LONG TIME PASSING
A Short Story
By
Thomas Watson




Smashwords Edition
Copyright © 2012 by Thomas Watson
All rights reserved.
Desert Stars Publications




With thanks to Linda Watson and Stephanie Hansen for assistance with proofreading. Any errors that remain are the fault of the author, and no other.




LONG TIME PASSING

I sat out in the open, looking up, in a place that could never truly be out in the open. That’s the way of it, living out here in these inverted worlds. In more than three hundred years, I’ve never really gotten over the novelty of it.
Yes, I said three hundred. I’m a Relic. I thought you knew that? It’s true, there are few of us left, these days, the folk who were alive before space-born civilization began to spread between the stars. Very few.
I sat in the center of the strip of parkland running down the middle of the main ring of the grand star liner Edwin Teale, the first such ship to serve a route out into the Confederation of Clans. The Teale had recently entered Man’norna System in the Confederation. I’d managed to miss out on the whole Contact thing, which happened a few years before, so I wanted to be there when the first of the great star liners that tied the Commonwealth’s culture together threw a loop of travel and exchange out into Leyra’an space. The war between the Republic and the Confederation seemed to be over, at that time, and there was little chance of a ship from the Commonwealth being caught in the crossfire between the two nations.
The very thought of war, after all our long years of peace, gave me a creepy feeling. I didn’t examine that feeling too closely. Doing so carried risks. The sequestration algorithms of the memory hoard in my head were the most robust available, but no such system is ever airtight. Best not to stir things up. My war was a matter for history, and the long war between the Leyra’an and the Humans of the Republic had nothing to do with me. I’d been adamant in this regard when approached by the Commonwealth Councils, and then later when contacted by the Artificial who served as shipmind for the Teale. War had nothing to do with me, not even as an advisor. They seemed reluctant to take “No” for an answer.
But that was my answer and it remained my answer. End of story.
The clearing in which I sat was carpeted by lush, green turf and surrounded by Japanese maples, their ruddy leaves sprinkled with tiny lanterns that gave off a silvery glitter during the ship’s night cycle. Night would soon begin to fall. I sat where I did to see ‘lights out’ to the best effect. The view up through the transparent upper dome that arched across the inner half of the ring was always spectacular. During ship’s day the shadowy form of the ship’s central axis could just be seen beyond the glare of the ring light. A small shuttle with a tapered prow flew slowly down its length, disappearing into the glare and then reappearing on the other side. I sipped beer from the stein acquired from the pub beyond the trees, and let my mind wander while I waited to see the stars from a place still very new to Humans.
I was not alone. There were picnics going on around me, and somewhere beyond the maples I could hear children playing. The sound of voices behind me stood out over the background, and after a moment I realized why. They spoke quietly in a language I did not recognize. Something about the words and the sounds of the voices made the hair on my arms stand up, and I turned to see what I more than half expected – and wanted – to see. Leyra’an, three of them, a man and two women. Not even a day into Leyra’an space and already I was granted a chance to meet the new neighbors. The man was tall and broad-shouldered, and carried, of all things, a picnic basket. The women carried beer steins; the shorter and more buxom of the two held a stein in each hand, with the extra presumably belonging to the man hauling the rather large basket.
They saw me turn and look, so I saluted them with the beer stein. “Hello,” I said, knowing nothing of their language, and hoping the gesture would mean the right thing.
All three turned and bowed slightly to me, male and female alike, then strode confidently forward, as if they’d been looking for me all along. I’d expected my salutation to be returned in some fashion, but this was more than I bargained for.  I rose to my feet to greet them properly. As they approached, all three wore smiles that reminded me somewhat of the Mona Lisa. The Leyra’an don’t show their teeth when they smile, considering it a sign of aggression. I didn’t know that, then, and wasn’t at all sure what I’d gotten myself into, but there was only one way to find out. Roll with it, as they said once upon a time.
“Hello,” I said again.
