Zoe's Tale

by John Scalzi

  “What did your dad think about that?” I asked.

  “Well, I just met you,” Gretchen said. “I don’t know what sort of language you can handle.”

  “Oh. Well, that’s not good,” I said.

  “I don’t think he hates your parents,” Gretchen said, quickly. “It’s not like that. He just assumed that after everything he did, he’d get to lead the colony. ‘Disappointment’ doesn’t even begin to cover it. Although I wouldn’t say he likes your parents, either. He got a file on them when they were appointed and then spent the day muttering to himself as he read it.”

  “I’m sorry he’s disappointed,” I said. In my head I was wondering if I needed to write Gretchen off as a possible friend; one of those stupid “our houses are at war” scenarios. The first person my age I meet, going to Roanoke, and we were already in different camps.

  But then she said, “Yeah, well. At a certain point he got a little stupid about it. He was comparing himself to Moses, like, Oh, I’ve led my people to the promised land but I can’t enter myself”—and here she made little hand movements to accentuate the point—“and that’s when I decided he was overreacting. Because we’re going, you know. And he’s on your parents’ advisory council. So I told him to suck it up.”

  I blinked. “You actually used those words?” I said.

  “Well, no,” Gretchen said. “What I actually said was I wondered if I kicked a puppy if it would whine more than he did.” She shrugged. “What can I say. Sometimes he needs to get over himself.”

  “You and I are so totally going to be best friends,” I said.

  “Are we?” she said, and grinned at me. “I don’t know. What are the hours?”

  “The hours are terrible,” I said. “And the pay is even worse.”

  “Will I be treated horribly?” she asked.

  “You will cry yourself to sleep on a nightly basis,” I said.

  “Fed crusts?” she asked.

  “Of course not,” I said. “We feed the crusts to the dogs.”

  “Oh, very nice,” she said. “Okay, you pass. We can be best friends.”

  “Good,” I said. “Another life decision taken care of.”

  “Yes,” she said, and then moved away from the rail. “Now, come on. No point wasting all this attitude on ourselves. Let’s go find something to point and laugh at.”

  Phoenix Station was a lot more interesting after that.

  SEVEN

  Here’s what I did when my dad took me down to Phoenix: I visited my own grave.

  Clearly, this needs an explanation.

  I was born and lived the first four years of my life on Phoenix. Near where I lived, there is a cemetery. In that cemetery is a headstone, and on that headstone are three names: Cheryl Boutin, Charles Boutin and Zoë Boutin.

  My mother’s name is there because she is actually buried there; I remember being there for her funeral and seeing her shroud put into the ground.

  My father’s name is there because for many years people believed his body was there. It’s not. His body lies on a planet named Arist, where he and I lived for a time with the Obin. There is a body buried here, though, one that looks like my father and has the same genes as he does. How it got there is a really complicated story.

  My name is there because before my father and I lived on Arist, he thought for a time that I had been killed in the attack on Covell, the space station he and I had lived on. There was no body, obviously, because I was still alive; my father just didn’t know it. He had my name and dates carved into the headstone before he was told I was still around.

  And so there you have it: three names, two bodies, one grave. The only place where my biological family exists, in any form, anywhere in the universe.

  In one sense, I’m an orphan, and profoundly so: My mother and father were only children, and their parents were dead before I was born. It’s possible I have second cousins twice removed somewhere on Phoenix, but I’ve never met them and wouldn’t know what to say to them even if they existed. Really, what do you say? “Hi, we share about four percent of our genetic makeup, let’s be friends”?

  The fact is, I’m the last of my line, the last member of the Boutin family, unless and until I decide to start having babies. Now, there’s a thought. I’m going to table it for now.

  In one sense I was an orphan. But in another sense…

  Well. First, my dad was standing behind me, watching me as I was kneeling down to look at the headstone my name was on. I don’t know how it is with other adoptees, but I can say that there never was a time with John and Jane that I didn’t feel cherished and loved and theirs. Even when I was going through that early puberty phase where I think I said “I hate you” and “Just leave me alone” six times daily and ten times on Sunday. I would have abandoned me at the bus stop, that’s for sure.

  John told me that back when he lived on Earth, he had a son, and his son had a boy, Adam, who would have been just about my age, which technically made me an aunt. I thought that was pretty neat. Going from having no family on the one hand to being someone’s aunt on the other is a fun trick. I told that to Dad; he said “you contain multitudes,” and then walked around with a smile for hours. I finally got him to explain it to me. That Walt Whitman, he knew what he was talking about.

  Second, there were Hickory and Dickory to the side of me, twitching and trembling with emotional energy, because they were at the gravesite of my father, even if my father wasn’t buried there, and never was. It didn’t matter. They were worked up because of what it represented. Through my father, I guess you could say I was adopted by the Obin, too, although my relationship to them wasn’t exactly like being someone’s daughter, or their aunt. It was a little closer to being their goddess. A goddess for an entire race of people.

