George Pollock, Jr.
Newport News, VA 23608-2855
USA
GJJPJR@aol.com
or GJJPJR@hotmail.com
This story won grand prize in the third annual Fanfic Contest at Anime North (www.animenorth.com), conducted May 25 to 27, 2001, in Toronto, Canada. Fanfic coordinator: Dave Greenlaw, dave@engine.ca
Epilogue
by George Pollock, Jr.
The queen sighed and set down the lantern.
She looked around in the gloom at the faces of the sleeping ghosts in the shadows. Closed eyes stared at heaven; hands clasped across unmoving bodies. A family of effigies. A family of the dead.
Her family.
She studied the reclining forms atop the sarcophagi: sleepers of stone, every one. Why stone? she thought, not for the first time in her life. With all our forests - continents and planets of forests - why do our dead sleep in stone?
But she already knew the answer, one told her when she was a child: All trees - even our trees - die some day. Wood will pass away. Wood is not immortal. Even we, who live a very, very long time, are not immortal, the queen thought in the lantern's pale light.
But stone - ah, stone - "Stone lives almost forever, little one," her father had told her. Told her long ago. Told her long before he died.
Died and slept in stone.
She glanced at a tomb to the left. Her father's tomb. He rested silently, his peaceful face framed by a beard and mustache of gray. The gray of stone - not the gray of age. For he was not terribly old when he died.
Some said he was dead long before he died. Something took the life from him well before he ceased to breathe. Made him a ghost even before he left mortality.
The something that brought the queen here this day, as it had on this day every year for time beyond counting.
The tomb she faced now.
Gently, next to the tomb's effigy, she placed a box. It was of dark wood, still with a heavy, glossy finish, and brass corners and a complex latch. It was made by an inventor she had known in her youth, and time hadn't ravaged the exterior in the least.
Which was ironic, for inside the box, time actually stood still.
She opened the latch and lifted the lid. Suddenly, the lantern's glow was lost in a celebration of white-yellow light that flashed from the box. The crypt became alive with light, and for an instant, the stony dead seemed to be merely the sleeping. She reached in, her hand disappearing into the warm ultraglow of the stasis field. Almost as quickly, she withdrew her hand.
With the letter.
A letter that seemed as fresh as on the day it was written. The paper was still crisp - if wrinkled and with the start of a tear -- and the fold was still sharp. And on the outside of the fold, she read her own name, as cleanly penned as it had been on that day.
That awful, evil day so very, very long ago now.
The queen closed the box, and as the woman's eyes adjusted to the darkness, the lantern extended its feeble reach into the dark corners again. The queen stood looking at the letter in silence, knowing what it would say. It never changed and never would. Its pain would be there, as always. Why should she read it again? Why subject herself to this hurt yet again?
Then, as always, she looked up at the sweet, silent face of the effigy before her.
And she knew:
So she would always remember the horrid sacrifice that had given the queen her place, her throne, her crown. A sacrifice offered in a moment of weakness, sorrow and pain.
She opened the letter and started to read:
"My most precious one, flesh of my flesh, blood of my blood:
"By the time you read this, I will be dead. I pray you will not be the one to find me after I die."
The queen closed her pink-red eyes and recalled that day: the choice that finally, decisively had to be made by a young man, the decision he made, the arguments that ensued and the tears. The tension that filled the house, and how a woman walked around the rest of the day as if her living heart had been ripped from her chest.
How the queen, as a child in that place on that day, had noticed later that a carving knife had disappeared from the kitchen.
And how the writer's wish was dashed much later -- when the girl-queen had found the body in a clearing in woods far from the house.
The body of the woman left without a loving heart.
She remembered the light dappling through the leaves and playing over the pink kimono that the woman wore. Her body was curled tightly, her stiff white hands still clasping the knife in her belly. And from her belly, on the green grass, spread a wet, glistening crimson semicircle.
And her eyes. Her pink-red eyes. They were open. And they were dead.
She remembered her own child screams. She remembered shaking the body fiercely until it rolled onto its back, and the hand-covered knife handle stuck straight into the air.
The dead eyes stared at heaven and saw nothing.
The next instant, the girl-queen was fleeing and stumbling and crying and screaming toward the house. The woods seemed to go on forever in that moment, filled with trees that she had once loved but now kept living while a woman lay dead in their midst. And that was horrible and cruel and unspeakable to her child's mind.
Her confusion and pain were so great, she had to be told later that she had apparently knelt in the woman's blood. Her white socks and the lower front of her own green kimono were soaked scarlet.
Which explained the looks of sheer terror that she got when she burst into the house.
Three men rushed to where the dead woman lay. The two oldest took in the scene with dread and control. The youngest screamed in horror and held the woman's cold face in his hands. His tears splashed onto her pale cheeks. He lifted her shoulders, embraced them and sobbed uncontrollably. The two older men were silent. Eventually, the oldest started offering up a prayer of some sort.
The queen remembered how two policewomen showed up after that and tried to console her. One with fair hair seemed almost as devastated as the girl was. She finally knelt and hugged the child tightly. And eventually, from behind her back - even over her own sobs -- the girl heard the officer's muffled crying.
The other officer, with dark hair, stood silently nearby and watched. There was a sadness on her face, a sadness of having seen so much of life and tragedy, she could no longer react to any of it. Finally, she walked over and gently laid a hand on the girl's head and the head of the other officer. "It'll be OK," she whispered, closing her eyes and stroking their hair, "It'll be all right ..."
Even at that moment, even as a child, it had struck the queen that the officer was trying desperately to convince herself of something she didn't believe.
