“Thank you.”
The bed was already neatly made up, along with Yan’s own blankets. The cups and teapot too were all washed, dried, and stacked on the bedside table. Everything was clean, orderly, and vacant. Yan stood in the doorway with the takeout bag in hand, looking over the now empty room.
There was no letter, no farewell.
The chair where Yan had spent the first nights sleeping in was graced with a neatly draped sandalwood mala. A pair of shoes that Iris had refused to wear earlier that day were tucked below, polished to perfection.
The shop was out of hot and sour soup, so Yan had bought beef broth and noodles instead, thinking Iris was well enough to stomach them. He placed the two bowls of soup on the bedside table. Spice mixed with sandalwood as Yan passed the mala beads between his fingers. A mixture of rage, and grief, and self-pity, and loneliness, and fear, and affection swelled in his stomach. But it was mostly affection, painful and bitter affection, the kind that sprouted from time and distance and missed opportunities. It was a reminder that he had been so close to something he had been searching for his entire adult life. Everything else, every other emotion, was just seasoning.
Yan passed the mala between his fingers over and over and over, like he would never move from the spot again. He replayed a moment from the ship. Iris, bloody and dying, the memory forever seared on his mind.
“My dear Yan,” Iris had whispered, “please show me your home. My dear, mydear—that’s the word, isn’t it? That’s what I’ve been trying to say all along.”
Yan gave the mala one last look and wound it around his left wrist.
EPILOGUE
Early morning light splintered through stained glass and fell across Yan’s glasses. He squinted and shifted from the antiquated podium for the fourth time since he began the lecture. The suit jacket pinched at his shoulders, and his shoes cramped his little toes, and he was uncomfortable in every other conceivable way, unsettled, and itching to push the corpse of this lesson over its finish line. Since his return to Sychi, lecturing had become a nearly unbearable task. His attention remained scattered, stretching thin between the events of theNicaeaand the seven-hundred strong class in front of him.
“And so, early AI formation remains a largely unexplored area of enquiry that would benefit from new, rigorous, and mixed-methods approaches,” he concluded and dismissed his class.
For the first four months after his return, Yan threw himself into every effort to locate Iris. It was simple enough to fabricate a research study about AI/human surveillance on gate-adjacent stations and easier still to request access to the surveillance data from said station AIs. It took him a day to write the code that searched through the video data for anyone who resembled Iris. He had limited visuals from when Iris had transited through Doshua the first time. After four months of searching, he still had nothing.
When the last of his students had shuffled out of the auditorium, Yan permitted himself a moment’s reprieve and slumped against the podium.
For the first four months, he had been convinced Iris left because Yan was unable to deliver him the hot and sour soup he had promised, that Iris had somehow known this fact and left before the disappointment ever arrived. Those days, Yan slept with his apartment door unlocked, hoping that Iris would somehow find his way to him, silently praying for what he knew to be impossible.
Then the seasons turned and Yan, at last, succumbed to the reality that Iris simply had not wished to remain, and no amount of soup would have made him stay. In the months that followed, Yan locked the front door before settling in for another restless night and paused his religious study of the surveillance footage. Now, spent both physically and emotionally, still resting on the podium, he was sufficiently distracted to miss the closing door skirt the edge of a white robe, to miss a pair of bare feet as they silently pattered down the steps of the auditorium.
Someone cleared their throat—loudly.
Yan’s head shot up from the podium, eyes resting on the robe-clad figure that stared at him from the depths of the auditorium. “Iris?”
A crystalline laugh was his answer. “I’m afraid not,” the woman before him spoke as she took several deliberately slow steps down the last of the steps. “But now I see what has kept my brother from returning home. Professor Fukui, I presume?”
Yan nodded. The robes, the cleanly shaven head, the nearly glowing white mala around the woman’s wrist all gave away her vocation as a Vessel. The intensity with which she glared at Yan made him brace in return. It was strange enough for a Vessel tofind him at the institute, stranger still that she would take this tone with him.
“What do you want?”
The woman smiled, pearly teeth glistening. “What Iwantis some sweets and some meats, and maybe a month to sleep. The more accurate question would be what is it Ineed.”
She was nearly at the podium now. They matched in height, yet somehow, the Vessel was far more imposing. Yan’s thoughts involuntarily went to Iris as he had seen him last: injured, distraught, but ever stubborn. It must have been a professional trait. “What is it that you need, Vessel?”
At once, a crisp envelope rested on the podium. “I need you to deliver this to Vessel Iris promptly.”
“I’m not your errand boy,” Yan managed to spit out. “Deliver it yourself.”
“I’d better not,” the woman said and gave him a little wink. “Anyway, I think you need the reunion much more than I.” She nudged the envelope towards Yan with the tip of her finger. “If you agree, I will tell you where you may find my brother. As far as I’m aware, your search has so far been fruitless.”
“What’s in the envelope?”
“Family matters.”
A thousand questions rushed through Yan’s mind. If the Vessel could truly tell him where Iris was, what would he say when he got there? Would Iris even want to see him? But any answer would be better than silence. And it was all silence without Iris there. It was silence in his home, now empty, hollow, cold. It was silence when Yan woke up every morning and silence as he tossed and turned, unable to sleep. It was this silence in his thoughts that he was acutely aware of now that everything in his life had splintered in two: before and after theNicaea. What a difference even brief company had made.Realcompany. The company of a stranger who felt more familiar than anyone Yan had ever known. The mere idea of spending the rest of his life lecturing, conducting research, supervising students, as if none of it had happened, made Yan want to scream.
“Where’s Iris?” he asked softly.
The Vessel cocked her head to the side and ran her eyes across Yan’s frame. “You will take this to him then?”