  Or, I don’t know. Maybe something that sounds less egotistical: patron saint, or racial icon or mascot or something. It was hard to put into words; it was hard to even wrap my brain around most days. It’s not like I was put on a throne; most goddesses I know about don’t have homework and have to pick up dog poop. If this is what being an icon is all about, on a day-today basis it’s not terribly exciting.

  But then I think about the fact that Hickory and Dickory live with me and have spent their lives with me because their government made it a demand of my government when the two of them signed a peace pact. I am actually a treaty condition between two intelligent races of creatures. What do you do with that sort of fact?

  Well, I tried to use it once: When I was younger I tried to argue with Jane that I should be able to stay up late one night because I had special status under treaty law. I thought that was pretty clever. Her response was to haul out the entire thousand-page treaty—I didn’t even know we had a physical copy—and invite me to find the part of the treaty that said I always got to have my way. I stomped over to Hickory and Dickory and demanded they tell Mom to let me do what I wanted; Hickory told me they would have to file a request to their government for guidance, and it would take several days, by which time I would already have to be in bed. It was my first exposure to the tyranny of bureaucracy.

  What I do know that it means is that I belong to the Obin. Even at that moment in front of the grave, Hickory and Dickory were recording it into their consciousness machines, the machines my father made for them. They would be stored and sent to all the other Obin. Every other Obin would stand here with me, as I knelt at my grave and the grave of my parents, tracing their names and mine with my finger.

  I belong. I belong to John and Jane; I belong to Hickory and Dickory and every Obin. And yet for all that, for all the connection I feel—for all the connection I have—there are times when I feel alone, and I have the sensation of drifting and not connecting at all. Maybe that’s just what you do when you’re this age; you have your stretches of alienation. Maybe to find yourself you’ve got to feel like you’re unplugged. Maybe everyone goes through this.

  What I knew, though, there at the grave, my grave,
was that I was having one of those moments.

  I had been here before, to this grave. First when my mother was buried, and then, a few years later, when Jane brought me here to say good-bye to both my mother and father. All the people who know me have gone away, I said to her. All of my people are gone. And then she came over to me and asked me to live with her and John, in a new place. Asked me to let her and John be my new people.

  I touched the jade elephant at my neck and smiled, thinking of Jane.

  Who am I? Who are my people? Who do I belong to? Questions with easy answers and no answers. I belong to my family and to the Obin and sometimes to no one at all. I am a daughter and goddess and girl who sometimes just doesn’t know who she is or what she wants. My brain rattles around my head with this stuff and gives me a headache. I wish I were alone here. I’m glad John’s with me. I want to see my new friend Gretchen and make sarcastic comments until we burst out laughing. I want to go to my stateroom on the Magellan, turn off the light, hug my dog, and cry. I want to leave this stupid cemetery. I don’t ever want to leave it because I know I’m never coming back to it. This is my last time with my people, the ones who are already gone.

  Sometimes I don’t know if my life is complicated, or if it’s that I just think too much about things.

  I knelt at the grave, thought some more, and tried to find a way to say a last good-bye to my mother and father and to keep them with me, to stay and to go, to be the daughter and goddess and girl who doesn’t know what she wants, all at once, and to belong to everyone and keep myself.

  It took a while.

  EIGHT

  “You seem sad,” Hickory said, as we took the shuttle back to Phoenix Station. Dickory sat next to Hickory, impassive as ever.

  “I am sad,” I said. “I miss my mother and father.” I glanced over to John, who was sitting in the front of the shuttle with the pilot, Lieutenant Cloud. “And I think all this moving and leaving and going is getting to me a little bit. Sorry.”

  “No need to apologize,” Hickory said. “This journey has been stressful for us, too.”

  “Oh, good,” I said, turning back to the two of them. “Misery loves company.”

  “If you would like we would be happy to try to cheer you up,” Hickory said.

  “Really,” I said. This was a new tactic. “How would you do that?”

  “We could tell you a story,” Hickory said.

  “What story?” I asked.

  “One that Dickory and I have been working on,” Hickory said.

  “You’ve been writing?” I said. I didn’t bother to keep the incredulousness out of my voice.

  “Is it that surprising?” Hickory said.

  “Absolutely,” I said. “I didn’t know you had it in you.”

  “The Obin don’t have stories of their own,” Hickory said. “We learned about them through you, when you had us read to you.”

  I was puzzled for a minute, and then I remembered: When I was younger I asked Hickory and Dickory to read bedtime stories to me. It was a failed experiment, to say the least; even with their consciousness machines on, neither of them could tell a story to save their lives. The beats were all wrong—they didn’t know how to read the emotions in the story is the best way I can put it. They could read the words, all right. They just couldn’t tell the story.

  “So you’ve been reading stories since then,” I said.

  “Sometimes,” Hickory said. “Fairy tales and myths. We are most interested in myths, because they are stories of gods and creation. Dickory and I have decided to make a creation myth for the Obin, so we have a story of our own.”

  “And this is the story you want to tell me,” I said.

