The Undefeated

by Una McCormack

  Young Monnie, as yet unequipped to form such questions, never mind try to answer them, left Sienna with her grief paramount and her conscience free. They travelled for a while—Monica, her mother, and the companion—her mother saying that this trip, their itinerancy, was good for Monica, a real education, after those long years buried in that backwater. Monica thought of the summer that would be burgeoning in Torello as they travelled further and further away from the only home she had known. For a while, she held two timelines in her head: the one that she was directly experiencing, of luxury liners and in-flight gossip, and the other, more real to her, of what her life would be if everything had remained the same. Reaching the core destroyed this second timeline for good: the vastness of the main conurbation worlds and her mother’s palpable relief at reaching “civilisation,” was enough to make clear to Monica that Torello was gone for good. She never wasted her time on fantasies, not even as a child.

  Besides, the conurbation worlds of the core were beyond imagining, and certainly beyond her mother’s rather limited powers of description. Monica was overwhelmed. (She started to think of herself as “Monica” around this time, with her father no longer there to use a diminutive, and her mother generally addressing her to criticise.) But soon the towers of glass and sunlight that were standard for these central worlds became familiar, too familiar, and Monica found herself wondering what all these people found to do . . . Everything felt false, superficial, and moving so quickly that people didn’t stop to notice how silly it all was. Still, she dutifully trudged round galleries and exhibitions, and stayed out of the way when her mother entertained. This was not as often as her mother would have liked. Money was a constant theme during this time—her father’s money was now Monica’s money, and she quickly understood that her mother was unable to touch the capital, and that this was a source of great bitterness. But for the first time, Monica watched how money was spent, how quickly, and on what kinds of things. There was about a year of this, during which time her mother accepted fewer and fewer invitations, and talked bitterly about the lack of new clothes. Monica began to wonder, vaguely, whether it was possible for money to dry up, and what might happen in such circumstances. And then, abruptly, the complaints ended. (Monica assumed some settlement had been reached between her mother and the lawyers, and some allowance agreed; when she gained her majority she saw this was indeed the case.) Her mother became cheerful, gregarious, and decisive. The following month Monica was on her way to an exclusive school two worlds away from the capital, while her mother headed in the opposite direction towards old Earth. The companion went with her. Monica travelled alone.

  The school was extremely good, and perfectly enjoyable insofar as spending one’s adolescence amongst several hundred other bored and secluded teenage girls can be enjoyable. Monica neither liked nor loathed it. Certainly her mother seemed to think that she was getting what she was paying for (although Monica doubted the fees came out of that allowance), praising Monica’s new poise and elegance whenever they spoke. Monica’s own pleasures from the new environment she kept to herself: the exposure to different people and ideas (they were a fairly homogenous bunch, all told, these scions of the Commonwealth’s richest families, but they were all very well read).

  She eavesdropped extensively during the first few weeks in the school: learning what to say and not to say, learning how to pass amongst these alien creatures without appearing alien herself. Her unusual background (and reputed vast wealth) went some way to easing her passage. Sometimes, when pressed by friends, she would call up memories of Torello. Her early years on such a distant world, not to mention the death of her father, attracted a certain amount of romanticism which she herself found ludicrous. Still, she was happy to supply stories of her life there, somewhat exoticised, and she discovered her talent for narrative based on the observation of real life. The teachers noticed too and, she later realised, nudged her to make the best of her gifts. Everything else was gloss, and came easily enough, but she worked at writing, privately (since working at something was considered by her peers to be not quite the thing), and with increasing proficiency. In later years, she came to understand too how those teachers had nourished her, in the kinds of texts they put her way, and the risks they took (they were jenjer, after all) in supplying them. But the ground was prepared here for the awakening that her later travels would bring.

  During shorter holidays, Monica was encouraged to take up invitations from friends to travel to their homes and estates, but summer was reserved for Earth and her mother. How she came to loathe that old world! A cross between a theme park and a retirement home, she was desperate to get away (and, truth be told, her visits did rather disrupt her mother’s diary). But those other holidays, amongst friends and their families, broadened her horizons, not to mention her connections. She was introduced to the old money that had built the Commonwealth. She came to realise that she had been admitted on probation to this circle: her mother’s background was impeccable; her father’s wealth was from the periphery, but large. On the last holiday before she left school she met the famous writer, twelve years her elder. He was the uncle of one of her friends, and known to hold radical views. He listened to her acerbic asides about their party with mirth and increasing infatuation. He told her she was beautiful and funny. She thought he was clever and that she was in love. The next month, she turned eighteen, acquired full access to her inheritance, and left the school without graduating, skipping off to the spaceport where he was waiting. She sent her mother a short message after the ceremony, and then they were gone, on their first adventure, which he was to recount over and over in various disguises in his books, taking a scruffy freighter the long way round to Clementia, where the Commonwealth had become involved in an unreported border war which had forced half a million people into transit. They stayed in a hotel in the main city and he wrote his despatches as if from the front line.

