The image bursts apart.
Jayd moans quietly in the corner.
“Jayd,” I say, “what are we here to do?”
“Save the world,” she says softly.
Another misty image bubbles up from the console. Myself again. My hair is shorn short. There’s blood running down my head from a long gash. There seem to be great yawning distances of time between these. I didn’t make a record every time I came back. Why? Did I always just choose to lose my memory? Have I always acted on blind faith? How many times had I done this before I made the second record?
“Fuck the Katazyrnas,” my past self says. “Fuck the Bhavajas. We escaped the core for no fucking purpose. Neither is going to help us and we’ve fucked up everything. You think you want your memory back, you get it back, but you won’t get all of us back, you understand? It’s a fucking synthetic. The ship puts it together from the last time you left, right before this whole shit started. You’re going to be all in love with Jayd again. You won’t remember what she’s done since.” She, too, looks outside the frame. I wonder what they’re all looking at.
I gaze around me at the ships of the Legion. Were they seeing someone coming for them? A ship? A vehicle? And then I see it—there’s a great wall of doors behind me. Most are open and empty. I count nearly a hundred of them, all stacked up on top of one another, up and up. Here on the bottom level, there are just four left. These doors are how I escape the Mokshi each time. They propel me up and out, clear of the Mokshi’s gravity. I close my eyes. I remember the feel of bursting free, but that’s all. My past selves were all looking at their escape. Even knowing what they knew about what lay outside the Mokshi, they knew they could not stay here. They had to stick to the plan and remake the world, or everything we had done up until this point was for nothing.
The image bursts apart.
“Who am I, Jayd?” I say softly. “What did you do to me?”
“We did this together,” Jayd says.
And maybe that is true. Maybe we became everything we hate together.
Another image pops up. Another swearing, angry version of me. Still no scar, though. This one has longer hair, and she’s carrying a spear like Arankadash’s. Her speech is much the same as the one before. Angry and bitter and cursing Jayd.
“What did we become?” I ask Jayd.
“I don’t know,” she says. She moans and lies back. The world is coming.
A misty green version of me wafts up from the sphere again. Her hair is shorn short. She looks very weary. This version of me says, “I waited four cycles this time. Got my memory back. Realized what I’d done to try to keep this ship going. We’re all slaves to these worlds, these . . . beings that have overtaken our vessels. No one can escape unless they rewrite the very pattern of the world. I’ve done that, but I don’t have the catalyst. Twelve generations, and no world-birther on Mokshi. But the Bhavajas have one. The bloody Bhavajas. I’ll go back, but if you’re watching this and you don’t have the arm and the world, just kill yourself. Just end it. It’s too much.”
The recording fades.
“I fell in love with you,” Jayd says. “You don’t have to believe that. But you and I worked together to find a way to rebuild this ship and kill Anat and get the world without a hopeless war. You’ve rewritten the code for the Mokshi so it can leave the Legion. But you need . . . you need a world to rebuild this one, to reinvigorate it. Renew it. You needed Rasida. I brought you that. I did that. For you, and for the Legion.”
I bend toward her. “You have a world inside of you?”
“Rasida’s.” She reaches her hand out to me. “We did this together, Zan. Please.”
“Das Muni,” I say.
She grimaces. “I’m sorry. I thought all the people from the Mokshi were dead. She was a prisoner, and she was going to betray you to Anat. She recognized you. I recycled her. I was afraid—”
“You were afraid she would tell me who I was.”
“She didn’t have the whole story. I did that without knowing what was at stake.”
I kneel beside her and touch her belly. I feel the pulsing of the world. She grabs my hand. Above me, I can hear another recording starting. How many times have I recorded myself here? My gaze follows the long lines of doors. At least as many as there are doors, I suspect. I’ve used that way out many, many times. Not hundreds as Maibe would have me believe, but surely dozens.
“I threw away a child,” I say. I can’t let that go. I want her to say out loud what we did. What we chose.
