But all our real shrines were gone into fire and the ship was directly overhead now, slipping above the rock-strewn plain. There was a flare from its side and something was hurtling downwards, striking the surface below the cave with a great puff of dust. I shut my eyes and turned my head away, to avoid what I thought would be an explosion. But the ship glided on. As the dust settled I could see the thing that had fallen – no, landed. It was a pod, with a curved hull, surrounded by a network of webbed spines. A small black hole appeared in its surface, like a mouth opening. Two figures came out and began to move around.
They were the first Kharain I had ever seen, but they did not look like the images on the monitors. They were not the big, spiral-bodied things, with armour plate, with needle claws. These figures were spindly and small. But they were moving quickly towards the fortress, away from the cave. At least I had the suit, at least I did not have to face the freeze without it. I began to talk to the suit, speaking to it as if it was my mother. I can’t remember what I told it. Stories of our people, perhaps, or stories that I made up. I spoke and I waited for the Kharain to come back. I think I might have slept, because when I next looked out over the plain, the spindly figures were nowhere to be seen and the pod was lifting up in a roil of dust. I watched it sail upwards to the ship as though it was pulled on a wire, and once it had disappeared, the great ship moved away.
I watched it disappear and did not believe. This was a trick. The ship would come back, or would turn and the last thing I’d see would be the flare of its guns, bright as Sulane. I waited and waited and sipped some of the emergency fluid from the inside of the suit, thankful that my mother had instilled in me the importance of keeping it topped up. But the filtering system would not last forever and eventually I knew that I would have to go back to the fortress.
I did not want to go back. The fortress was no longer my home; the Kharain had made it part of themselves, stealing it from me as they had stolen everything else. But, apart from an unfamiliar coding of the airlocks, imposed to over-ride the locking mechanism, there was initially no sign that they had been there. They had closed the airlocks behind them, with no damage. When I checked, still wearing the suit, that they had not done anything to the internal air supply of the fortress and found it intact, I stripped off the suit and went through the tower room by room. I moved stealthily, for I’d only seen the pod lifting off, not the two figures. For all I knew, they had left someone behind.
But there was no sign of anything or anyone, until I reached the data room. There was something on the monitor, unscrolling into air. It was a battle scene.
“I have been left an instruction by the visitors,” the data-source said in my mother’s calm voice. “I am to play these images.”
So I watched. I saw a legion of beings that looked like my mother, like my grandmother, like me. They were advancing through the streets of an unfamiliar city, somewhere with tall clay towers, from which a small, spindly people swarmed. The beings that were ourselves were tearing through them, tearing them apart, until the spaces between the clay mounds ran with ichor. Occasionally, one of our people would squat, her abdomen would pulse, and she would drop a squirming ball of a child, which swiftly uncoiled and grew. The ranks parted around each ball, until the back of the line was formed of new beings, growing quickly.
They were a spawn-squad, and they were me. Then the end of the city was reached and the image rewound itself from the beginning.
I watched it over and over again. I could not understand it, because it meant that everything I had been told was untrue. The Kharain were not the overrunning warriors. We were. I was.
“They have left a message,” the data-source said. “Shall I relay it?”
“Yes.” My voice sounded numb.
“It is this: the visit has been conducted. The treaty remains because the terms of the treaty have been adhered to. Your numbers have remained constant. The risk of your return is still judged to be too great and you must remain here, but you will not be harmed. You are the last of all your kind and we will not be responsible for extinction in spite of past actions. Message ends.”
It took me a long time to work it out. We had been the aggressors, but they had found a weapon against us: some chemical that limited the number of young we were able to reproduce. Reluctant to commit complete genocide, they had marooned one of our kind here, in what had once been an outpost of ours. And with difficulty, she had bred, the birth triggered by an adrenalin surge, not from combat this time, but from fear. So it had been all the way down the line, with the stories of how we had come here mutating and changing, until we were in the right, and they were in the wrong.
