by Rich Horton
“Brigid!” her mother said, grabbing her daughter by the shoulders. “What are you doing?”
Brigid tried, and failed, to hide the terror in her eyes as her mother scrutinized her. She wasn’t sure what her mother saw, but she seemed to think it required no more than a comforting hug. She held her daughter for a brief, sweet moment. Then she turned her attention back to the kitchen.
“Daddy will be home for dinner,” she said. Her mother’s hand on her shoulder tightened at the mention of Daddy. Brigid felt trapped. “Could you set the dining room table?”
The last thing Brigid wanted to do was touch the good china with her shaking hands. No, that wasn’t the last thing she wanted to do. The last thing she wanted to do was sit in her room, alone, and wait for Ian’s ghost to find her. She didn’t think they should be trying to help him anymore. She wondered if she and Sinead were actually keeping him here.
The dishes in the china closet trembled when she approached it, and Brigid caught sight of herself in its mirrored back wall. Between the mirrored backs of the dishes, her reflection had all its hair. Brigid searched the corners of the mirror for Ian, but he was nowhere to be seen.
After Brigid finished setting the table, her mother discovered her newly short chunk of hair and yelled at her for ruining her haircut. Brigid didn’t rat Sinead out this time, not because she was cowed by the stupid gum prank, but because she was afraid Sinead’s revenge would provoke more terrifying Ian episodes.
Sinead was hiding in the basement out of an attempt to put off her interview with her father, but she also had important work to attend to. Sinead had decided after the events of the previous night that Ian was lost, and being lost made him angry, so he needed to be guided to heaven, or wherever he was supposed to go—Sinead was pretty sure heaven was a part of the whole God-lie. Sinead had not made the prank connection, since she didn’t know about all of Brigid’s pranks; in fact, she was convinced that Ian was seeking them out, unable to let go. She had spent the afternoon acquiring the necessary tools: salt, an important memento, a tiny bell. The next time she saw him, she intended to send him off to eternal peace, whether she believed in it or not.
Sinead refused to come up from the basement to cut the potatoes, or polish the silver, or put out the glasses. She didn’t even respond to their mother’s calls for assistance, which made her sound if she was shouting down the stairs at no one. By the time Daddy came home, their mother was crackling with irritation, and it fell to Brigid to make the appeasing niceties required whenever her father joined the family for dinner. When he asked her how she had spent her day, she told him she had watched cartoons.
The rest of the family was already seated by the time Sinead emerged, the little bell tinkling in the pocket of her hoodie. Her parents’ half-empty bottle of wine sat on the kitchen counter and reminded Sinead that she wanted juice. She dug into the refrigerator for her orange-mango concoction, which she had secretly started to get sick of. But it inexplicably annoyed her father, so it would serve well as a final act of defiance before her punishment.
When Daddy came home for dinner, the family always ate in the dining room, with the gold-edged china and the freshly polished silver. The candles were always lit, and the girls’ mother made food that was cooked in the oven, not the microwave. Tonight there were small, bloody steaks freshly seared in the broiler, roasted fingerling potatoes, and garlicky greens. Each of the women handed a plate to Daddy, and he dropped on greens and potatoes and a single, wobbly steak. Brigid got half a filet, both because she was the youngest and because she was considered by the whole family to be fat. Then Daddy served himself a filet and Brigid’s leftover half, and the women listened to him talk about his day, and everyone enjoyed a nice family meal.
When Sinead sat down at the table with the mango juice, Brigid banged her knife on the table to get her attention, but Sinead refused to look up from her plate. She took a bite of her potatoes, then took a sip of her juice. She didn’t even register the taste; all she knew was that it had to be out of her mouth, now. Sinead spat orange liquid all over the white tablecloth, splattering the green beans and extinguishing one of the candles. The silence afterward was so complete that when Brigid took a breath, it sounded like the rush of the ocean.
“What,” their mother began with a sharp, clipped tone, “was that.” She clearly hoped to derail their father by taking on the scolding herself, but he spoke over her before she could get out her next word.