The man’s smile stretched his face a bit more, without becoming a grin. The woman with two beer steins did the same and bowed a little. She stood between what I guessed was her partner and a taller, slimmer woman who moved with a physical confidence and grace that made me think of a dancer. 
The slim one returned my greeting. “Hello, indeed,” she replied. Her words were as clear and easily spoken as if she had known the Human tongue all her life. Which was, of course, quite possible. “We were told this place provides a good view of the stars, when the lights go out.”
“It does,” I said. “I often come here at the end of the day, to look out there and relax.”
“We come for same,” said the man, his own command of my language being less than complete. “Also meet you people. You are first, almost.”
“Yia,” said the other woman.
“And I boarded the Edwin Teale for a chance to meet the Leyra’an,” I told them.
“We are here!” the shorter woman said with a laugh.
“So you are. I’m Martin Russman,” I said. I held out one hand, then hesitated when I realized the gesture might mean nothing to them.
“I am Jas’mala Gway,” said the slender woman. She reached out and returned the hand clasp, clearly as familiar with Human culture as she was Human language. Her grip was strong, almost assertive, and her amber-colored eyes met mine without flinching.
Even after so many years, I can tell. The strength of her grip, the way it tested mine, her walk and bearing, even her familiarity with my language and culture – I knew what she was. This was a soldier, a veteran of the recently suspended war. I merely shook her hand and said, “A pleasure to meet you.”
“Am Em’rosh Nakaa,” said the man, who placed his left hand over his breast and bowed slightly. “This is wife, you say. Em’rosh Ahyin.”
“Delighted to meet all of you,” I replied. After a small hesitation, I duplicated his gesture and bowed. This seemed to please them.
We all sat on the flower-sprinkled turf, grass blades strewn with tiny white, star-shaped blossoms, and saw to the logistics of beer steins and basket. I could just detect a subtle dimming of the light. Then there was a moment of quiet as we looked around and at each other.
You’ve seen images of the Leyra’an by now, of course, and know they are as varied a people as Humanity. Human in form and face, with skin covered by small, silky-smooth scales and dark hair that often reminds me of the mane of a lion. Like us, they have a variety of skin tones, from pale tan to nearly black; these three were all of the more common cinnamon hue. Husband and wife had black hair; that of Jas’mala Gway was dark brown. All had rust-colored bands on their arms and, in Em’rosh Ahyin’s case, across the cheeks. These markings looked natural to me, and not the result of body decoration. All were dressed in various combinations of brown, deep green, and dark red and blue. Em’rosh Nakaa and Jas’mala Gway wore loose tunics and trousers tucked into snug boots; Em’rosh Ahyin wore a long, flowing skirt of finely woven green cloth under a snug red blouse. Their otherwise Human-seeming eyes looked at me in various shades of amber.
“Human name is second name for family, ah?” Em’rosh Nakaa began to unpack the picnic basket as he spoke.
“Yes,” I replied. “So call me Martin.”
“Is other way ‘round, Leyra’an.” A serving blanket shaped like a runner unrolled from its cylinder when Em’rosh Nakaa set it down. He gave a little hoot of surprise, then laughed, when it did so. “Very good! So, you say Nakaa and Ahyin and Gway.”
“I shall do so,” I assured him, watching as he set out a feast between the three of them and me. Fresh bread, cheese, and a variety of meat dishes, including an entire roasted chicken. “Is someone hungry?” I asked as the food was piled on plates and handed around.
“You, we hope,” said Gway as she held a laden platter out to me. “Please, join us. We were given far more than we need!”
In younger days, when such things were bought and sold, I might have demurred, or at least been embarrassed. It’s different now. I accepted with thanks that had more to do with being included in their company than receiving their generosity.
Ahyin flipped the lid of her stein up and took a cautious sip. At the same time Gway drank deeply, apparently also quite familiar with beer. She exchanged a look with her friend, who tipped the stein back and drank more deeply.
“Is good,” said Ahyin. 
Her husband had already come to that conclusion. As he lowered his nearly empty stein he said, “More we will need!”
“Edwin?” I said to the open air.
“I will see to it,” the shipmind replied.
