A Large Anthology of Science Fiction

by Jerry

  This is how the hhaellesh happened:

  We had a handful of colonies in the Solar system and three outside of it: Gliese, Korolev, and Painter. Then, abruptly, we had a handful of colonies in the Solar system and two colonies in Gliese and Korolev.

  We still thought interstellar colonization was a pretty neat thing, and despite centuries of space war fiction, we didn’t have the infrastructure or the technology to mount a space war. We were thoroughly thumped.

  Then the esshesh showed up and told us that, while war was (untranslatable, but we think against their religion), they had no problems with arming races to defend themselves.

  So they gave us the hhaellesh.

  This is how the hhaellesh work:

  There’s a black suit that scatters light like obsidian and feels like a flexible atmosphere-dome composite to the touch. A soldier gets inside, bare as the day she was born. The suit closes around her.

  In a few minutes, it’s taking her breath and synthesizing the carbon dioxide back to oxygen. In a few hours it’s taking her waste and digesting the organic components. In a few days it’s replaced the top layers of her skin. In a few months it’s integrated itself into her muscles. In a few years there’s nothing human left in there, just the patterns of her neural activity playing across an alien substrate that we haven’t managed to understand yet.

  This is how a hhaellesh retires:

  The suit has a reverse mode. It can start rebuilding the human core, re-growing the body, replacing the armor’s substrate material with blood and muscle and bone and brain matter until the armor opens up again, and the human steps out, bare as the day they were born. A body like Theseus’s ship.

  But to do that, it needs the original human DNA.

  Or some human DNA, in any case; hell, I don’t know that anyone’s tried it, but you could probably feed in the DNA of your favorite celebrity and the hhaellesh suit would grow it for you, slipping your brain pattern in like that was nothing strange. I suppose that should freak me out—y’know, existentially—more than just growing a new copy of a body long ago digested by an alien non-meatsuit.

  It probably should, but it doesn’t.

  This is how a hhaellesh tries to get the DNA that’ll let it retire:

  My mother crouched at the side of my table. With the inhuman height and the swept-back digitigrade legs, the chairs weren’t designed to accommodate her.

  “When I left, I entrusted you with a sample of my DNA,” she said, and my hand went to the pendant. “With love, my daughter, I ask for it back.”

  At that point, I dove out the window.

  “They can’t cancel Elías,” I say. The top-of-spire restlessness is back, and I want to drop, freefall, roll, clamber, climb. My shoulders and thighs are shaking. “The fuck. He’s a goddamn cultural phenomenon, by now.”

  Michel’s voice is unsteady as well, but not as much as mine. He doesn’t get it. “To be fair, I feel like after you’ve won the war you don’t need to push people to sign up for the Forces any more.”

  “Fuck the war,” I say, and there’s anger at the pit of my throat. Like: how dare they take this away from us. Like: Elías and his adventures belong to us. Since the beginning of the war they’ve been how we’re meant to see ourselves—clever and active and go team human. You can’t take away our stories just because we won.

  The first time I met my mother—

  Except I can’t put it like that, can I? You don’t really meet your mother. Or I guess maybe you do at the moment of conception, if you think your zygote is you, or maybe it’s when the first glimmers of thought show up in your still-developing brain. But I think maybe it doesn’t count if there’s no chance that little undeveloped you won’t retain the memory.

  So. The first time I met my mother, I was in a utility transitway. You know, what we have for back alleys.

  I’ve always been the kid with a chip on her shoulder and a grudge against the world and her nose high in the air. The grudge and the pride come from the same thing. Neither made me many friends.

  I ran into a bunch of the voluntary-career types in the transitway on the morning of the Feast, just after the big public ceremony. My blood was up and they were them, and, well, the specifics of the argument don’t really matter. I started it. And then I was in the comforting beat of a street fight, and with a split lip and three split knuckles, and while one of them was hollering about how he was going to file a complaint for misdemeanor assault, who should show up?

