by Neil Clarke
There is letting go.
She does both.
“All of you are leaving. I will stay, with them. Au i ke kai me he manu ala!” With that, holding them with the energy born of their own surprise, like the throw of a jujitsu master, she steps back, closes the portal, and launches them.
To cross the sea like a bird.
Like released seed pods, the modules, expelled, move rapidly from the Moku, their manual control overridden by programming the children created. The slice of Mars grows. Pele releases her held breath when her information panel notes ignition of their maneuvering rockets, which will increase their speed.
“Hsu!” Zi’s contorted face is on her monitor. “There will be repercussions.” The sound of wild screaming floods into the comm channel, drowning out Zi’s voice. He switches to another channel. She can still hear dull thuds.
Quinn, in their breakaway, appears. “Pele!”
She says, “Is everyone safe?”
Selena’s voice breaks in. “I would not have predicted this success.”
Quinn’s black eyes hold more than rage. Terror, or just the rapid analytics required to deal with the unfolding situation? He barks, “Success? Broken bones. Abrasions. One death thus far. Sure to be more.” Pele hears a great commotion on the other screen; recognizes Ann and other parents as they crowd round the fish-eye lens. “Come back,” shouts Ann. “Return Kevin right now!”
Jane, the lawyer, yells, “You have committed piracy. Kidnapping. Treason. Child abuse. Manslaughter.”
Pele orders, “All craft move away with maximum speed. I have no control. The nukes, activated by the GCC, will detonate in seconds. They are contained, but—”
A tall, young boy is next to her. He touches her elbow. “Dr. Hsu. I am Eliott. Chimerist.” The wailing, frantic parents arrayed before him quiet. To them, Eliott says, “We apologize for injuries. We did our best to create a plan that would minimize them. We are all well. We have not been kidnapped. The reverse, perhaps. We have sent you our story. Listen to it. Do not blame our colleagues on Earth. You cannot blame us, of course. We are children. Communications are now blocked until we choose to re-open them.”
To Pele, he says “Hurry.”
In Nucleus, the op center of Moku, Pele sees thirty-seven children—short, tall, round, thin, each from a different country and culture, monitoring and managing the ship, a cohesive crew with their own Esperanto, which Pele took care to learn. Many, like Ta’a’aeva, are not Aspies; she knows that she has focused on those who are because of her own history.
Pele makes a rapid tour, gives a few suggestions, which are seriously considered and often executed. She could be in any of the many ships, private and government-backed, that she has had the privilege to serve on over the past fifty years.
Bean, ten, is the youngest. Ta’a’aeva’s on-board fourteenth birthday drew a record-making number of viewers just last week, and she is oldest. Most have at least one college degree. Pele has interacted with all of them, and henceforth—but there is no way to understand this enormity—neither she nor they will ever know any other humans.
“Don’t worry,” says Eliott. “We have done this, virtually, a million times. We know all the contingencies.”
“And my decision?”
“Scenario 174.”
She knows she could ask any of them and they would know that number, all the others, and what each would have entailed, just as she knew what Venus Room meant.
The ship announces, “Crew, prepare for nuclear ignition.”
Pele steps into the nearest empty booth on the wall of the circular space, which cocoons her, leaving her face free. For a wild, silly second, Pele is reminded of nothing so much as being strapped into a tilt-a-whirl at the state fair, waiting to be spun through the air, held to the wall by the force of gravity.
She can hear their conversation in her headphones, and sees a good number of their faces. Only a few look appropriately grave. Some grin. She hears a wild, shrieking laugh, and some self-congratulatory talk of victory, as if this is a virtual game they have won. Perhaps it is.
How can they imagine the horrors Pele foresees? They are so terribly young. They have had no chance to learn about life, and now they never will. The freedom of Earth, the freedom of choosing another road, and another, and another. The delight of communicating with and learning from a rich, diverse population. The road they face is hard, narrow, and probably impossible. Doubt, anger, and regret rage through her; she struggles against the restraints, her chest a dark, sad weight. She has saved them only for an impossible task.
