Center of Gravity (36 page)

PTED was particularly insidious, however: a mixture of depression, helplessness, and hopelessness mixed with thoughts of revenge or of having been wronged that could drag on for many years after the triggering event. Therapy had included a number of virtual reality revisitations of his PTED triggers—playing parts of his life back with memory resolution enough to have him feel like he was reliving the events of five years ago. Combined with cognitive-behavioral therapy, getting him to recognize inappropriate thoughts or distortions in his view of reality and actively changing them, the sessions had taken a lot of the burn out of his memories.

But not all. He would
always
have to live with the memory of having lost Angela. He suspected it would always hurt. The therapy had been aimed at teaching him not to immediately assume that authority-types were persecuting him… or that the gossip, innuendo, and outright viciousness of a few twisted zeroes like Collins mattered.

Wizewski’s order had taken Gray off active duty for almost three weeks, while the neuropsych people had, once again, taken him back into memories that he really wished could be forgotten. Angela had once again suffered a stroke, and once again he’d made his desperate flight north to the Columbia Arcology medical center in Morningside Heights. Once again he’d watched the change in her behavior toward him, her loss of affection, of love.

Once again, the voice of the neuropsytherapist riding with him through his memories pointed out how what had happened to Angela had not been his fault, nor had it been the fault of the Columbia Authorities. There was no
fault
. No blame. Only… events. Happenstance.
Life
.

He’d thought he’d been done with all of that.

He realized that Wizewski had just spoken to him, and he didn’t have a clue what he’d said. “I beg your pardon, sir?”

“I said, do you want a transfer?”

“What… to a deck division?”

“To another squadron. You seem to have a number of enemies in the Dragonfires.”

Gray thought about this. He’d put in for a transfer twice before last year, but Commander Allyn had shot it down. She’d talked to him about needing to fix what was wrong, rather than running from it. And now, the new CAG was offering him a chance to start over with another squadron.

“That’s… tempting, sir. Thank you. But I don’t think it would be a good idea.”

“Why not?”

“Do you mean… other than the fact that I’m going to be launching in another hour and a half?” He let his avatar grin. “Pretty bad timing for
that
, sir.”

“No, I can’t pull you from VFA–44 now. But I could… afterward.”

Assuming we’re still alive
, Gray thought. Again, he didn’t voice the comment within the shared virtual reality of the meeting.

“The way I see it, sir, is that I’m pretty well stuck where I am. If I transferred to another squadron, I’d just be starting all over with a different bunch of pilots. And they’d all be assuming I screwed up with the Dragonfires, wondering why I couldn’t get along, or figuring I had some kind of Prim chip on my shoulder.”

“And do you?”

“Do I think I’m as good as the other pilots in VFA–44? Yes, sir. Absolutely. Do I think I’m better?” He shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe I do. But I don’t let that influence me off duty.
All
Navy pilots assume they’re the best, right sir?”

“They do if they’re any good.”

“I know I have a couple of transfer requests in my folder, sir. But Commander Allyn talked me out of that last year. I have a good handle on the PTED. I do have a problem with people who make certain… assumptions about me because of my past. But I’m learning to cope.”

“Are you?”

“Look at it this way, sir. Five months ago I hauled off and slugged the risty clown who called me a squattie. This last time, I threw a glass of juice instead of a punch. I’d say that qualifies as an improvement in attitude, wouldn’t you?”

“Yes, Lieutenant. I would. The problem is that I need a one hundred percent improvement from you. Not eighty. Not ninety-nine point nine.
One hundred percent
. Am I chasing
c
here?”

The reference was to the fact that no physical artifact, no ship, however powerful, could
ever
reach
c
, the speed of light. It might reach 99 percent, and then tack on an almost inexhaustible string of nines after the decimal point, a ship could never reach
c
, not without pulling local space up around itself into an Alcubierre metaspace bubble.

“No, sir. One hundred percent.”

“If I have to separate you and Lieutenant Collins like a couple of children in first-year download, I will. I’ll do it to preserve the morale of my squadrons. But as it happens, I think you’re right. If you a have a problem with Collins, you need to settle it yourself, and not have me acting like your daddy.”

“Yes, sir. I’ll handle it, sir.”

Wizewski appeared to withdraw for a moment, as though he was thinking something over. “Corders off,” he said.

That startled Gray, but he disengaged his implant recorders. Normally, records were made of
all
ViR conferences, if only because people’s memories were faulty unless their implant ROMs were active.

“Corder is off, sir.”

“I assume you’ve heard the scuttlebutt about my religion.”

Ah. Wizewski had ordered the recorders off for
that
reason. Technically, it wasn’t against the law to discuss religion, but the terms of the White Covenant, the Covenant of Human Dignity, made it illegal to attempt converting someone else. People who didn’t agree with the declaration of non-interference with another’s religious beliefs, or who used religion as an excuse to kill, physically mutilate, or emotionally harm another human being, were denied Confederation citizenship. The Muslim
Rafadeen
were a case in point. So were the Refusers of some Baptist, Pentecostal, and Alien Rapturist churches. While Gray sincerely doubted that Wizewski was about to try to convert him or tell him that he was going to hell, he could understand the CAG’s reluctance to have
any
discussion of religion put into an official record.

“Nothing specific, sir,” Gray replied. “I guess some of us wondered why you weren’t using nananagathics.”

“I’m not a
complete
neo-Ludd,” he said. “I wouldn’t be in the Navy if I were. But I
am
a Purist.”

