Galactic Empires

by Neil Clarke

  Cuc didn’t answer. She didn’t need to; they both knew what would happen if that turned out to be true. Ancestors, watch over me, Lan Nhen thought, over and over, as the hangar doors rushed towards her, still closed—ancestors watch over me . . .

  She was close enough to see the fine layers of engravings on the doors when they opened—the expanse of metal flowing away from the center, to reveal a gaping hole just large enough to let a small craft through. Her own pod squeezed into the available space: darkness fell over her cockpit as the doors flowed shut, and the pod skidded to a halt, jerking her body like a disarticulated doll.

  It was awhile before she could stop shaking for long enough to unstrap herself from the pod; and to take her first, tentative steps on the ship.

  The small lamp in her suit lit nothing but a vast, roiling mass of shadows: the hangar was huge enough to hold much larger ships. Thirty years ago, it had no doubt been full, but the Outsiders must have removed them all as they dragged the wreck out there.

  “I’m in,” she whispered; and set out through the darkness, to find the heartroom and the Mind that was her great-aunt.

  “I’m sorry,” Jason said to Catherine. “Your first choice of posting was declined by the Board.”

  Catherine sat very straight in her chair, trying to ignore how uncomfortable she felt in her suit—it gaped too large over her chest, flared too much at her hips, and she’d had to hastily readjust the trouser-legs after she and Johanna discovered the seamstress had got the length wrong. “I see,” she said, because there was nothing else she could say, really.

  Jason looked at his desk, his gaze boring into the metal as if he could summon an assignment out of nothing—she knew he meant well, that he had probably volunteered to tell her this himself, instead of leaving it for some stranger who wouldn’t care a jot for her—but in that moment, she didn’t want to be reminded that he worked for the Board for the Protection of Dai Viet Refugees; that he’d had a hand, no matter how small, in denying her wishes for the future.

  At length Jason said, slowly, carefully, reciting a speech he’d no doubt given a dozen times that day, “The government puts the greatest care into choosing postings for the refugees. It was felt that putting you onboard a space station would be—unproductive.”

  Unproductive. Catherine kept smiling; kept her mask plastered on, even though it hurt to turn the corners of her mouth upwards, to crinkle her eyes as if she were pleased. “I see,” she said, again, knowing anything else was useless. “Thanks, Jason.”

  Jason colored. “I tried arguing your case, but . . . ”

  “I know,” Catherine said. He was a clerk; that was all; a young civil servant at the bottom of the Board’s hierarchy, and he couldn’t possibly get her what she wanted, even if he’d been willing to favor her. And it hadn’t been such a surprise, anyway. After Mary and Olivia and Johanna . . .

  “Look,” Jason said. “Let’s see each other tonight, right? I’ll take you someplace you can forget all about this.”

  “You know it’s not that simple,” Catherine said. As if a restaurant, or a wild waterfall ride, or whatever delight Jason had in mind, could make her forget this.

  “No, but I can’t do anything about the Board.” Jason’s voice was firm. “I can, however, make sure that you have a good time tonight.”

  Catherine forced a smile she didn’t feel. “I’ll keep it in mind. Thanks.”

  As she exited the building, passing under the wide arches, the sun sparkled on the glass windows—and for a brief moment she wasn’t herself—she was staring at starlight reflected in a glass panel, watching an older woman running hands on a wall and smiling at her with gut-wrenching sadness . . . She blinked, and the moment was gone; though the sense of sadness, of unease, remained, as if she were missing something essential.

  Johanna was waiting for her on the steps, her arms crossed in front of her, and a gaze that looked as though it would bore holes into the lawn. “What did they tell you?”

  Catherine shrugged, wondering how a simple gesture could cost so much. “The same they told you, I’d imagine. Unproductive.”

  They’d all applied to the same postings—all asked for something related to space, whether it was one of the observatories, a space station; or, in Johanna’s case, outright asking to board a slow-ship as crew. They’d all been denied, for variations of the same reason.

