As she crawls, Wen finds herself, incongruously, thinking of Mother.
She asked, once, why Mother had left San-Tay Prime — expecting Mother to rail once more at Grandmother’s failures. But Mother merely pulled a low bench, and sat down with a sigh. “There was no choice, child. We could dwindle away on San-Tay Prime, drifting further and further away from Felicity with every passing moment. Or we could come back home.”
“It’s not Grandmother’s home,” Wen said, slowly, confusedly — with a feeling that she was grappling with something beyond her years.
“No,” Mother said. “And, if we had waited too long, it wouldn’t have been your home either.”
“I don’t understand.” Wen put a hand on one of the kitchen cupboards — the door slid away, letting her retrieve a can of dried, powdered shrimp, which she dumped into the broth on the stove.
“Like two men carried away by two different currents in the river — both ending in very different places.” She waved a dismissive hand. “You’ll understand, when you’re older.”
“Is that why you’re not talking with Grandmother?”
Mother grimaced, staring into the depths of her celadon cup. “Grandmother and I… did not agree on things,” she said. “Sometimes I think…” She shook her head. “Stubborn old woman. She never could admit that she had lost. That the future of Felicity wasn’t with bots, with High Mheng; with any of what the San-Tay had left us.”
Bots. High Mheng — all of the things that don’t exist anymore, on the new Felicity — all the things the Honored Leader banished, for the safety and glory of the people. “Mother…” Wen said, suddenly afraid.
Her mother smiled; and for the first time Wen saw the bitterness in her eyes. “Never mind, child. This isn’t your burden to carry.”
Wen did not understand. But now… now, as she crawls down the aisle, breathing in the unfamiliar smells, she thinks she understands. Reconciliation means forgetfulness, and is it such a bad thing that they forget, that they are no longer chained to the hatreds of the past?
She reaches the coffin, and rises — turns, for a brief moment, to stare at the sea of humanity before her — the blurred faces with bots at the corner of their eyes, with alien scents and alien clothes. They are not from Felicity anymore, but something else — poised halfway between the San-Tay and the culture that gave them birth; and, as the years pass, those that do not come back will drift further and further from Felicity, until they will pass each other in the street, and not feel anything but a vague sense of familiarity, like long-lost families that have become strangers to each other.
No, not from Felicity anymore — and does it matter, any of it?
Wen has no answer — none of Mother’s bleak certainties about life. And so she turns away from the crowd, and looks into the coffin — into the face of a stranger, across a gap like a flowing river, dark and forever unbridgeable.
I am in halves, dreaming of a faraway home
Not a dry spot on my moonlit pillow
Through the open window lies the stars and planets
Where ten thousand family members have scattered
Along the River of Heaven, with no bridges to lead them home
The long yearning
Cuts into my heart
This is the last poem we received from Xu Anshi; the last one she composed, before the sickness ate away at her command of High Mheng, and we could no longer understand her subvocalised orders. She said to us then, “it is done”; and turned away from us, awaiting death.
We are here now, as Wen looks at the pale face of her grandmother. We are not among our brethren in the crowd — not clinging to faces, not curled on the walls or at the corner of mirrors, awaiting orders to unfold.
We have another place.
We rest on the coffin with Xu Anshi’s other belongings; scattered among the paper offerings — the arch leading into the Heavens, the bills stamped with the face of the King of Hell. We sit quiescent, waiting for Xu Wen to call us up — that we might flow up to her like a black tide, carrying her inheritance to her, and the memories that made up Xu Anshi’s life from beginning to end.
But Wen’s gaze slides right past us, seeing us as nothing more than a necessary evil at the ceremony; and the language she might summon us in is one she does not speak and has no interest in.
In silence, she walks away from the coffin to take her place among the mourners — and we, too, remain silent, taking our understanding of Xu Anshi’s life into the yawning darkness.
“With apologies to Qiu Jin, Bei Dao and the classical
Tang poets for borrowing and twisting their best lines”
About the Author
Aliette de Bodard lives and works in Paris, where she has a day job as a Computer Engineer. In her spare time, she writes speculative fictionshe is the author of the Obsidian and Blood trilogy of Aztec noir fantasies, and her writing has been nominated for a Hugo Award, a Nebula Award and the Campbell Award for Best New Writer.
What Everyone Remembers
Rahul Kanakia
I remember being with maman in the cabin of her ship, anchored someplace where the wind was always howling, the temperature was always freezing, and fires were always dancing just beyond the horizon. I spent most of my time inside the mattress where she slept, burrowing as close as I could to maman so that I could feel her solidity and heat spreading out above me without burrowing so close that I came in contact with the harsh light and cold air. It was a delightful spongiform environment, flecked with tinier insects — mites and flies and spiders — and with the crumbs of food and flakes of human skin on which the lesser creatures fed. Life was not hard for me there.
