by Kali Wallace
House of Wisdom had once been the pride and joy of the Space and Exploration Commission. Now it was a crypt.
And we were flying toward it on a broad, gentle arc.
In the front row M’Baga reached for his harness.
“We need you to stay in your seat, Professor,” Panya said. She was still smiling, but her voice had hitched up a notch, taking on the breathy, little-girl pitch she used when she most wanted to appear nonthreatening. “If the shuttle has to accelerate suddenly, you could be injured.”
“Is there something wrong?” M’Baga asked mildly. “We seem to be well off the usual course.”
“There’s nothing wrong. We’re taking a detour, that’s all.”
But the fellows knew by now that Panya was lying. No ship should pass close enough to House of Wisdom to see it with the naked eye. For ten years it had waited in orbit maintained by occasional, automated thruster fire, trailing the Moon on its orbit by some two hundred thousand kilometers, and protected by a ruthless security net of high-powered drones. To discourage daredevils or scavengers from nosing so close that they would put themselves in danger, SPEC maintained a strict no-fly perimeter of fifty thousand kilometers, with severe punishments for even accidental breaches.
“I’d like to speak with the captain,” M’Baga said. There was a click as he unclasped his harness.
“This will be fun,” Henke said. I glanced at him. He was smiling.
Panya caught my eye over the tops of the seats. I nodded. It was time.
Dag drew a gun from a compartment in the crew area and pointed it at M’Baga. His face carried none of Panya’s serenity or Henke’s pleasure, nor was there the slightest hesitation in his voice when he said, “You don’t need to talk to the captain.”
M’Baga stilled, looking from Panya to Dag. “What’s going on?”
“You’re going to remain in your seat.” Panya raised her own weapon; her hands trembled. “Fasten your harness, please.”
Henke took two weapons from the rear compartment and pressed one into my hand. We were not carrying the suppression weapons the Councils favored to subdue people using electric shock or sedation. These were projectile weapons designed for use in space. Most of the passengers had probably never seen one before except on news reports or in history books. The Councils saved their violence for those they could not control, not the sheep who submitted to their will.
Nothing has weight in space, but there was a pull to the gun’s mass that I could not ignore, and it made my motions awkward. I caught the slightest sneer of disapproval on Henke’s broad red face. I ignored it.
“What’s going on?” M’Baga said again. He was speaking calmly, deliberately slowing his words, as though we were wild animals and he meant to tame us. “What do you want?”
“Please stay in your seats,” Panya said. “We don’t want you to get hurt.”
“If you tell us what you want, we can help,” the professor said.
The passengers gaped at Panya and Dag, all of them transfixed and on the verge of panic. I had not expected fear to mesmerize them so easily. They could not look away as Panya repeated herself, told the professor to stay quiet, told the students to remain seated. She spoke in the same soft way she used to when teaching children on the homestead, and like those children, the passengers were captivated by her voice—save one.
Bhattacharya was not looking at Panya. He was looking at House of Wisdom.
There was a spark in the back of my mind, the beginning of something that I might have recognized as doubt, had I considered it at all. But watching and seeing are two different things, and I did not know what it meant that, when faced with armed strangers on what was supposed to be a peaceful trip, nothing inside the shuttle frightened Jaswinder Bhattacharya as much as the ship outside that window.
I heard the click of a harness and snapped my attention to the front of the cabin. M’Baga hadn’t moved. There was a collective gasp, the passengers inhaling in fear—
A young man surged from his seat. The one in the middle row, who had been flirting with Panya, who had first spotted House of Wisdom. He grabbed the seat in front of him and propelled himself upward with so much force he struck the ceiling with his shoulder and bounced back. Panya and Dag swung their guns toward him. M’Baga took advantage of their distraction to unfasten his harness.
“Panya!” I shouted, but she was already reacting. She turned her weapon to M’Baga again, the muzzle only half a meter from his face.
“Please,” she said softly. “Sit down, Professor.”
But the young man, that stupid young man, he kicked the window behind him, foot skidding on the smooth surface, and launched himself toward Panya and Dag. He twisted in the air, his arms flung out, grasping clumsily for Dag’s weapon. He let out a yell—wordless, pathetic. There was a sharp pop. His head vanished in a pink mist.
My finger released the trigger.
Dag reached out to stop the body on its forward trajectory.
One of the women screamed, and once she started she didn’t stop. Her shrieks filled the cabin. Where there was frightened quiet before, now there was only noise. Shouting, screaming, crying, demanding answers and expecting none, a suffocating crush of sound. We were going to lose control of our hostages. They were panicking, and they needed to be cowed.
I pressed my weapon to the head of Bhattacharya’s friend.
“Don’t move,” I said.
Somehow, through the screams, he heard me. I couldn’t see his expression; I was looking at Bhattacharya. That face I had studied in news reports and stolen SPEC files so many times, as familiar to me as that of my own brother. He looked at his friend, looked at my gun, looked at me. Above their heads the red mist coalesced into larger droplets, the droplets into globules, coming together like the beginnings of a solar system, gathering around the bits of brain and skull. A molecular cloud forming a star.
