“It’s enough,” Doctor Grellet said. “As Magadis says, better that one of us survives than none of us.”
“It would have suited Struma if you butchered us all,” Magadis said. “But you didn’t. And even when there was a hope that the repairs could be completed, you risked your life to investigate the wreck. The crew and passengers evaluated this action. They found it meritorious.”
“Struma just wanted a good way to kill me.”
“The decision was yours, not Struma’s. And our decision is final.” Magadis’s tone was stern, but not without some bleak edge of compassion. “Doctor Grellet and I will return to reefersleep now. Our staying awake was only ever temporary, and we must also submit our lives to chance.”
“No,” I said again. “Stay with me. Not everyone has to die—you said it yourselves.”
“We accepted our fate,” Doctor Grellet said. “Now, Captain Bernsdottir you must accept yours.”
And I did.
I believed that we had a better than even chance. I thought that if one of us survived, thousands more would also make it back. And that among those sleepers, once they were woken, would be witnesses willing to corroborate my version of events.
I was wrong.
The ship did repair itself, and I did make it back to Yellowstone. As I have mentioned, great pains were taken to protect me from the long exposure to reefersleep. When they brought me back to life, my complications were minimal. I remembered almost all of it from the first day.
But the others—the few thousand who were spared—they were not so fortunate. One by one they were brought out of hibernation, and one by one they were found to have suffered various deficits of memory and personality. The most lucid among them, those who had come through with the least damage, could not verify my account with the reliability demanded by public opinion. Some recalled being raised to minimal consciousness, polled as to the decision to sacrifice some of the passengers—a majority, as it turned out—but their recollections were vague and sometimes contradictory. Under other circumstances such things would have been put down to revival amnesia, and there would have been no blemish on my name. But this was different. How could I have survived, out of all of them?
You think I didn’t argue my case? I tried. For years, I recounted exactly what had happened, sparing nothing. I turned to the ship’s own records, defending their veracity. It was difficult, for Struma’s family back on Fand. Word reached them eventually. I wept for what they had to bear, with the knowledge of his betrayal. The irony is that they never doubted my account, even as it burned them.
But that saying we had on Fand—the one I spoke of earlier. Shame is a mask that becomes the face. I mentioned its corollary, too—of how that mask can become so well-adapted to its wearer that it no longer feels ill-fitting or alien. Becomes, in fact, something to hide behind—a shield and a comfort.
I have come to be very comfortable with my shame.
True, it chafed against me, in the early days. I resisted it, resented the new and contorting shape it forced upon my life. But with time the mask became something I could endure. By turns I became less and less aware of its presence, and then one day I stopped noticing it was there at all. Either it had changed, or I had. Or perhaps we had both moved toward some odd accommodation, each accepting the other.
Whatever the case, to discard it now would feel like ripping away my own living flesh.
I know this surprises you—shocks you, even. That even with your clarity of mind, even with your clear recollection of being polled, even with your watertight corroboration, I would not jump at the chance for forgiveness. But you misjudge me if you think otherwise.
Look out at the city now.
Tower after tower, like the dust columns of stellar nurseries, receding into the haze of night, twinkling with a billion lights, a billion implicated lives.
The truth is, they don’t deserve it. They put this on me. I spoke truthfully all those years ago, and my words steered us from the brink of a second war with the Conjoiners. A few who mattered—those who had influence—they took my words at face value. But many more did not. I ask you this now: why should I offer them the solace of seeing me vindicated?
They can sleep with their guilt when I’m dead.
I hear your disbelief. Understand it, even. You’ve gone to this trouble, come to me with this generous, selfless intention—hoping to ease these final years with some shift in the public view of me. It’s a kindness, and I thank you for it.
But there’s another saying we used to have on Fand. You’ll know it well, I think.
A late gift is worse than no gift at all.
Would you mind leaving me now?
The Dragon That Flew Out of the Sun
ALIETTE DE BODARD
Aliette de Bodard is a software engineer who lives and works in Paris, where she shares a flat with two Lovecraftian plants and more computers than warm bodies. Only a few years into her career, her short fiction has appeared in Interzone, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Clarkesworld, Realms of Fantasy, Orson Scott Card’s InterGalactic Medicine Show, Writers of the Future, Coyote Wild, Electric Velocipede, The Immersion Book of SF, Fictitious Force, Shimmer, and elsewhere, and she has won the British Science Fiction Association Award for her story “The Shipmaker,” the Locus Award and the Nebula Award for her story “Immersion” and the Nebula Award for her story “The Waiting Stars.” Her novels include Servant of the Underworld, Harbinger of the Storm, and Master of the House of Darts, all recently reissued in a novel omnibus, Obsidian and Blood. Another British Science Fiction Association Award winner, The House of Shattered Wings, came out in 2015. Her most recent book is a sequel, The House of Binding Thorns. Her website, www.aliettedebodard.com, features free fiction, thoughts on the writing process, and entirely too many recipes for Vietnamese dishes.
The story that follows is another in her long series of “Xuya” stories, taking place in the far future of an alternate world where a high-tech conflict is going on between spacefaring Mayan, Chinese, and Vietnamese empires. This one deals with the question of who is responsible for a war—never an easy question to answer, and often quite painful to decide.
Here’s a story Lan was told, when she was a child, when she lay in the snugness of her sleep-cradle, listening to the distant noises of station life—the thrum of the recycling filters, the soft gurgle of water reconstituted from its base components, the distant noises of the station’s Mind in the Inner Rings, a vast unreality that didn’t quite concern her, that she couldn’t encompass in words.
Mother sat by Lan’s side and smiled at her. Her hands smelled of garlic and fish sauce, with the faintest hint of machine oil. Her face was lined with worry; but then, it always was, those days. She wanted to tell a story about Le Loi and the Turtle’s Sword, or about the girl who was reborn in a golden calabash and went on to marry the king.
Lan had other ideas.
“Tell me,” she said, “about Lieu Vuong Tinh.”
For a moment, Mother’s face shifted and twisted; she looked as if she’d swallowed something that had stuck in her throat. Then she took a deep breath and told Lan this.