Warrior Women

by Paula Guran

  I never helped Michel settle his argument, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t come to my own conclusions.

  I think Elías and Seve love each other, but love doesn’t tell you what to do with it. It just shows up like a guest you have to make a bed for, and it puts everything out of order, and it makes demands.

  I don’t hear the rest of the episode.

  I take my time. I breathe through the anger in my gut and the sense, not exhilarating now, of falling. Then, in the evening, I sync up with the colony directions database and do a search for hhaellesh in public areas.

  Five hhaellesh arrived during the Feast of the Return, and two of them aren’t hanging out anywhere that the public cams can see them. One of the ones who is is surrounded by children and a lady who looks like their mother, beaming the whole group of them. Of the other two, one is walking the gardens in the Colony Center Plaza, and the other is . . . familiar.

  I take the monkey’s route, as my father called it. Roof to roof and wall by wall, the colony’s engineered and modified design giving me wings. From the feeds I read, the freerunning spirit everywhere means working with your environment, not against it; you have to take your obstacles as opportunities or you’ll never get anywhere. Literally, at that.

  If there’s a lesson to be learned there and applied to the rest of my life, I’ve yet to learn it.

  I pass over alleys and shopways and along the taut wires that traverse the wide boulevards, the places where parades had been held. People see me, but to them, I’m just motion; just another citizen who takes a hobbyist’s interest in how to get around. Anonymous. Not Aditi, the girl with the hhaellesh mother, the girl with her mother’s blood. They see me as I’m starting to see myself.

  I run harder.

  After my father’s first day of work, he took me to the breadfruit shop. It’s not real breadfruit—it’s some native plant the first colony engineers analyzed and deemed edible; something that looked like a breadfruit to whichever one of them named it—but when it’s processed and mashed it has a texture like firm ice cream and a taste that takes flavorings well. My father and I got bowls full of big, colorful scoops, and asked one of the other patrons to take a picture of us. They did, and said “Welcome to the colony!” We were that obvious.

  We sent the picture to my mother, and that’s where I find her today. Sitting at the table we always tried to get, without any of the breadfruit in front of her. Hhaellesh can eat, but I’m not sure they need to, and I have no idea if they have a sense of taste. You only hear about them eating to accept hospitality.

  There’s a halo of awed silence around her, and I slink through it and take another one of the chairs.

  “I’m sorry,” she says, and I let out a breath. Truth was, until she’d said that, I’d had some doubt that it was her. The hhaellesh all look alike.

  I grumble something. I don’t know how to accept her apology.

  “I haven’t been a good mother,” my war hero says. “I don’t know if you want me to start trying now. You’ve done well without me.”

  Yeah, if you want to call it that. I serve the minimum work requirements and spend the rest of my time running across the roofs and up the walls. I haven’t gone out and won any wars in my free time.

  What I’ve done, what they’ll know me for if I touch the history books at all, is that I’ve carried her.

  My fingers itch at the tips. I want to touch the pendant, but I don’t. “Hhaellesh don’t have blood, do they?”

  “The armor substrate carries energy and nutrients,” my mother says. “We don’t need blood, unless . . . ”

  “Why do you want to be human?” I ask. I don’t want to be human. I want to be more than what I am.

  My mother doesn’t answer that, and the stillness of the armor is the stillness of an alien thing: how am I to read it? Then she seems to answer two questions, my own and one she hasn’t articulated.

  Why don’t you?

  “I think,” she says, and her words are careful, perhaps uncertain,“if you are something, you don’t want it. Does that make sense? Because you are it, you forget ever wanting it. Or, I suppose, it never comes up.”

  I shake my head.

  “I miss being human,” she says. “I miss feeling warm and sleeping in and stretching out sore muscles. I miss holding you. You were so small, when I left.” I think she watches me. “You regret not being old enough.”

  “Old enough?” I snap. For what? To remember her leaving?

  My mother holds up her hand. “This lit me up like a candle,” she said, turning those long, precise fingers. “I was a goddess. A fury, a valkyrie. I wanted this. Now I miss being human.”

