by Kali Wallace
“Are you sure you’re my son?” my mother had asked, poking at my belly. “Maybe I picked up the wrong one at the maternity ward, because I know I asked for a child who doesn’t find the universe boring.”
The space between a truthful memory and a story made true only in the repeated telling of it is smaller than we imagine, but I believe my mother was full of joy that day, the day Captain Ngahere announced that House of Wisdom was going to intercept UC33-X and bring it aboard for study.
We were floating together in my father’s garden on Level 7. The ship was traveling at a steady velocity; within hours the propulsion drive would engage, and our feet would press to the floor, but that was yet to come. Around us the garden was an unending summer in vibrant hues of green, flowers fragrant and blooming. My mother had caught me skipping my lessons with the tutor to wander around the ship instead. Her punishment had been to bring me to the garden and teach me about the universe. Beyond the windows the stars were small, the sun behind us, the Earth tucked away on the other side of the solar system.
I remembered her laughter. The warmth of her arm around my shoulders. The pulse-skip of fear in my throat every time I thought about how far we were traveling. The answers I mumbled and excuses I offered when my mother noticed that I was not happy. I remembered her shoving me playfully when I rolled my eyes at her passionate biography of the universe, and the feeling of free fall that came with drifting toward the windows, as though there was nothing between me and the darkness, then a moment of panic, the kind of panic that claws at the throat and chills the blood, and I turned without thought, reaching for my mother, grasping for her hand and finding it out of reach, turning again, spinning out of control, and where my mother had been there was a pillar of fire in the darkness, and all at once, with the suddenness of a door slamming shut, a dream ending, a life snuffing out, my entire body shuddered with pain.
I cried out, a pathetic animal sound, the noise muffled in the helmet—
Helmet. Space suit.
Darkness, and light, and darkness again.
My vision was blurred, my head throbbing so powerfully I felt every heartbeat in my eyes, and my chest burned with a fiery agony that intensified with every breath. I was in a space suit and turning slowly—spinning, with nothing to grasp, nothing to reach for—and as I spun again, head over feet like the spokes of a wheel, I saw House of Wisdom, and smaller, so small, Homestead. The ships were tiny and distant and burning.
The collision had been indirect. An angled blow across Homestead’s nose had torn a great gash in the hull. Gases vented and the space around the ship was dotted with dust—
Not dust. Bodies.
I couldn’t breathe. The dead were tumbling into space from the broken hull. I had killed them. They looked like specks from this distance. I had killed them. I couldn’t breathe. As I turned again, the wheel going around, Homestead dropped out of sight, and there was the Earth, a small, cold marble, and the Moon, and the bright disk of Providence Station sliding out of view—and there were the ships again. Silent explosions, like lightning from far away, spewed blinding white light from every jagged wound along the hulls. They were so very far away.
I turned again, and there was nothing but darkness before me, and I moved without thinking, grasping although there was nothing to hold. Gathering spots overtook my vision. I thought I heard a beep—a voice—but it meant nothing, and I blacked out again. Somehow, somehow, even in the darkness, I knew I was spinning, and I knew I was falling away from the wreckage and the fire, and I knew I was alone.
* * *
• • •
Seven hours.” My aunt’s voice, normally as polished as a gleaming blade, was ragged. “That’s how long you were adrift.”
I didn’t remember all of it, but I remembered enough that I did not want to close my eyes, however exhausted I was by the effort of keeping them open. I remembered waking aboard Pangong in a quarantine tent with white-suited figures leaning over me, and waking again, still in quarantine, when a shuttle landed in Armstrong City, but the rest of the past few days were a blur of bright lights and looming doctors’ faces. When I slept, I dreamed of fire and darkness.
The quarantine tent and biohazard suits were gone. The doctors were satisfied the parasite had not come with me. I wished I could find the same certainty. Reason told me that the parasite would have asserted itself by now, but every itch on my skin, every phantom sensation, felt to me like a silver worm slithering through my limbs.
Aunt Padmavati went on, “You weren’t fitted into the evacuation suit quite right. That explains the bruising. Do you remember that?”
“No, but I didn’t—” I said, tried to say, but a dry cough overtook the words.
She lifted a straw to my lips. “You didn’t . . . ?”
The water was lukewarm. I gulped it greedily. “I didn’t put myself into the suit. I wasn’t awake. Zahra sedated me.”
My aunt’s eyes widened slightly. Too late I realized what I had revealed. I wanted to grab the words from the air and cram them back into my mouth, like a child hiding a cookie he should not have eaten.
But she had been sitting by my bedside when I awoke, every single time, even when the doctors and nurses were bustling through the room, and I was not going to lie to her. She seemed to me even smaller and more birdlike now. Her shoulders were thin, her graying hair escaping in wisps from the braid that wound over her shoulder. Every motion was deliberate in the way of somebody used to Earth’s gravity now moving about on the Moon. She had never looked less like my mother.
“Jas?” my aunt said softly.
