Кен Лю - The Hidden Girl and Other Stories

Ms. Coron stared at Ona, and Ona saw that she had hit upon a truth Ms. Coron didn’t want to admit, even to herself. In the Teacher’s eyes, the children would never be good enough, never be fully human , though they were the future of humanity on this inhospitable planet.

Ms. Coron took a deep breath and went on as if nothing had happened. “Today is the Day of Remembrance, and I’m sure you’ll impress all the Teachers with your presentations later. But let’s finish our lesson first.

“To compute the n-th term, the recursive function calls itself to compute the (n–1)th term and the (n–2)th term, so that they could be added together, each time going back earlier in the sequence, solving earlier versions of the same problem….

“The past,” Ms. Coron continued, “thus accumulating bit by bit through recursion, becomes the future.”

The bell rang, and class was finally over.

Even though it meant they had less time to eat, Ona and her friends always made the long walk to have lunch outside the Dome. Eating inside meant squeezing tubes of paste through a flap in her helmet or going back to the claustrophobia-inducing tanks of the dormitory.

“What are you going to do?” Jason asked, biting into a honeycomb fruit—poisonous to the Teachers, but all the children loved it. He had glued white ceramic tiles all over his suit to make it look like an ancient space suit from the old pictures. Next to him was a flag—the old Stars and Stripes of the American Empire (or was it the American Republic?)—his artifact, so that he could tell the legend of Neil Armstrong, Moonwalker, at the Remembrance Assembly later that evening. “You don’t have a costume.”

“I don’t know,” Ona said, twisting off her helmet and stripping off her suit. She took deep gulps of warm, fresh air, free of the suffocating chemical odor of the recycling filters. “And I don’t care.”

Everyone presenting at the Remembrance Assembly was supposed to be in costume. Two weeks ago, Ona had received her assigned artifact: a little, flat metal piece with a rough surface about the size of her palm and shaped like a toy spade. It was dark green in color, with a stubby, fat handle and a double-tined blade, heavier than its size would suggest. It was a family heirloom that belonged to Ms. Coron.

“But these artifacts and stories are so important to them,” Talia said. “They’ll be so angry that you didn’t do any research.” She had glued her artifact, a white veil, over her helmet and put on a lacy white dress over her suit so that she could enact a classical wedding with Dahl, who had painted his suit black to imitate the grooms he had seen in old holos.

“Who knows if the stories they tell us are true, anyway? We can never go there.”

Ona placed the little spade in the middle of the table, where it absorbed the heat from the sun. She imagined Ms. Coron reaching out to touch it—a precious keepsake from a world she will never see again—and then screaming because the spade was hot.

You must know where you came from.

Ona would rather use the spade to dig up the past of Nova Pacifica, her planet, where she was at home . She wanted to learn about the history of the “aliens” far more than she wanted to know about the past of the Teachers.

“They cling to their past like rotten glue-lichen”—as she spoke she could feel fury boiling up inside her—“and make us feel bad, incomplete, like we’ll never be as good as them. But they can’t even survive out here for an hour!”

She grabbed the spade and threw it as hard as she could into the whitewood forest.

Jason and Talia stayed silent. After a few awkward minutes, they got up.

“We have to get ready for the Assembly,” Jason murmured. And they went back inside.

Ona sat alone for a while, listlessly counting the darting shuttlewings overhead. She sighed and got up to walk into the whitewood forest to retrieve the spade.

Truth be told, on bright, warm autumn days like this, Ona wanted nothing more than to be outside, suitless and helmetless, wandering through the whitewood groves, their six-sided trunks rising into the sky, the vibrating silver-white hexagonal leaves a canopy of mirrors, their susurration whispers and giggles.

She watched the flutter-bys dance through the air, their six translucent, bright blue wings beating wildly as they traced out patterns in the air she was sure was a kind of language. The Dome had been built on the site of an ancient alien city, and here and there, the woods were broken by hillocks—piles of angular rubble left behind by the mysterious original inhabitants of this planet who had all died millennia before the arrival of the colony ship, alien ruins exuding nothing but a ghostly silence.

Not that they’ve tried very hard, Ona thought. The Teachers had never shown much interest in the aliens, too busy trying to cram everything about old Earth into the children’s heads.

She felt the full warmth of the sun against her face and body, her white scales coruscating with the colors of the rainbow. The afternoon sun was hot enough to boil water where the whitewood trees didn’t shade the soil, and white plumes of steam filled the forest. Though she hadn’t thrown the spade far, it was hard to find it among the dense trees. Ona picked her way slowly, examining every exposed root and overturned rock, every pile of ancient rubble. She hoped that the spade hadn’t been broken.

There.

Ona hurried over. The spade was on the side of a pile of rubble, nestled among some tinselgrass that cushioned its fall. A small spume of steam was trapped under it, so that it seemed to be floating over the escaping water vapor. Ona leaned closer.

The steam held a fragrance that she had never smelled before. The spume had blasted away some of the green patina encrusting the spade, revealing the gleaming golden metal underneath. She suddenly had a sense of just how ancient the object was, and she wondered if it was some kind of ritual implement, vaguely remembering the religion excerpts from Customs and Culture class—ghost stories.

She was curious, for the first time, whether the previous owners ever imagined that the spade would one day end up a billion billion miles from home, on top of an alien tomb, in the hands of a barely-human girl who looked like Ona.

Mesmerized by the smell, she reached for the spade, took a deep breath, and fainted.

For the Halloween dance, Fred Ho decided to go as Ronald Reagan.

Mainly it was because the mask was on sale at the Dollar Store. Also, he could wear his father’s suit, worn only once, on the day the restaurant opened. He didn’t want to argue with his father about money. Going to the dance was shock enough for his parents.

Also, the pants had deep pockets, good for holding his present. Heavy and angular, the little antique bronze spade-shaped token had been warmed by his thigh through the thin fabric. He thought Carrie might like to use it as a paperweight, hang it as a window decoration, or even take advantage of the hole at the handle end to turn it into an incense holder. She often smelled of sandalwood and patchouli.

Picking him up at his house, she waved at his parents, who stood in the door, confused and wary, and did not wave back.

“You look dapper,” Carrie said, her mask on the dashboard.

He was relieved that Carrie had approved of his costume. Indeed, she did more than approve. She had dressed up as Nancy Reagan.

He laughed and tried to think of something appropriate to say. By the time he settled on “You look beautiful,” they were already a block away, and it seemed too late. So he said, “Thank you for asking me to the dance,” instead.