And there was the final image she retained to this very day, this anniversary:
When she had looked up from crying to catch her breath, she had seen the other woman at the edge of the clearing. The woman with the silvery, wild, ragged hair. Looking at the scene with incomprehension, as if what she was seeing wasn't real, couldn't be real.
In her gold eyes was the cold, sick sheen of someone who realized that she was the cause of something she never intended to happen. Something that had gone out of control and now was irrevocably wrong and horrible.
She looked as if she had just killed someone by accident.
That woman ...
In the trauma of that far-away day, the letter hadn't been noticed at first. It was almost dismissed as litter until the oldest man - a spiritual sort of person, the queen felt -- had found it and gave it to the girl. After she read it, her young heart had burst, and the crying never seemed to stop.
By then, the inventor had shown up from her laboratory in the house, wondering where everyone had gone. She was told what had happened, and she gazed at the dead woman for the longest time. Like the one officer, she seemed to want to cry but couldn't. She, too, had seen more of life than she had cared to. She said later that what she felt most was the tragic waste.
The girl-queen hadn't understood what she meant then, but these many, many years later, she did. And she, too, mourned the loss of what could have been.
The girl had clutched the letter tightly, then - in a fit of blind, agonizing rage - had made to tear it to shreds. With a flash of pink, wild, ragged hair, the inventor had grabbed her wrists and spoke: "Let me keep it for you, all right?" She had not so much asked as made a declaration of what was going to happen, like it or not. She took the letter from the girl, smoothed the paper tenderly and put it in a pocket in her walking shorts.
A few days later, the inventor gave the girl the wooden-and-brass box. "The letter is in here," the inventor said, "but you can't read it now. The latch on the box has a timer on it. It'll open itself many years from now. But the letter won't get old or yellow or faded. I promise. I stopped time inside."
As the girl studied the dark container in her hands, the inventor lightly put her hands on the child's shoulders. "I think," the inventor said softly, "that by the time the box opens, you'll be glad you kept the letter ..."
The pigtailed little girl blinked and didn't understand.
The young queen blinked, and she was back in the crypt.
She sighed, collected herself and continued to read:
"I want you to know why I did what I did. You know how much I loved a man and how much I wanted him to love me, but he chose another, and I can't bear that.
"I asked why I didn't win his love. I realized I expected it as my due, not because I earned it. I know he valued me as a friend, but I wanted so much more.
"I was insulted. I admit it! How dare he turn me down for another woman?
"I know now she gave him love of life, not just love of him. I could never get his love. I was possessive, jealous, demanding. I was vain, selfish, arrogant, angry. How could anyone love someone like that?
"And what kind of queen would I be - like that -- after our father dies?
"Our people deserve better than me. They deserve YOU.
"You're what I'm not: kind, thoughtful, helpful, caring, loving. The queen our people need.
"So I'll give you to them.
"Be the queen I could never be. Be good.
"No - be GREAT.
"Forgive me, my most precious one. Goodbye. You won't see me alive again. And you won't see me after you die. You'll be in heaven, and I'll be in hell.
"Even there, I'll always love you so very much."
The queen's eyes teared up. They always did at this point. Which was why that around the name at the bottom of the letter, there were countless dried tear stains.
Yet, through the stains and her tears, the queen made out the name, as she always did and always would:
"Ayeka."
Silence. A long silence.
Finally, the queen folded the letter and wiped her eyes and cheeks. In a flood of light, she opened the box and returned the letter. She closed the box, and the dim light of the lantern bathed her again.
She regarded the effigy: a lovely young woman at repose and peace, her hands clasped atop her waist and her long pigtails flowing perfectly straight along her body. The face was blank as the stone it was carved from -- and maybe that was good, she thought: The woman's face would never again show the pain she must have felt in her final hours.
She glanced again at her father's tomb. As the young woman had spent her last day already dead - but still alive - so had the loss of his elder daughter taken the force and joy of life from the king. He died much younger than one might have expected. But he had lived - if that were the right word -- long enough for the girl-queen to grow into a woman and be trained for the throne.
But as soon as he was assured of that in his heart -- the heart that powered his huge, commanding, loving form -- that heart simply gave up one night in his sleep.
She looked back at the woman's blank face. After a thought, she leaned forward. Gently, she kissed the stony lips.
She stood back up and cupped for a moment the cold cheek and chin with her right hand.
At last, she sighed, picked up the box and lantern, and headed for the stairs to the sanctuary.
The giant wooden doors at the top creaked long and loud as she passed them, and the thud of their closing echoed off the soaring vaulted ceiling of the cathedral. Most of the building was modern, built to complement the most ancient parts of the sanctuary. Its lightness and airiness were a tonic after the depths of the crypt.
And as the doors' closing boom died away, she heard the snoring.
A ragged nasal sound filled the void, made almost hallowed by echoing in the spiritual space.
The queen gazed in the direction of the sound.
In the middle of the nave, seated among the worship rows, was the girl. On Earth, she would have been about 18 years old, though the queen knew she was actually much, much older than that. Below her wild, ragged dark hair shone two deep, kind brown eyes.
The hair and eyes of her father. The young man who had made the decision so very long ago.
Even the queen, as a girl, had been attracted to him. But she knew even then that she was a child in a world of women around him, so there never was a real chance for her. She knew that - but sometimes as a child, she dreamed she was a magical girl and could wave a magic wand and make her dreams come true.
Even her dreams of him.
He had been dead too many years to count, for his blood had been only one-fourth royal, and his life -- compared with hers -- had been but a moment's fluttering of a flower petal on a bright summer day. The queen sighed; all blossoms fade and die eventually, she thought. And he had.
The day she heard of his death, she cried in her bedchamber as she had cried only once before - on that other day. The one in the forest clearing.
