Page 2 of Azyr: Drifiting for Her

I clicked Decline Match, and a soft confirmation bloomed, another thing I had written: Your decision has been recorded and will be honored.

The office went quiet around the click. Not actually. The radiator still ticked, a bus stopped outside with a hiss of brakes. But something in me loosened, and I waited for the relief.

It came, right on schedule… thin, clean, and weightless, the relief of a decision made and a door pulled shut. Something stressful and unsure now had a finality. I recognized it, and that was the problem, because it was from the wrong side of the desk. I had watched this exact relief cross the faces of people who were about to make a mistake.

I had a name for it. I called it, in my own head, the fast no. The answer that comes too fast and too smooth, that a person mistakes for clarity when it is really just the quickest way out of a hard question. I had spent four years teaching people to distrust it. The easy no is the one to interrogate, I told them, or some version of it, in this chair. The no that costs you nothing to say is usually protecting something you haven’t looked at.

I had said it that very week, to Marisol’s replacement in my caseload, a woman named Tessa who was one bad night from declining a match she had told me she wanted.

I looked at the confirmation on my screen. Recorded and will be honored. I looked at the twelve faces on the wall, all of whom had, at some point, sat where I was sitting and wanted, more than anything, to click the gray button and go home to a life that was already the right size. Except, they’d signed up for the possibility of finding something better. I’d signed up to show them there was nothing to be afraid of.

I picked up the watering can.

It was a small brass thing, dented, and there was maybe a swallow of water in it, not enough for anything. I carried it to the windowsill and tipped it over the thyme, which didn’t need water. The soil was still dark from two days ago. I watered it anyway. Then I just stood there with the empty can in my hand and my own name still glowing on the screen behind me at ninety-one point three percent. Trying to ignore it, I did the small useless tending things I did when I didn’t want to think, and I thought anyway.

He would have already requested first contact. That was how the protocol worked. The off-world party filed their intent through the standard channel before a decision cleared, so that consent could be exchanged in both directions and nobody arrived unasked, which prevented the way those first women had been whisked off the planet before they understood what was happening. Which meant that somewhere out past the gray Portland sky, a man with no fixed address had already said yes, I would like to meet her. Right now, my decision was speeding toward him.

He would get the decline. It would be honored. He would go back to his eleven systems and his twelfth. I would go back to the binders, the faces, the goodbyes, the tray of thyme would grow because I stayed to make it grow, and this would be a funny story I never told. It was almost a shame. I’d declined the highest number the desk had ever seen, before nine a.m. on a wet Tuesday.

The relief was still there. I kept checking it, waiting to see if my emotions changed.

They didn’t. I stood at the window with the empty can, watching a street where nothing was happening, and I knew exactly what I would have told a client who felt what I was feeling… I had just done the fast no, in my own chair, about my own life, and I had not stopped to ask it a single question. Hadn’t even considered sleeping on it before deciding.

Priya’s key turned in the front door at nine on the dot. I set the watering can down, straightened the frames that didn't need straightening, and got ready to be good at my job.

CHAPTER 2

Azyr of Veyathi

I had charted eleven systems and I couldn’t make my hands file a departure from a street I had known for nineteen minutes.

The street was called Failing. I had read the sign at the corner, and something in me wanted to laugh, which was not a thing I did often. I had walked the length of it once already, north to south. Walking a place was how I learned it, but I didn't yet know why I wanted to learn this one so badly.

Failing Street, Portland, Earth. Wet air that tasted of iron and cut grass. A gray that was not the gray of my own world, but had the same quality of being between things, neither the hard light of a day-facing planet nor real dark. Low houses set back from the road. Gardens in front of most of them, small and deliberate.

I had counted the gardens without deciding to. Fourteen on the east side, eleven on the west, one of them dead and not yet cleared away. I had counted the cracks in the sidewalk and found the one that forked into the same shape as a river I had surveyed from orbit two years ago and never walked. That was the trouble with my memory. Everything I had ever seen was still in me, laid down in order, and I could walk through any of it in the dark without touching a wall. None of it had ever once felt like a place I could stop. A map was not a home. I had thirty years of proof.

Her door was blue. Number 4114. I stood across the road from it with a Survey Corps scanner in my hand that I didn't need and had brought anyway. Earth had handed over their information willingly, so I didn’t need to map the planet, or anything on the planet. That didn’t stop me from bringing the useless scanner.

A woman walked past me with a dog and looked at me a moment too long. I understood that I had been standing still on a public street for some minutes, blurred at the edges the way my people blur when the light is uncertain, and that to her I probably looked lost. I looked down at the scanner and pretended it had told me something. It had not. There were no cartographic anomalies on Failing Street. There was a blue door.

The notification had come six weeks earlier. I remembered the exact configuration of the terminal when it arrived, because I remembered everything. The survey overlay of an unnamed ice giant half-rendered on the left screen, a supply requisition I had been ignoring on the right, and between them a small persistent flag from a program I had forgotten I was in. Compatibility result. 91.3%. I had read it the way I read most things that asked something of me. Once, fully, and then I set it aside.

I told myself I set it aside because the work required it. There was an ice giant to finish, and there was always an ice giant to finish, and that was the design of the life I had built, though I would not have used the word built then. I would have said the work simply was, and I simply went where it sent me. If I never stayed anywhere longer than the time a survey took, that was the nature of surveying and not a decision I had made about my own life.

I had believed that for eight years. I had believed it so completely that I had stopped hearing it.

The flag didn't go away. That was the first strange thing. I was good at letting things fall out of the bottom of my attention, and this one would not fall. Three weeks in, I opened her file, and this too was a thing I let stand. Astoria Wellington. Earth Liaison Officer, Portland. A human who ran the intake for her whole region, who had, according to the public record her office kept, personally counseled and sent away more matched humans than any officer on the western edge of the continent. A woman whose entire life, as far as the record showed, had one location in it. One city. One office. One apartment for twelve years.

She was what I might have been if I had run toward something instead of away from everything. Instead, I read what her office had written. Not the regulations, though I read those too. The other thing, the intake philosophy, a document with her name at the bottom that she had clearly fought to keep in plain human words.

I would not have said I was moved. I couldn't stop reading, which in me was the same thing. There was a line in it about consent that was not really about consent at all.

No one should be asked to cross a distance this large without first being told, honestly, the true size of what they are leaving.

I read that on a survey vessel forty light-years from the nearest person who had ever known my name. I felt the blue come up in my hands in the dark of the bridge, and understood that I was in trouble I had no procedure for.

My people came from the twilight band of a world that does not turn. Half of it burned, half of it was ice, and we lived in the seam between, in a light that is always going but never gone. Our skin flourishes in that in-between light. In brightness I tinted a deep living blue, but in the dim I bled pale, colorless at the edges, hard to see against a wall. It was not a thing we could control. A Veyathi who says he feels nothing has simply not been looked at in good light. I had spent eight years arranging to be looked at in poor light. Survey vessels are dim. Space is dark. I had not, I realized on the bridge with her document open in front of me, gone deep blue about anything since before the fever.