Cardenas (Findlay IV), Findlay System, Eriuman Republic.
After ninety minutes of grappling drills under the intense sun of midday, both Khalil and Sang were happy to lie on the lawn for a moment and recover.
Sang listened to the hum of insects, Khalil’s heavy breath and the whisper of a breeze in the tops of the trees nearby. Here in the heart of the family garden, not a hint of the city that lay all around disturbed the peace. Nothing could be glimpsed through the bordering trees and bushes.
This was Max’s favorite section of the sprawling gardens. It was where he had taken most of his combat training and Sang had spent long hours standing at the narrow entrance, watching the sessions.
It had seemed appropriate to bring Khalil here when Sang had found him pacing the gallery. The man had been angry and miserable. “She will not stir from the bed,” he said. “She will not speak to me. To me.” His distress was plain. “What happened last night?”
Sang had suggested the training session as an excuse to get them both out of the house and into a location where they could speak freely, yet Sang had found the exertion a welcome relief. They only wished they had anticipated the activity and worn something lighter. Today was one of the early, hot days that heralded the coming of summer. Sang plucked the shirt away from their chest.
Khalil grunted, watching the movement. Then he sat up and pulled the tunic over his head and tossed it away. “Better,” he decided, rotating his bare shoulders.
“One often does not get to choose what clothes to wear in a battle. The battle arrives unannounced, in a location and time that is usually highly inconvenient,” Sang said, remembering the ex-Navy instructor bawling that fact at Max and Bellona, while they fought to stay awake and train in the small hours of the night, both wearing nothing more than the lightest of sleepwear and robes.
“So I should wear combat gear at all times?” Khalil asked, sounding both tired and amused.
“Do you feel you might be called upon to fight at any instant?” Sang asked.
Khalil propped himself up on his arms. “Here, I always feel that way.” He met Sang’s gaze. “What happened last night?”
Sang cast their mind back to the previous evening. The dinner party had proceeded choppily, with Bellona keeping Anh Delucas on his toes with pointed questions and observations, while Reynard and Iulia did their best to redirect the conversation whenever they could. The remaining dinner guests, all close relatives of Reynard’s, had tried to follow their hosts’ leads, hiding their discomfort at the raw subjects Bellona raised—abduction, annexation, hostages, slavery, subjugation, death ratios, acceptable loss rates, AI mortality priorities... Sang suspected that few of the guests had ever openly discussed such matters even in the privacy of their own homes, let alone over a formal dinner table.
“Bellona talked to Captain Ahn,” Sang told Khalil. “To speak to him was exactly what Reynard and Iulia wanted, only not at all the outcome they expected. Ahn found Bellona fascinating…and uncomfortable.”
Khalil smiled. “She can have that effect, if one forgets her experience.”
“We believe all her family would prefer to forget Ledan ever happened. Bellona reminded them, last night. It was a masterful display of expertise in a subject that Eriumans rarely speak about openly.” Sang shifted on the lawn, looking for a more comfortable position on the soft gray tufts.
Khalil waited.
Sang sighed. “It happened when dessert was served.”
“What happened?” Khalil coaxed.
“We are not entirely certain. Bellona bent to sniff the bowl in front of her.” Sang frowned. They had reviewed the sequence many times since it had happened. She had bent to sniff the concoction, a warm treat redolent with spices. Many of the other guests were doing the same and sighing with pleasure.
Bellona, though, had frozen, her gaze on the dish and her hand gripping the edge of the table. A frantic pulse throbbed at the base of her neck.
Sang noticed her distress quickly. Instantly, they turned to the sideboard, picked up one of the extra dishes and scooped up a mouthful of the dessert, analyzing it for poisons, toxins and histamines.
The explosion of spice flavors was pleasant, but in no way was it alarming. The dessert was completely innocent. Not even the scent it gave off was harmful.
Other guests were noticing her reaction. Anh put down his spoon and touched her arm. “Bellona?” he asked quietly, leaning closer so others would not hear the soft enquiry.
Sang leaned between them. “Excuse me, Captain,” they told Ahn and picked up the bowl in front of Bellona and sampled it. It was identical.
Sang bent to examine Bellona. Perspiration dotted her temples. She breathed raggedly through parted lips. Her eyes were still fixed on the place where the bowl had been sitting, unblinking. The pupils were very large.
Carefully, they laid their hand on her shoulder and gave her a gentle shake. “Bellona.”