But he was here now. In the color of a young woman's hair and in the life in her eyes.
The queen smiled at the girl.
The snoring sounded again.
At sight of the monarch, the girl leaned over to her right and stretched out an arm. She started shaking something unseen, something obscured by the intervening worship rows.
"Mom! Mom!" The girl's whisper resounded through the cathedral. "Wake up!"
An interrupted snore - more a ripping snort - blasted through the sanctuary. Then an almost-choked word shot through the sacred precincts.
"UNNNNGGHHHH?!!"
"She's back," the girl whispered loudly to the invisible voice.
"Whaaa ...? Where ...? WHO?"
"The queen," the girl warned.
Still unseen, the other person was silent for a moment. Then -- slowly crescendoing -- came the most fulfilled yawn the queen had ever heard.
"Awright ...," the disembodied voice said, the sleep deep in its tone.
A hand appeared and grasped the raised back of the worship row in front of the girl. The fingers were as long and slender as the queen recalled, and the nails still as long and sharp. The flesh had lost some of its fullness, but the fingers hadn't started to assume the gnarled quality of age. It was the hand of a woman at the undeniable end of her youth.
With a muffled grunt, the other voice finally showed its face.
That woman ...
A woman's broad face. Like the hand, the face had already seen the very last of youth. And it had begun to crease. But only just.
In the woman's silvery, wild, ragged hair, faint streaks of white salted the mane, telling any who saw them that despite the protests of the hair's owner, age had taken root.
Her gold eyes still glinted, though, with the possibility of mischief. They also were softer than the queen remembered. Watching a child grow up probably did that, she assumed.
The older woman propped her chin in one hand atop the back of the forward row. Her gold eyes, still heavy-lidded with drowsiness, lit upon the queen.
" 'Bout time, kiddo ...," the woman said blankly. "Whacha do - get lost down there?"
"Mom!" the girl chided.
The queen thought. "In a way ..." She offered a slight smile, then shut off the lantern and set it and the dark-wooden box on a worship row. "I hope you and your daughter will forgive me that I didn't invite you to the viewing. It's become an ... intensely personal thing ... to me."
The other woman shrugged. "I saw her when she was alive. That was enough for me." In the corner of her eye, she saw the dark-haired girl's sudden offended expression. She quickly added, "But I know how much she meant ... to you ..." She paused. "I'm sorry .. she's gone ... Have been since that day ..."
She faced the queen directly. "I truly have ..."
The monarch nodded. "I know," she replied softly. "I've always known. And I've never blamed you. What she did was her own choice. She could have lived." She fell silent, then finally repeated softly, "She could have lived ..."
She sighed. "In any event, this allows us to talk in private. We won't be disturbed here. The world knows that no one dares bother me on this day, in this place."
"Yeah, not with those two sentinels outside. Pretty serious 'bout your privacy, ain't cha?" The woman chuckled. "I swear, sometimes it's like those wooden soldiers follow us around just to keep your people from gettin' their hands on us."
"They have," the queen deadpanned.
Shock widened the gold eyes. "HUH?! What's that supposed to mean?! I thought you pardoned me!!"
"I did. But even my pardon can't keep some people from wanting vengeance. And I wanted you and your daughter to be completely safe while you visited."
The girl looked at her mother in confusion. "Mom, I noticed people here treat you like a disease. ... What did you do?"
The older woman closed her eyes and shook her head. "A lot of things before you were born." She glanced at the girl again. "I was different before you were born."
"I guess," the girl answered. "Those sentinels never leave our sides. And some of the looks I've seen you get here made me glad that they don't."
"That's also why I asked you to stay at the palace," the queen said. "They can keep a better eye on you there. So can I."
The other woman sat back in the worship row and crossed her arms behind her head. "So why did you ask us on this little jaunt, anyway, kiddo?"
The queen was direct: "I need an heir."
The girl's mother couldn't fight back the smirk, and her eyes flashed with risqué delight. "I usually recommend a man for that ..."
"I tried one," the monarch said levelly. "In fact, I tried 12 ..."
The girl's jaw dropped instantly. The silvery-haired woman gasped so loudly, it seemed she had started to choke. "WHA' ... WHAT?!!"
"A half-dozen suitors," the queen itemized, "and a half-dozen more lovers ..."
Mother and daughter turned slowly toward each other, agape. Finally, the mother again regarded the queen - this time with awe, as if seeing her for the first time.
"Damn ...," she said quietly, "you're not the pigtailed little girl I remember anymore, are ya ...?"
A knowing, worldly smile. "Haven't been for a long time ... The crown'll do that to you ..."
Silence. Then the mother asked quietly, "A dozen ...?"
The queen nodded.
"And no kid for all that?"
The queen shook her head sadly.
Gold eyes seemed to soften again. "That's rough, kiddo ... I'm sorry ..."
The queen shrugged. "I wanted to prove the doctors wrong, but ..."
The girl's brown eyes narrowed. "The doctors ...?"
The regal woman collected herself and addressed the mother. "Do you recall," she said, "when I was a girl and I revealed I had been ... assimilated ... to save my life once?"
"Yeah," the other woman replied, "you fell off a balcony. A spirit assimilated you to keep you alive. After that, you thought you were a fake - not the child who was born to your parents. But the spirit told you later your soul survived. You weren't the spirit's puppet, after all. You were really you."
The girl was confused again. "You sorta ... died?"
The queen nodded. "Sort of. But not quite." She drew a deep breath. "What all this has to do with an heir is this: It wasn't all metaphysical or supernatural. The spirit drew from my own life energy to save me. But it had a price."
"Which was ...?" the mother asked probingly.
"I'm barren."
