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Authors: Serdar Yegulalp
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straightened my back a
bit more.
“It can only be presumed that you had your
reasons, Mister Sim.”
Fine, I thought, because I wasn’t about to tell
even (and especially) her what I’ve really been doing all this time.
“Henré is fine. Look—” I shifted around again on
the cushion—my damn legs were already starting to fall asleep on me in that
pose—and tried, not very successfully, to sound petulant. “—why did you come
looking for me? I mean, not just to offer condolences, from the sound of it.” I
didn’t want to come out and say What do you want from me? , but I
was getting mighty close.
“I had heard about your self-instigated campaign
to apologize to the families and relatives of all the others who had lost their
lives on the Kyritan ,” she said, and suddenly the dull buzzing in my
legs was nothing compared to the hard, loud buzzing in my head. “My
understanding is that you took a fair amount of your own time and money to
approach many of them individually and apologize to them for what you perceived
as your failure. But this was interrupted when the manufacturers and managers
of the Kyritan took legal action against you for what they believed to
be a mischaracterization of the quality of their products—”
“Yes. Exoluft thought I was using the whole thing
as a platform to badmouth them.” Talking only made the head-buzzing worse, but
I went on anyway. “I wasn’t doing anything of the kind, but that’s how they saw it. They made noises about suing me at first, and then they approached me
privately with a settlement on the condition I make no more public statements
about the incident.” I looked around, let out a little between-the-teeth laugh.
“I wonder—you’re a public figure. Does this count as a ‘public statement’?”
Her smile was as serene as mine was forced. “This
conversation is entirely private.”
Wings fluttered outside, and something went splash
in the fountain. I turned my head too late to see what had caused the
commotion, and found myself staring out there into the sunlit greenery for
seconds on end. Angharad didn’t even so much as clear her throat to get my
attention. Maybe she trusted I’d snap out it before too long.
“What did you want from me?” I finally asked.
“I wanted to know why you wanted to apologize for
something that was manifestly not your fault. You were, after all, cleared of
any wrongdoing in two separate investigations.”
She’s done her homework and the
extra-credit assignment, I thought. With what she already knew, I wondered how
she couldn’t have put the rest together herself.
Or maybe she had and she was just waiting for me
to come out and say it.
I shook my head. “ They cleared me of
wrongdoing. That doesn’t mean I felt I was blameless.”
“What was it you felt you had done wrong?”
“There had to be something , right? Look, I
know my own work, or at least that’s what I told myself. And if I don’t know my
own work, then that’s bad news. If anything was wrong, I thought I’d be the
only one to discover it. Things like this don’t just happen. I went back
over every design, every materials program, and I just kept coming up
empty-handed. They did their own two investigations and finally just shrugged
and said ‘Sabotage, maybe.’ Didn’t say whether it was sabotage by some third
party or some negligence on my part that would have looked like sabotage
to an outsider. So I went back and kept bugging them to keep looking, because
it sounded like they wanted to close the file without actually closing it. They told me this was their job, not mine. They didn’t bother looking a
third time. Soon they started paying out settlements to the families involved,
me included. And I said, ‘This isn’t going to be enough. People want answers.’ If
Exoluft wasn’t going to give answers, I would. So I went and started looking up
the bereaved on my own, seeing if they would even want to talk to me. And you
know
bit more.
“It can only be presumed that you had your
reasons, Mister Sim.”
Fine, I thought, because I wasn’t about to tell
even (and especially) her what I’ve really been doing all this time.
“Henré is fine. Look—” I shifted around again on
the cushion—my damn legs were already starting to fall asleep on me in that
pose—and tried, not very successfully, to sound petulant. “—why did you come
looking for me? I mean, not just to offer condolences, from the sound of it.” I
didn’t want to come out and say What do you want from me? , but I
was getting mighty close.
“I had heard about your self-instigated campaign
to apologize to the families and relatives of all the others who had lost their
lives on the Kyritan ,” she said, and suddenly the dull buzzing in my
legs was nothing compared to the hard, loud buzzing in my head. “My
understanding is that you took a fair amount of your own time and money to
approach many of them individually and apologize to them for what you perceived
as your failure. But this was interrupted when the manufacturers and managers
of the Kyritan took legal action against you for what they believed to
be a mischaracterization of the quality of their products—”
“Yes. Exoluft thought I was using the whole thing
as a platform to badmouth them.” Talking only made the head-buzzing worse, but
I went on anyway. “I wasn’t doing anything of the kind, but that’s how they saw it. They made noises about suing me at first, and then they approached me
privately with a settlement on the condition I make no more public statements
about the incident.” I looked around, let out a little between-the-teeth laugh.
“I wonder—you’re a public figure. Does this count as a ‘public statement’?”
Her smile was as serene as mine was forced. “This
conversation is entirely private.”
Wings fluttered outside, and something went splash
in the fountain. I turned my head too late to see what had caused the
commotion, and found myself staring out there into the sunlit greenery for
seconds on end. Angharad didn’t even so much as clear her throat to get my
attention. Maybe she trusted I’d snap out it before too long.
“What did you want from me?” I finally asked.
“I wanted to know why you wanted to apologize for
something that was manifestly not your fault. You were, after all, cleared of
any wrongdoing in two separate investigations.”
She’s done her homework and the
extra-credit assignment, I thought. With what she already knew, I wondered how
she couldn’t have put the rest together herself.
Or maybe she had and she was just waiting for me
to come out and say it.
I shook my head. “ They cleared me of
wrongdoing. That doesn’t mean I felt I was blameless.”
“What was it you felt you had done wrong?”
“There had to be something , right? Look, I
know my own work, or at least that’s what I told myself. And if I don’t know my
own work, then that’s bad news. If anything was wrong, I thought I’d be the
only one to discover it. Things like this don’t just happen. I went back
over every design, every materials program, and I just kept coming up
empty-handed. They did their own two investigations and finally just shrugged
and said ‘Sabotage, maybe.’ Didn’t say whether it was sabotage by some third
party or some negligence on my part that would have looked like sabotage
to an outsider. So I went back and kept bugging them to keep looking, because
it sounded like they wanted to close the file without actually closing it. They told me this was their job, not mine. They didn’t bother looking a
third time. Soon they started paying out settlements to the families involved,
me included. And I said, ‘This isn’t going to be enough. People want answers.’ If
Exoluft wasn’t going to give answers, I would. So I went and started looking up
the bereaved on my own, seeing if they would even want to talk to me. And you
know
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