by Neil Clarke
“I believe you.”
“But he doesn’t have any stories. His memory stops after meeting the emperor, going out on those first tentative incursions. At some point his entire platoon came back with the emperor, and the powers that be must have suspected a Stranger was among them, because they were all examined, if that’s even an adequate word for it. He’s lost most of his memories of that period, and although his official record provides dates and locations, details are sparse.”
. . . possibilities of message retrieval using insufficient search parameters are questionable . . .
“I hope a message comes through. I’ll return to the ship, spend the rest of the day in queries.”
“Even if you can’t find anything, please come to the ceremony tomorrow? Having someone from outside in attendance, in official capacity or not—”
“Of course. Of course. I’ll be there,” he said, even though the idea of standing within a gathering of people he did not know made him cringe.
That evening he sat alone in the recording room in the hours before enforced sleep, as he would sit alone before many sleeps until the powers above (and there were thousands of layers, he thought, of powers above) chose someone to replace Anders. As he had sat alone time after time when Anders had still been alive and only a few meters away, simply another stranger listening for voices in the dark, recording what those voices had to say. Tonight there were a thousand such voices, most chronicling the minutiae of rulings and orders, specifications and principles, some calling out for contact from worlds not visited in generations, some pleading for assistance, remuneration, or the simple return of a greeting, and a few hesitant inquiries concerning Strangers, and fewer still wondering aloud if Strangers had at last taken over all that could be seen, heard, or imagined. The emperor himself, however, was conspicuously silent, as he had been silent, and invisible, all of Jacob’s life. The possibility the sought-after letter might miraculously arrive seemed almost infinitely remote.
“Continue to parse and deliver all incoming and previously uncate-gorized communications,” Jacob said aloud. “But please intersperse with entries from the diaries of Anders Nils.”
Command remained silent, as it had all evening, but swiftly complied.
The hall where the ceremony was held was small, but so was the attendance. Official banners had been hung, each one a few points off in color as far as Jacob could determine, lending a not-entirely unpleasant but unmistakable disharmony to the proceedings.
The walls cycled images of the retiring colonel at various points in his career, but there were numerous, obvious gaps. A few of the images portrayed groups of officers and enlisted. Jacob wondered if any of the blurred, shadowed faces was that of their emperor.
People stood up one at a time and offered chronicles of their experiences serving with the colonel. Some talked about his skills as an administrator, a supervisor. One or two said he was a visionary, but provided no evidence for this claim. A man appearing older than the colonel told a semi-humorous story of their time serving together in the campaigns, but stopped abruptly and sat down. Jacob then realized the man must have also been part of the group suffering the examination which had scattered the colonel’s memories.
Anya stood and told everyone what a good father he had been. She talked about his patience, and how much she respected him. When she sat down Jacob saw her warily eyeing the thin sheet of film Jacob held in his shaking hand.
“Is there anyone else?” a small man in a faded clerk’s uniform asked.
Jacob stood and unsteadily made his way to the front of the room. When he turned around he looked for someone to focus on. He discovered he couldn’t begin to look at the colonel, but watching Anya’s face as he read was pleasant and barely possible. He held the sheet tightly to minimize the shaking.
“The vast spaces between us are filled with messages. In these scattered times few seem to find their intended destinations, or satisfy us with the things we’ve always wanted to hear. But sometimes you can stitch together a voice here, a voice there, until some clarity of feeling emerges. I cannot vouch for the complete accuracy of what I am about to read—it is difficult to verify the messages that come to us out of the vast unknown. But I intuit its general true feeling.
“To Colonel William Bolduan, officer in custody of Joy, from Joseph, once acquaintance and always friend, emperor of all he loves, hates, or imagines, on the occasion of the colonel’s retirement from a lifetime of most meritorious service.
