The Mimicking of Known Successes, page 12
Mossa was lying on the ground, her split cheek open to the sky, her eyes blinking but unfocused. “Mossa,” I whispered, that quiet echo already awash with the guilt of my misused last cry to her. “Are you well? Can you move?”
She blinked again and murmured something, but it was no clearer than the syllables of a sleeping lover, sounds that seem to be coherent words but are impossible to decipher. Mossa used to speak so in her dreams, in university when we shared a bed.
I rubbed away my tears. Porbal was lying, cursing, a few feet away from us; the platform was vibrating thunderously; and as I slipped my hands under Mossa’s head, thinking to cradle it gently on my lap, a pre-recorded voice further shook the hangar: “Launch,” it proclaimed, in the timpani accents that signaled educated when this spaceport was built and now sounded archaic, “in ten minutes.”
Chapter 25
I somehow shuffled Mossa to her feet, but she leaned so heavily it was more like carrying her, and I begrudged every jostle and bump that thumped her head against my shoulder. I had nothing left for Porbal but one hand, and I caught the user end of the whip-lasso and dragged him after us, my recently stabbed arm protesting each step, while he shrieked. It wasn’t until we had nearly crossed the launch pad that I realized he was screaming not, as my guilt had assumed, because I was scraping him against the platform, but because I was taking him away from the rocket.
“Let me go~~~~~~~!” he wailed. “I was supposed to go~~~~! Please, please—” and then he devolved into a sobbing so pitiful that I might have questioned my decision if Rector Spandal had shown the least inclination to stop and pull him up on the rocket instead of incinerating him on the platform; if I hadn’t been too desperate to escape to pause for even a moment; and, of course, if he hadn’t tried to kill Mossa.
As it was, I got him through the entirety of the first blast wall—fortunately, there were quick exit paths designed for emergencies, I don’t know if I could have lugged them both through the entrance maze—and deserted him on the next launch pad. The blast walls were there to protect contiguous launch areas, I assured myself: the spaceport could not have been designed to destroy itself with every launch (although, a counter-argument whispered, most launches were simple shuttles into orbit; this interplanetary attempt might be more damaging?). He had been screaming for me to let him go for the last forty seconds (precisely timed by the ten-second intervals of countdown warnings); in any case, I could not manage the two of them any longer. I loosed the whip-lasso, my cramped hand struggling to let go, and lifted Mossa with both arms, a weight but a dearer one, and my strength burgeoned anew. Porbal was by that time too exhausted to yell, but his sobbing followed us across that terrible space until the door of the next blast wall closed behind us.
If Mossa’s weight in my arms had seemed negligible after the shuffle-drag of the first launch pad, by the time we were halfway through the last I could barely stagger under it. My atmoscarf had slipped down, and the harsh admixture of oxygen stung my heaving lungs. We had entered the final two minutes of countdown. I was almost certain we were safe from the explosion, but some atavistic part of me, doubtless genetically encoded during the violent ages of Earth, refused to believe it and insisted on reaching the station as soon as possible. The mirage of a railcar, doors open and ready to speed us along its ring, urged me onward, but when I finally reached the station, finding it empty and the next railcar not due for another nine minutes, it was almost a relief: there was no more I could do. I sank down to the floor of the station, slid Mossa somewhat more gently under a bench, and followed, arranging myself above her.
It is possible she said something coherent at that point, but I couldn’t make it out above my panting. “It’s going to be fine, everything’s going to be fine,” I said between gasps, or something of the sort. “Just a few more minutes. It’s going to be—” I don’t know how many times I repeated that before it was cut off by the explosion.
The platform shook hard enough to revive my childhood fear of the entire planet igniting, but when there was no corresponding rush of heat I foolishly twisted enough to lean my head out from under the bench, tilted towards the sky. The engineering parameters of the spaceport seemed to have been adequate: there was no fire, no falling debris, and as I looked up past the edge of the station roof, I saw the rocket crease the heavens on its way towards Earth.
