Sarah sat with her legs crossed, staring at it as though she could erase it from existence altogether. She didn’t rise when Minh Ha materialized within the V-space, didn’t turn her head. “Mother. Just in time for the daily education session.” You could have sawed bones with the edge in her voice.
“Are you . . . always there?” It hadn’t occurred to Minh Ha that the V-space could be more than visitors’ quarters; that it would be used for other purposes. But of course every tool could be turned to several uses.
Sarah shrugged. She gestured for Minh Ha to sit by her side, which Minh Ha did, feeling the illusory coolness of the floor under her. “Sometimes, when it suits them. They’re preparing us for the journey, in many ways.” She had marks on her wrists and on her lower arms—little pricks like dozens of syringe injections.
“You don’t sound as though it matters much to you one way or the other,” Minh Ha said, bitterly.
“Should it?” Sarah looked up. Her eyes were dark pits in the awful paleness of her face. “I’ve done what matters.” She gestured to the Memorial in front of her. “They’ve fixed it, but everyone remembers that it could be another way.”
“They don’t.” Minh Ha fought a rising wave of anger—remembering the two women on the shuttle. “You had a moment of fame on the feeds, and that was swiftly forgotten. The Memorial is still as it always was.” As it always had been—a thing which didn’t concern Rong, which wasn’t for them. It was the work of a Galactic man; it wept for the Galactic fallen; for the slaughter of innocents, but it knew nothing about the war. It acknowledged nothing about the Galactic domination and meddling that had exacerbated regional differences between the Western and Eastern continent—leading to a bloody civil war after independence; and to the desperate, last-ditch effort by the Galactics to maintain their foothold on Moc Tinh Hau with the Western continent as their puppet state. “How could you think this would be worth your life?”
“Not my life, you forget.”
“You’ll live and die on a forgotten planet—it’s the same as if they’d executed you!” Minh Ha couldn’t control the anger, the anguish anymore. Three interviews—enough to count them one by one, to know that each of them brought her closer to the final goodbye.
“You forget.” Sarah’s smile was bright, cutting. “They’re merciful.”
“You should have kept your head down,” Minh Ha said. “Now all the Rong are tarred with what the Vermilion Seal did.”
“Keep my head down? As your generation have done all your life? I won’t be silenced, Mother.”
How could she—? “You tell me I’ve seen the war, that I ought to know. I know about grit being sold as rice in the markets, about bombs that shattered the lanterns in the streets—about the ancestral altar growing every few months with new pictures, about how you’d have done anything—anything, as long as it got you out of Moc Tinh Hau. We were on Segundus on sufferance—because they took pity on us. The last thing we wanted was to draw attention to us—to be sent back there!”
Sarah grimaced, but said nothing.
The view in front of them had shifted to a temple, lingering on the gong and the drum on either side of the entrance, and the flow of Rong coming to make their own offerings. The wooden statues in the darkness were smiling, enigmatic and distant, so distorted Minh Ha had to guess at their identities—was the woman in flowing robes Bodhisattva Quan Am, was the man armed with a Galactic axe general Quan Vu?
Two days left. One further interview; and then that was all. How could she—? Minh Ha took a deep breath, keeping her eyes away from the Memorial’s reconstitution. She forced herself to speak calmly, leisurely, as if nothing were wrong; even though the emptiness in her stomach gnawed at her. “Segundus is your home. It’s easy to criticize what the Galactic government has done, but don’t forget that they allowed you to grow up in peace—to be in a position to speak up now.” No one knew what was happening on Moc Tinh Hau now, but there was no reason to think life had gone better—that the Hell Minh Ha remembered from her childhood had vanished altogether.
“You’d think speaking up would be less fraught.” Sarah’s voice was full of mordant amusement. “But there are truths that can’t be spoken out, apparently, or they become terrorism, eroding away at the foundation of the nation.”
