Nothing today. No hands-on business, nothing that needed me in the room. I tried to find something worth watching and the relays are just wall to wall politics right now, every hub the same, everyone arguing about who should be running what. I can only take so much of that. So I've been sitting here with my own thoughts, which is not something I do on purpose very often.

And when I've got nothing else to fill the space, my mind keeps wandering back to what that Liminoran said to me on the airship. The part about my mother. Where I came from. That the monster I am isn't who I could have been. I told myself at the time it was nothing, just a strange thing a strange man said before he flew off, and I meant to leave it there. But a slow day has a way of dragging things back up.

So I'll think it through here, since there's nothing better to do. What did he actually know about my mother that I don't. Because as far as I'm concerned there isn't much to know. Her name was Kayen'Suina. She raised me mostly on her own. Academic sort, kept to herself, kept me close. That's the whole of it. I don't know what a man in a doomsday church would think he understood about a woman like that.

Though now that I sit with it, there is one thing I remember about her that I never thought much of. She always kept us in the population centers. Always. Wherever we went, it was the crowded places, the hubs, the districts thick with people. And she had a real aversion to the countrysides. Not a fear exactly, but she never wanted to be out where it was open and empty and quiet. Any time we were near that kind of country she'd get us back toward people as quick as she could. I used to think she just liked the noise, or that she didn't trust the quiet. Kids don't ask why. You just go where your mother takes you.

Odd habit for someone who supposedly kept to herself. You'd think a private woman would want the quiet, not run from it. But that was her. Always toward the crowd.

Anyway. I don't know what any of that has to do with a Liminoran, and I'm not going to sit here inventing a story about my own mother because a stranger got cryptic with me on a bad day. She was who she was. She's gone. Whatever he thought he knew, he can keep it.

The politics are still going on the relay behind me. I might send someone out to see if there's a real deal worth taking, just to have something to do. Days like this are worse than the dangerous ones.