Exile's End Read online

  “He says they persisted long enough to be exiled again to Eleuthera.”

  “A convenient story.”

  “Regardless, I’d like to know more about how we got our Atoka collection.”

  “Whose side are you on?” Galbroobjected.

  “I just want to be prepared. If this ends in a repatriation claim…”

  “No one’s going to repatriate Aldry.”

  “I know that, but to prepare our response I want to be sure we came by her legally.”

  Galbrostopped his pretense of working and rested his fists on the table. “Sorry, can’t give you much joy there. The problem isn’t with the museum; we did everything right. But the original collector … well, you know how they were in those days. Regular looters and bandits. It may have been legal at the time, but by current standards, no.”

  “What happened?” Rue said.

  “Have you ever heard of the Immolation ceremonies?”

  “No. That is, I’ve heard the word, but not what it means.”

  “It was the heart and soul of Atoka culture. Once every three generations they would take all their earthly belongings, pile them up in the center of the village, and light a bonfire. Then they would burn all their homes to the ground, so that the next generation would have to start over with nothing. All their wealth, their art, their subsistencewould go up in flames. It was the reason the Atoka never built a great civilization—because they voluntarily reduced themselves to poverty and dependence whenever they started to get ahead.

  “When our ancestors came to Sarona, they tried to convince the Atoka of how pointless and self-destructivethe custom was. From their point of view, the Immolations reduced the Atoka to begging from their more provident neighbors, whose surpluses would be drained to subsidize Atoka beliefs. If they refused to help, well, starving people will get desperate and take what they have to. As tensions grew, our ancestors began to forciblysuppress the Immolations. In one famous instance, an Atoka village was all assembled and ready to light the bonfire when soldiers marched in and drove them out—then, naturally, looted the pile of goods ready for the torch. The Atoka were so enraged they attacked, and that was the beginning of the wars that led to their destruction at the Battle of the River Bend.

  “Well, our Atoka collection came from the descendants of a man who was an officer in that troop of soldiers. A man of his rank got first pick of the loot—and the Aldry portrait was the best Atoka culture had to offer.”

  Rue was silent, shocked. “That is a horrifying story,” she said at last. “We can’t tell that to the public. They would be outraged.”

  “Well, they think of the Atoka as idealized children of nature, not as flesh and blood who could be just as wrongheaded as we are. Sure, what the soldiers did was heavy-handed; but if they hadn’t saved the portrait, it would have been burned, not preserved so that we can revere it today.”

  Who were the helpers?

  One was kindly,

  One was clever,

  One was upright,

  One was wealthy,

  And one was treacherous.

  Rue returned to her office feeling troubled. She had taken the problem to Galbroin hopes that he would see it as an interesting topic for investigation. But he was too anchored to his conviction about the extinction of the Atoka. The made-up portion of his mind had crowded out the curiosity.

  Her spirits sank further when her wristband alerted her that Traversed Bridge had returned. It would be up to her to explain to him.

  This morning he was wearing a heavier coat, much more appropriate to the weather. “The lady at the hotel gave it to me,” he said when Rue remarked on it. She couldn’t help but notice that he brought out generous impulses in people.

  “Have you thought it over?” she asked when they reached her office.

  “Yes,” he said. “I need to do as Even Glancingtold me, and bring her back.”

  Rue pulled up a chair and sat facing him. “All right. Now, I can’t guide you through a repatriation, Traversed, because my first loyalty is to the museum, and they will contest this claim. It’s a complex, expensive process, and you may not win. The first thing I would advise you to do is hire an attorney to make the formal claim. You will also have to hire an expert to help you prove that your people are truly the Atoka.”

  “But we know who we are,” he said earnestly.

  “That’s not good enough for the court. You need a documented trail of evidence. The museum will have experts to testify that you can’t be who you say you are. We also need to know that you are truly authorized by your people to make this claim. Can you get that?”

  Gravely, he nodded. “I will have to send a message to my Kin Mother.”

  “Is she the one who sent you?”

  “Yes.” The shadows of complex thoughts moved behind his eyes. “I had no sisters, and I was firstborn, so it was my duty to go out into the world. They chose me to go to university.”

  It surprised Rue a little to hear that he was university educated; he gave such an impression of unworldliness. “Did you get a degree?”

  He nodded. “Hydrological engineering. I wanted to design a dam for the mountains above my village, to stop the river floods and bring us reliable water. I am here instead.”

  His obvious disappointmentmade Rue say, “Well, you have plenty of time. You can still do that when you return.”

  He shrugged. “I am earning my right to be a person.”

  She wanted to ask more, but it was a risk to know too much about him; it might cloud her loyalties. Instead, she continued, “You will also have to prove that the object was taken from your people illegally, and that it has an ongoing cultural importance to them. The museum isn’t likely to contest the first point, but what about the second? What traditions do you have about Even Glancing?”

  “None that I know,” he said.

  “Then how did you know her name?”

  “It is written on the portrait.”

  There was no label or inscription. “Really?” Rue said skeptically.

  “Yes, in the design on her jacket.”

  Rue called up a photograph on her tablet. “Show me.”

