Memory's Blade by Spencer Ellsworth

Author:Spencer Ellsworth
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates

-13-

Araskar

WE TAKE A HOVERBUG from Formoz’s seaside manor along a line of cliffs to a place where the coast opens up. Below, the long spread of sand is dotted with people. Young people. Lots of young adults, in their prime. I see only a couple of children.

“You’re about to live the dream, Araskar,” Aranella says.

I don’t answer. Three star systems.

There’s no words.

The hoverbug comes in for a landing at a public platform. The guy waving us to our parking spot has my face. The market is bright with colors, bright with fabrics and signs written both in Imperial standard and a language I don’t recognize. People move along laughing, chatting with each other. And when I say people, I mean crosses.

A sea of the same eighteen faces, those used again and again for the military models. My own face repeats about a dozen times, as do the faces of my slugs—Helthizor and Joskiya—and my friends, Barathuin and Karalla, everyone I’ve lost. Over and over again, the same faces, with different arrangements of scars. A few unique faces—probably from agricultural crosses, or those outliers, like Jaqi, whose parents managed to reproduce—break up the monotony.

But I’ve never seen these faces without a uniform. I’ve seen them over and over again in cramped ships, between Moths, over training swords and under emergency lights. I’ve never seen these faces smiling under a bright open sky, wearing loose, casual clothes, looking like they’ve taken a long lunch to enjoy the sunshine. That’s the kind of thing humans do. Humans get weathered skin from real sunlight. Humans laugh and sit out on cafes drinking coffee with a touch of thurkuk. Humans talk about politics like those politics don’t get us killed.

And humans have children. It seems like every third woman I see is pregnant. A whole new batch of crosses, being cooked up at home just like John Starfire promised.

Over and over. Not wearing military uniforms. Scars on plenty of them. Synthskin shining through the netting that merges it with regular skin. Most of these are veterans, I’m sure.

“Welcome to the dream,” Aranella says, co-opting my thoughts. “Can you quote it?”

“If you mean the actual book itself, no,” I say. John Starfire’s book, Toward a New Sentience, was supposed to be required reading in the Resistance. Few of us actually read it, because he quoted it so much in the required-viewing holos. “I read My Private Vat.”

“That one was written by a human,” Aranella says, shaking her head. “An incrementalist, to make it worse. Ten years ago, when all we had was a handful of ships. Why is it that all of you read that one, and not John’s book?”

“Sometimes you want to know what happened before.”

“But he was a moderate.” She’s referring to the author of My Private Vat, the book credited with starting the cross-rights movement. “He thought that crosses should be allowed to retire from the army into society, but that the army must be maintained.”

“Tell me, then,” I say, turning to her face, her unique face in a crowd filled with my face and the faces of all my dead friends.

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