“You’re going to do what we say,” I said to Bhattacharya, my voice just loud enough to carry over the whimpers and pleas, “or I’ll kill him too.”
The Earth our ancestors left behind was dying. They named this ship Mournful Evening Song because they could not see their way through the darkness. But if you can hear this, if humanity survives even now, we want you to know we have found our dawn. Soon we will sink our roots into the soil of a new world. We have nothing but hope in our hearts.
—FRAGMENT 1, MOURNFUL EVENING SONG VIA UC33-X
(Archaic Mandarin Chinese [Beijing dialect, circa 200–100 PCE]. Data reconstruction and translation by Gregory Lago, House of Wisdom, Deep Space Archaeology.)
JAS
I saw my mother die a thousand times. In nightmares, in unguarded waking moments, in the drug-induced haze following every surgery and the long, lonely quiet of recovery, I imagined her death as it might have been, as it could have been, and impossibly as well, methods and means that made no sense and could never have happened. I imagined a hundred scenarios leading to a hundred more, sometimes peaceful, more often horrific, the probabilities and potentialities tangling around and around themselves until they were a storm in my mind, every one true, every one an agony.
There was surveillance everywhere aboard House of Wisdom. There were cameras in the laboratories, public areas, and corridors. Even in the private living quarters, absent video and audio recorders, the ship was watching: the medical system monitored the location and health of every person aboard to constantly assess who was ill and who was well, who had worked too long and who was rested enough to call upon in an emergency, a never-ending churn of calculations and assessments.
On the morning of the fourth of January in year 393 of the Reconstruction Era, the ship detected the heartbeats of four hundred and seventy-eight people. Four hundred and seventy-eight crew, researchers, staff, and families. Four hundred and seventy-eight thriving and unsuspecting lives, not one of them aware that Dr.
Lago’s virus had already begun to spread.
Twenty-three hours later, there were none.
Laid out all together on a single image, the pulse lines fell flat like seismographs in the aftermath of a world-shaking quake. For many there was a wild spike of panic as they realized they were infected. Some ended there. Others subsided into an eerie calm with heartbeats so regular they might have been paced by a machine. Their calm might last minutes, hours, but it, too, ended with death. Some died in clusters, groups of ten or fifteen people extinguished all at once. Many died alone.
Somewhere in the mess of flattening lines, my father—
Identification: Roy, Vinod
Position: Chief of Botany and Horticulture
Location: Personal living quarters 7.23-S
Time of death: 17:37:04 01.03.393
Cause of death: Hemorrhagic shock
And hours later, when the signals of the survivors had thinned to a few jangling electric kicks—
Identification: Bhattacharya, Amita
Position: Propulsion Engineer (Research Primary)
Location: Unknown
Time of death: 02:13:56 01.04.393
Cause of death: Unknown
The record of my mother’s death was among the last disjointed fragments of data the ship had transmitted before it went dark.
All of this information was sealed by SPEC Security, but if a person were truly determined, and possessed the right connections, those records could be uncovered. My aunt was one such person.
It was just before the start of school when I was fourteen. All summer I had been short-tempered to the point of absurdity, picking fights with everybody, sulking for days in my bedroom with the curtains drawn. Baqir had visited for a couple of weeks, but he had gone home two days ago. We fought before he left—there were shouts, blows exchanged, bloodied lips, and quickly hidden tears—and I was certain when the school year began he would decide that friendship with me wasn’t worth the trouble, and I wouldn’t be able to blame him. I had said unforgivable things. I couldn’t even stand my own company. I woke every morning wanting to crawl out of my skin, went to bed every night hoping I wouldn’t wake up in the morning, and through all the hours in between, I felt phantom aches and pains vibrating through my entire body. I would lie in my bed, the house hushed around me, and imagine fissures appearing in my bones one by one, like cracks spreading over a frozen lake. I pictured them as faint lines of sickly yellow light, a spiderweb of fractures spreading through my body, every one of them sparking with the slightest pain as it broke open. I had seen the images from my medical records. Half my bones had broken when my mother’s experimental craft accelerated me away from House of Wisdom; the pilot’s chair had been designed for a full-grown adult in a compression flight suit, not a twelve-year-old child in his pajamas. By the time I was fourteen, the injuries were healing, the constant pain finally reduced to occasional flares, but in dark moments I could feel every wound becoming new again.
It had been a hot day and it promised to be a hot night. The monsoon finally passed from the hills above Dharamsala a week or two before, leaving in its wake a heavy mist that slunk over the lake, cloaking the rhododendrons in a clinging damp veil. It was too warm to open the house to the outside, but my aunt asked the staff to do it anyway. She liked to taste the night around her, unfiltered by the house’s enviro controls. We ate dinner at the counter in the kitchen, a simple meal of dal and roti. We did not speak. I picked at my food and stared at the lake. I watched the mist drift above the water and wondered if it would feel good to take a night swim and knew I would not find the energy to do so. The stars were hidden anyway, and the night was no comfort without stars.
“I have something for you,” my aunt said.
I was so surprised to hear her speak that I started, bumping my plate into my water glass with a soft clink. “What?”
“You’re old enough now,” she said.