Jayd weeps openly now. She leans hard against the console. Grips my hand. “I needed your womb,” she says. “I told you, you weren’t strong enough to do what needed to be done. I couldn’t just give you over to the Bhavajas. Besides, they would expect a trap if we gave them some unknown woman. They would do far worse things to you because you weren’t a Katazyrna. You were no one. You would have had no protection. But Rasida loved me. Lord of War, she always loved me.”
“But I was already pregnant,” I say.
“Yes,” she says. “We had to choose. One or the other. A child with no future, or the future of the Legion.”
So I threw away my child. Into the darkness of the Mokshi’s recycling pit. I threw away my child to save the whole world. I think of Arankadash and her sorrow. I wonder if I felt sorrow or just relief that we had finally found a way to save the Mokshi.
I sit beside Jayd and gaze out at the worlds of the Legion. I know the worlds are dying. I know we are the only hope we have for their salvation, while also being the harbingers of their destruction.
Jayd has asked me to trust her one more time.
She grits her teeth and bears down. “You can leave me,” she says. “Just leave me. When I have it . . . it will eat this whole world. Remake it. It will replicate all those patterns you programmed into it. Just . . . you need to trigger it. With the arm.”
I stand up and go to the console again, searching my memory for a way to trigger this change. My gaze is drawn, again, to the clear and purple liquids.
I listen to the recording above me, a weary woman, my own voice, saying, “Who do you become when you lose your memory? I don’t know. Some of it comes back, yes. But not all of it. I took the little vial, like something from a wizard, and I ate all the horror. Not just of what I’d done but of what I planned to do. I’ve waited here four turns now, puttering around this dying place. And why? Because I’m afraid to start over. I’m afraid to go back. I should have used an army. I should never have saved Jayd.”
“I don’t understand any of this,” I say.
Jayd makes a guttural laugh. “Neither do I. That’s the awful part. We’ve done such awful things to each other, Zan. So many awful things. But it’s going to end now. Just . . . leave me here. Please. I just want to end it. You have had this gift. You don’t have to remember any of this. But I do. I must. And I’m tired of it.”
“No,” I say.
“It all worked out in the end,” Jayd says. “You got back your ship, and you’ll escape the Legion once it’s reborn. I got revenge on the Bhavajas. We did this together, Zan.”
“I don’t want my bloody ship,” I say. “I want an end to all this death.”
Jayd chokes out a laugh and, with it, a spattering of blood. “Someone had to birth the new world, Zan. I wanted it. You didn’t.”
“You were my greatest enemy,” I say.
“No,” Jayd says. “You were always your own greatest enemy. Even here. Even now.”
I place my hands on the console beside each of the growths full of liquid. Above the vials is a spongy cap. It feels familiar to me, and I open it. Inside is a bubbling mess of green gel, very much like the green skin of my arm. I dip my arm into it and watch the green liquid from my arm bleed back into the wound on the console.
When the liquid from my arm joins the rest, the whole pot of green goo turns yellow and is absorbed into the console. As I watch, spidery yellow tendrils snake out from the console and run all along
the floor and up the walls of the temple room. A soft amber light fills the room, and it reminds me of the light in the hall of giants where Arankadash nearly stayed behind to find her child.
Jayd screams behind me. The world is coming. The Mokshi will be rewritten, will be reborn, will escape the Legion.
Yet here I finally sit with my memory in reach, and the means to erase everything again too. Which to choose? I have come here and chosen one or the other dozens of times. We were so single-minded in this, Jayd and this woman I once was. But do I want to become her? Lord Mokshi, the single-minded woman who was willing to sacrifice everything—her ship, her children, her womb, her memory—to power her way out of the Legion? Must I become her again, or is she, too, simply a suit, a temporary but necessary fix to get me to where I am now? I consider the pieces of my memory I have, and the pieces I’ve been told, and I wonder if it is all meant to bring me here, to this moment. This choice. To be someone I was, or to start over again, to fall in love again with Jayd. Am I doomed to love her and to be destroyed by that love?
