Memory's Legion: The Complete Expanse Story Collection

by James S.A. Corey

“We have to be one people,” he said. He sounded sad. “There’s no room for tribes on Laconia. That’s how they do it back in Sol system. Earth and Mars and the Belt. That’s what we’re here to outgrow.”

She was just shifting the blanket aside to get up when she heard the back door open and her parents’ voices drift in. She froze, listened. The strangest thing was how normal they sounded. How much grief sounded like regular life. “I’ll get that cleaned up later,” her father said. “It’s fine. I don’t care.” “I know, but I’ll clean it up anyway.”

“He should have been back in Paris,” her mother said. “He should have been with his cousins, not on this fucking nightmare of a planet.” “I know,” her father said. “I hate it here. I want to go home.” “I know, Dot. I want to go home too.” Cara felt the words like a punch. Home? They wanted to go home? They were home. This was home. What they meant was Earth, where she’d never been, where she didn’t belong. Where Xan didn’t belong.

“Sorry,” she whispered as if he had felt anything. “But really, this is your fault. When this is done, you’re going to have to do my chores for me from now on.”

Night on Earth was bright. That’s what they said. Their moon shone like a kind of second, crappy sun. Cities were big enough to drown out the stars with their extra glow. She’d seen pictures of it all, but that wasn’t what it had been like for her. On Laconia, day was bright and night was dark. The wide, smeary glow of the galactic disk was the brightest thing in the sky, and she could only navigate by it roughly. Enough to know which direction she was going. Two stick moons floated against the stars, shimmering and shifting, swimming toward each other in the darkness above the sky.

Everything about the little space was beautiful and calm and rich with a million things that no one had ever seen before. And every place was like this. A whole planet and a solar system beyond it. There would be caves somewhere, with fishlike things living in the waters. There would be ocean coves with tide pools filled with living systems that weren’t animals and weren’t plants. That didn’t have names or an idea of names. She tried to imagine what it would be like going back to Earth, where everything was already known and there weren’t any miracles left. It seemed sad.

He was changed, that was obvious. He was still wearing his funeral whites, but a long black stain ran from his left shoulder down to his belly. His skin had a grayness where the red of blood should have been. His eyes had gone pure black. When he moved, it had the same utter stillness broken by considered action as Momma bird, like every muscle that fired had been thought about for a fraction of a second first. But his hair still stood out in all directions the way it did when he’d just gotten up in the morning. His mouth was the same gentle curve that he’d inherited from their dad.

“I brought you to the dogs. They fix things.” “Like me,” Xan said. And then, “There’s something wrong with how things look.” “I guess they had to change you some,” she said. The nearest dog shifted and looked away, as if chagrined by the limits of their powers. Cara shook her head. “It’s okay. This is wonderful. Thank you.” “There are things I didn’t see before,” Xan said. The words sounded faint. Like he was speaking them from farther off than right here in front of her. “There are other things here. I don’t know what they are.”

“The dead don’t come back,” her father said. “They do here,” Cara said. “His eyes,” he said, shaking her as he spoke. “The way he moves. That’s not a human, babygirl. That’s something else wearing my little boy’s skin.” “So what?” Cara said. “He knows everything Xan knows. He loves everything Xan loves. That makes him Xan. How can you do this to him just because he’s not perfect!”

The soldiers were coming. Her parents were going to let them take Xan away. Make them take Xan away. They’d say the dogs were bad. Dangerous. They might hurt them. All because it didn’t work like this on Earth.

Then they were running out the back, into the night, toward the dogs, wherever they were. Xan matched her stride for stride, never letting go of her hand. Her parents’ voices faded behind her. She didn’t know if they’d found her tablet or if she’d just gotten far enough away that the sound wouldn’t reach her. It didn’t matter. Xan laughed, and the sound was just like the joy he’d had playing a game with his friends. She felt herself smiling. The feeling of freedom lifted her up. Even with the knowledge of the soldiers following behind her. Even with the grief just starting in her heart that she’d never go home. The night was hers, and Laconia was hers, and that was joyous.

