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Hauntology Musings
- Rose DuBois
The year was Universal Century 0080, and the world was being rewritten, as it had been at its beginning, and as it would, again and again and again.
Zeon’s War for Independence was won, and the great course of History was changed forever.
The Vist Foundation knew this, so the survivors said. The many employees spread out over several hundred associated companies and subsidiaries and then at last the Vist Family itself, nearly eighty big in its living breadth, had told so. They spoke of November in 0079, long after a Zeon ace pilot known as the Red Comet, Captain Char Aznable, stole Tem Ray’s great hope for the Federation: Project V, and its resultant make: Mobile Suit Gundam. They spoke of at that final family gathering Syam Vist, their leader, was animated, far more than he had ever been, an old man that he was, and how he had at the head of the table at Industrial 7 yelled to all of his name that History had been overridden, that the path of the Earth Sphere that which he apparently knew.
The old man had his insight, his precognitions, so to speak. He knew what decisions to make, and the supposed power and influence to put right anything that was not within his foresight. But what had happened on Side 7, the stealing of the Gundam, it seemed so out of bounds for him that something had been ruined; a grand old project that none had been privy to save for himself, and as notable guests from both the Federation and Anaheim Electronics looked on as he rose in his noble robes, before the starlit forever on the lawn before his manor, Cardeas Vist, his closest grandson, saw that his father had gone mad.
He yelled at all of them, from child to business partner, and all had been stunned at his articulation and their particular failures to stop that war in the first place, and then, at last, in not winning it. He was sweating, his wrinkles bearing the great tidal waves of a man lost as family came to him at his arms and shoulders and cane to try to stop him before he made an even further scene at that gathering.
He screamed at all the heavens and the hells and his life, and he told them all as his voice echoed that he had been there at day one: he had been there, at Space Station Laplace, when the great murder of the people that believed a new age would bring a new type of Humanity had been there. He told them all that he saw it all, saw the course of the Universal Century toward a horrifying point, of heaven itself sent down against Mankind, and the billions dead for it.
He told them all that what was transpiring had been even worse than that, and at once, perhaps, that his course through the world had been as a fraud man, and the world they were coming into one that was built falsely because of him.
The bald assistant to him and then Cardeas had beat through the crowd of family and worker to get to him as he waded through his blood, and doing much in their heated whispers to calm him, all was silenced in statement:
He was going to open the Box.
That’s what the survivors told the Zeon forces, two months after the Earth Federation’s attempted asteroid drop operation on Granada.
Two months after the disappearance of Captain Char Aznable and the Gundam.
The buildings were still smoldering, evidence of the miniature civil war known as “The Laplace Incident” remained on the grounds of Industrial 7 as it was towed to Side 3. The victors had not been Anaheim Electronic’s Mercenaries, or the Vist Foundation and their own soldiers. The victors that stood over the dead and the surrendering and the relics of Earth had been Vice Admiral M’Quve’s Fleet on the orders of her Highness, Kycilia Zabi.
The year was Universal Century 0080, and in the remains of the Vist Foundation who had been so wedded to a different History, two women were told to begin something again.
One is a taller woman, her arms and legs beset by brace and crane, and written in her skin are scars from some ailment that none would ever ask her, for it was not theirs to know. She’s bright eyed, always, her hair like wild roses that cascaded down her shoulders just shy of being unruly.
Absentmindedly, her wife is there with her long dainty fingers, the look about her like porcelain, barely coming up to her shoulders, and yet all the more imposing despite.
They look, they dream, before the recovered remains of grand tapestry that Cardeas Vist’s mistress had said defined everything about the workings of the Foundation:
“Mon Seul Desir.” the shorter woman had spoken, her arm threading with her wife’s, opposite of the one which always held her cane (Mercurian metal, a gift from her mother). They looked upon the rich tapestry of it, twin beasts before a princess, white and black, in visual and in metaphor: a depiction of offering of kingdoms which the certain peoples saw in themselves.
Future promises unfurled, and a new world had to come unaccounted for by the Vist Foundation.
This world that Syam Vist was not to see.
This world that Cardeas did not want to see.
