Memorys legion, p.29
Memory's Legion, page 29
Her mother walked in from the front door, footsteps hard and percussive. Her mouth was tight and her eyes as hard as rage. She gazed toward Cara without seeming to see her.
“Mom?” Cara said, and her voice seemed to come from a long way away. “What’s wrong?”
It was one of those things. An accident. If any of a thousand details had been just a little different, no one would have even noticed it. The soldier who’d been driving the transport had indulged in a couple beers with his lunch, so his reaction times were just that much delayed. Xan and Santiago and the other boys had decided to play football instead of tag, so there was a ball that could take a wild kick. Xan had been nearest the road, so he’d been the one to run out to retrieve it. The whole thing was over before anyone understood it had begun. Like that, her little brother was dead, and the drone and Momma bird and the dogs didn’t seem important anymore.
Cara sat while the soldier explained it all. Santiago Singh stood at attention, weeping as he retold all he’d seen like the good little soldier he was. Her father lurched out of the room at some point. Her mother dropped her favorite serving bowl, the fragments scattering across the floor. They were like moments out of a dream, connected because they were about the same thing, more or less. But she couldn’t have said which happened first. Which one led to the others. Xan was dead, and it shattered time for her. It broke everything.
Admiral Duarte sent his condolences. This was a lapse of discipline that should never have happened. The admiral had already ordered the drunk soldier’s execution. Cara’s family would be put first on the list for a place in the new housing facilities, and Cara would be guaranteed a place in the academy when it opened. The admiral understood that nothing could compensate for their loss, but the soldiers would do what they could. With the family’s permission, the admiral would like to attend the wake. Someone had said, Of course, but Cara didn’t know if it had been her mother or her father. She might even have said it herself.
The town didn’t have a mortuary. In the years they’d been on Laconia, there hadn’t been more than a handful of deaths, and none of them had been a child. Not until now. No one seemed to know what to do or how to go about it. Cara had never been to a funeral before. She didn’t know what to expect.
They brought Xan home that afternoon, and his body had already been cleaned. Someone had found or made a burial gown for him, white cloth from his throat down to his bare feet. They put him in the front between the door and road on a table. His eyes were closed, his hands folded on his belly. Cara stood at his side, looking down at him and trying to feel. Everything in her seemed to have gone numb.
To her, Xan looked like he was sleeping. Then he looked like he wasn’t really Xan, but only a statue of him. A piece of art. Cara found she could flip her brain between seeing him one way and then the other, like he’d become an optical illusion. Her brother, but only asleep. Something not alive, but also not her brother. Back again. Anything except the two together: Never both Xan and dead.
People from town came. Edmund Otero. Janet Li. The Stover family, with Julianne Stover carrying her new baby on one hip. They brought food. A couple of times, they tried singing hymns, but the songs died out before they could really take root. At one point, Mari Tennanbaum seemed to well up out of the crowd and grab Cara in an awkward hug, like Cara was supposed to be comforting her instead of the other way around. Then Mari faded back into the swirl of bodies and hushed conversation. Cara went back to looking at her brother’s corpse.
There was something. Not a bruise really, but where a bruise would have been if Xan’s blood hadn’t stopped where it was. A discoloration on his head. Cara couldn’t get the idea out of her mind that this was where Death had touched him.
She didn’t see the soldiers arrive so much as hear it. A change in the voices around her. When she thought to look up, Admiral Duarte was there, silhouetted by the light spilling out of their doorway as he talked to her parents. It was the first time she’d seen him in person and he wasn’t as tall as she expected. A centimeter or two shorter than her father. His uniform was perfectly tailored. His pockmarked cheeks made him look older than he probably was.
He was talking to her parents when she saw him, his head bent forward like he was putting all his attention into listening to them. It was a little bit like having a Greek god or a character out of history show up. It wasn’t the only unreal thing about the evening, but it was one among others.
