Exolegacy, page 5
He opened and closed his mouth like a fish, trying to decide what to ask first, but eventually just settled back into the bench and took up the now soggy chip and popped it into his mouth to keep it from working nonsensically.
“I understand that this is a lot of new information for you to process, I do not pretend to understand the capacity of human minds to conceive of such things, but there is more. When you are ready for it.”
Als raised a hand hesitantly, he was still playing catch-up with his mind, and images from his dream, or whatever it had been, kept butting in, interrupting his traffic jam of thoughts. “I need a minute… this is getting complicated,” he managed to get out after a moment.
Xikse waited across the table from Als, fidgeting in discomfort, wary of continuing. The next part was more important than the context that he had already explained, and potentially even more politically fraught.
Eventually, Als closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and then swallowed some water. “Does this place serve anything else to drink? Perhaps something harder?”
Xikse motioned to the proprietor and spoke something in his language. The Manis nodded and hobbled over to the bar to pour something, and brought it back, placing it in front of Als.
“Thank you,” he nodded to the server and took a sip of the golden liquid inside. Looking up abruptly, “Tequila? What is this doing here?”
Xikse shrugged, “It’s what your father drank, I think it was kept here solely for him, manisae cannot digest ethyl alcohol, so the bottle has just been here untouched.
“I’m sorry if I overstepped again, but it seemed appropriate at the moment.”
“No, it’s fine. You just keep surprising me is all,” Als said after another sip. “I’m okay now, you said that there was more?”
“Indeed. Now that you know of the ruins, and that your mother was denied access to them, well, I said that she was tenacious…
“She decided to find her own ruins. Ones that had not been uncovered by our researchers. She started going off on long hikes, and would not return for days sometimes. Eventually, your father came to me, knowing that she had my confidence in what he called her ‘hobby’. He was concerned for her safety being gone so long outside. You see, back then the air was not as easily breathable as it is now. She took precautions though. She was always very prepared, and always returned from her forays.
“And then one day she found what she was looking for. And more. She went to your father first, and they both went out to map the site she had found. I only found out because she was too excited to keep it a secret from me.
“She had not only found a site, but a reliquary of sorts. A library of artifacts that we had only dreamt of finding at the larger site.”
Als knew where he was going before he said it.
“Small pillars, intricately carved. Each one containing a flawless black crystal. Not just a jewel, but a storage device of vast capacity. Each contained volumes of data, science, culture, images, poetry, and memories… of a people long since passed.
“I am sorry to say that I could not keep the confidence that she had given me. I went to the elders in my excitement and they took everything. Her site, the artifacts, her notes, and her maps. They feared humans and their greed. That they would claim the ruins as their right, their heritage.”
Xikse sat back heavily in the booth, emotionally exhausted from the toll his confession exacted.
Als knew most of what he had heard already. Images filling in the blanks in his mind as the words were perceived. He knew more as well. The Manisae elders had confiscated all of his mother’s materials and swore her to secrecy to avoid an interplanetary incident. However, despite their thorough sweep of the reliquary and her lab, she had managed to secret away a single artifact. It was sitting on his shelf in the study back home, and haunted his thoughts.
He now understood what it was. A memory crystal, or at least the inspiration for the technology. It hadn’t come from the Manisae at all, just adapted by them and ‘re-gifted’ as it were. What an incident it would have caused. Als agreed in principle that the discovery should be attributed to the Manisae, but also understood the greed of Humanity. The Manisae foothold was delicate still, and rumblings about ‘manifest destiny’ were not unheard of on Earth.
He also felt that there was more, perhaps he already possessed the rest, but had yet to remember it all.
10 Unfounded Guilt
That evening, Als opened the case of tequila that he had found in a storage unit on the estate. It didn’t surprise him that his father would have taken precautions against running low on the luxury, it was apparently one of the only ones he allowed himself in his position as ambassador. He sat at the desk in the study, fondling the glass and taking small sips every few minutes. The idea of inviting Rez over for an evening meal and conversation had crossed his mind on the way home. The information that Xikse had given him would have interested her to no end, but he ultimately decided against it. His head had been swimming after the meeting, either from the tequila or the onslaught of memories and information.
The event seemed to have opened up the floodgates to more buried memories of his mother as well, and as he sat at the late ambassador’s desk, every object that Als laid his eyes on triggered memories of places and events that were attached to them. He wondered if his father had known how disorientating the process of integrating another’s memories would be to his children. He suspected that Hildy and Ehrenfeld were similarly occupied in their own minds.
Als fought to avoid looking directly at the artifact containing the crystal. He knew that it would surface memories of his mother, which had become more painful every time it had happened recently. The pain of loss, even ten years old, seemed fresh and raw in his father’s memories, and with it was a plunging sense of guilt.
