You sat away from us, reading a book a friend had given you — the outsiders’ Planet of Danger and Desire, which was the latest rage that summer — while Khi Phach and I watched the receding continents, and talked about the future and what it held in store for us.
At the docks, the screens blinked above us, showing that your sister had just arrived from the First Planet. We stood outside the gate, waiting for her passengers to disembark — a stream of Viets and Xuyans, wearing silk robes and shirts, their faces still tense from the journey — from the odd sounds and sights, and the queer distortions of metal and flesh and bones one experienced aboard a mind-ship in deep spaces.
There were dignitaries from the Court itself, in five-panel brocade, their topknots adorned with exquisite jade and gold, talking amongst themselves in quiet tones — and a group of saffron-cloaked monks carrying nothing but the clothes on their back, their faces calm and ageless, making me ache for their serenity. Last of all came a vacant-eyed mother who hadn’t survived the birth of her Mind, being led by her husband like a small child. My hands must have tensed without my realizing it, because Khi Phach grabbed me so hard I felt bruised, and forced me to look away.
“It’s over,” he said. “You’ll never need to carry another Mind again.”
I looked at my hands, tracing the shape of my bones through translucent skin — it had never been the same since Mi Nuong’s birth. “Yes. I guess it is.”
When we turned back, you weren’t with us. I glanced at Khi Phach, fighting rising panic: you were an adult after all, hardly likely to be defenseless or lost. “He must have gone to another dock,” Khi Phach said.
We searched the docks; the shops; the entire concourse, even the pagodas set away from the confusion of the spaceport’s crowd, before we finally found you.
You were at the back of the spaceport, where the outsider hibernation ships berthed — watching another stream of travelers, their pale skins glistening from the fluid in the hibernation cradles, their eyes still faraway, reeling from the shock of waking up — the knowledge that the thin thread of ansible communications was their only link to a home planet where everyone they had ever held dear had aged and died during the long journey.
Khi Phach called out your name. “Anh!”
You didn’t turn; your eyes remained on the outsiders.
“You gave us quite a fright,” I said, laying a hand on your shoulder, feeling the tension in every one of your muscles. I thought it was stress; worry at the new life that opened up for you as a mandarin. “Come, let’s see your sister.”
You were silent and sullen the entire way; watching Khi Phach introduce himself to the crewmember that guarded the access to the ship, telling him we were family — her face lit up, and she congratulated him on such a beautiful child. I’d expected you to grimace in jealousy, as you always did when your sister was mentioned; but you didn’t even speak.
“Child?” I asked.
I felt you tense as we walked into the tunnel leading to your sister’s body; as the walls became organic, as faint traceries of poetry started appearing, and a persistent hum rose into the background: your sister’s heartbeat, reverberating through the entire ship.
“This is stupid,” you said, as we entered.
“What is?” Khi Phach asked.
“Mind-ships.” You shook your head. “It’s not meant to be that way.”
Khi Phach glanced at me, inquisitively; for once, I was stuck for words. “Outsiders do it better,” you said, your hands shut into fists.
We stopped, in the middle of the entrance hall — rafters adorned with red lanterns, poetry about family reunions, your sister’s way of welcoming us home — I knew she was listening, that she might be hurt, but it was too late to take this outside, as you’d no doubt intended all along. “Better?” I said, arching an eyebrow. “Leaving for years in hibernation, leaving everything they own behind?”
“They don’t take mind-ships!” You weren’t looking at me or Khi Phach; but at the walls, your sister’s body wrapped all around you. “They don’t go plunging into deep spaces where we were never meant to go, don’t go gazing into things that make them insane — they don’t— don’t birth those monstrosities just to navigate space faster!”
There was silence, in the wake of your words. All I could think of was all that I’d ignored; the priests’ books that you’d brought home, your trips to the nearby Sleeper Church, and your pale-skinned outsider friends — like the one who had spoken to you so intently at the banquet.
“Apologize to your sister,” Khi Phach said.
“I won’t.”
His voice was cold. “You just called her an abomination.”
“I don’t care.”