One or the other.
I think of Das Muni’s choices—to poison and maim, but also to heal and rebirth. I think of Arankadash and the cog she nursed until the world came for it. I think of Casamir and the love she lost to the recycler pits, and her endless stories. And I wonder if I’ve given myself a false choice.
There are never just two choices.
I step away from the console. Behind me, Jayd is panting. She does not need a warmonger or a general or a tactician in this moment. The tactician got us here, but someone much different needs to get us out. I need to get us out.
And so, I make another choice.
I choose neither. I choose the woman I’ve become, not the woman I was, not the woman I can be. The woman I am. Like the versions of myself before me, I stare at the long row of doors leading to my escape, but unlike those before me, I do not step into one. Not yet.
I take Jayd’s hand. Together, we will remake the Mokshi, as we planned all those rotations ago.
But it must be our last act together.
“LET IT NOT BE FORGOTTEN, NO MATTER HOW MANY TIMES WE GO BACK, OR HOW MANY TIMES THINGS ARE UNDONE, THAT I LOVED JAYD KATAZYRNA, HOWEVER MUCH IT HURTS MY HEART TO GIVE HER UP.”
—LORD MOKSHI, ANNALS OF THE LEGION
38
JAYD
I give birth to a world.
It does not seem so portentous. It’s mostly pain and agony, as if my whole lower half is being split apart. It’s worse than when I gave birth to Rasida’s child . . . Zan’s child. I just want it out. I want it over.
Zan takes her hand from mine and pulls the world from my body and holds it up wonderingly, as if it is a great light, though really it is only a fleshy, nubby organ of a thing. Its tentacles wriggle out from its nubs and cling to her fingers, and in the amber bloom of the room, it does not look like something that was worth all this pain and darkness.
Zan sets it on top of the console.
Above her, all of the past Zans are still playing. This last one has the long wound on her head, the one she still bore when she came to me this last time, when I thought her dead. I had seen her crash into the Mokshi that last time. She bears the same terrible wounds and scars that I would see on her when we finally retrieved her from the organic tube she used to escape the Mokshi. I thought she’d come back to us because she could not tend her own wounds. I thought she’d come back to me to be remade.
“I waited so many turns,” the recording says. Zan, my Zan, the last Zan, who is not this Zan. I gaze up at her and remember how awfully things went that time, and I weep again, and I’m glad I’ve told Zan to leave me here, because we have been so awful to each other that there’s nothing to pick up anymore.
Sometimes you can’t go forward. You can’t put things back together. I will die here. This will be my penance for all we’ve done.
Zan gets up now and wipe her hands on her suit. I lie back as the contractions still wrack my body. I begin to tremble. I lean back and wait for the world to devour me. This is how it should be. I was the stronger one. I could get us this far. I’ve done my part.
But Zan is holding out her arms to me. She’s helping me up. I’m confused. My legs are weak. I can barely stand, but she is holding me up and helping me across the floor. I’m trailing afterbirth. My placenta slides free of my body, and the umbilicus tangles my legs.
Zan leans over and cuts me free of it. I glance back one more time at the last Zan I knew, the one before this one, the one who chose to come back to me despite all we had done.
“I don’t want to go back,” the other Zan says. “Who would want to go back to a dead world? But I can’t leave her, can I? I can never leave her, no matter how many times I do this.”
I burst into tears again because I feel like a monster, though Zan and I, the old Zan, are just the same. We were made for each other. We could have only done this being as we are. We couldn’t be anything else and save the Mokshi.
“I have done terrible things,” I say.
“I know,” Zan says.
“Sabita,” I say, because I ignored her too. I used her, and while we are here confessing all we have done wrong, she is one more thing I must atone for. “You should know she protected me. She helped me, just as you asked her. Even if you don’t remember. She helped me get here. Turned around and took on the Bhavajas following us, and I . . . I just let her. I didn’t look back. I didn’t go back. I didn’t . . .”
