Returned to Life, Coda
Nov. 15th, 2006 03:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jeriendhalFor the record, I had this ending planned from the beginning, when I first started posting this story.
“Can I get you anything, Miss?”
She turned away from the transfer station's magnificent view of Vulpine Prime, framed in a floor to ceiling window five meters across, to find a Vulpine lounge attendant hovering solicitously at the arm of her float chair. She smiled at the woman and answered, “No, thank you. I'm just enjoying the view before my shuttle starts boarding.”
The attendant smiled. “It is wonderful, isn't it? Have you ever visited one of the garden worlds before?”
“I'm from Earth, originally.”
“Oh, then you know what to expect then. Some folks who grew up on stations or in domed colonies get a touch of agoraphobia the first time they visit. Enjoy your stay.”
“Thank you,” Rachael replied, turning back to the window as the attendant went to serve another visitor to the VIP lounge. It was so odd, to look out over another blue green world, like Earth, but with continents and oceans in the wrong places, filled with plants and animals that didn't look like anything her home world had. Get used to it, she thought to herself, you won't be going back to Earth anytime soon.
Not that there was anything there for her anymore. Everything would be different, except maybe ancient, red Uluru. No, even that would be. She'd read an encyclopedia entry about it, describing how the area had been restored, the tacky tourist town on the edge of the sacred site being demolished and the surrounding land going back to the wilderness it once was.
I'm certainly different. She wondered if she ought to thank the Gene Mage, for the gift of this new body. The New and Improved Rachael Namatjira. Bleed her dry and she just hibernates, like Terinu when he's got low blood sugar. Thank the heavens for Terinu's grieving stubbornness, insisting that Leeza put her body under the medical scanner when they'd returned to Rufus' yacht, enabling them to detect the faint brain activity as her body went into a protective coma. Some surgery courtesy of the autodoc, a few square feet of artificial skin grafts and a considerable amount of blood plasma later, she was, if not on her feet yet, at least alive.
Alive and as of yet undiscovered. She had a new name, a new citizen ident and a new bank account. The first two were courtesy of one of Gunny's comrades in arms, another Vulpine that went by the name of Joker, who was some kind of cyber-hacker she'd been told. The last was a gift from Rufus. The sum, he assured her, was enough to live off of comfortably for a couple of years if she was careful, at least until she managed to find a place for herself in this strange new world. Somewhere far from Earth and anyone who might recognize her for who she really was.
She heard a pair of childish shrieks behind her, then someone small and fast bounced off her float chair, nearly tipping her out of it before she could grab the arms. Rachael caught a glimpse of two faces a few shades lighter than her own, with dark almond eyes, belonging to boy and a girl, both human, and both appearing to be about nine years old. They looked up at her, then turned in surprise as an older man wearing white linen robes and a white cap rushed up, shouting something in Arabic as he waved a walking stick at the children.
“Fareed, Daliyad, what did you think you were doing, rushing about like that?” he went on, switching to English. “You nearly threw this poor woman out of her chair. Apologize at once!”
“We're sorry, Grandfather,” the boy said.
“Not to me, young fool, to her!”
“We're sorry, madam,” the girl said, the boy echoing her a moment later.
“It's all right, no harm done,” Rachael reassured them quickly.
“They should not have been running around the lounge, you could have been seriously injured,” the old man told her. To the children he said, “Go back to back to your mother, walking this time and tell her what you did!”
“Yes, Grandfather,” the both said, and scurried away.
“Young fools,” the old man repeated, sighing. Then he looked over to her and said, “Please, forgive an old chaperone for losing his charges for a moment, Ms.” He gave a her a small bow. “I am the Imam Yusef bin Safi. May I know your--”
The old man's eyes widened and his face went so pale Rachael feared for a moment that he might faint. “Masha'allah. Has anyone ever told you that you look almost exactly like...”
“Yes, I get that an awful lot,” she interrupted. Five times since Terinu, Leeza and the others had dropped her off at a Creo commercial transfer station. This was the first time since she'd entered Vulpine controlled space however. She'd been glad the double-takes had slowed down, otherwise she might have had to consider getting some elective plastic surgery to alter her features.
“Yes, well, I suppose you must,” Yusef said, recovering his composure. “May I know your name, young woman?”
“It's, ah, Rachael actually. Rachael Boroke.” She blushed slightly at lying to the old man. “Boroke” meant butterfly in one of the Aboriginal languages, which she thought had fit her situation nicely. Tell the lie long enough, maybe it'll become truth. she mused.