“Thanks.”
“My pleasure.”
Two of my three new friends looked around in bewilderment; Gway laughed quietly.
“That was the shipmind, the Artificial who watches over the Edwin Teale,” I explained. “We generally address such beings with the name of their ship.”
“They have heard of such things,” said Gway. “But hearing and experiencing, ah, those are different matters!”
“Very true!” I agreed, thinking of my own situation, seated with people who were not Human.
The feast began and the light faded slowly to something like the twilight on old Earth, so long ago. It would be, I knew, a long twilight, comparable to the fall of night in Earth’s mid-northern latitudes in high summer. It was always June aboard the star liner. The Edwin Teale hosted a population of fireflies, and these began to blink on and off in the grass and the lower branches of the maples. Their lights were a soft counterpoint  to the cooler glitter of the lights in the trees. I remembered chasing fireflies as a boy. Fortunately, mosquitoes had not been seen as necessary components of the Teale’s mesocosm.
Although the foods were all dishes from the Commonwealth, the Leyra’an sitting with me showed little hesitation in consuming them. The Leyra’an truly are very Human, after all, to share our tastes and to enjoy good beer. In a remarkably short time I no longer felt overwhelmed by the novelty they presented. They simply were what they were, the Leyra’an. People. So much like us, and yet clearly not the same. We ate together in the lingering twilight, and talked and laughed, and now and then a server from the pub beyond the trees would wander over to refill the beer steins. Other Humans passed by, gazing at my new friends with wondering eyes, at times coming closer and joining the conversation for varying lengths of time. I reveled in my good fortune to have been singled out by this trio of visitors. It never occurred to me to wonder why they were there.
The conversation wandered widely and contained numerous pauses, and lower light levels seemed to induce thoughtful introspection, as beer began to gently take its toll on my judgment. Like many people I have my nanomed system set to pretty much ignore alcohol.
“You remind me,” said Gway at one point, “of those who serve the Confederation with me.”
“Those who serve?” I asked, only mildly puzzled by the observation. I was distracted by Nakaa, who studied with fascination a firefly walking across the back of his large, scale-backed hand. His eyes were wide and dark as he watched the insect flash on and off, lighting small patches of scales each time, while wandering up and then down each finger.
“To defend our people,” she said. “Soldiers, like me. You remind me of them.”
So she was a soldier, then, and recognized the same in me as well. I didn’t answer for a long moment, then nodded and said, “Once upon a time, a very long time ago. I’ve nearly forgotten about it, by now.” And in a manner of speaking, this was true.
“I would have guessed you were a citizen of the Republic, then,” Gway said. “I was not aware that the Commonwealth had known war so recently.”
“It hasn’t,” I replied. “I’m . . . old enough to remember the last one.”
“You make it seem a very long time ago.”
“It was,” I said. “Very long.”
She cocked her head to one side, as if my answer required careful consideration. So much like us, but did the gesture mean what it seemed to mean? I’d been responding to these people all evening as if they were human beings, and that was surely a risky thing!
“It tickles,” Nakaa announced as the firefly clambered to the tip of his upraised thumb, popped open its wing covers, and flew away into the cool, still dusk.
So much like us.
I looked for a way to steer her away from the subject. Memory sequestration is a tricky thing, and no one really knows how robust the system is, when prodded. And even answering her general questions regarding my past counted as . . . prodding.
“These days, I’m a chef,” I said before she could speak again. “Been one for about, oh, sixty years or so.”
Gway said something to her companions, who then gaped at me.
“Uh . . . What did you just tell them?”
“I translated ‘years’ into units used by my people,” she replied.
“How are you so old?” Ahyin asked, blinking and a little the worse for the beer.
“Nanomed technology,” I replied, a bit surprised she asked. “I thought the Commonwealth had adapted it and shared it with the Leyra’an?”
“They have,” said Gway. “It is still being distributed, and word of it generally comes along with the treatment itself.” She spoke quietly to her friends, who followed her words with widened eyes, then stared at me again.