She always blacks out at five g’s, but until then, she desperately thinks, plans, wonders, What can I do to help them survive?
Pele is six. She sits crosslegged on a large, cool rock across from her brother Jack. Their knees almost touch. The waterfall, which the kids often visit, is small, but makes a pleasing sound as it rushes over rocks. The tumble of fresh water washes the air. Small dark fish hang in the shadows. Fallen red lehua blossoms drift on the surface.
Jack is fifteen, one of the Hsus’s three natural children. Dapples of light brighten his straight, black, shoulder-length hair as wind shifts the forest canopy above them and blows it across his face. He is the only one of the children she has anything to do with. The others just seem like a lot of noise.
“Okay. Let’s try again. Look at my face. Can you tell how I feel?”
She stares intently at Jack’s teeth, sorting the long call of the i’iwi, the amakihi’s chatter, the sweet song of the apanane.
“No, Pele. My eyes. Raise your chin. Look.”
She does. He draws his eyebrows together, glares at her. “Tell me—what am I feeling?
” She shrugs.
He thrusts his face forward, retaining the ferocious look, and says, “I am angry! Now I will make you feel angry. Pele, you are stupid!”
She leaps to her feet and lunges down at him, fists forward. He catches her wrists, one in each of his hands. “That is anger, Pele. You feel angry. I feel the same way. I am angry that you tried to hit me! Tell me what my face looks like! My mouth! My eyebrows! My wrinkles!”
As he holds her wrists in mid-air, it dawns on her. “I can tell how you feel by looking at your face?”
He lets go and nods. She drops back onto the rock and rests her chin in her hands. The water is dark green, then clear and sparkling where the sun hits it.
He says, “Now you look worried. You’re thinking. What are you thinking?”
She says forcefully, “I am wondering why you are bothering me. I am thinking that this is too much work.”
“It’s work for me too. But I like to work with you. You’re my sister, and I want to help you.”
“I don’t need help.”
He says, very gently, “Please look at my face for just a minute.”
She does, reluctantly. “You are looking right at me. Into my eyes.”
“Tell me how my face looks.”
“Your eyes are open very wide. Your look is strong. It almost hurts me.
It makes me feel …”
He nods encouragingly. “Feel what?”
“I don’t know. Is there a word?”
“I am trying to tell you with this look that I care about you.”
She wonders how she can memorize a look, and how Jack’s look would seem on someone else’s face. It all seems quite impossible. “Why?”
“My older brother lived here when I was little. He was our parents’ biological child too. He could never look at me. I loved him. He’s a grownup now. His name is Edmond Hsu. He’s a mathematician, eh? You can see his work online. He started college when he was twelve and lives on the mainland now. I was always sad that he would never look at me. Mom told me that I shouldn’t be sad, that he didn’t know what we were feeling and thinking.”
“So?”
“I think that you can know, Pele.” He smiles.
She looks back at the pool. “Then what do I feel now?” She knows that she feels vaguely out
-of-sorts. She is not sure what any of this means.
“Grumpy.” He jumps up. “Come on. Bet I can beat you back to the trail-head!”
She gets up more slowly and stands, hands on her hips, nodding. “Grumpy.”
Another day, he hands her a wet rag while she is in the back yard throwing rotten mangoes at a big tree in the gully and watching them smash. “Wash your hands. I know you can read. Try reading this.”
“No!” She throws The Wizard of Oz on the ground as he walks away.
Irritated that this does not bother him, she picks it up, wipes mango goo from the cover, and reads aloud to the gully in a shouting voice: “When Dorothy, who was an orphan, first came to her, Aunt Em had been so startled by the child’s laughter that she would scream and press her hand upon her heart whenever Dorothy’s merry voice reached her ears; and she still looked at the little girl with wonder that she could find anything to laugh at. “
She turns and faces the house, where Jack might still be listening. She hopes he is. “So? I am an orphan. I scream a lot. AIEEEE! And sometimes I hate it when people laugh!”