Chapter 26
It was a wearisome few days of convincing aghast officials of increasing prominence what had been done and that, however difficult they found it to believe this fact, it had been Rector Spandal who had done it. I heard any number of improbable explanations for the rector’s empirical absence and drank many liters of tea before acceptance, of the events if not of their implications, finally reached a critical mass. I thought at that time I could retire to my rooms for several hot baths and perhaps two days of sleep, but my mere presence at the unknotting of the plot, happenstance though it was, somehow meant that my opinion was crucial to all that followed; I was required in meeting after meeting, briefing after briefing, all the various attempts to explicate and extrapolate the consequences in front of various positions of leadership, all of it time that I couldn’t spend at Mossa’s side while she was treated for the concussion and the broken cheekbone. When they insisted that I participate in the search for a new rector, I realized that, through the strange alchemy of proximity to significance, my status at the university had irrevocably changed.
Porbal did survive, although his hearing was somewhat damaged; still, it was a deep relief to me when they told me he had been found alive. He and Bolien were played against each other in the typical fashion, and in the typical fashion of individuals who believe the world should bend itself to their convenience, they sold each other out neatly, although they did try to crush Rector Spandal with much of the blame. According to Porbal, it was the rector who had loosed the caracal on us in the mauzooleum; Porbal said Spandal had told him about it afterwards, laughing at it as a foolish scheme, but one that he couldn’t quite resist attempting. All three men had been convinced they would be able to survive on Earth while an ecosystem grew up around them.
Valdegeld (represented in part by yours truly), the Investigators, and the Earth Resettlement Authority were able to get a probe launched in record time, two days after the rector departed. It will follow his rocket, if slightly more slowly, and go into orbit around the planet, hopefully sending back images to confirm the fate of the rector and, more importantly, that of the additional biological material he took with him.
During the discussions pertinent to this launch—which, record time or no, felt nearly interminable—I could not prevent my thoughts drifting. Yes, it was vital work, but it was also so obvious that I had little patience with the details. When I wasn’t looping historical or speculative moments with Mossa, I found myself conjuring an alternate life on Earth. It was difficult: I would imagine leaving a house, seeing grass and soil, and then I would realize that I had imagined myself wearing an atmoscarf. Breathe air, swim in water, the Rector had said, and the words twined into my brain: would living on the planet we had evolved for relax muscles I didn’t know I was tensing? Then again, we had, largely on purpose, wrenched Earth into a very different state than that we had evolved for; would it really be so welcoming? If returning meant making all the adjustments of exile again, was it so worth it?
Not the same Earth; he had said that too. I wanted to believe that I had known always that of course the reseeded Earth would not be … not exactly the same, anyway. It still hurt to hear it said, hurt with a terrible epigenetic ache for an ecosystem I had never known but wanted, always wanted.
It will, of course, be some months yet before either of the ships arrive at their destination. There was some talk of sending an additional crewed ship, with its own payload of carefully selected species, as a sort of counterweight to the rector’s less comprehensive approach. The argument was that a few days, or weeks even, would not make much difference, and the serious Classics scholars could wrest some control back and make the experiment more viable and aligned with our principles. However, the scholars involved have not reached an accord on the precise selection of species to send, and the Speculative biologists collaborating on the problem agree the window is closing.
It was this last development that drove me, if not to despair, then at least out of the meeting, down to the station, and on to the railcar to Sembla. As with every time I boarded a railcar, I remembered that day at the spaceport: hauling Mossa back to her feet after the explosion and half-dragging her forward as I watched the timer with an irrational worry that the railcar wouldn’t arrive; my relief when I saw it, approaching exactly as scheduled; the expressions on the faces of the other passengers when we struggled on to the carriage … I shook my head, dismissing the images. Surely these flashbacks would fade with time. To assist with that I had brought a book for the journey: nothing Classical, a Modern saga set here on Giant.
In Sembla I walked slowly to Mossa’s place. She had told me to come at any time; she did go for walks occasionally (I imagined her in that garden, our garden, where we had kissed), but as with every time I visited I wondered if someone else might be there; that “colleague” with her key, perhaps …
But as every previous time I had visited, Mossa was alone. There was a book—a Classical novel—on the table and the remnants of a storyboard on the wall, but when I asked what she had been doing she grumbled about the amount of paperwork required to close up the case.