Now, we have a new story. And it is ‘we’, not ‘I’, for my child is growing slowly within, her conception sparked by my fright when the Kharain ship came onto the monitor screens. We will have a new story to pass down, but it is not one that I want to tell, just as my many-times great-grandmother did not want to tell it, the story of our failure. But the alternative is a comforting lie and so I have a choice, as I sit here in the fortress, knowing now that there are no wonderful lands to which to return, no ships of my lost people which will one day come home. All I have is a story.
THE FIRST DANCE
MARTIN MCGRATH
Martin McGrath is a writer and editor. Originally from Northern Ireland, he now lives in Hertfordshire with his wife and a disturbingly precocious daughter. He has seen around twenty of his short stories appear in anthologies such as NewCon Press’
Conflicts
and Mutation Press’
Rocket Science
, and in magazines including
Albedo One
. He has a PhD in a thoroughly obsolete area of political science and was once pushed off a Eurostar by an impatient elderly French woman. When he correctly predicts the lottery numbers he will buy the Odeon cinema in Leicester Square and live on popcorn.
T
HEY HAD TAKEN
away the memory that Alejandro cherished most. He wanted it back. The Muninn in his shoulder whirred warmly and recalled everything. The old man relaxed, allowing the device to take him back, he did not hope – did not allow himself to hope – that this time would be different. He accepted the pain that must come.
A
LEJANDRO LOOKED AROUND
at the faces of friends and family, as he has always done. So many were now long gone. Even the community centre was rubble today, cleared for some office building that was never finished. But here were the people, young and bright. And here was the room still filled with the smell of fresh paint.
He let the soft rumble of conversation enfold him, Arsene’s barking laugh, the tinkling of glasses and the scraping of chairs on the red-tiled floor. He felt the warmth of the summer’s day seeping through the building’s thick walls and the gentle breeze from the single fan that stirred the air above the hastily cleared dance floor. His stomach felt heavy from drink and food, his head light from an unexpected depth of joy.
Finn, Tommy’s little boy, stared up at him. Alejandro smiled then and now. Finn was twice married, and twice divorced, with three kids and a big belly but here he tottered across the dance floor, his body still working out the complexities of standing upright. The boy’s face was set in a mask of fierce determination. Every step was a struggle of will against gravity, battling loose legs that only reluctantly obeyed his commands. In the boy’s fist, gripped tight and held out high, a carnation, the buttonhole from his father’s rented tuxedo.
The boy plodded towards them, dragging the focus of the room with him. The chattering faded; the band, tuning up in the corner, fell silent. The world stopped spinning. Finn swayed to a halt and raised the bruised white flower to Teresita.
“Thank you,” she said as she stooped to take the gift.
“Princess!” the boy said, eyes wide.
Teresita laughed and scooped the child up in her arms, spinning him around.
Alejandro flicked a jaw muscle to pause the play back. The hum of the Muninn, more felt than heard as it thrummed against his collar bone, settled into a lower pitch.
Teresita.
His throat tightened. He blinked away tears.
She had been, on that day, so convinced of her own happiness that it seemed to Alejandro that a kind of joyful rapture had engulfed the whole wedding. Even her mother, who had always known Alejandro would never amount to anything, sat holding her new husband’s hand with a soft smile and her eyes bright. Teresita’s faith in him, in them together, had been so absolute that it had scared him even then. From here, knowing all the ways he would let her down, all the stupid disappointments and carelessness, the promises that he never could keep...
Alejandro blinked, restarting the recall – the Muninn whined.
Teresita kissed Finn on the forehead and set him down. The boy nodded solemnly, turned on his heel and tottered away into the arms of his parents – both gone now, God take them – and the laughing, applauding crowd.
Teresita put the flower in her hair, the white petals shocking amidst that ebony flow. She looked up, a wide, immodest grin on her face. Alejandro felt his hand reach out, the movement steadier and stronger than he had managed in many years. He felt himself brush her face with one finger, wondering again at the softness of the touch, the cool smoothness of her skin. She rested her cheek against his hand.