The trees swish in the wind, and the palms make rain-pattering sounds beneath the blue sky.
She does nothing for three days except read The Wizard of Oz. When she is finished, she marches into Jack’s room, where he is studying, and smacks it down on his desk.
“I am very angry with you,” she shouts.
“Why?”
“Because this made me sad and afraid and worried.” “Anything else?”
“I was happy and sad at the same time when Dorothy got back home. I hated it!” “Why?”
“I just did!”
Jack smiles as she stomps from the room. Next, he gives her a curious old volume, My Bookhouse: Through Fairy Halls. It is a hefty book, bound in black leather, with vivid pictures that seem like music, because of the way they move in Pele’s mind. It smells funny. The pages are dry. “Take care of it,” he says.
Pele is walking on a treadmill. A girl stands next to her, watching.
“Are you Bean?”
“That’s the first time you remembered.”
“I told you a story.”
The girl looks straight at Pele. Her eyes are hazel with flecks of gold. “A girl lived in the mountains of Tibet. She was trying to escape from the Chinese and broke her leg and nearly starved to death.” Bean purses her lips, looking confused. “You said I couldn’t give her any powers, and I couldn’t earn any weapons, so I couldn’t help her. Things just happened and then it was over and nobody won, but she did get out and became a hero. You said it would change my brain. I tried to measure that, but I couldn’t. I think I need more stories to do that, or I have to figure out a new way of measuring.”
“Usually when I was your age I liked a story if it made me cry.”
Bean flashes her a startled look. “You liked to cry?”
Pele smiles. “It is kind of strange, isn’t it?”
Bean frowns. “I will tell you my story. It is about a horse. I don’t know if you would like it. It doesn’t have an ending.”
“I think I know your story. But there are many ways to tell every story. Tell it to me again. I’m sure that it will make me cry.”
As Pele strides back into trance, into dream, Bean wonders why tears flow from beneath Pele’s closed eyelids.
“Pele!”
Ta’a’aeva stands in front of her. Bean leans close, against her left arm. They are all gathered, all looking at her.
Ta’a’aeva speaks. “We need your help. It is almost completed, we think. But you are the one who can do it. We are glad you have come. But be here! Please wake up!”
Obviously, a dream.
Pele, in her own little house, a chicken coop in a row of chicken coops long ago completely sanitized, used, and abandoned by various Hsu children.
Hers has weather-smoothed streaks of white paint, abundant sun that lies on the floor in a slant, a shelf where hens once roosted crowded with a row of old books. Large, castoff cushions on the floor.
She is seven.
Her brothers and sisters rush down the gully, a crescendoing cavalcade of pounding feet. They surround her house, yelling. Rocks bounce off the side. Diane peers in the window, howls with laughter. “She’s reading those silly fairy tales again!”
“Yeah, she likes those old books. I loaned her my screen and found it in the trash can!”
They leap around the chicken coop, yelling, singing, beating on it with sticks, making it shake when they try to push it over.
Pele, lying on her stomach, barely hears them. She is in worlds of ogres, fairies, magic boots, menehunies, stupid children, endless journeys, flying carpets, talking animals, and powerful goddesses like her namesake, a dangerous woman whose actions are unpredictable and thrilling, who created the Hawaiian Islands with her volcanoes. They are more real than people, and certainly much more interesting.
She does not even notice when the clatter recedes. Rain patters on big-leaved trees, sun speeds across the floor, she smells sweetly rotting mangoes mixed in the brisk, whipping breeze, and reads.
Sunny’s sideways head and shoulders darken the coop’s small door. “It’s getting dark. Come inside.”
Pele, her head propped on her elbows, is reading about a giant. “No.”
Sunny smiles, sets a water bottle, a package of dried squid, and a book light inside, then leaves.
When Pele wakes the next morning in her own bed, she has a memory of being carried through the night, and the stars. Next to her on the bed is Through Fairy Halls, her favorite of the Bookhouse volumes. She opens it and starts to read. Grimm, Anderson, the Blue and Green and Red books follow, and then folk and fairy tales from around the world. Wise and wily rabbits, lions, crickets and tortoises argue, beguile, win, lose. And Fairyland itself?