“It’s not closed, though,” I blurted out. “We don’t know what will happen to Spandal, or what will happen to Earth…”
Unexpectedly, she reached out an arm, and I moved to sit next to her, against her. She had been doing such things more often, but it still surprised me, every time. I told her about the meeting, and the stalemate, and she listened, but seemed hesitant to speak.
“This is why he called me a—the c-word,” I said at last, sniffling. I had started crying as I spoke, and hadn’t completely stopped yet. “We want everything to be perfect, to be the way it was, and that’s … we’re never going to find it. And so we’ll never do anything. We’ll never decide. Maybe—” I couldn’t bring myself to say aloud that Spandal might have been right.
Mossa started rubbing my back, her face thoughtful. “The Classics faculty may be a little … hidebound,” she said cautiously, “but Spandal was wrong too. Attempting to approximate an idealized past is most certainly both futile and foolish, but individually disrupting what absolutely must be a collective endeavor is no better, and selfish as well.”
“But what then? Do we stay here forever?” As I spoke, I recalled the other thing Spandal had said: So happy here, studying your ancient texts and cozy in those ridiculous quarters. It had been an attack, I knew: it had shivered me with guilt in the moment and every time I remembered it. But was it really so terrible? Yes, I loved my cozy quarters and ancient texts. My breathing calmed just thinking of it, of the students, and the operetta I had tickets for in a few days, and the easy railcar ride here to see Mossa. Was that enough, if there was no grand project of return?
Mossa, meanwhile, was answering what should have been an impossible bit of rhetoric. “I am sure there are approaches that fall into neither of those traps.” From someone else, I would have thought those empty comforting words, but I could see that Mossa’s mind was already gnawing at what those approaches might be. “Perhaps there’s a discipline, or trans-discipline, of flexibility and reactiveness, or a calculation of the principles involved in ecosystem survival rather than the literal mimicking of known successes.”
I inhaled the deepest breath I had managed since the goshawk.
“And you should work on it,” she concluded.
“Me?” I had been immensely relieved by the reanimation of my hopes, I was unprepared to be praised as well.
“Yes, you. You’re very open to thinking in new ways.”
I looked at Mossa skeptically.
She returned the glance severely. “You are certainly not co—” She stopped, as reluctant as I to use that vicious epithet Bolien had thrown at me.
“I’m not?”
“No. Look at how quickly you adapted to helping with my investigation,” she pointed out.
“Oh,” I said softly, and then went on, headlong, with an utter absence of lyricism or subtlety: “And you’re the greatest Investigator.”
“Really?” I expected laughter, given how clumsy a compliment it had been, but she said it wonderingly, as if she believed me or tried to.
Still, I thought I could do better. “Really.” I sat up properly, wiping my eyes. “I think I could adapt to a few other things, too,” I said.
“Oh?” She eyed me cautiously.
“Like visiting Sembla. It’s not so far from Valdegeld.”
“No,” Mossa said, with a hesitant smile, “it’s not. I might visit Valdegeld as well.”
I let her hold me for a while, the smile blooming on my face even though she couldn’t see it.
“Mossa? When you said before, that you hadn’t changed? In the ways I wanted you to?”
“Yes?”
“You have changed, you know. But even if you haven’t changed everything that I said, back when—well. You don’t need to. It doesn’t matter.”
“It does, though, it mattered to you a lot then—”
“It doesn’t. You don’t need to change. Because I have.”
