by Neil Clarke
Johanna’s face was pale, so pale Catherine wanted to hug her, to tell her the old lie that things were going to be fine—but she’d never get to say those words now, not ever.
“I’m sorry, Catherine,” she said. Her voice was shaking; and the circles under her eyes took up half of her face, turning her into some pale nightmare from horror movies—a ghost, a restless soul, a ghoul hungry for human flesh. “I can’t do this, not anymore. The Institution was fine; but it’s got worse. I wake up at night, and feel sick—as if everything good has been leached from the world—as if the food had no taste, as if I drifted like a ghost through my days, as if my entire life held no meaning or truth. Whatever they did to our memories in the Institution—it’s breaking down now. It’s tearing me apart. I’m sorry, but I can’t take any more of this. I—” she looked away from the camera for a brief moment, and then back at Catherine. “I have to go.”
“No,” Catherine whispered, but she couldn’t change it. She couldn’t do anything.
“You were always the strongest of us,” Johanna said. “Please remember this. Please. Catherine.” And then the camera cut, and silence spread through the room, heavy and unbearable, and Catherine felt like weeping, though she had no tears left.
“Catherine?” Jason called in a sleepy voice from the bedroom. “It’s too early to check your work inbox . . . ”
Work. Love. Meaningless, Johanna had said. Catherine walked to the huge window pane, and stared at the city spread out below her—the mighty Prime, center of the Galactic Federation, its buildings shrouded in light, its streets crisscrossed by floaters; with the bulky shape of the Parliament at the center, a proud statement that the Galactic Federation still controlled most of their home galaxy.
Too many lights to see the stars; but she could still guess; could still feel their pull—could still remember that one of them was her home.
A lie, Johanna had said. A construction to keep us here.
“Catherine?” Jason stood behind her, one hand wrapped around her shoulder—awkwardly tender as always, like that day when he’d offered to share a flat, standing balanced on one foot and not looking at her.
“Johanna is dead. She killed herself.”
She felt rather than saw him freeze—and, after a while, he said in a changed voice, “I’m so sorry. I know how much she meant . . . ” His voice trailed off, and he too, fell silent, watching the city underneath.
There was a feeling—the same feeling she’d had when waking up as a child, a diffuse sense that something was not quite right with the world; that the shadows held men watching, waiting for the best time to snatch her; that she was not wholly back in her body—that Jason’s hand on her shoulder was just the touch of a ghost, that even his love wasn’t enough to keep her safe. That the world was fracturing around her, time and time again—she breathed in, hoping to dispel the sensation. Surely it was nothing more than grief, than fatigue—but the sensation wouldn’t go away, leaving her on the verge of nausea.
“You should have killed us,” Catherine said. “It would have been kinder.”
“Killed you?” Jason sounded genuinely shocked.
“When you took us from our parents.”
Jason was silent for a while. Then: “We don’t kill. What do you think we are, monsters from the fairy tales, killing and burning everyone who looks different? Of course we’re not like that.” Jason no longer sounded uncertain or awkward; it was as if she’d touched some wellspring, scratched some skin to find only primal reflexes underneath.
“You erased our memories.” She didn’t make any effort to keep the bitterness from her voice.
“We had to.” Jason shook his head. “They’d have killed you, otherwise. You know this.”
“How can I trust you?” Look at Johanna, she wanted to say. Look at me. How can you say it was all worth it?
“Catherine . . . ” Jason’s voice was weary. “We’ve been over this before. You’ve seen the vids from the early days. We didn’t set out to steal your childhood, or anyone’s childhood. But when you were left— intact . . . accidents happened. Carelessness. Like Johanna.”
“Like Johanna.” Her voice was shaking now; but he didn’t move, didn’t do anything to comfort her or hold her close. She turned at last, to stare into his face; and saw him transfixed by light, by faith, his gaze turned away from her and every pore of his being permeated by the utter conviction that he was right, that they were all right and that a stolen childhood was a small price to pay to be a Galactic.
