by Rich Horton
Nothing, Wen wants to say; but as before, she cannot bring herself to lie. “That she used the technologies of the San-Tay against them; but that, in the end, she fell prey to the lure of their power.” It’s what she’s been told all her life; the only things that have filled the silence Mother maintains about Grandmother. But, now, staring at this small, diminutive woman, she feels almost ashamed. “That she and her followers were given a choice between exile, and death.”
“And you believe that?”
“I don’t know,” Wen says. And, more carefully, “Does it matter?”
Nhu shrugs, shaking her head. “Mingxia—your mother once asked Anshi if she believed in reconciliation with Felicity. Anshi told her that reconciliation was nothing more than another word for forgetfulness. She was a hard woman. But then, she’d lost so much in the war. We all did.”
“I’m not Mother,” Wen says, and Nhu shakes her head, with a brief smile.
“No. You’re here.”
Out of duty, Wen thinks. Because someone has to come, and Mother won’t. Because someone should remember Grandmother, even if it’s Wen—who didn’t know her, didn’t know the war. She wonders what the Honored Leader will say about Grandmother’s death, on Felicity—if she’ll mourn the passing of a liberator, or remind them all to be firm, to reject the evil of the San-Tay, more than sixty years after the foreigners’ withdrawal from Felicity.
She wonders how much of the past is worth clinging to.
See how the gilded Heavens are covered
With the burning bitter tears of our departed
Cast away into darkness, they contradict no truths
Made mute and absent, they denounce no lies
Anshi gave this poem into our keeping on the night after her daughter left her. She was crying then, trying not to show it—muttering about ungrateful children, and their inability to comprehend any of what their ancestors had gone through. Her hand shook, badly; and she stared into her cup of tea, as hard as she had once stared into the black hole and its currents, dragging everything into the lightless depths. But then, as on Shattered Pine, the only thing that came to her was merciless clarity, like the glint of a blade or a claw.
It is an old, old composition, its opening lines the last Anshi wrote on Felicity Station. Just as the first poem defined her youth—the escaped prisoner, the revolution’s foremost bot-handler—this defined her closing decades, in more ways than one.
The docks were deserted; not because it was early in the station’s cycle, not because the war had diminished interstellar travel; but because the docks had been cordoned off by Mheng loyalists. They gazed at Anshi, steadily—their eyes blank; though the mob behind them brandished placards and howled for her blood.
“It’s not fair,” Nhu said. She was carrying Anshi’s personal belongings—Anshi’s bots, and those of all her followers, were already packed in the hold of the ship. Anshi held her daughter Mingxia by the hand: the child’s eyes were wide, but she didn’t speak. Anshi knew she would have questions, later—but all that mattered, here and now, was surviving this. “You’re a heroine of the uprising. You shouldn’t have to leave like a branded criminal.”
Anshi said nothing. She scanned the crowd, wondering if Zhiying would be there, at the last—if she’d smile and wish her well, or make one last stab of the knife. “She’s right, in a way,” she said, wearily. The crowd’s hatred was palpable, even where she stood. “The bots are a remnant of the San-Tay, just like High Mheng. It’s best for everyone if we forget it all.” Best for everyone but them.
“You don’t believe that,” Nhu said.
“No.” Not any of that; but she knew what was in Zhiying’s heart, the hatred of the San-Tay that she carried with her—that, to her little sister, she would be nothing more than a collaborator herself—tainted by her use of the enemy’s technology.
“She just wants you gone. Because you’re her rival.”
“She doesn’t think like that,” Anshi said, more sharply than she’d intended; and she knew, too, that she didn’t believe that. Zhiying had a vision of the Mheng as strong and powerful; and she’d allow nothing and no one to stand in its way.
They were past the cordon now, and the maw of the ship gaped before them—the promise of a life somewhere else, on another planet. Ironic, in a way—the ship was from the San-Tay High Government, seeking amends for their behavior on colonized stations. If someone had ever told her she’d ride one of those as a guest . . .