  I grind my fingertips out against the table. “What’s going to happen to the suit, if you’re not using it?”

  My mother lays her hand near mine, which is a disturbingly human gesture coming from something whose hand is a mechanical claw. “It’ll go into a museum,” she says. “Or on display in one of the Remembrances. I would give it to you if I could.”

  I rear back, at that.

  “Ah,” she says, and she can’t smile. There’s nothing on her face to smile. But I get the impression she’s smiling. “You think I’d say, no, it wasn’t worth it, in the end. I’ve learned my lesson and a human life is the most important thing of all. No.” Her head bends toward the table. “This is a part of my life; this is me. I will not disavow it. I would give it to you if I could.”

  The colony is white buildings and boulevards, green growing plants, and the searing blue sky. And then there’s the black of the esshesh artillery emplacements, the black edging on the Observances. Red’s not a colony color. Red is primal and messy, like blood.

  When I went to enlist, they took a hard-copy signature in black ink and a handprint biometric signature as well. I wonder what else the biometrics recorded: my anxiety? My anger? The thrumming of my heart in my veins?

  My mother’s hands are cool and pulse-less on the table. Black as the artillery. Black as the ink. Black as the space between what stars we see, where the primal brightness of the cosmos has been stretched into infrared by the passage of time.

  I reach behind my neck and fumble with the clasp of my pendant. It takes me a bit to work it out; it’s stayed against my throat through showers and formal occasions and a hospital stay or two, busted ribs and broken legs. Pulling it off makes me feel more naked than taking my clothes off does. But here I am, baring myself in front of this alien who wants more intimacy than I think she deserves.

  “Two conditions,” I say. And it’s difficult to tell, under the smooth black mask, but I think she’s still watching me and not the blood. I push on ahead. “One: I want a piece of that armor. Or, I guess, the substrate. Make a pendant out of it.”

  It’s not a replacement for the blood. But it’s not something I’ll be holding in trust: it’s part of my history, now, too, and it’s something that’ll be mine.

  My mother nods.

  I exhale. Red’s no good for the colony anyway. Black’s a bit better, if only because black is the color of the hhaellesh, and the security emplacements which grow fractally more close-packed toward the colony’s borders: the lines we draw around ourselves to protect us from the enemy.

  After Painter, the enemy never set foot on colony land. They’re not the thing that scares me. I’m still figuring out what my enemy is.

  “Two,” I say. And I’m not sure how to say this next part.

  But those were her words. I’d give it to you if I could.

  “I want your stories,” I tell her.

  Elizabeth Moon has said that her story “looks at one of the traditional assumptions of military power: the people a soldier protects (at the cost of blood) should be grateful for such protection, that the culture that is saved should serve its saviors. It is not a pacifist or a militarist story; it is a tale of the tangles humans get into when they don’t examine their assumptions, emotional as well as political.”

  Hand to Hand

>   Elizabeth Moon

  Ereza stood in the shadows at the back of the concert hall. She had promised to be silent, to be motionless; interrupting the final rehearsal would, she had been told, cause untold damage. Damage. She had survived the bombing of her barracks; she had survived being buried in the rubble for two days, the amputation of an arm, the loss of friends and all her gear, and they thought interrupting a rehearsal caused damage? Had it not been her twin onstage, she might have said something. But for Arlashi’s sake she would ignore such narrow-minded silliness and do as she was told.

  She had seen concerts, of course; she had even attended the first one in which Arlashi soloed. This was somewhat different. From the clear central dome the muted light of a rainy day lay over the rows of seats, dulling the rich colors of the upholstery. The stage, by contrast, looked almost garish under its warm-toned lights. Musicians out of uniform wore all sorts of odd clothes; it looked as if someone had collected rabble from a street fair and handed them instruments. Ereza had expected them to wear the kinds of things Arlashi wore, casual but elegant; here, Arlashi looked almost too formal in purple jersey and gray slacks. Instead of attentive silence before the music, she could hear scuffing feet, coughs and cleared throats, vague mutters. The conductor leaned down, pointing out something to Arlashi in the score; she pointed back; their heads finally moved in unison.