She drew in a rushed, deep breath and stirred, bringing her hand to her head. “I…have to go.” She lurched from the table, brushing past Gaubert, who sat on her left, ignoring the hand he raised to help her.
“Sang,” Iulia said shortly, in a tone Sang understood. They caught up with Bellona and assisted her from the room, guiding her in a straighter line than the weaving path she had been following.
Bellona shuddered as they walked. “I could almost see it,” she murmured, her voice thick.
“See what?” Sang asked.
“I don’t know! I can’t remember.”
Sang paused outside the entrance to her suite of rooms, to give her a chance to deny them entry if she wished, as Khalil was in there.
Bellona put her hand on the door, propping herself up. “I feel…sick.”
“Should we assist you? An anti-nausea shot, perhaps…”
Bellona shook her head, then held still and pressed her fingers to her temple once more. “No. No cures. No remedies. I need to find out.” She touched the doorplate and moved out of the way as the door swung open. She met Sang’s eyes. “Thank you,” she said simply. “I will be fine now.”
Sang understood why she was lying. “It got you out of the dinner party,” they pointed out, trying to lift the mood.
Her smile was barely there, yet it was a smile. “Yes, I planned it all along. A way to avoid the after-dinner wine on the terrace that Anh would undoubtedly have suggested. Good night, Sang.”
Sang watched until the door was closed and sealed once more, then moved through the mostly silent house to their own small quarters. There was no point in returning to the dinner party. Their presence would act as a reminder to everyone and they did not enjoy being resented.
When they had finished relating the event to Khalil, he remained silent for a long moment. There were very few people who were as comfortable with silences as Khalil was.
“She said ‘I could almost see it’?”
“Yes.”
Again, the deep silence. Then Khalil sat up, taking the weight off his arms. He brushed the grass off his palms. “I remember the land where I lived as a child. The sun was more orange than this one—I found out later it was just barely within the livable zone and only the equatorial areas of my world were sustaining, but those areas were warm and comfortable. I don’t remember harsh winters, of course. Just endless warm days. The earth was a deep, dark brown, darker than any earth I have seen since. The sky was nearly always cloudless. I would walk for hours and hours, watching the way the mountains never seemed to come any closer. They were so tall. Even now, I have never seen taller mountains. They towered over us who lived in that tiny village. They surrounded the city, a day’s ride away. The mountains looked after me, I thought, for they were everywhere I went. I remember those days with a fondness that makes me smile. I was innocent. I knew nothing of the greater world beyond provincial space.”
“Most children are so,” Sang said in agreement, wondering why Khalil was telling them this. As he had never spoken about his life before meeting Bellona, Sang did not interrupt him now. Later, they would analyze every word for implications, assumptions that could be made and hidden facts. It was a natural function to gather data about those surrounding the one they worked for, especially those who were in her bed.
Khalil pointed with his freshly brushed-off hand. “There is a plant over there—I have no idea what it is, yet when I get near it, I can smell it. It has an aroma very close to the one given off by the bushes the farm directors planted alongside their crops to ward off birds. When I smell that plant, Sang, I don’t just remember the mountains and the earth with simple fondness. For a moment, it is as if I am actually there. I can recall details that I have long forgotten. The way the earth squeezed through my toes when I ran through freshly ploughed fields. The sun on my face. The cold air that came off the peaks when the wind was right, with the smell of snow riding on them. The tartness of the berries from those bushes…my mouth watered when I recalled it.”
Sang considered that. “A repressed memory,” they said. “Did the spice force her to recall a memory of Xenia? The fighter, not the dancer?”
Khalil shook his head. “Those memories are not suppressed. They’re not there at all. There is only one memory I know of that Bellona cannot recall even when she tries.”
“Why she left Cardenas,” Sang concluded.
Khalil was staring at the plant that had evoked his childhood.
“Should we arrange for a miniature to be created for you?” Sang asked.
Khalil shuddered, his smile fading. “No, thank you.” He brushed his hands off once more, even though they were clean. “Not every memory of home is a pleasant one. The rest…can remain just memories. I do not care to repeat them.”
Sang tried to sort through the courses of action that lay open to them now that Khalil had proposed this enticing possibility. How could they help Bellona retrieve the memory? Should they? Perhaps, like Khalil’s past, it was a memory best left buried.
“Have you ever wondered what goes into the making of a hero, Sang?”
Sang frowned. “I have not studied heroes at all, although the Eriuman Navy decorates many of them every year.”