“Now, you may not remember because of measures taken both terrible and necessary, but when I hungered so long for sustenance, and courage, you made us a meal out of the wings of some glorious bird whose name was unfamiliar to all, whose face bore a map of the hard world we’d traveled, and while we ate, our eyes became like white jewels, and we paid each other out of laughter and song. For us there were no soldiers or emperors, no desperate orders or misguided honor to separate us, and we swore to each other the peace that comes with age. I would stand by you as your children were married, and we would tolerate no serious disagreement, and think nothing of the worlds that separated us, but praise the fineness of difference.
“When we woke I could see your embarrassment, the shame you felt for being so familiar, and you would not hear when I explained what all emperors know, that sometimes the heart must be lubricated if any truth is to be told.
“Still, we were no strangers to adventure. We were not strangers in our hearts. Without regret I followed you into the fires at Weilung, where the breath of the dying fliers erased our uniforms and then our hair. In agony you carried me to the fountains of that fading world, where those beautiful ghosts regretted our injuries, and we lay swaddled in their manes as the battles raged without us, until finally I could open my eyes without screaming, and you had that ship waiting, and past the eighty-two falls of those unfortunate worlds you transported me, until the rest of the fleet arrived, and there began our first separation.
“And you should know my people thought it improper. They called themselves my people but in truth I was irretrievably theirs. Some beings must remain separate, they told me, and a friendship of equals is a lie we tell children. So I had to content myself with reports of your exploits, your rescue mission between the two green seas, the time you brought the children (those oh-so-gullible children!) out of the mines at Debel ‘Schian, and your long voyage out of the Cheylen clouds.
“If you could only remember our next meeting at the Hejen Temples! How broken I was over those jokes you told! I painted my cheeks like a little girl, and danced until you were too hoarse to sing. Later, when you were afraid your honor could not bear such frivolous and insane behavior, I somehow convinced you that sometimes insanity is the only reasonable response to atrocity, and the death of everything, and long voyages home, alone in the dark.
“But all this ends. And even I with such a grand, fully augmented memory, cannot remember the last time we laughed together, any more than you, my friend. It all has to end. And strangeness comes, and there is no science deep enough to explicate the secrets of the heart. An empire separates us, but still I think of you.
“Signed Joseph, your emperor.”
Jacob returned immediately to his ship. His dialogue with command continued in the recording room, even as the vessel departed that atmosphere, trailing unanswered messages from the occupants of Joy.
“This is a continuation of queries related to the death of Anders Nils, crewman reporter third. Are you prepared to answer these queries?”
“Ask me anything. You may also repeat questions from our first session. Obviously, I have nothing better to do.”
“Before proceeding to those queries we would like to ask you some possibly related questions concerning your stay on 960G4-32.”
“Yes, I imagine you do.”
“The letter you read from the Emperor Joseph—that was a complete fabrication, was it not?”
“Yes, a complete fabrication.”
“The letter was fabricat
ed from fabrications previously entered by Anders Nils in his diaries, concerning imaginary adventures you and he experienced while visiting a variety of worlds.”
“Yes, that was the principal source—Ander’s imaginary adventures and the imaginary friendship he invented for us. But I filled it in with a few details from the colonel’s service record, some stray descriptive passages from this soup of transmissions I have travelled in these past nine years. The style came out of Li Po’s Exile’s Letter. Have you read it?”
“The poem is in the database.”
“I admit I’ve hardly done it justice.”
“So you admit the emperor’s letter was a lie?”
Jacob waited, thinking, then said, “It is not a lie. It is an accurate depiction of the way Anders Nils felt about me, felt about the loneliness of the voyage. It is an accurate depiction of his yearnings. I also believe it is an accurate depiction of Colonel Bolduan’s yearnings, and perhaps those of our maybe-living, maybe-not emperor as well. It is certainly an accurate depiction of my own feelings.”
“But the events you’ve narrated, events which were supposedly experienced by Colonel Bolduan, are fictional.”