But maman frightened me. When I emerged from the mattress, she would sometimes grab me, pinch my useless wings and interrogate me in front of bright lights. She’d put me in her nest of tubing and plastic cupboards and order me to run from one place to another as quick as I could. She would touch delicate golden wires to my various legs and my body would dance with strange impulses.
Usually my days passed in total silence, except for the few occasions when maman interacted with the other occupant of the ship, Uncle Frederick. These conversations were always initiated by Frederick, who would stare at her for a long time, then nod. They’d go onto the deck, shut the cabin door behind them, and talk in very low voices. On one of these occasions I oozed out through a crack in the doorway and tried to listen to them more clearly.
They were huddled together behind the wheel of the ship.
Frederick said, “…have to interact with her. Want all of her descendents to be poorly socialized?”
“It is an insect,” maman said. “Don’t anthropomorphize it. It can be anything it wants to be. Why should it carry all our human baggage? I want to give them a blank slate.”
“And what about survivors? What if she finds more of us? Or if her descendents do? What will they think of us if we don’t at least try to be kind to her?”
“I developed it. I know what is best for it.”
“And I risked my life to keep her alive. Food is getting low. I’m not bringing more supplies unless I can get some sort of input.”
“Fine, talk to it, if that will make you happy. But don’t involve me.”
After this, there was one day when she did not pinch me. Instead, she called out, “You’ve been hiding from me.”
“No,” I said. “I always come when I hear you calling for me. But sometimes I don’t hear.”
“No more hiding. I’ve given the whistle to Frederick. You must go to him whenever he calls for you.”
“Please, not the whistle,” I said, but she had already turned away.
The next day, my restless burrowing was interrupted by a sound that dragged hooks all across my body. Despite the pain, I tried to resist that insistent tootling. I stayed still for minutes, until the whistle had become near continuous, before I scuttled across the sticky deck of the cabin, up the stairs, and out into the freezing night.<
br />
Uncle Frederick lived in the cabin underneath the stairs. During the day he was largely quiescent: a vaguely human bulk that I sometimes perceived in the distance. But during the night he would lumber up the stairs and outside. He’d be wrapped up in seven layers of cloth and nylon and plastic. He’d seat himself down carefully on a mat, and stare up at the sky for hours.
I insinuated myself into the folds of his jacket to avoid the buffeting blasts of wind.
His body rumbled with speech. “Took you long enough to get here, didn’t it?”
All along the horizon line, fires blazed just out of sight, filling the sky with a sunset glow, even though it was midnight.
“You’re getting a good look aren’t you?” Frederick said. “It’s not so scary there. And it’ll be even less scary for you.”
“You’re…you’re taking me to the shore?” I said.
“Eventually. When your mother and I are gone, you’ll need to forage for food. Don’t worry, though, by then you’ll have help.”
“Are there more people, then? On land?”
“I meant that you’d have help from your own kind.”
“Oh.” The prospect of meeting more of myself was disgusting. I thought of them scrambling all over maman and felt slightly ill. “I would have liked to see more people.”
“Well, maybe you will. What would you do if you saw them?”
I nestled more deeply into Frederick’s jacket. “I wouldn’t ever bother them. I know that you and maman don’t like to be bothered.”
“No, no, there’s no need to be afraid of us. You should think of yourself as one of us.”
I moved deeper into Frederick’s garments. He shuddered. His hand twitched and started scratching the places where I had been. “I’m sorry,” I said. “So sorry. I won’t touch you again.”
“No, that’s my problem. I’m not used to people shaped like you. But you’re fine. You’re beautiful.”
“When are there going to be more of me?”
“Soon. When your egg case bursts, there should be forty or fifty more of you.”
I shifted my egg case uneasily, pressing it against Frederick’s bulk as if to stop it from splitting open right there. I’d seen what happened to the mothers of the spiders and flies in maman’s mattress.
“Will I have to die, then?” I said
“Die?” Uncle Frederick said. His body shook slightly. “No, never. You really don’t know, then? You’re never going to die. All your children will remember everything you remember. It will feel like closing your eyes to give birth, and then opening them in a new body. You’ll live forever.”
At the time, this was not a shock for me. I was too young to appreciate the gift that maman had engineered into me.
Frederick was silent for long moments after this. When I assayed a crawl up onto his face, I caught a brief glimpse of tear-stained eyes before an instinctive sweep of his hand dropped me to the deck with an exoskeleton-jouncing crash.
I picked myself up off the damp, salty deck and scurried back to the safety of maman’s mattress.
Frederick and maman were arguing again. I did not have to try hard to hear them, since the cabin hatches had been left open in order to air out the stale and dusty smells.
“I told her,” Frederick said.
“And you’ve put your own spin on it. Called it ‘immortality’ or some such nonsense. You won’t rest until you’ve fully humanized it, will you?”
“You know that she thinks of you as her mother, don’t you?”
“I’m no such thing.”
“You are the only mother her species will ever have. All the millions and billions of her descendents will only remember one childhood: her childhood. You have to pay more attention to her psychology, to her development, to her socialization and her adjustment. Every interaction her species will ever have is going to be governed by the shadow of you.”