“Is there something wrong with your drink, Sinead?” he said. He said it so gently that all three women at the table tensed.
Sinead said nothing as she stared at Brigid, who looked at her with wide, helpless eyes. Brigid had never felt regret like this before, not even when she told Ian that he was dead. That had been an accident. This was something she had done on purpose, and it had worked exactly as she had planned. As terrifying as Ian’s reaction had been, he had stayed trapped in the mirror. Sinead and her father were here in the room.
Sinead kept staring at Brigid as she said, “Just went down the wrong tube.”
Their father considered this answer, folding his hands like the girls imagined he did in complex negotiations. “Take another sip,” he said—then added, as if it had just occurred to him, “so we know you’re all right.”
As she brought the glass to her lips, Sinead thought of the people who ate bugs on television. The horrid hot-salty flavor of the juice burned her throat, and her stomach turned and gurgled when it hit bottom. She put down the juice in a way she hoped was ladylike, then covered her mouth for one tiny cough.
Sinead could not tell if her performance had any effect, because now their father was looking between them, as if trying to spot an invisible thread. “Brigid, why don’t you take a sip?” he said.
Brigid should just take it. Just take the glass, choke the whole thing down, and spare Sinead. But she would spew juice everywhere or, worse, throw it up. “I hate that weird mango stuff,” she said. She pathetically hoped this would win his sympathy, since he, too, hated the weird mango stuff.
“Give it another try,” their father said. “Go get the bottle.”
Brigid rose from her seat as slowly as she possibly could, and shuffled into the kitchen. She pulled out the orange-mango juice and a glass and shuffled back into the dining room like a prisoner headed to the gallows. The three members of her family stared at her with anger as she approached, though their anger was confused, and directed at different people. Her sister was angry with Brigid for pranking her and furious with their father for toying with them. Her mother was angry with the girls for provoking her husband, though her constant, simmering anger at their father boiled up from beneath the other, safer emotion. And her father—her father was angry at his children, and at his wife, but his ideas of who they were and what they represented were so distorted that the anger might as well have been at different people entirely. He’d been furious at Ian when he got sick again. Brigid had seen him slap him. Their father’s anger made no sense.
All these competing angers made Brigid angry, too. Hers was not mixed with denial, however, or directed at someone who didn’t exist. She was angry at everyone, and she was going to make this stop. When she crossed the threshold, she slid her foot underneath the rug and elaborately, comically, tripped. The glass went flying out of her hands, and the juice bottle crashed to the floor. Their parents stared at Brigid, frozen, but Sinead leapt to her aid, making sure to knock over her juice glass in the process. Sinead slid her hands beneath her sister’s arms and drew her to her feet.
Then their parents started screaming about the rug and broken glass and carelessness and disrespect. Sinead and Brigid couldn’t make the words out, exactly. They were too distracted by Ian’s reappearance. Sinead saw him standing next to their father, arms crossed. Brigid saw him staring out from the china-cabinet mirror, hovering.
“—disrespect that should have died with your son!” their father shouted, just at the moment when their mother fell
silent. Then everything was silent, taut with the ugly truth that had just been unleashed. Ian was dead. And each member of the family had wished for that death in the hope that life would be better without him.
The first dish in the cabinet broke like a gunshot. The one closest to it went off next, then another, and another, the dishes exploding like targets in a carnival game. Sinead saw Ian pick them up and hurl them. Brigid saw his face in the mirror behind each dish. Their parents were screaming again, and the sisters watched the carnage unfold before them like spectators, rather than two people intimately involved in the situation. Then Sinead remembered the bell in her pocket, and Brigid remembered the look on Ian’s face when she told him he was dead, and they both began to shout, too.
“You can leave!” Sinead shouted. She rang her little bell at the dish cabinet, then pulled out her salt and shook it around the floor. “You don’t have to stay here! You can leave!”
“Ian, I’m sorry!” Brigid said. “I’m sorry you died! I’m sorry!”
