Wherever there was good, there would be evil, and stories were no exception. Despite all the good they brought into the world, they also caused no end of trouble. For every story that carried a noble truth, there would be a story that carried an ignoble lie, like the lie that hardship made people better.
In stories, suffering often made characters better people. In having experienced pain and overcome it, a character would gain an understanding of and an appreciation for what they had previously taken for granted, or perhaps even outright condemned.
But that was in stories. Real life had no concern for such principles.
The awful truth was that suffering did not make people better. If anything, it made most people worse. Desperate times make for desperate measures. Every step of the road threatened to turn victims into perpetrators. People told themselves it was because everyone was sinful, but that was just denial, a defense mechanism, to keep us from holding ourselves—and one another—to account for our misdeeds. Cruelty the victim into the criminal; oppression turned the wronged into the status quo’s champions. In its terminal stage, suffering converted its victims into its supporters. More often than not, instead of building empathy, hardship turned a soul calloused, leaving them as cold, merciless, and unyielding as the circumstances that had shaped them, and rare was the soul that could survive that crucible with their kindness intact, let alone strengthened for the better.
Ani had explained it to me once, in one of our sessions, back when I’d still been actively treating her as a patient, in addition to being her residential mentor. Her father had come from a family of alipin—serf-slaves that worked on the grand sugar plantations in the Costranaks. These were families of agrarian workers who were owned by wealthy landowners, on whose land they labored and lived. Their owners decided who they married, where they lived, and if and when they could leave—and they usually couldn’t. It was an utterly brutal existence, and it was a miracle that Ani’s father had been able to escape and make a life for himself in Trenton.
Though I wouldn’t go so far as to say that I respected Alon as a person, I certainly respected the strength it took for him to pull himself out of the muck the way he had. I just wish he’d been a little bit stronger, as did Ani. Then, maybe that same muck might not have broken him as much as it had. For all his suffering, Alon had little empathy. Wherever he looked, he only saw thorns. The man was to grudges what formaldehyde was to lab specimens.
Fortunately, I had a pretty good idea of how to reach him.
I’d once had the unique experience of sharing a meal with the Lokanoks. Alon was not a pleasant host. His conversational skills consisted of silence, bragging, and invective. The man loved to rant about how everything in the Costranaks was just perfect until 500 years ago when the Munine brought (early-)modern economics and proto-industrialization and made the Costranak warlords build enclosures on their lands and thereby begin the alipin system for farming their precious, precious sugar cane. As for what his homeland had become, he thought it was the worst country in the world—other than Mu—and if anyone said anything bad about it to him, he’d tear them a new orifice.
Not surprisingly, the man was doggedly patriotic for his adopted country. The Trentons had ousted the Munine, so, in Mr. Lokanok’s eyes, my country and its people could do no wrong.
A bunch of kids got shot by Elpeck PD? “They deserved it.”
Civilians got caught in the crossfire of our anti-cartel operations in the Costranaks? “They shouldn’t have been in that shit-hole country.”
The Second Trenton Empire picked up oppressing the Costranaks where the Munine had left off? “That was different. The Trentons knew better.”
Whatever the opposite of a bucket of sunshine was, Alon was that.
Fortunately for me, it made him as predictable as clockwork. Convincing Alon he was dead and that I was on his side was as simple as taking a trip back in time. As soon as I’d explained the basics of his new existence to him, I’d provided him with a demonstration tailor-made to stoke his fancy.
And, boy, had it worked.
The four of us—Alon, Yuta, Andalon, and myself—sat on a grassy hillside, overlooking a dream of a Vaneppo that never was. Drawing from my memories of a documentary I’d once watched with the kids for school about Costranak Islands in the pre-colonial era, I whipped up a mind-world that showed the show’s recreation of what the Costranak capital probably looked like prior to the Munine occupation. Strangely enough, compared to modern Vaneppo, and the city as it had been in Yuta’s time, it could be argued that the ancient Vaneppo better resembled the modern incarnation. The past fifty years or so had seen a boom in the Costranak economy, and that meant loads of new buildings constructed in a faux-vernacular style, showing off the influences that north Zidian cultures had had in the Costranaks before the Soran Empire had claimed the islands for itself.
Funny thing: Vaneppo was both Yuta and Alon’s hometown. That had definitely helped soften Alon to Lord Uramaru. Ani’s father had been quite hostile to the time-traveler at first, but relented the instant I mentioned that Yuta was half-Costranak. In that deeply, deeply racist man’s eyes of Ani’s father, in order to be a good person, all you had to do was have the fortune to be born either Trenton or Costranak.
Oh, and whatever you do, just don’t be Munine.
As should go without saying, I’d been incredulous of that fact when Ani first shared it with me, and had peppered her with questions in order to get to the bottom of it. It turned out her father justified his marriage to a child of Munine émigrés by saying that any Munine smart enough to “abandon that Angelforsaken country” was worth giving a fair shake.
At the moment, though, Alon was on cloud nine, utterly enraptured by the sight of his people’s heritage, before the Sorans had come and given Vaneppo its characteristic quasi-Munine features.
The ancient city’s streets were groves of wooden skyscrapers, three stories tall—tall being the operative word for traditional Costranak architecture. Even their bungalows were at least one-and-a-half stories tall, thanks to the grids of wooden struts that served as the buildings’ foundations in the wet, tropical ground. Every floor of every building was encircled by a circuit of verandas, balconies, and walkways. Thatch woven from dried palm fibers covered the gently sloping rooftops. These had been smeared over with tar and then topped by curved clay tiles, made by shaping the clay on the masons’ thighs.