“Bismallah, what an amazing coincidence.”
“Well, like any shrink will tell you, blame my parents.” She laughed at her own joke and tried to divert him away from her looks. “'Imam' means you're a religious scholar, right?”
Yusef smiled. “It's just Arabic for 'leader' actually, normally either of prayer or community. Prayer, in my case. I'm attending an inter-faith conference in the capitol, bringing the Prophet's word to new worlds.” He waved his stick in the general direction that the children had left in. “I brought my granddaughter and her family along for company, to get a taste of life beyond parochial old Earth.”
“That's odd. I wouldn't think that the Vulpine would be big on other religions. I thought they were all for their goddess, the Holy Den Mother.”
He nodded in agreement. “Almost all of them. Fortunately for me, they've no objection to others' faiths and are always willing to listen. And who knows, I may find one who is open to the true words of the Prophet yet. So what brings you to this beautiful world, Ms. Boroke?”
“Visiting friends,” she said. “And, well, getting away from Earth for a while. With a face like this...” Rachael shrugged and waved a hand over it, as if to hide under a mask.
“I quite understand,” Yusef said, leaning on his walking stick and looking sympathetic. “To be honest, I find humanity's... well, I wouldn't quite call it worship... of the Three Children and what they supposedly represent to be disturbing sometimes. Verging on idolatry, actually.”
“I can agree with that. They were just kids,” she said bitterly. “No one has the right to... make them out to be something they aren't. I mean, have you seen any of the movies they've done about them?” The first one she'd viewed, mostly out of morbid curiosity, had almost made her laugh at the absurdity of it. At least when she wasn't feeling jealous about the actress portraying her being an order of magnitude prettier than Rachael herself. Not to mention a Kiwi.
Yusef sighed deeply. “Every single one. Multiple times.”
Spurred on by the sympathetic ear, she took the chance to vent. “I mean, Mark and m--, Rachael, snogging on the station and then taking a nice roll in the tundra after they crash landed? Do the people who makes these things have any idea how cold it w... had to have been out there?”
“I'm always impressed by how Unity Station looks so clean and neat in the films, a shining example of humanity's technical prowess,” he said, chuckling. “I mean really. Even discounting the relatively primitive technology, when you stuff fifty people into the equivalent of about six or eight large lorries, it becomes anything but neat. Not mention the whole place smelling like week-old sweat socks.”
“I guess that's the point, isn't it?” She began to laugh with him, the first laugh she'd managed in... well, about five hundred years. “History is all cleaned up, organized, indexed. What's happening now, or how people experienced history, is always a lot messier and it leaves so much out that never gets recorded.”
“Yes, no scholar will ever learn the truth as to how the Three Children bonded, by getting together one evening and learning to belch each other's national anthems,” Yusef said with mock gravitas.
Rachael's face froze in shock. That had actually happened, maybe the third or fourth evening of their pre-flight orientation at the launch center. It was a joke, a coincidence. It's not like Yusef could have actually been there, she told herself.
“Are you all right, Rachael?” Yusef asked, looking concerned.
“I... I'm sorry, just had a random thought pop into my head. It's nothing important,” she said hastily, then after a moment's thought added, “I was just wondering, what Ari Suhayar thought, just before Unity was attacked, when they were watching the Gene Mage give his speech before the UN. He was a Muslim too. I'd always imagined it was something like, 'There is no God but God, and that is certainly not his prophet.'”
Now it was Yusef's turn to freeze, his face growing almost as pale as it had before. “Yes,” he said slowly, looking at her much more carefully this time. “Yes, I imagine that's exactly what he said.”
“The thing is, no one knows what happened to them, any of them, after Mark's message to Earth,” she said. “Everyone assumes that Mark and Ari were executed, and that Rachael Namatjira died on the Kazakh steppes. Except if she died, why did they take her body back with them/ And if the boys were killed, why didn't the Varn announce that, to try and demoralize Earth? What if everyone was wrong?”
Yusef looked like he was about to weep. He closed his eyes and took in a deep breath. “Dear all merciful God, I am an old, old man and I have done much that is wrong, but I do not think you would curse me by making me go mad.”
“Ari, it's me. It's really me. Please, tell me it's you. Because otherwise I'm going crazy too.”
He simply took hold of her hand and held it tight.
The End
“Can I get you anything, Miss?”
She turned away from the transfer station's magnificent view of Vulpine Prime, framed in a floor to ceiling window five meters across, to find a Vulpine lounge attendant hovering solicitously at the arm of her float chair. She smiled at the woman and answered, “No, thank you. I'm just enjoying the view before my shuttle starts boarding.”