  “What did you get?” Johanna asked. Her own rumpled slip of paper had already been recycled at the nearest terminal; she was heading north, to Steele, where she’d join an archaeological dig.

  Catherine shrugged, with a casualness she didn’t feel. They’d always felt at ease under the stars—had always yearned to take to space, felt the same craving to be closer to their home planets—to hang, weightless and without ties, in a place where they wouldn’t be weighed, wouldn’t be judged for falling short of values that ultimately didn’t belong to them. “I got newswriter.”

  “At least you’re not moving very far, ” Johanna said, a tad resentfully.

  “No.” The offices of the network company were a mere two streets away from the Institution.

  “I bet Jason had a hand in your posting,” Johanna said.

  “He didn’t say anything about that—”

  “Of course he wouldn’t.” Johanna snorted, gently. She didn’t much care for Jason; but she knew how much his company meant to Catherine—how much more it would come to mean, if the weight of an entire continent separated Catherine and her. “Jason broadcasts his failures because they bother him; you’ll hardly ever hear him talk of his successes. He’d feel too much like he was boasting.” Her face changed, softened. “He cares for you, you know—truly. You have the best luck in the world.”

  “I know,” Catherine said—thinking of the touch of his lips on hers; of his arms, holding her close until she felt whole, fulfilled. “I know.”

  The best luck in the world—she and Jason and her new flat, and her old haunts, not far away from the Institution—though she wasn’t sure, really, if that last was a blessing—if she wanted to remember the years Matron had spent hammering proper behavior into them: the deprivations whenever they spoke anything less than perfect Galactic, the hours spent cleaning the dormitory’s toilets for expressing mild revulsion at the food; or the night they’d spent shut outside, naked, in the growing cold, because they couldn’t remember which Galactic president had colonized Longevity Station—how Matron had found them all huddled against each other, in an effort to keep warm and awake, and had sent them to Discipline for a further five hours, scolding them for behaving like wild animals.

  Catherine dug her nails into the palms of her hands—letting the pain anchor her back to the present; to where she sat on the steps of the Board’s central offices, away from the Institution and all it meant to them.

  “We’re free,” she said, at last. “That’s all that matters.”

  “We’ll never be free.” Johanna’s tone was dark, intense. “Your records have a mark that says ‘Institution’. And even if it didn’t—do you honestly believe we would blend right in?”

  There was no one quite like them on Prime, where Dai Viet were unwelcome; not with those eyes, not with that skin color—not with that demeanor, which even years of Institution hadn’t been enough to erase.

  “Do you ever wonder . . . ” Johanna’s voice trailed off into silence, as if she were contemplating something too large to put into words.

  “Wonder what?” Catherine asked.

  Johanna bit her lip. “Do you ever wonder what it would have been like, with our parents? Our real parents.”

  The parents they couldn’t remember. They’d done the math, too—no children at the Institution could remember anything before coming there. Matron had said it was because they were really young when they were taken away—that it had been for the best. Johanna, of course, had blamed something more sinister, some fix-up done by the Institution to its wards to keep them docile.

  Catherine thought, f
or a moment, of a life among the Dai Viet—an idyllic image of a harmonious family like in the holo-movies—a mirage that dashed itself to pieces against the inescapable reality of the birth vid. “They’d have used us like broodmares,” Catherine said. “You saw—”

  “I know what I saw,” Johanna snapped. “But maybe . . . ” Her face was pale. “Maybe it wouldn’t have been so bad, in return for the rest.”

  For being loved; for being made worthy; for fitting in, being able to stare at the stars without wondering which was their home—without dreaming of when they might go back to their families.

  Catherine rubbed her belly, thinking of the vid—and the thing crawling out of the woman’s belly, all metal edges and shining crystal, coated in the blood of its mother—and, for a moment she felt as though she were the woman—floating above her body, detached from her cloak of flesh, watching herself give birth in pain. And then the sensation ended, but she was still feeling spread out, larger than she ought to have been—looking at herself from a distance and watching her own life pass her by, petty and meaningless, and utterly bounded from end to end.