“What is it like?” asked Nakaa. “To live on and on?”
That depends on your memories, I almost said. “Hard to describe,” I replied with a shrug. “When I grew up, people got old and died. Now, we don’t. I was lucky. I was a very old man when the first therapies became available. I was able to hold on until the full nanomed was available, and that thoroughly rejuvenated me.”
Gway was translating my words softly as I spoke them. Apparently what I was saying exceeded the knowledge of the Human language her friends had. When I paused and she caught up, she asked, “But that was a very long time ago, was it not?”
“Yes,” I said. I found myself reluctant to elaborate. “I was born more than three hundred years ago,” I said at last, and very quietly.
They all looked impressed, assuming the faces of the Leyra’an speak the same way as Humans. And Gway said, “Then you really do remember the last battles before the Commonwealth was born. It must have been an amazing time to be alive!”
“Amazing,” I said. I was trying not to snap at her, annoyed that my attempt to change the subject had failed. Backfired, in fact. But even as my mind by long habit and training shied away from thoughts that might threaten the sequestration protocols, I realized she probably could not help staying in this track. She was a soldier. Her war amounted to current events, mine to ancient history. “Yes, it was indeed. It looked for a time that we wouldn’t survive it, but we did. We’re out here among the stars. We’ve left the rest of it behind.” And realized as I spoke that I’d put extra emphasis on the last words to leave my mouth.
Gway seemed to pick up on it and tilted her head again to one side slightly as she looked into my eyes. Suddenly the amber gaze of her kind seemed uncanny, and I couldn’t endure it. To cover this, I turned my attention to the bit of sausage still there on the runner, wrapping it up in a sheet of flatbread. I was anything but hungry, by that point, but felt less embarrassed seeming to have something to do.
“History lives, for the Leyra’an,” Gway said quietly. “We leave none of it behind. For that reason we survived the war with your sundered kin.”
She was now a shadow, seated on dark grass before me, visible only because my eyes had adjusted to the fading light all along, aided now by tiny lights wired to the trees. I looked away from her, trying to think of a way to divert her from discussion of the war her people had fought with the offshoot of Humanity calling itself the Republic.
“They come,” Nakaa said, not helping my cause. “We know what to do. Stand firm.”
“And now it seems the folk of the Republic have come to their senses,” Gway said. “There will be peace, now. At least, so I hope. And believe, in part because the Commonwealth has come to stand in between. But mostly because the people of the Republic are good people in their hearts, and know now they were misled. History, all our histories, are filled with sadness because someone failed to understand, or refused to.”
“Yes,” I said, not really meaning to. “Yes, that’s all too true.” And worked to avoid considering why I knew this to be true. Reflection on such experience would surely weaken the barriers of sequestration.
But Jas’mala Gway wasn’t quite done. “So we learn from the past, embracing it even as it hurts us. For we have all done questionable deeds, with the best of motives. It seems this is another thing Humans and Leyra’an share. Do you think this is true?”
Think it was true? I knew it was true. I damned well knew it!
No! Look away from that!
How do you hide from history? Memories can be sequestered, but the braided chain of history that leads up to your life? To the present moment?
I shuddered and just gave her a nod as I ate the sausage roll I’d put together. I felt the food in my mouth, but did not taste it. Then I took a long, deep drink from the stein, holding the thing as if to shield myself from her eyes. The lid snapped shut as I finally lowered it. It was fully dark, now, and the lamp ring had faded to a barely visible, dark blue glow.
“Lights out,” I said, and waved the beer stein up toward the now utterly transparent canopy that arched over the ring. 
So clear was the material from which it was made that we might well have been open to the merciless Void of space. But of course, the soft grass in which we sat, the trees surrounding us with their star-like lamps and fireflies, all of these dispelled that illusion. That, and the warm, grass-scented air we breathed. Through the canopy we could see the ghostly central pole of the ship, the axis around which this inverted world turned to give us the feeling of gravity. It bore no lights of its own. The opposite curve of the ring was there, a shadowy band set against the stars and sprinkled with lights like the lamps around us; some of those lights moved about at various speeds. The stars were as yet undimmed by that system’s primary. That would change as the ship’s rotation whirled us around. We were out on the edge of that system, though, and its sun would be no more than an extremely bright star.