The attendant smiled. “It is wonderful, isn't it? Have you ever visited one of the garden worlds before?”
“I'm from Earth, originally.”
“Oh, then you know what to expect then. Some folks who grew up on stations or in domed colonies get a touch of agoraphobia the first time they visit. Enjoy your stay.”
“Thank you,” Rachael replied, turning back to the window as the attendant went to serve another visitor to the VIP lounge. It was so odd, to look out over another blue green world, like Earth, but with continents and oceans in the wrong places, filled with plants and animals that didn't look like anything her home world had. Get used to it, she thought to herself, you won't be going back to Earth anytime soon.
Not that there was anything there for her anymore. Everything would be different, except maybe ancient, red Uluru. No, even that would be. She'd read an encyclopedia entry about it, describing how the area had been restored, the tacky tourist town on the edge of the sacred site being demolished and the surrounding land going back to the wilderness it once was.
I'm certainly different. She wondered if she ought to thank the Gene Mage, for the gift of this new body. The New and Improved Rachael Namatjira. Bleed her dry and she just hibernates, like Terinu when he's got low blood sugar. Thank the heavens for Terinu's grieving stubbornness, insisting that Leeza put her body under the medical scanner when they'd returned to Rufus' yacht, enabling them to detect the faint brain activity as her body went into a protective coma. Some surgery courtesy of the autodoc, a few square feet of artificial skin grafts and a considerable amount of blood plasma later, she was, if not on her feet yet, at least alive.
Alive and as of yet undiscovered. She had a new name, a new citizen ident and a new bank account. The first two were courtesy of one of Gunny's comrades in arms, another Vulpine that went by the name of Joker, who was some kind of cyber-hacker she'd been told. The last was a gift from Rufus. The sum, he assured her, was enough to live off of comfortably for a couple of years if she was careful, at least until she managed to find a place for herself in this strange new world. Somewhere far from Earth and anyone who might recognize her for who she really was.
She heard a pair of childish shrieks behind her, then someone small and fast bounced off her float chair, nearly tipping her out of it before she could grab the arms. Rachael caught a glimpse of two faces a few shades lighter than her own, with dark almond eyes, belonging to boy and a girl, both human, and both appearing to be about nine years old. They looked up at her, then turned in surprise as an older man wearing white linen robes and a white cap rushed up, shouting something in Arabic as he waved a walking stick at the children.
“Fareed, Daliyad, what did you think you were doing, rushing about like that?” he went on, switching to English. “You nearly threw this poor woman out of her chair. Apologize at once!”
“We're sorry, Grandfather,” the boy said.
“Not to me, young fool, to her!”
“We're sorry, madam,” the girl said, the boy echoing her a moment later.
“It's all right, no harm done,” Rachael reassured them quickly.
“They should not have been running around the lounge, you could have been seriously injured,” the old man told her. To the children he said, “Go back to back to your mother, walking this time and tell her what you did!”
“Yes, Grandfather,” the both said, and scurried away.
“Young fools,” the old man repeated, sighing. Then he looked over to her and said, “Please, forgive an old chaperone for losing his charges for a moment, Ms.” He gave a her a small bow. “I am the Imam Yusef bin Safi. May I know your--”
The old man's eyes widened and his face went so pale Rachael feared for a moment that he might faint. “Masha'allah. Has anyone ever told you that you look almost exactly like...”
“Yes, I get that an awful lot,” she interrupted. Five times since Terinu, Leeza and the others had dropped her off at a Creo commercial transfer station. This was the first time since she'd entered Vulpine controlled space however. She'd been glad the double-takes had slowed down, otherwise she might have had to consider getting some elective plastic surgery to alter her features.
“Yes, well, I suppose you must,” Yusef said, recovering his composure. “May I know your name, young woman?”
“It's, ah, Rachael actually. Rachael Boroke.” She blushed slightly at lying to the old man. “Boroke” meant butterfly in one of the Aboriginal languages, which she thought had fit her situation nicely. Tell the lie long enough, maybe it'll become truth. she mused.
“Bismallah, what an amazing coincidence.”
“Well, like any shrink will tell you, blame my parents.” She laughed at her own joke and tried to divert him away from her looks. “'Imam' means you're a religious scholar, right?”
Yusef smiled. “It's just Arabic for 'leader' actually, normally either of prayer or community. Prayer, in my case. I'm attending an inter-faith conference in the capitol, bringing the Prophet's word to new worlds.” He waved his stick in the general direction that the children had left in. “I brought my granddaughter and her family along for company, to get a taste of life beyond parochial old Earth.”
