Chapter Twenty-Seven
HANA
The pack is heavy, but I can manage it by resting every few minutes or so and massaging my shoulders.
What I can’t manage is what I’m about to encounter.
I haven’t spoken to Cyclo in what feels like years. The last time I slept within Cyclo was days ago, before the crew told me it was no longer safe. The last time I slept was within Fenn’s arms, kissing him with kisses I didn’t know could be so warm and hard to stop…doing. And now I’ve left Fenn and Portia behind me, these few and fragile beings.
And I am worried, despite my brave words to Fenn. The old part of me knows that Cyclo has done nothing but nourish me, care for me, save me from spiraling down into the abyss of loneliness. But that was before. Before they came, before Cyclo changed. What I saw her do to Gammand was—no, I cannot think of that. I can’t. Even when I do, it feels like I’m watching another ship doing something unspeakable to someone I’ve never met. Even then, it’s too terrifying to breathe.
Walking along the edge of the northeast quadrant, heading north, I see signs of Cyclo’s degeneration everywhere. Looking out the plastrix windows, I see flaking and drying around her surface edges. And inside, her bright-blue matrix has deepened to the telltale navy blue that says her nerves are dying. The area between the windows and her matrix is peeling and cracking. A few windows are buckling and slightly askew.
Underfoot, the matrix is tougher and less cushiony, as if it’s been dehydrated under a bright, hot sun. This is even worse than a day ago. Some of the translational units built into the walls have fallen out, pushed by the matrix that is shrinking like skin around a scab.
“Cyclo,” I say as I walk. “Cyclo. How are you? I haven’t asked in so long. And I’m sorry for that.”
But here, where her matrix has gone dead—like a human foot after frostbite—there is no response. I wonder what that must feel like, to lose parts of one’s self.
I wonder if Doran will make it all the way here in time.
I wonder if he simply logged off, laughed about the conversation to his superiors, and went to eat some cake, pretending that he’s the good guy when, in reality, he was complicit all along.
This is why I have to do this. I can’t believe in anyone saving me but me. Not anymore.
I enter the northeast quadrant. The color change is the most obvious—the blue brightens ever so slowly. Underfoot, the matrix starts to feel more cushioned. I am barefoot, as I’ve been all this time. Now that I am in more familiar territory, I pause and feel her gently pulsating warmth under my toes, and smile.
This feels right.
My room is around the next curve. But there is a passageway to the right, which takes me to an area where Portia says I need to release the cells and they’ll go into her fluttery mantle around the edge of the ship. I pause at the intersection.
I need to find out what my mother said in the last pages of her diary. But I need to save Cyclo, too.
All logic tells me to turn right.
So I turn right.
Three steps into my foray to the edge of Cyclo’s last living quadrant, the colors on the walls and floor flash with stripes of yellow iridescence and lingering spots of peach.
Through the soles of my feet, I can feel her latching onto my skin and trying to communicate, but it’s making my feet stick in the matrix. Forced to pause, I watch as her matrix slinks over my feet and rises up to my ankles.
I am fixed in place, and her voice enters my bloodstream.
Hana. Where are you? Where are you? Gone. Gone. I am here.
Her words are disjointed, as if missing whole sentences and thoughts. Looking down, I can see her trying to pull me into the matrix. Her blue matrix forms fingerlike projections that snake their way up my calves now. Can she not see me?
I wave my hand, a gesture that usually gets me a pretty rainbow of colors in return—a trick I often did as a child. But there’s no response. I think Cyclo can’t see me, only sense me through my feet.
Hello, Cyclo. I missed you, too, I tell her in my head. I’m back now. But I can’t go into hibernation right now. I need to do something.
But you are going the wrong direction. Room back. Left, turn, delete. Back, back.
My heart flutters, faster and faster, and I break out in a sweat. Her gel encasing my feet makes me want to flee and scratch and fight. I can control the voice in my head, but I can’t keep my body from reacting. Never, in my whole life, has her touch made me feel like this. My head goes slightly dizzy with the sensations flooding my system.
Fight or flight. That is what it’s called. This is what I felt the first time Fenn saw me and chased me down. Only now, I would much rather run into Fenn’s arms. Cyclo’s gel on my skin doesn’t feel like coming home, as I’d expected. In fact, I was worried that it would be so soothing, so irresistible, that I’d go into hibernation for a week and completely forget that Fenn and Portia were waiting for me to return.