I’ve seen dark skies from various places, including undeveloped lands on old Earth, back when such places were still to be found. The darkest night sky of my former days was nothing like this. We sat and gazed up at a universe ablaze with points and swaths of light.
“I never get tired of this,” I said softly, to no one in particular.
“It is beautiful,” Gway said.
“The cold, hard beauty of the night . . .” I said, mangling a bit of poetry heard long ago. “It draws the eyes, and the spirit. Always has.”
“All through our history, we dreamed of the stars,” Gway said. Her friends seemed to pay no attention, caught up by the view. Like many other couples seated in the grass around us, Ahyin sat within the circle of Nakaa’s arms, and leaned back against him.
“Same here,” I said. “And now, here we are!”
“Is it what you expected?” Gway asked.
“No,” I said with a quiet laugh. “But then, I never expected to be out here at all. No one did, really. We thought we’d blow ourselves away before we managed to come out here.”
So much for changing the subject.
“We very nearly did.” 
I heard the words even as Gway looked up across my shoulder. I had not heard the speaker approach, her footsteps muffled by the grass behind me. I turned and came halfway up and around, not truly aware at first of what startled me. I saw the face, a face of cold, hard beauty, and black hair cut short. In the split second that followed, her name came to me, matching the sound of an all-too-familiar voice, an accent that had never quite faded in three centuries.
“Guan-yin.”
“Hello, Martin,” she said. “I was afraid you might have forgotten me.”
I’d tried to forget her. I was trying to even then. The sequestration protocols were at their weakest when it came to recognizing faces and aromas, and she still smelled ever so faintly of jasmine. My first, and best, defense was to focus down on the here-and-now, to fill my mind with the present moment. That would have been easier, it might have worked, had it been anyone else.
I looked down at Gway and the other Leyra’an. “You were expecting her.”
“Yes,” Gway replied. Nakaa and Ahyin looked away as if embarrassed, faces less than half visible in the combined lamp and star light. “We were looking for you, and kept you busy until she was aboard the ship.”
“Regret dee-cep-shun,” said Nakaa.
“It was necessary to bring you together,” Gway added.
Necessary? As if my answer would change, or could change! But almost at once I realized it wasn’t to argue this point that she’d come, no, not at all. Those who sent Guan-yin knew what they were doing, and the Leyra’an were almost certainly up to speed. I came to my feet and turned abruptly, first walking from them with long, hasty strides, then breaking into a run as panic rose. Yes, necessary, and I had to get away from them before that familiar face . . .
But it was too late, by then. Faces and aromas, and I’d been presented with both. An image flashed in my mind, and the memory of a sound, of sounds, of voices that rose in anger and fear. I ran faster, but they kept pace. I dodged around a small grove of lilacs, leaves black in the near darkness, and almost ran into a small group of children being herded by a trio of adults. Each bore a small light. I startled them, and several shouted in alarm, the small, high voices of frightened children. And chance or fate or whatever couldn’t possibly have arranged for a worse coincidence.
I stumbled away from them and heard someone shouting for help, but could no longer focus on the here-and-now, and thought I heard a familiar voice crying out in shock and horror . . .  but no, that man was many years dead and buried, for all that I heard so clearly the sound of his own soul torn to bits by what he had just seen. The grass was cool and moist beneath me – when had I fallen? – and the scent of it filled my nose. I breathed deeply. There’d been no green grass that day, just dust and smoke and blood. I tried to use the smell of the grass to pull me back, but it was much too late for that.
They’d warned me, all those years ago. Warned me that long term sequestration had consequences, that if the protocols failed it would be harsher and more real, the longer the time that passed. I was only supposed to use it to aid in my therapy, a temporary arrangement. Instead I’d used it to hide, and now there was no hiding place.