Zan is shushing me. I have no more breath for my guilty admissions. Zan pulls me toward the wall of doors that house the organic tubes that will jettison us from this place. She showed them to me when she first captured me, and invited me to leave any time I wished. But I wanted to stay, that first time, and sabotage this place. I was a fool then. I hadn’t believed her yet that she had found a way to stop us all from dying.
“This isn’t how I want it to go,” I say. “I want to die. That is my story.”
“Fuck that story,” Zan says.
She pulls me to one of the doors and palms it open with her iron arm. It’s going to be tight, and it won’t have air very long for two of us. I’m afraid, more afraid to die with her than without her, because at least without her, I could pretend she had some future that outlasted us. Who will pilot the Mokshi if she dies?
She brings me into the damp tube. “You can stay if that’s what you really want,” she says, “But if you stay, I’ll stay too. I don’t leave people behind.”
I am shaking hard. I gaze back at the control room. The images, all of the old Zans, have gone quiet.
“There is nothing for me here,” I say.
“Good,” she says. “Then let’s start over.”
“I HAVE SPENT MY LIFE BATTLING MONSTERS. IT WAS ONLY IN REALIZING THAT I WAS THE MONSTER, AND CHOOSING TO DESTROY HER, THAT I COULD SAVE THE WORLD.”
—LORD MOKSHI, ANNALS OF THE LEGION
39
ZAN
The massive organic tube pops free of the Mokshi and enters the long, quiet dark of the Legion. It is the silence that comforts me. I got tired of listening to my own voice. I hold Jayd against me until her trembling subsides. She drifts in and out of wakefulness.
We begin to circle the Mokshi, just another bit of detritus caught in its gravity well. This is the part I haven’t thought through. When I escaped before, no doubt Jayd or Anat came for me, but now we are alone.
We are alone.
I hope that Jayd sleeps through it. I hope she does not wake to find that we’re doomed out here together like two young stupid lovers. I gaze out at the Mokshi and raise my hand to it. The auroras light back up. They are beautiful to look at. A fitting final view. Maybe we can watch the Mokshi be reborn. I wonder if what I did to it means it can leave the Legion without a pilot. Maybe this reborn world will be a sentinel for the whole Legion, an ambassador to Legions that circle all those other stars. Maybe it will be ripped apart and used for scrap out there the same way it was here
.
The air becomes stale. I drift in and out of consciousness as we float free. I think of all that I’m told I was, and all that I have become. All that I could be. That we could be, together, if we had the courage to start again.
Just like the Mokshi.
It’s then that I see the vehicle speeding toward us from the Katazyrna. I can’t make out the figure, but I can see the big cephalopod gun.
I pull Jayd closer. She murmurs something. “Sabita,” she says. “Sabita held off the Bhavajas. I let her go. I let her do it.”
It’s only as I raise my arm that I see the rider’s face.
It’s Casamir.
Casamir gives me a little two-fingered salute. She clumsily attaches her vehicle to the tube’s outer face. Her first walk in the blackness, her first view of the Legion. I should not be surprised that she has taken it all in stride. She has always been an intrepid explorer. I just never thought she’d take the leap and believe me.
She burns the vehicle’s yellow fuel and tows us back to the open hangar of Katazyrna.
From this vantage, the world looks as if it has an open wound. I see the great blackened patches of skin surrounding the hangar and wonder how long it will hold out. How many can we move to the Mokshi? The whole world? Can we really start again? And from there, then what? The whole of Katazyrna is still swarming with Bhavajas, all of them running around without someone to lead them. It will be a mess to clean up, and doing it will require a great deal of help from the levels below.
Casamir lands. The great hangar doors close and I see the blinking tangles of light shift in the viewing port above. Casamir tugs at her suit and manages to squeeze the wrist of it to get it to melt off her. She always was a quick study. The interior hangar door opens, and Arankadash comes in and leans over our sticky translucent pod.
The Stars Are Legion Page 31