Mother and daughter glanced at each other again, uncomfortably.
"... How ...?" the older woman asked.
"The life energy drawn from me ... was metabolic energy from the most expendable part of my being at the time. I was about four years old, in Terran terms." The monarch paused. "And if a four-year-old girl needs metabolic energy -- from somewhere in her body -- to save her life in an emergency ..."
She spread her hands a little and shrugged in longtime acceptance. "... Well, a four-year-old girl isn't using her reproductive organs - if they're even fully formed by then -- so ..."
She fell silent. The silence fell on the two others in the cathedral.
"The assimilation ...," the mother finally said, "damaged your reproductive organs ..."
"Stunted them," the queen specified.
"I'm ... so ... sorry ... Your Majesty ...," the girl whispered.
"I didn't want to believe the doctors for the longest time," the queen recalled. "It seemed so ... unfair. So ... I went from man to man, hoping that each new time would be the one when I'd conceive an heir." She bit her lip and shook her head slightly. "But ... it never happened ... Finally, I gave up ... accepted it ..." Her voice trailed off.
"I finally told myself ... that my people, my world, are my spouses, my family," she finished. "It's what gives me a purpose in life now ..."
"Like Elizabeth the First," the girl said quietly.
The queen raised an eyebrow. "Who?"
"A queen of ancient England on Earth," the girl explained. "I learned about her when I went to school on Earth. She devoted her life to her people, so she never married. She was called the 'Virgin Queen.' "
The mother's eyes flashed wickedly, and she grinned deliciously. "And there, the similarity ends ..."
"MOM!!" the girl yelled.
"Look ...," the mother continued, ignoring the girl, "what's the big deal about an heir, anyway? Forgive me, kiddo, but what difference will it make after you're dead? It won't be your problem anymore. Just enjoy your life. Let someone else figure out the succession."
"I've thought about that," the queen admitted, "but you know this world as well as I do. Look at the anger your just being here caused. Look how quickly we turn to hatred and violence if things aren't handled just so. The whole damned place comes apart. Always has. Having an heir to the throne helps smooth things over." She sighed. "If you've never worn the crown, you can't understand how important that is ..."
The other woman leaned forward again, crossed her arms on the back of the forward row and rested her chin on them. "So ... whacha gonna do?"
"I've decided to designate my heir."
The brows above the gold eyes rose. "Who?"
"Her."
And the queen pointed at the dark-haired girl.
"ME?!" the youth screamed. "ME?!!"
The mother grinned. "Good choice ..."
"Why me?!!" the daughter yelled.
"Because of your father," the queen noted. "He was of our royal house."
It shocked the girl. She spun around to her mother, asking all her questions with her brown eyes.
The silvery-haired woman sighed. "It was way before Earth made first contact with other intelligent life in the galaxy. I was an alien on a world that had never seen one. Your father was descended from another alien."
"My half brother," the queen explained. "So you have our royal blood in your veins. You have the right to wear the crown."
"We kept our pasts from you ... to protect you before first contact," the mother continued. "After that, aliens were accepted. There didn't seem to be any need to explain things then." She shrugged. "After first contact, there was nothing strange on Earth about a woman who could levitate, disappear through walls and had a tail like a cat's." She recalled the memories and flashed a knowing grin.
The girl studied her mother carefully. "That's why you told me never to tell anyone about my tail -- or show it to anyone -- when I was a kid ..."
The older woman nodded. "Um-hmmm ..."
"I remember ... when first contact was on all the news. You never bothered me about showing my tail after that ..."
"It was very freeing - for a lot of us," the mother remembered.
And for a moment, the two women regarded each other with tangible growing appreciation.
The queen broke the silence. "What do you say?" she asked the girl. "Will you be the heir to my world's -- and your world's -- throne?"
The younger woman thought quietly.
"Won't be easy, kiddo," the mother said. "You'll have to fight a lot of baggage that being my daughter brings around here. But ya know I love ya, I'm damned proud of ya and I'm not ashamed you're my daughter." She turned to the queen. "But I kinda think the council will bristle at the thought of my kid on the throne."
"You are also your father's child," the queen observed to the girl. "You are of the royal line. No one can challenge that." She faced the mother. "And I'll take care of the council. I know what strings to pull."
She saw the surprise on the older woman's face. "Like you said," the monarch recalled, "I'm not the pigtailed little girl you remember ..."
"That's for damned sure," the mother said.
"If I accept ...," the girl offered cautiously, "will you ... teach me how to be a ... good ... queen?"
"No," the regal woman answered quickly - such that the two others were caught off-guard and gasped in surprise.
Then the monarch grinned slightly. "I'll teach you to be a GREAT queen ..."
A glow of understanding dawned across the girl's face. "In that case ...," she said quietly at last, "I will be your heir, Your Majesty ..."
The queen closed her eyes and nodded in satisfaction. "Thank you," she whispered.
The mother jerked a thumb toward her daughter and grinned. "Better watch this one, kiddo. If what I went through is any clue, you'll have your hands full getting her to listen to anything you say ..."
The girl blushed. "Mom..."
"Ryoko," the queen said to the other woman, "now that I think about it ... it might be better from now on if you start calling me 'Your Majesty' ... whenever we're in public."
The aging space pirate chuckled and made a flippant gesture. "Oh, yeah, right. Sure. Whatever ..."
The girl gave her mother a stern -- but playful -- look. "I'll make sure she does that, Your Majesty."
Queen Tsunami smiled. "Tenko," she said warmly, "from now on, when we're in private like this, you may call me 'Aunt Sammy' ..."
"Tenchi Muyo!" characters copyrighted by their owners. Story and original characters copyright 2000 by George Pollock, Jr. All rights reserved.