Her mother said something she couldn’t hear, and the admiral nodded and touched her arm as he replied. He shook her father’s hand, neither man smiling. When he walked in her direction, she thought it was to see Xan. To view the body, if that was the phrase. She was surprised when he stopped in front of her.
“Cara?” The way her name sat in his mouth, it was like he was making sure he had the right person and also talking to someone that was his equal. His eyes were soft brown. She could see the sorrow in them. “My name is Winston.”
“I know,” she said like she was accepting an apology. Letting him off the hook.
He shifted to look at Xan. They were silent for a few seconds. He sighed. “I wish I could make this better. I’ve lost people I love before. It was very hard.”
“Why?” she asked, and her voice was sharper than she’d expected. It wasn’t a fair thing to ask. She wasn’t even sure quite what she meant by it other than who the hell was he to come to her brother’s funeral and talk about his own pain. Winston took the question in, pursing his lips like he was sucking on it. Tasting it.
“Because I hate feeling powerless,” he said. “I hate being reminded that the universe is so much bigger than I am. And that I can’t always protect people.” He shifted to look at her directly again. Like he actually cared about her reaction to this explanation. She understood why the soldiers would follow him. Why they all loved him.
“Would you undo it,” she asked, “if you could? If you could bring him back?”
Maybe he heard something in the question. Maybe it was only that he was listening to her so deeply. He paused, thought. “I believe that I would, yes. I need your family to be well. To be part of what I’m doing here.”
“Taking over Laconia?”
“And everything that comes after that. I want to keep people safe. Not just here but everywhere. The people on Laconia, not just the ones who came with me but all of us, are my best chance to do that. And yes, if I could save your brother, I would. For him, and for your parents, and for you. If I could wave a magic wand and go back in time to keep him off that road? I would do it.”
“You killed the soldier who killed him. Didn’t you need him too?”
“Not as much as I needed you and your family to know that your brother mattered to me. I’m the government here. I imposed that. I didn’t ask your permission first. That puts some obligations on me. It means I have to show sincerity and respect for our rules, even when that requires doing something I might not want to do. I don’t have the right to compromise.”
“I think I understand that.”
“We have to be one people,” he said. He sounded sad. “There’s no room for tribes on Laconia. That’s how they do it back in Sol system. Earth and Mars and the Belt. That’s what we’re here to outgrow.”
“Everything is different here,” Cara said, and the admiral nodded as though she’d understood him perfectly, then touched her shoulder and walked away.
Behind her, someone was weeping softly. She didn’t turn to see who. For the first time since she’d come home, she felt almost clearheaded. When she put her hand on Xan’s foot the same way she used to when she woke him up, his body was cold.
“It’s going to be okay,” she said. “I know how to fix this.”
Her parents were in the kitchen with Mari Tennanbaum, each of them with a squat glass of wine. Usually her father would be making jokes about it being vintage fifteen minutes ago, but now he didn’t seem to notice it was in his hand. The missing joke made her sad, because it meant he was sad.
“What happens to him tonight?” Cara asked.
Mari blinked and reared back a centimeter as if Cara had shouted something rude. Her father didn’t react at all, just turned the fixed, polite smile a degree more toward her. Her mother was the one to answer.
“This isn’t the time—”
“I know the funeral’s tomorrow,” Cara said, “but it’s not like there’s a place in town that he can stay in until then. Can he be here? It’s the last night he can, so he should stay here. With us.”
Her voice was louder and shriller than she’d intended. Mari Tennanbaum wasn’t looking at her, but other people were. Her mother’s eyes were as dead as Momma bird’s.
“Sure,” her mother said. “If it’s important to you, he can stay here until the funeral. That would… that would be nice. To have him here.”
Then her mother started crying and didn’t stop. Her father put down his wine, still with the same smile, and led her away. For a moment, Cara expected Xan to rush in and ask what was wrong with Mom, and then she remembered again. She went back out to stand guard over the body. To make sure that if anyone came and tried to take him away, she’d be there to tell them her mom said not to.