  And my heart leapt up and got a grip in my throat, and I thought, Oh gods, a hhaellesh, and standing right there, alien and beautiful. Staring at us with a blank, featureless swept-forward face that we all unambiguously read as disapproval.

  The fight stopped. The boys stood there, twitching and uneasy, until they worked out that the hhaellesh was only staring at me. Then they slipped away.

  And I stood there, frozen in the moment, until I worked out why a hhaellesh would single me out and come find me in a utility transitway. The wonder was slapped right out of me. It meant nothing: it wasn’t the free choice of an alien intelligence but the obligate bonds of unreliable blood.

  I turned my back and sprinted away.

  . . . hold it there for a moment. I realize this makes it sound like I just run from all my problems, and I want to make it clear that that’s not true. The truth is that I run from this one problem, and looking back at it, I guess I always have.

  I was talking about my pride and my grudge, and how they both come down to this pendant at the base of my throat. My mother’s blood. My mother the hhaellesh, the guardian of the colonies, the war hero.

  All the hhaellesh are war heroes.

  What the hell am I?

  [“My gotdamn ship,”] Seve says. They’re in the corridors of her gotdamn ship now, the soundscape full of mechanical noises and ambiance. There was a behind-the-scenes episode a few months ago back where they talked about those soundscapes, and how they chose the sounds for Seve’s ship to be reminiscent of a heartbeat, rushing blood, ventilation like breath, so it’d seem alive. [“My gotdamn job. Better pilot than you, anyway; I can see this idiot plan through.”] She’s pissed-off. I would be. Hell, I am.

  [“I’m a good enough pilot to dodge through a crowd,”] Elías says. [“Come on, Seve. The captain doesn’t have to go down with her ship.”]

  Michel complains a lot that Seve is a boy’s name, and I tell him that so were Sasha and Madison and Wyatt, back in the pre-space days known as the depths of history. And then Michel says that of course I would pay attention to the pre-space days, and I say that of course he thinks history started with the erection of the initial colony dome.

  Michel is first-generation colony native. He was born here. His parents were in the third or fourth batch of colonists to set down here. We’re never quite sure who’s supposed to be jealous of who in this relationship, so mostly we just rib each other a lot.

  In my position, it’s easy to feel like you don’t have a history. Yeah, I’m from Earth, but I don’t remember much. My dad knew more, but he naturalized us; the most culture I think he held over was the way he made tea in a pot with colony spices, and his habit of saying gods instead of god.

  I’m the girl with the hhaellesh mother and the blood at her throat. That’s who I am. And I was pretty sure no one could take that away.

  [“Seve, I can’t let you die in my place,”] Elías says.

  Seven snorts. [“Well, one of us got to.”]

  “I enlisted,” I blurt out. I swing the words like a fist. And I can hear the change in Michel’s breathing on the other end; I can hear how Elías and the finale and how the writers are screwing us over has ceased to matter.

  “Say what?”

  “I enlisted,” I say again. “I got the assessment. They were going to let me into a Basic Training Group and then the war ended.”

  Michel doesn’t know what to say. I can tell because he says “You—”, and then “Oh.”, and then “So . . . what? What now? Are you
—” and then he trails off into silence. I’m pretty sure I’ve hurt him.

  It’s a thing, in my family.

  “I don’t know,” I say. All my plans have been derailed. “I can join the colony’s military track. Would that be totally pointless? Think I should go? I could just get out of here.”

  “. . . should I know the answer to this?” He gives a nervous laugh—and the laugh is probably fake, now that I think about it. It’s not right, anyway. Michel’s real laugh is this deep, throaty thing that doesn’t sound right when you know that his voice is higher than average and naturally polite.

  If Michel was blood family there’d be a reason I could point to as why I felt so close to him, without wanting to screw him. I could have family that meant what family’s supposed to mean.

  After a moment, he says “Aditi, if this is about your mother, can we just, maybe, talk about your mother?”

