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 centre, 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 a while 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 apologised 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 had 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 flavour 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 realised how foolish she’d been—that it wasn’t a call, but merely a message from beyond the grave.
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 leeched 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, centre of the Galactic Federation, its buildings shrouded in light, its streets crisscrossed by floaters; with the bulky shape of the Parliament at the centre, 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 ve
rge 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 fairytales, 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 equipment into the ship, carefully shifting the terminals she couldn’t make sense of—hadn’t dared to go closer to the centre, 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 recognise—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-practised 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 on 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 s
till 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 centre—tackling the huge mound 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 defences 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 colour 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.