Padmavati Bhattacharya did not explain herself to anyone, and especially not to me, the nephew she had never wanted to raise. She had told me once that several people came forward after the House of Wisdom incident with offers to adopt me. For a time I let myself imagine what my life would have been like if she had let them. To grow up with another family, in the home of people who had seen a broken boy on the news and decided they wanted to surround him with warmth and love. To have siblings, cousins, impostor parents with wringing hands and sad eyes. I imagined a life in which they might have changed my name, taken me somewhere—as though such a place could exist—where I was not a constant reminder of the world’s tragedy. Where I could have been somebody other than my dead mother’s shattered son.
My aunt had never even met any of those would-be adoptive parents. She told me they only wanted fame and prestige, not a child. She was probably right. Still I wondered.
I waited as she set aside her dinner and turned to the kitchen wallscreen. She had eaten even less than usual. My aunt was a small woman, birdlike in her frame; when my mother was alive, she had dwarfed her older sister so much she could rest her chin on my aunt’s head. They would both laugh when she did that, playful, younger than their years. I could not remember when I had last seen my aunt laugh. I could not remember ever thinking her fragile before, but that evening, the two of us in our house by the lake, she looked so very small, and so very old, tired in a way that grayed her brown skin and stooped her normally dancer-straight shoulders. Fear and worry stirred beneath the selfish numbness I had been wallowing in for days. She never rested. She would not tell me if she was unwell.
A list of file names filled the screen.
“What is that?” I asked.
“This,” said my aunt, and she sighed on the word, an uncharacteristic pause, “is all of the data received from House of Wisdom before the transmissions stopped.”
A distant, low buzz filled my ears. My skin went cool and clammy all over. My aunt left me alone in the kitchen. She might have touched my arm as she passed; she was not one for casual gestures of affection. For a long time—minutes, an hour, time stretched and snapped around me, meaningless in its flexibility— I could not bring myself to open even one of those files. I didn’t know what to do. I hated that my aunt had given this to me and walked away. She would not have done so unless she wanted me to see something. She never did anything without reason.
Then, without even meaning to, I was looking for my parents.
When I had begun speaking again, months after the attack, I told everybody who asked that I did not remember anything. I had blocked the trauma from my mind. It was all a blur, a nightmare haze. I did not remember. Not the spread of the virus, not the cascade of deaths, not leaving House of Wisdom, not drifting in space aboard my mother’s ship. I told them I did not remember Dr. Lago and the outrage that gripped the onboard scientists when he was caught hiding data from UC33-X. I told them I did not know how my father had died. They suspected I was lying, but eventually SPEC Intelligence investigators decided that the testimony of a child who could barely speak wasn’t likely to provide the answers they wanted.
It was easy to find the surveillance recording of the moment my mother sent me away. I remembered the location precisely: Level 12, Section D. Experimental Propulsion. The workshop where she built her small ships had once been as familiar to me as my own bedroom, but in the recording it looked as alien to me as another planet. There was already a corpse in the workshop, a woman named Linna, a fuel scientist and one of my mother’s friends. My mother and I came through the door, floating, not walking; House of Wisdom had been in orbit for nearly a month. She pulled me along behind her. My pajamas were damp with my own blood, spilled from my nose, by then sticky and cooling to a ruddy crust, and my mother’s blood from the wounds she had sustained protecting me. I had never forgotten how it itched when it flaked from my hands. How it tasted flowing over my lips.
In my
aunt’s kitchen I stood, walked to the sink, and threw up my dinner. I rinsed my mouth. I returned to the recording.
My mother put me into the first of her experimental ships, the one she had named Tiger. There was no audio to accompany the visual record, but I knew I had begged her to come with me. Our hands had smeared blood throughout the craft’s small airlock, the cockpit, over the controls and pilot’s seat, turning my mother’s great engineering achievement into a crime scene. My mother had promised to follow, but she had things to do first. I had been crying when she sealed me inside, alone.
My mother returned to the launch console outside the dock. She gave the launch command. The air vented and the bay doors opened. The docking clamps maneuvered Tiger beyond the hull, beyond the reach of the surveillance cameras, and I was gone.
Because I was not properly logged out of the ship’s roster, the medical system interpreted that separation as a system error, a curious blip that left me neither dead nor alive in the ship’s eyes.
Identification: Bhattacharya, Jaswinder
Position: Minor Child
Location: Auxiliary craft TIGER ME-3
Time of signal loss: 12:53:04 01.03.393
Cause of signal loss: Unknown
When my mother turned to leave her workshop, she looked up at the surveillance camera—a steady long look, her eyes fiery with anger. She said something, lips moving briefly, silently. It might have been I’m sorry.
She left her sanctum on Level 12 and vanished.
There was no visual record of her after that. The ship’s computer was severely compromised by then—the crew had done it themselves, in fits of hysteria—and the surveillance system was badly malfunctioning. A great deal of information was never recorded, and only a fraction of what was recorded had ever been transmitted to Earth. My mother’s heart beat steadily for another hour or so, but she did not appear in the spotty surveillance data. If there were any data at all about where she had gone or what she had done after she sent me away, it was all locked aboard House of Wisdom, forever out of reach.
