Page 24 of Prima (After the End #8)

Chapter Fourteen

The present

Ren stows his supply of Jasperdew tea leaves, the remaining mooncakes, and his sketchbooks in his bag. To his surprise, Lady Sun returns to him his small pack of explosives.

“In case the torpedoes miss,” she explains. “I don’t have the greatest confidence in the sub’s crew.”

The endemic corruption of Dawan does make it likely that the competent are sidelined while the obsequious advance.

The current wind condition is fine for sailing south, but requires repeated tacking, not something he can do if he’s not on board. The Blue Sampan, however, has an auxiliary electric motor. He starts it, points the boat’s bow toward Dragon Gate, and sets the autosteering.

“Five gave me this boat.” He takes one last look at the blue interior, which he painted by hand, before he follows Lady Sun onto her raft. “It deserves a better fate than becoming a shipwreck.”

“In a hundred years, when we’re all gone, this shipwreck of yours will be the site of a beautiful coral reef, alive and vibrant.”

An unexpectedly comforting thought.

She carries most of their things into the understructure.

When she returns, she says, “I’ve let it be known, on an open channel, that I’ve left your vessel.

Border patrol will be tracking the progress of your boat and communicating its latest location, also via open channels.

That should make it easier for our friends in the sub.

If they still can’t hit it, I might have to compose a sternly worded letter to someone. ”

The Blue Sampan, all its navigation lights ablaze now that it’s under power, will need to travel a few klicks before it enters torpedo range for the sub; they have some time to sit on the raft and maybe watch the stars together.

She hands him a book and taps on a solar lantern. In the darkest hour before dawn, a gentle light envelops them and illuminates a manga named The Long Safari, printed and bound, its pages turning from left to right.

On the cover is a girl in a camouflage uniform, windsurfing, no, terrasailing across a great desert at sunset, the frame of her translucent sail an intense blue against a sky of purple and gold.

He blinks. The color scheme of the sky strikes him as something he wouldn’t have picked, but the image itself, the simple outline of the girl, the more competently drawn sail…

He flips the pages. The story takes place in a distant future after landmasses on Earth have been reclaimed and is about a girl rather than a man, but stylistically, the drawings are remarkably similar to the ones in The Wandering Sailor.

“Is this—did I—what—”

“Your mother brought twenty sketchbooks with her. For me.”

For her. Of course they would have been for her. But twenty sketchbooks? He must have been as busy as a kitchen boy the day before Lunar New Year.

She caresses the pages of the manga. “After I went through your sketchbooks, I wanted the whole world to see this story.”

“You paid to have them printed?” He marvels.

“No, publishers vied for the rights. And when the last volume was released, there were lines outside bookshops.”

Her voice catches. “Sometimes I see a volume of this manga in the wild, in the hands of somebody on a park bench or in a moving tram, and I think to myself, that is our story. They’re reading our story.”

He turns her face toward him. Her cheeks are damp. She smiles through her tears. “You have earned yourself a bit of a nest egg. Your mother was almost disappointed that when you arrived eventually you wouldn’t be entirely dependent on her—she wanted to be the one to give you everything.”

Everything he feared he might never find out in this lifetime is now coming at him as if from a firehose.

He can barely process what she’s telling him.

How did his frail mother manage to come into enough resources to give him “everything”?

She had been sheltered against her wish, but sheltered nevertheless, inexperienced in the ways of the world.

“As it turned out, before she was captured in her youth and gifted to the Potentate, she was the last inheritor of sericulture.”

His jaw drops. He has heard, of course, that in the past few years, sericulture has been revived in New Ryukyu. For nearly a century and a half before that, the production of silk, worldwide, was entirely lost.

“Two decades in the Potentate’s Palace made her more than capable of holding her own in the outside world.

She obtained loans, leased a mulberry forest, and three years after she arrived in New Ryukyu, produced the first new batch of silk in a hundred and fifty years.

You can imagine—no, you can’t imagine—what those first bolts of woven silk went for.

“And once she proved that she could do it, she opened a sericulture school. She’s had to turn down ninety percent of the applicants because so many people want to learn the process.”

