by Paula Guran
[“Okay,”] Elías says, always the good guy, always the hero. [“What’s our job? We can barely take one enemy ship in a firefight; a force that size is beyond us.”]
Commodore Shah says nothing, and the delay is striking. The audio play doesn’t go for delays. There’s another rumble, and another sensation thrills up my spine, but it’s not the fun kind of thrill this time.
“Oh, you’re not,” I whisper.
[“As you know,”] Shah says, her voice clipped so regret doesn’t make it through. [“Huracán II suffers from a violent geology. Your ship is one of the few with both the range to reach the Huracán system and the maneuverability to penetrate the enemy’s lines and engage your jump engines within the planet’s red jump threshold.”]
I hear Michel’s sucked-in breath, and I’m sitting dumb, myself.
[“Blow out the planet and us with it,”] Seve says. [“Jump’ll turn the rock into a frag grenade, and the gravity turns my girl’s engines into a nova. That what you want from us, Shah?”]
Shah’s always looked after her people. Elías and Seve—they’re not official, military types, but Shah looks after them as her own. Problem is, even Shah’s people come in second to the war.
[“It’s not what I want,”] Shah says, and I want to slam my headset down. [“But I don’t see another option.”]
“They’re doing a finale,” I say, my calves and fingers burning again to run. “The war is over, so they’re just going to finish Elías Perez.”
“You left when I was three years old,” I’d told my mother as she crouched at the edge of the table, as I shuffled through my shelves for a decent tea. I had a couple spoonfuls left of loose-leaf colony Faisal, which I hear is a good substitute for an Earth Assam, which I will never in my life be able to afford unless it goes big and all the importers start shipping it in in bulk. But the urge to make a good impression got in a fistfight with the urge to be petty and spiteful, and I pulled out two bags of a generic colony black and plunked them into mugs.
“I remember,” she said. “I braided your hair and you wore your favorite dress. It was the blue of cobalt glass.”
Her voice was deep and flanged, and totally factual. All hhaellesh sound alike. At least, the ones on the war reports sounded the same as my mother.
I have an allotment and not a flat because I have a work placement and not a career. I don’t care for any of the careers on offer. But the colony’s not so much of a fool to let work potential go unexploited, unlike the governments of Earth, which I’m just old enough to remember. I still have images of walking to the subway past the grimy homeless, with my father’s hand on the small of my back to rush me along.
That’s what I remember of my childhood. My father’s protective hand, my father’s tutoring after school, my father’s anchor mustache with a bit more salt in its pepper every year, my father’s voice carefully explaining the war.
“I don’t like dresses,” I told my mother, and set down the two mugs of tea. Her fingers clicked around the ceramic.
The hhaellesh can eat and drink, but human scientists still don’t know how food passes through the suits. We do know that the suits filter and metabolize any toxins—people have tried to poison them before, with everything from arsenic and cyanide to things like strong sulphuric acid, and the hhaellesh just eat and drink it up and are polite enough not to mention it.
I did not try to poison my mother.
“You’ve grown,” she said. “Of course, I expected that.”
“Yeah, kids grow up when you disappear on them.”
She was quiet for a few seconds. “I did not expect your father to die.”
I stared down into my slowly darkening tea.
“I received notice,” she said. “I had to make the decision whether or not to come home. The tide of the war hadn’t turned yet. I knew the colony would look after you.”
I swirled the tea in my mug. Tendrils of relative darkness wavered out from the bag.
“I was one of only eight hundred hhaellesh volunteers at that point,” she said.
“Yeah, I know,” I finally interrupted. “Without the hhaellesh, we wouldn’t’ve won the war.”
This is how the hhaellesh happened:
We had a handful of colonies in the Solar system and three outside of it: Gliese, Korolev, and Painter. Then, abruptly, we had a handful of colonies in the Solar system and two colonies in Gliese and Korolev.
We still thought interstellar colonization was a pretty neat thing, and despite centuries of space war fiction, we didn’t have the infrastructure or the technology to mount a space war. We were thoroughly thumped.
Then the esshesh showed up and told us that, while war was (untranslatable, but we think against their religion), they had no problems with arming races to defend themselves.
So they gave us the hhaellesh.
This is how the hhaellesh work:
There’s a black suit that scatters light like obsidian and feels like a flexible atmosphere-dome composite to the touch. A soldier gets inside, bare as the day she was born. The suit closes around her.
In a few minutes, it’s taking her breath and synthesizing the carbon dioxide back to oxygen. In a few hours it’s taking her waste and digesting the organic components. In a few days it’s replaced the top layers of her skin. In a few months it’s integrated itself into her muscles. In a few years there’s nothing human left in there, just the patterns of her neural activity playing across an alien substrate that we haven’t managed to understand yet.
This is how a hhaellesh retires:
The suit has a reverse mode. It can start rebuilding the human core, re-growing the body, replacing the armor’s substrate material with blood and muscle and bone and brain matter until the armor opens up again, and the human steps out, bare as the day they were born. A body like Theseus’ ship.
But to do that, it needs the original human DNA.