Newport News, VA 23608-2855
USA
GJJPJR@aol.com
or GJJPJR@hotmail.com
This story won grand prize in the third annual Fanfic Contest at Anime North (www.animenorth.com), conducted May 25 to 27, 2001, in Toronto, Canada. Fanfic coordinator: Dave Greenlaw, dave@engine.ca
Epilogue
by George Pollock, Jr.
The queen sighed and set down the lantern.
She looked around in the gloom at the faces of the sleeping ghosts in the shadows. Closed eyes stared at heaven; hands clasped across unmoving bodies. A family of effigies. A family of the dead.
Her family.
She studied the reclining forms atop the sarcophagi: sleepers of stone, every one. Why stone? she thought, not for the first time in her life. With all our forests - continents and planets of forests - why do our dead sleep in stone?
But she already knew the answer, one told her when she was a child: All trees - even our trees - die some day. Wood will pass away. Wood is not immortal. Even we, who live a very, very long time, are not immortal, the queen thought in the lantern's pale light.
But stone - ah, stone - "Stone lives almost forever, little one," her father had told her. Told her long ago. Told her long before he died.
Died and slept in stone.
She glanced at a tomb to the left. Her father's tomb. He rested silently, his peaceful face framed by a beard and mustache of gray. The gray of stone - not the gray of age. For he was not terribly old when he died.
Some said he was dead long before he died. Something took the life from him well before he ceased to breathe. Made him a ghost even before he left mortality.
The something that brought the queen here this day, as it had on this day every year for time beyond counting.
The tomb she faced now.
Gently, next to the tomb's effigy, she placed a box. It was of dark wood, still with a heavy, glossy finish, and brass corners and a complex latch. It was made by an inventor she had known in her youth, and time hadn't ravaged the exterior in the least.
Which was ironic, for inside the box, time actually stood still.
She opened the latch and lifted the lid. Suddenly, the lantern's glow was lost in a celebration of white-yellow light that flashed from the box. The crypt became alive with light, and for an instant, the stony dead seemed to be merely the sleeping. She reached in, her hand disappearing into the warm ultraglow of the stasis field. Almost as quickly, she withdrew her hand.
With the letter.
A letter that seemed as fresh as on the day it was written. The paper was still crisp - if wrinkled and with the start of a tear -- and the fold was still sharp. And on the outside of the fold, she read her own name, as cleanly penned as it had been on that day.
That awful, evil day so very, very long ago now.
The queen closed the box, and as the woman's eyes adjusted to the darkness, the lantern extended its feeble reach into the dark corners again. The queen stood looking at the letter in silence, knowing what it would say. It never changed and never would. Its pain would be there, as always. Why should she read it again? Why subject herself to this hurt yet again?
Then, as always, she looked up at the sweet, silent face of the effigy before her.
And she knew:
So she would always remember the horrid sacrifice that had given the queen her place, her throne, her crown. A sacrifice offered in a moment of weakness, sorrow and pain.
She opened the letter and started to read:
"My most precious one, flesh of my flesh, blood of my blood:
"By the time you read this, I will be dead. I pray you will not be the one to find me after I die."
The queen closed her pink-red eyes and recalled that day: the choice that finally, decisively had to be made by a young man, the decision he made, the arguments that ensued and the tears. The tension that filled the house, and how a woman walked around the rest of the day as if her living heart had been ripped from her chest.
How the queen, as a child in that place on that day, had noticed later that a carving knife had disappeared from the kitchen.
And how the writer's wish was dashed much later -- when the girl-queen had found the body in a clearing in woods far from the house.
The body of the woman left without a loving heart.
She remembered the light dappling through the leaves and playing over the pink kimono that the woman wore. Her body was curled tightly, her stiff white hands still clasping the knife in her belly. And from her belly, on the green grass, spread a wet, glistening crimson semicircle.
And her eyes. Her pink-red eyes. They were open. And they were dead.
She remembered her own child screams. She remembered shaking the body fiercely until it rolled onto its back, and the hand-covered knife handle stuck straight into the air.
The dead eyes stared at heaven and saw nothing.
The next instant, the girl-queen was fleeing and stumbling and crying and screaming toward the house. The woods seemed to go on forever in that moment, filled with trees that she had once loved but now kept living while a woman lay dead in their midst. And that was horrible and cruel and unspeakable to her child's mind.
Her confusion and pain were so great, she had to be told later that she had apparently knelt in the woman's blood. Her white socks and the lower front of her own green kimono were soaked scarlet.
Which explained the looks of sheer terror that she got when she burst into the house.
Three men rushed to where the dead woman lay. The two oldest took in the scene with dread and control. The youngest screamed in horror and held the woman's cold face in his hands. His tears splashed onto her pale cheeks. He lifted her shoulders, embraced them and sobbed uncontrollably. The two older men were silent. Eventually, the oldest started offering up a prayer of some sort.
The queen remembered how two policewomen showed up after that and tried to console her. One with fair hair seemed almost as devastated as the girl was. She finally knelt and hugged the child tightly. And eventually, from behind her back - even over her own sobs -- the girl heard the officer's muffled crying.
The other officer, with dark hair, stood silently nearby and watched. There was a sadness on her face, a sadness of having seen so much of life and tragedy, she could no longer react to any of it. Finally, she walked over and gently laid a hand on the girl's head and the head of the other officer. "It'll be OK," she whispered, closing her eyes and stroking their hair, "It'll be all right ..."
Even at that moment, even as a child, it had struck the queen that the officer was trying desperately to convince herself of something she didn't believe.
