kuangning | Mnemosyne

Grandmother, they call me. Grandmother. I, who have never borne a child. I, who never will. Their voices are low, and sad, and frightened, and I... I have no comfort to give. Call me Achaia; it fits well enough.

I am the last.

There is a rightness in that: I was once the first. The first child born to my parents; four others would follow. Some of these persistent ones should by right be calling me Aunt. Or Great-Aunt, I suppose. My brothers and I were never close, and I stopped keeping track of birthdays and offspring long ago. Out here, like this, time is barely more than trivial, and the constant marking of days and weeks was not something I was unhappy to let go. Besides, age buys freedom, and I am entitled to a few of those. I allow them their fussing, their pokings and proddings every now and again, and in return, among other things, they remove the clocks, the calendars, the machines, and no-one carries a watch through these doors. But I see you looking around now, glancing at the space where your watch should be. This is not the story you wanted, you are thinking, and is she ever going to begin?

... As I said, I was the first.

I was ten months old when they made the diagnosis: Rhabdoid tumour, they called it. Fast-growing, highly malignant, and it was causing paralysis on my left side. Two years before, it would have been a death sentence for me. My parents were poor... you are too young to know those times, but that was the era before Julint, before they declared free health care a basic right, and my parents could not afford the traditional treatments. An operation, first, to remove the tumour, and then, provided I survived that, chemotherapy, to make sure that it was truly killed. And even then, there would be no guarantees that I would see even my second birthday. You are cringing -- but that was my best hope. Still, they could not afford it, and so they did the only thing they knew to do: they turned me over to the state.

You must understand, it was not so uncommon, in those days. Their decision saved my life, in any case. As a ward of the state, I became eligible for a trial, a desperate attempt to save my life with a new and promising procedure. They meant well. They all meant well.

You are looking away from me. It is hard for you to accept, yes? Times have changed, and today no parent would ever do what mine did. I was angry, too, for a very long time. Forgiveness... was never one of my strongest traits. And, of course, today we do not experiment on the living, and you are outraged to think that anyone would. But then, had they not, I would have died. So I tell you again that they meant well.

There used to be a saying, many generations ago; the road to Hell is paved with good intentions. It fell into disuse sometime after the wave of probes dispatched to seek out other life in our galaxy mostly failed to return. And the one that did return -- well, but you know that story. It is only that the words sum up so well the road they set me on.

If this were one of your vids, I would remember somehow every moment of every procedure. I do not. I was one year old, I know, when it began. I was six the last time I walked through the hospital doors, and healthy. It was a grey sort of day, and it seemed wrong to me, because I was happy. Or perhaps I only remember it so now. It does not make a difference.

I was happy, for a long time. I wanted a family, of course. Every foster home, I was an outsider. At every school, I was the new child, always a little behind. I wanted a home where I would stay put. Where I would know that my room would always be my room, and there would be no social worker to tell me I was going to yet another family. When I was ten, they found me one -- and I came full circle.

I was readopted by my own family, introduced to my own brothers and reunited with parents of whom I had no memory. It was every foster child's dream, of course. The parents who disappeared, reappearing to tell you they wanted you all along. It was... overwhelming. Glorious and frightening and hard. Rougher than I can tell you. Harder than you can imagine, because it could never happen now.