  He pointed out the portion of the embroidery that gave her name. “And this part says, ‘Cherished daughter.’ Maybe she was the daughter of the artist.”

  “What about the wave design on the border?” It had played an important role in Rue’s interpretation of the work’s symbolism.

  “Oh, that’s not a wave,” Traversed said. “It’s a thought. She is thinking, you see.”

  If what he said was true, a great many art historians would look very foolish, starting with Rue herself. The best way to handle this would be to get ahead of it, to be the one to publish the new information. But that would be an admission that she accepted his claims of cultural authority. A clever attorney could use that against the museum.

  “So your people have no tradition, no story, about Even Glancing?”

  He shook his head. It was an important concession. She felt a little compromised to have wheedled it from him. “Then why do you want it back?”

  “Because,” he said seriously, “there is a ghost imprisoned in it.”

  Good luck arguing that in court, she thought. But all she said was, “That’s it?”

  “That’s enough. We need to free the ghost.”

  “And how would you do that?”

  “We have to destroy the picture.”

  Rue’s horror must have shown on her face, because he said, “It is the only humane way.”

  It was unthinkable. “Traversed, this artwork is acknowledged as a masterpiece—not just on this world, but all over the Twenty Planets. It’s in all the art history books, and people honor the Atoka for having created it. Doesn’t that make you proud? Don’t you want to preserve the greatest achievement of your ancestors?”

  He didn’t have an immediate response, but seemed to be weighing what she said. She watched, hoping he would reconsider. But at last he
shook his head. “It’s not worth her suffering. Pride can’t justify that.”

  He really believed it. Rue had been taught from childhood to respect the beliefs of other cultures—but damn it, she had her own core principles. “Then I am bound to oppose you,” she said. “I cannot see this artwork destroyed.”

  They sat in silence, facing one another, aware that they had become enemies.

  “You had better go now,” Rue said.

  “All right.” His expression was regretful. At the door he stopped, looked back. “I’m sorry.”

  “I understand,” Rue said.

  But she didn’t.

  How do you lose your name?

  When people stop telling your story.

  Why must we tell our story?

  Because others start telling it for us.

  The gallery was relatively uncrowded except for the clump of people around the Aldry portrait. There were masterworks all over the walls, but people had eyes only for Aldry. They wanted to say they had seen her. They wanted their photographs taken with her. Some just stood there for minutes at a time, watching the image change, transported.

  They all knew the story.

  Once upon a time, Aldrywasa real girl livingin anAtoka village thathad tamed all the birds in the forest around them. Birds were their messengers and their music; birds ate the troublesome insects and brought warnings about the weather. They made nests in the thatched roofs of the village, and kept everyone below dry. Artisans vied to create elaborate cages for them.

  Then one day the Atoka spied an ominous fireball descending from the heavens: the landing craft of the settlers who were the ancestors of present-day Saronans. That the two peoples were very different was clear from the start, for the Atoka had amber eyes like owls, and where normal humans had body hair, the Atoka had downy feathers. The new settlers wererefugees pushed out of a crowded, urbanized planet.Theywere woefully unprepared for a subsistence life scratched from alien ground. If it hadn’t been for the kindness of Aldry’s people, they would have perished. The natives taught them which crops could be cultivated and which were poison, how to hunt the abundant wild animals, how to speak to unfamiliar nature. But as the settlers multiplied, and more of them arrived, relations grew tense. Conflict seemed inevitable. It had happened that way throughout human history.

  But Aldryprevented history from going down its familiar, violent path. She had fallen in love with a bookish young settler—the very one who chronicled the whole tale in cramped and sideways antique language. In her culture, a woman’s decision to marry conferred personhood on the man she chose, and when she announced her intention to unite the two groups, the Atoka could no longer regard the settlers as invaders of questionable humanity. The marriage ushered in a period of peace. Aldry bore twin boys. One of them favored his father’s people and one his mother’s, for one had hair and the other had down.

  It came to pass that a terrible flood swept through the settlers’ town, destroying thehomes and fields they had labored for years to build. Viewing the drenched mudlands where their crops and storehouses had been, they knew they faced starvation. Then Aldry saw her duty. Sorrowfully, she kissed her infant boys goodbye and set out alone into the forest. Five days later, an immense flock of birds came to the village. Led by a silver pheasant, the birds descended onto the fields, each with a seed in its beak, and replanted all the crops. The village was saved, but no one ever saw Aldry again. It was said that a silver pheasant perched on the ridgepole of the house where her grieving husband raised her orphan boys, as if to keep them company.

  When the boys became men, they quarreled. One went to live with the Atoka, the other stayed with the settlers. They both became great leaders, and their sibling enmity passed to their people. When war broke out, they faced each other in battle. But just when the Atoka brother was about to kill his twin, he glimpsed the silver pheasant in the sky above, and spared him for Aldry’s sake.

  “She is the mother of us all,” Saronans said. She was the generous spirit of the planet that welcomed them and invited them to be athome.

  The portrait dated to an era at least two hundred years after the original events. It was thought to be an Atoka artist’s image of Aldry, with wings foreshadowing her sacrifice.Who else could it show?