And there was the final image she retained to this very day, this anniversary:
When she had looked up from crying to catch her breath, she had seen the other woman at the edge of the clearing. The woman with the silvery, wild, ragged hair. Looking at the scene with incomprehension, as if what she was seeing wasn't real, couldn't be real.
In her gold eyes was the cold, sick sheen of someone who realized that she was the cause of something she never intended to happen. Something that had gone out of control and now was irrevocably wrong and horrible.
She looked as if she had just killed someone by accident.
That woman ...
In the trauma of that far-away day, the letter hadn't been noticed at first. It was almost dismissed as litter until the oldest man - a spiritual sort of person, the queen felt -- had found it and gave it to the girl. After she read it, her young heart had burst, and the crying never seemed to stop.
By then, the inventor had shown up from her laboratory in the house, wondering where everyone had gone. She was told what had happened, and she gazed at the dead woman for the longest time. Like the one officer, she seemed to want to cry but couldn't. She, too, had seen more of life than she had cared to. She said later that what she felt most was the tragic waste.
The girl-queen hadn't understood what she meant then, but these many, many years later, she did. And she, too, mourned the loss of what could have been.
The girl had clutched the letter tightly, then - in a fit of blind, agonizing rage - had made to tear it to shreds. With a flash of pink, wild, ragged hair, the inventor had grabbed her wrists and spoke: "Let me keep it for you, all right?" She had not so much asked as made a declaration of what was going to happen, like it or not. She took the letter from the girl, smoothed the paper tenderly and put it in a pocket in her walking shorts.
A few days later, the inventor gave the girl the wooden-and-brass box. "The letter is in here," the inventor said, "but you can't read it now. The latch on the box has a timer on it. It'll open itself many years from now. But the letter won't get old or yellow or faded. I promise. I stopped time inside."
As the girl studied the dark container in her hands, the inventor lightly put her hands on the child's shoulders. "I think," the inventor said softly, "that by the time the box opens, you'll be glad you kept the letter ..."
The pigtailed little girl blinked and didn't understand.
The young queen blinked, and she was back in the crypt.
She sighed, collected herself and continued to read:
"I want you to know why I did what I did. You know how much I loved a man and how much I wanted him to love me, but he chose another, and I can't bear that.
"I asked why I didn't win his love. I realized I expected it as my due, not because I earned it. I know he valued me as a friend, but I wanted so much more.
"I was insulted. I admit it! How dare he turn me down for another woman?
"I know now she gave him love of life, not just love of him. I could never get his love. I was possessive, jealous, demanding. I was vain, selfish, arrogant, angry. How could anyone love someone like that?
"And what kind of queen would I be - like that -- after our father dies?
"Our people deserve better than me. They deserve YOU.
"You're what I'm not: kind, thoughtful, helpful, caring, loving. The queen our people need.
"So I'll give you to them.
"Be the queen I could never be. Be good.
"No - be GREAT.
"Forgive me, my most precious one. Goodbye. You won't see me alive again. And you won't see me after you die. You'll be in heaven, and I'll be in hell.
"Even there, I'll always love you so very much."
The queen's eyes teared up. They always did at this point. Which was why that around the name at the bottom of the letter, there were countless dried tear stains.
Yet, through the stains and her tears, the queen made out the name, as she always did and always would:
"Ayeka."
Silence. A long silence.
Finally, the queen folded the letter and wiped her eyes and cheeks. In a flood of light, she opened the box and returned the letter. She closed the box, and the dim light of the lantern bathed her again.
She regarded the effigy: a lovely young woman at repose and peace, her hands clasped atop her waist and her long pigtails flowing perfectly straight along her body. The face was blank as the stone it was carved from -- and maybe that was good, she thought: The woman's face would never again show the pain she must have felt in her final hours.
She glanced again at her father's tomb. As the young woman had spent her last day already dead - but still alive - so had the loss of his elder daughter taken the force and joy of life from the king. He died much younger than one might have expected. But he had lived - if that were the right word -- long enough for the girl-queen to grow into a woman and be trained for the throne.
But as soon as he was assured of that in his heart -- the heart that powered his huge, commanding, loving form -- that heart simply gave up one night in his sleep.
She looked back at the woman's blank face. After a thought, she leaned forward. Gently, she kissed the stony lips.
She stood back up and cupped for a moment the cold cheek and chin with her right hand.
At last, she sighed, picked up the box and lantern, and headed for the stairs to the sanctuary.
The giant wooden doors at the top creaked long and loud as she passed them, and the thud of their closing echoed off the soaring vaulted ceiling of the cathedral. Most of the building was modern, built to complement the most ancient parts of the sanctuary. Its lightness and airiness were a tonic after the depths of the crypt.
And as the doors' closing boom died away, she heard the snoring.
A ragged nasal sound filled the void, made almost hallowed by echoing in the spiritual space.
The queen gazed in the direction of the sound.
In the middle of the nave, seated among the worship rows, was the girl. On Earth, she would have been about 18 years old, though the queen knew she was actually much, much older than that. Below her wild, ragged dark hair shone two deep, kind brown eyes.
The hair and eyes of her father. The young man who had made the decision so very long ago.
Even the queen, as a girl, had been attracted to him. But she knew even then that she was a child in a world of women around him, so there never was a real chance for her. She knew that - but sometimes as a child, she dreamed she was a magical girl and could wave a magic wand and make her dreams come true.
Even her dreams of him.
He had been dead too many years to count, for his blood had been only one-fourth royal, and his life -- compared with hers -- had been but a moment's fluttering of a flower petal on a bright summer day. The queen sighed; all blossoms fade and die eventually, she thought. And he had.
The day she heard of his death, she cried in her bedchamber as she had cried only once before - on that other day. The one in the forest clearing.
