Memory's Legion, page 31
“What is the matter with you?” Cara shouted. She punched her father’s back and then froze. She’d never hit him before. She’d never hit anyone before. He didn’t even notice. He grabbed one of the kitchen stools and used it to jam the pantry door closed. Xan banged against the door harder than Cara would have thought he could. Her mother yelped and started cursing fast and low, almost under her breath. It sounded like praying.
Tears were streaming down Cara’s cheeks, but she wasn’t sad. All she felt was a powerful, growing outrage.
“I brought him back!” she yelled. “He was dead and I took him to the dogs, and they fixed him!”
“Dogs?” her father said. “What dogs?”
“The dogs that came after the stick moons turned on,” Cara said. There was so much they didn’t understand, and the words were like trying to drink through too thin a straw. The meaning wouldn’t all fit. “They fixed Momma bird and the drone and they fixed Xan because I asked them to, and he’s back. I brought him back and you hurt him!”
She heard her mother somewhere behind her, talking into her handheld. I need the military liaison. It’s an emergency. Cara’s outrage and impatience felt like venom in her blood. She pushed at the stool, trying to get the pantry door open again. Her father grabbed her shoulders, pulled her close until his face was the whole world.
“That’s not your brother,” her father said, biting off each word. “That’s. Not. Xan.”
“It is.”
“The dead don’t come back,” her father said.
“They do here,” Cara said.
“His eyes,” he said, shaking her as he spoke. “The way he moves. That’s not a human, babygirl. That’s something else wearing my little boy’s skin.”
“So what?” Cara said. “He knows everything Xan knows. He loves everything Xan loves. That makes him Xan. How can you do this to him just because he’s not perfect!”
Her mother’s voice came, hard as stone. “They’re sending a force from town.”
“The soldiers?” Cara said, pulling away from her father’s grip. “You called the soldiers on him? You hate the soldiers!”
She grabbed at the stool again, but her mother lifted her from behind, hauled her feet off the floor and carried her back toward her room. Xan was calling from the pantry, his voice muted and rough with tears and confusion. Cara tried to twist back toward him. Tried to reach for him.
Her mother pushed her into her room and blocked the door with her body. When she looked down at Cara, her expression was blank and hard. “It’s going to be all right,” her mother said. “But you have to stay here until I get this under control.”
A rush of thoughts fought for Cara’s voice—It was under control and Why are you making this a bad thing? and You let Daddy cut Xan—and left her sputtering and incoherent. The door closed. Cara balled her hands, screamed, and pounded the wall. Her parents’ voices came from the house in clipped, hard syllables that she couldn’t make out. She sat on the edge of her futon, bent double, and put her head in her tingling hands. Her blood felt bright with rage, but she had to think.
The soldiers were coming. Her parents were going to let them take Xan away. Make them take Xan away. They’d say the dogs were bad. Dangerous. They might hurt them.
All because it didn’t work like this on Earth.
The room was filled with her things. Her clothes—clean and folded in the dresser and worn and scattered on the floor by the hamper. The picture over her bed of dinosaurs running from a man in a big pink hat. The picture she’d made when she was seven from Laconian grass and paste, with Instructor Hannu’s note—Good work!—beside it. The tablet with her book on it. She scooped it up, turned it on. It was still open to the page of Ashby Allen Akerman in Paris. The old woman feeding bread to the birds. She put her fingertips on the picture. It wasn’t a real woman. It wasn’t even a real painting. It was just the idea of an idea. It didn’t have anything to do with her life, and she didn’t lose anything by letting it go.
She closed the book and opened the recording function. She felt the time slipping past, but she took a long look around the room all the same. Her whole life was here, written in little notes and objects that added up to a story that only she would understand.
Or else no one would.
