What the Dead Remember

The intrusions stopped being rare after Dren's arrival, and Sable understood, without being told, that this was not coincidence — that the Lattice-Singer, feeling the Federation's attention finally close around it after forty years of undiscovered solitude, had stopped rationing itself as carefully as it once had. It was no longer trying to introduce her slowly to something enormous. It was trying to make sure that if the ending came suddenly, she would already be carrying enough of the Kessari that their disappearance would not be total.

She told herself this was a violation, still. She told herself that every time, in the two or three seconds before each fragment arrived, and she found that the telling made no difference at all to how much she wanted it once it came.

She was cataloguing supply requisitions with Tomás — routine, tedious, the specific relief of ordinary administrative tasks — when she became, for eleven seconds, a poet named Yara composing the last stanza of something she would never finish, sitting cross-legged on a narrow bunk with a stylus that kept running out of charge at the worst moments, muttering the same four words to herself in different orders, trying to find the one that would let the whole poem exhale.

*the light does not know it is leaving us*

*it is leaving us, the light does not know*

*does not know, the light, that it is leaving*

None of them worked. Yara set the stylus down, frustrated in the specific, textured way of an artist who has almost got it and cannot yet see why almost is not enough, and reached for a cup of something that had gone cold, and Sable surfaced back into her own body mid-sentence, staring at a requisition form for hydroponic nutrient packets, and Tomás said, 'You alright? You went somewhere.'

'Poetry,' Sable said, which was true and explained nothing, and Tomás, who had stopped asking follow-up questions about her recent behavior three weeks ago out of a mixture of respect and self-preservation, simply nodded and went back to the requisitions.

She thought about Yara's unfinished stanza for the rest of the day. She thought: *the light does not know it is leaving us* was almost right, but it put the weight on the light, and the poem — she was somehow certain of this, though she had never read a line of it beyond those four words in four orders — was not about the light. It was about the people watching it leave, and not knowing, either, until it was too late to say the thing that needed saying.

She never found out if Yara solved it. There was no way to ask. The not-knowing sat in her like a small persistent stone.

She was in the shower when she became a father named Onwe teaching his daughter orbital mechanics using a spinning fruit and a marker, both of them laughing at how badly the demonstration was going, the fruit skidding off the table twice before the daughter — small, maybe seven, missing a front tooth in a way that made her explanations of gravitational capture come out with a whistle in the consonants — grabbed it out of the air on the third try and held it aloft like a trophy.

'See,' the girl said, whistling. 'I caught it. That's what gravity does. It catches things.'

'That's not exactly—' Onwe started, and then stopped, and looked at his daughter's triumphant, gap-toothed face, and decided, visibly, that being exactly right mattered less than letting a seven-year-old believe she had personally out-argued the fundamental forces of physics. 'You're right. That's exactly what gravity does.'

Sable surfaced under water gone lukewarm, laughing and crying in a combination she was getting uncomfortably practiced at, and thought: *I don't even know their names. Onwe. The daughter. I don't know if the fruit demonstration was real or a favorite memory sanded smooth by retelling. I only know that a man decided, once, that his daughter's joy in being right was worth more than his own accuracy, and that decision survived a fusion core cascade and eleven light-years of transit and forty years in the dark, to arrive in me, in a shower, on an ordinary Tuesday.*

She thought: *I am starting to love people who have been dead for longer than I've been an adult.*

She thought, with the specific vertigo of realizing a feeling had already arrived before she'd agreed to it: *I don't think I can give this back now, even if I wanted to. Some of it is already mine.*

The two old women came back — Kess and Dell, still arguing, this time about whether a particular garden trellis needed rewiring or replacing, a debate that had apparently been running for close to as long as the tomato dispute and showed no more sign of resolution.

'You said that about the last one,' Dell said. 'You said replace, and we replaced, and it broke again in eight months.'

'That one was a manufacturing defect.'

'Everything is a manufacturing defect to you, Kess. Nothing is ever just old.'

'Some things are just old,' Kess said, with the particular offended dignity of a woman who suspected she was included in the category and did not appreciate the reminder. 'That doesn't mean everything old should be left broken out of sentiment.'

Sable, watching from inside a body that was not hers, inside a decade that no longer existed, felt something settle in her that she did not have a clean name for — not grief exactly, though grief was close to the surface of everything now. Recognition, maybe. The specific, aching familiarity of two people who had loved each other for forty years through the medium of bickering about garden infrastructure, because some kinds of love only know how to speak in maintenance disputes.

She surfaced from that one at her own kitchen table, tea gone cold, and found that she had, without noticing, started keeping a private list — not for any report, not for Dren, not even really for herself in any way she could articulate a purpose for. Just names. Yara. Onwe. Kess. Dell. Ferrant. The unnamed daughter with the whistle in her consonants. A growing roster of the specific, irreplaceable dead, written in her own hand on actual paper, because some part of her did not trust digital storage with something this fragile, though she could not have said what she thought might happen to it there that couldn't equally happen to ink.

The list had eleven names on it by the end of the week. She understood, looking at it, that this was what the Lattice-Singer had been trying to explain to her since the first contact, and had never quite found the words for, because there were no words for it that didn't sound smaller than the thing itself: it was not asking her to remember a disaster. It was asking her to become, slowly and against her own careful instincts, the last living person who had ever met these people at all.

She told Priya about the list, eventually, because Priya was the only person who already knew enough to make the telling feel less like a confession and more like a continuation.

'Eleven names,' Priya said, looking at the paper without touching it, the way you look at something you understand to be more fragile than its physical form suggests. 'That's a lot of ghosts to be carrying around for someone who hasn't agreed to anything yet.'

'I know.'

'Do you? Because from where I'm sitting, it looks like you agreed a while ago and you're just still working up the nerve to admit it to yourself.' Priya said it gently, the way you deliver a diagnosis you suspect the patient already knows. 'You cried in my maintenance bay over a woman who died before you were born. You've got a grocery list of dead strangers you're keeping on paper like it's something a computer might lose. Sable. I like you. I'm not going to pretend I don't see what's happening.'

'Dren's survey ends in three days.'

'That's not an answer to what I said.'

'I know,' Sable said again, and this time it came out smaller, closer to true. 'I'm not ready to say the thing out loud yet. Saying it out loud makes it a decision instead of a feeling, and decisions can be wrong in ways feelings apparently can't.'

Priya didn't argue with that. She just reached over and, with a gentleness that surprised them both, added a twelfth line to the bottom of the list, in her own handwriting, beneath Sable's eleven names: *and however many more there turn out to be.*

'In case you run out of room,' Priya said, 'to keep pretending this is a small thing.'