“I saw what you did in the Memorial,” Minh Ha said. “The city that you brought to life ‘from the point of view of the Rong.’ That’s not truth—none of you lived in Xuan Huong, or on the Western continent. None of you remember the war. Moc Tinh Hau is just a story to you, no different than it was to the Galactic who built the Memorial.” It wasn’t true, not quite—of course Moc Tinh Hau was the home of Sarah’s ancestors, of course it would remain a special place, more special to her than to Steven Carey, who had interviewed so many Rong yet failed to capture the essence of their lives in his Memorial. But she had to make her understand.
Sarah shrugged. “Do you think to make me recant, Mother?” She gestured at the Memorial behind its pane of glass. “As they do?”
“I want you to understand that this is how we live together, child. The Galactics did what they did on Moc Tinh Hau—” she saw Sarah raise a hand in protest, and cut in before Sarah could say anything— “but if you never forget grievances, then they’ll choke you like ivy. The Memorial isn’t for us, no matter what they say; and it’s enough that we know that.” It was enough not to make waves; not to make themselves noticed; to live in harmony with the Galactics in their new home on Segundus.
“Why are you here, Mother?”
“Because you’re my child. Because I raised you.” Because I’ll lose you.Because, somehow, she wanted to give Sarah something to take to Cygnus, to remember her by; and she couldn’t articulate what.
Sarah turned, and looked at her full in the eye; as a Galactic would have done. Her face was set. “I’m sorry,” she said, and didn’t sound sorry in the least. “You’ve made your choices, Mother. I made mine.”
***
The Dead watch Minh Ha, impassive. Their faces shift, oddly, weirdly, into some expressions a human face can’t take—rippling between a smile and a grimace and tears. Second Aunt speaks—the words came through all garbled, even as Minh Ha’s filters flash a warning she can’t understand either, something about compromised communication protocols and infected messages.
“I need advice.” She dares not look up, but she sees Mother drift closer to her. There is a smell in the air that is almost like Mother’s perfume, the faint mixture of cloves and sandalwood that followed her everywhere, even into the hospital where she breathed her last, hunched around her pain like a dragon wrapped around a pearl. “Please. I don’t know where to go, or who to turn to.” She would weep, if she still had tears.
The Dead are not the living.
“She’s your only descendant,” Minh Ha says, watching the familiar faces bend and distort like thin sheets of metal. “And they’re taking her away from us. From all of us. Please.”
Mother speaks, but it is all nonsense that Minh Ha can’t interpret—no better than an unanswered prayer at the ancestral altar after all. Can she even sure that any of them understand her? Perhaps the filters distort her own speech to the Dead, just as they mangle what should have been familiar Rong words.
“You’d know what to do, I’m sure. You’d know how to—” She isn’t sure what she wants—to convince Sarah of how wrong she’s been, to rescue her from her inevitable fate, from yet another kind of exile? “Mother. Revered aunts. I—Please tell me what to do.”
There is no answer. There never is any.
***
Going home, Minh Ha was stopped three times by police barricades; the last one erected just below her compound and staffed with what seemed like an entire army’s worth of policemen. The leader, a beefy woman with the reddened skin of blondes, examined Minh Ha from head to toe; no doubt seeing all there was to see from the failure of her marriage to Charles to Sarah’s arrest. “Where are you going, Mrs Tran?” Perh
aps it was Sarah’s words, but today the mangling of Minh Ha’s last name grated—reminded her that she wasn’t home anymore, that her own home had been lost so long ago it only existed in her imagination—all in the past, unable to be ever truly recovered.
“I’m going home,” Minh Ha said. And, because she didn’t care much, anymore, about Galactics or her complex relationship with the city she now lived in, “From the holding facility. I was visiting my daughter.”
The leader grimaced, but Minh Ha held her ground. “I have three visits.”
“So you do.” She didn’t seem altogether happy.
At home, the feedswriters appeared to have got bored; there were but a few of them, loitering at the entrance of the building, and Minh Ha easily bypassed their frantic calls for interviews and information.