Als didn’t understand his guilt until that night, after falling asleep across the desk, too exhausted to move to the bed. He dreamt of his mother again, waving her hands in excitement. Only this time he knew what she was talking about. She took from her satchel the first of the artifacts that she had found on her foray into the newly discovered library, talking rapidly about the details and the implications for history, culture, and religion. Then she showed him that she had figured out the puzzle of opening it and had seen things when she touched the crystal. Als felt his doubt in the dream until the scene changed and he found his mother passed out in the study, grasping the open artifact. She had touched it and become overwhelmed.
The scene shifted to him nursing her back to health in bed, then to her talking excitedly about her experience, and the things she had learned. The scenes were blurred into each other and skipped in time too fast to keep up, but he realized what he was seeing when he saw his own hands lifting the artifact up to the pedestal in front of the Manisae elders. His concern for his wife translated through the dream as a dull ache in the gut. Then images of the Manisae guard confiscating all of her work as he held her back, telling her it was for her own good.
The dream started to fade as he found her again, passed out with a different crystal. Unable to stay away from the lure of discovery, she had kept it from him and the guard to discover its secrets on her own. He had driven her to it instead of helping her to proceed with care.
He woke himself up shouting “Taryn! No!”
Als was on the floor curled into a fetal position, much the same as he had just seen his mother in his mind. He was shivering from the emotion and the cold of the ceramic tile.
Dragging himself to the shower, he managed to stand there while the warm steam bathed the sweat from his skin, his head pounding from the alcohol he had imbibed earlier.
11 Delving Deeper
In the morning, he found Rez there.
“Did I pass out again?” he asked her as he entered the kitchen to discover her preparing coffee.
“No, you called me in the middle of the night and then hung up abruptly without a word. I’m not one for booty calls, but I got the feeling that you needed someone’s company. I’ve met Xikse and can see why you might call your only other friend.”
“I have friends…” Als tried to explain, but he really didn’t. For all intents and purposes, Rez and Xikse were the only people he even knew, let alone could call friends. He just sat at the table as she handed him a steaming mug.
“I saw him yesterday. He told me about my mother.”
“Oh?” Rez’s eyebrows raised. “That seems a bit too coincidental for the first manisae that you meet to have known your parents.”
“It wasn’t. He explained to me that he had been on the transport ship specifically to meet me. He was at the wake too, my father’s that is, and had followed me afterward when he realized that I would be coming to Tiras.
“He worked with my mother just before she died. Her passion for exoarchaeology is what inspired him to take it up.” When Rez started to inquire about the term, he told her everything that had happened over the course of the previous day and night.
She sat and listened silently until he was finished, only interrupting to ask questions for clarification. As Als sat back exhausted despite the coffee, she said, “So you think the aneurism that your mother died from was caused by her experimentation with this crystal?”
Als nodded solemnly, “If not from the first use, at least from the repeated use that I had driven her to. By forcing her to keep it a secret… my father, I mean.”
“Can I see it?” She said after a pause.
He led her to the study and handed the artifact to her, then showed her how to open it, feeling no need to caution her after what she had just learned.
“Wow,” she whispered. “I can’t imagine how much information this would contain. The ones that humans are capable of using seem much lighter. Perhaps they’re less dense, or maybe the data is formatted differently… Do you think the Manisae have figured out a way to interface with them yet?”
“I think they must have. And probably not long after they appropriated the discovery. From what I can remember, and let me know if I’m remembering wrong—which wouldn’t surprise me these days—the memory crystals were first given to humans by the Manisae fifteen years ago. That’s Earth years. So they would have had to reverse engineer the technology to be able to reproduce it on a less efficient scale for human and manisae anatomy. That’s assuming that the anatomy of the people who created them was vastly different.
“Your comment about the data being differently formatted for our brains would necessitate reconfiguring the mode of transfer, and that would have taken a much longer time I think. My guess is that the technology didn’t have to be drastically manipulated to work with humans. We know that manisae brains are chemically similar enough to humans, so it would explain the shorter development of the technology, as well as answer the question as to whether they were using it as well.
“I’m afraid that I don’t know anything else about their development and research into the artifacts. Only what my father knew regarding it, which was my mother’s experimentation. Xikse mentioned that he thought my father was advocating for the release, or at least sharing, of the knowledge of these first people on Tiras.”
Rez added, “Especially if sharing the knowledge of the existence of these people was followed by deciphered knowledge of their culture. It could spark a war, or foster the closest bond between Humanity and the Manisae… all depends on how it’s released, I guess.”
Als nodded. “I think I should do a little more research into my father’s files. Perhaps there’s something there that I missed or something that might trigger additional memories. I feel like I’m hunting for where he wrote down his passwords so that I can unlock his journal, except that his journal is in my brain already.”