  Michel, Michel, my not-family family. Talking about my mother, my family not-family. I got this far by not looking too close at the contradiction. It’s a lot harder to do when it breaks up your fights and shows up to tea.

  It’s a lot harder to do when it wins its fucking war.

  When we came to the Colony, my father and I, we stepped off the transport in a queue of seven hundred other colonists. We waited nearly an hour before it was our turn to go into a white room whose windows let in the blue of the sky and the white of the skyline, and a pleasant-enough woman took our biometric data and verified all my father’s professional assessments. She gave him his schedules—for Colony orientation, the walking tour, the commerce and services lecture, the first day at his assigned career—and set up an educational track for me. Through all of it, I was bored but fascinated by the blue-white-green of the outside world, and my father bounced me on his knee.

  At the end, the woman bent down and put her face in front of mine. “That’s a beautiful piece of jewelry,” she said. “What is it?”

  I looked her straight in the eye, and said—you know, in the way that some kids don’t quite get metaphor, even when they’re using it—“It’s my mother.”

  On my phone, there’s a message from the Coalition Armed Forces Enlistment Office. It reads:

  To Aditi Elizabeth Chattopadhyay,

  This is a note to confirm that your assessment scores were sufficient to place you in a Basic Training Group for Immediate Interstellar and Exo-Atmospheric Combat. However, due to the recent decision of the Colony Coalition Oversight Office and the cessation of hostilities, the Coalition Armed Forces as an oversight unit is being disbanded and the colonies’ individual standing military forces are being scaled back.

  At your request, your application can be transferred to the Gliese Armed Forces Enlistment Office, where you can enter into their Standing Military career track. If no such request is made, we will consider your enlistment withdrawn.

  Thank you for your willingness to serve the safety and security of the Colonies.

  The Standing Military career track trains you in an off-surface location with strict access restrictions. I could still get out of here. I have the option. She can’t take everything away.

  I dial back the Elías audio to a quiet background murmur. I can’t concentrate on it, anyway, and I don’t want to. I don’t want to hear Elías and Seve argue about who’ll sacrifice for the other.

  “Aditi,” Michel says.

  “Why the hell,” I ask him, “wouldn’t you just put your blood in a bank safe if it meant that godsdamn much to you?”

  There’s a moment when I think that could have used a little more context than I gave it, but Michel finds the meaning fast. “If I had a kid, I’d want to leave something they could know me by.”

  I kinda think there’s not a maternal bone in my body, because that just sounds stupid to me. “Yeah, well, I didn’t end up knowing her, did I?”

  “You can, though. Now. Can’t you?”

  “She came back for her blood,” I say. “She never said she came back to get to know me.”

  Like a slap in the face, Michel laughs.

  “What the fuck,” I tell him. “Not funny.”

  “It is, though,” Michel says. “Adi, I swear you just described exactly what you would do. You would go off to war and kick ass and come back home when there was no more ass to kick, and be all ‘hi, I’m back, gimme.’ Tell me you wouldn’t.”

  I spluttered.

  [“Some things are more important than my life, Seve!”], Elías is shouting, though the low volume just makes him sound faraway and muffled like he’s already lost.

  From the beginning, Seve has said that if she can’t save herself, she’s not worth saving. And this is propaganda, so the story never goes out of its way to correct her. I like that. I like that she’s never needed saving when she couldn’t save herself.

  I don’t like change.

  I want to mute the audio.

  “I’m not that self-centered,” I tell Michel, but my hand is on my pendant and I’ve convinced myself the blood inside is mine. It’s demonstrably not mine, and the DNA will prove it. But still. Still.

  “Adi, can I tell you something, and not get in a fistfight with you in a utility transitway?”

  I’ve never been in a fight with Michel. “What?”

  He takes a moment to put the words together. “The necklace is just a thing, Adi. Get your mom back. Once you have her, you can replace the blood. Anyway, one necklace for one mom is a pretty good trade.”