  She was young, and he was not, particularly, and it was great a scandal at the time. She was not pardoned until the following year, when he won his first major award for his reports from Clementia. He was feted up and down the central worlds, and she was a means to access him. After this triumphant return to grace, she took him to old Earth to meet her mother. That visit Monica often fondly recalled as one of the few genuinely happy family occasions of her adult life. Her mother adored him, of course, since not only was he famous now, but he knew exactly how to treat her, with a faultlessly well-judged combination of deference and flirtation. Monica, somewhat sidelined, nevertheless benefitted from their mutual adoration. She had at last done something right. Her stock rose considerably, and shot up to hitherto uncharted heights when she provided the funds to purchase the apartment in Venice that her mother had set her heart on. That was Monica’s zenith. On the flight away from old Earth, onwards to their next adventure, they were sitting in the bar and she thought, just for a second, quickly suppressed, how much he bored her. The divorce, which came after three years, was never forgiven. Never.

  * * *

  When she made the break, it was abrupt. She left him at Wheeler’s Station, depositing him at the bar with some pals. She claimed she was off shopping; and she did go shopping (Monica rarely lied), for passage on the next ship out. It was three weeks before he managed to track her down and make contact. He tried bluster at first, telling her she’d be sorry and back soon, and when he realised that wasn’t going to work, he warned her how angry it would make her mother, and when she laughed at this, he cried and begged her to come back to him. She was sad to see this—he set such store by his manliness—but she said goodbye, and he didn’t try to contact her again. (He gave up journalism not long after and switched to novels. It didn’t do him any harm.)

  Now she was free to lead her own life, however she chose, paid for by the money her father had left her, and not yet twenty-five. She went back briefly to the capital, but she understood, from hints dropped by friends, that the divorce was a scandal too far, and that a p
eriod of penitence should now be observed. She found that this suited her perfectly well and, furthermore, that she enjoyed being independent immensely. Her inheritance provided so many options that she was almost spoiled for choice. But she could not forget some of things that she had seen on Clementia, even in the relative safety of the main city. (She never denied the impact the famous writer had on her: opening her eyes to the different worlds out there, giving her the means whereby she might have her awakening. She read the books that he read, tried on his politics and found that they fit, and then she pushed herself beyond anything he achieved.) She was pulled back out to the periphery, and she sat in hotel bars on worlds where the Commonwealth was expanding, and she drank with medics who had been on the front lines, and somehow she persuaded them to take this implausible young woman with them next time they went out. And on Tintagel she saw the transit camps, bereft of supplies, and a small boy picking listlessly at some rough tufts of grass. He looked around, furtively, to make sure nobody was watching—but Monica was, as ever, and she saw him shove a handful in his mouth.

  Her account of this, written in what would become her trademark clipped unfussy style, shocked the core worlds into action. There had been a general sense there, growing all the time, that perhaps the expansion had gone far enough, and these pushes into more and more distant worlds were stretching things too far, making the borders permeable, allowing people to slip through (both ways). All that this vague sense of unease needed was a focus for moral outrage, and Monica supplied it. Within five years, the expansion was more or less over. Monica knew that she had played only a small part in that, but it had been significant, and she felt a weight lift from her. It was as if some debt had been paid to her father. Sienna’s fate had not been forgotten, and a kind of justice had been meted out.

  Monica’s Letters from the Front restored her to the centre of things. On her return to the core worlds she discovered that she was no longer outrageous, but had done something so stellar, so remarkable, that everyone wanted to know her again. She had fame—on her own terms, this time—and a career. One unexpected result of all this was that she became acceptable to her mother again, who could understand fame, if not the reasons for Monica achieving it. She travelled extensively throughout this period across the Commonwealth and beyond, chasing the stories she knew were there, pricking the conscience of the empire of which she had become an unwilling subject.

  She remained reliably in touch with her mother throughout this period, although sometimes commissions took her out of reach for long periods of time. She made a point—and sometimes considerable effort—to ensure they were able to speak each year on her mother’s birthday, although on one or two occasions she concealed where she was and the conditions in which she was living. Her mother did not need to see war zones—they would distress her, and it was better to maintain the fiction that Monica’s work took her close to danger but not right into the thick of it. Monica suspected her of keeping in touch with the famous writer for some time after the divorce. Eventually, this contact dwindled to nothing more than the delivery, signed, of every one of his first editions as and when they were published. There was a shelf full of them by the end; after her mother’s death, when she was clearing the apartment, Monica flipped through the last few, finding him unchanged. She had been right to leave, and she was only glad that she had not wasted too much of her precious time with the whole business.

  She visited once or twice, but she still found old Earth deadly, and the lifestyle suffocating. She found the sight of her mother increasingly sad: she was using longevity treatments to keep her “beautiful,” but not everything can be held back, and if the gene is there, the gene is there. She wondered, sometimes, usually in the company of another sweet lover, whether her mother might be lonely, but reminded herself that she had her friends, and the companion. Still, Monica knew that the summons would come eventually, and that she would answer when it did; that she would go and sit beside her mother and watch her die. The only question was when, and how much freedom remained to her until then.