“Anything would do.” Jason’s voice was slow, quiet—explaining life to a child, a script they’d gone over and over in their years together, always coming back to the same enormous, inexcusable choice that had been made for them. “Scissors, knives, broken bottles. You sliced your veins, hanged yourselves, pumped yourselves full of drugs . . . We had to . . . we had to block your memories, to make you blank slates.”
“Had to.” She was shaking now; and still he didn’t see. Still she couldn’t make him see.
“I swear to you, Catherine. It was the only way.”
And she knew, she’d always known he was telling the truth—not because he was right, but because he genuinely could not envision any other future for them.
“I see,” she said. The nausea, the sense of dislocation, wouldn’t leave her—disgust for him, for this life that trapped her, for everything she’d turned into or been turned into. “I see.”
“Do you think I like it?” His voice was bitter. “Do you think it makes me sleep better at night? Every day I hate that choice, even though I wasn’t the one who made it. Every day I wonder if there was something else the Board could have done, some other solution that wouldn’t have robbed you of everything you were.”
“Not everything,” Catherine said—slowly, carefully. “We still look Dai Viet.”
Jason grimaced, looking ill at ease. “That’s your body, Catherine. Of course they weren’t going to steal that.”
Of course; and suddenly, seeing how uneasy he was, it occurred to Catherine that they could have changed that, too, just as easily as they’d tampered with her memories; made her skin clearer, her eyes less distinctive; could have helped her fit into Galactic society. But they hadn’t. Holding the strings to the last, Johanna would have said. “You draw the line at my body, but stealing my memories is fine?”
Jason sighed; he turned towards the window, looking at the streets. “No, it’s not, and I’m sorry. But how else were we supposed to keep you alive?”
“Perhaps we didn’t want to be alive.”
“Don’t say that, please.” His voice had changed, had become fearful, protective. “Catherine. Everyone deserves to live. You especially.”
Perhaps I don’t, she thought, but he was holding her close to him, not letting her go—her anchor to the flat—to the living room, to life. “You’re not Johanna,” he said. “You know that.”
The strongest of us, Johanna had said. She didn’t feel strong; just frail and adrift. “No,” she said, at last. “Of course I’m not.”
“Come on,” Jason said. “Let me make you a tisane. We’ll talk in the kitchen—you look as though you need it.”
“No.” And she looked up—sought out his lips in the darkness, drinking in his breath and his warmth to fill the emptiness within her. “That’s not what I need.”
“Are you sure?” Jason looked uncertain—sweet and innocent and naïve, everything that had drawn her to him. “You’re not in a state to—”
“Ssh,” she said, and laid a hand on his lips, where she’d kissed him. “Ssh.”
Later, after they’d made love, she lay her head in the hollow of his arm, listening to the slow beat of his heart like a lifeline; and wondered how long she’d be able to keep the emptiness at bay.
“It goes to Prime,” Cuc said. “All the data is beamed to Prime, and it’s coming from almost every ship in the ward.”
“I don’t understand,” Lan Nhen said. She’d plugged her own equipme
nt into the ship, carefully shifting the terminals she couldn’t make sense of—hadn’t dared to go closer to the center, where Outsider technology had crawled all over her great-aunt’s resting place, obscuring the Mind and the mass of connectors that linked her to the ship.
On one of the screens, a screensaver had launched: night on a planet Lan Nhen couldn’t recognize—an Outsider one, with their sleek floaters and their swarms of helper bots, their wide, impersonal streets planted with trees that were too tall and too perfect to be anything but the product of years of breeding.
“She’s not here,” Cuc said.
“I—” Lan Nhen was about to say she didn’t understand, and then the true import of Cuc’s words hit her. “Not here? She’s alive, Cuc. I can see the ship; I can hear her all around me . . . ”
“Yes, yes,” Cuc said, a tad impatiently. “But that’s . . . the equivalent of unconscious processes, like breathing in your sleep.”
“She’s dreaming?”