Or some human DNA, in any case; hell, I don’t know that anyone’s tried it, but you could probably feed in the DNA of your favorite celebrity and the hhaellesh suit would grow it for you, slipping your brain pattern in like that was nothing strange. I suppose that should freak me out—y’know, existentially—more than just growing a new copy of a body long ago digested by an alien non-meatsuit.
It probably should, but it doesn’t.
This is how a hhaellesh tries to get the DNA that’ll let it retire:
My mother crouched at the side of my table. With the inhuman height and the swept-back digitigrade legs, the chairs weren’t designed to accommodate her.
“When I left, I entrusted you with a sample of my DNA,” she said, and my hand went to the pendant. “With love, my daughter, I ask for it back.”
At that point, I dove out the window.
“They can’t cancel Elías,” I say. The top-of-spire restlessness is back, and I want to drop, freefall, roll, clamber, climb. My shoulders and thighs are shaking. “The fuck. He’s a goddamn cultural phenomenon, by now.”
Michel’s voice is unsteady as well, but not as much as mine. He doesn’t get it. “To be fair, I feel like after you’ve won the war you don’t need to push people to sign up for the Forces any more.”
“Fuck the war,” I say, and there’s anger at the pit of my throat. Like: how dare they take this away from us. Like: Elías and his adventures belong to us. Since the beginning of the war they’ve been how we’re meant to see ourselves—clever and active and go team human. You can’t take away our stories just because we won.
The first time I met my mother—
Except I can’t put it like that, can I? You don’t really meet your mother. Or I guess maybe you do at the moment of conception, if you think your zygote is you, or maybe it’s when the first glimmers of thought show up in your still-developing brain. But I think maybe it doesn’t count if there’s no chance that little undeveloped you won’t retain the memory.
So. The first time I met my mother, I was in a utility transitway. You know, what
we have for back alleys.
I’ve always been the kid with a chip on her shoulder and a grudge against the world and her nose high in the air. The grudge and the pride come from the same thing. Neither made me many friends.
I ran into a bunch of the voluntary-career types in the transitway on the morning of the Feast, just after the big public ceremony. My blood was up and they were them, and, well, the specifics of the argument don’t really matter. I started it. And then I was in the comforting beat of a street fight, and with a split lip and three split knuckles, and while one of them was hollering about how he was going to file a complaint for misdemeanor assault, who should show up?
And my heart leapt up and got a grip in my throat, and I thought, Oh gods, a hhaellesh, and standing right there, alien and beautiful. Staring at us with a blank, featureless swept-forward face that we all unambiguously read as disapproval.
The fight stopped. The boys stood there, twitching and uneasy, until they worked out that the hhaellesh was only staring at me. Then they slipped away.
And I stood there, frozen in the moment, until I worked out why a hhaellesh would single me out and come find me in a utility transitway. The wonder was slapped right out of me. It meant nothing: it wasn’t the free choice of an alien intelligence but the obligate bonds of unreliable blood.
I turned my back and sprinted away.
. . . hold it there for a moment. I realize this makes it sound like I just run from all my problems, and I want to make it clear that that’s not true. The truth is that I run from this one problem, and looking back at it, I guess I always have.
I was talking about my pride and my grudge, and how they both come down to this pendant at the base of my throat. My mother’s blood. My mother the hhaellesh, the guardian of the colonies, the war hero.
All the hhaellesh are war heroes.
What the hell am I?
[“My gotdamn ship,”] Seve says. They’re in the corridors of her gotdamn ship now, the soundscape full of mechanical noises and ambiance. There was a behind-the-scenes episode a few months ago back where they talked about those soundscapes, and how they chose the sounds for Seve’s ship to be reminiscent of a heartbeat, rushing blood, ventilation like breath, so it’d seem alive. [“My gotdamn job. Better pilot than you, anyway; I can see this idiot plan through.”] She’s pissed-off. I would be. Hell, I am.
[“I’m a good enough pilot to dodge through a crowd,”] Elías says. [“Come on, Seve. The captain doesn’t have to go down with her ship.”]
Michel complains a lot that Seve is a boy’s name, and I tell him that so were Sasha and Madison and Wyatt, back in the pre-space days known as the depths of history. And then Michel says that of course I would pay attention to the pre-space days, and I say that of course he thinks history started with the erection of the initial colony dome.
Michel is first-generation colony native. He was born here. His parents were in the third or fourth batch of colonists to set down here. We’re never quite sure who’s supposed to be jealous of whom in this relationship, so mostly we just rib each other a lot.
In my position, it’s easy to feel like you don’t have a history. Yeah, I’m from Earth, but I don’t remember much. My dad knew more, but he naturalized us; the most culture I think he held over was the way he made tea in a pot with colony spices, and his habit of saying gods instead of god.
I’m the girl with the hhaellesh mother and the blood at her throat. That’s who I am. And I was pretty sure no one could take that away.
[“Seve, I can’t let you die in my place,”] Elías says.
Seven snorts. [“Well, one of us got to.”]
“I enlisted,” I blurt out. I swing the words like a fist. And I can hear the change in Michel’s breathing on the other end; I can hear how Elías and the finale and how the writers are screwing us over has ceased to matter.
