by Malka Older
“Eighty-five cycles,” Irnv says, then looks up, calculating. “About thirty-two of your years,” she adds, and Flur catches the corners of a smile again. Meanwhile, Tsongwa and Slanks are exchanging some sort of ritualized embrace, both arms touching.
The return beam is less difficult than the landing, and once they are out of the planet’s atmosphere and waiting for the Mission Crawler to pick them up, Tsongwa takes off his breathing apparatus and helmet, removing the comms link to Mission Control.
“You okay?” he asks.
“Fine,” Flur says, trying for a why-wouldn’t-I-be tone. “You?”
Tsongwa nods without saying anything.
“I just wish we could have gotten the stupid thing signed,” Flur says finally.
Tsongwa raises both palms. “It’ll happen. I think.”
“The president seemed so…” Flur shakes her head. “It’s a shame that we caught a weak leader.”
“You think she’s weak?”
“Well, grief-stricken, maybe. But it comes to the same thing. For us, anyway.”
Tsongwa leaves a beat of silence. “What did you talk about in the eating room?”
“Personal stuff, mostly … names, families. Oh, that’s something,” Flur sits up in her chair. So different from those hammocks. “Irnv told me she’s named after our planet, but after our word for it. Earth, I mean.”
Tsongwa is stunned for a moment, then laughs. “Well, that’s very hospitable of them.”
“Tsongwa, she’s thirty-two. Thirty-two in our years!”
Another pause. “Maybe her name was changed in honor of the visit?”
“Or maybe…” Neither of them says it: Maybe the Cyclopes have been listening to us longer than we have been listening to the Cyclopes.
“What did you talk about?” Flur asks finally.
“Family, to start with.” Tsongwa says. “Personal history. It’s very important to them.”
“What do you mean?”
He arranges his thoughts. It occurs to Flur, looking at the lines in his face shadowed by the reflected light from the control panel, that she has no idea what he might have told them about his family, because she doesn’t know anything about him outside of his work.
“They wanted to know if I’d suffered.”
“Suffered?” Flur repeats, in the tone she might use to say, Crucified?
Tsongwa sighs; the English word is wrong, so dramatic. “They wanted to know if I’d … eaten bitter, if I’d … gone through hard times. If I’d experienced grief. You know.” An alert goes off; he starts to prepare for docking as he speaks. “They think it’s important for decision makers, for leaders. It stems from the myth of the founder—you heard about that? They believe that people who have suffered greatly have earned wisdom.” He twitches a control. “Now that we know this, we can adjust the way we approach the whole relationship. It’s a huge breakthrough.”
“But … but…” Flur wonders, with a pang, whether this means she won’t be included in the next mission. Can she somehow reveal all the hardship and self-doubt she has so painstakingly camouflaged with professionalism, dedication, and feigned poise? “But come on! The president has suffered, okay, but she didn’t seem any the wiser for it!”
Tsongwa shrugs. “They believe it, I said. That doesn’t mean it’s true. They aren’t perfect, any more than we are.”
And Flur thinks of the Mission Director, his careful multidisciplinarity and his pep talks, or the president of her country, a tall, distinguished-looking, well-spoken man who has failed by almost every measure yet retains a healthy margin of popularity. By that time they are docked, and scanned for contaminants, and the airlock doors open, and then they are swarmed by the ops team, shouting and congratulating them, slapping their shoulders and practically carrying them into the main ship where the Mission Director, his emotion apparent but held in perfect check, shakes hands with each of them and whispers a word or two of praise in their ears. Flur tries to smile and nod at everyone until finally, though it can’t have been more than five or ten minutes later, she’s alone, or almost, stripped to a sterile shift and lying in a clinic bed for the post-visit checkup.
“What’s the matter?” The medical officer says, coming in with a clipboard and a couple of different scanners. “Are you feeling okay?”
“Fine,” Flur manages through her sobs.
“You did great,” he says, as he runs the scanners over her quickly, almost unnoticeably. “The geeks are already raving about those samples you brought back. There, there,” he says, when she doesn’t stop crying. He pats her arm awkwardly. “It’s just the tension and excitement. You’ll be fine.”
But it isn’t the tension or the excitement. Flur is thinking about the things she could have said to Irnv: about her four brothers, dead, drunk, imprisoned, and poor; her three sisters, poor, unhappy, and desperate. About her own childhood, hungry and hardscrabble. If she had unburied these old sufferings, would Irnv have trusted her more? Would she have been able to get the agreement signed?
But mostly, and it is this that makes her want to cry until she makes her own, shimmering tear tracks, she is thinking about her mother. Twice abandoned (three times if you count Flur’s reluctance to visit). Beaten occasionally, exploited often, underpaid always. An infant lost, a dear sister lost, an adult child lost. Flur has always avoided imagining that grief. When her brother was killed, she clung to her own complicated pain and did not look her mother in the eye so she would not probe those depths. Now she weighs all her mother has suffered.
In another world, it would be enough to make her president.
About the Author
MALKA OLDER is a writer, humanitarian worker, and PhD candidate at the Centre de Sociologie des Organisations studying governance and disasters. Named Senior Fellow for Technology and Risk at the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs for 2015, she has more than eight years of experience in humanitarian aid and development, and has responded to complex emergencies and natural disasters in Uganda, Darfur, Indonesia, Japan, and Mali. Infomocracy is her first novel. You can sign up for email updates here.
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Begin Reading
About the Author
Copyright
Copyright © 2015 by Malka Older
Art copyright © 2015 by Richie Pope