  * * *

  Migration had always shaped humanity’s presence on old Earth, whether by the plunder of various parts of the planet, or through forced passage, or by moving in search of a better life away from poverty or war. The various diasporas that had sent humanity off to form the Commonwealth were no different: the first settlers trekking to the new worlds; the movement of jenjer to make the expansion of those settlements possible; and, at last, the removal of the left-behind, those too poor to leave the crumbling world with their own resources (since they had none), some of whom wanted a helping hand to get away, others who, finally, had to be removed for their own good when the core worlds made clear that they would no longer pay to maintain the ruins of the family home.

  What had not necessarily been predicted was the return of wealth to old Earth. After the planet emptied, it was left to its own devices for a while, the old places becoming like names in a work of fantastical fiction; unreal cities, lost lands, a whole world turned into Atlantis. Eventually someone had the bright idea that all this real estate was waiting there to be exploited and, even better, that the very rich could be persuaded to foot the bill for redevelopment. Rome, Beijing, Jerusalem, Chicago, Machu Picchu: someone would pay for addresses like that. Soon the old places were rebuilt, more or less; carefully constructed enclaves for the super-rich. Monica suspected that living here was well beyond her mother’s means, but the querulous nature of the old woman’s voice whenever she touched upon this question was enough for Monica simply to make a few private enquiries and then adjust the allowance accordingly. Thank God, she thought, that her father had settled the money directly on her: her mother would have burned through the whole fortune in a matter of years.

  The first few years her mother lived in London, but she didn’t like the weather and, once the famous writer was part of the family, the choosing of a new address was the chief topic of conversation between him and her mother. Their visits would coincide with trips exploring various places, and culminating in one of his lesser books of essays, Travels on an Old Planet. Eventually they settled on Venice. Monica disliked it, sensing a rot beneath the façade, but her mother wanted it, badly, and it was easier to give way than to fight. Still, Venice featured in her nightmares: she knew with sinking certainty she would end up there overseeing her mother’s decline. Her hope was that she could keep that time as brief as possible within the bounds of decency.

  But at last the subtext of her mother’s messages became too pitiful, too clear. The increasingly limited activities, the friends whose names slipped away from her messages—at last, Monica couldn’t put it off any longer. She found more or less what she expected—an old woman, rather frail, left behind by her set, her only companion a jenjer who was counting the hours until this episode of her bond came to an end and she could be released to some better, more stimulating task. Monica would not have wished such an end upon an enemy, and she did not, in fact, count her mother amongst her enemies.

  Their household was luxurious, but life was very narrow and constrained, particularly given Monica’s usual freedom. Her mother couldn’t travel far and, by the end of the second year, was more or less bedridden. With nothing better to do, Monica wrote three novels, which she buried, and she put off a visit from the famous writer, who offered to remarry her. Occasionally she made it out into the wider world, but the company bored her, and the wonders of the old world did not astound: she knew that they were re-creations, fakes. She found herself looking more and more at the jenjer, wondering about them . . .

  She wondered about them later, too, in Torello, these jenjer upon old Earth. What would be happening to them there, as news from the periphery came in? Rome had crucified six thousand, once upon a time, and the whole bloody planet was pockmarked with a hundred thousand gulags and plantations that over a hundred thousand years had kept the slaves oppressed. Had some of them taken flight, found their way beyond the periphery to . . .
where? Some kind of haven? Some kind of training ground? But what about the ones left behind? What would happen to them when the war—and war was coming, that much was certain—when the war at last came? What would be done to them, and how far would they go to defend themselves? Lifting her eyes, Monica saw Gale, across the empty pool. She touched the tracker beneath her skin, pulsing away, without purpose.

  * * *

  Monica’s mother took nearly three years, Earth years, to die. Frail and increasingly bedbound, her friends slipped away, one by one, until, at the end, there was only Lucy, obliged to be there in order to stay alive, and Monica, obliged to be there by ties so primal she sometimes wondered whether they could be called consensual.

  The old woman’s mind stayed sharp, and, listening to her talk (her mother liked conversation), Monica realised the specific gift that she had inherited from her mother—the gift for the telling detail. Her mother remade history to her own purposes—stories that Monica knew to be untrue in some respect were repeated over and over until they gained authenticity in her mother’s mind or else, sometimes, were told unexpectedly in their true form, which Monica would realise, some hours later, had been an offering—an admission of guilt, perhaps, or a kind of apology for a moment missed, a mistake made. And the detail—ah, yes, the devil was there. The insult remembered in its entirety, down to a cruel mimicry of the cadences in which it was delivered; the inappropriateness of a rival’s dress; and, sometimes, more touchingly, memories of great tenderness and love, of first seeing her husband-to-be; of the girl child’s first word.