Dead in their blood. One shot by the other as M’Quve’s forces closed in, both of them collapsed before the great secret that, if revealed, might have prevented the War. But the War was over. The Box had been opened, and what it could have saved was now no matter even with its words:
In the future, should the emergence of a new space-adapted human race be confirmed, the Earth Federation shall give priority to involving them in the administration of the government.
Zeon Deikun’s Newtypes had arrived, and they had left the truth of the Box behind.
Vice Admiral M’Quve was currently parading the Box in an escort fleet around the Earth Sphere, leaving you alone to administrate a project that held no jot in wider plans, but was to be carried out, anyway. It was still structural proof, after all.
Not so dire, your position, this time: A place in this world after the end of History. You know better that this is new pathing but with a familiar feel.
The year is Universal Century 0080, and you have returned to a place hollowed, with different adherents to this old order.
You’re silent in your steps, as you must always be as a quiet observer, especially as regards seeing these two invited guests.
The taller one, leaning both on cane and then her partner, smiles down on her, the ridges along her face of scars, proof that the life she lived had been all too full. No one questions her of their origin. No one questions her origin. She was always here.
She cracks a smile at her own joke, giving up the game before she says it: “Mon Sully Desire?” her amusement at her own play on words is both self-referential, but also enjoyed as her wife shook her head fondly and reached up to pinch her cheek.
You see these two from afar in their giggling, and as always, you give them the time they always deserved until pragmatic scheduling asked of you your entrance.
Like steps to a dance.
You walked quietly to them, behind them, announcing your presence, your greetings, and at last, your joy. It was nice to see new friends in such old places.
Mio Rembrandt-Mercy was much more firm than her wife, upfront and always first as Sully shrunk behind her, despite the size difference. Her handshake to you had been resolute and businesslike in its acumen, her fingers precise and rigid and meaningful.
“I didn’t think we’d see you again,” she tells you before she looked back to Sully. Sully Mercy had seen you, and in her equal gaze her face softened. She passed her cane from right hand to left and when she gingerly offered it to you, you took it very softly, and her palm was warmed and scarred all the same. She’s a big woman, almost as big as you, or, perhaps, all comparisons were thrown off for Mio’s own shorter stature, but she is a gentle giant.
She has a kind heart.
She says your name, and she says it as if she knew you from Adam.
You know this world. You know the great violence expected of it and that had come to pass. One year ago, the colony Island Iffish was seized and gassed, hundreds of thousands perishing in it, sacrificed in the name of an operation that forfeited the life of half the Human Race. The details of this plan were not official, not given out freely by the victorious Zeon, especially when they could point to the Federation’s depravity in all the years since its inception, ending with the ploy to drop an asteroid on a lunar city. But you knew better.
Perhaps more than them, but your place here affords you certain discretions in your knowledge.
And because of this, you wanted these two here.
They were the only people you could trust to make school. A model school for Spacenoid children. Taken, nationalized even, in the name of Zeon, but a school nonetheless.
These two had the perfect pedigree for it.
You let go of Sully’s hand and you all return to looking at the tapestry, rich in its fibers of promises unfulfilled.
“We’re a long way from home,” Mio spoke. She looked up, at the high ceilings of opulence, at the other collected works of art ranging from Rome to Da Nang to Buenos Aires, from the world to space. Thousands of years collected within that place, stolen from origin because of a certain hubris or expectation and privilege of wealth that you realize that Mio knew best. “And yet it’s all the same.”
Sully had clasped her hand softly upon Mio’s shoulder. “Home is wherever we’re together. It’s not so bad.” It’s a comforting reassurance.
As had been with them, you tell them, there are roles to fill, the world in its infinite development not minding those that had experience to stay out of the way of certain paths tread on by those who would step to them. You told them that they come from a better world, and that the dance that they were a part of will yet go on, but these are new steps in an old rhythm.
“It’s not really a curse, is it?” Mio asks you.
No, it’s just a story.
Sully idly scratched her cheek in her sheepish way. She had lived a life and fought a war so that she may be so. “I don’t know about that, but from what I hear, this is… the same story? Told differently? I don’t know we’re uh- new to this.”
“It’s not our concern, though.” Mio had reassured back as Sully tried the concept in her head. “We have a literal reason to be here.”
They do.