Acknowledgments
This book was written at a time of isolation and intensity. I am so appreciative of all the online connections that nurtured me. Thank you to the groups on Slack and Discord that invited me in, offered care and conversation, and modeled thoughtful, committed, voluntary approaches to the difficult work of building and maintaining healthy communities. Thank you to the scholars who reached out to collaborate across continents, disciplines, and time zones; thank you to the bookstores and writers, universities and nonprofits, who organized online events. Thank you to the theaters that streamed recorded performances or developed hybrid models and interactive experiments; thank you to the conferences that put time and resources into making it possible to share ideas and experiences without sharing contamination vectors; thank you to the fic writers on AO3, thank you to the public libraries that set up systems for borrowing and returning books from great distances. Thank you to the Twitter mutuals who interacted with respect and restraint and shared their expertise and interests, thank you to friends and family and followers still on Facebook who checked in and shared joy and organized play readings and poetry workshops. Thank you to everyone who decided to schedule a Zoom or Skype just to chat (and respected those times when one or more of the participants were Zoomed out).
Let’s not lose what we learned about connecting across distance.
Thank you to all the writers whose accumulated, stored efforts sustained me during this time and gave me hope, comfort, and beauty. I will inevitably forget some, but in the interests of offering recommendations to others as well as offering gratitude (and in no particular order), thank you to Martha Wells, KJ Charles, T. Kingfisher (and, for that matter, Ursula Vernon), Sherry Thomas, Annalee Newitz, Naomi Kritzer, Laurie R. King, Charlie Jane Anders, Sarah Rees Brennan, Talia Hibbert, Karen Lord, Hilary Mantel, Freya Marske, Arkady Martine, Judith Flanders, Alexis Hall, Courtney Milan, Kelly Robson, Megan Whalen Turner, Elin Gregory, Katherine Addison, Zen Cho, Rabih Alameddine, Sarah Pinsker, Theresa Rebeck, Anne Perry, Henry Lien, Hilary McKay, Roan Parrish, Louise Penny, Olivia Atwater, Ann Leckie, Nicola Griffith, Shannon Hale, William Gibson, Kerry Greenwood, Nancy Springer, Stephanie Burgis, C. M. Waggoner, Andrea Beaty, Naomi Novik, Lee Welch, Y. S. Lee, Ben Aaronovitch, Casey McQuiston, Rosalie Knecht, Keigo Higashino, and many, many more. (NB: Please note that while I found works by these authors comforting and engrossing, some of them write a range of genres/subjects including much less comforting ones and, of course, comfort is subjective.)
Many people helped to make this book better, most importantly Brent Lambert, who not only edited it but also understood it, cheered it on, and pushed it to improve. Thank you also to Emily Goldman, who guided this book through the publishing process with care and attention; Amanda Hong for copy editing and Andrea Wilk for proofing; Christine Foltzer, who designed the incredible cover; Natassja Haught and Michael Dudding for marketing; Saraciea Fennell (The Bronx is Reading! Latinx in Publishing!) and Jocelyn Bright for publicity; Samantha Friedlander for social media support; Lauren Hougen, Greg Collins, and Jim Kapp; and Irene Gallo.
Particular thanks to my very early readers, Dora Vázquez Older, Carmen Crow Sheehan, and Annahita de la Mare, for all your support, encouragement, and useful comments. Also to my slightly later readers, Charlie Jane Anders, Fran Wilde, KJ Charles, and Freya Marske, for your thoughtful reviews and your support.
Big thanks to Lale Uribe, for offering in-person friendship and empathy when I really needed it; to Carmen Crow Sheehan for steadfast friendship and finding ways to make long-distance support tactile as well as virtual with mini-care packages even under very difficult circumstances; and to Dora Vázquez Older, Marc Older, and Daniel José Older for finding ways to stay close. Thank you to Calyx, Paz, and Azul for everything.
Also by
MALKA OLDER
THE CENTENAL CYCLE
Infomocracy
Null States
State Tectonics
… and Other Disasters (short story collection)
About the Author
MALKA OLDER is a writer, aid worker, and sociologist. Her science fiction political thriller Infomocracy was named one of the best books of 2016 by Kirkus Reviews, Book Riot, and The Washington Post. She is the creator of the serial Ninth Step Station, and her short story collection … and Other Disasters came out in November 2019. She is a Faculty Associate at Arizona State University’s School for the Future of Innovation in Society and teaches in the genre fiction MFA at Western Colorado University. Her opinions can be found in The New York Times, The Nation, and Foreign Policy, among other places. You can sign up for email updates here.
