“Paris, you can’t go around hitting your sister.”
“She’s not my sister!”
Captain Kahta leaned back as if I’d hit her in the face too.
“She’s not my sister and you’re not my mom!”
“Okay, okay.”
“I don’t care about math!”
“Paris, sit down.”
I started to run around the cabin. She couldn’t stop me. Not until she grabbed me around the waist and held me down on the bed. I kicked and screamed at her. Mister Chandar came in and held me down too. They said things to each other, but I wasn’t listening. Sanja came in with an injet and pressed it to my arm.
Everything slowed down. Even me.
The ship was big. Tall, cold corridors, all white and grey. There were lots of adults but some kids too, older than Sanja or younger, like me. Every sixth day a vid screened in rec and we got extra treats than what was usually available from the galley. Sometimes I stayed and watched the vid, but sometimes they bored me and I snuck out in the dark.
I wandered around the ship when I wasn’t supposed to, but I didn’t like being minded all the time. Sanja handed me off to the other older kids sometimes and none of them liked it when I acted up. Sometimes I didn’t mean to act up, but everything grew frustrating. All of these rules about where I wasn’t supposed to go, and checkups in medical, and toys I was supposed to be interested in, and food I was supposed to eat. These faces weren’t the faces from my storybook memory. When I had nightmares, nobody came to save me.
Sometimes I remembered riding on the back of a four wheeler, holding an older boy around the waist. He’d tell me, “Don’t fall off, Puppy!” My brother Cairo. But I couldn’t remember his face anymore.
I had a lot of nightmares. The lady on the station said to record them when I woke up and send them to her, but I didn’t like to put words to them, so most of the time I didn’t. Mister Chandar or Captain Kahta was supposed to talk to me about them and help me record them, but after the first six months they stopped. I guessed they got busy. The ship travelled a lot and I didn’t check in all the time with the lady on the station. I didn’t ask Captain Kahta about it. If I didn’t need to do these things anymore, then maybe that meant I was okay. Or they didn’t care. I didn’t think they had to care since they weren’t my family.
My brothers Cairo and Bern. And Mama and Daddy. Now every time I thought the word “family,” I also thought of the word “dead.”
I turned seven on Chateaumargot. Captain Kahta and Mister Chandar threw a party. All the kids came, even the ones who called me weird and talked behind my back. Sanja tried to put a cardboard hat on my head. I knocked it away. After that, nobody was happy. They weren’t happy with me and the ice cream melted all over my cake. I felt a little bad so I was nice for the rest of the party and even hugged Captain Kahta afterward so she would smile. She hugged me back real tight.
“Are you happy, Paris?”
I didn’t really know what she meant by being happy, like maybe if I liked my cake and the presents. The games and new clothes.
“Yeah. Everything’s good.”
She touched my hair and smiled, like she knew I was lying.
The other kids on Chateaumargot didn’t stay nice. But neither did I. I got into fights a lot until every week Mister Chandar locked me in my quarters. I sent some of the kids to medical and sometimes I went to medical. Bruises and cuts and a couple black eyes shared amongst us. Then one shift when we’d docked at a station, Captain Kahta came to get me after breakfast and took me by the hand. She walked me to my quarters and told me to pack some of my favourite things. My clothes and whatever toys I liked.
“Why?”
“I’ll help you, honey.”
“Help me with what?”
She cried and held me, so I couldn’t do anything but stand there and let her be. Everything felt dark and silent, like someone had covered my ears and eyes.
She and Mister Chandar took me off the ship, and we went down the dock to another ship’s airlock. That ship let us inside the airlock but not quite inside the ship. We met another woman. She introduced herself as Madame Leung. She was shorter than Captain Kahta and had dark eyes like me. Madame Leung took me by the shoulders and smiled.
“You look just like your picture, Paris.”
What picture? Captain Kahta crouched down in front of me and told me to go and live with Madame Leung now.
“Why? Why?”