You take one look back at that grand tapestry and its meaning, and in it you realize that it has no meaning because what it was supposed to be would never happen, so it had no meaning at all. What it was, it was not. The weight of History lifted from those who would vessel it.
You three all moved on.
It is at Sully’s pace, but you did not mind. It’s not a bad place to be. For all the wealth of the Vists they did much to create a paradise in space, because even in paradise, consciously or not, there was a dialectical opposite: Sprawling out from where they stood at the manor of Syam Vist and the heart of the Vist Foundation, they did so from the tip of the colony Industrial 7. Where they sat had been the head of that colony, and discoveries and testimonies from Vist Foundation employees and Zeonic engineers had discovered that the colony builder that had been attached to Industrial 7 was something of a communications device, a broadcasting station built in secret by Syam’s request for a truth that had come too late.
It was a bubble of paradise, a manor with real grass, real trees, cobblestone walkways that rimmed a border between it and the colony below where in its industrial organization began a city of work and making that colored it gray.
It was depopulated now, but not out of genocide. Most of the population of Industrial 7 had been Anaheim Electronics’ employees, and when Anaheim had nearly dissolved in the Vist Family’s dissolution and then the Earth Federation’s loss of the war, the civil unrest in the colony that had brewed was dissolved by Zeonic and Zeon’s military stepping in: the offer to work for them instead of languishing with a failing company in a standalone colony separated from the rest of the Sides attractive to all. What had been left were the stubborn or those who simply knew Industrial 7 as home.
A dozen Musai cruisers had been towing Industrial 7 into Side 3. These remnants of Dozle Zabi’s fleet had been without true commander, so a certain officer by the name of Garahau had been assigned these vessels on middling orders throughout the Earth Sphere. There was no real directive for them like her Highness’s Kycilia’s fleet who were enforcing her will in Side 3, or Garma’s ground forces who, as his last orders before he resigned to marry an Earthnoid elite wife, promoted and ordered General Ral to maintain security of Earth.
Aimless, without heading save for the day-to-day expectations.
You could feel it: the weight of nothing whose pressure had been indistinct but real for all those that now lived, as if dying in the War had been the expectation and no future plan existed.
As Sully found herself a bench before the star scape beyond, Industrial 7 rolling beneath them, you and Mio stood before that expanse separated by that glass and you talked on still.
You told her that M’Quve fought long and hard to claim Industrial 7 as his own, but you made a good case to her Highness that the precious art of the Vist Foundation could still be managed by him, but the rest of this colony, now totally unaccounted for, could act as a sanctuary for a new demographic now numerous: Orphaned children.
You told her that you came to the idea because you remembered them, and it was what she would’ve wanted, referring to Sully.
“The work is never done.” Mio sighed.
Unfortunately, you responded, knocking knuckled against the glass. You both looked up, and in the distance you both saw it: Earth. So blue, so green, so distinct against the smear of stars in the heavens amidst the blackness.
“This colony, it’s ours now?”
You nodded. All preparations and paperwork had been overseen and settled. Their NGO had been set up and verified by the Zeon High Council and funds would be made available to them, but money would still need to be raised otherwise. Mio grumbled. She could handle that. “Maybe I can sell all that art to M’Quve.”
“I’d like to keep some.” Sully had stood up, having rested her perpetual ache as she joined you two at the border, resting her head against the cool glass. “I was never an artist, but- but I know that it’s important to have. It’s always on my curriculums.”
Sully the Superintendent. Super Superintendent.
She knows children because she was one, and perhaps, more than most, remembered so. The vulnerability, the powerlessness felt by a child, she knew very much so.
“Of course, dear.” Mio settled.
“Mm.” Sully looked on, looking up at the stars, looking at their constellations. “Different, but the same… Even on Mercury, they still are the same… I guess people are too, huh?”
You nodded, tiredly sighing. For better or worse.
“I-… I…” she was forming a thought, hanging on that word as she closed her eyes and let it come to her as you and Mio waited. “I read about the family that was here, that owned all of this. When I was first making my first schools, it was important to know about who came before because everyone always had a part in the world, even if it didn’t seem like it. But this Vist family they seemed… they were…” she smiled at her wife. “They reminded me of your dad, Mio****.”
Sully said her name so quietly as if to not invoke olden rules, but she had always been a rule breaker.
