The Angels of Our Better Beasts

by Jerome Stueart

  In the Grand gallery at Antigone, the paintings fill the space. Everything else is put away to make room for the definitive Renault show—your last eight years. Outside the venue, protected by a barrier, is the sitejet dubbed the Chariot of Elijah.

  They will bring the elevator panel, not the whole elevator, grisly as it is. When they place it on a wall, it is a reflective surface inside which people can find themselves reflected as the artist had been. And those patrons of the arts, both the wealthy and the not so wealthy, find their reflection just above yours and imagine that they are you.

  It brings the miners and the mining executives and the art world together, just as you hoped it would. You should have seen them meeting each other—awkward handshakes, first conversations, seeing that the subjects of the paintings were wandering around them. The barrier between art and life had been removed, as no one could tell if they weren’t walking inside a Renault.

  Your body was brought back to Paris for a memorial service, and sun-sailed ships gathered at sunset like a flock of birds around the Arc du Triomphe, spreading across the city in remembrance of you.

  You loved spectacle. You were spectacle. And everything you touched became spectacle. If you were owned by the art world, then you wanted them to take ownership of the things that mattered: people and love.

  It is hardest on Ajax and Marie. Marie remembers what you said, that after you died, they would forget about the miners. As executor of your will, she fights for your wishes to make the miners the recipients of your future sales percentages, with Ajax having the largest percentage and the miner’s union and their families with the rest. Inside her heart, she wonders if her message to you contributed to your death. Ajax reassures her that she did the right thing, and that no one could have stopped you from doing anything you wanted to do. At what point did she think she still had control?

  Ajax treats her as you would have, as his daughter, staying with her while he is there, dining with her, sharing all your stories. And there are a lot of stories. “It’s difficult to see his face everywhere,” he confesses. “Famous people are the most famous when they die.” But he hasn’t really had a chance to say goodbye.

  >?

  After three weeks of staying with your show in Antigone, Ajax wants to leave, and begs the gallery for the elevator panel and the paintings that you made for him. Because they are so personal; he can see your body everywhere in Antigone, your face, and it is hard for his grief to be so public right now. He just wants to be alone with you. But the show is so successful that crowds will come for weeks to see it, from all over the system, and Eustachi knows that. It’s already been booked, they say. You’ve lent these pieces for the duration of the show, especially the elevator panel, his last conscious work. There is a tug of war over your body of work, about who owns it—who owns you—and the Ajax that fought for miners’ rights is forced to fight for his own.

  Until Marie steps in as your agent, as representative of Eustachi, to let those pieces go.

  “But what if he never brings them back? What if no one can ever see those pieces again?” they ask.

  “There were always parts of him you never had,” Marie says to them.

  They place pictures of his work in a commemorative retrospective, and in a book of the show titled Together, and on Marie’s suggestion they don’t ask if they will ever see these works again. Marie helps Ajax lift the elevator panel from the wall, and helps him take the other few paintings that he owns from the gallery.

  He will take the elevator panel back to Aethon and he will sit and look into it, for hours some nights, to try and say goodbye, which slowly turns into good night. Sometimes he’ll look to see his reflection in your face, to try and understand what you found in him that was so good that you’d leave the rest of the solar system behind to spend it with him, together.

  For a Look at New Worlds

  “Every generation has an obligation to free men’s minds

  for a look at new worlds . . . to look out from a higher

  plateau than the last generation.”

  —Ellison S. Onizuka

  Benji Onizuka stood in front of his great great-grandfather’s memorial. A swirl of brightly coloured paper cranes flew around the twenty-seven-foot-high copy of the Space Shuttle Challenger, the brass base, the face of Ellison S. Onizuka. As if caught in a beautiful pastel tornado of little wings, the monument had its picture taken from hundreds of different angles. If Benji wanted to reproduce this on Mars, he’d need multiple shots for the holographic display to work with.

  His mother and daughter stood a ways behind him as he worked, not wanting to be in the way. A holographic sika fawn stood beside Benji’s daughter, Naia, and looked around the square, as if watching the people go by. Naia, only five, spoke to it softly, saying, “Non’t be scared. No one’s gonna hurt you. Non’t be scared.”

  His mother, Sharlet, watched Benji go round and round the memorial and sighed.

  “I just want to get it perfect, Mom,” Benji said. “I’ll only get this one chance before I go.”

  He watched the 3D picture form in front of him on his tablet, controlling the crane-drones, making sure they didn’t miss even the smallest fraction of the memorial.

  She said, “Make sure you get plenty of shots of the base, too—there’s a lot of information there.”

  “Yep, I’m all over it.” He kneeled down and guided the swirl of paper cranes downward, around the base, to get pictures of Ellison S. Onizuka, mission specialist, who died in the Challenger explosion in 1985. His bronze face was smiling, and Benjirou felt as if this time, Onizuka was smiling on him.

  Naia handed the deer an invisible apple; it was programmed to come to her hand and nibble on the invisible food. Other people walked by on Onizuka Street, past the shops, their shirts wildly animated and moving, sometimes too much for Sharlet Onizuka to look at. She wanted to look at things that were still, calm, peaceful.