“That's odd. I wouldn't think that the Vulpine would be big on other religions. I thought they were all for their goddess, the Holy Den Mother.”
He nodded in agreement. “Almost all of them. Fortunately for me, they've no objection to others' faiths and are always willing to listen. And who knows, I may find one who is open to the true words of the Prophet yet. So what brings you to this beautiful world, Ms. Boroke?”
“Visiting friends,” she said. “And, well, getting away from Earth for a while. With a face like this...” Rachael shrugged and waved a hand over it, as if to hide under a mask.
“I quite understand,” Yusef said, leaning on his walking stick and looking sympathetic. “To be honest, I find humanity's... well, I wouldn't quite call it worship... of the Three Children and what they supposedly represent to be disturbing sometimes. Verging on idolatry, actually.”
“I can agree with that. They were just kids,” she said bitterly. “No one has the right to... make them out to be something they aren't. I mean, have you seen any of the movies they've done about them?” The first one she'd viewed, mostly out of morbid curiosity, had almost made her laugh at the absurdity of it. At least when she wasn't feeling jealous about the actress portraying her being an order of magnitude prettier than Rachael herself. Not to mention a Kiwi.
Yusef sighed deeply. “Every single one. Multiple times.”
Spurred on by the sympathetic ear, she took the chance to vent. “I mean, Mark and m--, Rachael, snogging on the station and then taking a nice roll in the tundra after they crash landed? Do the people who makes these things have any idea how cold it w... had to have been out there?”
“I'm always impressed by how Unity Station looks so clean and neat in the films, a shining example of humanity's technical prowess,” he said, chuckling. “I mean really. Even discounting the relatively primitive technology, when you stuff fifty people into the equivalent of about six or eight large lorries, it becomes anything but neat. Not mention the whole place smelling like week-old sweat socks.”
“I guess that's the point, isn't it?” She began to laugh with him, the first laugh she'd managed in... well, about five hundred years. “History is all cleaned up, organized, indexed. What's happening now, or how people experienced history, is always a lot messier and it leaves so much out that never gets recorded.”
“Yes, no scholar will ever learn the truth as to how the Three Children bonded, by getting together one evening and learning to belch each other's national anthems,” Yusef said with mock gravitas.
Rachael's face froze in shock. That had actually happened, maybe the third or fourth evening of their pre-flight orientation at the launch center. It was a joke, a coincidence. It's not like Yusef could have actually been there, she told herself.
“Are you all right, Rachael?” Yusef asked, looking concerned.
“I... I'm sorry, just had a random thought pop into my head. It's nothing important,” she said hastily, then after a moment's thought added, “I was just wondering, what Ari Suhayar thought, just before Unity was attacked, when they were watching the Gene Mage give his speech before the UN. He was a Muslim too. I'd always imagined it was something like, 'There is no God but God, and that is certainly not his prophet.'”
Now it was Yusef's turn to freeze, his face growing almost as pale as it had before. “Yes,” he said slowly, looking at her much more carefully this time. “Yes, I imagine that's exactly what he said.”
“The thing is, no one knows what happened to them, any of them, after Mark's message to Earth,” she said. “Everyone assumes that Mark and Ari were executed, and that Rachael Namatjira died on the Kazakh steppes. Except if she died, why did they take her body back with them/ And if the boys were killed, why didn't the Varn announce that, to try and demoralize Earth? What if everyone was wrong?”
Yusef looked like he was about to weep. He closed his eyes and took in a deep breath. “Dear all merciful God, I am an old, old man and I have done much that is wrong, but I do not think you would curse me by making me go mad.”
“Ari, it's me. It's really me. Please, tell me it's you. Because otherwise I'm going crazy too.”
He simply took hold of her hand and held it tight.
The End
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no subject
Date: 2006-11-15 08:23 pm (UTC)I love happy endings. And I wasn't hoping for one. And I dearly love surprises. Tickles me the right way, the coda does. But it is also very good work!
Although... Didn't Racheal's father tell her she was going now? Or was that just going on with a normal life, rather than one of pain?
no subject
Date: 2006-11-15 08:40 pm (UTC)I'm just happy that no one picked up on the hint I left with Leeza's dad asking what happened to Rachael's body. :)
no subject
Date: 2006-11-15 08:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-11-15 10:12 pm (UTC)Nauseating but sweet.
I was wondering if you were ever going to address what happened to the third one of the three.