“Say what?”
“I enlisted,” I say again. “I got the assessment. They were going to let me into a Basic Training Group and then the war ended.”
Michel doesn’t know what to say. I can tell because he says “You—”, and then “Oh” and then “So . . . what? What now? Are you—” and then he trails off into silence. I’m pretty sure I’ve hurt him.
It’s a thing, in my family.
“I don’t know,” I say. All my plans have been derailed. “I can join the colony’s military track. Would that be totally pointless? Think I should go? I could just get out of here.”
“ . . . should I know the answer to this?” He gives a nervous laugh—and the laugh is probably fake, now that I think about it. It’s not right, anyway. Michel’s real laugh is this deep, throaty thing that doesn’t sound right when you know that his voice is higher than average and naturally polite.
If Michel was blood family there’d be a reason I could point to as why I felt so close to him, without wanting to screw him. I could have family that meant what family’s supposed to mean.
After a moment, he says “Aditi, if this is about your mother, can we just, maybe, talk about your mother?”
Michel, Michel, my not-family family. Talking about my mother, my family not-family. I got this far by not looking too close at the contradiction. It’s a lot harder to do when it breaks up your fights and shows up to tea.
It’s a lot harder to do when it wins its fucking war.
When we came to the Colony, my father and I, we stepped off the transport in a queue of seven hundred other colonists. We waited nearly an hour before it was our turn to go into a white room whose windows let in the blue of the sky and the white of the skyline, and a pleasant-enough woman took our biometric data and verified all my father’s professional assessments. She gave him his schedules—for Colony orientation, the walking tour, the commerce and services lecture, the first day at his assigned career—and set up an educational track for me. Through all of it, I was bored but fascinated by the blue-white-green of the outside world, and my father bounced me on his knee.
At the end, the woman bent down and put her face in front of mine. “That’s a beautiful piece of jewelry,” she said. “What is it?”
I looked her straight in the eye, and said—you know, in the way that some kids don’t quite get metaphor, even when they’re using it—“It’s my mother.”
On my phone, there’s a message from the Coalition Armed Forces Enlistment Office. It reads:
To Aditi Elizabeth Chattopadhyay,
This confirms that your assessment scores were sufficient to place you in a Basic Training Group for Immediate Interstellar and Exo-Atmospheric Combat. However, due to the recent decision of the Colony Coalition Oversight Office and the cessation of hostilities, the Coalition Armed Forces as an oversight unit is being disbanded and the colonies’ individual standing military forces are being scaled back.
At your request, your application can be transferred to the Gliese Armed Forces Enlistment Office, where you can enter into their Standing Military career track. If no such request is made, we will consider your enlistment withdrawn.
Thank you for your willingness to serve the safety and security of the Colonies.
The Standing Military career track trains you in an off-surface location with strict access restrictions. I could still get out of here. I have the option. She can’t take everything away.
I dial back the Elías audio to a quiet background murmur. I can’t concentrate on it, anyway, and I don’t want to. I don’t want to hear Elías and Seve argue about who’ll sacrifice for the other.
“Aditi,” Michel says.
“Why the hell,” I ask him, “wouldn’t you just put your blood in a bank safe if it meant that godsdamn much to you?”
There’s a moment when I think that could have used a little more context than I gave it, but Michel finds the meaning fast. “If I had a kid, I’d want to leave something they could know me by.”
I kinda think there’s not a maternal bone in my body, because that just sounds stupid to me. “Yeah, well, I didn’t end u
p knowing her, did I?”
“You can, though. Now. Can’t you?”
“She came back for her blood,” I say. “She never said she came back to get to know me.”
Like a slap in the face, Michel laughs.
“What the fuck,” I tell him. “Not funny.”
“It is, though,” Michel says. “Adi, I swear you just described exactly what you would do. You would go off to war and kick ass and come back home when there was no more ass to kick, and be all ‘hi, I’m back, gimme.’ Tell me you wouldn’t.”
I spluttered.
[“Some things are more important than my life, Seve!”] Elías is shouting, though the low volume just makes him sound faraway and muffled like he’s already lost.
From the beginning, Seve has said that if she can’t save herself, she’s not worth saving. And this is propaganda, so the story never goes out of its way to correct her. I like that. I like that she’s never needed saving when she couldn’t save herself.
I don’t like change.
I want to mute the audio.
“I’m not that self-centered,” I tell Michel, but my hand is on my pendant and I’ve convinced myself the blood inside is mine. It’s demonstrably not mine, and the DNA will prove it. But still. Still.
“Adi, can I tell you something, and not get in a fistfight with you in a utility transitway?”
I’ve never been in a fight with Michel. “What?”
He takes a moment to put the words together. “The necklace is just a thing, Adi. Get your mom back. Once you have her, you can replace the blood. Anyway, one necklace for one mom is a pretty good trade.”
Theseus’ pendant. I feel a rush of disagreement. I guess that solves that philosophical riddle for me: I really believe that if you replace all the boards, it’s not the same ship.
Which means I also believe there’s no way to keep the ship from eventually rotting away.