“Don’t project,” maman said. “I barely remember my own childhood.”
“And why is that? Why are you so cold?”
“You’ve made it clear that you have the upper hand here, Frederick, so I suppose I can’t stop you from telling it whatever you want. We can even decant another, if you think I’ve ruined this one. You can train the next one to call you papa.”
“A second Eve?”
“Sure, or two more, or three, or a hundred…whatever it will take to satisfy you.”
“And have a hundred nations spring up to fight with each other, bomb each other, and create another disaster?”
“It will happen eventually.”
“You don’t understand. They won’t be like that. Not if we do our jobs, they won’t. They’ll remember this, every single one of them…they’ll look into each others’ eyes and see themselves. They’ll see that the good of everybody is the most important thing, and that if the race goes forward, then their memory will go forward, and they’ll live forever.”
“I know that my survival depends on your survival,” maman said. “But that hasn’t prevented me from developing a hatred for you. Why should they be different?”
When maman came in, she was smiling. She stared at the mattress for a long moment.
She was far away, too far to be able to catch me up, so I scrambled out of the mattress and called out, “Is my name ‘Eve,’ then?”
Maman frowned. “No,” she said. “You don’t need a name.”
“Why not?”
“What is it that you call me?” Maman was creeping closer, and I skittered back slightly.
“Maman.”
“Where did you get that name?”
“In the books that Frederick showed me, that is what the elephant called the woman who took care of him.”
“You liked his idiotic books?”
“Nnnnooo.”
“Good. You don’t need them.” She crouched and spread her hands on the edge of the mattress, and looked at, past, through me.
“Your memory is good,” maman said. “I know that, from the mazes I had you run. Please. Try to remember my face. You must never forget me.”
She coaxed me up onto her hard, pitted hands — those hands that were like whole worlds to me — and lifted me up right in front of her face. This was my first good, long look at her. Usually, I only peeked at her with sidelong glances, in order to see if she was about to come after me.
Her strangely-scented breath shivered right through my body, and I looked up with kaleidoscopic sight at her enormous face. Since then, I’ve seen many human faces. But, in my memory, there is nothing human about maman’s face; it is a machine of snorting nostrils and slowly dilating pupils.
Then she grabbed me by the wings and performed more tests on me.
A few days later, Frederick motored away in the dinghy. He was heading off to the shore: to the fires. I was happy when he left, since I would not have that whistle tugging at me. But I was also sad. I crept into maman’s workroom, where she was poking her head into and out of her refrigerator and other equipments. I was all alone with her. Now that Uncle Frederick wasn’t here to protect me, she could do anything.
She grunted as I crossed the threshold. She had not turned around. It was my first clue that she was always trying to sense where I was.
“Is he ever coming back?” I said.
Maman did not say anything. She played with her implements. As I waited, she picked up a very sharp tool that I had never seen her use before. I knew that she was not working. She was trying to scare me into running away.
“Did you send him away because of me?”
She turned towards me and pursed her lips. “He’s left before. The last time was several months ago, when you were very young. He is going to get more food and gasoline.”
“So he isn’t gone forever?”
“Don’t worry. You’ll hear the whistle again, soon enough.”
Several days later, when Frederick came back, I was still ecstatic at having had such a long and nonviolent conversation with maman. She had not
come for me since we’d spoken. I climbed up top and watched him unload the dinghy. Maman came out and helped him as he lifted things up.
“What was the land like?” I said. “Did you walk into the fires?”
Maman and Frederick exchanged a look. He handed her a satchel of cans. Everything in the boat was blackened with soot.
“The forests are still burning, but the fires are mostly gone from the city,” he said.
“Did you see any humans?” maman said.
“A good number,” he said. “They’re starting to emerge.”
She looked down at the cargo. “Did you have to fight?”
“Some,” Frederick said.
They continued loading in silence, and didn’t respond to my increasingly chipper questions. I scurried back and forth across the length of the metal hand-rail, and barely avoided being inadvertently slapped under Frederick’s hand.
I’d hoped that Frederick would be too tired from his journey to use the whistle, but as night fell, I heard its shriek. It was even more terrible than I remembered.
I ran out and settled on his chest.
He was quiet for several moments, then said, “You’ll be kind to the people you find, won’t you?”
“I won’t even bother them at all!” I said. “Except maybe when they’re sleeping would it be maybe okay if I went inside their mattresses?”
“That’s not what I meant. I meant…will you help them? They won’t be having as easy a time as you. Will you tell them where food is? And not hurt them?”
“Talk to them…?” I said. “But…will they…will they have whistles?”
“No, of course not. They don’t even know that people like you exist. They’ll probably be surprised to see you. But they’ll want your help. They’re hungry and they’re dying.”
“Why don’t they get more cans?”
“They can’t find them. And nobody is making more.”
“Then why don’t they eat the spiders and the flies and the crumbs of…”
Clarkesworld Anthology 2012 Page 3
