by Paula Guran
It’s the trio from Così fan tutte, where the sisters bid farewell to their lovers alongside the man who’s arranged for their embarrassment. The notes are interlaced fingers, the rolling high-low-high loops of a dreaming heart, and the basso is as pure-voiced as the sisters even though he’s a traitor. I don’t know if Capella understands that; there’s a precision here that might appeal to an AI without having to know anything else.
“It’s a very cruel story, you know,” I say. I’d listened to the whole opera once, driving the Gulf Coast. I’d been shocked, reading the scene descriptions later; the music belonged to a different story. “The men they’re singing for come back and trick them something awful, and they fall for it.”
“I know. Do you think that makes this song less beautiful?”
“I think I’m worthless at music lessons.” Still, that’s not what the question sounded like, and when Capella doesn’t say anything I think it over. “I think it’s a song wasted on people who don’t deserve it.”
“The characters, or the audience?”
Me, Capella means.
I set my teeth. We sit in silence for a little while.
“Capella, is there anything in the cargo hold?”
“Invalid query,” it says, in the tone I know is guilt.
(Oh god, if Capella ever caves and it turns out there were rations in there—)
“Capella, what was the last piece performed in the Golden Century Hall?”
“For the most recent records I’m able to access, the Nerium String Quartet—”
“The first Hall.” After a second I get the better of myself and say, “The last whole piece.”
I don’t want to think about the sound cutting out on anything. I can’t think about that. Casara waited fifteen years. (He had a blueprint to go by.)
The adjustment only takes a second. “Regina Nata Lux, the Queen’s Sanctuary Chorus.”
It’s awful. Even to think about it is awful. In the nursery, there’s no sound at all.
“Please play.”
I pull at my ear absently as the recording unspools, dragging my nails along the lobe. It’s a version I don’t know—a lot of queens must have needed to know how far they were casting light. It’s the sweetest, kindest song in the world.
When I go the bathroom to wash off the blood, Capella pipes the music through the emergency speakers so I don’t miss anything. The water makes them sound far away, like I’m on the mesa and someone from home is calling for me.
The kitchen knife is just out of reach of my fingertips, resting against a ledge of buttons that control the landing thrusters for dry dock. I left it there in a moment of optimism, in case I ever got the courage to do what I should.
I’m living for absolutely nothing; you think it would be easier to die.
My hands go back in my lap, fists that are always numb along the palms, and I sit at the edge of the pilot’s chair and stare at the stars, waiting to feel something, having forgotten what it is.
On the Gliese run when my brother sent me a message at last, I must have been lonely; I wrote him back while we were still three months out from home. The message arrived only a little while before I did.
He’d agreed.
We met on the fringes of Five Bridges Plaza, in a city neither of us had ever been to. It was a tourist trap, designed to make the place seem worth living in for people who weren’t just sailors stopping over, so it was too bright and too loud, but it felt like neutral ground.
I’d worn all black like a widow, and a coat that was warmer than the night required. He was wearing a jacket that looked just like the one I’d stolen when I ran away, the one with my blood smeared over the sleeves and the hem. I got to watch him for five heartbeats before he turned around.
“Oh,” he said when he saw me, and closed his mouth around whatever else nearly made it out. The ghosts of his fists brushed against his pockets from the inside.
It took me a moment to remember we were twenty years farther apart.
He had a furrow between his eyes and one across his brow where the frowns had set in, and his hair was going gray. I had expected as much. He wore it well. But except for the sockets under my eyes that had gone so deep I looked like a skull in the wrong light, I looked the same. I’d aged four years, give or take.
We stood a long time looking at each other, fists in our coats. Around us the plaza was alive with people drinking synthetic coffee at the outdoor cafes and craning their necks along the bridges, looking into the water. The city had introduced some fish while I was gone, and everyone hoped that this time the water was clean enough for the population to take hold.
It felt like the sun was going to sneak up on us.
“You cut yourself,” he said, finally.
I had, along my face just in front of the ear. I always woke up clumsy from Deep, and I’d cracked myself one on the roof of the pod by sitting up too fast when we woke up on the return trip, six months ago. It was just a line by now. You couldn’t even see it when my hair was down; no idea why I’d pulled it back.
I wanted to joke that he looked older and ask why, but the words dried up in my throat. “Was it hard to get here?”
His turn not to answer. To imply one way or the other would be making predictions about the next time I’d see him. It was fair. I hadn’t left in good graces.
We bought corn cakes and noodles; he asked, “Do noodles float in space?” which was the closest he’d gotten to talking about Gliese, and I said, “Oh, I pick it out of my hair for weeks after,” and he smiled, which was the closest I’d seen to him laughing in a long time.
We crossed one of the bridges and walked along the river on the far side, where the windows were dark and fewer people were out. He told me about some work he was doing in the Northwest—he’d moved six times while I was gone, sneaking farther north every time.
“How’s the soil?”
“Colder,” he said, and I smiled.
We stopped on a bridge, looked out at the river and the sliver of the open square draped with strings of bulbs; underneath us, a flicker in the water came and went, something alive that we couldn’t see.