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And speaking of tiles: by the Angel, the streets were positively paved in the things. Even now, archaeologists still unearthed colorful pathways deep beneath the mud, often during digs done to construct underground parking garages for brand new multi-story construction. The color-gridded paths led off toward the jungle and the beach, giving way to palm trees that swayed in the salty sea-breeze. Further into the distance, the land rose and fell in hills and valleys, swept over by mist and fog, forming clouds that obscured the mountains’ jungle-dripped heights. The peaks seemed like islands in the sky.
Seeing ancient Vaneppo at this scale was a real treat.
Yuta and Andalon watched in silence, fascinated by the sights.
Ropes and walkways crisscrossed over the tiled avenues. Some buildings were literally grown from trees, using living trunks as struts or support columns. Crowds of people thronged in the streets, darting out of the way of pygmy elephants, their noisy trumpeting signaling an approaching wagon.
As for the latest crazy revelations from Andalon—you didn’t think I’d forgotten about those, did you?—it was a lot to handle, and the Council (yes, that Council) was in an uproar. We’d eventually agreed that, as pressing as it was, for the sake of my sanity, I needed to first deal with the other issues on my plate—General Labs, the knights, etc.—before I let myself delve into the mysteries of the multiverse. As much as I wanted to dive into that stuff right now, I recognized that I needed to get these other priorities dealt with first, or I’d simply flake out and let them fall by the wayside, and that wasn’t a risk I was willing to take.
Remember, if Vernon’s mission didn’t go smoothly, the military was going to nuke us, and though I wasn’t sure if there was a branch of the multiverse where Andalon and I came out victorious over the fungus, I was certain that, if such a universe existed, it wasn’t one where a thermonuclear bomb had gotten dropped over my head. (At least, I hoped not!)
Anyhow… as Alon and I had been talking, it was clear to me that Alon hadn’t just died; he’d been through an incredibly traumatic experience, even worse than dying from the Green Death. Given the man’s personality, I had to proceed carefully. Yes, there were other ghosts that I could consult—others that I’d picked up in the aftermath of whatever madness was afoot in General Labs—but I already knew Alon, so he was my quickest route toward unraveling that mystery. Rushing might make him vulnerable to the fungus’ malign influence, or worse, he might decide to blacklist me.
Yes, in Alon’s eyes, I was of the chosen race, but that could only get me so far with him.
“The elephants,” Alon muttered. “To see them move and live.” Shaking his head, Alon turned to face me, trying his best to hide the tears in his eye. “They killed them, you know,” he said. “The Munine bastards hunted the elephants to extinction, just to make room for their damned horses.”
Yuta looked on in solemn silence. “My mother would have loved to see this,” he said, softly.
Nodding, Alon looked Yuta in the eye. “When they killed the last elephants, they killed our people’s soul,” he said. “They killed the islands’ soul. The elephants, you know, they were born from Irgiban’s flesh, out from the mud.”
Yuta nodded. “My mother told me the story as a child.”
Alon stared at him for a moment. “I can’t imagine what you must have endured under your father’s people.”
Yuta shook his head. “I do not blame them.”
For once, Alon and I were on the same page. We both stared, shocked. “What?” we said, in unison.
Picture the most ethnically homogeneous society you can imagine. Whatever you’re imagining, the next level of ethnic homogeneity above that? That’s Mu. Yes, they’d mellowed out somewhat in the modern era, but, every now and then, you heard a story of someone getting arrested or beaten up on account of having hair that wasn’t straight and black like the gods intended. Even celebrities or M-pop idols who dyed their hair wacky colors (pink, blond, silver, chartreuse, etc.) always made sure to keep some black visible at the tips. And don’t get me started about their laws and regulations about interracial marriage. And that was how things were now; I couldn’t have imagined how bad they would have been back in Yuta’s time.
Yet here he was, not blaming the racists for being racist.
“Why not?” I asked.
“People aren’t ideas, nor are ideas people,” Yuta said, “and we conflate them at our peril. We don’t choose the circumstances of our birth, nor do we decide who raises us, nor what they teach us.” He looked off into the distance. “Ideas are contagious. Dr. Howle, as a physician of the mind, you must have realized that, no?”
“Yes,” I said, nodding. “We call it meme theory,” I said. “Ideas are like living things: they live and die, reproduce, and evolve.”
“In my era,” Yuta said, “Mu believed the Costranak people to be something less than fully human. But I’ve never blamed the Munine people for this. I always felt the fault lay at the feet of the idea itself, and anyone who would use it for their own, selfish ends.” The samurai glowered. “People like Sakuragi,” he added.
“So… you forgive them?” Alon asked. “How enlightened of you.” Ani’s father crossed his arms. “Well, I’m not that fucking gracious.”
“If you must know,” Yuta said, calmly, “no, I don’t forgive them.”
“Eh?” Alon said.
Yuta placed his katana in his lap. “It’s their thoughtlessness that I refuse to forgive, not their hate. They never entertained the thought that they might be wrong.” He looked up. “But… I know I have. I know myself well enough to admit that I’m not always certain I’m on the right path, but I know I want to be. I try to have faith that, if I search for the road to a better world, I might find it someday. It isn’t enough to keep my doubts at bay, but it makes their burden easier to bear.”
Alon turned his gaze over to the city once more.
I could have pried into his thoughts and seen them for myself, but I didn’t. I let him have his privacy. I felt it was the right thing to do.
After a moment of silence, he turned to me.