“No,” Cuc said. A pause, then, very carefully: “I think she’s on Prime, Cousin. The data that’s being broadcast—it looks like Mind thought-processes, compressed with a high rate and all mixed together. There’s probably something on the other end that decompresses the data and sends it to . . . Arg, I don’t know! Wherever they think is appropriate.”
Lan Nhen bit back another admission of ignorance, and fell back on the commonplace. “On Prime.” The enormity of the thing; that you could take a Mind—a beloved ship with a family of her own—that you could put her to sleep and cause her to wake up somewhere else, on an unfamiliar planet and an alien culture—that you could just transplant her like a flower or a tree . . . ”She’s on Prime.”
“In a terminal or as the power source for something,” Cuc said, darkly.
“Why would they bother?” Lan Nhen asked. “It’s a lot of power expenditure just to get an extra computer.”
“Do I look as though I have insight into Outsiders?” Lan Nhen could imagine Cuc throwing her hands up in the air, in that oft-practiced gesture. “I’m just telling you what I have, Cousin.”
Outsiders—the Galactic Federation of United Planets—were barely comprehensible in any case. They were the descendants of an Exodus fleet that had hit an isolated galaxy: left to themselves and isolated for decades, they had turned on each other in huge ethnic cleansings before emerging from their home planets as relentless competitors for resources and inhabitable planets.
“Fine. Fine.” Lan Nhen breathed in, slowly; tried to focus at the problem at hand. “Can you walk me through cutting the radio broadcast?”
Cuc snorted. “I’d fix the ship, first, if I were you.”
Lan Nhen knelt by the equipment, and stared at a cable that had curled around one of the ship’s spines. “Fine, let’s start with what we came for. Can you see?”
Silence; and then a life-sized holo of Cuc hovered in front of her— even though the avatar was little more than broad strokes, Great-great-aunt had still managed to render it in enough details to make it unmistakably Cuc. “Cute,” Lan Nhen said.
“Hahaha,” Cuc said. “No bandwidth for trivialities—gotta save for detail on your end.” She raised a hand, pointed to one of the outermost screens on the edge of the room. “Disconnect this one first.”
It was slow, and painful. Cuc pointed; and Lan Nhen checked before disconnecting and moving. Twice, she jammed her fingers very close to a cable, and felt electricity crackle near her—entirely too close for comfort.
They moved from the outskirts of the room to the center—tackling the huge mount of equipment last. Cuc’s first attempts resulted in a cable coming loose with an ominous sound; they waited, but nothing happened. “We might have fried something,” Lan Nhen said.
“Too bad. There’s no time for being cautious, as you well know. There’s . . . maybe half an hour left before the other defenses go live.” Cuc moved again, pointed to another squat terminal. “This goes off.”
When they were finished, Lan Nhen stepped back, to look at their handiwork.
The heartroom was back to its former glory: instead of Outsider equipment, the familiar protrusions and sharp organic needles of the Mind’s resting place; and they could see the Mind herself—resting snug in her cradle, wrapped around the controls of the ship—her myriad arms each seizing one rack of connectors; her huge head glinting in the light—a vague globe shape covered with glistening cables and veins. The burn mark from the Outsider attack was clearly visible, a dark, elongated shape on the edge of her head that had bruised a couple of veins—it had hit one of the connectors as well, burnt it right down to the color of ink.
Lan Nhen let out a breath she hadn’t been aware of holding. “It scrambled the connector.”
“And scarred her, but didn’t kill her,” Cuc said. “Just like you said.”
“Yes, but—” But it was one thing to run simulations of the attack over and over, always getting the same prognosis; and quite another to see that the simulations held true, and that the damage was repairable.
“There should be another connector rack in your bag,” Cuc said. “I’ll walk you through slotting it in.”
After she was done, Lan Nhen took a step back; and stared at her great-aunt—feeling, in some odd way, as though she were violating the Mind’s privacy. A Mind’s heartroom was their stronghold, a place where they could twist reality as they wished, and appear as they wished to. To see her great-aunt like this, without any kind of appearance change or pretence, was . . . more disturbing than she’d thought.
