History is Written
The aging datacube sits in front of Vala - it is chipped at the edges, cracked down one side. Cheap and rather shoddy, as too many things from that time were. But priceless.
The truth.
If Vala's mother could be believed. Vala's mother had believed it all her life.
She runs a thin, bony finger over those rough edges and thinks about the one who left this memoir to history, who believed that history would judge, and approve. Who didn't realise that the memoir would never be there for history to judge. Who would have hated being a barely recalled, scathingly condemned by-note in other people's memoirs. A failure, a traitor, at the end a nonentity murdered in error.
History. Huh. History is written by the winners...at least, the official history, of that turbulent, violent time that seems so long ago. Just two generations, really. Vala's mother had been born in the final, wasteland years... and she had been born in the slow, grey rebirth.
The datacube, its century-old glitter faded and pale, mocks her - should she, could she sell it? Who'd pay best, one of the interplanetary universities, or the gutter media? Plenty in there for both of them... the lofty politics and the sordid betrayals of people who, with death, became more than human.
Well, more or less. Sometimes it was hard to tell.
And Vala could use the money. The last of her family, she'd lived all her life in the shadowy world of poor, powerless, ex-Alpha families scrambling for any remnants of privilege and comfort. The Alpha name her mother had been born to was too dangerous, too hated - it had to go. But without it, her mother - and she - had nothing.
Yes, she could use the money, and the satisfaction of seeing history, and their name, that name in history, put in its proper place.
Whatever that might be...
That is the danger, of course.
Again, Vala touches the datacube, tilting it to one side, watching the softly glowing colours change from red to mauve to blue.
She is old, and the last of her family, and she knows it is time to make a choice. Sell it, make it public, let that voice be heard... or destroy it, just let it go. Let history stay written by those who won, let the decades of hard-won healing alone. She has always been afraid to make that choice, as her mother was.
Her grandparent - the one who wrote this long, bitter chronicle, so different from the accepted historical truth - would not have been afraid, nor cared about that healing that this cube would rip apart. Her grandparent would not even begrudge it being done for the money. Not if it enabled the memoir to be heard. The truth...
Her truth.
Or her lies.
And - remembering her grandparent, even so dimly through the years - they could be lies, maybe even be proven lies. Vala's mother had most afraid of that, and Vala... didn't know if she wanted to know.
The names carved into the plastic in tiny, ornate lettering - quaintly old-fashioned, rare even then - mocks her. Servalan, also known as Sleer, also known as Svarlora, also known as...
Vala puts the cube down, and decides to make that choice another day.
-the end-