Khalil laughed. “I mean a real hero. A leader, a visionary, someone who emerges from obscurity to blazing glory, changing the world with their deeds. True heroes, Sang, are rare. They burst upon the known worlds once every thousand generations or more and they leave a mark that is never forgotten.”
“Mia Rasmussen,” Sang suggested.
“Svend Murat Kovac,” Khalil added. “Ben the Glorious. The Emperor of Xylander.”
“Dusan Funard.”
“Susan the Savior,” Khalil said. “See, the names come very easily to you. To everyone. Their names are never forgotten. Their impact upon the known worlds is endless and immeasurable. Think of how different life would be if Dusan Funard had not fought every cynic and politician in his way and made the first null engine, two thousand years ago.”
Sang catalogued all he knew of the people they had swiftly named. “Many of them come from humble beginnings and dire circumstances,” Sang pointed out. “Do you feel your own unfortunate experiences qualify you as a potential hero?”
This time Khalil’s laughter came from deep in his belly. He shook with it and wiped away tears, as paroxysms swept over him. When he had himself under control once more, he sighed and wiped at his eyes one last time. “You’re smart, Sang. No argument. When you say things like that, though, I am reminded that you are not altogether human.”
Sang felt no offense. “We are always willing to learn.”
“I’m not a hero,” Khalil said. “I can never be one. I don’t want to be one.”
“Yet you study them.”
“I do.”
“Why?”
He shrugged. “Curiosity, I suppose. If the human chaos throws up a hero every thousand generations or so, we are long overdue for a hero of our times. I often wonder what that hero might look like and how they will change the known worlds.”
“You do not like the known worlds as they are?”
“Does anyone?”
Sang considered the question seriously. “We would not exist in different circumstances, so we are grateful for these circumstances. Other than that, they are what they are.”
“Bellona is troubling you, too, isn’t she?”
Sang sighed. “Max was specific in the responsibilities he assigned us. While Bellona is…suffering, we are not abiding by that assignment. Yet, the way ahead is not clear. Perhaps it is better she live with the frustration of a lost memory, than unearth a memory that…”
“Changes everything?” Khalil asked.
“Yes. Which means we must live with failure. That is not a comfortable thought for one such as we, who prefers binary decisions.”
“Humans have been dealing with such dilemmas throughout history.”
Sang nodded. “We are aware of that. We even tried writing down our thought processes as the exercise seems to provide clarity to others.” Sang shrugged. “Yet, the dilemma remains.”
“How, exactly, did you try writing down your thoughts?” Khalil asked curiously.
“The usual way. We spoke aloud while the archivist recorded.”
Khalil smiled. “Give me an example. Recite something you wrote.”
Puzzled, Sang recalled the writing session. Because of their perfect recall, the act of writing and storing thoughts was doubly useless. Nevertheless, Sang selected an innocuous phrase. “We struggle to understand how we might better—”
“That’s why it didn’t work for you,” Khalil said, interrupting.
Sang frowned.
“We this. We that. No group in history has ever been able to group-think a solution better or faster than a clear-thinking individual—and you are that, Sang.”
“Clear thinking?”
“Transparently clear.” Khalil patted their shoulder. “Try again.” He got to his feet. “Time to beat your skinny frame into submission. Get up.”
* * * * *
Much later that night, when Sang had assured themselves that Bellona rested comfortably, even if her thoughts were plaguing her, and long after the house had grown still and dark, Sang directed the house AI to extrude recording sheets and print a stylus keyed to the sheets.
Trembling with their own daring, Sang sat at the small table, the stylus hovering over the blank sheet. They had learned rudimentary writing skills as part of their forced development while still emerging from the growth tanks, so the act of writing was not completely foreign to them. The skill was sometimes required as a form of record-keeping. Such records were always converted to more permanent states, later.
Sang wrote.
Khalil thinks we are troubled about Bellona’s state of mind.
Sang read the crude letters aloud, then glanced around. There was no one to hear.
They scratched out the sentence. There was an intimate secrecy about the act of writing, especially on record sheets that no one could access through a terminal, or recall upon a screen somewhere else. Not even the absolutely discreet household archivist held the words inside it. They were for Sang alone.
That gave them the courage to write again, the letters already forming faster.
We are troubled about Bellona’s state of mind.
Sang read the sentence. It had no impact. They drew a hard line through it and gripped the stylus, hovering once more. Then, with a sucked-in breath, they wrote quickly, before they could change their minds. They dropped the stylus and sat back to study the single short line they had written.
I am afraid for Bellona.
“Truth,” Sang whispered, then covered their eyes and wept.