  Theseus’s pendant. I feel a rush of disagreement. I guess that solves that philosophical riddle for me: I really believe that if you replace all the boards, it’s not the same ship.

  Which means I also believe there’s no way to keep the ship from eventually rotting away.

  I never helped Michel settle his argument, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t come to my own conclusions.

  I think Elías and Seve love each other, but love doesn’t tell you what to do with it. It just shows up like a guest you have to make a bed for, and it puts everything out of order, and it makes demands.

  I don’t hear the rest of the episode.

  I take my time. I breathe through the anger in my gut and the sense, not exhilarating now, of falling. Then, in the evening, I sync up with the colony directions database and do a search for hhaellesh in public areas.

  Five hhaellesh arrived during the Feast of the Return, and two of them aren’t hanging out anywhere that the public cams can see them. One of the ones who is is surrounded by children and a lady who looks like their mother, beaming the whole group of them. Of the other two, one is walking the gardens in the Colony Center Plaza, and the other is . . . familiar.

  I take the monkey’s route, as my father called it. Roof to roof and wall by wall, the colony’s engineered and modified design giving me wings. From the feeds I read, the freerunning spirit everywhere means working with your environment, not against it; you have to take your obstacles as opportunities or you’ll never get anywhere. Literally, at that.

  If there’s a lesson to be learned there and applied to the rest of my life, I’ve yet to learn it.

  I pass over alleys and shopways and along the taut wires that traverse the wide boulevards, the places where parades had been held. People see me, but to them, I’m just motion; just another citizen who takes a hobbyist’s interest in how to get around. Anonymous. Not Aditi, the girl with the hhaellesh mother, the girl with her mother’s blood. They see me as I’m starting to see myself.

  I run harder.

  After my father’s first day of work, he took me to the breadfruit shop. It’s not real breadfruit—it’s some native plant the first colony engineers analyzed and deemed edible; something that looked like a breadfruit to whichever one of them named it—but when it’s processed and mashed it has a texture like firm ice cream and a taste that takes flavorings well. My father and I got bowls full of big, colorful scoops, and asked one of the other patrons to take a picture of us. They did, and said “Welcome to the colony!” We
were that obvious.

  We sent the picture to my mother, and that’s where I find her today. Sitting at the table we always tried to get, without any of the breadfruit in front of her. Hhaellesh can eat, but I’m not sure they need to, and I have no idea if they have a sense of taste. You only hear about them eating to accept hospitality.

  There’s a halo of awed silence around her, and I slink through it and take another one of the chairs.

  “I’m sorry,” she says, and I let out a breath. Truth was, until she’d said that, I’d had some doubt that it was her. The hhaellesh all look alike.

  I grumble something. I don’t know how to accept her apology.

  “I haven’t been a good mother,” my war hero says. “I don’t know if you want me to start trying now. You’ve done well without me.”

  Yeah, if you want to call it that. I serve the minimum work requirements and spend the rest of my time running across the roofs and up the walls. I haven’t gone out and won any wars in my free time.

  What I’ve done, what they’ll know me for if I touch the history books at all, is that I’ve carried her.

  My fingers itch at the tips. I want to touch the pendant, but I don’t. “Hhaellesh don’t have blood, do they?”

  “The armor substrate carries energy and nutrients,” my mother says. “We don’t need blood, unless . . .”

  “Why do you want to be human?” I ask. I don’t want to be human. I want to be more than what I am.

  My mother doesn’t answer that, and the stillness of the armor is the stillness of an alien thing: how am I to read it? Then she seems to answer two questions, my own and one she hasn’t articulated.

  Why don’t you?

  “I think,” she says, and her words are careful, perhaps uncertain. “if you are something, you don’t want it. Does that make sense? Because you are it, you forget ever wanting it. Or, I suppose, it never comes up.”

  I shake my head.

  “I miss being human,” she says. “I miss feeling warm and sleeping in and stretching out sore muscles. I miss holding you. You were so small, when I left.” I think she watches me. “You regret not being old enough.”