Suddenly, a warm sensation washes over me. I look down, and the gel is still rising higher up my calves.
Oh. Cyclo is reading my thoughts. She understands that I’m panicking and upset. She’s using her chemicals to calm me down and settle my racing heart. But I need to stay alert. I can’t let her lull me into being complacent. Into our old way of me being taken care of by her. There isn’t time for me to be a child anymore.
This is what she wants. Isn’t it, Hana?
Room. Sleep. Go fracture to gather.
I don’t understand, and I do. My room. That is where I want to go, too, I tell her without thinking, because it is my instinct, too. I shift the canisters on my backpack and shake my head to clear the fuzziness that’s rapidly slowing my thinking.
Cyclo, I tell her. Let me go, so I can go to my room. Okay?
Wordlessly, the gel withdraws from my calves and sinks back into the floor. I sigh in relief, and the clarity in my mind tells me that her sedatives were slight and short-acting. Good. I can’t do what Portia and Fenn want me to do first. I’ll get Mother’s diary, and placate Cyclo somehow, then release the cells.
I turn around and take the other corridor to my room. It’s only about fifty steps away. The membrane door is already open and waiting for me, but beige scar tissue mars its edges. Even here, she is showing signs of degrading.
Inside the room, everything has changed back to before our group dinner here. I can almost smell the soup I cooked, see the look of happiness on the crew’s faces when given a steaming bowl of warmth and nourishment, and remember the laughs and frowns from certain inappropriate behaviors. It was like a family. They say that families are imperfect, and that you don’t choose who your family is.
I wish I’d gotten to know Gammand and Miki better. Frowns and scowls and all.
Cyclo’s colors flash around me. Content bright blue, and curious gold, and pulsating yellow that says she’s reading information I’m giving out with each footstep. Green colors that welcome me, invite me to sleep, invite me to stay. There is a new color I’ve not seen before, but I know what it means. It’s on the very edge of the UV spectrum, nothing that Fenn or other humans could see. Electric violet, mixed with the lowest range of infrared that I can see. The spectrum. Everything.
Forever, Cyclo is saying.
Stay with me forever.
Maybe it is what she means, and maybe not. I take off my backpack, placing it on the kitchenette instead of the ground, since I can’t take the chance that Cyclo will steal it away. I kneel before the black lacquer trunk full of my things and Mother’s. Mother always liked writing—she even had a fountain pen, and one of the chemists on board had to make her new ink out of some leftover carbon chunks taken from one of the filtration systems.
I’ve occasionally flipped through the diary when I was bored, but always stopped after reading a sentence or two. It was Mother’s private world, and I enjoyed it so much more when she read it to me herself. Only a month ago, she’d read one particular passage to me. I flip through the pages to find it.
Today my Hana became four years old. And she emerged from her hibernation singing. Singing!
eommaga seomgunure gul ddareo gamyeon
agiga honja nama jibeul bodaga
She lisped the words and asked Cyclo to make a blue shell around her, as if Hana were inside an oyster, a pearl to be found. Hana always has ways of changing the story. She turned the lullaby on its head! That’s my Hana. She does things I never would. She will do things I never can. My myth, my pearl, my Hana.
I remember that song. When Mother went to the island to pick oysters, the baby was left to stay in the house alone. That’s what it meant. The mother came back worried about the baby. There’s nothing in that lullaby about the baby turning into a pearl or that sort of nonsense. But I made it that way in my brain. And that’s what I’ve always thought the lullaby was about. But it’s not.
It’s about a mother who leaves her baby while she gathers oysters. And she comes back. There is no transformation, no baby saving the day. But it doesn’t matter. Lullabies aren’t real life. And my mother is not coming to rescue me.
I finger the pearl around my neck and cringe. It’s such a pretty trinket, something I’ve worn since before I can remember, but I’ve always forgotten where they come from. Oysters. A nagging piece of grit, like a piece of sand, or a parasite, around which the oyster secretes this pearlescent nacre to smother the irritation. I look around and wonder. Is that all we have been to Cyclo? An irritation that needed to be smothered to death? I yank the pendant, and the pearl comes loose from the necklace and bounces to the floor.
Mother is not going to rescue me.
Neither is Cyclo.