The window was easy to open, but the screen was harder to rip than she’d expected. Once she’d gotten a hole big enough for a couple of fingers, it got easier to pull it apart, but it still hurt her fingertips. A little puff of dust came off the fibers when she ripped the hole big enough that she could squeeze through it. The empty water bottle slipped out of her pocket as she climbed out, clattering onto the paving outside her window. She didn’t go back for it. She ran across the road to where the underbrush started getting thick. High clouds interrupted the stars in streaks, as if giant claws had ripped strips out of the sky.
The light in the house and the darkness of the world let her see her mother and father in the main room perfectly. Her father had a length of metal as long as his arm held in both hands like a club. He was crying, but he didn’t wipe the tears away. He wouldn’t put the weapon down long enough for that. Her mother stood at the door, ready to usher the soldiers in when they came. It would be soon. Town wasn’t far away when you had military-transport vehicles.
Cara started the tablet recording. She took a deep, slow breath, waited fifteen seconds, and screamed.
“Momma!”
Her mother’s head came up sharply as she looked out into the darkness of the night. Cara tapped the playback and loop, threw the volume to max, and then flung the tablet as hard as she could into the brush. Her mother came out the front door, scanning but blind from the light. From the brush, Cara’s voice came again. Momma!
“Cara?” her mother said. “Where are you?”
Her father came to the door. She heard him say, “What is it?”
Cara started running. She heard her own voice again, behind her, and her mother screaming for her. And her father now too. She didn’t have much time. She looped around the back of the house and in the back door, opening it carefully to keep from making noise. Both her parents had gone out the front to find her. To save her. Their voices reminded her of the search party that she’d avoided. All the ways they wanted to help her, but never asked how she wanted to be helped.
She kicked the stool away and hauled open the pantry door. Xan was kneeling in the darkness, his legs folded under him just like the dogs. Wet tracks of tears marked his cheeks. His black eyes took her in. She held out her hand.
“Come on,” she said. “We have to warn the dogs.”
The front door stood open. Across the road, the brush crackled and hushed as her parents crashed through it, calling her name. They sounded frightened. Cara felt sorry for them, but they’d made their choices. She’d made hers. Xan took her hand with his uninjured one, and she hauled him up.
Then they were running out the back, into the night, toward the dogs, wherever they were. Xan matched her stride for stride, never letting go of her hand. Her parents’ voices faded behind her. She didn’t know if they’d found her tablet or if she’d just gotten far enough away that the sound wouldn’t reach her.
It didn’t matter.
Xan laughed, and the sound was just like the joy he’d had playing a game with his friends. She felt herself smiling. The feeling of freedom lifted her up. Even with the knowledge of the soldiers following behind her. Even with the grief just starting in her heart that she’d never go home. The night was hers, and Laconia was hers, and that was joyous.
Her legs burned and she felt light-headed from hunger. She hadn’t had anything to eat since the fruit and rice in the forest. And there wouldn’t be anything for her out in the world. All the plants that Laconia grew were indigestible for her at best. Poison at worst. The sunbirds, the blue clover, the grunchers, the glass snakes, everything alive knew, at a chemical level, that she wasn’t one of them. But that didn’t matter either.
The worst that could happen was she’d die.
The dogs would fix her.
Strange Dogs
Author’s Note
This one is often read as a horror story. That’s fair. It is one. But it’s another story too. It just depends on which generation you’re identifying with.
The other story that’s like this is Romeo and Juliet. They usually trot that one out in high school. When you read (or watch) the play at about the same age and level of maturity as Romeo and Juliet, and the story is about two lovers who catch a series of bad breaks. They wind up dead because the world around them is just a little too fucked up for their more tender emotions to have a place in it. And that’s a perfectly legitimate reading. Hell, it’s the one that the play steers us toward.
But read it again when you’re old enough to play Capulet or Montague, and it feels very different. What Romeo and Juliet experience as the only world they know is the one Montague and Capulet made. From the old-guy seats, the tragedy is watching the fight you started and then failed to end go on until it kills your kids. And that’s worse, because you’re still there to suffer the loss after they’re gone. Your failure to fix things takes the people you love the most, and it’s your fault. That’s Romeo and Juliet for middle-aged guys.