And there they stood, perfectly still, at the centre of the world.
The lead singer of the band started counting.
“One, two, three, four –”
And at that moment the picture fractured and the sound crackled and a wall of static fuzz rose up around Alejandro. Over the hiss and warble a low female voice began to intone a legal statement about copyrighted material and the rights of its owners and the cost of licensing and offering him the opportunity to upgrade his package with Mnemosyne to reinsert the missing moments.
Alejandro sighed, twitched his jaw again to end the playback and felt the Muninn’s hum fade on his shoulder.
A
LEJANDRO FLICKED THROUGH
his bill from Mnemosyne. He’d long ago paid off the basic charge on his Muninn; going through the bill and removing memories that were flagged with demands for copyright payments meant that the basic services of the device were available free.
He could have set his scroll to automatically reply to the bill, giving up everything that contained a memory he could no longer afford to keep, but sifting through the memories he was about to lose had become a small ritual. He’d wander down through the list, attempting to remember each incident without the Muninn, trying to work out where copyrighted material might have slipped into the memory.
Was it a tune on a distant radio? Or was a screen in the corner playing some movie? He flicked away one memory when he realized they were demanding a payment for the taste of a soft drink.
Alejandro enjoyed the puzzle even as he resented dropping each lost moment into the wastebasket. Every deletion came with a polite reminder from the sweet-voiced Mnemosyne woman reassuring him that his memories would never be deleted and were always there for him if he paid the required licence fee. It stung every time. He knew that he could never bring them back.
He’d held on to their wedding dance for as long as he could afford to. Now, though, the prices had gone up again and the rules kept changing. He had no choice.
He clicked the box and dragged the file to the corner of the screen and consigned it to the trash.
Tomorrow I will visit Filipe’s boy,
he thought.
A
LEJANDRO WONDERED IF
he was the only one left who remembered that this building had once been a bowling alley. The neon signs were long gone, as were the bowlers. The inside had been divided up into tiny rooms – the lanes buried under cheap flooring. Did the mechanisms still work? Were there, somewhere underneath the narrow dirty corridors and crudely boxed-in apartments, pins and balls sitting, waiting to be rediscovered one day by a wrecking crew or, perhaps a thousand years hence, by a confused archaeologist?
He pushed his way through the junk-filled space, past discarded furniture, heavy boxes, broken toys and stacks of waste-filled plastic bags that reeked of rot and seeped colourless liquids across a tacky floor that sucked at his feet.
The door to Gideon’s room was open just a crack and violet light spilled around the jamb into the corridor. From inside music throbbed with bass so deep that Alejandro could feel it vibrating in every bone – his skin shivered with the beat.
Alejandro knocked. Waited. Knocked again. And then, when it became obvious that the music would drown out any sound he was capable of making with his knuckles, he pushed the door open.
There was a man with black skin, not brown but black with a hint of blue, like the deepest night sky, and stars of silver sparkled in his ears and his lips, his nose and his eyebrow, his teeth and his tongue. A line of what looked like rivets ran from the bridge of his nose over his brow and across the bald-black skin of his head.
The music snapped off and silence roared into the room.
“Gideon?” Alejandro said.
The boy looked up, suspicious at first. Then he smiled and Alejandro saw his mother in him and for an instant he was again the little boy he had once been, playing in the street with Gael and Tad, Alejandro’s grandsons.
“Mister Marichal?” The boy stood up. He was very tall. Alejandro wondered if that was something else he’d done to himself. Filipe and his mother were not so big. “Mister Marichal!”
The boy came around the desk, ignored Alejandro’s offered hand and gave him a fierce hug, lifting the old man off his feet. Then he pulled away, looking serious.
“What are you doing down here? You should have told me you were coming, it’s dangerous down here.”