Memory's Legion, page 44
He looked at the equipment. It was heavy, but it wasn’t unworkable. There were straps on the yeast cylinder, and a mounting for the solar array. He could wear it on his back and trickle power into the food supply, as long as he didn’t walk in the shade. A bottle for water, and if he stayed by the river, he’d have enough. Unless some native microorganism slipped through the filter and decided he was a good environment to set up shop in his bloodstream.
“All right,” he said. “Thank you. I’ll go.”
“Do you have a plan?”
“No,” he said. “Maybe I’ll try for Alpha. It’s a long way, but there could be supplies there. Maybe people. If not, I can find out what happened to them.”
“If you figure out why the choice you made to kill Jandro was wrong, come back to us, okay? I’ll do everything I can to make sure you have a place here.”
Filip picked up the emergency blanket. It was very light, and small enough to put in a pocket. “Thank you, but I don’t deserve any mercy.”
“Of course you don’t. That’s why they call it mercy. If you deserve it, they call it justice.” She put her hand on his arm the way she always did with people. It seemed more genuine to him now. “I’m going to do everything I can to keep these people alive. I’m going to compromise and bend and be adulterated and impure and imperfect. And there’s going to be a time not too long from now that I’m really going to wish you were here. Just like I’m really going to wish Alejandro was.”
Filip was silent, but she nodded like he’d spoken.
“That’s the mystery, and that was your clue,” she said, stepping back. “Try to figure it out.”
He watched her as she walked back to the wall, and then past it. Once she had vanished, he got to the task of loading up his kit. It was like a little, scattered ship. The blanket was his environmental controls. The cylinder was his food recycler. The planet, vast around him, was his air recycler. There was a logic to survival that didn’t change, no matter which vastness he was traveling through. And the regret was there too, the way it always had been.
He walked south, keeping far enough from the river that the land wasn’t damp. It was less than an hour before the valley curved and Emerling-Voss Permanent Settlement Beta passed out of sight. The sun tracked to the west, reddening, and Filip found what seemed like a good spot to make the first camp of his new life. The yeast output was less than he’d hoped, but the carbon fixation chamber looked clean. He found a creek and filtered the water before he drank it.
At sunset, the stars came out. The great smear of the galactic disk. The universe that humankind had once been heir to and then lost, now just a light show and a promise. Or a hope.
In the distance, the monsters began to sing.
The Sins of Our Fathers
Author’s Note
What’s the opposite of an overture? A summation, maybe?
Naomi never knew that her son didn’t die along with the rest of the Free Navy, and people kept expecting him to show back up in the novels, but that wasn’t the story we were telling with him. The real end to his story with Naomi was a passage in Babylon’s Ashes. Naomi is talking to Holden about the video pieces he’d made hoping to humanize the Belt for the inner planets and, in answer, the inner planets for the Belt. This passage goes like this:
“I don’t know that those mattered,” Jim said. “Did they do anything?”
“You don’t get to know that,” Naomi said. “They did or they didn’t. You didn’t put them out so that someone would send you a message about how important and influential you are. You tried to change some minds. Inspire some actions. Even if it didn’t work, it was a good thing to try. And maybe it did. Maybe those saved someone, and if they did, that’s more important than making sure you get to know about it.”
On one hand, she’s talking about just what she seems to be talking about. On the other, she’s also us, talking about Filip and the end of their relationship. She saved him from his father, and that she never knew is less important than the fact that she did. Doing the right thing has to be enough in itself. It’s not about getting the pat on the head.
But this is the end. The last story in the cycle, and there he was. One loose thread. And you’re not Naomi, so maybe you wanted to know how it turned out for him. And also, of course, for Nami Volovodov, who we last saw heading out to the colonies with her moms.
And the end isn’t really entirely the end. One of the central arguments we’ve made with these stories is that, when you look at history, you see the same kind of people doing the same stupid, selfish, delusional, gorgeous, kind, astonishing things that we do today. And we’ll keep doing the same, as long as the species survives. Technical knowledge advances. The organism stays the same.
And, to quote Nami from her younger days: We’re spending our whole lives together, so we need to be really gentle.
Acknowledgments
We often talk about collaboration, but we haven’t specifically mentioned the collaboration between writer and editor. Without a few people on the editorial side, this volume would not exist. John Joseph Adams asked for the very first Expanse short story we ever wrote, so everything in here is sort of his fault. And Jonathan Strahan bought another one of these stories and encouraged us to keep making them. Along the way, all our editors at Orbit have contributed to one or more of the stories in this volume. A heartfelt thanks to them all.
And as always, this series and all that came with it would not exist without the hard work and dedication of Danny Baror and Heather Baror-Shapiro, and the whole brilliant crew at Orbit, including (but by no means limited to) Bradley Englert (and his predecessors Darren Nash, DongWon Song, Will Hinton, and Tom Bouman), Tim Holman, Anne Clarke, Ellen Wright, Alex Lencicki, and Lauren Panepinto. Special thanks are also due Carrie Vaughn for her services as a beta reader, and the gang from Sakeriver: Tom, Sake Mike, Non-Sake Mike, Jim-me, Porter, Scott, Raja, Jeff, Mark, Dan, Joe, and Erik Slaine, who got the ball rolling.
And, as always, none of this would have happened without the support and company of Jayné, Kat, and Scarlet. We lost time with them in order to do this, and it wouldn’t have been worth doing if they hadn’t been there for us when we got back.
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BY JAMES S. A. COREY
THE EXPANSE
Leviathan Wakes
Caliban’s War
Abaddon’s Gate
Cibola Burn
Nemesis Games
Babylon’s Ashes
Persepolis Rising
Tiamat’s Wrath
Leviathan Falls
Memory’s Legion: The Complete Expanse Story Collection
THE EXPANSE SHORT FICTION
Drive
The Butcher of Anderson Station
Gods of Risk
The Churn
The Vital Abyss
Strange Dogs
Auberon
The Sins of Our Fathers
James S. A. Corey, Memory's Legion