Nhu, without hesitation, was heading up towards the dark tunnel. “You don’t have to come,” Anshi said.
Nhu rolled her eyes upwards, and made no comment. Like Anshi, she was old guard; a former teacher in the Mheng schools, fluent in High Mheng, and with a limited ability to control the bots. A danger, like Anshi.
There was a noise behind them—the beginning of a commotion. Anshi turned; and saw that, contrary to what she’d thought, Zhiying had come.
She wore the sash of Honored Leader well; and the stars of Felicity’s new flag were spread across her dress—which was a shorter, less elaborate version of the five-panel ceremonial garb. Her hair had been pulled up in an elegant bun, thrust through with a golden phoenix pin, the first jewel to come out of the station’s new workshops—she was unrecognizable from the gaunt, tall prisoner Anshi remembered, or even from the dark, intense leader of the rebellion years.
“Elder sister.” She bowed to Anshi, but did not come closer; remaining next to her escort of black-clad soldiers. “We wish you happiness, and good fortune among the stars.”
“We humbly thank you, Your Reverence,” Anshi said—keeping the irony, and the hurt from her voice. Zhiying’s eyes were dark, with the same anger Anshi remembered from the night of the Second Ring riots—the night when the girl had died. They stood, staring at each other, and at length Zhiying gestured for Anshi to move.
Anshi backed away, slowly, pulling her daughter by the hand. She wasn’t sure why she felt . . . drained, as if a hundred bots had been pumping modifiers into her blood, and had suddenly stopped. She wasn’t sure what she’d expected—an apology? Zhiying had never been one for it; or for doubts of any kind. But still—
Still, they’d been on Shattered Pine together; had escaped together; had preached and written the poetry of the revolution, and dared each other to hack into Felicity’s network to spread it into every household, every corridor screen.
There should have been something more than a formal send-off; something more than the eyes boring into hers—dark and intense, and with no hint of sorrow or tears.
We do not weep for the enemy, Anshi thought; as she turned, and passed under the wide metal arc that led into the ship, her daughter’s hand heavy in hers.
In the small antechamber, Wen dons robes of dark blue—those reserved for the mourners who are the closest family to the dead. She can hear, in the distance, the drone of prayers from the priests, and the scuttling of bots on the walls, carrying faint music until the entire structure of the hall seems to echo with it. Slowly, carefully, she rises, and stares at her pale, wan self in the mirror—with coiled bots at its angles, awaiting just an order to awaken and bring her anything she might desire. Abominations, she thinks, uneasily, but it’s hard to see them as something other than alien, incomprehensible.
Nhu is waiting for her at the great doors—the crowd has parted, letting her through with an almost religious hush. In silence, Wen kneels, her head bent down—an honor to the dead, an acknowledgement that she is late and that she must make amends, for leaving Grandmother’s ghost alone.
She hears a noise as the doors open—catches a flash of a crowd dressed in blue; and then she is crawling towards the coffin, staring at the ground ahead of her. By her side, there are glimpses of dresses’ hems, of shoes that are an uneasy meld of San-Tay and Mheng. Ahead, a steady drone from the monks at the pulpit, taken up by the crowd; a prayer in High Mheng, incomprehensible words segueing into a melodious chant; and a smell of incense mingled with something
else, a flower she cannot recognize. The floor under her is warm, soft—unlike Felicity’s utilitarian metal or carpets, a wealth of painted ostentation with patterns she cannot make out.
As she crawls, Wen finds herself, incongruously, thinking of Mother.
She asked, once, why Mother had left San-Tay Prime—expecting Mother to rail once more at Grandmother’s failures. But Mother merely pulled a low bench, and sat down with a sigh. “There was no choice, child. We could dwindle away on San-Tay Prime, drifting further and further away from Felicity with every passing moment. Or we could come back home.”
“It’s not Grandmother’s home,” Wen said, slowly, confusedly—with a feeling that she was grappling with something beyond her years.
“No,” Mother said. “And, if we had waited too long, it wouldn’t have been your home either.”