  She looked forward to visiting the Japanese gardens later today. She was sure that Benjirou would take pictures there as well. Another something to capture and take to Mars with him. Why he wanted to leave her, she didn’t understand.

  “Okay, I think I got it all,” he looked up at the Challenger statue, which pointed toward the sky. “Mr. Onizuka I just want you to know—I’m going up to Mars, and I’m going to live there, but I’m taking you with me.”

  He looked over at his mother who’d turned away, was looking across the street at the sushi place. He said, “I just wanted you to know how much you inspired me to be an astronaut.” He knew his mother wouldn’t acknowledge what he was saying; she didn’t want to. His wife, Audra, and Naia would join him there in a year, after he put down roots, got a place to live.

  Without looking at him, his mother said, “We’re not going to get a good seat if we don’t hurry.”

  “Audra’s already got them, I’m sure.”

  “I don’t want to be late.”

  “I know. I just wanted to get this.”

  He programmed the cranes to fly above Little Tokyo now, to take thousands of pictures and download them simultaneously, so that he could bring Little Tokyo itself to Mars.

  “I don’t think anyone’s brought Little Tokyo yet.” Personal drones—even nanodrones—weren’t that new, but holographic technology had taken off in the last ten years or so, and most of the Mars colonists had already been settled.

  He walked toward her. “I hear they have the Taj Mahal and the Eiffel Tower and the Grand Canyon—but I really want to bring a little of me up there.”

  These tiny nanodrones could fly all over a place and take this single day of Little Tokyo with them. My day with my family. “It’s a lot of work,” he said aloud.

  “You could always stay?” She turned, smiling, knowing it was a futile effort but asking anyway. Who knew? Maybe this time he’d stay.

  “Mom,” he sa
id. “That’s not gonna work.”

  She looked away. “I didn’t wink enough, did I?”

  He laughed. “It’ll take more than a wink to turn government paperwork around. Let’s go see what Audra’s doing.”

  He was an astronaut and a holographic/fabrications engineer. A digital reconstructionist, as he sometimes called himself. Able to create anything, again. Useful in a new colony that needed to build, but couldn’t ship the proper materials.

  The three of them walked, followed by Naia’s sika fawn, past streams of people shopping, talking, eating little bowls of green tea ice cream, their own animated dogs and cats following them. Some had birds that followed them. Signs on the outsides of shops read please turn off holographic projections before entering the store.

  Sharlet remembered having a personal drone take pictures of her and her friends when they were teens. They’d stop and pose everywhere. Small drones followed like paparazzi, always looking for your good side.

  Nothing like what you could do now—recreating monuments and cities you could walk through. If she were young, would she too want to go to Mars?

  She sighed. Little Tokyo was her home.

  “I want to go see the ocean wall after the service, after the gardens,” she told Benjirou.

  “That’s all the way in Old Jefferson. We can take the LR.”

  “The LR is very fast,” she said, remembering how jostled she felt the last time.

  “Well, driving will be too slow. You forget how crowded it is down there. Everyone’s going to be walking the ocean wall on a day like today.”

  >?

  Sharlet had been overjoyed when she heard that she got to take Audra and Naia to live with her for the year as they waited to join Benji on Mars. What happiness that they would be hers! But weighing on her were the years that would follow. She wouldn’t see Naia grow up. The rules were pretty strict: if you went to Mars to live, you made a commitment. Naia would have a chance to leave when she was ready for college, but until then, she wouldn’t be back to Earth. Would Sharlet even be alive when Naia returned? If Sharlet wanted to see them, she would have to visit on one of the Earth-Mars shuttles and stay six months inside of a shuttle, and then spend a year there on Mars. What was there anyway? There were fewer than 500 people on Mars. It was growing, expanding, but still. She couldn’t imagine it. She felt claustrophobic just knowing she’d have to stay inside a bubble for a year.

  “Oh, Mom, you don’t go much outside of Little Tokyo now. And that’s practically the size of the biodome. They have parks. You really don’t think of it as being cooped up inside—the dome is so huge. You’ve seen pictures.”

  “I would miss the wind.”

  “They have wind.”

  “It wouldn’t be the same.”

  Why did they have to move so far away? She used to think that if her children moved to New York City, they would be almost too far away from her. But now, New York seemed like it was across the street compared to where they were going to take her little grandbaby. The terrible choices our children force us to make, she thought to herself.

  Audra waved at them across the terra cotta-bricked plaza when they arrived for the service. She wore a navy blue dress and motioned to some shaded seats. Some people sat in the sun on white chairs, but many of the older people sat in the shade. The press stood in the aisles, controlling their tiny camera drones.

  Across the steps of the stage in front of everyone were racks and racks of real paper cranes—brightly coloured streamers hanging from above, commemorating the short life of Sadako Sasaki following the Hiroshima bombing, and her thousand paper cranes, her wish for peace. Naia and Benji went to the front to look at the cranes with several other people. Sharlet wished that she had folded a thousand paper cranes—she knew her wish.

  “He’s trying to get every moment with her he can,” Audra remarked beside her.

  “It’s barely a year. That’s nothing,” Sharlet said.