  Maybe Johanna was right. Maybe it wouldn’t have been so bad, after all.

  The ship was smaller than Lan Nhen had expected—she’d been going by her experience with The Cinnabar Mansions, which was an older generation, but The Turtle’s Citadel was much smaller for the same functionalities.

  Lan Nhen went up from the hangar to the living quarters, her equipment slung over her shoulders. She’d expected a sophisticated defense system like the drones, but there was nothing. Just the familiar slimy feeling of a quickened ship on the walls, a sign that the Mind that it hosted was still alive—albeit barely. The walls were bare, instead of the elaborate decoration Lan Nhen was used to from The Cinnabar Mansions—no scrolling calligraphy, no flowing paintings of starscapes or flowers; no ambient sound of zither or anything to enliven the silence.

  She didn’t have much time to waste—Cuc had said they had two hours between the moment the perimeter defenses kicked in and the moment more hefty safeguards were manually activated—but she couldn’t help herself: she looked into one of the living quarters. It was empty as well, its walls scored with gunfire. The only color in the room was a few splatters of dried blood on a chair, a reminder of the tragedy of the ship’s fall— the execution of its occupants, the dragging of its wreck to the derelict ward—dried blood, and a single holo of a woman on a table, a beloved mother or grandmother: a bare, abandoned picture with no offerings or incense, all that remained from a wrecked ancestral altar. Lan Nhen spat on the ground, to ward off evil ghosts, and went back to the corridors.

  She truly felt as though she were within a mausoleum—like that one time her elder sister had dared her and Cuc to spend the night within the family’s ancestral shrine, and they’d barely slept—not because of monsters or anything, but because of the vast silence that permeated the whole place amidst the smell of incense and funeral offerings, reminding them that they, too, were mortal.

  That Minds, too, could die—that rescues were useless—no, she couldn’t afford to think like that. She had Cuc with her, and together they would . . .

  She hadn’t heard Cuc for a while.

  She stopped, when she realized—that it wasn’t only the silence on the ship, but also the deathly quiet of her own comms system. Since—since she’d entered The Turtle’s Citadel—that was the last time she’d heard her cousin, calmly pointing out about emergency standby and hangar doors and how everything was going to work out, in the end . . .

  She checked her comms. There appeared to be nothing wrong; but whichever frequency she selected, she could hear nothing but static. At last, she managed to find one slot that seemed less crowded than others. “Cousin? Can you hear me?”

  Noise on the line. “Very—badly.” Cuc’s voice was barely recognizable. “There—is—something—interference—”

  “I know,” Lan Nhen said. “Every channel is filled with noise.”

  Cuc didn’t answer for a while; and when she did, her voice seemed to have become more distant—a problem had her interest again. “Not— noise. They’re broadcasting—data. Need—to . . . ” And then the comms cut. Lan Nhen tried all frequencies, trying to find one that would be less noisy; but there was nothing. She bit down a curse—she had no doubt Cuc would find a way around whatever blockage the Outsiders had put on the ship, but this was downright bizarre. Why broadcast data? Cutting down the comms of prospective attackers somehow didn’t seem significant enough—at least not compared to defense drones or similar mechanisms.

  She walked through the corridors, following the spiral path to the heartroom—nothing but the static in her ears, a throbbing song that erased every coherent thought from her mind—at least it was better than the silence, than that feeling of moving underwater in an abandoned city—that feeling that she was too late, that her great-aunt was already dead and past recovery, that all she could do here was kill her once and for all, end her misery . . .

  She thought, incongruously, of a vid she’d seen, which showed her great-grandmother ensconced in the heartroom—in the first few years of The Turtle’s Citadel’s life, those crucial moments of childhood when the ship’s mother remained onboard to guide the Mind to adulthood. Great-grandmother was telling stories to the ship—and The Turtle’s Citadel was struggling to mimic the spoken words in scrolling texts on her walls, laughing delightedly whenever she succeeded—all sweet and young, unaware of what her existence would come to, in the end.