From the perspective of the parents, “Strange Dogs” is a horror story and a tragedy. Xan dies and comes back changed. And then they lose Cara to the same fate because they can’t get her to see the situation through their eyes. They can’t make her understand why they see this unexpected resurrection as a bad thing.
From Cara and Xan’s perspective? It’s an immigrant story.
They’ve come to a new place, and their parents are still living in the old country that exists in their minds. The children’s books are all about birds Cara and Xan have never seen and rules they’ve never lived by. Their home—their real home—is the place they’re growing up. On Laconia, it turns out dead doesn’t always mean dead. Sometimes it just means changed. And for them, that’s okay because it’s just the way the world they’ve grown up in works. But because Mom and Dad can’t shed the old ways, the old rules, they can’t see it.
We know a lot of second-generation immigrant families that suffer this break between an old world that the parents know and the culture their kids belong to.
For parents, that’s always going to have the potential to be horror.
Auberon
The old man leaned back in his chair, ran his tongue over his teeth, then lit a fresh cigar. His left arm was a titanium and carbon-fiber prosthetic grafted deep into the bones of his shoulder, but his natural right arm was just as intimidating: scarred and pocked by decades of violence and abuse. His hair was a fluffy white fringe that cupped the back of his skull, and he wore a thin mustache like it was a joke he was in on.
“All right. So we’ll get a new governor who answers to a different boss,” he said. “It happens. Everyone’s playing by the rules, and then something rolls through and changes them all. Things get scrambled for a while until everyone figures the new rules out.”
His second went by Agnete because it wasn’t her name. She didn’t roll her eyes. She was used to the old man getting poetic, especially when he was thinking something through. The fingers of his metal arm shifted unconsciously, the wrist curling in on itself the way the real one had, back in the day.
The office wasn’t really an office at all. At the old man’s level, business could be done anywhere, and he liked the little bar on the Zilver Straat plaza with its wide-bladed ceiling fan and the smells of salt and sulfur coming off the bay. He claimed it reminded him of the kinds of holes and corners he’d grown up in, back on Earth. Some days, people came to meet him there. Occasionally, he’d go out and sit with people in other parts of the city. Someone powerful needed a loan and couldn’t get one. Someone needed a supply of agricultural chemicals or drugs, pornography or off-book sex workers, untraceable security teams or zero-day code exploits, then sooner or later they came to the old man.
“The thing is,” he said, “you only have so long to figure out the new rules. That’s what kills you. You’ve got to look at the situation like you’re just coming into it, because you are. And sure, maybe it’s got the same street and the same people. That doesn’t mean it’s the same place. All the things you just take for granted about how it works are up for grabs again, and—”
“Permission?”
He scowled, but he nodded her on.
“Boss,” she said, “we didn’t just get a new governor. We got conquered.”
The old man grunted dismissively. He didn’t like being interrupted. Agnete nodded toward the wallscreen behind the bar. The newsfeed from Sol had the secretary-general of Earth, the speaker for the Martian parliament, and the president of the Transport Union—the most powerful people among all the scattered human billions—being humiliated and brought to heel by the new order like the burghers of some half-razed medieval town. The combined fleet was in tatters. The void cities broken or occupied. Pallas Station was reduced to pebbles and hot gas. Medina, at the heart of the gate network, taken over by the half-alien ships that had boiled out of Laconia system. The whole human orthodoxy overturned in what felt like a moment. High Consul Winston Duarte had named himself ruler of all humanity and had killed enough people to make it true. Emperor of the galaxy.
“This time is different,” she said.
The old man spat smoke and grunted again.