“Yeah,” Mio grimaced. “I see it.”
“Mister Vist… I mean, the grandfather, he seemed so knowing of the way the world was supposed to be. Not like- not like if he had plans, but rather, he just knew that it was supposed to be this way and not that way.” Speaking this much had seemed to wind her, but she went on. “I heard that… before this war, his family said he was scared of the future as it was coming, but… something changed, and he was scared of something that did not happen… I’m not sure how to say it.” She pressed her fingertips together, as if gathering thoughts within their momentary circles.
Mio chuckled. “This is why she’s the teacher.”
“He was scared of the fact that something was not happening that should have.”
You thought on it a moment until speaking. You said that for those with infinite power and wealth, it seemed, to not know of something was an aberration, and the Vist family did very well to try to make such things impossible in their order.
Sully was quiet. Her forehead still against the glass, her scars on her face where the ruins of men’s plans for her body were abundant and still aching. You never thought you would see her like this: an adult woman, but this was a future that came, because it would.
“I don’t know if I want to do this.” You barely heard her words.
“Sully?” Mio stepped forward again, but the curvature of the dome could not allow her to close the distance, not so much so as she had to lean on the glass herself. In ordered pairs, their reflections conversed as they did.
She took a long time to answer.
Somewhere distant, you wondered what the others were doing. You wondered what the soldiers of the Federation in their remnants in Side 1 and the Earth had been viewing as their future and if they too had feared the future. You wondered of those like Luio or Yashima, whose families destined them to service in Capital’s name, regardless of a political master. You wondered of rebellions brewing, of rebels born in war whose conflict that now seeded with them would have to come alive in different ways. You wondered as you did, as this world became, where it was going.
You wondered what became of the children of Side 7.
The children. Always the children suffering.
You’d have to give the school over to Doctor Flanagan and, knowing of his plans, his students, left unbidden by failure and proven by victory, you shuddered.
The Newtype had been discovered. They were real, among the living and soon to be born.
You needed this school to be open. You needed them to run it.
But you did not impress upon them. You could not. Would not.
They’ve been through enough.
“I wonder what it must be like to have your entire life know that it was all going one way. That certainty. No different way except what was to happen. That’s…” Sully spoke on. She closed her eyes. “Who’s to say that we won’t just end up repeating our roles in this story?”
“Sully…” Mio said, her name distressed. “We did it once before.”
“But as us. We’re not us here. This isn’t Mercury. This isn’t…” She let drag, and all knew what she meant. Sully looked past Mio to you. “Are you sure?”
You told them the truth, without preamble, as you knew it so.
No, you weren’t sure.
You told them that this was an unusual time and place, as was the course of History always to be sure, but this time especially had been such a uneasy and unknown thing that had not precedence in all knowledge and that it was what Syam Vist feared: that which could never happened, which people felt in the air.
There was a right way that the world should have gone, or perhaps, people had felt that this was the wrong way.
The repetition of History as some people might think as concrete was only one way of viewing that progression, and some with more nuance would say it was not a repetition as much as it was a rhyme, as was her fear.
No, you said, with such a view gifted to you by certain writers seemingly as you spoke it, for the first time, the Universal Century is new, as you were.
Sully lifted her head from the glass and she stared down at Industrial 7’s true body, branches and geometric designs of pipes and smokestacks and facilities. “As I was.” she repeated.
As children before her, as heroes preceding.
Her story was one in a long line of the rest.
(A dance.)
(A curse.)
(The story.)
“I think about it, sometimes.” Sully blinked away, her eyes were wet for some reason. “About what could have been for us.”
She thought about years of schooling as a student that never was. A list that was completed without drama. She thought about a simple life, without duels, without witches, without the pain that would always be a part of her that still fulfilled her dream of opening a school on Mercury. She thought of her mother alive still. Without the hatred in her heart. She thought of the father she never knew, and what it must have been like to grow up with a family.
She then thought of others and their futures that never came. She thought of the Fourth, and his life ended. She thought of the Fifth, and the woman that never became with him. She thought of second chances for brothers and different choices for those who had only one, and then, at last, she thought of her bride.
She thought of, in one course of History, that she made it to Earth and she disappeared as she wanted, and that perhaps, was a good life for her too.