Oh, there is music and dancing in Fairyland. No yesterday, and no tomorrow. Pipes call. Trumpets sound. The low are made high, and the high are surprised and chagrined.
There is a dangerous edge to Fairyland, which Pele enjoys. One flirts with it to one’s own peril.
And part of her now, the living dreaming part, knows that she has crossed the border. Nightingales, clear springs, great rose-trees whose rich scents confound the senses. The large made small; the small, large, and one’s own self made true.
And Time a leafy, sun-dappled orchard.
Gray horse, crunch of sweet, crisp fruit, swish of long silver tail.
Long ago. Ever-now.
She is Gulliver, pounded by tiny fists.
“Please, please, wake up! We need your help! We can’t do it alone! Please, please, wake up!”
She opens her eyes. Bean is there. “You have been asleep for a long, long time, Pele.” Her eyes are grave.
“This is too slow,” says Kevin, shaking her arm. “We’re only transiting Venus. We’ll never get to Shining Leaf.”
Ignoring trumpet fanfares, Pele calculates, considering Orion’s acceleration, that she has been asleep for three months.
Ta’a’aeva says, “We can’t make the drive work. You know how. Tell us! Tell us, and we’ll engineer it. You know that we can.”
Pele says, “Get me out of this.” As they unstrap her cocoon, she looks at a nearby screen. “I’ve been exercising three hours a day on the bike? Really?”
“You weren’t awake,” says Eliott. “You were in a trance.”
“Indeed,” she says, taking in the compressed graphic of her brainwaves for the past few months, noting the sharp spikes that she knows linger in her mind like haunting, exotic music, calling her to return.
It takes all her will to remain where she is, on Moku, where she has committed a powerful, monstrous act. She sees the resolve of the children arrayed around her and knows that she cannot gain control of the ship. She knows that they would have done this without her help.
She tries to believe that they are better off with her here. She must make that true.
She also sees, scrolling
, continuous, messages from Earth. With a touch, she speeds them up, goes backwards, absorbs them like a blow, for it is all her fault.
And Gustavo. She searches wildly, finds a tiny line of news—
“No!” She raises her hands to cover her face, and sobs, slumping back into the cocoon, curling up so that no one, no one, can see her.
She does not re-emerge for another spell. But now, her dreams are new. She is working.
Bean sees Pele first.
She is standing just outside Nucleus, where diagrams, equations, charts, and virtual models of FTL drives litter the air in transparent, threedimensional overlays. She has been watching, listening to the hum of intense concentration, several intertwining musics that tangle and leap within her long-quiet mind, and getting ready to turn and re-enter her cocoon.
The displays rainbow Bean’s slight body as she approaches Pele, her stare a powerful command. She takes Pele’s hand and, as the others gather, leads her to an array of cushions. Pele settles on one, back straight, legs crossed, and says, direct from her hard-won beginner’s mind, “You don’t really need me. Are you ready to tell us, Bean?”
First, Bean’s eyes widen as she tilts her head at Pele.
Pele nods. “I know.”
Bean frowns and clenches her fists. “I’ve been trying. It’s closed in. Like a hard nut. I can’t tell it. No one understands.”
“Try another way.”
Bean takes a deep breath, then shakes her head and makes her long hair swirl round her face. She stretches her long legs out in front of her, grasps the soles of her feet with her hands, tucks her head in, and silences.
“Bean, who is in this story?” asks Pele.
She asks three times. Finally Bean says, her head still down, her voice muffled, “It is a story about a horse.” She walks her hands up her calves, singing more than speaking, bends both knees to the right, and kneels, her spine ramrod straight, hands moving as in a hula, shaping the story in space. “Sometimes the story seems short, and sometimes I know that it is actually very, very long. “On the pampas, I ride Alcubierre, my silver mare, all day through the wheat. It parts and lets us through.” Her hands speak in swift, darting signs now: her own language, Pele knows, which they must learn.