Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 78

by Aliette de Bodard

  “I saw what you did in the Memorial,” Minh Ha said. “The city that you brought to life ‘from the point of view of the Rong.’ That’s not truth—none of you lived in Xuan Huong, or on the Western continent. None of you remember the war. Moc Tinh Hau is just a story to you, no different than it was to the Galactic who build the Memorial.” It wasn’t true, not quite—of course Moc Tinh Hau was the home of Sarah’s ancestors, of course it would remain a special place, more special to her than to Steven Carey, who had interviewed so many Rong yet failed to capture the essence of their lives in his Memorial. But she had to make her understand.

  Sarah shrugged. “Do you think to make me recant, Mother?” She gestured at the Memorial behind its pane of glass. “As they do?”

  “I want you to understand that this is how we live together, child. The Galactics did what they did on Moc Tinh Hau—” she saw Sarah raise a hand in protest, and cut in before Sarah could say anything— “but if you never forget grievances, then they’ll choke you like ivy. The Memorial isn’t for us, no matter what they say; and it’s enough that we know that.” It was enough not to make waves; not to make themselves noticed; to live in harmony with the Galactics in their new home on Segundus.

  “Why are you here, Mother?”

  “Because you’re my child. Because I raised you.” Because I’ll lose you. Because, somehow, she wanted to give Sarah something to take to Cygnus, to remember her by; and she couldn’t articulate what.

  Sarah turned, and looked at her full in the eye; as a Galactic would have done. Her face was set. “I’m sorry,” she said, and didn’t sound sorry in the least. “You’ve made your choices, Mother. I made mine.”

  The Dead watch Minh Ha, impassive. Their faces shift, oddly, weirdly, into some expressions a human face can’t take—rippling between a smile and a grimace and tears. Second Aunt speaks—the words came through all garbled, even as Minh Ha’s filters flash a warning she can’t understand either, something about compromised communication protocols and infected messages.

  “I need advice.” She dares not look up, but she sees Mother drift closer to her. There is a smell in the air that is almost like Mother’s perfume, the faint mixture of cloves and sandalwood that followed her everywhere, even into the hospital where she breathed her last, hunched around her pain like a dragon wrapped around a pearl. “Please. I don’t know where to go, or who to turn to.” She would weep, if she still had tears.

  The Dead are not the living.

  “She’s your only descendant,” Minh Ha says, watching the familiar faces bend and distort like thin sheets of metal. “And they’re taking her away from us. From all of us. Please.”

  Mother speaks, but it is all nonsense that Minh Ha can’t interpret—no better than an unanswered prayer at the ancestral altar after all. Can she even sure that any of them understand her? Perhaps the filters distort her own speech to the Dead, just as they mangle what should have been familiar Rong words.

  “You’d know what to do, I’m sure. You’d know how to—” She isn’t sure what she wants—to convince Sarah of how wrong she’s been, to rescue her from her inevitable fate, from yet another kind of exile? “Mother. Revered aunts. I—Please tell me what to do.”

  There is no answer. There never is any.

  Going home, Minh Ha was stopped three times by police barricades; the last one erected just below her compound and staffed with what seemed like an entire army’s worth of policemen. The leader, a beefy woman with the reddened skin of blondes, examined Minh Ha from head to toe; no doubt seeing all there was to see from the failure of her marriage to Charles to Sarah’s arrest. “Where are you going, Mrs Tran?” Perhaps it was Sarah’s words, but today the mangling of Minh Ha’s last name grated—reminded her that she wasn’t home anymore, that her own home had been lost so long ago it only existed in her imagination—all in the past, unable to be ever truly recovered.

  “I’m going home,” Minh Ha said. And, because she didn’t care much, anymore, about Galactics or her complex relationship with the city she now lived in, “From the holding facility. I was visiting my daughter.”

  The leader grimaced, but Minh Ha held her ground. “I have three visits.”

  “So you do.” She didn’t seem altogether happy.

  At home, the feedswriters appeared to have got bored; there were but a few of them, loitering at the entrance of the building, and Minh Ha easily bypassed their frantic calls for interviews and information.

