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Interview 1
It was only the second time I met her, I think. We were at the departmental ceremony for the Straw Threshing festival, and someone— a lochagos from one of the escort squadrons or something like that— went right up to her and asked her out loud what it was she did.
And do you want to guess what she said?
“Oh, I work at the Seventh Recitation Building, I’m just a records assistant really, tell me about what you do.”
The poor officer was practically cowering. You have to understand, she hadn’t dressed the part at all. Everyone wears their best clothes to the Straw Threshing— micro-damask was having a comeback that year, with Amuri-style arm rings and matching shoe covers. And this woman from a species nobody recognizes, dressed in the kind of commodity robe you’d get from a sundries store in the Exurba and the kind of all-weather arm ring you’d wear out surf-kiting, and she’s saying she’s in the Seventh. Well, really.
I felt so bad for them both. I had to take her aside afterwards and explain that a seventh-rank analyst is the equivalent of a syntagmarch— or is it a taxarch, I always forget— someone a junior officer had no business speaking to. The poor dear shouldn’t even have looked at her without an invitation, but if you don’t dress the part, how is anyone to know?
I introduced her to my tailor afterwards, got her properly fitted out. She kept trying to turn things down, everything was too ostentatious for her, oh, it would look so much better on my daughter, my grand-daughter, it’s so expensive. To be perfectly frank, it was a little bit wearing, if you see what I mean. But I was happy to pay for everything if she didn’t want to.
It was nothing to me, you understand. I’m not talented, and I know it, they only invite me to these affairs because I’m related to the emperor— but then again, I am related to him, I’m allowed to talk to all the up-and-comers. It’s clear when someone is going to go places, you see. And it can be very useful to have connections.
Oh, the lochagos? No, I didn’t trouble myself. People like that come and go.
Interview 2
Owed a lot to her? Everything, I would say. I was her protege for a while. Everyone in the image analysis group knew how it worked. You signed your name to a report and you knew the Director might see it. You never put in anything late, and you never complained, and if you were wrong you apologized, and if you were right, you didn’t back down. Those were the rules. If you broke them, you’d be transferred.
It would usually look like a promotion, but they did that to avoid the Recitation looking bad; everyone was very clear that you’d never get any higher once that happened. It happened to a good friend of mine once, a Taurian. She was writing up a report on some scans of a shipyard in the Coalsack. This was during the leadup to the border dispute in eighty-two, so tension was high and we were desperate to know what they were building, but there were reconnaissance images coming in at all hours of the day and night. I don’t think any of us slept, certainly not the Director. We were all absolute wrecks except her. No, probably her too. But she’d never, never have admitted it. She understood the demands of morale very clearly, it was something I admired about her.
They did a fly-by the next month and that yard turned out to have a second cruiser spinning up. I told my Taurian friend— can we keep her name out of this? Thank you. I told her to admit she’d been careless, but she wouldn’t. I think she’d genuinely convinced herself by that time that she had remembered to check, that the drive signature just hadn’t been there yet. The transfer came through two weeks later, I helped her pack, and I never saw her again. I think she went back to Tau.
But if you followed the rules, well, she was a nursing hive-bear and we were all her cubs. In eighty-three, after the dispute went hot, I was writing an assessment on one of the convoy raids. The raid leader was the heir to one of the Strategoi. I am not going to tell you which one and you are not going to guess. Otherwise this interview is over.
But the after-action report was ridiculously padded. We’d seen a full listing of the convoy before it sailed, although that was highly classified at the time, and there were ships claimed as destroyed that hadn’t even existed. I got a hint from a friend in the Navy that I should be a little charitable with my assessment, maybe let some of the claims slip by.
Two hours later, the Director called me up to her office on the pergola level. Six floors higher than I’d ever been, I had to show identification twice to even get up there. She offered me some sort of Terran beverage. I’d been half-expecting Star Tears, but it was a drink I’d never seen before. Black as vacuum, and bitter. Her one luxury, I think. Terra was still uncontacted in those days, but joyriders would stop by occasionally and she always seemed to know when someone was planning a trip.