I let go of you, then; moved away with one hand over my heart, as if I could make the words go away. “Child. Apologize. Please,” I said, in the tone that I’d used when you were little.
“No.” You laid a hand on the walls, feeling their warmth; and pulled back, as if burnt. “Look at you, Mother. All wasted up, for her sake. All our women, subjugated just so they can birth those things.”
You sounded like Father Paul; like an outsider yourself, full of that same desperate rage and aggressiveness — though, unlike them, you had a home to come back to.
“I don’t need you to defend me, child,” I said. “And we can resume that discussion elsewhere —” I waved a hand, forestalling Khi Phach’s objections — “but not here, not in your sister’s hearing.”
A wind rose through the ship, picking up sound as it whistled through empty rooms. “Abomination . . .” Mi Nuong whispered. “Come tell me what you think — to my face. In my heartroom.”
You stared upwards; as if you could see her; guess at the mass of optics and flesh plugged into the ship — and before either of us could stop you, you spun and ran out of the ship, making small, convulsive noises that I knew were tears.
Child . . .
I would have run, too; but Khi Phach laid a hand on my shoulder. “Let him cool off first. You know you can’t argue with him in that state.”
“I’m sorry,” I said to Mi Nuong.
The lights flickered; and the ship seemed to contract a little. “He’s frightened,” Mi Nuong said.
“Which is no excuse.” Khi Phach’s face was stern.
But he hadn’t been there at the birth; he didn’t remember what I remembered; the shadow that had lodged like a shard within your heart, that colored everything. “I should have seen it,” I said. Because it was all my fault; because I should have never brought you to the ship that day. What had I been thinking, trusting in strangers to protect my own child?
“You shouldn’t torment yourself,” Mi Nuong said.
I laid a hand on a wall — watching lines of poetry scroll by, songs about fishermen flying cormorants over the river, about wars dashing beloved sons like strings of pearls — about the beauty of hibiscuses doomed to pass and become nothing, just as we, too, passed away and became nothing — and I thought about how small, how insignificant we were within the world — about letting go of grief and guilt. “I can’t stop,” I said. “He’s my son, just as you are my daughter.”
“I told you before. He’ll see it.”
“I guess,” I said. “Tell me about your trip. How was it?”
She laughed; giggled like a teenage girl. “Wonderful. You should see the First Planet, it’s so huge — it has all those palaces and gardens, covering it from end to end; and pagodas that go all the way through the atmosphere, joined to orbitals, so that prayers genuinely go out into the void . . .”
I remember it all; remember it vividly, every word, every nuance that happened that day. For, when we came home, you weren’t there anymore.
You’d packed your things, and left a message. I guess you were a scholar in spite of everything, because you didn’t send a mail through the terminal, but wrote it with pen and paper: crossed words over and over until they hardly made sense.
I can’t live here
anymore. I apologize for being an unfilial son; but I have to seek my fortune elsewhere.
Khi Phach started moving Heaven and Earth to find you; but I didn’t have to look very far. Your name, barely disguised, was on the manifest for an outsider hibernation ship headed out of the Dai Viet Empire, to an isolated planet on the edge of a red sun — a trip sponsored by the Sleeper Church. The hibernation ship had left while we were still searching for you; and there was no calling it back, not without starting a war with the outsiders. And what pretext could we have given? You were an adult; sixteen already, with the mandarin exams behind you; old enough to do what you wanted with your life.
You wouldn’t age in your hibernation pod; but by the time you arrived, twenty years would have elapsed for us, making the distance between us all but insurmountable.
Khi Phach fumed against the Church, speaking of retribution and judgment, making plans to bring this before the local magistrate. I merely stood still, watching the screen that showed the hibernation ship going farther and farther away from us — feeling as though someone had ripped my heart out of my chest.
Many years have passed, and you still haven’t come back. Khi Phach took his anger and bitterness into his grave; and I stare at his holo every morning when I rise — wondering when I, too, will join him on the ancestral altar.
Your sister, of course, has hardly aged: Minds don’t live like humans, and she’ll survive us all. She’s with me now — back from another trip into space, telling me about all the wonders she’s seen. I ask about you; and feel the ship contracting around me — in sadness, in anger?