He thinks of the confident woman before the wall of books. She wasn’t just safe and free, but proud of what she had made of herself in life. “The silk shirt that landed on my doorstep last year—the one I wore to dinner last night—did she send it?”

He glances at the woman next to him. At this point, perhaps he can stop addressing her as Lady Sun. But he doesn’t want to call her Sun Yi, or even just Yi. It’s as if there’s a better alternative, if it would only come to him.

“Indeed she sent it. Because we needed to involve our agents in Dawan, the matter came before the Secretariat. The minister of trade herself pled your mother’s case.

And when I abstained from voting, my mother finally learned about you.

Then she read The Long Safari, put two and two together, and said, ‘The silk dress?’

“I thought she was going to say something cutting about you—after all, at the time, that dress was almost as valuable as the yacht I lost. But she only said, ‘I knew it wasn’t you who sewed the buttonholes together with fishing line—too much skill and patience for you.’”

She laughs.

He can’t make heads and tails of what she’s saying. “The silk dress? The one you wore at dinner? What did I do to it?”

Her mirth fades. “I forgot that you still have no way to access those memories.”

The silence of night, broken only by the flow of water around her raft, makes itself known. She looks wistful. He wants to tell her that it’s okay, that they can make new memories to share together, but he can’t console her blithely when he doesn’t know what she has lost.

What she has endured over the years.

She taps off the solar lantern. For a moment the world goes dark. Then he sees a thread of light at the eastern horizon. Dawn approaches.

“Would you like to remember everything?” she asks solemnly.

Nervously, it feels.

He has asked himself the same. He remembers many terrible things; who is to say that he wouldn’t remember more if his memory returned?

“Yes,” he answers. “I want to remember everything.”

Even if much of it hurts and infuriates, the rest is what makes life worth living, the people for whom he sacrificed his memories. And would again and again.

But of course, it’s a theoretical question. There is no equivalent of a dead letter office for lost memories, where one can go in search of a past that has gone astray.

Gently, she rakes her fingers through his short hair, but not in an amorous manner, more as if she’s trying to soothe away a headache.

“The orca in the film strip, her name is Old Friend. You’ve known her most of your life.

When you took my pain, she most likely saved your life, fishing you out of the water and tossing you on land.

I’d guess she did the same when you took the tracking devices off your mother and your sister.

She escorted them to New Ryukyu, then went off to live her own life.

Your mother, Nin, and I, we sail out to see her a few times a year. ”

“Old Friend,” he murmurs.

A small beep comes from the understructure. She excuses herself and descends. When she comes back up, she says, “Border patrol reports that torpedoes have been fired from the sub.”

The raft has been traveling north as The Blue Sampan heads south. It’s now several klicks beyond the horizon. He puts a hand in the waves and senses the collision well before the expanding ripples from the impact reach them, bobbing the raft on the surface of the sea.

She descends into the understructure again and reports from there, “The sub is fleeing the scene. Border patrol will give chase—but only give chase. We want to make sure the crew in the sub live to report their success to Prince Four, or the new Potentate, rather.”

“Four already staged his coup?”

He expected it—once Four realized that he himself wouldn’t have the support of the Sea Witch, there was no more point waiting—but the news still makes him feel as if it’s raining needles.

He wishes he wasn’t born into a family and a realm where the worst win.

And he has tried, alongside Five, to make a difference these last years—if nothing else, they could at least take credit for the banning of nerve weapons.

But sometimes it’s too late to change course from within; sometimes larger forces have already been marshalled, and it’s all a man can do not to be caught in the vortex of a sinking ship.

“Prince Four has forced the High Potentate to yield the throne,” she answers, still in the understructure. “Prince Six is dead. I also heard from the former Prince Eighteen. He has rendezvoused with Prince Five and the entire entourage is safe, including your cook.”

How does she know Eighteen?

“How do you—"

His voice falters. She has reemerged from the hatch and even in the barely-there light he can see the collar around her neck—and the device in her hand. The device that made him feel instantly uneasy when he searched her valise yesterday evening, while she was in the shower.

“What is that?” He can hear the agitation in his voice.

“This? A helpful apparatus I borrowed especially for this trip.”