Captain Kahta’s eyes were shining, and she just shook her head. “You’ll be better here with Madame Leung,” was all she said. Then she straightened up, and they said things to each other in a language that I didn’t know. Mister Chandar squeezed my shoulder and then they left the airlock.
They left me on this new ship and I couldn’t do anything about it.
So I screamed.
Madame Leung dragged me to quarters inside her ship. Another woman joined her to wrangle me. They locked me in, and through the intercom she said, “I’ll come back when you’re done.”
That was it. No matter how much noise I made, nobody came.
Madame Leung told me everything. Captain Kahta and Mister Chandar didn’t feel they could provide me with the best, they didn’t know how to handle me, and they feared for the other children on board because of the fights I got into.
The idea of saving me wasn’t as good as the reality.
“You’re getting worse,” Madame Leung said. “That won’t happen here.”
Captain Kahta wouldn’t take me back to the station from long ago, and the lady who had given me away in the first place didn’t ask.
“We’re busy ships!” said Madame Leung. “Who wants to go all the way back to a station to deal with that shit?”
It was easier, out here in deep space, to hand me to another family ship like Madame Leung’s. Her ship, Dragon Empress, transported medical drugs to far-flung stations and colonies in need. But Madame Leung and her crew weren’t a part of EarthHub’s humanitarian organizations.
“We’re not pirates,” she said. “I don’t attack places and murder people. We just provide a service.”
“Why do you want me?”
She crouched down in front of me. I was sitting on the bunk. The quarters were smaller than what I’d had on Chateaumargot. The lights were narrow pricks in the ceiling, like sunrays through bullet holes.
“I like kids, Paris. Kids grow up to be good soldiers. Like my boys. I have a lot of boys here as it is, they know their work. You’ll do great with them, you’ll see.”
Madame Leung said they were going to get my records purged. It would be easy since so many records of so many kids were all over the place, and with the right amount of money, people did anything you wanted. That way nobody would come looking for me.
Nobody was left to come looking for me anyway. When Madame Leung smiled at me, it was like she knew it too.
As far as Madame Leung was concerned, I was a Dragon. No longer a Rahamon, and definitely not an Azarcon. She never asked about my actual family or where I came from. I doubt she would’ve cared if Captain Kahta had offered the information. Captain Kahta, who trunked me off as someone else’s responsibility, likely hadn’t explained much about my origins.
I was physically healthy and mentally able to handle complex tasks. Madame Leung made me one of her boys and that was that. One in a crew of four-hundred men and boys who followed her lead. The drug queen of the Dragons, the Dragon Empress. Deep space depended on her, she said, to cure it of its ills.
She didn’t mean the war or the aliens or the pirates. If you couldn’t change anything, you could at least anestheticize.
I dreamed of my family. My parents’ faces, their presence, blurred out from my memory like a vid not quite calibrated right. But my brothers, my protectors, they remained vivid.
I didn’t believe in guardian angels because seeing them only in my mind’s eye was more like hell.
Over the years under Madame Leung’s tutelage and the
hammering of her “boys” to make me into her version of a good soldier, one who kept his mouth shut and evaded authorities on station, the memories trickled back. Like the first bits of dust that were the only evidence of an exploded star, the further I went into deep space with the Empress, the closer I came to my own past.
Maybe it was because of these adopted “brothers,” foisted on me, equipped with powers of loving persecution. Unlike the kids on Chateaumargot, Madame Leung’s gang accepted me with a rough sort of respect. The lady herself handpicked me, and though they didn’t spare me when she disciplined my rebellious nature, they offered security and freedom at the same time.
I carried a gun. I learned the trade of drug trafficking, of clandestine meetings on stations and in half-forgotten refugee colonies. Some of our clients were even EarthHub soldiers, more wary-eyed than we were but equally invested in the market. Some used our pharmaceuticals for their intended purposes, others didn’t. As long as they paid us, it was none of our business.