The stuff must have cost its weight in iridium. It was just like her to serve it to a junior analyst.
She told me that if they tried to remove me from the Seventh Recitation, she’d tender her resignation and walk straight out behind me. She’d have done it, too. She said the report had been good work, she had sent the Strategos a personal endorsement of the entire thing, and that I should hold my eyestalks high for writing it. She didn’t need to say the last part. Telling me I’d done good work was enough.
Interview 3
First contact? A whole lot of nothing, if you ask me. There was another influenza pandemic that year, and wildfires turning the air orange, and they shot that state senator… was it Missouri? Mississippi? One of those M states. Prices kept going up, first you couldn’t get beef because of the drought, then it was chicken because of the flu, then I forget what. Everyone just keeping their heads down, the news comes on and you’re just like “What’s it gonna be now?”
Well, we know the answer now, don’t we, it was going to be the Ames plague and after that, the rest of it seems like a goddam golden age, doesn’t it, wildfires and all? But that was then.
I have to admit it woke me up the first time I saw it. Aliens from space landing and planting a flag on the White House lawn and wherever else… Tiananmen Square? And they give a big speech, “Hey everyone, you’re part of the empire now. No, there are no taxes because there’s nothing on this fucking rock we want. Just do your thing, don’t touch the flag or we’ll bomb everyone until the rubble bounces, oh by the way, we’re taking the moon. Bye now.”
And I mean, sense of wonder, sure. I read science fiction as a kid, I watched those movies with the robot and the people with the foreheads and the laser swords, right? I used to love that shit. Fear? Yeah. I mean, I get it. You think, are we the Aztecs, or the— the whatever they had in Virginia, the Pocahontases or whatever?
But that kept on not happening. There’s talking heads on the news, “Oh, they’ll come back this time. Feed the poor, wipe out the diseases, crush us under their iron jackboot, ship us all off to space as fresh meat for the flying purple people eaters.” And those Arabs got the bomb, there were the Bengal floods in… I forget the year, actually, but all those people dead, and then the quakes and the big LA fire— no, the first one— and no aliens. Finally you had to admit they just didn’t give a rat’s ass. The flag on the White House lawn, they tried to take that down a few times, and it was zappy zappy time. Other than that, nothing.
I think we just didn’t have anything they wanted. The Indians, it was all that gold and silver, the Africans it was slaves, and then it was land or oil or there was always something. I remember right after first contact, like you were asking, one of them went on TV, big skinny motherfucker with fur, and the little blond anchor was asking it, like, “Why now? Why come here?” And this big furry thing just leans down and says the emperor gave someone the moon. As, like, a retirement gift. Some big-ass reception where the boss drones about how good you were at balancing accounts and gives you a mug with your name on it. Except the boss is a space emperor, and he’s got this general or admiral or, like, the lord high director of zappy zappy, and he decides what would look really classy on the mantelpiece is the moon.
There was a huge green spot on it after that, that was the big change. One of the dark spots? Yeah, the marinas. They turned one of them green. You can look up every night and think, like, some retired alien warmonger is sacked out on the moon. Watching us try to rebuild, and half the time we’re still too busy fighting each other to do it. Honestly at this point I think we’ll make it, but who knows?
Maybe it’s entertainment for them. Why the hell not? If I owned the moon, it’s probably what I’d do.
Interview 4
Listen, you mustn’t call us ungrateful. Please. We could all have died, the entire town. Billions of people died. She saved us, and I’ll always thank her for that.
We used to grow coffee, good coffee. Like you don’t get anymore. Ever had it with coconut milk? Or condensed milk, that was good.
I know. I do all right these days, there’s rice and fish and soy beans, but you can’t get milk anymore.