The gate network had opened more than thirteen hundred solar systems to humanity, almost all of them with one or two or three planets in the Goldilocks zone. Under hundreds of suns, evolution had improvised new answers to the overwhelming question, What is life? With carbon and nitrogen, hydrogen and sunlight and time, the possibilities weren’t limitless, but they were mind-boggling. The DNA and asymmetric chirality of organic life on Earth and its Sol system colonies turned out to be idiosyncratic in a wide and creative universe. Even animals shaped by the same selective pressures to look similar to Terran life—the grass trees of Bara Gaon, the humpbacked pigeons of Nova Brasil, the skinfish of New Eden—only needed a glimpse under a microscope to show they were as different from their Terran counterparts as a bull from a bicycle.
A human being could eat all day and still starve to death in the great garden of Sigurtá, surrounded by bright fruits and soft vegetables, trees heavy with fat birds and rivers filled from bank to bank with things that almost passed for trout.
The forest of life was varied and exotic, and the trees there didn’t get along with each other. Or most of them didn’t anyway.
At first glance, Auberon system didn’t seem exceptional. Three modest gas giants, none of them larger than Saturn. A single wet, life-bearing planet with a large but unexceptional moon. There were no alien artifacts the way there had been in Newhome and Corazón Sagrado. No weirdly pure ore profiles like on Ilus or Persephone. Just a scattered handful of planets, a couple of asteroid belts, and a star burning its slow way toward a billion-year-distant collapse. Among the hundreds of systems to which humanity was heir, it could have been anyplace.
But it was now the most important human system outside of Earth, Laconia, and maybe Bara Gaon Complex. Only a few decades into its settlement, and it already boasted a dozen cities, each of them in the middle of built-up rural areas like the floral disc in the center of a daisy. There were six dwarf planets with mining and refining developments big enough to have permanent civilian populations growing around them. There was a transfer station built to accommodate the trade between it and the other, less fortunate colony worlds. It was the second most developed human settlement in the universe, and on track to keep growing for centuries. And the thing that made its first settlers the winners of history’s land-rush lottery was that, apart from competing for sunlight, the biosphere of Auberon barely interacted with the plants and animals of Earth.
There was a famous image of an Earth apple tree and an Auberon-native tree, their roots intertwined as if each were acting as soil for the other. That mutual biochemical shrug made open-air farming possible on Auberon. Contamination by local organisms tended not to mean more than a mild case of gas. And because it was the most habitable of the new planets by orders of magnitude, it was developed. Because it was developed, it was influential. Because it was influential, it was wealthy. And because it was wealthy, it was corrupt.
And now, it was Biryar Rittenaur’s problem.
A woman’s face appeared on his handheld. She had a prominent chin, long white hair in tight curls, and a high forehead… Biryar tapped his fingers against his thigh. He should know this one. A face like a spade. A spade is a garden shovel. Shovel…
“Michelle Cheval,” he said. “President of the Agricultural and Food Production Workers Union.”
The handheld shifted to a young man’s face. Pleasant, neutral, with a mole at the side of his mouth that reminded Biryar of a cartoon rabbit. That was the image he’d built—cartoon rabbit with a basketball. He knew it was the right image, but he couldn’t make the jump to why he’d chosen it.
“Damn it,” he said, and tapped the man’s profile. His name was Augustin Balecheck. He was the deputy minister in charge of planetary transportation security. Mona leaned over his chair, resting her chin on Biryar’s shoulder.
“What was this one?” she asked. He could smell the almonds on his wife’s breath and feel the shifting of her jaw against his as she chewed. It was the third year of their marriage, and he had never stopped loving the smell of her skin close to his.
“A rabbit basketball player,” he said. “The mole was like a rabbit whisker. Balecheck like ‘ball check.’ Also traveling is a foul in basketball, and he’s planetary transportation.”
Her sigh meant she was thinking. She pointed a thin, graceful finger at Deputy Minister Balecheck’s mole. “He got that because the guy he was deep-throating had paving tar on his scrotum.”