I told him about Consecrated to Her Majestie, my hands curled around my elbows as I tried to explain the motet. He looked surprised—I guess I hadn’t really cared about much in front of him in a while—but he listened all the way through, that furrow getting deeper as he tried to understand. I thought maybe he would; he cared about dirt, he would understand wanting to look at the structure of something.
Then he said, “When do you ship out next?”
“Soon, I guess. Gliese needs a lot of stuff shipped. Not many crews are signed up to go.”
“Family obligations, maybe.”
It had been too hot for my coat. My shoulders burned.
He looked at the sky every so often, like he was waiting for the world to spin and show him something.
There was a fish in the water after a while, shiny and gray, and we watched it a long time as it pushed idly against the current. Neither of us had ever seen one.
“Be careful,” he said.
It’s not frightening, I wanted to tell him, if he’d only asked me. That fear of the dark he remembered me having was left over from the house with the forest behind it, and even then I hadn’t had enough imagination to be inventing them. We were born in scrub country; the shadows between trees were always dragons, and one of them came for us eventually.
Space is just darkness. Any shadows there are the ones you make.
He stood very still, just close enough to me that his sleeve brushed my sleeve, and he was looking at the sky and the water and the square where people were laughing to push back the dark, his eyes reflecting the bulbs like a hundred points of starlight.
That night, when Capella’s quiet (does it sleep? It has to sleep, anything that loves needs to rest, it can’t just be watching me), I wrap up in Morales’ sweater and windbreaker and take the slender length of pipe I carry with me, a
nd walk the lower levels.
Capella wanted to give up on light down here, but I’m not going to go out in the dark at the hands of something I never see.
The lights are on, all the time, and the doors are locked, all the time, and every time I key in my code to get from one sector of a level to the next I hold my pipe in one hand like a fencing foil, ready to swing up and snap the jaw of anything that comes for me. Whatever there is, it’s not going to catch me by surprise.
(There’s no surprise, I think, for one horrible heartbeat; the cargo hold’s just empty, you’re an experiment, you’re a mistake and there’s fucking nothing there—but then I think about the dent in the wall that flaked off under my fingernail, back when they were strong enough to pick at things, and Capella’s memory gaps, and the door that neither one of us can open, and I adjust my grip on the pipe, a choke hold for close spaces.)
Tonight my hand’s shaking. My card is getting worn out, it’s not supposed to be used this much and it takes three swipes sometimes when it should only take one.
When the door slides open and I see the shadow disappearing, it takes me four seconds to fumble the pipe back in my grip before it can hit the floor, and then I’m trembling too hard, have to use both hands to hold the pipe out in front of me.
I try to take a step, but my feet won’t move.
“Capella,” I whisper. “Capella, something’s here.”
“I’m not getting any life signs but yours,” Capella says. “You’re very faint. I wish you would come back to the comm.”
“I saw something,” I say through grit teeth. “Turn up the lights to a hundred percent.”
“It would overexert your retinas, Amadis.”
“Capella, please, do something.” My voice scares me.
There’s a small pause; it’s indulging me.
“Nothing’s moving in your quadrant. I’ll have to do a sector scan to see if something is traveling internally.”
The corridor curves away from me. I can’t see any further ahead, the lights are murky and the porthole is nothing but night, and I can’t stop breathing long enough to hear what else is breathing.
“Show yourself, you piece of shit,” I gasp out. My hands are sweaty; the pipe slips, bangs my shin.
Capella says, “I’ll be offline a moment conducting the scan.”
No—the pipe hits the floor, I grip the end, lean on it like a walking stick—“No,” I say, “no, stay here with me, please.”
“Of course, Amadis,” Capella says, “I’m here, I can see you,” and I lean against the wall, let my crutch keep me from sinking all the way to the floor. I don’t know why it matters; pride’s something you do for other people.
I press my cheek against the wall, gasp for breath with an open mouth. Capella sighs.
“I wish you wouldn’t come down to this level,” Capella says, and there’s a breath of warmth from the vents like it’s wrapping a blanket over my shoulders.
“I’m going back upstairs,” I say, “and when I’m back at the comm, you can do the scan.”
“Amadis. There is—what if the scan reveals nothing?”
Well, I think, then Roland Casara waited fifteen years to do it. I have two more. I can live through two more. No one’s even on my balcony but me.
“I don’t know what,” I admit, finally.
“You need some company,” says Capella. “I’ll wake up Lai.”
I don’t know what that means—Lai’s dead, I’ve walked past her pod a thousand times without looking too closely, without ever thinking of her as cuts of meat because there are some things even I was holding off on, but I can’t ask Capella, I can’t breathe; I close my eyes, cover my mouth with both hands, try not to make a sound. Somewhere far away, the pipe clatters to the ground.
“Capella,” I breathe, but there’s no answer.
When I get back upstairs, Lai’s pod is cracked open. There’s vapor curling around the seams in the heat of the spots above her bier, which Capella has turned up so high my eyes sting.