“Those events, those memories are gone forever. They were taken from the colonel. If the colonel had lost a leg in combat, the service would have provided him with a prosthetic. The events I have narrated in the emperor’s letter are a prosthetic for what he has lost.”
“Do you know why Anders would commit suicide?”
“I cannot be sure. I will never be sure. But I believe the stories he had made up, or fabricated, to use your word, had ceased to work for him. He must have been terribly, terribly lonely.”
“He should have spoken to you. He could have asked us for assistance.”
“Some people are unable to ask, or tell. People do what they can do.”
“Why did you not know Anders was thinking of committing suicide?”
“Because I failed at the one thing I have been so thoroughly trained to do. I failed to listen.”
And there ended the interview. Jacob returned to his long nights listening, alone, waiting for Anders’s replacement, wondering if there would even be a replacement. Now and then he would listen to Anders’s diaries. Now and then he would make up diary entries of his own.
Command wrapped up its report and transmitted it into the empty space between its reported location and a vague approximation of the location called home, not knowing, or caring, if contact was made.
Melinda Snodgrass has written multiple novels and screenplays, and is best known for her work on Star Trek: The Next Generation. She has also worked on numerous other shows, including The Profilers, Sliders, and Seaquest DSV. She coedits the Wild Cards series with George R. R. Martin. Melinda is the author of The Edge series, which is published by Tor Books in the US and Titan Books in the UK. She lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
THE WAYFARER’S ADVICE
Melinda Snodgrass
We came out of Fold only twenty-three thousand kilometers from Kusatsu-Shirane. “Good job,” I started to say, but was interrupted by blaring impact alarms. “Shit, shit, shit,” Melin at navigation chattered, and her fingers swept back and forth across the touch screen like a child finger painting. Our ship, the Selkie, obedient to Melin’s sweeping commands, fired its ram jet. My stomach was left resting against the ceiling and my balls seemed to leap into my throat as we dropped relative to our previous position.
A massive piece of steel and composite resin, edges jagged and blackened by an explosion, tumbled slowly past our front viewport. It had been four years since I’d been cashiered from the Imperial Navy of the Solar League, but the knowledge gained during the preceding twenty years was still with me.
“That was an Imperial ship,” I said. My eye caught writing on the hull. I had an impression of a name, and my gut closed down into an aching ball. It couldn’t be . . . but if it was . . . I had to know. I added an order. “Match trajectory and image-capture.”
Jax, the Tiponi Flute, piped through the breathing holes lining his sides, “Not good news for Kusatsu-Shirane if the League has found them.” The alien had several of its leafy tendrils wrapped around handholds welded to the walls, and his elongated body swayed with the swoops and dives of the ship.
“I’d call that the understatement of the year,” Baca grunted from his position at communication.
Three hundred years ago, humans had developed a faster-than-light drive and gone charging out into our arm of the Milky Way galaxy. There we had met up with a variety of alien races, kicked their butts, and subjugated them under human rule. But two hundred years before the human blitzkrieg began, there had been other ships that had headed to the stars. Long-view ships with humans in suspended animation, searching for new worlds.
Most of these pioneers were cranks and loons determined to set up their various ideas of utopia. Best guess was that probably eighty percent of them died either during the journey or shortly after locating on a planet. But some survived to create Reichart’s World, and Nirvana, and Kusatsu-Shirane, and numerous others.
The League called them Hidden Worlds, and took a very dim view of human-settled planets that weren’t part of the League. In fact, the League rectified that situation whenever they ran across one of these worlds. The technique was simple and brutal: The League arrived, used their superior firepower to force a surrender, then took away all the children under the age of sixteen and fostered them with families on League planets. They then brought in League settlers to swamp the colonists who remained behind.
But it hadn’t worked this time, because there were pieces of Imperial ships orbiting Kusatsu-Shirane. Something had killed a whole battle group. Whatever it was, I didn’t want it destroying my little trade vessel.
“Contact orbital control, and tell them we’re friendlies,” I ordered Baca.