  The conductor moved back to his podium and tapped it with his baton. “From measure sixty,” he said. Pages rustled, though most of the musicians seemed to be on the right one. Silence, then a last throat clearing, then silence again. Ereza shifted her weight to the other leg. Her stump ached savagely for a moment, then eased. Arla, she could see, was poised, her eyes on the conductor.

  His hand moved; music began. Ereza listened for the bits she knew, from having heard Arla practice them at home. Arla had tried to explain, but it made no sense, not like real things. Music was either pretty or not; it either made her feel like laughing, or crying, or jumping around. You couldn’t say, as with artillery, what would work and what wouldn’t. This wasn’t one she knew without a program. It sounded pretty enough, serene as a spring evening in the garden. Arla’s right arm moved back and forth, the fingers of her left hand shifting up and down. Ereza watched her, relaxing into the sweetness of the music. This was the new cello, one of only four wooden cellos on the planet, made of wood from Scavel, part of the reparations payment imposed after the Third Insurrection. Cravor’s World, rich in military capacity, had far too few trees to waste one on a musical instrument. Ereza couldn’t hear the difference between it and the others Arla had played, but she knew Arla thought it important.

  Her reverie shattered as something went drastically wrong with the music. She couldn’t tell what, but Arla’s red face and the conductor’s posture suggested who had caused the problem. Other instruments had straggled to a halt gracelessly, leaving silence for the conductor’s comment.

  “Miss Fennaris!” Ereza was glad he wasn’t her commanding officer; she’d heard that tone, and felt a pang of sympathy for Arla. Somehow she’d thought musicians were more lenient than soldiers.

  “So sorry,” Arla said. Her voice wavered; Ereza could tell she was fighting back tears. Poor dear; she hadn’t ever learned toughness. Behind her twin, two other musicians leaned together, murmuring. Across the stage, someone standing behind a group of drums leaned forward and fiddled with something on the side of one of them.

  “From measure eighty-two,” said the conductor, this time not looking at Arla. Arla had the stubborn, withdrawn expression that Ereza knew well; she wasn’t going to admit anything was wrong, or share what was bothering her. Well, musicians were different, like all artists. It would go into her art, that’s what everyone said.

  Ereza had no idea what measure eighty-two was, but she did recognize the honeyed sweetness of the opening phrase. Quickly, it became less sweet, brooding, as summer afternoons could thicken into menacing storms. She felt breathless, and did not know why. Arla’s face gave no clue, her expression almost sullen. Her fingers flickered up and down the neck of the cello and reminded Ereza of the last time she’d played the game Flight-test with her twin, last leave. Before the reopening of hostilities, before some long-buried agent put a bomb in the barracks and cost her her arm. Arla had won, she remembered, those quick fingers as nimble on the controls as on her instrument.

  Suddenly the impending storm broke; the orchestra was off at full speed and volume, Arla’s cello nearly drowned in a tumult of sound. Ereza watched, wondering why it didn’t sound pretty anymore. Surely you could make something stormy that was also good to listen to. Besides, she wanted to hear Arla, not all these other people. Arla was leaning into her bowing; Ereza knew what that would mean at home. But the cello couldn’t dominate this group, not by sheer volume. The chaos grew and grew, very much like a summer storm, and exploded in a series of crashes; the man with the drums was banging away on them.

  The music changed again, leaving chaos behind. Arla, she noted, had a moment to rest, and wiped her sweaty face. She had a softer expression now and gazed at the other string players, across from her. Ereza wondered what she thought at times like this. Was she thinking ahead to her own next move? Listening to the music itself? What?

  Brasses blared, a wall of sound that seemed to sweep the lighter strings off the stage. Ereza liked horns as a rule, but these seemed pushy and arrogant, not merely jubilant. She saw Arla’s arm move, and the cello answered the horns like a reproving voice. The brasses stuttered and fell silent while the cello sang on. Now Arla’s face matched the music, serenity and grace. Other sections returned, but the cello this time rose over them, collecting them into a seamless web of harmony.