  In the apartment, she found her sister Thuy busy in the kitchen, and her niece Hanh in front of the computer, watching the feeds. “How is she, aunt?” Hanh asked, but her mother Thuy cut her off.

  “There’s someone waiting for you in the living room.”

  Minh Ha had been expecting him, so it wasn’t entirely a surprise to find Charles standing before the chimney, looking at the holos on the ancestral altar with the practiced indifference of a man who had turned his back on this particular area of his life. “Good evening, Charles.” Her voice had never felt so formal in addressing him. “Come to see about Sarah, I guess.”

  He turned around, slowly, his face a mask; a minute tremor in his hand masking the emotion underneath. “I came to see how you were. And yes, to ask about Sarah. Since it seems you’re the only one she’s speaking to.”

  Minh Ha shook her head. “She’s not telling me much.”

  “I need to see her,” Charles said. “But, of course, I can’t. It’s all that Vermilion Seal rubbish, telling her to reject all things Galactic. As if she weren’t Galactic herself, born and bred on Segundus . . . It’s all nonsense.” Charles kept his voice even, but Minh Ha could hear the frustrated anger; could feel that he was going to lash out at whoever stood in his way. He hadn’t always been so impatient; but years of bad financial luck had soured their relationship—hardening him, even as Minh Ha became quieter and less inclined to fight him for anything.

  “She’s always been headstrong,” Minh Ha said, unsure of what to say. She hadn’t spoken much to Charles in the years since the divorce—they’d gone their separate ways, he to his merchant spaceships, she to help manage the family restaurant’s finances. Only Sarah’s arrest and trial had brought them back into each other’s life; and even then, it had been briefly and painfully, all the old grievances flaring up to life again, biting and unbearable. “I’m not surprised she wouldn’t want to speak to you.”

  Preparing us for the journey, Sarah had said—how much of it was her, too, preparing herself, shedding all the attachments to Segundus, forging herself into metal hard enough that nothing on Cygnus would so much as scratch it?

  “How is she?” Charles asked.

  Minh Ha thought of Sarah; pale and thin and looking half out of this world, already gone ahead. “As well as can be,” she lied. “Convinced that she did the right thing.”

  “But you’re not.” Charles’ voice was uncertain; probing into her weaknesses, exposing all her doubts.

  “I don’t approve of what she’s done,” Minh Ha said, uncertain if that was the truth anymore.

  Charles watched her for a while, and then he said, “You do see that we can’t allow the Vermilion Seal to blackmail the Government into some nonsense about revising the history books. That hacking into public V-spaces and revealing ‘the truth’ is no way to run a society.”

  “I don’t know,” Minh Ha said, wearily. One day. One interview left before Sarah was gone forever. “Is this really what we should be arguing about?”

  “You have to see—” Charles paused. “You’re the one who gave her all those Moc Tinh Hau stories. The one who encouraged her.”

  “I take no responsibility for that,” Minh Ha said. How dare he accuse her? She’d never taught Sarah anything but how to respect the law, to be a good Galactic citizen—and how to best adapt herself to this society the Rong all found themselves living in.

  “Of course you do.” Charles said it without resentment or visible expression. “You’re her mother. You delude yourself if y
ou think you have passed nothing on to her.”

  Precious little—what kind of mother was she, that she couldn’t prevent her only child from leaving her? “I’m her mother, not her master. Are you threatening me with anything? Isn’t bad enough that I’m losing my only daughter?”

  “She’s my daughter too.” Charles voice was low, angry; Sarah had inherited that from him, that tendency to speak tonelessly and yet still exude a sense of menace. “We’re all losing her.”

  Minh Ha gestured to the ancestral altar behind him. “The entire family is losing her. You know what this means for us.”

  “Your old Rong superstitions?” Once, Charles’ jabs would have been more biting; but now he merely sounded weary—like her, wrung dry by the enormity of Sarah’s acts. “You forget. I left all that behind.” He turned to the ancestral altar, watching the holos. “Do you still go to the Hall of the Dead?”

  Minh Ha nodded. “I went yesterday. They had nothing to tell me.”

  “They never have.” Charles didn’t move. “You should leave the Dead well alone, Minh Ha—they just drag you down. Like they did with Sarah.”