I staggered to my feet, or tried. The blast had left my ears ringing and damaged my filter mask. I could smell the fires, the blood, and the fear. People were shouting, weapons firing, and I spun around wildly, trying to sort out friend from foe, and a shot hit me from behind. Nothing the armor couldn’t block, but I was on my knees again. And on the ground before me Guan-yin was in flames, screaming in mortal terror as the armor heated up.
“No! God damn it . . .  No!”
I was kneeling in dark grass, clutching my head between my hands and casting a dim shadow as the ring’s rotation brought the distant sun of the system into view. The shadow moved slowly, then stood out in stark contrast as someone from behind turned a light on me, no doubt in an attempt to help.
Sudden flare of light, a shadow that swept out from me, then in an eye blink swept off to one side. The shock of the blast, men and women falling around me even as they returned fire. Gathering, rallying, seeking a line for our retreat, and Guan-yin exploded in flames before me, an old-fashioned Molotov cocktail crashing against her breast plate.
It was all going to hell, the whole mission. Had gone to hell. Intel had been shit, and we hit the wrong place. A shelter full of children, guarded by a few women and a handful of teenage boys with Cold War era rifles. We blew the place, brought it down, before we realized it wasn’t the insurgent HQ we’d been after. The enemy wasn’t there, just children, dozens of them, and all dead because of us.
“Oh, gawd!” one of our British contingent kept shouting. “Oh, gawd, look what we’ve done!” His was the only cry of horror and pain from the group. He spoke for us all, even as Guan-yin shouted orders and organized the retreat. Up to that point I’d wanted nothing to do with a Chinese commanding officer, never mind the new alliance, but she did the job. She got us focused. Got us running.
Nothing for it but to retreat, run for the extraction point, with no idea now where the insurgent militia might be. 
But they soon knew where we were. The people who had lost their children made sure of that. It started with small arms fire and grenades, little more than harassment, but effective enough to slow us down, even wearing our powered armor augmentations. Slowed us down enough for the real enemy to reach us. They told us the armor would make each of us worth ten of them. That worked until we faced an army driven to madness by grief and rage. Then the bets were off.
The Brit died first, taken out by something that pierced his suit and blew up. That told the enemy that we could be killed, and they came at us with a murderous fury. We killed scores of them, but they came on, blind in their rage and their lust for vengeance, and numbers worked against us. One by one we fell to their fury as we tried to fight our way out, Guan-yin screaming orders in English and Chinese, and the language didn’t matter, we knew what she meant.
They attacked from rooftops and doorways, windows and alleys, from behind wrecked trucks and piles of rubble. They kept it up, and we fought for every meter of advance, running low on ammo and courage, short of everything but fear. And just before air support reached us the real insurgents, the ones we’d gone after, hit us with everything they had.
Guan-yin was on fire, screaming, and I could hear her screaming as I knelt there in the dark grass. People were talking through the memories pouring from the memory hoard implanted in my brain. A horde of memories swarming from the hoard in which they’d been for so long imprisoned. I couldn’t answer them, those people around me in present time. My words here-and-now didn’t jibe with then, and then carried a lot more weight. They wanted to help, wanted to know what was wrong, but couldn’t they see? She was burning right there before them, and screaming. How could they not hear her pain?
I did the only thing that made sense. Lunging forward, while what remained of our group covered me, I hit the emergency release on her suit and yanked at it, splitting it open and hauling her free of it. The heat of the flames was intense. The stench of burned flesh overwhelmed me and I vomited even as I gathered her up and staggered away from the flames. She kept screaming, never stopped, writhing in my arms, in pain beyond reason. I used the strength of the armor to control her, and broke one of her arms in the process. We started to run again, near as we were to the extraction point, and fire erupted all around us, blasts that brought down buildings and sent us to our knees. But it was friendly fire. Rescue had finally arrived.
Too late for so many of us. They whisked the last of us away into the sky and to a safety that for some of us would never be quite right.
In the immediate debriefing we were told by an officer that our mission would be recorded as a success, that the usual cover story about the enemy using children as human shields would be used. “You’re all heroes,” he said. I was still in my armor, then. I crushed his skull between my steel-encased hands before anyone else could move. I spent the next twenty years in a mental institution for that act, and I really didn’t want to remember that, either.