  When the conductor cut off the final chord, Ereza realized she’d been holding her breath and let it out with a whoof. She would be able to tell Arla how much it meant to listen to her and mean it. She was no musical expert, and knew it, but she could see why her sister was considered an important cultural resource. Not for the first time, she breathed a silent prayer of thanks that it had been her own less-talented right arm she’d lost to trauma. When her new prosthesis came in, she’d be able to retrain for combat; even without it, there were many things she could do in the military. But the thought of Arla without an arm was obscene.

  The rehearsal continued to a length that bored Ereza and numbed her ears. She could hear no difference between the first and fifth repetition of something, even though the conductor, furious with first the woodwinds and then the violas, threw a tantrum about it and explained in detail what he wanted. Arla caused no more trouble—in fact, the conductor threw her a joke once, at which half the cello section burst out laughing. Ereza didn’t catch it. At the end, he dismissed the orchestra and told Arla to stay. She nodded, and carried her cello over to its case; the conductor made notes on his papers and shuffled through them. While the others straggled offstage, she wiped the cello with a cloth and put the bow neatly into its slot, then closed the case and latched it.

  Ereza wondered if she should leave now, but she had no idea where Arla would go next, and she wanted to talk to her. She waited, watching the conductor’s back, the other musicians, Arla’s care with her instrument. Finally all the others had gone, and the conductor turned to Arla.

  “Miss Fennaris, I know this is a difficult time for you—” In just such a tone had Ereza’s first flight officer reamed her out for failing to check one of the electronic subsystems in her ship. Her own difficult time had been a messy love affair; she wondered why Arla wasn’t past that. Arla wisely said nothing. “You are the soloist, and that’s quite a responsibility under the circumstances—” Arla nodded while Ereza wondered again what circumstances. “We have to know you will be able to perform; this is not a trivial performance.”

  “I will,” Arla said. She had been looking at the floor, but now she raised her eyes to the conductor’s face—and past them, to Ereza, standing in the shadows. She turned white, as if she’d lost all her blood
, and staggered.

  “What—?” The conductor swung around then and saw that single figure in the gloom at the back of the hall. “Who’s there? Come down here, damn you!”

  Ereza shrugged to herself as she came toward the lighted stage. She did not quite limp, though the knee still argued about downward slopes. She watched her footing, with glances to Arla who now stood panting like someone who had run a race. What ailed the child—did she think her sister was a ghost? Surely they’d told her things were coming along. The conductor, glaring and huffing, she ignored. She’d had permission, from the mousy little person at the front door, and she had not made one sound during rehearsal.

  “Who told you you could barge in here—!” the conductor began. Ereza gave him her best smile, as she saw recognition hit.

  She and Arla weren’t identical, but the family resemblance was strong enough.

  “I’m Ereza Fennaris, Arla’s sister. I asked out front, and they said she was in rehearsal, but if I didn’t interrupt—”

  “You just did.” He was still angry but adjusting to what he already knew. Wounded veteran, another daughter of a powerful family, his soloist’s twin sister . . . there were limits to what he could do. To her, at least; she hoped he wouldn’t use this as an excuse to bully Arla.

  She smiled up at her sister. “Hello again, Arlashi! You didn’t come to see me, so I came to see you.”

  “Is she why—did you see her back there when you—?” The conductor had turned away from Ereza to her sister.

  “No.” Arla drew a long breath. “I did not see her until she came nearer. I haven’t seen her since—”

  “Sacred Name of God! Artists!” The conductor threw his baton to the floor and glared from one to the other. “A concert tomorrow night, and you had to come now!” That for Ereza.

  “Your own sister wounded, and you haven’t seen her?” That for Arla. He picked up his baton and pointed it at her. “You thought it would go away, maybe? You thought you could put it directly into the music, poof, without seeing her?”