I left a small vacuum-sealed capsule next to Ummi. I had almost nothing of ours to leave behind. A small photo that Papa-ji took of his three girls and encased in flexible acrylic, our names and the latitudes and longitudes of our birthplaces etched on the back. I left my Cold Spot data, my notes and models. I left my key. There is no reason to lock anything anymore.
I whispered goodbye when I left the old apartment. It is the last place for Ummi and Zayna to rest. Peace be with them.
Voice Log: Planet Mirzakhani, Diin 7 Saal 3027, Last Day
The key was to a dwelling on the twentieth floor. Her place. Perhaps a quiet room she could go to when the terrible silence and fear grew too loud.
There she was, body curled up in a corner, the golden R pendant dangling from her neck.
Words cover the walls. Her words. Every inch of free space. Math problems and diagrams. Two-dimensional maps of the Cold Spot. And a log. A diary of days. Of the horrors she faced. Of the wonders she saw. Of the curiosity she tried to follow.
I sat next to Razia Sultana, my namesake, for hours, through the entire night. Letting her know she was found and will not be lost. Thanking her for her courage, for her story. For this unexplainable moment that drew us together.
We study the ancient ones to learn about ourselves. They are not a monoculture, not a song with a single note. They are a collection of stories, an endless symphony, a galaxy of stars. Perhaps my people are too logical to believe in synchronicity; perhaps the notion is absent in our language. But on this planet it meant something. Improbably, Razia called to me, through the vast emptiness of space-time, and asked me to find her, to tell her story.
I honor that request.
September 1, 2031
I don’t think I’ll be able to write anymore. I think this is the end. The sun is rising over the lake, and I am thankful that for a moment it covers me in its golden light. So that I will be able to close my eyes and remember what it was like to be warm. To remember what it was like before we lost everything.
If you have found this, if you are reading this, tell our story. The terrible and the beautiful. The horror and the wonder.
Tell my story.
Say I lived.
I wondered.
I dreamed.
I loved.
I gazed into the stars, hoping to seek you out. And here you are. I looked to find answers because I refused to believe we were alone.
Strange, now as my light dims, I’ve found a flicker of hope again that you might find me. That you have heard my call and will answer.
I was here.
We were all here.
Remember us well.
The College of Dedicated Renovation had agreed to make Lady Insarra a new body because she was tired of being a woman.
Insarra was one of eleven small kings of the nameless crater city: rich, powerful, and spoiled enough that boredom was all it had taken for her to commission this expensive redesign. Most people who wanted a new body but not chimerical accentuations or augmentations did so because of their gender identities, and of those, most couldn’t afford this level of work. But Insarra could’ve afforded wings if she’d had a sudden hankering to fly.
Elir was the designer assigned by the college. She was a sixteen-year-old prodigy born with crystal bones and retractable crystal claws that allowed her to lift and knot pure threads of power with her bare hands. A stylus was often necessary for heavier work, but not that day.
In the initial design phase, Elir spent hours alone with Insarra, a magnifying circle, pencil, and paper, drawing every tiny detail of the small king’s current body.
Insarra reclined, naked, on a low sofa, presently on her side and smoking a long red cigarette. She was careful not to blow the smoke toward Elir, as she must have known its effects would limit the girl’s capacity for detailed drawing, but otherwise Insarra ignored her. Elir knelt on a thin pillow, a sketching frame set over her knees to support the sheaf of papers upon which she drew the dips, shadows, jutting lines, and folds of the small king’s right hip. This phase was for overall design: color, freckles, blemishes, and hair texture would come later, once Elir’d finished the structural design mesh. Though it was possible Insarra would request a new skin color or hair texture, Insarra was Osahan dynasty, with the rosy-tan skin and wavy thick hair of her people, and for pride would very likely keep it.
Such concerns were for another day. Elir licked her bottom lip to make it more sensitive to the eddies of force-threads as they curled against Insarra’s hip and belly. She made a note in the corner of her paper: Insarra was heavy with flow force, which affected the other three forces—falling, rising, and ecstatic—in difficult-to-predict ways. Some said impossible-to-predict, but those people didn’t understand the math as well as Elir.
The chamber in which Insarra posed for Elir was octagonal, with eight pillars holding up a mosaicked ceiling, and the walls were latticework quartz, thin enough that sunlight penetrated not only the cutouts, but the pale-pink stone itself. It made this room ideal for sketching at all hours of the day: the pinkish glow softened the harsh desert sunlight.
“Irsu,” Lady Insarra drawled, arching her neck to glance toward the eastern archway.
Elir paused, not because Insarra moved, but because the small king’s only child had entered. Irsu walked on bare feet, which slapped gently against the marble floor, ans chin lifted arrogantly. An wore a loose white robe and pantaloons tied at the knee, and ans hair fell in sleek black lines around ans face and neck. An was so much more beautiful than ans mother.
“I came to tell you, Mother, I am not attending dinner tonight. I’m tired of the games you play with Far Dalir.” Irsu drooped one shoulder in a lazy, disinterested affectation that Elir wanted badly to draw. An was the sort of person inherently talented at using ans body to the fullest. Inhabiting it completely in a way even Elir, who understood the very design of her own, could not quite manage. And an was only eighteen, barely older than she was. By the time Irsu was thirty, imagine the devastation an might cause, or the emotion an might encapsulate with the slightest gesture. Elir wanted to imagine it. She wanted to imagine Irsu doing a great many things.
Lady Insarra groaned and flicked cigarette ash toward her heir. “You would be dour company. I give you permission.”
Irsu stiffened so slightly Elir might not have noticed if she hadn’t been staring at the play of musculature on ans face. But an loosened the tension instantly. “My thanks, Mother.” An turned to go, glancing at Elir.
The designer lowered her gaze to her work. Irsu paused, studying her, Elir was sure. Then an strode out.
“I am exhausted, Eliri,” Insarra said. She stretched her back with a pretty sigh, then reached for her long silk robe.