The dishes kept exploding, and every member of the family kept shouting, and the sisters weren’t sure if they had unleashed something cathartic or something terrible. Sinead believed Ian just needed to release this anger to move on. Brigid wondered if their family had poisoned him with their selfishness, and now they were paying the price. Either way, all they could do was cower under the table, holding hands, until it had run its course.
Scattered Along the River of Heaven
Aliette de Bodard
I grieve to think of the stars
Our ancestors our gods
Scattered like hairpin wounds
Along the River of Heaven
So tell me
Is it fitting that I spend my days here
A guest in those dark, forlorn halls?
This is the first poem Xu Anshi gave to us; the first memory she shared with us for safekeeping. It is the first one that she composed in High Mheng—which had been and remains a debased language, a blend between that of the San-Tay foreigners, and that of the Mheng, Anshi’s own people.
She composed it on Shattered Pine Prison, sitting in the darkness of her cell, listening to the faint whine of the bots that crawled on the walls—melded to the metal and the crisscrossing wires, clinging to her skin—monitoring every minute movement she made—the voices of her heart, the beat of her thoughts in her brain, the sweat on her body.
Anshi had once been a passable poet in San-Tay, thoughtlessly fluent in the language of upper classes, the language of bot-handlers; but the medical facility had burnt that away from her, leaving an oddly-shaped hole in her mind, a gap that ached like a wound. When she tried to speak, no words would come out—not in San-Tay, not in High Mheng—only a raw croak, like the cry of a dying bird. Bots had once flowed to do her bidding; but now they only followed the will of the San-Tay.
There were no stars in Shattered Pine, where everything was dark with no windows; and where the faint yellow light soon leeched the prisoners’ skin of all colors. But, once a week, the prisoners would be allowed onto the deck of the prison station—heavily escorted by San-Tay guards. Bots latched onto their faces and eyes, forcing them to stare into the darkness—into the event horizon of the black hole, where all light spiraled inwards and vanished, where everything was crushed into insignificance. There were bodies outside—prisoners who had attempted to escape, put in lifesuits and jettisoned, slowly drifting into a place where time and space ceased to have any meaning. If they were lucky, they were already dead.
From time to time, there would be a jerk as the bots stung someone back into wakefulness; or low moans and cries, from those whose minds had snapped. Shattered Pine bowed and broke everyone; and the prisoners that were released back to Felicity Station came back diminished and bent, waking up every night weeping and shaking with the memory of the black hole.
Anshi—who had been a scholar, a low-level magistrate, before she’d made the mistake of speaking up against the San-Tay—sat very still, and stared at the black hole—seeing into its heart, and knowing the truth: she was of no significance, easily broken, easily crushed—but she had known that since the start. All men were as nothing to the vast universe.
It was on the deck that Anshi met Zhiying—a small, diminutive woman who always sat next to her. She couldn’t glance at Zhiying; but she felt her presence, nevertheless; the strength and hatred that emanated from her, that sustained her where other people failed.
Day after day they sat side by side, and Anshi formed poems in her mind, haltingly piecing them together in High Mheng—San-Tay was denied to her, and, like many of the Mheng upper class, she spoke no Low Mheng. Day after day, with the bots clinging to her skin like overripe fruit, and Zhiying’s presence, burning like fire at her side; and, as the verses became stronger and stronger in her mind, Anshi whispered words, out of the guards’ hearing, out of the bots’ discrimination capacities—haltingly at first, and then over and over, like a mantra on the prayer beads. Day after day; and, as the words sank deeper into her mind, Anshi slowly came to realize that the bots on her skin were not unmoving, but held themselves trembling, struggling against their inclination to move— and that the bots clinging to Zhiying were different, made of stronger materials to resist the fire of Zhiying’s anger. She heard the fast, frantic beat of their thoughts processes, which had its own rhythm, like poetry spoken in secret—and felt the hard shimmer that connected the bots to the San-Tay guards, keeping everything together.
And, in the dim light of Shattered Pine, Anshi subvocalised words in High Mheng, reaching out with her mind as she had done, back when she had been free. She hadn’t expected anything to happen; but the bots on her skin stiffened one after the other, and turned to the sound of her voice, awaiting orders.