  Unless it was Even Glancing, the daughter of the artist.

  Rue shook her head impatiently. In an important way, it did not matter. Whoever she had been once, she was Aldry now. Generations of Saronans had woven that identity around her. And they would not easily give it up.

  What did they say on Refuge?

  They said, “Speak another language.”

  “Give up your primitive ways.”

  “Be more like us.”

  And what did they say on Home?

  “Be our imagined angels.”

  “Be what we can’t be.”

  “Reject us, love us, teach us, exalt us.”

  We are so tired of being told who to be.

  Rue half expected never to hear of Traversed Bridge again. The odds against any lone individual mounting a credible repatriation claim were so high that, when he realized it,he would most likely become discouraged and leave for home.

  She underestimated his determination.

  Three weeks later, as she was picking up breakfast on her way to work, her wristband started to chime insistently with news alerts having to do with the museum. She put in her earpiece and listened on the tram, her attention so absorbed that her body had to take over the automatic job of exiting at her stop and walking to the staff entrance.

  The story was sensational and appealing: a remnant of the Atoka had been discovered on faraway Eleuthera. Old Radovani records filled in their history. Now, an Atoka emissary had come seeking the ancient homeland of his people. After traveling across the light years, the young man had met only rejection and disbelief from the Orofino Museum.

  When Rue got to her office, there was a message summoning her to see the director.

  GalbroHess was already in the director’s office when she came in. “Of course I told her,” he was saying. “It’s just the truth. There is no way Atoka culture could have survived intact through hundreds of years of persecution on Radovani.”

  The director was a handsome, distinguished older man with a neatly trimmed beard. His aura of scholarship was a sham; his main job was care and feeding of the museum’s benefactors. He was good at it, and Rue considered it in her own best interest to make his job easy.

  When he saw Rue, he said, “MagisterSavenga, what’s this about our rejecting a repatclaim out of hand? You know we can’t legally do that.”

  Rue settled down in a chair, deliberately projecting confidence and calm. The director knew how to handle donors, but she knew how to handle him. “We haven’t rejected any claim. In fact, I am the one who told Traversed Bridge how to file one.”

  Outraged, Galbrosaid, “You did what?”

  “If he’s a charlatan,” Rue said, “it will come out. Did you listen to the interview?”

  Uncomfortably, Galbrosaid, “All right, maybe not a charlatan—just deluded and naïve. But now he’s got an attorney and a pipeline to the press. His story’s an invasive weed, a virus people have no immunity to. It’s going to sweep the world.”

  The director interrupted, “But there hasn’t been a repat claim?”

  “Not yet,” Rue said.

  “All right.” The director had his talking point. That was all he needed. “I want you two to handle this as you would any other claim, and refer all press to my office. We need to graciously suspend judgment, as befits our responsibility as guardians of Saronan cultural heritage.”The press release was almost writing itself.

  “We need to find out what he wants,” Galbrosaid. “He may just be an opportunist, wanting to hold the painting hostage for gain.”

  “No,” Rue said calmly. “He wants to destroy it.”

  The two men looked at her in speechless horror.

  Galbrofound his voice f
irst. “What, is he threatening to re-enact an Immolation? This really is a hostage situation.”

  “He’s following voices. Revelations.”

  “Oh great. We’re dealing with a lunatic.”

  Severely, the director said, “That doesn’t leave this room. You could jeopardize our case, Galbro.”

  “But we’ve got to expose him!”

  “We won’t do anything. If he’s exposed, it will be the media, the court, or other scholars. We have to appear neutral.”

  As they were leaving, Galbromuttered to Rue, “You really have gotten us into a mess.”

  “Don’t worry, Galbro,” she said. “I’m not letting anyone set a match to Aldry.”

  What did they tell him, and what did he say?

  “You are not yourself,” they said.

  “You are not Manhu.”

  “You should be Atoka.”

  “No,” he said.

  Galbrowas right: Atoka fever swept the land, sea, and sky. The story enthralled the public. It was better than finding a species given up for extinct. It was a chance at redemption, a chance to save what was lost, to reverse injustice, to makeeverything right.

  The reality of the Atoka faded into inconsequence.

  The museum was forced to put its other Atoka artifacts on display—a bronze drum, a life-size wooden baby, a carved eggshell, and an obsidian knife so thin it was transparent. Visitation shot up. Archaeologists were sudden celebrities. Musicals revived, bad old novels came out again, embroidered jackets crowded the racks. Rue’s coffee shop sold Atoka breakfast buns.

  Suddenly, there was money for all things Atoka. When Orofino University received a grant to investigate the claims of the Manhu, Rue felt reprieved. With the length of the light-speed journey to Eleuthera, it would be at least ten years before the researchers could travel there and reach any conclusion. By then, the mania would have died down.

  But she had not reckoned with recent improvements in instantaneous communication by Paired-Particle Communicator, or PPC. It was now possible to send video via arrays of entangled particles, thwarting the limits of light speed. Sarona had no direct PPC connection to Eleuthera, but the university was able to set up a relay via Radovani, and enlist local researchers.