MY MOTHER LISTENS TO THE DEAD
a fragment of the Martian novel, Part II
Please note: the first part of this novel fragment can be found here
I
My grandmother had snatched the girl and her mutant ring away from all her rivals. A victory of the first order, adding to her reputation across the entire Empire: Irkania was one you did not toy with.
But from another angle, my mother’s capture was also a terrible failure. Neither my grandmother nor her specialists could coax the girl’s mutant ring into awakening again. The extraordinary math she had nearly shredded Irkania with could not be drawn out by threat, persuasion, science, or happenstance.
That the girl could not re-awaken the Great Ring was a cruel disappointment -- but not, on deeper consideration, entirely unanticipated. Great Rings never instantiated long. The previous instantiation of a Great Ring from 893 years earlier was recorded to have burned for only ten months. Long enough for the Tyrant to conquer the Empire, but a brief visit nevertheless.
There were plenty of theories from the Sciencemasters as to why my mother’s No-Ring (as it was being called) vanished so swiftly: The Wildborn girl awakened it too late or used it too greedily. She was not Firstborn and therefore the Ring, realizing its mistake, had collapsed. The Ring was not gone but dormant and would re-emerge at some fitting future date.
All studied the problem -- and all failed to generate a solution.
My uncle was not alone in suggesting that Irkania turn the girl over to the Emperor, a gift to soothe hard feelings over the way Irkania had stolen her out from under Imperial searchers.
Irkania snorted in derision: "Let the Emperor find his own worthless girl. Or come South and try to take her himself.”
My grandmother wasn’t being difficult just because. Even if the ring had perished it was beyond certain that the initial activation had altered my mother's biological composition in ways that the Sciencemasters could not entirely measure -- pushed her into the highest range of Martian ability. She was faster and stronger and more resilient than she had a right to be -- had even acquired a more robust version of the Firstborn gift of regeneration. Who knew what other powers might be lurking in that new blood of hers?
All talents which could be passed on to her children, children that would belong, by right, to the Antares, to Irkania.
When, after three months her Sciencemasters could not re-activate the ring, my grandmother sent a congratulatory message to her son, my father, who was up in the Imperial Capital doing very little besides racing, dueling, and whoring.
Congratulations, my feckless heir, on your imminent nuptials. Your presence will be expected at the betrothal ceremony upon pain of disinheritance.
She ordered her secret services to give Safael two days after receipt of letter, and if in that time he didn’t board an airship they had her permission to return him South under force of arms.
Which was precisely what happened.
II
A world ends, a worse one begins -- what is an apocalypse if not that?
And that, precisely, was what my mother’s new life was: an apocalypse.
Understand: in the entire history of House Antares a Wasteborn had never set foot inside the Spear – though thousands of decapitated rebel heads had, at one time or another, dripped blood from the palace’s battlements. But an actual living Wasteborn?
Never. My mother was the first, and she came not as a prisoner but as bride-to-be.
As family.
Irkania did the best she could to make my mother look the part, but Wasterborn is Wasteborn no matter what uniform it wears. The very fact that one of her race was now considered Antares and had to be given Antares respect drove the household almost completely mad. The servants flinched when they caught sight of her and the house guard had to stop themselves from drawing their weapons every time she entered a room. Irkania's advisors hid their distaste somewhat better and gave her courteous words. Most of them, anyway.
What’s next? one seneschal complained a little too loudly. We’ll be making meals for Sracn?
Irkania, always the jokester, rewarded that outburst by throwing the offending seneschal into the Sracn pits -- making him a meal for the Sracn.
My mother kept no journal, left no letters, trusted no confidants, so of her first year my sister and I know very little. She learned the language, refused to eat anything that was made for her, prepared her own food, stayed mostly in her room, and didn’t attempt to escape -- which is surprising, but given Irkania’s watcher network was probably just common sense.
In the palaces of the Antares, my mother was not just a complete outsider, she was a complete alien. She might have crossed worlds in the flesh but her mind, her heart, her soul was still back in the wastes with her people. Nothing about the Firstborn, about my grandmother or my father or their ways, made any damn sense to her. It was as if she was in a terrible nightmare that she could not wake from.