“I don’t know, Mother. The outsider planets are closed to mind-ships.”
I know it already, but I still ask.
“Have you —” I bite my lips, pull out the treacherous words one by one — “have you forgiven him?”
“Mother!” Mi Nuong laughs, gentle, carefree. “He was just a child when it happened. Why should I keep grudges that long? Besides . . .” Her voice is sadder, now.
“Yes,” I say. “I’ve seen the holos, too.” Gently, carefully, I pull your latest disk — finger it before triggering the ansible record it contains. An image of you hovers in the midst of the ship, transparent and leeched of colors.
“Mother. I hope this finds you well. I have started work for a newscast— this would please you, wouldn’t it, my being a scholar after all?” You smile, but it doesn’t reach all the way to your eyes; and your face is pale, as if you hadn’t seen the sun in a long time. “I am well, though I think of you often.”
The messages all come through ansible; so do money transfers — as if money could reduce the emptiness of space between us, as if it could repay me for your absence. “I was sorry to hear about Father. I miss you both terribly.” You pause then, turn to look at something beyond the camera — I catch a glimpse of slim arms, wrapped around you — a quick hug, to give you strength, but even that doesn’t light up your eyes or your face — before you look at the camera again. “I’m sorry. I — I wish I were home again.”
I turn off the disk, let it lie on the floor — it becomes ringed with scrolling words, with poems of sorrow and loss.
“He’s happy,” Mi Nuong says, in a tone that makes clear she believes none of it. “Among the outsiders.”
Walking on a strange land, in a strange world — learning new customs in an unfamiliar language — away from us, away from your family. “Happy,” I say.
I finger the disk again. I know that if I turn it on again, I’ll hear your final words, the ones that come at the end of the recording, spoken barely loud enough to be heard.
I miss you all terribly.
Us all. Father and Mother — and sister. This is the first time you’ve ever admitted this aloud. And I’ve seen the other, earlier holos; seen how your eyes become ringed with shadows as time passes; how unhappiness eats you alive, year after year, even as you tell me how good life is, among the outsiders.
I’ll be long gone when your pain becomes heavier than your fear, heavier than your shame; when you turn away from your exile and return to the only place that was ever home to you. By the time you come back, I’ll be dust, ashes spread in the void of space; one more portrait on the ancestral altar, to be honored and worshipped — I’ll have passed on to another life, with the Buddha’s blessing.
But I know, still, what will happen.
You’ll walk out of the outsiders’ docks, pale with the lack of sun, covered in the slime of your hibernation pod — shaking with the shock of awakening, your eyes filled with the same burning emptiness I remember so well, the same rage and grief that all you’ve ever held dear has been lost while you traveled.
And, like an answer to your most secret prayer, you’ll find your sister waiting for you.
EATER-OF-BONE
Robert Reed
Robert Reed sold his first story in 1986, and quickly established himself as one of the most prolific of today’s writers, particularly at short fiction lengths, and has managed to keep up a very high standard of quality while being prolific, something that is not at all easy to do. Reed stories such as “Sister Alice,” “Brother Perfect,” “Decency,” “Savior,” “The Remoras,” “Chrysalis,” “Whiptail,” “The Utility Man,” “Marrow,” “Birth Day,” “Blind,” “The Toad of Heaven,” “Stride,” “The Shape of Everything,” “Guest of Honor,” “Waging Good,” and “Killing the Morrow,” among at least a half-dozen others equally as strong, count as among some of the best short work produced by anyone in the last few decades; many of his best stories have been assembled in the collections The Dragons of Springplace and The Cuckoo’s Boys. He won the Hugo Award in 2007 for his novella “A Billion Eves.” He is also a prolific novelist, having turned out eleven novels since the end of the ’80s, including The Lee Shore, The Hormone Jungle, Black Milk, The Remarkables, Down the Bright Way, Beyond the Veil of Stars, An Exaltation of Larks, Beneath the Gated Sky, Marrow, Sister Alice, and The Well of Stars, as well as two chapbook novellas, Mere and Flavors of My Genius. His most recent book is a new chapbook novella, Eater-of-Bone. Coming up is a new novel, Slayer’s Son. Reed lives with his family in Lincoln, Nebraska.