Before she left Felicity, Xu Wen expected security at San-Tay Prime’s spaceport to be awful—they would take one glance at her travel documents, and bots would rise up from the ground and crawl up to search every inch of skin, every body cavity. Mother has warned her often enough that the San-Tay have never forgiven Felicity for waging war against them; that they will always remember the shame of losing their space colonies. She expects a personal interview with a Censor, or perhaps even to be turned back at the boundary, sent back in shame to Felicity.
But it doesn’t turn out that way at all.
Security is over in a breeze, the bots giving her nothing but a cursory body check before the guards wave her through. She has no trouble getting a cab either; things must have changed on San-Tay Prime, and the San-Tay driver waves her on without paying attention to the color of her skin.
“Here on holiday?” the driver asks her in Galactic, as she slides into the floater—her body sinking as the chair adapts itself to her morphology. Bots climb onto her hands, showing her ads for nearby hotels and restaurants: an odd, disturbing sight, for there are no bots on Felicity Station.
“You could say that,” Wen says, with a shrug she wills to be careless. “I used to live here.”
A long, long time ago, when she was still a baby; before Mother had that frightful fight with Grandmother, and left San-Tay Prime for Felicity.
“Oh?” the driver swerves, expertly, amidst the traffic; taking one wide, tree-lined avenue after another. “You don’t sound like it.”
Wen shakes her head. “I was born here, but I didn’t remain here long.”
“Gone back to the old country, eh?” The driver smiles. “Can’t say I blame you.”
“Of course,” Wen says, though she’s unsure what to tell him. That she doesn’t really know—that she never really lived here, not for more than a few years, and that she has a few confused memories of a bright-lit kitchen, and bots dancing for her on the carpet of Grandmother’s apartment? But she’s not here for such confidences. She’s here—well, she’s not sure why she’s here. Mother was adamant Wen didn’t have to come; but then, Mother has never forgiven Grandmother for the exile on San-Tay Prime.
Everything goes fine; unti
l they reach the boundary district, where a group of large bots crawl onto the floater, and the driver’s eyes roll up as their thought-threads meld with his. At length, the bots scatter, and he turns back to Wen. “Sorry, m’am,” he says. “I have to leave you here.”
“Oh?” Wen asked, struggling to hide her fear.
“No floaters allowed into the Mheng districts currently,” the man said. “Some kind of funeral for a tribal leader—the brass is afraid there will be unrest.” He shrugs again. “Still, you’re local, right? You’ll find someone to help you.”
She’s never been here; and she doesn’t know anyone, anymore. Still, she forces a smile—always be graceful, Mother said—and puts her hand on one of the bots, feeling the warmth as it transfers money from her account on Felicity Station. After he’s left her on the paved sidewalk of a street she barely recognizes, she stands, still feeling the touch of the bots against her skin—on Felicity they call them a degradation, a way for the San-Tay government to control everything and everyone; and she just couldn’t bring herself to get a few locator-bots at the airport.
Wen looks up, at the signs—they’re in both languages, San-Tay and what she assumes is High Mheng, the language of the exiles. San-Tay is all but banned on Felicity, only found on a few derelict signs on the Outer Rings, the ones the National Restructuring Committee hasn’t gone around to retooling yet. Likewise, High Mheng isn’t taught, or encouraged. What little she can remember is that it’s always been a puzzle—the words look like Mheng; but when she tries to put everything together, their true meaning seems to slip away from her.
Feeling lost already, she wends her way deeper into the streets—those few shops that she bypasses are closed, with a white cloth spread over the door. White for grief, white for a funeral.
It all seems so—so wide, so open. Felicity doesn’t have streets lined with streets, doesn’t have such clean sidewalks—space on the station is at a ruthless premium, and every corridor is packed with stalls and shops—people eat at tables on the streets, and conduct their transactions in recessed doorways, or rooms half as large as the width of the sidewalk. She feels in another world; though, every now and then, she’ll see a word that she recognizes on a sign, and follow it, in the forlorn hope that it will lead her closer to the funeral hall.
