Грегори Бенфорд - Not One of Us - Stories of Aliens on Earth

“Do I know if these images are true in every aspect? No, I do not. I recalled them through the hazy filter of the mind of a child, and no doubt the memories shared by all the other survivors have inseminated them, colored them, given them more details. Our memories bleed into each other, forming a collective outrage. The Tawnin will say they’re no more real than the false memories they’ve implanted, but to forget is a far greater sin than to remember too well.

“To further conceal my trails, I took the pieces of the false memories they gave me and constructed real memories out of them so that when Kai dissected my mind, thie would not be able to tell thir lies apart from my own.”

The false, clean, clutter-free living room of my parents is recreated and rearranged into the room in which I meet with Adam and Lauren…

Sunlight coming in from the windows along the western wall makes clean parallelograms on the ground…

You cannot tell which memories are real and which memories are false, and yet you insist on their importance, base so much of your life on them.

“And now, when I’m sure that the plot has been set in motion but do not yet know enough details to betray the plans should I be probed, I will go attack Kai. There is very little chance I will succeed, and Kai will surely want me to be Reborn, to wipe this me away—not all of me, just enough so that our life together can go on. My death will protect my co-conspirators, will allow them to triumph.

“Yet what good is vengeance if I cannot see it, if you, the Reborn me, cannot remember it, and know the satisfaction of success? This is why I have buried clues, left behind evidence like a trail of crumbs that you will pick up, until you can remember and know what you have done.”

Adam Woods… who is not so different from me after all, his memory a trigger for mine…

I purchase things so that someday, they’ll trigger in another me the memory of fire…

The mask, so that others can remember me…

Walker Lincoln.

Claire is outside the station, waiting, when I walk back. Two men are standing in the shadows behind her. And still further behind, looming above them, the indistinct figure of Kai.

I stop and turn around. Behind me, two more men are walking down the street, blocking off my retreat.

“It’s too bad, Josh,” Claire says. “You should have listened to me about remembering. Kai told us that thie was suspicious.”

I cannot pick Kai’s eyes out of the shadows. I direct my gaze at the blurry shadow behind and above Claire.

“Will you not speak to me yourself, Kai?”

The shadow freezes, and then the mechanical voice, so different from the voice that I’ve grown used to caressing my mind, crackles from the gloom.

“I have nothing to say to you. My Josh, my beloved, no longer exists. He has been taken over by ghosts, has already drowned in memory.”

“I’m still here, but now I’m complete.”

“That is a persistent illusion of yours that we cannot seem to correct. I am not the Kai you hate, and you’re not the Josh I love. We are not the sum of our pasts.” Thie pauses. “I hope I will see my Josh soon.”

Thie retreats into the interior of the station, leaving me to my judgment and execution.

Fully aware of the futility, I try to talk to Claire anyway.

“Claire, you know I have to remember.”

Her face looks sad and tired. “You think you’re the only one who’s lost someone? I wasn’t ported until five years ago. I once had a wife. She was like you. Couldn’t let go. Because of her, I was ported and Reborn. But because I made a determined effort to forget, to leave the past alone, they allowed me to keep some memory of her. You, on the other hand, insist on fighting.

“Do you know how many times you’ve been Reborn? It’s because Kai loves… loved you, wished to save most parts of you, that they’ve been so careful with carving as little of you away as possible each time.”

I do not know why Kai wished so fervently to rescue me from myself, to cleanse me of ghosts. Perhaps there are faint echoes of the past in thir mind, that even thie is not aware of, that draw thim to me, that compel thim to try to make me believe the lies so that thie will believe them thimself. To forgive is to forget.

“But thie has finally run out of patience. After this time you’ll remember nothing at all of your life, and so with your crime you’ve consigned more of you, more of those you claim to care about, to die. What good is this vengeance you seek if no one will even remember it happened? The past is gone, Josh. There is no future for the Xenophobes. The Tawnin are here to stay.”

I nod. What she says is true. But just because something is true doesn’t mean you stop struggling.

I imagine myself in the Judgment Ship again. I imagine Kai coming to welcome me home. I imagine our first kiss, innocent, pure, a new beginning. The memory of the smell of flowers and spices.

There is a part of me that loves thim, a part of me that has seen thir soul and craves thir touch. There is a part of me that wants to move on, a part of me that believes in what the Tawnin have to offer. And I , the unified, illusory I, am filled with pity for them.

I turn around and begin to run. The men in front of me wait patiently. There’s nowhere for me to go.

I press the trigger in my hand. Lauren had given it to me before I left. A last gift from my old self, from me to me.

I imagine my spine exploding into a million little pieces a moment before it does. I imagine all the pieces of me, atoms struggling to hold a pattern for a second, to be a coherent illusion.

Ted Chiang was born in Port Jefferson, New York, and holds a degree in computer science. In 1989 he attended the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writer’s Workshop. His fiction has won four Hugo, four Nebula, and four Locus awards, and he is the recipient of the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer and the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award. His collection, Stories of Your Life and Others , has been translated into ten languages. He lives near Seattle, Washington.

Your father is about to ask me the question. This is the most important moment in our lives, and I want to pay attention, note every detail. Your dad and I have just come back from an evening out, dinner and a show; it’s after midnight. We came out onto the patio to look at the full moon; then I told your dad I wanted to dance, so he humors me and now we’re slow-dancing, a pair of thirtysomethings swaying back and forth in the moonlight like kids. I don’t feel the night chill at all. And then your dad says, “Do you want to make a baby?”

Right now your dad and I have been married for about two years, living on Ellis Avenue; when we move out you’ll still be too young to remember the house, but we’ll show you pictures of it, tell you stories about it. I’d love to tell you the story of this evening, the night you’re conceived, but the right time to do that would be when you’re ready to have children of your own, and we’ll never get that chance.

Telling it to you any earlier wouldn’t do any good; for most of your life you won’t sit still to hear such a romantic—you’d say sappy—story. I remember the scenario of your origin you’ll suggest when you’re twelve.

“The only reason you had me was so you could get a maid you wouldn’t have to pay,” you’ll say bitterly, dragging the vacuum cleaner out of the closet.