Not that it mattered. I remembered it all. Again. The sequestration was gone, and I was there, in the fire and stench and the terror of it, with faces of dead children all around me. Running from the enemy . . . half hoping they would kill me.
Carrying what I thought was a half-burned corpse in my arms when the chopper came in. “She’s dead,” I said when the medics took her.
But she wasn’t, even if she wanted to be, for a long time after. 
Things were jumbled, memories out of order, and I knelt in the dark grass as the experiences that once defined me tried to do so yet again. And as before, I was helpless. Helpless before the faces of the children I’d helped to kill. It was an accident. I was told that, through years of therapy, though it did nothing to ease the guilt. 
Thirty soldiers, men and women, Americans, Chinese, and Brits for the most part, in the latest powered armor, descended upon that half-ruined city. We were to set an example, teach a lesson. We hit our target and destroyed it. Eleven of us survived the fury we unleashed. Just eleven.
I could hear voices around me, inquiring, assuring me of help on the way, and one telling them all to back off and leave me alone. To leave me alone. I fought to focus on the shadowy blades of grass between my hands – I’d fallen forward on hands and knees – and realized all those little white blossoms were gone. Where had all the flowers gone? Had the children picked them, every one? No, the children were dead, and I’d helped to kill them. Fool, I said to myself. Not those children. And not the children I’d frightened in my panic, either.  It was night, that was all. Lights out. These flowers only bloomed in the light of day.
The nanos in my blood must have been working overtime to stabilize me. Somehow they kept me from being sick, even as my stomach tied itself into a painful knot around the huge meal I’d just eaten. They could do nothing about bladder pressure, though. I’d had quite a lot of beer. The insistent discomfort herded me back to the here-and-now, at last. I stood, shaking and gasping for breath, and looked around. There was a comfort station not far off, and I headed that way, deliberately not looking around at the people who had gathered around in response to my distress.
“Leave him be,” Guan-yin repeated. 
I ignored her and staggered through the door, clutching at the frame, almost unable to stand. The light came up, from bare illumination to normal indoor light fast enough to matter, but not fast enough to make me blink. There was no one inside. I leaned on the cool tiles of the wall above the urinal and dealt with the aftermath of beer, then turned around to the sinks and the wide mirror, cold and white. I splashed cool water into my face and over my hair. I don’t know why that helps, but it does, and it did. Instead of turning on the drier, I leaned over the sink, dripping.
“You bitch,” I said, knowing she was there, seeing her in the mirror. “Why? What purpose could anything I remember possibly serve?”
She gave a little shrug and said, “The Artificials consider you an asset and wanted you in the loop. They are rarely wrong, you know.”
“There’s no way I can work with them as a consultant without remembering . . . that day.” I turned to face her. “I can’t live with that.”
“Three hundred years, Martin!” she said, shaking her head. “Shit, I got over my burns and scars in a fraction of that time!”
“Nanomed can help those scars,” I said harshly. My voice was shaking and I couldn’t help it. “God damn it, this stuff burned holes in my mind! I killed a man because of it!”
She crossed her arms over her breasts and looked down, away. “He got what he deserved, from what I heard.”
I chose not to argue that point. “I tried to deal with it,” I told her instead. “I did the therapies. I took the drugs! It didn’t hold them back. None of it. So when the memory hoards were developed . . . “ It was my turn to shrug. “God, Guan-yin, couldn’t you have left well enough alone?”
“No,” she said quietly, looking back up at me. “No, I couldn’t. Because in my gut, I know the Artificials are right. We need you. We need what you remember. Things have changed. We aren’t alone out here, and there’s no knowing what we’ll come up against next. Hell, the truce between the Leyra’an and Republic may not last. If it doesn’t . . . you’d have to be some kind of idiot to think that won’t put the Commonwealth at risk.”