Adolescence passed in a haze of tattoos, training, and tradecraft. The colourful ink emblazoned on my arms and back were needle tapped in the ancient way, not with a gun. I marked my years by the images that flowered across my skin: a tiger, an Earth mountainscape, a constellation of stars, and of course, the elaborate golden dragon winding its way down my spine. Sometimes, at the height of my pain, when I lay across the horishi’s table, I heard my brothers’ voices, their ghosts whispered back in those moments.
Pain begat pain. What was the antidote for it? I’d been closest to Cairo. My oldest brother Bern held a more distant place, a peripheral shadow in the shape of our father. He’d fought back too, and the laser bolt slammed between his eyes.
Cairo’s voice surfaced with each needle puncturing into the shallow points beneath my skin.
He said, “Run, Puppy!”
His nickname for me. Because I was the baby.
Once, in the middle of the tattooing, I shoved at the pain. At the horishi. Blood scored across my skin, ruining the line she’d been drawing. I made her start on a new image. I’d seen it in the ship’s educational files while voraciously reading about an ancient civilization from a country I’d never seen.
I told her to ink an Egyptian ankh over my heart, and she didn’t ask.
Age was a meaningless thing in space, especially on a ship. Maybe I was some form of adult, chronologically in my twenties. But to look in the mirror was a different story altogether, with pictures that didn’t match up. Still a teenager to outside eyes. My own face reminded me of the ones who swam back to me in the dark, in sleep, in blissed out moments with occasional drugs in my system. We all took part, never to excess, but skating that line was a part of this world.
My third world. One was my heart, the second was my armour, and the third was my artillery. Two of those things protected the other.
I hung out with a boy named Soochan. He was a little more gentle than the other boys, probably because he was addicted to sweet leaf. He tended to smile, even when shit was going down around him, a beatific expression like a saint in the throes of religious epiphany. Once when a buyer tried to shaft us, Soochan was almost sorry. He made her face the wall of the station tunnel where we’d been doing the deal; his voice was so soft. “Just close your eyes, baby, and this won’t hurt a bit.” He whipped her once with his gun and kicked her a few times, then stole what he could off her body—an old platinum ring, her data dots. “Madame Leung don’t like stiffers,” he said. Still smiling.
On this ride between deals, the ship’s drives hummed like a hive of bees all around us. Soochan sprawled on my bunk, blowing smoke rings to the ceiling between slurred rambles. I tried to read, but the words upended and crawled over one another like roaches running from the light. Nothing made sense. Maybe it was the drugs, but the nightmares had been plentiful lately, taking my concentration into the dark.
In the middle of Soochan’s words, he said, “. . . Azarcon . . .”
My lulled focus sharpened like a shiv. From my seat on the deck with my legs outstretched, slate in hand, I said, “What?”
“What?” he echoed back, the corner of his mouth tilting upward as if giving coordinates to his eyes. Clouded by smoke and whatever wandering thoughts he let off the leash.
“You said something. A name.”
“Uh—”
“Azarcon?” My name. My first world. Of course, he didn’t know.
“Don’t you read? Your head’s in that slate so damn much.” His hand flit, making the smoke from his sweet leaf cigret carve the air. “Captain Cairo Azarcon. EarthHub’s latest bulldog of deep space.”
I thought I was done collecting worlds. I thought Madame Leung had tied me to hers for the rest of my living days, one of her soldiers, one of her boys, all of the security and sanctimonious criminality of a group of people with no loyalty but to their own. Who needed more?
But this fourth world crashed into me and sheered to the side the next moment, casting me against my own armour.
“Captain Cairo Azarcon,” I said, like an invocation of the devil.
My brother lived.
When Captain Kahta had found me, had there been no others? Hadn’t she seen Cairo? Or had the pirates who had taken our colony also taken the one member of my family who’d lived and left nothing but the dead and thought-dead for the Chateaumargot to find.