“It’s up to me,” I say aloud.
Cyclo responds in a swirl of concerned iridescent yellow. Are you hungry, Hana? Tired? Would you like to sleep?
It would be so lovely to let Cyclo take over so I could rest. I have a restlessness in me that I haven’t felt before. But I don’t want it quelled. Not yet. I flip through the book, looking at the dates. But the dates aren’t universal timestamps. They are markers of my life. My doljanchi, or first birthday, when she prepared an array of objects for me to pick, to foretell what kind of life I would have. The paintbrush, to show I’d be an artist? The artificial rice grains, to symbolize wealth? The wool yarn, for long life?
In the pages, all I see is me. Me growing, me crying, me learning to walk and climb, me trying pickled radishes for the first time.
Where is Mother in all of these pages? It’s strange how her own thoughts aren’t in here—just stories of me. I stifle the urge to read the entire thing, front to back. But even without looking, the diary is haunting me. I need to find out what she was thinking on the day before she died. I flip to the last pages of the diary to find what I’m looking for.
There are only a few blank pages at the end of the book. And I find the last diary entry.
My Hana is a young woman. She has been for some time, but seeing her in the evening, knitting a sixteen-pointed star, listening to Mozart’s serenade number 10 in B flat major, “Gran Partita” from our audio archives, she seems too wise. So much like a grown woman already. She has a lot to learn. But, then again, there is only so much left to learn here.
Autumns come. Clouds part to reveal their treasures on Earth. Apples fall from their trees.
It’s time for her to meet the crew of the Calathus.
It’s time for her to belong to the universe, not just her mother. Not just Cyclo.
Someday, Hana, I’ll share the rest with you. But for now, it’s time for one truth to enter the light.
You.
I shut the diary. She was going to tell the crew about my existence. There is no timestamp on the entry, so I can only guess it was the day before she died. But I don’t know for sure. Mother, like me, was an antiquist, with a love for earthly objects. Writing on paper, knitting wool garments, cooking food as real as we possibly could. It wouldn’t have been her style to keep a digital diary in Cyclo’s archives.
No; there has to be more. There has to be something here.
This diary is all fluff and feathers and happiness. Even with my charmed existence, as coddled and protected as I have been, I have had doubts. Frustrations. Mother had one foot in my world of secrecy and a foot in the world as the Calathus’s Chief of Bioengineering. No one is so perfect that they could put all their thoughts and hopes down and never have misgivings.
There must be another diary.
I rummage around the lacquer box, but I can’t find anything that looks like another notebook or journal. There are our clothes, my knitting supplies, some boxes of spices for cooking. There are a few books, but I’ve read them all, and there is no mystery within them.
No, wait. That’s not true. There is one book in there, a gift from my mother’s great, great grandfather. An original twentieth-century copy of short-stories by a Korean writer, Yi Kwang-Su. It’s entirely in Korean, without pictures on the cover or the insides. I glanced at it once as a very young child, and finding it completely incomprehensible and (horrors) without any pictures, I never looked at it again. Mother found an archived English translation, but I read that ages ago. She kept it wrapped in a silk handkerchief, under the sole piece of Goryeo pottery with its celadon glaze, on a shelf near our little kitchenette.
I go to it immediately, unwrapping the rustling silk, and open the book.
As usual, it contains vertical columns of hangul that I cannot read, another reminder that I feel less Korean than my face would prove. There is nothing else.
I sigh. Another dead end.
And yet, the pages are worn and well-thumbed, far more than any of our other books. Almost as well-worn as the diary. The book is hiding something. I just know it. Mother might have written it in ultraviolet ink so that only I could read it. But since she was hiding it from me, maybe she did the opposite. Hid it in a spectrum where I could never, ever read it. It’s the only possibility.
I shove the book into my suit. I need to find an infrared reader somewhere. I need to go. I head for the door, when Cyclo releases a pattern of golden and amber dots and smudges.
What are you doing? Cyclo asks me.
“I have to go,” I say, breathlessly. But her gel rises up, so fast I can’t even lift my foot. She climbs up my back, encases my wrists, encloses my neck and face. It’s faster than I’ve ever experienced, inhumanly fast. And I hear her voice as my body succumbs to the numbness of the chemicals she unleashes into my skin.
You aren’t leaving me, Hana. Never again.