I felt my shoulders sag. “I know,” I said at last. And I did. With the full memory set restored I knew all too well that the opposite of war isn’t always peace. So many on tired old Earth had learned that the hard way, back in my day. “But . . . Couldn’t they have picked someone else?”
She did not speak for a long time, then said quietly, “There is no one else, Martin. There’s just us. Just the two of us left, now. Of all the Relics known in the Commonwealth, we’re the last soldiers.”
She met my eyes as she said this, then looked quickly away, visibly distraught. Seeing that look on the face of the biggest hardass I ever served with . . . the bottom just dropped out. I knew exactly what she was feeling. We were the last of a breed, the last professional soldiers in a population that numbered in the hundreds of billions. It didn’t feel good. It didn’t feel right.
I felt vulnerable.
“It’s all changed,” I said quietly. “Having no need for soldiers hasn’t mattered for so many years. And now we’re next door to a war zone. Now, oh merciful God . . . Someone just had to remember war for us, didn’t they?”
“Yes,” she said. “Look, if the Commonwealth fails to keep the peace, I don’t see how we could avoid being drawn into this mess. At the very least we would need to secure our borders. People can learn to defend themselves, the archives of the Artificials contain the knowledge . . . “
“But only you and I have actually done these things,” I finished for her.
“Yes,” she said again, this time meeting my eyes.
The initial flood of memories from behind the walls in my memory hoard were quiet. They ran freely, now, along whatever tracks and tracings they’d once inhabited among the tangled neurons of my brain. It was as if they’d never been sequestered at all. My hands hurt, and I forced my fists to open, to relieve the cramps. So many things had been banished with the memory of that horrible day, among them the knowledge of necessity. I could not hide, anymore. I knew Guan-yin and the Artificials were right. I could see that she was watching me, and wondered exactly my face revealed. She was the poker player, not I. All I did was nod, and she knew. She knew.
And I knew it, as well, all the way through. There was no choice. It was up to us, now. Left to us, to restore a tradition I could only pray my fellow citizens would never actually follow.
“I couldn’t face them,” I told her, sighing deeply. “When decades became a century and I still saw their faces and the flames, in my dreams. I was going to go mad, again, no matter what sort of therapies were applied.”
“You made it impossible to see them.” She stared at me without apparent sympathy.
I nodded. “They . . . deserved better than that. That day must be remembered. It must be! Or what we teach the Commonwealth . . . oh hell!” I struggled not to break down completely, but tasted salt where my tears crossed my lips. “They’ll do it all again, if we don’t remember! The same mistakes, the same tragedies, all over again!”
“If we do not tell them of that day,” she said with a nod.
“They deserved better,” I said again. And then, “I’m a fool, Guan-yin. And a coward.”
Dark, Asian eyes in the face of an angel turned to stone gazed back at me. Then the eyes blinked, and the face thawed, softened. “It was no coward who carried me from the flames, Martin. And it is no coward I see before me now.” She held out her small slim hand, a hand long since healed of burns and scars, the fingers re-grown and strong. I took her hand. “Come, my friend,” she said quietly. “Come. We have much to do.”
And I followed my comrade-in-arms into the ship’s gentle night.




The story you’ve just read is set in the same universe as that of The War of the Second Iteration.

Book One
The Luck of Han’anga

The Human Commonwealth of Worlds had colonized their small corner of the galaxy for almost four centuries before an intelligent non-human species was encountered. The Commonwealth was a civilization at peace with itself, but it was all Humanity knew. Like many citizens of the Commonwealth, Robert MacGregor and his crewmates aboard the probeship William Bartram had come to believe Humanity was alone in the galaxy. And then they met the Leyra'an. In that encounter they found an unsettling mystery, for the Leyra'an were so similar to Humans that it defied both science and belief. But before the crew of the probeship can investigate this mystery, there is a darker and far more dangerous matter before them. Someone else met the Leyra'an first, and started a war.
The Luck of Han'anga begins the story of how an age of peace and prosperity comes to a sudden and terrible end, and of how Humanity and its allies must fight to defend everything they are, or ever hope to be.