She touched my hand. Her skin was papery and dry but warm. I had forgotten what a warm touch felt like; it might have been the brand of a red-hot iron. I jerked my hand away, and my aunt withdrew hers. Her lips were pursed, her brow creased. I did not recognize this stranger who wore my aunt’s face, a woman soft with concern where stern and unbending Councilor Padmavati Bhattacharya ought to have been, and I hated that she was not a stranger at all. She was who she had always been, now stripped of the armor she’d constructed over a lifetime.
“Baqir,” I said. “Xiomara. Did they—are they—”
“They’re fine,” my aunt said. “They were retrieved by a SPEC ship.”
“They’re okay?”
“They were both moderately dehydrated and bruised, and Baqir’s shoulder is injured, but otherwise they are well. They have been cleared from quarantine. They will recover,” Aunt Padmavati said.
Relief was a sharp pain in the center of my chest. She would not lie to me about that.
“Auntie, there’s something—it’s important. Dr. Lago didn’t kill anybody,” I said. “He had nothing to do with any of it. It wasn’t even—”
“We know,” Aunt Padmavati said, interrupting me gently. “Jas. We know. Everybody knows by now. His daughter made certain of that before she died.”
I had not expected otherwise, but still I felt a pang upon confirmation of Zahra’s death. She had apologized when she sedated me. Apologized, and promised to finish it. I had never meant to leave her to do it alone.
So sluggish were my thoughts that it took me a moment to ask, “What do you mean? What did she do?”
My aunt raised a single eyebrow, then reached for the panel beside the bed. Live news reports from across the world filled the wallscreen. House of Wisdom. Homestead. Dr. Lago. The man called Adam Light. A significant amount of debris had struck Providence, causing serious damage and seven fatalities. Of greater concern was the ongoing danger from the debris. Orbital Control had restricted space traffic while they monitored the possibility of a Kessler cascade. There were salvage crews working to clean up what they could.
“The man who was calling himself Adam Light was in truth a former Councils citizen named Jeffrey Kimball,” my aunt said when an image of him appeared. “Twelve years ago he was convicted of assault. R
ather than enter a counseling and service program, he fled to the desert.”
I tried to decide if I cared about being right about that, that he had been a Councils criminal before he became overlord of his own scrabbling desert kingdom, but I felt nothing.
The news reports did not mention Malachi and SPEC’s secret, forbidden mission. They did not mention the parasite. They were still referring to it as a bioengineered virus. The survivors from Homestead were receiving a great deal of attention.
As was Zahra.
“Listen,” said my aunt as she called up a public audio file.
Zahra’s voice filled the room. She sounded hoarse and tired. She was asking for help, not for herself but for her siblings, her family. For the memory of her father. She was saying goodbye.
I turned my head away, too late to hide my tears. To my right, tall windows looked over Armstrong City. There was no sunlight on the domes; Armstrong was somewhere in the middle of its long lunar night, as well as its artificially defined local night. Wispy clouds drifted over the city, twisting around the buildings and winding along rails and pathways. It was as close as Armstrong ever came to experiencing real weather, that fleeting formation and dissipation of moisture exhaled from the city’s carefully maintained parks and farms. The buildings were mostly white, tinged with a silver gleam that faded into gray, with broad windows like flat blank eyes.
Zahra’s message ended. My aunt moved in her chair but said nothing.
“How many people survived?” I asked.
“Eighty-three,” she said.
Eighty-three out of three hundred. Eighty-three people who had believed they were leaving a life of hardship and misery for a gleaming home in the stars, for safety and comfort, for a dream of peace. They had so despaired of what Earth had to offer, having crashed so many times against walls they could not breach, they had followed a criminal narcissist on a hopeless voyage into space, and fewer than one-third of them had survived.
“Zahra had a brother and a sister,” I said. “Twins. Teenagers.”
“They survived. We’re trying to locate their family. Their closest relation is a cousin, I believe. A researcher in one of the outer planets stations. None of the children will be punished for their part in what happened.”
Some in the Councils would have suggested it. I knew that much without asking. There were always those who viewed the children of refugees and separatists not as victims but as pawns in a game in which the winners had been chosen long ago. I thought about the anger in Baqir’s voice when he spoke about how his entire family had been denied citizenship because of the medicine his grandmother stole.
“And the others?” I asked. “The ones who aren’t children?”
“That remains to be determined.”
In the distance a train whipped along curving rails, darting between unseen stations. There was no color. No sound penetrated the walls and closed doors of the hospital room. Everything about the atmosphere and environment of Armstrong City was controlled, measured, balanced. There was a joke on Earth that a person could not cough on the Moon without triggering the city’s viral filtration system. It was a marvel of environmental engineering.
All I could see was how delicate it was. How very easy it would be to destroy.
Don’t let them make you lie, Malachi had said.
Already they were trying to erase him and all he had endured. Already they were doing exactly what he and Zahra had feared. I didn’t even know if Malachi was his real name. If he had family, they would never know about the sacrifice he had made.
I was quiet for a moment, considering my words. “SPEC isn’t going to admit their part in getting back aboard, are they? Is anybody even asking how three hundred people slipped through border checkpoints and stole a ship?”