“Are you not happy with what did happen?” Mio reached out but half-way, unsure, young as they still were.
“I am happy, I could not be happier.” Sully declared, reached out that half-way and threading fingers where they fit so perfectly, where matching rings clinked, and out from their sleeves the bracelets of snow men matching found each other again. “But I feel- I feel sad now, for the futures in my past.”
So profound and abstract, and yet said with emotion.
“What if my best is not better here? What has happened here is-“
“What has happened.” Mio answered in her own way, and then hers. “We can only move forward, right?” she said so hushed that you were not meant to hear it. She moved closer until her head leaned upon her chest, and Sully remembered who she was and why. She dipped her head into Mio’s hair and let settle her heart.
“I’m sorry. I-“ Sully remembered you were here after a moment, looking at you. “There are people that are in need, and you think we can help them.”
You thought about that tapestry a lot. The one back in the manor. That which internal logic and mythos was attached to by the old man and now was an irony.
The beast of possibility. You said it, you told it to her.
You told them that that tapestry depicted in some meanings the beast of possibility where all futures could come about and yet in that Syam Vist realized that the futures that would not come to pass would still affect the present just as the past that was no longer there was still impinging on the present. The beast became a beast to him as was the madness that ruled over his ends.
People expected, consciously or unconsciously, that the course of the world that should have happened did not, and in their silent mourning in the end of war for what might have happened.
You told them, at last, that they were needed to run this school, because if past and future affected the now as she had just experienced, then why not the partition and version of History that they were familiar of, for upon their conditions, they were precluded from a certain corruption that existed in that place.
You told them that if any were to make a school for children to be trusted, you told them that their hearts were not suspect to the corruption of this time of times.
You told them that this world needed what it did not have, and it was them.
They were themselves beasts of possibilities, and who else did children need at a school?
Give them more futures to believe in and not to mourn in their passing or dread in their coming.
Sully was silent, Mio was silent, still comforting her wife in embrace, but Sully was thinking of it. She thought for a long time.
She finally spoke carefully. “Are you not a professor? You sound like…”
“You sound like a stuck up English teacher.” Mio groaned.
It was with your laugh that allowed Sully to follow.
This was all theory, all ideology, you told them both. The literal actions which you asked for them, it would be a story like anything else, but one they knew, for better or worse. To make a school in an aftermath to a war, and if anything they needed, they could ask.
“Bring me children.” Sully asked immediately, affirmation and confidence in her words now. “I’ll give them their chance.”
“Get us teachers, because I’m not letting her do another 200 large class again.” Mio demanded, and that you could do.
Real demands, real world, back to the time and place.
There was one condition, however, to their stay here at Industrial 7.
“Oh?” They both raised eyebrows at your insinuation.
You told them the condition, and it was not any bother to them at all.
You told them that you argued one more favor for this place and that was of all the Vist Family, of all the sons and daughters and children, you would allow only in residence with, of course help, the mistress of Cardenas Vist who had been wronged herself, and in irony her reprieve.
You told them that Anna Links should enjoy a nice home for her pains.
“What pains?” Sully asked delicately.
The pain of being a mother.
The two had basically sprinted, even Sully, at your revelation to where this woman could be found. They found her in Syam Vist’s chamber, where the once blackness of a holographic void was replaced with an ocean view, where whales and fish swam freely and alive all for the delight of a single person.
They came over to her, and she was beautiful, sitting in a rocking chair at the side of a cradle.
Sully saw a shared frailty in this woman and as they approached, they did so quietly so as to not disturb the baby boy, not more than three months old, pawing up at an aquatic world beyond him which his mother would hope he would one day see.
You all peered down and saw the child, and the two visitants had told her that her being there was no bother, and that anything that she needed, to please ask.
She had one request, and perhaps the only one she wanted to make:
“I would like my son to be the first student at your school.”
Sully beamed, and Mio had huffed some amusement at it. Such an easy request. Such a natural one. Anna had looked at you and thanked you with honest eyes for the future that you presented to her. That maybe this time it could be better.
Sully had kneeled down, very quietly, very slowly, before Anna’s child in the crib.
“And what is your name?” she smiled, and the child reached up to grab Sully’s own finger.
But she already knew.