The tense and exciting novella that follows is related to Reed’s long-running series of stories about the “Great Ship,” a Jupitersized spaceship created eons ago by enigmatic aliens that endlessly travels the Galaxy with its freight of millions of passengers from dozens of races, including humans. In this story, set at a tangent to the main “Great Ship” sequence, human colonists from the Ship have crashed and been marooned on a planet inhabited by smaller, weaker aliens. Because of their comparatively greater size and strength, and because of the repair nanomechanisms in their blood, which make them effectively immortal, or at least very, very hard to kill, the natives see them as monsters, and over hundreds of years, their relationship with humans has evolved into a state of constant warfare. To the surviving humans, though, the real monsters are other humans. . . .
1
With cured gut and twitch-cord, the Nots had constructed their trap — a marriage of old cleverness and deep rage designed to catch dreaded, unworldly monsters such as her. But the device had lain undisturbed since summer, and the winter rains had washed away some of the leaf litter and clay that served as its camouflage. Knowing what to expect, the young woman easily spotted the taut lines and anchor points, and experience told her where a single soft footfall would trigger the mechanism, causing the ground to fall away. An extraordinarily deep hole had been dug into the hillside. One misstep, and she would plunge into blackness, every kick and helpless flail bringing down the loose dirt that would suffocate and then temporarily kill. She had seen this design before. The Nots were masters when it came to doing the same ancient tricks again and again. Only once in her experience had this type of mechanism worked as designed, but the vivid memory of that exceptionally miserable night was enough to make the woman step backwards — a reflexive, foolish reaction, since traps occasionally came i
n pairs, and one careless motion could be more dangerous than twenty smart, studied footfalls.
But her bare foot fortunately hit only damp dirt, and she felt nothing worse than a jikk-incisor gouging her exposed Achilles.
She knelt slowly and pulled the thorn free, placing a thumb across the wound to force the first drop of blood to remain inside her body. Her skin grew warm beneath her touch, and then there was no wound. Sucking on her thumb, she tasted iron and salt and a dozen flavors of grime, and after some consideration, she carefully, carefully traced out a wide ellipse that eventually placed the trap upwind from her.
Riding the breeze was the aroma of a mature piss fungus. Saliva instantly filled her mouth. Her present hunger had been building for days. She couldn’t resist taking a quick step forward while sucking down the scent, wild eyes searching the forest floor until she saw the trap’s bait tucked behind a stand of spent silver yddybddy.
Her bare foot struck nothing but dirt; another youthful impulse went unpunished.
Again she made herself stop. Again she retreated cautiously. Then from a safe vantage point, she studied the Nots’ trap. Her empty stomach rolled and shrank ever closer to nothing, but she didn’t let her instincts run free. Only when she had a workable plan did she coax herself back the way she had come earlier, climbing the slight slope, tracing two of the exposed twitch-cords and deciphering where the third was hidden. Her best knife was an ancient nanocarbon blade wrapped inside a plastic scabbard. She decided to use a worn sapphire knife instead, digging into the cold gray clay until the last cord was discovered. It took five hundred breaths to fully uncover each of the cords. Working together, dozens of Nots had pulled the cords to their natural limits. Extend them just a little more, and their latent energies would be unleashed. The trapdoor would be wrenched open, and the piss fungus would vanish into the killing hole. That was why she found a stand of mature pegpokes, breaking off the strongest three pokes and sharpening them, and then with the heaviest rock she could lift, pounding each one into the ground. Every stake had to be buried next to one of the twitch-cords, as close to the bait as she dared. Then she spent the rest of her rich morning weaving short heavy ropes that she tied to the pokes and then spliced into the cords, leaving no slack. Finally she eased her green blade under the middle cord and sliced it with a single clean motion, and with the pegpoke absorbing the load, the long portion of the cord slapped and twisted its way uphill, leaving the invisible trapdoor undisturbed.
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