“Hmmm. No doubt.” The Dream of Millet starts moving away; her comms growing slightly fainter. “I’ll see you again, then. Remember what I said.”
The Tiger in the Banyan will; but not with pleasure. And she doesn’t like the tone with which the other ship takes her leave; it suggests she is going to do something—something typical of the old, getting The Tiger in the Banyan into a position where she’ll have no choice but to acquiesce to whatever The Dream of Millet thinks of as necessary.
Still… there is nothing that she can do. As The Tiger in the Banyan leaves the orbital onto her next journey, she sets a trace on The Dream of Millet; and monitors it from time to time. Nothing the other ship does seems untoward or suspicious; and after a while The Tiger in the Banyan lets the trace fade.
As she weaves her way between the stars, she remembers.
Mother, coming onboard a week before she died—walking by the walls with their endlessly scrolling texts, all the poems she taught The Tiger in the Banyan as a child. In the low gravity, Mother seemed almost at ease; striding once more onboard the ship until she reached the heartroom. She’d sat with a teacup cradled in her lap—dark tea, because she said she needed a strong taste to wash down the drugs they plied her with—the heartroom filled with a smell like churned earth, until The Tiger in the Banyan could almost taste the tea she couldn’t drink.
“Child?” Mother asked.
“Yes?”
“Can we go away—for a while?”
She wasn’t supposed to, of course; she was a mindship, her travels strictly bounded and codified. But she did. She warned the space station; and plunged into deep spaces.
Mother said nothing. She’d stared ahead, listening to the odd sounds; to the echo of her own breath, watching the oily shapes spread on the walls—while The Tiger in the Banyan kept them on course; feeling stretched and scrunched, pulled in different directions as if she were swimming in rapids. Mother was mumbling under her breath; after a while, The Tiger in the Banyan realised it was the words of a song; and, to accompany it, she broadcast music on her loudspeakers.
Go home to study
I shall wait nine months, I shall wait ten autumns…
She remembers Mother’s smile; the utter serenity on her face—the way she rose after they came back to normal spaces, fluid and utterly graceful; as if all pain and weakness had been set aside for this bare moment; subsumed in the music or the travel or both. She remembers Mother’s quiet words as she left the heartroom.
“Thank you, child. You did well.”
“It was nothing,” she’d said, and Mother had smiled, and disembarked—but The Tiger in the Banyan had heard the words Mother wasn’t speaking. Of course it wasn’t nothing. Of course it had meant something; to be away from it all, even for a bare moment; to hang, weightless and without responsibilities, in the vastness of space. Of course.
A hundred and three days after Mother’s death, a message comes, from the Imperial Palace. It directs her to pick an Embroidered Guard from the First Planet; and the destination is…
Had she a heart, this is the moment when it would stop.
The Embroidered Guard is going to Mother’s space station. It doesn’t matter why; or how long for—just that she’s meant to go with him. And she can’t. She can’t possibly…
Below the order is a note, and she knows, too, what it will say. That the ship originally meant for this mission was The Dream of Millet; and that she, unable to complete it, recommended that The Tiger in the Banyan take it up instead.
Ancestors…
How dare she?
The Tiger in the Banyan can’t refuse the order; or pass it on to someone else. Neither can she rail at a much older ship—but if she could—ancestors, if she could…
It doesn’t matter. It’s just a place—one with a little personal significance to her—but nothing she can’t weather. She has been to so many places, all over the Empire; and this is just one more.
Just one more.
The Embroidered Guard is young, and callow; and not unkind. He boards her at the First Planet, as specified—she’s so busy steeling herself that she forgets to greet him, but he doesn’t appear to notice this.
She’s met him before, at the funeral: the one who apologetically approached Quang Tu; who let him know Mother’s mem-implants wouldn’t pass to him.
Of course.
She finds refuge in protocol: it’s not her role to offer conversation to her passengers, especially not those of high rank or in imperial service, who would think it presumption. So she doesn’t speak; and he keeps busy in his cabin, reading reports and watching vids, the way other passengers do.
Just before they emerge from deep spaces, she pauses; as if it would make a difference—as if there were a demon waiting for her; or perhaps something far older and far more terrible; something that will shatter her composure past any hope of recovery.
What are you afraid of? A voice asks within her—she isn’t sure if it’s Mother or The Dream of Millet, and she isn’t sure of what answer she’d give, either.
The station isn’t what she expected. It’s a skeleton; a work in progress; a mass of cables and metal beams with bots crawling all over it; and the living quarters at the centre, dwarfed by the incomplete structure. Almost deceptively ordinary; and yet it meant so much to Mother. Her vision for the future of the Empire; and neither Quang Tu nor The Tiger in the Banyan having a place within.
And yet.. and yet, the station has heft. It has meaning—that of a painting half-done; of a poem stopped mid-verse—of a spear-thrust stopped a handspan before it penetrates the heart. It begs—demands—to be finished.
The Embroidered Guard speaks, then. “I have business onboard. Wait for me, will you?”
It is a courtesy to ask; since she would wait, in any case. But he surprises her by looking back, as he disembarks. “Ship?”
