“It’s not true,” she says, slowly—breathing out, feeling the burning in her lungs. “It’s—all a lie.”
Vien brings the palms of his hands together, as if he were going to bow. “Everything is a lie,” he says, finally. “Everything a fragment of the truth. Don’t you have relatives who remember?”
Mother, in the kitchen, saying she didn’t know what they had done, and looking away. “I—” Lan breathes in again, everything tinged with the bitterness of ashes. “I don’t know,” she says, finally. It’s the only thing that will come to mind.
“Look it up,” Vien says, almost gently. “There’s no shortage of things on the network.”
Written by the Dai Viet Empire, the hegemony’s stories about her own people—what does it mean, if it means anything at all? She’s called on the network before she’s aware she has—and “skiff-ghosts” brings up all kinds of hollow-eyed, shambling monstrosities in her field of vision. “I don’t know,” she says, again, and inwardly she’s calling for Mother, who is as silent as she ever was. Tales for children. Bedtime stories: the only narratives that can be stomached.
Vien says nothing, merely watches her with a gaze that seems to encompass the entire universe. She’d rage and scream and rant at him, if he did speak, but he doesn’t. His mouth is set. “I’ll leave you,” he says, finally, and walks away, his back ramrod straight, except that in the communal network, a little icon blinks, something he has left her, as a farewell gift. Forgive me—this is all I can give you, on this day of all days, the message says, and Lan archives it, because she cannot bear to deal with him or the Ro.
At home, Mother is waiting for her. The compartment smells of meat and spices and garlic. Everyone else is shimmering into existence, the entire family gathering around the meal for the ancestors, for the dead planet. “Child?”
Lan wants to ask about skiff-ghosts and the Ro, but the words seem too large, too inappropriate to get past the block in her mouth.
Instead, she sits down in silence at her appointed place, reaching for a pair of chopsticks and a bowl. As the Litany of the Lost begins, and the familiar names light up in her field of vision—the ones who are still there, still dust among the dust of Lieu Vuong Tinh—she finds herself reaching for Vien’s gift and opening it.
A blur, and a jumble of rocks; then the view pans out, and she sees a scattering of rocks of all sizes tumbling in slow motion, and bots weaving in and out like a swarm of bees, lifting off with dust and fragments of rock in their claws.
The view pans out again, until it seems to rise from behind the bots, slowly filling her entire field of vision—a corona of light and ionised gases, a mass of contracting colours like a stilled heart; a slow, stately dance of clouds and interstellar dust, blurred like the prelude to tears.
A live link to a bot-borne camera; a window into an area of space she’s never gone to but instantly recognises.
What else could it be, after all?
Lieu Vuong Tinh: what is left of the planet, what the Ro are scavenging from the radiation-soaked areas. The place her people came from, the place her people fled, with the weight of the dying sun like ghosts on their backs.
Ghosts.
She wonders about the dead, and the skiff-ghosts—and mind-alterations and who bears what, in the mess of the war—and who, ultimately, is right, and justified.
The grit of dust against her palate, and the slow, soundless whistle of spatial winds—and, abruptly, it no longer matters, because she sees it.
The dragon’s mane streams in the solar winds, a shining star at the point of each antler; the serpentine body stretched and pockmarked with fragments of rock; the pearl in its mouth a fiery, pulsing point of light; its tail streaming ice and dust and particles across the universe like the memory of an expelled breath—and its eyes, two pits of utter darkness against the void of space, a gaze turning her way and transfixing her like thrown swords.
The mark. The wound. The hole in the heart that they all want to fill, she and Tuyet Thanh and Mother—and Vien—all united in the wake of the dragon’s passage like farmers huddled in the wake of a storm, grieving for flooded fields and the lost harvest, and bowed under the weight of all that they did to one another.
Mother is right, after all. This is the only story of the war that will ever make sense—the only truth that is simply, honestly, heartbreakingly bearable.
Waiting Out the End of the World in Patty’s Place Cafe
NAOMI KRITZER
Here’s an affecting story that is about just what it says it’s about….
Naomi Kritzer won the 2016 Hugo Award for Best Short Story for her story “Cat Pictures Please,” which originally appeared in Clarkesworld. (She also won the Locus Award for this story and was nominated for the Nebula Award.) This was her fourth appearance in Clarkesworld. Her short stories have also appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction, Analog Science Fiction and Fact, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Lightspeed, and Apex Magazine, as well as various anthologies. Her early novels remain available from Bantam; she also has a short story collection forthcoming in July 2017 from Fairwood Press, and as of this month, she is working on a new novel—about the AI from “Cat Pictures Please” and its teenage sidekick—for Tor Teen. She maintains a website at naomikritzer.com.
I ran out of gas in Belle Fourche, South Dakota, just 200 miles short of Pierre, my goal. Pierre, South Dakota, I mean, I wasn’t trying to get to someone named Pierre. I was trying to get to my parents, and Pierre was where they lived. I thought maybe, given that the world was probably ending in the next 24 hours, they’d want to talk to me.
I’d taken back roads almost the whole way from Spokane, hoping to avoid the traffic jams. I also figured that out-of-the-way gas stations would run out of gas less quickly. That turned out to be true for a while. The problem was that the back-roads gas stations weren’t getting deliveries, either. The last gas I’d found was in Billings. If they’d let me fill up, I might have been able to make it all the way to Pierre on that tank, but the owner, who was overseeing the line with a large gun hanging over his shoulder, was only letting people buy eight gallons per car. Admittedly, that was probably the only reason they weren’t completely out.
I turned my car off and checked my map. Belle Fourche was just 12 miles from I-90. I didn’t know exactly how much gas I still had, but the low fuel light had been on for a while and I wasn’t sure I could make it that far. I tried calling the gas stations along the interstate, but of course no one was picking up. If you had 16 hours left to live, would you spend that time working at a gas station?
I rubbed my eyes, numb with fatigue and fear. If nothing else, maybe I could find somewhere in Belle Fourche to get coffee.
Subway and Taco John’s had fallen victim to the “would you go to your job if you maybe had 16 hours left to live” problem, but I saw the lights on in Patty’s Place, a wood-framed building with a sign out front advertising REAL BBQ EVERYDAY, RIBS THURS NITE. The sign said to seat yourself. I looked around and finally spotted an empty spot in a corner by the window. Even just sitting down in a seat that didn’t have a steering wheel in front of it made me realize how exhausted I was. Possibly I should have taken a few more naps. Or a longer nap at some point.