  Unlike the rest of the ship, the heartroom was crowded—packed with Outsider equipment that crawled over the Mind’s resting place in the center, covering her from end to end until Lan Nhen could barely see the glint of metal underneath. She gave the entire contraption a wide berth—the spikes and protrusions from the original ship poked at odd angles, glistening with a dark liquid she couldn’t quite identify—and the Outsider equipment piled atop the Mind, a mass of cables and unfamiliar machines, looked as though it was going to take awhile to sort out.

  There were screens all around, showing dozens of graphs and diagrams, shifting as they tracked variables that Lan Nhen couldn’t guess at—vital signs, it looked like, though she wouldn’t have been able to tell what.

  Lan Nhen bowed in the direction of the Mind, from younger to elder—perfunctorily, since she was unsure whether the Mind could see her at all. There was no acknowledgement, either verbal or otherwise.

  Her great-aunt was in there. She had to be.

  “Cousin.” Cuc’s voice was back in her ears—crisp and clear and uncommonly worried.

  “How come I can hear you?” Lan Nhen asked. “Because I’m in the heartroom?”

  Cuc snorted. “Hardly. The heartroom is where all the data is streaming from. I’ve merely found a way to filter the transmissions on both ends. Fascinating problem . . . ”

  “Is this really the moment?” Lan Nhen asked. “I need you to walk me through the reanimation—”

  “No you don’t,” Cuc said. “First you need to hear what I have to say.”

  The call came during the night: a man in the uniform of the Board asked for Catherine George—as if he couldn’t tell that it was her, that she was standing dishevelled and pale in front of her screen at three in the morning. “Yes, it’s me,” Catherine said. She fought off the weight of nightmares—more and more, she was waking in the night with memories of blood splattered across her entire body; of stars collapsing while she watched, powerless—of a crunch, and a moment where she hung alone in darkness, knowing that she had been struck a death blow—

  The man’s voice was quiet, emotionless. There had been an accident in Steele; a regrettable occurrence that hadn’t been meant to happen, and the Board would have liked to extend its condolences to her—they apologized for calling so late, but they thought she should know . . .

  “I see,” Catherine said. She kept herself uncomfortably straight— aware of the last time she’d faced the board—when Jason ha
d told her her desire for space would have been unproductive. When they’d told Johanna . . .

  Johanna.

  After a while, the man’s words slid past her like water on glass— hollow reassurances, empty condolences, whereas she stood as if her heart had been torn away from her, fighting a desire to weep, to retch— she wanted to turn back time, to go back to the previous week and the sprigs of apricot flowers Jason had given her with a shy smile—to breathe in the sharp, tangy flavor of the lemon cake he’d baked for her, see again the carefully blank expression on his face as he waited to see if she’d like it—she wanted to be held tight in his arms and told that it was fine, that everything was going to be fine, that Johanna was going to be fine.

  “We’re calling her other friends,” the man was saying, “but since you were close to each other . . . ”

  “I see,” Catherine said—of course he didn’t understand the irony, that it was the answer she’d given the Board—Jason—the last time.

  The man cut off the communication; and she was left alone, standing in her living room and fighting back the feeling that threatened to overwhelm her—a not-entirely unfamiliar sensation of dislocation in her belly, the awareness that she didn’t belong here among the Galactics; that she wasn’t there by choice, and couldn’t leave; that her own life should have been larger, more fulfilling than this slow death by inches, writing copy for feeds without any acknowledgement of her contributions—that Johanna’s life should have been larger . . .

  Her screen was still blinking—an earlier message from the Board that she hadn’t seen? But why—

  Her hands, fumbling away in the darkness, made the command to retrieve the message—the screen faded briefly to black while the message was decompressed, and then she was staring at Johanna’s face.

  For a moment—a timeless, painful moment—Catherine thought with relief that it had been a mistake, that Johanna was alive after all; and then she realized how foolish she’d been—that it wasn’t a call, but merely a message from beyond the grave.