In the apartment, she found her sister Thuy busy in the kitchen, and her niece Hanh in front of the computer, watching the feeds. “How is she, aunt?” Hanh asked, but her mother Thuy cut her off.
“There’s someone waiting for you in the living room.”
Minh Ha had been expecting him, so it wasn’t entirely a surprise to find Charles standing before the chimney, looking at the holos on the ancestral altar with the practiced indifference of a man who had turned his back on this particular area of his life. “Good evening, Charles.” Her voice had never felt so formal in addressing him. “Come to see about Sarah, I guess.”
He turned around, slowly, his face a mask; a minute tremor in his hand masking the emotion underneath. “I came to see how you were. And yes, to ask about Sarah. Since it seems you’re the only one she’s speaking to.”
Minh Ha shook her head. “She’s not telling me much.”
“I need to see her,” Charles said. “But, of course, I can’t. It’s all that Vermilion Seal rubbish, telling her to reject all things Galactic. As if she weren’t Galactic herself, born and bred on Segundus . . . It’s all nonsense.” Charles kept his voice even, but Minh Ha could hear the frustrated anger; could feel that he was going to lash out at whoever stood in his way. He hadn’t always been so impatient; but years of bad financial luck had soured their relationship—hardening him, even as Minh Ha became quieter and less inclined to fight him for anything.
“She’s always been headstrong,” Minh Ha said, unsure of what to say. She hadn’t spoken much to Charles in the years since the divorce—they’d gone their separate ways, he to his merchant spaceships, she to help manage the family restaurant’s finances. Only Sarah’s arrest and trial had brought them back into each other’s life; and even then, it had been briefly and painfully, all the old grievances flaring up to life again, biting and unbearable. “I’m not surprised she wouldn’t want to speak to you.”
Preparing us for the journey, Sarah had said—how much of it was her, too, preparing herself, shedding all the attachments to Segundus, forging herself into metal hard enough that nothing on Cygnus would so much as scratch it?
“How is she?” Charles asked.
Minh Ha thought of Sarah; pale and thin and looking half out of this world, already gone ahead. “As well as can be,” she lied. “Convinced that she did the right thing.”
“But you’re not.” Charles’ voice was uncertain; probing into her weaknesses, exposing all her doubts.
“I don’t approve of what she’s done,” Minh Ha said, uncertain if that was the truth anymore.
Charles watched her for a while, and then he said, “You do see that we can’t allow the Vermilion Seal to blackmail the Government into some nonsense about revising the history books. That hacking into public V-spaces and revealing ‘the truth’ is no way to run a society.”
“I don’t know,” Minh Ha said, wearily. One day. One interview left before Sarah was gone forever. “Is this really what we should be arguing about?”
“You have to see—” Charles paused. “You’re the one who gave her all those Moc Tinh Hau stories. The one who encouraged her.”
“I take no responsibility for that,” Minh Ha said. How dare he accuse her? She’d never taught Sarah anything but how to respect the law, to be a good Galactic citizen—and how to best adapt herself to this society the Rong all found themselves living in.
“Of course you do.” Charles said it without resentment or visible expression. “You’re her mother. You delude yourself if you think you have passed nothing on to her.”
Precious little—what kind of mother was she, that she couldn’t prevent her only child from leaving her? “I’m her mother, not her master. Are you threatening me with anything? Isn’t bad enough that I’m losing my only daughter?”
“She’s my daughter too.” Charles voice was low, angry; Sarah had inherited that from him, that tendency to speak tonelessly and yet still exude a sense of menace. “We’re all losing her.”
Minh Ha gestured to the ancestral altar behind him. “The entire family is losing her. You know what this means for us.”
“Your old Rong superstitions?” Once, Charles’ jabs would have been more biting; but now he merely sounded weary—like her, wrung dry by the enormity of Sarah’s acts. “You forget. I left all that behind.” He turned to the ancestral altar, watching the holos. “Do you still go to the Hall of the Dead?”
Minh Ha nodded. “I went yesterday. They had nothing to tell me.”