We know she considered suicide more than once, but suicide was what the Slavemakers did (that’s what Wasteborn called the Firstborn, and they weren’t wrong). We also know she thought about cutting off the arm where the ring had appeared ever so briefly -- a florescence of math-patterns braiding her skin -- but Irkania, guessing her intent, cautioned her against it.
A ring might have shown itself in the arm, but it entangled all of you.
The loneliness of that first year...to go from being understood, being cherished, and most importantly being of many...to being untranslatable, feared, being of one...that was what nearly finished her. My mother did not cry because she had been taught that a Wasteborn only cries when they’re born, when their people died or when the world died, and none of those had transpired.
Yet it felt to her a very close call indeed.
And the man she had been betrothed to, Irkania’s son, my father?
That was its own special hell, of which there will be more to say.
III
When no child was conceived that first year, Irkania invited my mother to her offices at the top of the Spear. The view those offices commanded was astonishing, all of Azuwan spread before them, a dust-lashed labyrinth, the ammunition factories spewing out scarves of purple toxins.
Irkania gestured towards the Shield Walls. "The Ancients built strong.”
My mother shrugged. “Walls are weak words in strong winds.”
There was an album on the desk. My grandmother turned it to face my mother, flipping the pages with exaggerated slowness. Grotesque two-tone images of children, mostly Wildborn, being vivisectioned by white-smocked Firstborn doctors. My mother closed her second lids without meaning to.
"These images were smuggled out from Minas Secundus last year," Irkania said. "They are from a Neyra experimental station. The Neyra have over thirty of these facilities in their territories. Very industrious, the Neyra are. And this, daughter in law, was the fate that awaited you, the fate I spared you from." She flipped another page and tipped the book to show my mother. "You think we Antares are the worst -- yes, witchling? To our enemies we may be, but to you we are the best hope you have. Antares are patient and do not waste, which is more than I can say for our sister houses.”
My grandmother closed the album. “You help me, daughter in law, and I'll help you. Give me what I ask, and I'll keep their knives away. Give me what I ask, and I’ll put you up in your own palace, near your beloved wastes. You won't even have to see any of us, not even my son, except when it’s time to do your duty."
"If I give you the children, will you let me go?"
Irkania smiled thinly. "Oh, witchling, haven’t you realized that I will never let you go? Not with that Great Ring lurking somewhere inside you. So stop playing games and do as I ask."
My mother stared intently at the blade at Irkania’s side. "I should have died."
"And then you'll say what all the dead say: I should have lived. Listen to the dead, witchling, as they usually have the right of it. Is that not what your elders say?”
My mother hung her head.
Irkania leaned forward. “Chop-chop with the baby-making -- or it will be chop-chop for real."
IV
Clearly in the end my mother couldn’t bring herself to do it – to kill herself.
Courage. Make a way out of no way. Was that not what her beloved Omerin had cried out when she was dragged away? What he and the others of her clan whispered to her in her dreams? Never her name, never any affirmations of love. Only the old words of her people.
What was worse: Omerin never held her. None of them did -- not her cousins or her parents -- they kept their arms at their sides and chanted the words.
Courage. Make a way out of no way.
Was it their visitations that steeled her to the inevitable? Or the ghoulish images Irkania had shown her of the children having their limbs pared off, children with their heads thrown back, trying to tear themselves free of their torments? Or was it Irkania's implacable purpose?
Or was she Wasteborn to the end? Hiding her true eyes within and waiting, as her elders had taught her, for her chance?
Whatever the reason, the next month when Safael returned from Helios she did not neutralize the arousal serum that she'd been given, and allowed the conception.
She felt nothing at all when two months later the doctors identified two fetuses within: twins with viable ring matrices.
Irkania invited my mother up to her office for a celebratory gloat. "Now that wasn't so terrible, was it, witchling? Well, even if it was, consider yourself fortunate. My father, the Baron, gave me to my first husband for 500 rifles the bastard never delivered."
Perhaps there was something in my mother's face. Perhaps something even my grandmother could not ignore.
"Well," Irkania said, staring out over the city. " I don't like men, either. They are a means to an end."
"I liked one,” my mother said.
On the recording there's no audible trace of sadness, but it was there, had only someone with the right ears listened.
Irkania cleared her throat. "Better to like none. One sleeps easier."
Beautiful. Thank you.