“I don’t understand.” Wen put a hand on one of the kitchen cupboards—the door slid away, letting her retrieve a can of dried, powdered shrimp, which she dumped into the broth on the stove.
“Like two men carried away by two different currents in the river—both ending in very different places.” She waved a dismissive hand. “You’ll understand, when you’re older.”
“Is that why you’re not talking with Grandmother?”
Mother grimaced, staring into the depths of her celadon cup. “Grandmother and I . . . did not agree on things,” she said. “Sometimes I think . . . ” She shook her head. “Stubborn old woman. She never could admit that she had lost. That the future of Felicity wasn’t with bots, with High Mheng; with any of what the San-Tay had left us.”
Bots. High Mheng—all of the things that don’t exist anymore, on the new Felicity—all the things the Honored Leader banished, for the safety and glory of the people. “Mother . . . ” Wen said, suddenly afraid.
Her mother smiled; and for the first time Wen saw the bitterness in her eyes. “Never mind, child. This isn’t your burden to carry.”
Wen did not understand. But now . . . now, as she crawls down the aisle, breathing in the unfamiliar smells, she thinks she understands. Reconciliation means forgetfulness, and is it such a bad thing that they forget, that they are no longer chained to the hatreds of the past?
She reaches the coffin, and rises—turns, for a brief moment, to stare at the sea of humanity before her—the blurred faces with bots at the corner of their eyes, with alien scents and alien clothes. They are not from Felicity anymore, but something else—poised halfway between the San-Tay and the culture that gave them birth; and, as the years pass, those that do not come back will drift further and further from Felicity, until they will pass each other in the street, and not feel anything but a vague sense of familiarity, like long-lost families that have become strangers to each other.
No, not from Felicity anymore—and does it matter, any of it?
Wen has no answer—none of Mother’s bleak certainties about life. And so she turns away from the crowd, and looks into the coffin—into the face of a stranger, across a gap like a flowing river, dark and forever unbridgeable.
I am in halves, dreaming of a faraway home
Not a dry spot on my moonlit pillow
Through the open window lies the stars and planets
Where ten thousand family members have scattered
Along the River of Heaven, with no bridges to lead them home
The long yearning
Cuts into my heart
This is the last poem we received from Xu Anshi; the last one she composed, before the sickness ate away at her command of High Mheng, and we could no longer understand her subvocalised orders. She said to us then, “it is done”; and turned away from us, awaiting death.
We are here now, as Wen looks at the pale face of her grandmother. We are not among our brethren in the crowd—not clinging to faces, not curled on the walls or at the corner of mirrors, awaiting orders to unfold.
We have another place.
We rest on the coffin with Xu Anshi’s other belongings; scattered among the paper offerings—the arch leading into the Heavens, the bills stamped with the face of the King of Hell. We sit quiescent, waiting for Xu Wen to call us up—that we might flow up to her like a black tide, carrying her inheritance to her, and the memories that made up Xu Anshi’s life from beginning to end.
But Wen’s gaze slides right past us, seeing us as nothing more than a necessary evil at the ceremony; and the language she might summon us in is one she does not speak and has no interest in.
In silence, she walks away from the coffin to take her place among the mourners—and we, too, remain silent, taking our understanding of Xu Anshi’s life into the yawning darkness.
Four Kinds of Cargo
Leonard Richardson
Terequale Bitty went below decks to check on a coolant cycling pipe that was heating the cargo hold above nominal, and the pipe exploded and scalded her to death and half the cargo was ruined anyway. Kol the executive officer heard the explosion, shut everything down, and wrestled the dead woman through microgravity into the medical chamber, not that it did any good.
The chamber pulled the shrapnel from Terequale Bitty’s body and replaced all the tissue, but it was performing cosmetic surgery on a corpse. When it jump-started her nervous system, she took one big breath and held it, not metabolizing, not even passing it from her air bladder into the lung. No matter what Kol did to try and make Terequale Bitty not be dead, the ornery sysadmin would not finish that breath. Kol had to go in with a post-nasal probe and drain the air bladder manually so she’d stop looking bloated.