But he was here now. In the color of a young woman's hair and in the life in her eyes.
The queen smiled at the girl.
The snoring sounded again.
At sight of the monarch, the girl leaned over to her right and stretched out an arm. She started shaking something unseen, something obscured by the intervening worship rows.
"Mom! Mom!" The girl's whisper resounded through the cathedral. "Wake up!"
An interrupted snore - more a ripping snort - blasted through the sanctuary. Then an almost-choked word shot through the sacred precincts.
"UNNNNGGHHHH?!!"
"She's back," the girl whispered loudly to the invisible voice.
"Whaaa ...? Where ...? WHO?"
"The queen," the girl warned.
Still unseen, the other person was silent for a moment. Then -- slowly crescendoing -- came the most fulfilled yawn the queen had ever heard.
"Awright ...," the disembodied voice said, the sleep deep in its tone.
A hand appeared and grasped the raised back of the worship row in front of the girl. The fingers were as long and slender as the queen recalled, and the nails still as long and sharp. The flesh had lost some of its fullness, but the fingers hadn't started to assume the gnarled quality of age. It was the hand of a woman at the undeniable end of her youth.
With a muffled grunt, the other voice finally showed its face.
That woman ...
A woman's broad face. Like the hand, the face had already seen the very last of youth. And it had begun to crease. But only just.
In the woman's silvery, wild, ragged hair, faint streaks of white salted the mane, telling any who saw them that despite the protests of the hair's owner, age had taken root.
Her gold eyes still glinted, though, with the possibility of mischief. They also were softer than the queen remembered. Watching a child grow up probably did that, she assumed.
The older woman propped her chin in one hand atop the back of the forward row. Her gold eyes, still heavy-lidded with drowsiness, lit upon the queen.
" 'Bout time, kiddo ...," the woman said blankly. "Whacha do - get lost down there?"
"Mom!" the girl chided.
The queen thought. "In a way ..." She offered a slight smile, then shut off the lantern and set it and the dark-wooden box on a worship row. "I hope you and your daughter will forgive me that I didn't invite you to the viewing. It's become an ... intensely personal thing ... to me."
The other woman shrugged. "I saw her when she was alive. That was enough for me." In the corner of her eye, she saw the dark-haired girl's sudden offended expression. She quickly added, "But I know how much she meant ... to you ..." She paused. "I'm sorry .. she's gone ... Have been since that day ..."
She faced the queen directly. "I truly have ..."
The monarch nodded. "I know," she replied softly. "I've always known. And I've never blamed you. What she did was her own choice. She could have lived." She fell silent, then finally repeated softly, "She could have lived ..."
She sighed. "In any event, this allows us to talk in private. We won't be disturbed here. The world knows that no one dares bother me on this day, in this place."
"Yeah, not with those two sentinels outside. Pretty serious 'bout your privacy, ain't cha?" The woman chuckled. "I swear, sometimes it's like those wooden soldiers follow us around just to keep your people from gettin' their hands on us."
"They have," the queen deadpanned.
Shock widened the gold eyes. "HUH?! What's that supposed to mean?! I thought you pardoned me!!"
"I did. But even my pardon can't keep some people from wanting vengeance. And I wanted you and your daughter to be completely safe while you visited."
The girl looked at her mother in confusion. "Mom, I noticed people here treat you like a disease. ... What did you do?"
The older woman closed her eyes and shook her head. "A lot of things before you were born." She glanced at the girl again. "I was different before you were born."
"I guess," the girl answered. "Those sentinels never leave our sides. And some of the looks I've seen you get here made me glad that they don't."
"That's also why I asked you to stay at the palace," the queen said. "They can keep a better eye on you there. So can I."
The other woman sat back in the worship row and crossed her arms behind her head. "So why did you ask us on this little jaunt, anyway, kiddo?"
The queen was direct: "I need an heir."
The girl's mother couldn't fight back the smirk, and her eyes flashed with risqué delight. "I usually recommend a man for that ..."
"I tried one," the monarch said levelly. "In fact, I tried 12 ..."
The girl's jaw dropped instantly. The silvery-haired woman gasped so loudly, it seemed she had started to choke. "WHA' ... WHAT?!!"
"A half-dozen suitors," the queen itemized, "and a half-dozen more lovers ..."
Mother and daughter turned slowly toward each other, agape. Finally, the mother again regarded the queen - this time with awe, as if seeing her for the first time.
"Damn ...," she said quietly, "you're not the pigtailed little girl I remember anymore, are ya ...?"
A knowing, worldly smile. "Haven't been for a long time ... The crown'll do that to you ..."
Silence. Then the mother asked quietly, "A dozen ...?"
The queen nodded.
"And no kid for all that?"
The queen shook her head sadly.
Gold eyes seemed to soften again. "That's rough, kiddo ... I'm sorry ..."
The queen shrugged. "I wanted to prove the doctors wrong, but ..."
The girl's brown eyes narrowed. "The doctors ...?"
The regal woman collected herself and addressed the mother. "Do you recall," she said, "when I was a girl and I revealed I had been ... assimilated ... to save my life once?"
"Yeah," the other woman replied, "you fell off a balcony. A spirit assimilated you to keep you alive. After that, you thought you were a fake - not the child who was born to your parents. But the spirit told you later your soul survived. You weren't the spirit's puppet, after all. You were really you."
The girl was confused again. "You sorta ... died?"
The queen nodded. "Sort of. But not quite." She drew a deep breath. "What all this has to do with an heir is this: It wasn't all metaphysical or supernatural. The spirit drew from my own life energy to save me. But it had a price."
"Which was ...?" the mother asked probingly.
"I'm barren."
Mother and daughter glanced at each other again, uncomfortably.