The aliens sent a ship every year to trade for some of it. At first we were shocked, but we got used to it. I didn’t know, no. It seemed strange… they could have gone to Indonesia, Colombia, anywhere. We grew good coffee in Vietnam, but there were other places that were more famous for it. After the market crash in America, though, we were glad to have anyone to sell it to. The French brought it here in the first place, the coffee plant. It’s funny, we fought a whole war to get rid of the French and the Americans and there we were, selling them coffee. I didn’t mind. They hadn’t wanted the war, not the ordinary people. I was sorry when the plague hit.
They say Ames was an American, that he started it spreading out there and in Europe. It certainly did the most damage there. It was lethal in the beginning. They said birds carried it everywhere, that nobody survived. Not quite true, I heard, but it might as well have been. There weren’t enough people left there to keep themselves alive… the rest of them must have died by winter.
But it mutated faster than Ames must have thought. In Hanoi thirty percent died, in Ho Chi Minh City only twenty. In China they killed all the birds with toxic gas. That bought them a little time, and the strain they ended up with wasn’t as devastating. It was bad enough. Riots, piles of burning corpses, the hospitals filled up and then emptied because there were no doctors left. Every time you coughed or your eyes itched, you worried that you had it already.
And that was when the ship came. The aliens. It was like a last chance, a reprieve from heaven. I begged them, I pleaded, I told them there there wouldn’t be any more coffee ever again, and somehow they listened.
No, I don’t know exactly how long it took. Not as long as I expected. They had a speaking machine of some kind, but they didn’t talk to me. I looked up and the earth was hanging over us, like in the pictures we used to see. The pale blue dot. That was when I realized what the green spot on the moon was. They’d built a forest there! A whole forest, under a force field. The soil was real soil, the air was real air. I don’t know how.
No, not exactly the same. It was cooler and there were plants I didn’t recognize. But still very familiar, comfortable. Crunchy brown leaves underfoot. A little dirt pathway between the trees, about a kilometer, and at the end of the path was a bench with a little old woman sitting on it petting a cat. A little table with a coffee service on it. The bench was made of wooden slats, a bit weathered.
I was expecting a voice machine, but she looked up at me and I realized she was human. She spoke English, too. With an American accent. Yes, I speak it quite well. I learned in school. She looked like any little old tourist grandmother.
Oh, you must be joking. A private little bench in a forest on the moon? She didn’t need to carry a gun. We both knew who was in charge.
I tried to tell her about the Ames plague, the birds, all the deaths. But she already knew everything. She’d had them pack up a vaccination kit while I was still on the ship, before I even landed. Navy standard issue, I think, the same thing all their marines get.
“I just wanted to talk to another human being for a moment,” that’s what she said. And then she asked me questions about the town. How many people lived there, whether I liked it. She wanted to know what had been rebuilt since the war, whether there was still a lot of damage. I said there wasn’t much. Most of the houses went up in the postwar boom, they’d moved the docks to make room for larger boats, the bridges were all new. A nice place to live. I asked if she’d ever been there, but she said she hadn’t.
“I only saw pictures,” she said. “From the air. It looked beautiful, before the bombs hit. Very different afterwards. I’m glad they built it all again.”
No, I don’t remember what else we talked about. Not much, I think. She poured me a cup of coffee that must have come from my own plantation and we sat there and sipped and she petted the creature in her lap. It wasn’t actually a cat, it had a long snout and shaggy fur and a bare tail like a rat. An opossum, from America. It stuck in my head— such a strange-looking little thing. I saw a picture a few years later, once the power was back on some of the time.
Yes, it occurred to me. She could have saved more of us. Maybe still New Zealand at that point, most of Mongolia, who knows where else? I didn’t ask. If she’d wanted to, she would have. I’d already asked her to save the town. That was as big a favor as I thought I could get.
After a little while the creature stirred and yawned and stretched itself. She smiled at me and said, “It was lovely having you, dear,” so I knew I was dismissed.
No, I don’t remember what she was wearing. Only the forest, and the earthlight shining down on us both, and the opossum stepping from the bench, strolling across the clearing. Unhurried, as though it owned the place.