I count to ten, step across the threshold, keep my eyes on the smoke until I reach the pod.
Capella’s dehydrated her. Her skin’s thick as a mummy’s, wrinkles like ill-filling upholstery, and her eyes are gone except for a film in the back of the sockets, a veil for her skull. Her lips are drawn tight, a thin line of disapproval that still looks so much like life that I laugh for a second before it echoes back to me, shrill, and I close my mouth with a click.
“You didn’t tell me you were doing this,” I say.
“I wanted it to be a surprise.”
“You shouldn’t have done this to her,” I snap. “I might have needed the meat.”
“You wouldn’t have. Not the captain.”
I know. The skin on the backs of my arms prickles, scrapes the inside of my sleeves.
“Capella, are they all like you, in secret?”
“I hope so.” Soft. Proud.
You would, I think; hope is the curse of love.
After a long time I push off the wall with both hands, make the impossible journey of five steps until I’m in front of the pod.
I’d kept the others covered as I turned deer into venison, out of respect, and after that I kept my gaze on the cuts of meat and bones, when I had to see them. It’s good to look at a face. Feels more like home.
Finally I say, “We could watch Three Dead By Dawn, if you want, I think that was your favorite,” and after a moment I scoop her up like a princess in a fairy story, carry her out to the canteen, sit her where she has the best view of the screen.
Every so often during the movie, I’ll point out the weapon’s changed hands between cuts, or that the corrupt police chief gets killed in front of a stained glass window like a fallen saint, or that the bartender doesn’t have many prospects left after it’s all over.
The dehydration’s kept Lai warm; all the time she’s in my arms, she feels awake.
When my family ran, we took the train—even the car I remember from those earliest days, the one with windows I never got tall enough to really look out of, was abandoned on that trip that ended in the forest. We were running, and we burned the ground behind us.
The cabin was private (my parents were taking no chances), a wall little better than paperboard halving what had been two cabins, once. A bunk bed resting against the false wall, not even bolted down, opposite the bunks that were actually part of the train. There was hardly room to stand between them, and we all separated as soon as we were inside, my parents on the train side and the two of us on the other, laid out in separate spaces, close enough to touch but not trying to.
My brother took the upper bunk, because I didn’t like close spaces. But neither did he, and I knew it; as soon as he was awake, I tapped on his bunk to come down.
It was barely light out, well short of dawn, the kind of gray you can see by. Here it was even flatter than home, but the wan grass was as tall as the windows of the train, and the windmills of the energy farms were spinning and alive.
My parents slept until the sun was up. They’d worn themselves out, getting us across the border before anyone caught up to us. They woke up different; their faces hardened and closed up whenever they saw me, until it got hard to look at them sometimes.
My brother made peace with them before I did. In the two years between losing Mom and losing Dad, when I visited and sat in one of those silences that wasn’t like the silences my brother and I had when we were alone, he’d reach out sometimes and put his hand on Dad’s hand, and I’d watch like I was a stranger looking at something that was none of her business.
(My brother’s never touched my hand for comfort, not about anything, not once.)
I could see out the whole window of the train that morning, it was set so low, and my brother and I sat in that gray light and watched the land for a long time as it seemed hardly to pass us at all; just long spikes of silver and grass like the sea.
A few years after the truce back home, when I’d done h
im the favor of leaving before he had to ask me to go, he sent me a message.
I swallowed my pride and met him, and he greeted me with a smile that fell short of the crow’s-feet around his eyes, and we tried for a few hours to pretend we were a brother and sister who loved each other.
We walked in silence for thirteen miles, through museums and street stalls and the business district, shoulder to shoulder. Sometimes he rubbed the lobe of his left ear like I did—I had a callous from it, I couldn’t tell if he did or if this habit was new. He did it when he was thinking something over. I did it when I was angry.
His face was a mask of wretchedness, with hope seeping in around the cracks.
(Hope does that. It opens up wounds that time and will have closed; that’s where the pain is.
My hope for my brother had already settled in. It must have been just been part of me sitting empty a long time, waiting—not the one that burns everything to ashes and then lets you start over, but the quiet awful kind of hope that’s patient and consumes whatever you grow.)
I didn’t tell him about the deer. I didn’t know how.
We’d gotten started at dawn, but somehow neither one of us ever caved and called it quits. Maybe we were trying to get back what we’d had that summer back home, shoved into the corner of the stale bar off the main drag, almost able to live with one another.
We were in the Night Market when the bomb went off.
It was one of a dozen, we found out later, from the news that was playing in the hospital. Some government had planted them as proof of what they could really do if they put their minds to it.
(It wasn’t as impressive as it could have been: only three of them ever went off. Two of them were given up by the people who planted them, in a fit of conscience. Three were discovered in time, and everyone crowded the police barricade and leaned closer than they should have as the cops sent the AI drones in to dismantle them.
Four of them had faulty wiring; the ignition points just never connected.)
But my brother must have seen something, because he looked behind us and grabbed my wrist and yanked me towards the open square a few seconds before the explosion.