The memorial ended late, people staying until the darkness felt like it had always been there. Like daytime was some other planet. She was still standing beside Xan when Admiral Duarte and the soldiers left, and when Stephen DeCaamp and Janet Li came to move Xan’s body inside. Probably nothing in the local system would mistake him for food, but they brought him in anyway, still on the table. They left him between the dining area and the kitchen, dressed in his funeral whites. It was like something out of a dream.
Her parents saw everyone out, said their last farewells, and closed the door. None of them spoke, and Cara went to the washroom and pretended to prepare for bed. Brushed teeth, washed face, changed into a nightgown. She kissed her mother on the cheek and went to her bedroom. She left the door open just a crack, though, so the latch wouldn’t make noise when she opened it. Then, as quietly as she could, she took the nightgown back off and pulled on work clothes. She tucked her handheld into her sock drawer. If they checked, it would look like she was in her room. She crawled into bed and pulled the covers up to her neck so if her parents did come in, she’d look normal. The trick, she thought, would be waiting until they went to bed without falling asleep herself.
In the darkness, she bit her lip, chewing the soft flesh so the pain would keep her awake. She counted backward from five hundred, one number with each breath, and then counted back up to five hundred again. She was just shifting the blanket aside to get up when she heard the back door open and her parents’ voices drift in. She froze, listened.
The strangest thing was how normal they sounded. How much grief sounded like regular life.
“I’ll get that cleaned up later,” her father said.
“It’s fine. I don’t care.”
“I know, but I’ll clean it up anyway.”
The ghost of a laugh, gone almost before it started. She could imagine her mother leaning against the counter the way she always did, except that Xan was dead. So maybe they acted different. It seemed like everything ought to have changed.
“I can’t believe this is happening,” her mother said. “It’s just not… plausible?”
“Yeah. I keep feeling like I just had a little seizure or something. Like I was having some kind of hallucination, and now I’m back. Or I’m asleep again. I don’t know. I can’t… I don’t feel like he’s gone.”
Cara felt a little smile tugging at her mouth. For a second, she was tempted to run out and tell them. To have them help. Then they could all do it together.
“I don’t want to be here anymore,” her mother said. “We weren’t supposed to be here anymore. Not us. Not—” Her voice thickened and stopped, like the words had gotten too gooey to get out. Her father was making noises. Like little cooing sounds Cara might have heard from paper bugs. She shifted a little, thinking that maybe she could peek through the crack in her door. See what they were doing. The tightness in her gut was the seconds of nighttime slipping away, and she had to find the dogs.
“He should have been back in Paris,” her mother said. “He should have been with his cousins, not on this fucking nightmare of a planet.”
“I know,” her father said.
“I hate it here. I want to go home.”
“I know, Dot. I want to go home too.”
Cara felt the words like a punch. Home? They wanted to go home? They were home. This was home. What they meant was Earth, where she’d never been, where she didn’t belong. Where Xan didn’t belong.
She must have made a noise, because her mother called out in her tear-thickened voice. “Babygirl?”
Cara froze, then inched back toward her bed. She couldn’t be found now. Not dressed like this.
“Babygirl?” her mother said again, and Cara jumped back into the bed, hauled the blanket up to her neck, and turned her face to the wall. If they saw her face, they’d know she was only pretending to sleep…
Her door opened. She fought to keep her breath slow and deep. What would she say if they touched her? Should she pretend to wake up? What did she look like when she was just waking up? She didn’t know.
“I love you, babygirl,” her mother whispered, and the door closed, the latch clicking home. Cara let out a long, stuttering breath. Her pulse was going fast enough for two people, which struck her as funny, because it was sort of true. Her heartbeat and Xan’s too. For a while at least.