  “Sarah never went to the Hall.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  Yes, the weight of the past; those resentments he couldn’t understand—the Galactics declaring war on behalf of the Western Continent, hoping to maintain their presence on Moc Tinh Hau; the history holos proclaiming the fight for democracy, as if things were ever that simple or that pure. “The past made us what we are,” Minh Ha said, knowing it to be true.

  “But the past is gone.” Charles’ voice was almost gentle. “This is the true lesson of the Halls—the Dead might as well be on another planet. They no longer speak our language or understand our thoughts.”

  Minh Ha remembered being on her knees, staring at the cobbles of the V-space; remembered Mother’s agitation, the frantic gestures she couldn’t interpret. She said nothing—merely watched the holo of Mother as she’d been before old age caught up with her, strong and unbending and unlikely to give way to anyone. Why was she gone—why were they all alone, without the guiding influence of the older generation? “I guess not,” she said at last.

  Charles turned back to her; and forced a weak smile. “Thank you for the information. I’ll go back to the holding facility and apply for another interview with her. You never know.”

  Minh Ha, staring at him, was struck by the white scattered in his hair, by the bowed set of his shoulders, as if time itself had pressed down on him until his old arrogance disappeared—and she thought of the way that everything seemed to have been hollowed out by the arrest. “Do you want to stay for dinner?” she asked, in spite of herself.

  Charles shook his head. “I don’t think so. I’ve intruded enough on you for one night. Forgive me.”

  After he’d left, she remained where she was, staring at the altar. The Dead no longer speak our language, he had said, knowing full well the unbearable silence of the Hall: the chatter of the V-space, and all the familiar things, just frustratingly out of reach.

  “Is he gone?” Thuy asked from behind her; putting her hands on Minh Ha’s shoulders, as she’d used to do when they’d been children in Xuan Huong.

  Her elder sister’s hands smelled of garlic and something sweet—perhaps dried jujubes? “Yes,” Minh Ha said, knowing Thuy had never approved of him. “And Sarah will be gone, too, soon.”

  “One more interview.” Thuy’s voice was oddly shrewd. “One last thing to give her before she goes ahead into the darkness of space.”

  “I don’t know what to give her,” Minh Ha said, frustrated. She thought of the book she’d brought on her first interview, left in a locker somewhere—Master Kong’s sayings, a physical gift she hadn’t been able to give to Sarah. “I don’t understand her anymore.”

  “I don’t think you’re meant to understand,” Thuy said, gently. “Just to support her.”

  “I can’t—” Minh Ha watched the holos; watched Mother’s face, forever frozen into a half-grimace; watched Second Aunt’s serene gaze, Third Aunt’s awkward smile at the camera. Mother was the one who’d found them safe passage—who had bargained and smiled and bribed Galactic officials until they found a berth on one of the last ships to leave. The aunts were the ones who had opened the Rong restaurant—it was the only non-menial work open to them—and sent the entire family through Applied Schooling. They had lived through a war and an entire life of exile, and surely they would know—surely they would—

  Minh Ha thought of everything that they no longer had; every way in which they had been diminished, and cut off from what mattered most.

  “You’re right,” she said, finally. “It’s time to accept what I can’t understand.”

  Time to give Sarah what she would most need on Cygnus.

  There is no answer. There never is any.

  None but the ones you make for yourself.

  Trembling, Minh Ha reaches out—in that suspended instant before the filters come online, before the Dead are rewritten into safer, saner— sanitized—code. Her hand touches Mother’s; and she feels warmth, travelling all the way from her palm into her madly beating heart.

  On her third visit to Sarah, Minh Ha says nothing. There are no words left, no message of comfort that she could give her daughter.

  Instead, she takes Sarah’s hand, and holds it tight until the last of the warmth has leached from her body into her daughter’s; and braces herself for the future.

  She ignores Sarah’s slight gasp of surprise; the widening of her daughter’s eyes as the patterns of the Dead slip into V-space—from her hand into Sarah’s hand; from her mind into her daughter’s own. It is, in any case, too late to turn back.