“Yes?”
“I’m sorry for your loss.” His voice is toneless.
“Don’t be,” The Tiger in the Banyan says.
He smiles then; a bare upturning of the lips. “I could give you the platitudes about your mother living on in her work, if I thought that would change something for her.”
The Tiger in the Banyan doesn’t say anything, for a while. She watches the station below her; listens to the faint drift of radio communications—scientists calling other scientists; reporting successes and failures and the ten thousand little things that make a project of this magnitude. Mother’s vision; Mother’s work—people call it her life work, but of course she and Quang Tu are also Mother’s life work, in a different way. And she understands, then, why The Dream of Millet sent her there.
“It meant something to her,” she says, finally. “I don’t think she’d have begrudged its completion.”
He hesitates. Then, coming back inside the ship—and looking upwards, straight where the heartroom would be—his gaze level, driven by an emotion she can’t read: “They’ll finish it. The new variety of rice they’ve found—the environment will have to be strictly controlled to prevent it from dying of cold, but…” He takes a deep, trembling breath. “There’ll be stations like this all over the Empire—and it’s all thanks to your mother. “
“Of course,” The Tiger in the Banyan says. And the only words that come to her as the ones Mother spoke, once. “Thank you, child. You did well.”
She watches him leave; and thinks of Mother’s smile. Of Mother’s work; and of the things that happened between the work; the songs and the smiles and the stolen moments, all arrayed within her with the clarity and resilience of diamond. She thinks of the memories she carries within her—that she will carry within her for the centuries to come.
The Embroidered Guard was trying to apologise, for the mem-implants; for the inheritance neither she nor Quang Tu will ever have. Telling her it had all been worth it, in the end; that their sacrifice hadn’t been in vain.
But the truth is, it doesn’t matter. It mattered to Quang Tu; but she’s no
t her brother. She’s not bound by anger or rancour; and she doesn’t grieve as he does.
What matters is this: she holds all of her memories of Mother; and Mother is here now, with her—forever unchanged, forever graceful and tireless; forever flying among the stars.
* * *
Aliette de Bodard lives and works in Paris, where she has a day job as a System Engineer. She is the author of the critically acclaimed Obsidian and Blood trilogy of Aztec noir fantasies, as well as numerous short stories. Recent works include The House of Shattered Wings (Roc/Gollancz, 2015 British Science Fiction Association Award), a novel set in a turn-of-the-century Paris devastated by a magical war, and its upcoming sequel The House of Binding Thorns (April 2017, Roc/Gollancz). She also published The Citadel of Weeping Pearls (Asimov’s Oct/Nov 2015), a novella set in the same universe as her Vietnamese space opera On a Red Station Drifting.
Madeleine
By Amal El-Mohtar
An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory – this new sensation having had on me the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me it was me. … Whence did it come? What did it mean? How could I seize and apprehend it? … And suddenly the memory revealed itself.
—Marcel Proust
• • • •
Madeleine remembers being a different person.
It strikes her when she’s driving, threading through farmland, homesteads, facing down the mountains around which the road winds. She remembers being thrilled at the thought of travel, of the self she would discover over the hills and far away. She remembers laughing with friends, looking forward to things, to a future.
She wonders at how change comes in like a thief in the night, dismantling our sense of self one bolt and screw at a time until all that’s left of the person we think we are is a broken door hanging off a rusty hinge, waiting for us to walk through.
• • • •
“Tell me about your mother,” says Clarice, the clinical psychologist assigned to her.
Madeleine is stymied. She stammers. This is only her third meeting with Clarice. She looks at her hands and the tissue she twists between them. “I thought we were going to talk about the episodes.”
“We will,” and Clarice is all gentleness, all calm, “but—”
“I would really rather talk about the episodes.”
Clarice relents, nods in her gracious, patient way, and makes a note. “When was your last one?”
“Last night.” Madeleine swallows, hard, remembering.
“And what was the trigger?”
“The soup,” she says, and she means to laugh but it comes out wet and strangled like a sob. “I was making chicken soup, and I put a stick of cinnamon in. I’d never done that before but I remembered how it looked, sometimes, when my mother would make it—she would boil the thighs whole with bay leaves, black pepper, and sticks of cinnamon—so I thought I would try. It was exactly right—it smelled exactly, exactly like hers—and then I was there, I was small and looking up at her in our old house, and she was stirring the soup and smiling down at me, and the smell was like a cloud all around, and I could smell her, too, the hand cream she used, and see the edge of the stove and the oven door handle with the cat-print dish towel on it—”
“Did your mother like to cook?”
Madeleine stares.
“Madeleine,” says Clarice, with the inevitably Anglo pronunciation Madeleine has resigned herself to, “if we’re going to work together to help you I need to know more about her.”
“The episodes aren’t about her,” says Madeleine, stiffly. “They’re because of the drug.”
“Yes, but—”
“They’re because of the drug, and I don’t need you to tell me I took part in the trial because of her—obviously I did—and I don’t want to tell you about her. This isn’t about my mourning, and I thought we established these aren’t traumatic flashbacks. It’s about the drug.”