“And now?” she asked Cuc.
Even without details, Lan Nhen knew her cousin was smiling. “Now we pray to our ancestors that cutting the broadcast is going to be enough to get her back.”
Another night on Prime, and Catherine wakes up breathless, in the grip of another nightmare—images of red lights, and scrolling texts, and a feeling of growing cold in her bones, a cold so deep she cannot believe she will ever feel warm no matter how many layers she’s put on.
Johanna is not there; beside her, Jason sleeps, snoring softly; and she’s suddenly seized by nausea, remembering what he said to her—how casually he spoke of blocking her memories, of giving a home to her after stealing her original one from her. She waits for it to pass; waits to settle into her old life as usual. But it doesn’t.
Instead, she rises, walks towards the window, and stands watching Prime—the clean wide streets, the perfect trees, the ballet of floaters at night—the myriad dances that make up the society that constrains her from dawn to dusk and beyond—she wonders what Johanna would say, but of course Johanna won’t ever say anything anymore. Johanna has gone ahead, into the dark.
The feeling of nausea in her belly will not go away: instead it spreads, until her body feels like a cage—at first, she thinks the sensation is in her belly, but it moves upwards, until her limbs, too, feel too heavy and too small—until it’s an effort to move any part of her. She raises her hands, struggling against a feeling of moving appendages that don’t belong to her—and traces the contours of her face, looking for familiar shapes, for anything that will anchor her to reality. The heaviness spreads, compresses her chest until she can hardly breathe—cracks her ribs and pins her legs to the ground. Her head spins, as if she were about to faint; but the mercy of blackness does not come to her.
“Catherine,” she whispers. “My name is Catherine.”
Another name, unbidden, rises to her lips. Mi Chau. A name she gave to herself in the Viet language—in the split instant before the lasers took her apart, before she sank into darkness: Mi Chau, the princess who unwittingly betrayed her father and her people, and whose blood became the pearls at the bottom of the sea. She tastes it on her tongue, and it’s the only thing that seems to belong to her anymore.
She remembers that first time—waking up on Prime in a strange body, struggling to breathe, struggling to make sense of being so small, so far away from the stars that had guided her through space—remembers walking like
a ghost through the corridors of the Institution, until the knowledge of what the Galactics had done broke her, and she cut her veins in a bathroom, watching blood lazily pool at her feet and thinking only of escape. She remembers the second time she woke up; the second, oblivious life as Catherine.
Johanna. Johanna didn’t survive her second life; and even now is starting her third, somewhere in the bowels of the Institution—a dark-skinned child indistinguishable from other dark-skinned children, with no memories of anything beyond a confused jumble . . .
Outside, the lights haven’t dimmed, but there are stars—brash and alien, hovering above Prime, in configurations that look wrong; and she remembers, suddenly, how they lay around her, how they showed her the way from planet to planet—how the cold of the deep spaces seized her just as she entered them to travel faster, just like it’s holding her now, seizing her bones—remembers how much larger, how much wider she ought to be . . .
There are stars everywhere; and superimposed on them, the faces of two Dai Viet women, calling her over and over. Calling her back, into the body that belonged to her all along; into the arms of her family.
“Come on, come on,” the women whisper, and their voices are stronger than any other noise; than Jason’s breath in the bedroom; than the motors of the floaters or the vague smell of garlic from the kitchen. “Come on, Great-aunt!”
She is more than this body; more than this constrained life—her thoughts spread out, encompassing hangars and living quarters; and the liquid weight of pods held in their cradles—she remembers family reunions, entire generations of children putting their hands on her corridors, remembers the touch of their skin on her metal walls; the sound of their laughter as they raced each other; the quiet chatter of their mothers in the heartroom, keeping her company as the New Year began; and the touch of a brush on her outer hull, drawing the shape of an apricot flower, for good luck . . .
