Page 47 of Prima
“In a hundred years, when we’re all gone, this shipwreck of yours will be the site of a beautiful coral reef, alive and vibrant.”
An unexpectedly comforting thought.
She carries most of their things into the understructure. When she returns, she says, “I’ve let it be known, on an open channel, that I’ve left your vessel. Border patrol will be tracking the progress of your boat and communicating its latest location, also via open channels. That should make it easier for our friends in the sub. If they still can’t hit it, I might have to compose a sternly worded letter to someone.”
The Blue Sampan, all its navigation lights ablaze now that it’s under power, will need to travel a few klicks before it enters torpedo range for the sub; they have some time to sit on the raft and maybe watch the stars together.
She hands him a book and taps on a solar lantern. In the darkest hour before dawn, a gentle light envelops them and illuminates a manga namedThe Long Safari, printed and bound, its pages turning from left to right.
On the cover is a girl in a camouflage uniform, windsurfing, no,terrasailingacross a great desert at sunset, the frame of her translucent sail an intense blue against a sky of purple and gold.
He blinks. The color scheme of the sky strikes him as something he wouldn’t have picked, but the image itself, the simple outline of the girl, the more competently drawn sail…
He flips the pages. The story takes place in a distant future after landmasses on Earth have been reclaimed and is about a girl rather than a man, but stylistically, the drawings are remarkably similar to the ones inThe Wandering Sailor.
“Is this—did I—what?—”
“Your mother brought twenty sketchbooks with her. For me.”
For her. Of course they would have been for her. Buttwentysketchbooks? He must have been as busy as a kitchen boy the day before Lunar New Year.
She caresses the pages of the manga. “After I went through your sketchbooks, I wanted the whole world to see this story.”
“You paid to have them printed?” He marvels.
“No, publishers vied for the rights. And when the last volume was released, there were lines outside bookshops.”
Her voice catches. “Sometimes I see a volume of this manga in the wild, in the hands of somebody on a park bench or in a moving tram, and I think to myself, that is our story. They’re reading our story.”
He turns her face toward him. Her cheeks are damp. She smiles through her tears. “You have earned yourself a bit of a nest egg. Your mother was almost disappointed that when you arrived eventually you wouldn’t be entirely dependent on her—she wanted to be the one to give you everything.”
Everything he feared he might never find out in this lifetime is now coming at him as if from a firehose. He can barely process what she’s telling him. How did his frail mother manage to come into enough resources to give him “everything”? She had been sheltered against her wish, but sheltered nevertheless, inexperienced in the ways of the world.
“As it turned out, before she was captured in her youth and gifted to the Potentate, she was the last inheritor of sericulture.”
His jaw drops. He has heard, of course, that in the past few years, sericulture has been revived in New Ryukyu. For nearly a century and a half before that, the production of silk, worldwide, was entirely lost.
“Two decades in the Potentate’s Palace made her more than capable of holding her own in the outside world. She obtained loans, leased a mulberry forest, and three years after she arrived in New Ryukyu, produced the first new batch of silk in a hundred and fifty years. You can imagine—no, you can’t imagine—what those first bolts of woven silk went for.
“And once she proved that she could do it, she opened a sericulture school. She’s had to turn down ninety percent of the applicants because so many people want to learn the process.”
He thinks of the confident woman before the wall of books. She wasn’t just safe and free, but proud of what she had made of herself in life. “The silk shirt that landed on my doorstep last year—the one I wore to dinner last night—did she send it?”
He glances at the woman next to him. At this point, perhaps he can stop addressing her as Lady Sun. But he doesn’t want to call her Sun Yi, or even just Yi. It’s as if there’s a better alternative, if it would only come to him.
“Indeed she sent it. Because we needed to involve our agents in Dawan, the matter came before the Secretariat. The minister of trade herself pled your mother’s case. And when I abstained from voting, my mother finally learned about you. Then she readThe Long Safari, put two and two together, and said, ‘The silk dress?’
“I thought she was going to say something cutting about you—after all, at the time, that dress was almost as valuable as the yacht I lost. But she only said, ‘I knew it wasn’t you who sewed the buttonholes together with fishing line—too much skill and patience for you.’”
She laughs.
He can’t make heads and tails of what she’s saying. “The silk dress? The one you wore at dinner? What didIdo to it?”
Her mirth fades. “I forgot that you still have no way to access those memories.”
The silence of night, broken only by the flow of water around her raft, makes itself known. She looks wistful. He wants to tell her that it’s okay, that they can make new memories to share together, but he can’t console her blithely when he doesn’t know what she has lost.
What she has endured over the years.