12 Gin
Names had always held a certain level of importance in Gin’s family. Each of her brothers and she had been christened after important friends and family from either side of their parents’ families. Ehrenfeld was named after his paternal grandfather, Alsón was given a derivation of his father’s name, Álvaro. She had been given the name of one of their closest friends, Auntie Hildegard Chawla. Auntie Hildegard was a hero, is still, though the hype had died down in the past fifty years. One of the side effects of being an international celebrity though is that people will want to name their children after you. So, even though she was named after Hildegard because of their family connection, tens of thousands of little girls born in the five years after First Contact were named Hildegard, or Hildy for short.
So she grew up with at least one or two other girls in each class sharing her name. As soon as she started university though, she switched to her middle name, Juniper. Which eventually led to her becoming known by Gin to friends. She suffered her family calling her Hildy, but for all others, she was Gin.
Despite her personal rejection of the name, her aunt had never brought it up or otherwise shown that she had taken offense. They had in fact grown closer since Gin had become an adult and moved to live and work in Hosa Bengaluru, the lunar capital.
Gin had her own apartment at Isro station, one of the oldest sections of Hosa Bengaluru. But for the past few years—when her father had been off Luna—she had occupied his suite at Unity Station. So even though many of her personal effects and research had colored the decor for a long time, the official sense of the space being hers changed things. She had kept the apartment, which was little more than a two-by-three meter closet underground, out of a sense of either investment or sentiment.
Now, though, she didn’t need it, and had scheduled the transfer of the remainder of her belongings to the suite soon after the departure of both her brothers, Ehrenfeld back home to Wien and Alsón further out to Tiras. She envied him, Alsón, that is, in his new adventure. Not so much her elder brother. Earth no longer held her interest as it once had, and besides, she hadn’t really gotten along with him as well as she did Alsón, as they were closer in age. Ehrenfeld had been born early in her parents’ marriage and they had waited ten years before expanding the family again.
As Gin methodically sorted through the container of her belongings, finding and placing them in their new homes on shelves and compartments, her mind wandered back to a week ago. Her father’s wake had been one of the largest events in recent memory for most who had attended. The feeds were still talking about who had been there, and what had been said. There were multiple bio-flicks of the late ambassador’s life as well. None of them she deigned to pay any attention to. She had been there for much of it or at least read about it in the moment.
Of course, she wasn’t there for the highlight of most of the biographies: First Contact. When Álvaro Hernandez and Hildegard Chawla had stood face to face with the first aliens that had ever been encountered by humans, they had been thrust into the spotlight for all time. Álvaro, her father, had ultimately become the first ambassador to Humanity’s new neighbors. Hildegard had worked her way through the ranks of the newly formed Fleet of the Confederation to eventually earn the highest rank of Admiral. One she held to this day, despite pushing eighty years of life.
When Gin’s mind returned to the present, her legs had fallen asleep and the habitat lights outside of the suite had dimmed, indicating evening. She must have been sitting on the floor now for a few hours. Losing circulation in the low gravity of Luna was not an easy thing to do. Or perhaps it was due to her age, and the fact that she didn’t practice her low grav exercises as often as was recommended.
Gin wasn’t generally one to reminisce, so it was obvious to her that her internal retrospective of her father’s professional career was due to the memory crystal he had left her. It was virtually identical to the other two that had been left to her brothers, only the contents were dissimilar. Hers contained her father’s memories from some time after First Contact to the moment that he was assigned the ambassadorship to Tiras, some twenty years later. There were holes in the continuity here and there, as some of his work had been for the Confederation and had been scrubbed from his memory chemically after necessity had expired. The majority of the recorded, or rather emprinted, memories had been of family. His first meeting with her mother, Taryn, their courtship and marriage. The birth of Ehrenfeld seven months afterward, and then the subsequent family successes and struggles up to and after the addition of herself and her younger brother, Alsón.
Experiencing these memories through the crystal was nothing like watching the bio-flicks on the feeds, those were two-dimensional, both physically and figuratively. The memories swam through her consciousness and merged with her own, providing perspective to her own shared memories of her early life. Perhaps most jarring, was the fact that her father’s emotions had been attached to each, and they in turn were transferred to her mind upon experiencing them.
The first time she had held the crystal in the now chaotically strewn office, she was a puddle of emotion. The second and third times had been more controlled; she had been more emotionally stable in preparation. Still, experiencing her own birth from her father’s visual and emotional perspective was difficult. He had always seemed so stoic toward his family, always shuttered away in whatever office or project he was involved in at the time. But her feelings toward him were forever changed as she realized the depth of his love for his wife and children. His sorrow and grief for his own lack of emotional maturity came through as well and knocked her flat.
In all of the years that she had spent studying materials science and more specifically biocrystallography, she had never once experienced the personal transfer of memory from the crystals. Most experiments were in controlled environments and any information that was transferred was sterile and efficient. Ever since the Manisae had gifted the technology to Humanity, her focus had been singular, to understand and reverse engineer the strange and vastly different format for the benefit of human technological advancement.
