Who!–
Oh, you. I didn’t recognize – we were children when we met. But your kind doesn’t change much. I should have recognized that little dark blaze on your ear. I stared at it awkwardly while playing translator all those years ago, writhing with discomfort.
…Come in.
Is your mother alive? That is good to hear. Mine will be pleased.
Yes. Your mother left quite an impression on my amma. It is why you are alive. The wound looks good – you surrendered voluntarily? I’m glad to hear it. There are so many healing complications if you struggle.
Those are my children playing among the roses. They are named after my sisters.
They died in the resettlement camps. One fell sick and the other was eaten by a guard when a food shipment was late. The camps were where amma and I learned to speak your language. I spoke it better, having grown up there. Eventually we were turned out to make our way in the mountains if we could, since your race cannot live there anyway. But amma chose to come back here. To see her house, and be killed by its new owners.
The roses – amma planted them when she built the house. She loved the way they spiraled out into those sort of helical towers. She loved that she could afford the space to grow inedible plants. She’d started out with no land of her own, but she bought this plot after decades of canny, bold trading – sometimes running into war zones to sell at a premium. This house was her life’s work, so she limped back here with me, her only surviving child. It was a hard trek. I thought we would surely be killed on the way. I begged her not to, but she was half crazy with grief.
The neighborhood was filled with strangers who had let the plants die, or extended their houses so that there was no moat of plants at all. The herbs we grow in our personal ring gardens are important to us. As important as different kinds of meat are to you. It was hard to look at the tangles of withered yellow. But when we arrived at our house, we saw our roses still spiraling into the sky, off freshly varnished trellises.
Your mother came out to greet us. I saw she was what amma had once been, before we were forced out of our homes. She was a woman who made order among her people.
Amma had been prepared for a fight. She was a clod of hunger and acrimony. But your mother spoke courteously to us and brought us into the house. She offered roots and herbs from the garden-moat – a clumsy, unprocessed scattering, but it scarcely mattered to us in our state.
There was no question we would be turned out at the end of the conversation. Your mother was not cruel through ambiguity. She showed us the rooms that had once been ours. Her painted furs lay on our clay floors. Some of our fabrics still hung from the walls – she folded them up one by one and gave them back to us. Amma said goodbye to the rooms of my dead sisters, and your mother turned away to let her do it, without even peeking to see if she would steal. And then, excruciatingly, the two of them sat down and talked for hours.
You remember this part. You were just a little thing playing under her chair, but I know your race remembers almost everything from birth.
Amma made me translate when her language was not good enough. So I remember a lot of what was said, having been forced to hold and turn it in my mind. What was so uncomfortable was that I could feel amma healing. I knew she had been starved of food, but I didn’t know how much she had been starved of understanding and courtesy, too. Amma had come expecting to be insulted at best and eaten at worst. Instead she was guided through the house to see another woman’s happiness living in it. It should have been awful – it was awful, for me – but it wasn’t for amma. It was odd, but she was more sick of being mindlessly hated than she was afraid of being killed. Your mother had no intention of giving the house back, but she didn’t need to wipe away the traces of amma’s love of the house to live in it. How strange that sounds. To put it another way – she clearly did not mind our destruction, but she did not need to destroy us in her mind.
In the presence of such a person, Amma told her whole life story. It embarrassed me to have to involve myself and translate the more complex parts, but your mother attended deeply. She looked into amma’s eyes and chose to know what kind of person she had stolen a home from.
The shadows went long and you came up to sleep on her lap. The house felt good. Even I, sick with being in this house where my childhood wasn’t, could see that it was clean and beautiful and full of happy people.
When amma was done, your mother put you to bed and walked us out of the village. There was no question of returning, unless it was as conquerors. All of us knew it. For several generations now, the war had been sweeping back and forth on the plains between the mountains where my people dwell in extremity and the sea where yours do the same. We left with bundles of food and our household goods and headed to the mountains, to plan again for war.
Amma was not listless with hate anymore. She was alert and calm. She went among the refugees in the mountain and she made order there. Many of her underlings and colleagues were people who are sharpened by hate. But amma needed to be cleansed of it – or at least have much of it swilled out – before she could get to work.
So that is why you are alive. When amma’s forces swept back out of the mountains, they didn’t kill the people they subdued, they sterilized them and gave them their freedom and land back. This final war was less awful than the previous ones. People don’t fight to the death if they know they and their children can live to old age in peace.
That is what your mother’s kindness won your race.
Oh, for – what is the purpose of a race as an idea, if not to further the survival and flourishing of its constituent individuals? A germline doesn’t have rights. Only the soma does.
No. Of course I don’t expect thanks. No more than your mother expected thanks. Gratitude has no place in the dignity between the conqueror and the loser. As you know twice over, now, even the most extraordinary kindness makes no difference to the outcome, which is death for one.
You are not dead – you are a nearly whole man, and just like me, you have decades left to weave and grow roses and love. The dignity our mothers shaped together now covers the whole land, and under it you have a right to a long and happy life. But you don’t have a right to a race, do you?