“I’ve been trying, Tracy, but nobody’s answering. Worse, the whole planet’s gone silent. Nobody’s talking to nobody.”
“Some new Imperial weapon to knock out communications?” Melin asked.
“Are you picking up anything?” I asked.
“Music,” Baca replied.
We all exchanged glances; then I said, “Let’s hear it.”
Baca switched from headphone to speaker, and flipped through the communication channels from the planet. Slow, mournful music filled the bridge. It wasn’t all the same melody, but they all had one thing in common. Each melody was desperately sad.
Something terrible had happened on Kusatsu-Shirane, and judging by the debris, something equally terrible had happened in orbit. Periodically, Melin fired small maneuvering jets as she dodged through the ruins, but despite her best efforts the bridge echoed with pings and scrapes as debris impacted against the hull.
“Not the safest of neighborhoods, Captain,” came my executive officer’s voice in my left ear, and I jumped. Damn, the creature could move quietly! I gave a quick glance over my shoulder, and found myself looking directly into the Isanjo’s sherry-colored eyes. Jahan had settled onto the back of my chair like Alice’s Cheshire cat.
“We’ll grab an identification and get out,” I said.
Jahan wrapped her tail around my throat. I couldn’t tell if the gesture was meant to convey comfort or a threat. An Isanjo’s tail was powerful enough to snap a two-by-four. My neck would offer little challenge.
As if in answer to my statement, the screen on the arm of my jacket flared, adjusted contrast, and the name of the ship came into focus: Nuestra Señora de la Concepción. My impression had been correct. It had been her ship. I gave the bridge of my nose a hard squeeze, fighting to hold back tears.
“Holy crap, that’s a flagship!” Baca yelped as he accessed the computer files.
“Under the command of Mercedes de Arango, the Infanta who would have held the lives of countless millions of humans and aliens in her hands once her father died,” Jax recited in his piping tones. His encyclopedic memory baffled me. I had no idea how that
much brain power could reside in something that looked like an oversized stalk of bamboo.
“Instead, she precedes him into oblivion,” Jahan said.
The attention of my crew was like a pinprick, the unspoken question hung between us. “Yes, I was at the Academy with her,” I said.
“So, did you know her?” Baca asked.
“I’m a tailor’s son. What do you think?”
Baca reacted to my tone. “Just asking,” he said sulkily.
A fur-covered hand swept lightly beneath my eyes. “You weep,” Jahan said, and I was glad she had used her knuckle. An Isanjo’s four-fingered hand is tipped with ferocious claws, capable of disemboweling another Isanjo or even a man. She leaned in closer and whispered, “And I note you did not actually answer the question.”
“Twelve ships were destroyed here. Six thousand starmen died. If things had fallen out differently, I might have been among them,” I said loudly. “Of course I’m upset.”
“They came here to do violence to the people of Kusatsu-Shirane,” Jax tweeted.
“It wasn’t a duty they would have relished.”
“But they would have done it,” Jahan said. “The Infanta would have ordered it done.”
I shrugged. “Orders are orders. I cleared a Hidden World once. When I was a newly minted lieutenant.”
“And now you trade with them and keep them secret,” Jahan said.
“Making me a traitor as well as a cashiered thief.” I changed the subject. “We need to find out what happened down the gravity well.”
“It will take a damn lot of fuel to set the ship down,” Jax tweeted. Flutes were famous for their mathematical ability, and Jax was no exception. He was our purchasing agent, and I was pretty damn sure he was the reason the Selkie ran at a profit. He counted every Reales and squeezed it twice.
“I’ll take the Wasp,” I said, referring to the small League fighter craft we’d picked up at a salvage auction. The cannons had been removed, but it was still screamingly fast and relatively cheap to fly.
Melin had given us enough gravity that I could grip the sides of the access ladder, and slide down to the level that held the docking bay. Even so, Jahan, using her four hands and prehensile tail, reached the lower deck before me.