  As she walks out of the visitors’ V-space, Minh Ha hears the whispers of the Dead in her mind; snatches of sentences that feel sharp enough to tear her mind apart; the bright, terrible sound of bombs over the city—the dark and biting history of her people that she’ll always carry with her, the memories and insights of the Dead that might destroy her, that might make her finally whole.

  And she knows that, wherever her daughter goes, she, too, will carry it all—the weight of her ancestors’ blessing, in her blood and in her mind.

  About the Author

  Aliette de Bodard lives and works in Paris, where she has a day job as a Computer Engineer. In her spare time, she writes speculative fiction­she is the author of the Obsidian and Blood trilogy of Aztec noir fantasies, and her writing has been nominated for a Hugo Award, a Nebula Award and the Campbell Award for Best New Writer.

  The Last Survivor of the Great Sexbot Revolution

  A.C. Wise

  She’s not what you expected, Alma May Anderson, the last survivor of the Great Sexbot Revolution. For one thing, her eyes are bluer. She must be a hundred if she’s a day, but her eyes are the blue of puddle-broken neon, and a postcard ocean, and the sky at noon. They are all the things you thought were only metaphor, because nobody’s eyes could really be all those colors at once. But there they are, watching you over a teacup as thin as an eggshell filled with jasmine-scented tea.

  You didn’t expect her to be in plain sight, either. All your careful research, chasing down obscure references in mostly forgotten histories, and here she is. She’s not hiding, and if she’s not proud of her part in history, she’s not ashamed, either.

  She makes you sit up straighter. She makes you want to tuck your shirt in, and smooth your hair. She makes you want to say please and thank you, and ‘may I’ instead of ‘can I.’ And all that after you tumbled, panting, through her window in the middle of the night. She didn’t ask your name, or question your presence in her home. She made you tea.

  You sip to cover your nerves, because Alma May has been watching you with her poetry-eyes since you arrived, never once looking away. The tea is more intense than you’re used to, real leaves—you can almost feel the ghost-weight of them on your tongue.

  “I suppose you want to see my sexbot,” she sa
ys.

  “I . . . ” You nearly choke on that weighty tea. Your cup rattles as you set it down.

  You can’t help a glance toward the window, listening for the pounding of footsteps from the street below. What if you were followed? What if Sam . . . ?

  “That’s why you came isn’t it?” Alma May folds her hands in her lap, one laid precisely over the other.

  She says it matter-of-factly, not blushing, not accusing, and not guilty, either. Despite the tea, your throat is bone-dry. Alma May’s mouth quirks up in what might almost be a smile.

  “What do you know about the Great Sexbot Revolution?” She asks more gently even than a teacher might. She asks it like she really wants to know, as though she has no part in history, only a curious bystander, a stranger looking to pass the time.

  Your pulse finally slows. You’re sober now, but shaking, and your cheeks color for a different reason than your mad run uptown.

  “I don’t . . . Not much, really. I guess. Ma’am.”

  “Tsk. What do they teach in school these days?” It’s not a true admonishment, but you can’t help taking it as one. Now that you’re here, you feel like a complete fool.

  “Sorry,” you say, bumping the table and spilling your tea in your haste to rise. “I should go. I shouldn’t have . . . ” You gesture at the window, then at the cup in its tea-spotted saucer. “I mean, thank you.”

  It’s the most you’ve said since Alma May froze you in place by switching the lights on while one of your feet still hung out her window onto the fire escape.

  “Sit.” A simple word, a quiet word, but it has enough force to push you back into your chair and drive the breath from your lungs.

  You sit because, panic aside, deep down you know you didn’t make a mistake coming here. You made your mistake what feels like a lifetime ago. Drunkenly bragging to take off the sting of Sam stalking away, telling anyone who would listen, that you—despite being an unbeliever, in Sam’s words—that you, not Sam, managed to track down the last sexbot in existence. Knowing the words would filter back to Sam, but pretending you didn’t care if they did. It wasn’t until later, sleeping off your drunk, that panic slammed you awake and sent you running here. You imagined the light in Sam’s eyes, passion but not the kind you’d hoped for, and the image nipped at your heels the entire way.