  “If you think it would cheer you up,” Hickory said.

  “Well, is it a happy creation myth?” I asked.

  “It is for us,” Hickory said. “You should know you play a part in it.”

  “Well, then,” I said. “I definitely want to hear it now.”

  Hickory conferred with Dickory quickly, in their own language. “We will tell you the short version,” Hickory said.

  “There’s a long version?” I said. “I’m really intrigued.”

  “The remainder of the shuttle ride will not be long enough for the long version,” Hickory said. “Unless we then went back down to Phoenix. And then back up. And then back down again.”

  “The short version it is,” I said.

  “Very well,” Hickory said, and began. “Once upon a time—”

  “Really?” I said. “‘Once upon a time’?”

  “What is wrong with ‘once upon a time’?” Hickory asked. “Many of your stories and myths start that way. We thought it would be appropriate.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with it,” I said. “It’s just a little old-fashioned.”

  “We will change it if you like,” Hickory said.

  “No,” I said. “I’m sorry, Hickory, I interrupted you. Please start again.”

  “Very well,” Hickory said. “Once upon a time…”

  Once upon a time there were creatures who lived on a moon of a large gas planet. And these creatures did not have a name, nor did they know they lived on a moon, nor did they know that moon circled a gas planet, nor what a planet was, nor did they know anything in a way that could be said that they were knowing it. They were animals, and they had no consciousness, and they were born and lived and died, all their lives without thought or the knowledge of thought.

  One day, although the animals knew nothing of the idea of days, visitors came to the moon that circled the gas planet. And these visitors were known as Consu, although the animals on the planet did not know that, because it was what the Consu called themselves, and the animals were not smart and could not ask the Consu what they called themselves, or know that things could have names.

  The Consu came to the moon to explore and they did, noting all the things about the moon, from the air in its sky to the shape of its lands and waters to the shape and manner of all the life that lived in the moon’s land, air and water. And when they came to these certain creatures who lived on this moon, the Consu became curious about them and how they lived their lives, and studied them and how they were born and lived and died.

  After the Consu had watched the creatures for some time the Consu decided that they would change the creatures, and would give them something that the Consu possessed and that the creatures did not, which was intelligence. And the Consu took the genes of the creatures and changed them so that their brains, as they grew, would develop intelligence well beyond what the creatures would themselves achieve through experience or through many years of evolution. The Consu made these changes to a few creatures and then set them back on the moon and over many generations all the creatures became intelligent.

  Once the Consu gave intelligence to the creatures they did not stay on the moon, nor shared themselves with the creatures, but departed and left machines above the sky, which the creatures would not see, to watch the creatures. And so the creatures for a very long time did not learn of the Consu and what they had done to the creatures.

  And for a very long time these creatures who now had intelligence grew in number and learned many things. They learned how to make tools and create a language and work together for common goals and to farm the land and mine metals and create science. But although the creatures thrived and learned, they did not know that they among all intelligent creatures were unique, because they did not know there were other intelligent creatures.

  One day, after the creatures had gained intelligence, another race of intelligent people came to visit the moon, the first since the Consu, although the creatures did not remember the Consu. And these new people called themselves the Arza and each of the Arza also had a name. And the Arza were amazed that the creatures on the moon, who were intelligent and who had built tools and cities, did not have a name and did not have names for each of their number.

  And it was then the creatures discovered through the A
rza what made them unique: They were the only people in all the universe who were not conscious. Although every creature could think and reason, it could not know itself as every other intelligent creature could know itself. The creatures lacked awareness of who they were as individuals, even as they lived and thrived and grew on the face of the moon of the planet.

  When the creatures learned this, and although no individual could know it felt this, there grew within the race of these creatures a hunger for that thing they did not have: for the consciousness that the creatures knew collectively they did not have as individuals. And this is when the creatures first gave themselves a name, and called themselves “Obin,” which in their language meant “The ones who lack,” although it might be better translated as “The deprived ones” or “The ones without gifts,” and although they named their race they did not give names to each of their individual number.

  And the Arza took pity on the creatures who now called themselves Obin, and revealed to them the machines that floated in the sky and that were put there by the Consu, who they knew to be a race of immense intelligence and unknowable aims. The Arza studied the Obin and discovered that their biology was unnatural, and so the Obin learned who had created them.

  And the Obin asked the Arza to take them to the Consu, so they could ask why the Consu had done these things, but the Arza refused, saying the Consu met only with other races to fight them, and they feared what would happen to the Arza if they brought the Obin before the Consu.

  So it was the Obin determined they must learn to fight. And while the Obin did not fight the Arza, who had been kind to the Obin and took pity on them and then left the Obin in peace, there came another race of creatures called the Belestier, who planned to colonize the moon on which the Obin lived and kill all the Obin because they would not live in peace with them. The Obin struggled with the Belestier, killing all those who landed on their moon, and in doing so found they had an advantage; because the Obin did not know themselves, they were not afraid of death, and had no fear where others had fear in abundance.