“They never have.” Charles didn’t move. “You should leave the Dead well alone, Minh Ha—they just drag you down. Like they did with Sarah.”
“Sarah never went to the Hall.”
“You know what I mean.”
Yes, the weight of the past; those resentments he couldn’t understand—the Galactics declaring war on behalf of the Western Continent, hoping to maintain their presence on Moc Tinh Hau; the history holos proclaiming the fight for democracy, as if things were ever that simple or that pure. “The past made us what we are,” Minh Ha said, knowing it to be true.
“But the past is gone.” Charles’ voice was almost gentle. “This is the true lesson of the Halls—the Dead might as well be on another planet. They no longer speak our language or understand our thoughts.”
Minh Ha remembered being on her knees, staring at the cobbles of the V-space; remembered Mother’s agitation, the frantic gestures she couldn’t interpret. She said nothing—merely watched the holo of Mother as she’d been before old age caught up with her, strong and unbending and unlikely to give way to anyone. Why was she gone—why were they all alone, without the guiding influence of the older generation? “I guess not,” she said at last.
Charles turned back to her; and forced a weak smile. “Thank you for the information. I’ll go back to the holding facility and apply for another interview with her. You never know.”
Minh Ha, staring at him, was struck by the white scattered in his hair, by the bowed set of his shoulders, as if time itself had pressed down on him until his old arrogance disappeared—and she thought of the way that everything seemed to have been hollowed out by the arrest. “Do you want to stay for dinner?” she asked, in spite of herself.
Charles shook his head. “I don’t think so. I’ve intruded enough on you for one night. Forgive me.”
After he’d left, she remained where she was, staring at the altar. The Dead no longer speak our language, he had said, knowing full well the unbearable silence of the Hall: the chatter of the V-space, and all the familiar things, just frustratingly out of reach.
“Is he gone?” Thuy asked from behind her; putting her hands on Minh Ha's shoulders, as she'd used to do when they'd been children in Xuan Huong.
Her elder sister’s hands smelled of garlic and something sweet—perhaps dried jujubes? “Yes,” Minh Ha said, knowing Thuy had never approved of him. “And Sarah will be gone, too, soon.”
“One more interview.” Thuy’s voice was oddly shrewd. “One last thing to give her before she goes ahead into the darkness of space.”
“I don’t know what to give her,” Minh Ha said, frustrated. She thought of the book she’d brought on her first int
erview, left in a locker somewhere—Master Kong’s sayings, a physical gift she hadn’t been able to give to Sarah. “I don’t understand her anymore.”
“I don’t think you’re meant to understand,” Thuy said, gently. “Just to support her.”
“I can’t—” Minh Ha watched the holos; watched Mother’s face, forever frozen into a half-grimace; watched Second Aunt’s serene gaze, Third Aunt’s awkward smile at the camera. Mother was the one who’d found them safe passage—who had bargained and smiled and bribed Galactic officials until they found a berth on one of the last ships to leave. The aunts were the ones who had opened the Rong restaurant—it was the only non-menial work open to them—and sent the entire family through Applied Schooling. They had lived through a war and an entire life of exile, and surely they would know—surely they would—
Minh Ha thought of everything that they no longer had; every way in which they had been diminished, and cut off from what mattered most.
“You’re right,” she said, finally. “It’s time to accept what I can’t understand.”
Time to give Sarah what she would most need on Cygnus.
***
There is no answer. There never is any.
None but the ones you make for yourself.
Trembling, Minh Ha reaches out—in that suspended instant before the filters come online, before the Dead are rewritten into safer, saner— sanitized—code. Her hand touches Mother’s; and she feels warmth, travelling all the way from her palm into her madly beating heart.
***
On her third visit to Sarah, Minh Ha says nothing. There are no words left, no message of comfort that she could give her daughter.
Instead, she takes Sarah’s hand, and holds it tight until the last of the warmth has leached from her body into her daughter’s; and braces herself for the future.
Anthology of Speculative Fiction, Volume Two Page 430