Your failure to fix things takes the people you love the most, and it’s your fault. That’s Romeo and Juliet for middle-aged guys.

At first glance, Auberon system didn’t seem exceptional. Three modest gas giants, none of them larger than Saturn. A single wet, life-bearing planet with a large but unexceptional moon. There were no alien artifacts the way there had been in Newhome and Corazón Sagrado. No weirdly pure ore profiles like on Ilus or Persephone. Just a scattered handful of planets, a couple of asteroid belts, and a star burning its slow way toward a billion-year-distant collapse. Among the hundreds of systems to which humanity was heir, it could have been anyplace.

But it was now the most important human system outside of Earth, Laconia, and maybe Bara Gaon Complex. Only a few decades into its settlement, and it already boasted a dozen cities, each of them in the middle of built-up rural areas like the floral disc in the center of a daisy. There were six dwarf planets with mining and refining developments big enough to have permanent civilian populations growing around them. There was a transfer station built to accommodate the trade between it and the other, less fortunate colony worlds. It was the second most developed human settlement in the universe, and on track to keep growing for centuries. And the thing that made its first settlers the winners of history’s land-rush lottery was that, apart from competing for sunlight, the biosphere of Auberon barely interacted with the plants and animals of Earth.

From sunrise to sunset lasted a little over four standard hours on Auberon, with cycles of light and darkness changing only slightly with the seasons. By local convention, day was two cycles of light and one of darkness, night the reverse. Noontime on Auberon was always dark, and midnight was bright. It was midmorning, but it looked like sunset. Red clouds high above them, and huge sessile organisms like trees or massive fungi lifted red streamers as if all the world were touched by fire.

As he moved among the guests, he found himself orbiting her. Touching her arm as they passed, laying claim to her the same way he was laying claim to the world. The glitter of amusement in her eyes, invisible to anyone but him, meant she saw what he was doing, and that she forgave him his weakness. Or that she enjoyed the power she had over him. They were two ways to say the same thing.

“I don’t know. He’s a tight-ass, this one. I mean, it seems like these Laconians all are. Not a big surprise. You take a bunch of Martian Congressional Republic fanatics and interbreed them for a few decades, it’s not going to tend toward a greater mental flexibility.

Laconia had always been the few and the pure against the many and the corrupt. Like the Spartans from whom they took their name, Laconians were severe within their group, both to forge the iron discipline that had led them to victory and to demonstrate to others the sincerity of their beliefs. It was hard, but it was necessary.

Effort in Discipline. Effortless in Virtue—

“This man,” the old man said, tapping the frozen image of Governor Rittenaur, “is fucking hilarious.” “He just killed one of his own men to make a point,” Agnete said. “Right? You know who does that shit? Theater majors,” he said. Then, seeing her expression, he put the hand terminal in his pocket. “It’s easy to execute your own. Someone that follows your orders, they’re easy to kill. This ‘We hold ourselves to an exacting standard’ thing? I’ve seen it before. It’s showy, because who does that shit? But it’s easy.”

“You see,” the old man said, not to the fallen thug but to Agnete, “this is the difference. A buy goes bad, and I need to send a message that that’s not okay. I could go the Laconian way, right? Kill you and send these fuckers home. Would that make any sense?” “I guess not,” she said. “Grandstanding,” the old man said, his false hand wrapping fingers around Bless You’s throat. “It’s immature, is what it is.” Bless You tried to say something. Before he could, the old man used him to send a message.

The reports coming in from other systems showed that the separatists were still very much at work. The governor of Nova Catalunya, a man Biryar had trained with, had died in a shuttle accident that was being investigated for sabotage. Governor Song, on Medina Station, found another discrepancy in the station map that hid a service corridor, abandoned now, that the terrorists had used as they planned their missions. Drive plumes had been sighted in half a dozen systems that couldn’t be tracked back to known ships.

“There are, what, a couple hundred decent-sized colony worlds with shiny new Laconian governors on them? And this thing has or is going to happen on every single one. It’s the basic problem with religion, be it Jesus or Vishnu or God Emperors. Ideological purity never survives contact with the enemy.”