretched circles of muddy light across his fingers where they touched it, like a stain. He tried not to look for a metaphor there.
"Your daughter looks more like her," Winnicot said, instead of responding. He was smiling now, as though he couldn't help himself. "Do you have any other children, Supervisor Uzuki?"
His palms were slippery, and he nearly dropped the sample before managing to slot it into one of the console's chambers. A question for cocktail parties, government functions, one that didn't belong in this room, with the shadows of birds on the floor and screens flashing endless strings of numbers, and Aoi's deep, even respiration the only sound. When Jin had been fourteen he'd been quiet, studious, more likely to sit in the attic for hours with Dad's antiques than to cause trouble for anyone. A good boy. A good son. So many times a saving grace.
"I'm just trying to make conversation," Winnicot said behind him, almost snapping, to the sound of skidding chair wheels. "None of us really knows anything about you."
"Are you insinuating something?" Suou said to his connection gear. The snort was loud, meant to be heard.
"No. I just said. You're really paranoid, aren't you, Supervisor?"
"I'm here at great personal risk." He followed the strings of values with his eyes. A slightly abnormal wave from about forty-five minutes previous -- just before he'd entered the room, he thought, and frowned. He'd have to check the security camera footage, just in case. "Winnicot, we both have work to do. If you want to -- "
And then he turned back, to Winnicot standing right behind him, smirking, so closely in his space he was dimly surprised through his larger shock that he hadn't felt the heat of Winnicot's body. "I want to," he said, and Suou stumbled back, catching his foot on one of the consoles, jarring his elbow at a painful angle back into the wall as he fell back on the instrument panel. Just his luck if he damaged millions of credits' worth of technology, funded at his own recommendation -- a dizzy, stupid thought, blowing through his head and then gone. Then Winnicot was close enough to set off every alarm, within the fork of his unbalanced legs, looking up searchingly into his face.
"Actually she looks a lot like both of you," he said, after a few seconds' pause, not seeming to notice Suou's reaction. "It's your mouth, I think. Here." He tapped his fingertip on the curve of Suou's underlip, then pressed so he dragged it down slightly. Suou tried to jerk his head away, and found he didn't have the room. "It must be so weird, to look at two people and see all your own features already there, just jumbled up. Like nothing about us is original, and nobody can get away from wherever they started."
Suou caught Winnicot's wrist in his hand, finally, and wrenched it away from his mouth. The boy was tall but maybe half his weight. They stared at each other for a matter of moments, the bright light from outside making Winnicot's face so bright it almost burned.
"Great personal risk," Winnicot said finally, and smiled. It was actually quite lovely. "Of course." When he went down on one knee Suou thought at first he was going to pick up Suou's dropped connection gear, which had him jolting to stop him even before Winnicot slid his other knee under him and Suou realized he wasn't looking down, but up. He understood the hands on his belt, he supposed, but could so little credit them that for precious seconds all he could do was stare. "If you stop me, I'll tell them it was your idea," Winnicot said, conversationally, as if this were only continuing on what he'd been saying all along. "And who knows what we'll find out about you?"
I think you do, Suou thought hopelessly, but his hand had already locked around the console's upper deck, and in the end he said nothing at all.
Aoi's soft breathing did nothing to cover the sound of the zipper purring open. The screen spilled on the floor still showed the pattern of her EKG, with that troubling spike at the edge, and the output values from the last preliminary experiment. He could still remember how he'd tried to tell himself, at first -- long before any of this, long before Margulis had taken him aside on a shadowy afternoon, or he had wept in the underground isolation wing face to face with a horror he could never understand but in whose poison waters his wife had swum for years now, or he had drafted the recommendation with slightly shaking hands at a conference table with three silent Inquisitors -- that those fluctuations buried deep in the numbers meant that somewhere inside, she was feeling something, thinking something. He couldn't remember, though, when exactly he had started trying to tell himself the opposite: that they were arithmetic coincidences with no more or less meaning than the noise in any iterated algorithm, and his wife was gone forever, and couldn't feel a thing. Kinder, ultimately, to think that there was no meaning; that it was only, as with so many things, that the universe was messy.
"Oh, relax," Winnicot said with an air of disgust, from somewhere hundreds of miles away and in the vicinity of what was still a good distance from being an erection. "Your wife's been a vegetable for years, right?"
He wasn't a violent man by nature, but he thought he could probably break Winnicot's nose with one blow from this angle. But in the end he only turned his face toward the wall, where the light was so bright it was like being blind. There's only so much we can afford right now, Jin had said at the edge of the fountain path where the city lights didn't reach. When Jin had been fourteen --
The tongue, still held off the last tiny distance by the barrier of his briefs, was hot and wormlike, and he cut off that line of thought and all others as though with a knife. Striving for the safety of silence in his mind. But with his mind quiet there was no help for the sound of Aoi's soft breathing, or the crude cross-section of her grey matter that was pasted up in indifferent flickering blue all around this room, a starker display in a way than his own open uniform trousers. He found himself thinking for no good reason of the casual way she had opened her blouse the first night they had made love, what felt like a thousand years ago, and as fingers slipped under elastic and a jungle's breath touched the bare skin along his cock he could finally be stirred to something, at least. Anything, he thought, if that would just make it over for both of them.
So her breath was a lifeline in this quiet room and in the blinding sun he thought silent images, the wife he had loved and how her hair had caught sun that wasn't through a window, the glass she had dropped the first time she fainted, thick and on carpet too soft for it to break, only bounce, and then the Zohar towering and golden; and all the time this boy with no apparent reason for being here or anywhere ducked and bobbed his head in a way no boy should know how to do, soft dark hair making a screen across his eyes as he swept his tongue, his hand planted in a loose circle in the wiry scrim of pubic hair he had freed like the handguard of a sword. He wasn't smiling anymore. Suou clasped his hand on a panel he vaguely hoped wasn't something that could cause problems, tilted back his head, and as he at last thought of Aoi again in more words than numbers, did the most he had ever been able to do: nothing, nothing, nothing.
And after some length of time he couldn't possibly count his head tossed to the side in an uneasy negation, and he found himself looking over at her face, turned half into the pillow: lips parted, skin pale, hair uncombed and lusterless, looking nothing at all like she was only asleep. That was when he came, gripping the metal, catching almost everything of his groan between his clenched teeth. With hardly a drop of sound to waste.
Winnicot spat on the floor and stood up, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. His gaze was locked on Suou's by the time he was able to look again, and it was flat and entirely opaque.
"You don't really care about either of them," he said -- jolting Suou with the sound of a voice after all this empty space. He looked young again, and sullen, told to stay home from the movies or that schoolwork came before girls. "No one does."
And before Suou could begin to come up with any answer for that, or for any of this, Winnicot had already gone.
The door hissed closed behind him, and his footsteps rang in the hall all the way down and away. When he couldn't hear them anymore Suou blinked away the fragments of light and hurried to rearrange himself, finding his fingers as numb as the rest of him from their grip around the console deck. As much as he tried to look anywhere else, he found himself staring at the small puddle on the floor between his feet. He began to reach with the toe of his shoe to smear it into meaninglessness, and then gave the whole thing up.
The universe was messy. He picked up his connection gear in a shaking hand, and went back to work.