Interview 5
We weren’t close, in those last years. Of course I missed her. But she was difficult. I mean, I suppose everyone’s mother is difficult, but…
It was just me and her for years and years. Us against the world. We did everything together. Venice, Zanzibar, Chimborazo. She would save up all year, buy the guidebook, we’d plan it all out. I had my first shot of calvados at ten, in a waterfront cafe in Bayeux. I shot my first buck at eight— we went hunting every fall, I bet you didn’t know that. Up in the Finger Lakes. She had an old friend, Mrs. Hayes Smith, who had a cabin up there. She was a crack shot, too. Not Mrs. Hayes Smith, my mother. Absolutely lethal.
All those friends of hers. I don’t think I realized where she must have met them until after we left. At some point I looked up the Halls of Recitation. Military intelligence, of course. That’s what she must have done all along. I felt like such a fool when I found out. But it was always “Aunt Doris works in General Services” and “Mrs. Gallagher is a secretary-typist” and they never broke cover, not when they drank or got sick or sitting in a hot tub with their bras off. Not ever.
I’m nearly certain Aunt Doris and Aunt Vivian were a couple. They weren’t all allergic to sex the way Mother was. Some of them were married, and I think a lot of the rest of them would have a little fling or dalliance every once in a while, abroad, or with a military man who wasn’t going to stay in town, or with women who knew how to be discreet. As far as I know, Mother only picked up a man once— to have me. I don’t think she liked them very much, not that I blame her. I heard her talk about it sometimes, My Lai, Duc Pho, all the massacres. She felt more strongly about it than she liked to tell anybody, you know.
I’m sure her colleages in Recitation told you about her. The good soldier, the stone-faced old lady. Chewed nails and spit out bullets. That was part of her, but… she slept badly most nights. She had hideous nightmares, about being beaten or shouted at or crushed by a gigantic machine. She would lie down and try to doze off and five minutes later she’d wake up crying in terror.
In the end, I just couldn’t anymore. I took Vicky to visit her on the moon, just once. She must have been ten at that point. Ten or eleven, maybe. We'd used the stasis chamber a lot in the beginning, before we got our feet under us.
We took the shuttle to that little apartment on the moon. It had a kind of unreality to it… it could have been anywhere, a little two-bedroom flat with faded paint on the walls and a few plates in the cupboards and a new plasma-powered electro-array where the range ought to have gone, because of course they weren’t going to put in gas on the moon, were they? It wasn’t remotely practical. And I mean, that was exactly it. The whole place screamed “Don’t notice me, don’t look at me, I’m just an ordinary person,” and then you’d go outside and look up— at the earth!
Vicky was showing her a puzzle game on the holovizor, you remember the ones? Everyone was playing them for a while, they were based on quantum entanglement analysis, and you had to steer the wave function towards one state or another. Vicky was very good at it, most people played for a week and then put it down, but she kept going, doing the really complicated ones, trying to do them as fast as she could. It’s the age, you know— starting to feel like your own person, testing how far you can go. She had quite the high score after a few months.
And she showed Mother her record on the public board, and Mother looked at her very seriously for a second and said, “Bright young girls attract the wrong kind of attention.” And she took her holovizor and wiped all the game data off it.
Vicky cried her eyes out, of course, and Mother and I had a deadly polite little fight about it, and we left the next morning. I didn’t know it was going to be the last time. But Vicky didn’t want to go, and I missed Ks’sais when I had to travel alone. That was part of it, not being able to tell her about my life. We’d been together for five years by that point. I had to swear Vicky to secrecy.
Own the moon? Me? Oh, heavens. Imperial inheritance doesn’t work that way. I think it went to her successor in Recitations. The machine grinds on, you know. I think she always dreamed of getting away from it all. Not having to be cheerful and unassuming and stone-faced and whatever else she thought people wanted.
The thing is, the further you want to go, the harder you have to push to get there. I think she made herself part of what she was running from, if that makes any sense. I hope she was happy, you know? In the cracks, in the little gaps when the machine wasn’t running. I hope she let herself be happy.