Terequale Bitty was gone; and for what? For a few crates of fake caviar. For stuff.
That’s the first kind of cargo: physical goods, ordinary stuff. Sour Candy mostly transported contraband, but it’s all the same, made of atoms, low-hassle and absolutely wonderful to work with. You can put atoms into a refrigerated crate or magnetic containment, and bring them to someone who’ll be glad to take them off your hands. Physical goods are the least dangerous of the four kinds of cargo, but they were dangerous enough to get Terequale Bitty killed.
“I should have been the one to check that alert,” said the Captain. That was the gist of what she probably said. The Captain was facing away from Kol, hurriedly grooming herself in the bathroom mirror. She was also brewing tea in her mouth, so the only way to decipher her mumbling was to know, as Kol did, what the Captain would say in any given situation.
Seeing other people drink made Kol thirsty; he unholstered his water bottle and took a long slurp. “We can’t go around retroactively taking bullets for each other,” he said. “If Terequale Bitty had woken you up and told you to go check a random alert, you’d be dead instead of her. How would that help anyone?” Kol held the Captain’s vinyl jacket between his delicately scaled egenu fingers, and the rasme thau woman shrugged her thick muscular arms backward into the sleeves.
The Captain’s cranial fronds came to life as the tisane seeped into her bloodstream. “You’ll need to be the sysadmin again,” she said, presumably. “Just for a while, until we find someone else.” She swallowed her tisane, spat the leaves into the sink, and wiped her mouth. “I don’t think this crew needs a full-time executive officer, anyway.”
“They need a full-time XO because their captain is batshit insane,” said Kol.
Kol had spent his childhood with his head wrapped in 3-goggles, watching egenu video epics about roguish smuggler captains and their eclectic multi-ethnic crews, writing fan mail to the actors et cetera. These epics were the main cultural export of Kol’s home planet, and their sequels still ensured a steady stream of recruits into the ships that patrolled the complicated border between the Fist of Joy and the Terran Extension.
The Captain had spent her childhood watching bad native-language dubs of those same epics, except the implication that all this stuff was fiction had been lost in translation, or cut so the broadcaster could squeeze in another commercial. When she came of age, the Captain (probably not her birth name) had boug
ht Sour Candy with Mommy’s money, hired a crew, and declared herself a smuggler.
And somehow, amazingly, not gotten killed. Eight kiloshifts of combat zones and hazardous materials. Hundreds of surly senders and uncooperative recipients waving invoices and weapons and long-expired coupons, and no crew had gotten killed. Until now.
The Captain solemnly punched Kol in the arm, sending his scales rippling. “Kol,” she said, “I need you now more than ever. The crew needs you.” Her hand trembled with the shock of unaccustomed loss.
“Yes, ma’am,” said Kol.
Suppose that the system administrator on Nightside got killed. This would never happen, barring a contract dispute with the actor, but any fan instinctively knew how Captain Mene would react. He’d grab one of his officers in a wrestling hold and say something corny like “I need you now more than ever.” This would mean double shifts for a while, and they’d close out the episode with wry smiles and optimism.
This was the best job Kol had ever had, even counting legit gigs. Most smuggling bosses took sixty percent of the profits and let the crew fight over the rest; the Captain insisted on equal shares. The Captain was also too small to try any Captain Mene wrestling holds on her crew. But Captain Mene’s hand wouldn’t be trembling right now.
The Captain addressed her crew from the center of Sour Candy’s minuscule bridge. “We will be returning Terequale Bitty’s body to Quennet,” she said, “so that her family can perform the funerary rites.”
Oh, shit. Kol flinched, standing next to the Captain in what he’d thought would be a pro forma show of support. The other two living crew members started shouting.
“Whoa, whoa,” said Kol, recovering quickly. “Calm down. One at a time. Yip-Goru?”
“We just came from Quennet,” said the rre navigator from inside thon’s metamaterial suit. “Twenty shifts out.”