“There are quite a lot of questions going officially unanswered.”
“Will they tell people about the parasite? Or release the rest of the messages Dr. Lago recovered?”
“There are no plans to do so at this time,” my aunt said. She was watching the screen, although I did not know that she was seeing it.
“Don’t fuck around with me, Auntie.” The words sounded more tired than angry, but it worked. She looked at me sharply, eyebrows raised. “I spent ten years lying to make things easier for them. If I’m expected to do it again, you should probably tell me what I’m supposed to lie about.”
I could not guess what Aunt Padmavati saw when she looked at me then, but her expression was not one of shock or disapproval or disappointment. Instead of answering, she said thoughtfully, “I remember them, you know. Dr. Lago and Dr. Dove. I met them before he left for House of Wisdom. It was one of those tiresome ceremonial dinners. Everybody else was there because it was an obligation, but Gregory Lago was delighted. He took so much joy in his research, in sharing it, in hearing what others were doing. In what he might discover.”
A pause, and she looked past me, turning her gaze to the view over Armstrong City.
“There have been a great many meetings lately about what the public does and does not need to know. I’ve not been invited to all of them,” she said.
“But you don’t think they’re going to release the messages from Mournful Evening Song.”
“No.”
“They’re going to keep saying it was a man-made virus. From Earth.”
“Yes.”
“And pretending to look for some anarchist or terrorist group to blame. Probably somebody in the wastelands. Somebody who can be blamed without anybody important being implicated.”
“Not overtly, but yes, essentially.”
“They’re going to demand that I lie for them again. Baqir and Xiomara too. Are they threatening Baqir’s citizenship? What do they have to hold over Xiomara?”
“I am not privy to those conversations.”
“But you’re letting them happen.”
My aunt lifted one hand in a defeated gesture. “I don’t know what you think my position entails, but I hardly have the power to unilaterally command the Councils’ decisions. They’ve got quite a bit to argue about. Few people even believe they have the full story of what happened. The fire aboard House of Wisdom, followed by the collision, was so destructive it might be months before we recover anything useful. Zahra Dove Lago did quite a thorough job.”
Her tone was so mild, so calm.
“Zahra had never even been in space before,” I said.
My aunt did not reply. She was still not looking at me.
“It was my plan. Zahra helped, but I was the one who decided to destroy the alien parasite. I was the one who decided to deflect Homestead using House of Wisdom. I wasn’t even sure it would work,” I added. “But I did it anyway.”
I faced my aunt as I spoke, and I did not turn away, even as the silence stretched, and stretched, and her eyes remained fixed on the gray city outside.
Finally, my aunt said, “Before you were born, Amita asked me if I would take care of you, should anything ever happen to her. I laughed when she asked. I knew nothing of children, but she was not asking in jest. I agreed because she wanted me to, and because I could not imagine anything would ever happen to her. I did not expect to ever have to raise a child. I always thought she would outlive me by decades.”
“I know,” I said quietly.
“No, Jas,” she said, finally turning to face me, “I don’t think you do. Do you want to know why I haven’t been invited to very many Councils meetings over the last couple of days? It’s a bit embarrassing, I’m afraid. I grew rather . . . heated in my response when Councilor Nyman suggested the doctors wake you prematurely to interrogate you.”
I didn’t know what to say, so I only said, “I’ve never liked him.”
“He’s a boorish, insufferable prick,” my aunt said. “Jas, I did not think a young woman who’s spent more than half her life on a desert
homestead could have figured out how to revive the ship’s engines and set such a carefully calculated course. I knew who had come up with the plan from the very moment it became clear.”
“Mum’s engines didn’t need any help.” My voice was hoarse. “They fired up like they’d never gone cold.”
“Oh, of course they did,” Aunt Padmavati said, with a breathy exhalation that was almost a laugh. “As though Amita would have accepted anything less. Do you know what they’ll say about you, if the truth is revealed? If you become known as the one who destroyed humanity’s first chance at communicating with alien life? Do you know what they’ll say about your mother? Some people will understand, but others won’t. Others will only see the destruction and the death. They won’t see what was saved.”
I sat up, ignoring the twinges of pain, and reached for her hand.
“Auntie, I knew exactly what I was doing. So did Mum.”
She squeezed my hand and smiled sadly. “Jas . . .”
“And what happens if the Councils cover it up?” I asked. “They’re going to search the wreck for everything they can. If any part of the parasite survives, and they aren’t warned, it will happen again. There will be another massacre. They’ll find somebody else to blame. And it might happen here in Armstrong, or down on Earth. We might not be able to stop it.”
Her lips were a thin, worried line, but she did not deny it.
“I knew what I was doing,” I said again. “We have to tell them. Release the data to the public. Let everyone know what happened and why.”
“The Councils will never agree to that, but we—”
“So don’t ask them! You’ve done it before! I know you weren’t supposed to give me any of the ship’s data when I was all of fourteen years old, but you did it anyway. You can—”