"... How ...?" the older woman asked.
"The life energy drawn from me ... was metabolic energy from the most expendable part of my being at the time. I was about four years old, in Terran terms." The monarch paused. "And if a four-year-old girl needs metabolic energy -- from somewhere in her body -- to save her life in an emergency ..."
She spread her hands a little and shrugged in longtime acceptance. "... Well, a four-year-old girl isn't using her reproductive organs - if they're even fully formed by then -- so ..."
She fell silent. The silence fell on the two others in the cathedral.
"The assimilation ...," the mother finally said, "damaged your reproductive organs ..."
"Stunted them," the queen specified.
"I'm ... so ... sorry ... Your Majesty ...," the girl whispered.
"I didn't want to believe the doctors for the longest time," the queen recalled. "It seemed so ... unfair. So ... I went from man to man, hoping that each new time would be the one when I'd conceive an heir." She bit her lip and shook her head slightly. "But ... it never happened ... Finally, I gave up ... accepted it ..." Her voice trailed off.
"I finally told myself ... that my people, my world, are my spouses, my family," she finished. "It's what gives me a purpose in life now ..."
"Like Elizabeth the First," the girl said quietly.
The queen raised an eyebrow. "Who?"
"A queen of ancient England on Earth," the girl explained. "I learned about her when I went to school on Earth. She devoted her life to her people, so she never married. She was called the 'Virgin Queen.' "
The mother's eyes flashed wickedly, and she grinned deliciously. "And there, the similarity ends ..."
"MOM!!" the girl yelled.
"Look ...," the mother continued, ignoring the girl, "what's the big deal about an heir, anyway? Forgive me, kiddo, but what difference will it make after you're dead? It won't be your problem anymore. Just enjoy your life. Let someone else figure out the succession."
"I've thought about that," the queen admitted, "but you know this world as well as I do. Look at the anger your just being here caused. Look how quickly we turn to hatred and violence if things aren't handled just so. The whole damned place comes apart. Always has. Having an heir to the throne helps smooth things over." She sighed. "If you've never worn the crown, you can't understand how important that is ..."
The other woman leaned forward again, crossed her arms on the back of the forward row and rested her chin on them. "So ... whacha gonna do?"
"I've decided to designate my heir."
The brows above the gold eyes rose. "Who?"
"Her."
And the queen pointed at the dark-haired girl.
"ME?!" the youth screamed. "ME?!!"
The mother grinned. "Good choice ..."
"Why me?!!" the daughter yelled.
"Because of your father," the queen noted. "He was of our royal house."
It shocked the girl. She spun around to her mother, asking all her questions with her brown eyes.
The silvery-haired woman sighed. "It was way before Earth made first contact with other intelligent life in the galaxy. I was an alien on a world that had never seen one. Your father was descended from another alien."
"My half brother," the queen explained. "So you have our royal blood in your veins. You have the right to wear the crown."
"We kept our pasts from you ... to protect you before first contact," the mother continued. "After that, aliens were accepted. There didn't seem to be any need to explain things then." She shrugged. "After first contact, there was nothing strange on Earth about a woman who could levitate, disappear through walls and had a tail like a cat's." She recalled the memories and flashed a knowing grin.
The girl studied her mother carefully. "That's why you told me never to tell anyone about my tail -- or show it to anyone -- when I was a kid ..."
The older woman nodded. "Um-hmmm ..."
"I remember ... when first contact was on all the news. You never bothered me about showing my tail after that ..."
"It was very freeing - for a lot of us," the mother remembered.
And for a moment, the two women regarded each other with tangible growing appreciation.
The queen broke the silence. "What do you say?" she asked the girl. "Will you be the heir to my world's -- and your world's -- throne?"
The younger woman thought quietly.
"Won't be easy, kiddo," the mother said. "You'll have to fight a lot of baggage that being my daughter brings around here. But ya know I love ya, I'm damned proud of ya and I'm not ashamed you're my daughter." She turned to the queen. "But I kinda think the council will bristle at the thought of my kid on the throne."
"You are also your father's child," the queen observed to the girl. "You are of the royal line. No one can challenge that." She faced the mother. "And I'll take care of the council. I know what strings to pull."
She saw the surprise on the older woman's face. "Like you said," the monarch recalled, "I'm not the pigtailed little girl you remember ..."
"That's for damned sure," the mother said.
"If I accept ...," the girl offered cautiously, "will you ... teach me how to be a ... good ... queen?"
"No," the regal woman answered quickly - such that the two others were caught off-guard and gasped in surprise.
Then the monarch grinned slightly. "I'll teach you to be a GREAT queen ..."
A glow of understanding dawned across the girl's face. "In that case ...," she said quietly at last, "I will be your heir, Your Majesty ..."
The queen closed her eyes and nodded in satisfaction. "Thank you," she whispered.
The mother jerked a thumb toward her daughter and grinned. "Better watch this one, kiddo. If what I went through is any clue, you'll have your hands full getting her to listen to anything you say ..."
The girl blushed. "Mom..."
"Ryoko," the queen said to the other woman, "now that I think about it ... it might be better from now on if you start calling me 'Your Majesty' ... whenever we're in public."
The aging space pirate chuckled and made a flippant gesture. "Oh, yeah, right. Sure. Whatever ..."
The girl gave her mother a stern -- but playful -- look. "I'll make sure she does that, Your Majesty."
Queen Tsunami smiled. "Tenko," she said warmly, "from now on, when we're in private like this, you may call me 'Aunt Sammy' ..."
"Tenchi Muyo!" characters copyrighted by their owners. Story and original characters copyright 2000 by George Pollock, Jr. All rights reserved.