“Madeleine,” and Madeleine is fascinated by Clarice’s capacity to both disgust and soothe her with sheer unflappability, “Drugs do not operate—or misfire—in a vacuum. You were one of sixty people participating in that trial. Of those sixty, you’re the only one who has come forward experiencing these episodes.” Clarice leans forward, slightly. “We’ve also spoken about your tendency to see our relationship as adversarial. Please remember that it isn’t. You,” and Clarice doesn’t smile, exactly, so much as that the lines around her mouth become suffused with sympathy, “haven’t even ever volunteered her name.”
Madeleine begins to feel like a recalcitrant child instead of an adult standing her ground. This only adds to her resentment.
“Her name was Sylvie,” she offers, finally. “She loved being in the kitchen. She loved making big fancy meals. But she hated having people over. My dad used to tease her about that.”
Clarice nods, smiles her almost-smile, makes further notes. “And did you use the technique we discussed to dismiss the memory?”
Madeleine looks away. “Yes.”
“What did you choose this time?”
“Althusser.” She feels ridiculous. “‘In the battle that is philosophy all the techniques of war, including looting and camouflage, are permissible.’”
Clarice frowns as she writes, and Madeleine can’t tell if it’s because talk of war is adversarial or because she dislikes Althusser.
• • • •
After she buried her mother, Madeleine looked for ways to bury herself.
She read non-fiction, as dense and theoretical as she could find, on any subject she felt she had a chance of understanding: economics, postmodernism, settler-colonialism. While reading Patrick Wolfe she found the phrase invasion is a structure not an event, and wondered if one could say the same of grief. Grief is an invasion and a structure and an event, she wrote, then struck it out, because it seemed meaningless.
Grief, thinks Madeleine now, is an invasion that climbs inside you and makes you grow a wool blanket from your skin, itchy and insulating, heavy and grey. It wraps and wraps and wraps around, putting layers of scratchy heat between you and the world, until no one wants to approach for fear of the prickle, and people stop asking how you are doing in the blanket, which is a relief, because all you want is to be hidden, out of sight. You can’t think of a time when you won’t be wrapped in the blanket, when you’ll be ready to face the people outside it—but one day, perhaps, you push through. And even though you’ve struggled against the belief that you’re a worthless colony of contagion that must be shunned at all costs, it still comes as a shock, when you emerge, that no one’s left waiting for you.
Worse still is the shock that you haven’t emerged at all.
• • • •
“The thing is,” says Madeleine, slowly, “I didn’t use the sentence right away.”
“Oh?”
“I—wanted to see how long it could last, on its own.” Heat in her cheeks, knowing how this will sound, wanting both to resist and embrace it. “To ride it out. It kept going just as I remembered it—she brought me a little pink plastic bowl with yellow flowers on it, poured just a tiny bit of soup in, blew on it, gave it to me with a plastic spoon. There were little star-shaped noodles. I—” she feels tears in her eyes, hates this, hates crying in front of Clarice, “—I could have eaten it. It smelled so good, and I was hungry. But I got superstitious. You know.” She shrugs. “Like if I ate it I’d have to stay for good.”
“Did you want to stay for good?”
Madeleine says nothing. This is what she hates about Clarice, this demand that her feelings be spelled out into one thing or another: isn’t it obvious that she both wanted and didn’t want to? From what she said?
“I feel like the episodes are lasting longer,” says Madeleine, finally, trying to keep her voice level
. “It used to be just a snap, there and back—I’d blink, I’d be in the memory, I’d realize what happened and it would be like a dream, I’d wake up, come back. I didn’t need sentences to help. But now…” She looks to Clarice to fill the silence, but Clarice waits, as usual, for Madeleine herself to articulate the fear.
“…Now I wonder if this is how it started for her. My mother. What it was like for her.” The tissue in her hands is damp, not from tears, but from the sweat of her palms. “If I just sped up the process.”
“You don’t have Alzheimer’s,” says Clarice, matter-of-fact. “You aren’t forgetting anything. Quite the opposite: you’re remembering so intensely and completely that your memories have the vividness and immediacy of hallucination.” She jots something down. “We’ll keep trying to dismantle the triggers as they arise. If the episodes seem to be lasting longer, it could be because they’re fewer and farther between. This is not necessarily a bad thing.”
Madeleine nods, chewing her lip, not meeting Clarice’s eyes.
• • • •
So far as Madeleine is concerned her mother began dying five years earlier, when the fullness of her life began to fall away from her like chunks of wet cake: names; events; her child. Madeleine watched her mother weep, and this was the worst, because with every storm of grief over her confusion Madeleine couldn’t help but imagine the memories sloughing from her, as if the memories themselves were the source of her pain, and if she could just forget them and live a barer life, a life before the disease, before her husband’s death, before Madeleine, she could be happy again. If she could only shed the burden of the expectation of memory, she could be happy again.
Madeleine reads Walter Benjamin on time as image, time as accumulation, and thinks of layers and pearls. She thinks of her mother as a pearl dissolving in wine until only a grain of sand is left drowning at the bottom of the glass.
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