Page 8 of Azyr: Drifiting for Her

“No.”

“The unit renders me poorly.”

I retrieved the pen. “The unit renders you a menace to interstellar relations.”

The blue went straight up his throat. He reached over and switched the thing off at the collar, and then, in his own slow, strongly shaped English, hunting every word down one at a time: “I said. The office. Is warm. You made it warm. That is all I said.”

And that was worse, because a machine could say anything, but a man didn't turn off his translator and struggle through his second language unless he needed me to know he had not meant the filthy thing that was misspoken. I have never wanted so badly to climb across a desk at a person for so little cause.

I didn't climb across the desk. I put down the pen I’d been holding against my mouth and tried to remember what a disclosure packet was for.

“Ask me about the twelve.” I had apparently decided to burn the whole afternoon to the ground on purpose. “Since you want to know.”

“I would like that.”

“They’re the ones I drove to the hub myself. I sat with each of them the night before, answered every question three or more times, hugged them at the gate, and waved until the shuttle was a dot. And I have never once cried. Not one of them.” I made the tactical error of meeting his eyes, which had gone soft and blue at the edges. “And you want to know why.”

He waited. I had run out of questions to hide behind.

“Because I’m the one holding the door. You hold the door for others to go onto their new adventure… you don’t get to fall through it. You just hold it. For the next one, and the next one.”

He was quiet a long moment. Then he turned the translator back on and spoke slowly. “On my world, there is a word for the person who stands in the doorway during the wind so the others can pass. It does not translate. Your unit offers lintel. The beam that carries the weight of the wall, so the opening can exist.” A pause. “It is load-bearing. It is not a small thing to be.”

Nobody had ever called me a structural component and made it sound like that. I looked down at the clipboard. I had drawn a heart beside the agenda and pressed the pen through its middle.

“Right.” I stood up too fast and cracked my knee on the desk hard enough to rattle both mugs and every scrap of my composure. “Good. Great session, very productive.”

“Astoria.”

“We covered a lot of ground.”

“We covered transit documentation for four minutes.”

“And it was riveting.” I herded him toward the office door, which put us closer than I wanted to be.

He looked down at me and went the deepest blue I’d seen on him yet, and didn't move. Neither did I. The radiator ticked. A bus sighed to a stop outside.

“Nine sharp tomorrow.” My voice squeaked in the most embarrassing way. “Bring questions about transit documentation.”

“I will not.”

“Somehow that doesn't surprise me.” I slowly shut the door in his lovely blurred face and then leaned my entire back against it.

CHAPTER 6

Azyr of Veyathi

I found the holes in her network the way I find thin ice. I didn't go looking, and then I couldn't stop seeing them.

She'd asked me to look over the pilot program's support maps between sessions. Forty matched humans, each with a web of names meant to hold them through the counseling and the leaving and the long strange after. And in the web, the gaps. Nine of the forty had one advocate and no backup, so a single bad month would leave them with nobody. Two support routes dead-ended at an office that had closed. At the center of it, drawn nowhere and load-bearing everywhere, was the one node the whole structure couldn't survive the loss of.

Her. Doing the work of four people and calling it a job. Plus her job was now inside her home. Priya came to Astoria's home since the office had been eliminated.

So I redrew it. My hand was moving before I decided anything, laying a clean version of her own system over the broken one, the gaps marked, three fixes that cost nothing but rearrangement. I put it in front of her at the next session instead of answering her question about export documentation.

She went still. Then, in a few seconds, furious, the particular fury of a competent person watching a stranger point at her load-bearing wall. Then she looked at it properly, and the fury drained out.

“You did this between sessions.” She didn’t look up from the page.