There was nobody to ask.
I went on a treasure hunt around the Send. I excavated and saved every possible mention, note, and passing criticism lobbed toward my resurrected older brother. I became an Azarconologist, twice divorced from the name but like any spouse rendered obsolete by a new mate, I looked back with judgment. On myself if not on the one who’d left me.
I wanted to judge. I found shoddy pictures of a handsome man attached to reports of bravery and ruthless alien strit killing. He tended to avoid cams, so the only people who had a clear picture of him also had access to his military records or his daily life. But there was enough to see a resemblance. Dark eyes and dark hair. Tall. The kind of carriage in the spine that would rarely bend for anybody. He was the young scourge of aliens everywhere. He made his name as a fighter pilot but now commanded the spacecarrier Macedon. Specific corners of the Send said he was one to watch, like they were talking about a celebrity. The deep space war made military heroes.
My corner of the galaxy didn’t bow down to heroes. I didn’t care about the war.
He was a new father. Captain Cairo Azarcon was married and had a son.
I was an uncle.
What did blood mean?
I wanted to hate him. Didn’t he look for me? Couldn’t he have found me? In the entire galaxy, why didn’t his honed military skills somehow raze the stars for his little brother? Who told him I was dead, and why did he believe them? Why didn’t he refuse to stop looking until he had tangible proof of my death?
Neither of us were children now, and maybe, with so many years behind him, my brother also preferred to forget.
At Basquenal Rimstation 19, I met a woman at the bar and shacked up with her in a private den. After sex, she told me she was an investigative journalist and she’d been looking into my ship. She said this while smoking a cigret in my face. I was uniformly unsurprised. For some reason, when you had sex with a stranger, anything they said just seemed to go along.
“You think my ship’s a pirate? Because it isn’t. It’s not interesting enough to be a pirate.”
“No,” she said. She’d only told me her first name: Mabel. Her hair was long and silver but her face was young. Maybe from suspended aging treatments, so there was no telling her real age. Not that it mattered. “No,” she repeated. “Not a pirate, but they do recruit in unconventional ways.”
“Yeah?” I took the cigret from her and dragged. I could tell she was trying to read my eyes, but I’d been told enough times that I was “stoic,” that my stare walled people off and forced them to lay siege. So I watched her building a siege tower word by word.
“I found a node on the Send. Where the children are traded.”
She squinted at me as if this was supposed to mean something. When she didn’t get anything, she pressed on.
“They disguise it, of course. It looks like a parenting node where people are just talking about their kids. Getting advice. Arranging meetups at various stations. But there’re codewords. Pictures and codewords. These people know what to look for and how to ask for it.”
“Why are you telling me this? You want me to spy for your story?”
“No—but Paris, your name was there.” She glanced at my tags.
“My name Paris? Lots of kids are named Paris.” But my stomach began to form an ice rock, deep in the centre.
“Isn’t your last name Rahamon?”
I hadn’t told her that. It wasn’t something you told to someone you just shacked with. And maybe she could read my eyes after all.
My last name wasn’t Rahamon. I was reminded every time I heard it.
She said, “I recognized your first name and your face. Your picture had been posted. You were a little boy but the resemblance is obvious.” She climbed off the bed and went to her clothes, which were strewn on the floor in our haste to get together. Her body was flawless in a way that probably spoke of enhancements, but I hadn’t really noticed in the act. Now, as she leaned down to fish something out of her jacket pocket, I just wanted to get away.
But I couldn’t seem to move from the bed. This room. Or out of my own skin. She returned, sliding back beside me with a slate in her hand. She brushed at it, and soon lines of text and an image popped up.
A photo of me. As a child. I knew my own face like you did a vague stranger. Difficult to place but not forgotten.
I looked away before I allowed myself to read the words beside the image. The cigret burned between my fingers, so I pulled on it some more.
Where The Stars Rise: Asian Science Fiction and Fantasy Page 18