“Ah…”

That made a certain amount of sense.
Neo-Ludd
referred to that tiny and generally marginalized portion of the human spectrum that rejected, for one reason or another, any technological enhancements or infrastructure. There were degrees within such belief, of course. Usually, it meant a rejection of nanotech and other invasive technologies—cerebral implants, cosmetic transmogrification, or Netlinks, but stopped short of banning fire, textiles, or water purification. There were peoples still living in isolated corners of the Americas, Australia, South Asia, and Africa where local cultures rejected
all
technology more advanced than subsistence agriculture, but those were rarities. Life in the modern world demanded a certain amount of interaction with information technology, if nothing more. When he’d been living in the Manhattan Ruins, Gray had lacked a basic neural implant because he’d not been a full citizen at the time… but that had been for social and economic reasons, not a matter of personal faith or belief. He’d liked the fact that the government couldn’t look over his mental shoulder, as it were, but he’d envied a lot of the risty high-tech advantages like global communication access, net downloads, and full healthcare that citizens took for granted.

Purists, though, were a branch of the Rapturist Church of Humankind, an offshoot of the old Pentecostals that believed that it was important for believers to be
fully human
if Christ was one day to return for them. While most modern RCH members accepted nano-grown implants that enabled them to communicate, interact with computers and implant-linked machinery, and engage in basic economics, they tended to reject more serious modifications to the basic human somatype. No cosmetic nano or physical enhancements. No genetic prostheses or modification, either
in utero
or later. No cyborg blendings of human and machine.

And no anti-aging nano.

The Purists seemed to pick and choose among which bits of technology were forbidden, and which were allowed. Many would accept basic medical care, for example, for emergency first aid or for disease prevention, though quite a few rejected any nanotechnic or genetic tinkering with what they saw as God’s creation. Gray found the idea ridiculous; there’d been Christian sects a few centuries before that prohibited blood transfusion or, in extreme cases, any medical treatment at all, and the Purist philosophy struck him as just as irrational as those.

But, of course, it was their basic and unalienable right to believe anything they chose, so long as they didn’t try to harm others with their antiscientific nonsense.

“The church I grew up in,” Wizewski continued, “believed that you shouldn’t mess with the human body, shouldn’t
change
it, because we were all created in God’s image.”

“Including nanogrown implants?” Gray asked. He tried not to smile. “Or gene-therapy inoculation?”

“That was… a matter of personal belief,” he said. “There were a few, including our pastor, who paid the fine.”

To be a citizen of the Union of North America, you
had
to have at least a basic Class One cerebral implant. Otherwise you would have trouble paying for goods or opening locked doors. The law mandated heavy fines and compulsory neurpsytherapy for people who refused; the government authorities could do so under the terms of the White Covenant by assuming that any who refused the basic advantages of the technological infrastructure were harming their ability to interact with society and, therefore, were harming themselves.

“We were
not
idiots,” Wizewski went on. “If we were sick, we accepted treatment, even if it was gene-therapy or nanomeds. But injecting ourselves full of nano in order to change into an animal or change our skin color or to add a pair of arms or make ourselves super-strong or to turn our bodies into movie screens… no. If a fetus had a genetic predisposition to heart disease or depression, we would treat that. But try to make ourselves live for five hundred years… or make ourselves look like we were twenty for the rest of our lives? Uh-uh.”

“That seems a little… selective, sir.” Gray honestly wasn’t sure how far he could go with being critical of the man’s religious beliefs. There was a fuzzy area here between freedom of speech and freedom of belief, and he was glad Wizewski had asked for the corders to be turned off. “How is giving yourself a life span of more than a few decades against God’s will if preventing a life-threatening illness is not?”

Wizewski smiled. “I often wondered that. Maybe a short life isn’t so bad if it’s not a short
miserable
life.”

“And maybe God doesn’t care if we use our intelligence to make our lives better. Healthier and happier.”

“Maybe. I won’t argue the point. It’s up to me to draw the lines, right?”

“Of course it is, sir.”

“But I told you all of this so that you would know. I do understand your position.”

“Sir?”

“You’re a Primitive… or, rather, you
were
. You grew up without all of this hardware”—he tapped the side of his head with a forefinger—“inside your brain. And every person you meet, damned near, assumes you hate technology and can barely make a credit transfer, much less strap on a Starhawk and fly the thing. It’s a common prejudice, and one that you and I are going to be facing for the rest of our lives. However long they might be. Understand?”

“Yes, sir.”

“If you need to talk to someone, I’m always here. That goes for Ryan too, if she needs it. Having a set of social and personal beliefs outside of the mainstream can be crippling, especially in the military, where you’re forced to fit in, to assimilate. Sometimes the need to keep a low profile can make you feel like you’re absolutely the only person in the universe who feels the way you do. But that’s not true. Understand?”

“Yes, sir, I do. Thank you, sir.”

“Don’t thank me. Just assimilate, damn it, because the next time you assault another man or woman in this battlegroup, I’m going to skin you alive and nail the bloody hide on
that
bulkhead in my office as a warning to the others. Clear?”

“Clear, sir.”

“Then get the hell out of here. Preflight in thirty minutes. Launch in forty-five.”

“Aye, aye, sir!”

The virtual reality link was broken, and Gray was again in the lounge chair in his squadron’s ready room. A number of the other flight officers were there, including both Collins and Kirkpatrick, but both of them were on the other side of the compartment and none were paying attention to him.