  “Well, considering we can’t come back, it’s a lifetime.”

  “I still don’t understand why you couldn’t just take a shuttle—”

  “Mama Sharlet, we told you they’re small. Visitors have priority. You can’t build a big city on Mars if people keep leaving.”

  Sharlet nodded. Rightfully so. It was hard to try and build a family anymore. She spoke under her breath. “People shouldn’t leave.”

  >?

  It was the 118th Anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima. This service for peace commemorating that moment was also shared by the Indian, Pakistani, and Chinese people who had been through the short-lived but nuclear South Asian War of 2021. Many of them suffered disfiguring burns, and their children, like Sadako, contracted leukemia. They came because they wanted to pray for unity and peace. Little Tokyo pulled them into the ceremony as if it were always theirs. Later, on the anniversaries of New Delhi, Beijing, and Karachi, the Japanese Americans joined them in prayer as well.

  As the ceremony began, Benji re-joined them, but Naia and her sika fawn still walked around the paper cranes, which gave Sharlet no end of worry. “She needs to come sit down.”

  They tried calling to Naia but she was mesmerized by the sudden procession of religious figures marching out of the glass doors of the Japanese American Cultural & Community Center. Buddhist monks, Muslim imams, Protestant preachers, Catholic priests, representatives from all the major religions in and around Los Angeles came to the service and stood in a line in front of the spectators. Naia and her fawn walked carefully around them, looking up at them, like Sadako herself. Some of them tried to ignore she was there; others nodded to her, as if she were inspecting the troops of prayer.

  Are you ready with that prayer? she could have been saying.

  Yes, miss, I am ready. My god is ready.

  >?

  With the world shrinking, the rising seas and oceans, and everyone crowding closer together, prayers of unity and peace were needed every day, not just once a year. Still, the ceremony reminded everyone that violence was the worst way to solve our differences.

  Naia walked back to them casually.

  “We do this to remember you,” a priest said, speaking to the living and the dead. The interfaith clergy lit butter lamps for peace with a flame that had travelled the long distance from Hiroshima to be with them that day.

  Sharlet tried to pray for unity and peace, but felt as if the world, specifically Benji and Audra, had undermined her prayer. How could she pray for unity when he was tearing them apart? How could she find peace when her family was being tossed across the solar system?

  Then she heard the bell, the bell from Hiroshima that had rung at 4:15 pm, when the bomb dropped. They rang it again here. A clear sound. A sound of going away. Of launching. Of disappearances. Of sudden goodbyes. Of no goodbyes. It startled her, gripped her, as if her son were leaving right then.

  They brought out the mandala then—a beautiful sand painting of blue and orange and startling green, fragile, easy to blow away. The monks who had crafted it invited people to come up now and destroy it.

  Many walked up, and with a hundred fingers they carved swaths of themselves across the sand, ruining the beautiful design. The destruction of such beauty was supposed to bring home the price of violence, the pledge for peace. Today, though, it felt as if those fingers had pushed into her heart. She could see the back of Naia, her hand enveloped in the bodies of others, her fingers no doubt clawing through the bright sand. Her fawn looked lost without her, backed away from the crowd and looked around.

  Looked at Sharlet.

  For a moment, this creature, not really there, studied her, with an expression of so much loss that Sharlet wanted to hold it. But she was sure the fawn would shiver, and when her own hands passed through the deer, she might shiver, too.

  >?

  After the ceremony was over and the sand mixed together, placed
in a bottle, and given to the great, great, great grandson of Sadako’s brother, Audra gathered Naia and Benji together.

  But Sharlet wanted to see what was left of the mandala. She walked up after the crowds dispersed and saw what remained: tiny grains of green sand; crumbs on a brown board, on a brown table, in the sun. She ran her finger down the front of the board, just in case a bit of sand might have clung to it. He’s taking all the beautiful things with him.

  Her heart felt like it dropped into a well. Her eyes blurred with tears as she looked down at the erased mandala.

  Then something flapped in front of her face. She looked up. In the air around her were a thousand paper cranes flying, their bright colours like a reconstructed mandala in the air. They begged for her, it seemed, to come to them.

  “I think I got the whole service!” Benji said from way behind her as the cranes rose.

  Could he take the service back to where the mandala was whole again? She turned to look at them, across the terra cotta courtyard, a surface the colour of Martian sand. All she’d known was Little Tokyo. Raised here. Married here. Buried her husband here. Her family was all she had left.

  The cranes surrounded Naia.

  “Naia,” Benji called from outside the colourful whirlwind, “don’t touch them. I’m trying to capture you for Gramma. So she can have you to play with.”

  Like a fawn she couldn’t touch.

  Would she rather have a holographic granddaughter, or a holographic city?

  She could hear something like a bell in the distance.

  The cranes flew to her now, surrounded her in a breeze.

  “And now you, Momma. Hold still,” Benji said.

  “Non’t be scared, Gramma,” Naia called.

  A whirlwind of origami birds snapping pictures, scanning her, recreating her like the fingers of the crowd to the mandala. Don’t take it all away, all of this. A flock of paper flew between her and her family, and she tried to stay still, but they were like insects and she raised her hands to swat them away.