Her parents’ voices were less clear now, but she heard the door to their bedroom close. She waited, counted to five hundred and down again, waited some more. No more noises. No more voices.
The latch was louder than she wanted it to be, no matter how gently she opened it. It felt like it was echoing in the empty house, but she’d spent too much time waiting already. She walked carefully, rolling her weight from carefully placed heel to her toe. Xan lay still on his table. She opened the back door, stepped out to the shed. When she pulled the cart out, she was almost surprised to see that the sampling drone was still in the shed. It seemed like an artifact from some other life, like it had been hidden there for years and not hours. Funny how time worked like that. She ran her fingertips over the repaired shell with its new veins.
Xan’s body was heavier than she expected. She’d carried him before sometimes, but he’d always been helping her, at least a little. He wasn’t stiff anymore, and she staggered a little getting him through the back doorway. It got easier when she stopped trying to carry him less like a boy and more like a sack of soil. When she dropped him into the cart, his head hit the side with a thump.
“Sorry,” she whispered as if he had felt anything. “But really, this is your fault. When this is done, you’re going to have to do my chores for me from now on.”
Xan’s eyes had opened a little. Tiny wet slits hidden behind his eyelashes, catching the starlight. His arms had folded under him when she put him down, twisted and bent at angles that made her own shoulder ache to look at. There wasn’t time to make him comfortable, though. She fumbled with the cart’s handle and started down the path, then paused and snuck back into the house. She pulled a bag of fruit and some rice bars out of the pantry, and a bottle of filtered water from the refrigerator. She tucked them beside her brother’s corpse, took up the cart handle, and started out.
Night on Earth was bright. That’s what they said. Their moon shone like a kind of second, crappy sun. Cities were big enough to drown out the stars with their extra glow. She’d seen pictures of it all, but that wasn’t what it had been like for her. On Laconia, day was bright and night was dark. The wide, smeary glow of the galactic disk was the brightest thing in the sky, and she could only navigate by it roughly. Enough to know which direction she was going. Two stick moons floated against the stars, shimmering and shifting, swimming toward each other in the darkness above the sky.
Cara put her head down and pulled. She’d been down this path so many times at so many times of day and in such different weathers that her body knew the way even when she couldn’t exactly see it. She knew the sound of the grass and the water, the places where the breeze changed shape, the smell of broken soil and the pattering of bug honey on the lower fronds of the trees. She could have made the trip with her eyes closed, and with the darkness, she very nearly did.
At the pond, a rock deer lifted its head at her approach, its scales shifting and reflecting starlight like a little slice of sky that had come down for a drink. It was too dark to see its eyes.
“Shoo,” Cara said, and the animal turned and launched itself into the darkness, tramping through the underbrush and then running away faster than a soldier’s truck, even though there were no roads. Cara stopped. A film of sweat covered her forehead, and her armpits felt swampy. She was here, though. She’d made it.
“Hello?” she shouted. “Are you there?”
The darkness didn’t answer back. Even the night animals and bugs went quiet, like they were listening with her. Now that she was here, the plan that had seemed so simple was showing its holes. For her to take Xan to the dogs, the dogs had to be there. If they weren’t…
“Hello?” Her voice sounded thin, even to her. Stretched and desperate. “Please, are you there?”
She parked the cart in the soft ground at the water’s edge and stepped toward the trees. The already black night grew darker. There wasn’t even starlight here. Only an absence, like looking straight into the pupil of an eye as big as the world. She put her arms out, fingertips waving for the fronds and scrub that she knew were there but couldn’t see. Her eyes ached from trying to see anything. Her ears rang with the silence.
“Please? I need help.”
Nothing answered. Despair she hadn’t known she was fighting washed into her. If the dogs weren’t there, then Xan was gone. And gone forever. And he couldn’t be. Grief shifted in her belly, shook her legs and hands. The dogs had been there for Momma bird. They couldn’t leave her brother dead, and just save a fucking sunbird.
