Being a transcription of some of the last writings of Lillian Alexandra Anderson Satou, penned in her own hand in the month of June in the Year of Our Lord 2074, and dedicated to the memory of old friends and the glory of God. The original documents may be found in the care of the archivist of the Church of St. Stephen, in which graveyard her mortal remains are interred.
Lilly: Testament7 (T +50)
It’s evening now, and Hideaki has cooked an excellent dinner from the resources I commandeered from the local resource market earlier today. He will leave tomorrow for Japan, still in some sense his home after all these years, as long as there are certain gravestones that remain standing somewhere in Saitama. I have to write this last part because I want to, because in some sense I would not be Lilly Satou if I did not. We are all creatures of circumstance; sometimes we fight it, sometimes we fall victim to it, occasionally there are triumphs of the spirit.
In any event, 2064 turned out to be one of the ghastliest years of my life. I am happy that it is now a decade away, which puts some safe distance between me and its events. I am glad that Hana and Hideaki have given me my own rooms, where in the end, I hope to find rest for my soul. This high in the mountains, I can still see the sun even though it is getting late. I do not see it as most of you do, but I sometimes wonder if the glories of ultraviolet and infrared, or the things I think of when I see those colours, are what the rest of you see.
And so also it is with the things of the spirit.
*****
In October 2063, Akira finally confessed that she was dying. What could not be cured in that age of the nanomachine? There were still a few things—system failure, genetic damage, mysterious debilities and disabilities. Somehow, her liver had turned on her, and had already sent invading particles and tendrils into the rest of her body.
We had a few months left. Akira swore at me when I said I would stay the course. I will not remember her extraneous words, but she said, “Go to their wedding! We don’t have much family, you need to do that for family!”
“But you’re family too, you’ve sometimes been my only family!” I sobbed. The voice from my mouth was unrecognizable to me: an old lady’s querulous, trembling utterances.
“Lils, I’ll still be here when they’ve done the deed. Go. Give Misha my love, and Shizune. God knows I’ve not loved enough in this life.”
“God doesn’t know any such thing. You’ve always loved me.”
“And you’ve always loved the boy.”
It was a low blow, but it sobered me. “I need to spend time with you. We’ve never had enough of that.”
“There’ll be enough.” She coughed, a terrible, hollow sound. I heard the tubes and wires around her shift restlessly.
She worsened slowly into December. It was like waiting for a spring that would never come. The day before I was scheduled to leave for Narita, she was shifted carefully into an intensive care unit because her lungs were failing. She was all grey, like a marble statue, when they told me.
I cancelled my flight. She did not complain, but I could sense her body protesting.
I called Shizune, but I was unable to say what I wanted to say.
[Lilly? Is it Akira?]
I tapped out, [Yes.]
[Would you like us to fly over?]
[No.]
Yes, yes, please, I thought frantically, but would not say it.
[We will come as soon as we can. We might have to fly up separately. Will she last?]
I put my phone aside, surrounded by the beeps and pulses of the machinery. They had stabilized her with infusions of green goo. I was unclear about what that was, but I did not want my sister to die. I did not bother to ask her opinion.
The end came a few weeks later, on 6th January, after everyone else had saved the world, or whatever it was that they thought they had saved. Hana and Hideaki were outside and Misha was with me. Akira had summoned her into the room, still smelling of the airport. Misha held our hands together, because I had no strength left to do it. True to herself, Akira’s last words were something rather crude. Then she stopped moving, and I felt as if the world had stopped turning too.
The one thing I remember most clearly was Misha saying, “Bring Lilly back to Andorra with you! She won’t last one more summer here. She’s got nothing left except you both! Shicchan and I talked about it. We don’t mind her coming back with us, but I think she doesn’t want to be in Japan.” There was not a single trill in her voice, only a kind of desperate earnestness.
It was too much kindness, from someone I had once been unkind to. My friendship with Misha had never been something I had really thought about. In that moment, it became something I wished I had. But I had no more tears, no more space left for regrets.
*****
Shizune had always been a very busy person. Forty years earlier, rumours had had it that she had worked Hisao to death. I had discounted those, simply because it was not her nature. She would have killed herself from overwork first.
It was she who accepted my power of attorney and put the business in order. She knew enough to work with Hideaki and his international team to set my small group of restaurants up as a Katayama subsidiary. I was in no shape to protest, but I did ask why. My cousin replied: [Rika will outlive all of us, and she believes that she owes us many things. The children don’t want anything to do with business. And lastly, because I am not the one to manage your restaurants. We found that out almost sixty years ago, yes?] As she went through the points, I could hear her ticking them off on her fingers, just as she did then.
I could tell that she was trying to cheer me up, so I returned as brave a smile as I could. Hana and Hideaki left their children with me, both girls now grown and in their thirties. Kit was small and neat, very much like Shizune, but Shiny, like her godmother, was loud—and unlike her godmother, tall and thin. Kit was pregnant; I remember joking that Hana was too young to be a grandmother, and Hideaki replying, “She only looks that way!” and getting thumped by his wife.
It was the end of April, and spring had returned to the city, by the time things were settled and I was finally ready to leave Edinburgh for good. All of us said goodbye to the Church of the Sacred Heart, where Kit, accompanied by her husband Kin, and her sister Shiny tried hard to imagine their parents getting married. Shiny said, “Vids aren’t enough, Aunt Lilly. It’s the whole feel of the place. And the old smells.”
I would miss those smells, and the place. Soon, I would be Dunedain no more.
*****
“I am NOT too frail to travel,” I hissed at Hana, but my friend ignored my outrage.
“Y-yes, you are. The doctor said your body was still recovering from everything. You have to stay at home. Father Josep will be checking on you in case you need anything, and I’ve set all the alerts up in the local Net.”
“But it’s Shizune’s seventy-fifth! She was in Edinburgh for mine…” I was wailing piteously. This was most unlike my usual self, but the thought of spending spring alone in the mountains was a terrible one. I wanted the company.
“Doctor Muñoz says you have to s-stay. He won’t risk his favourite patient collapsing again.”
So I stayed, almost under house arrest, as my closest friend and her husband, my cousin, flew back to Japan for the big celebration. They were there in person for what happened on the night of 6th May. Across the world, the newsdrones caught Shizune’s beautiful smile. I had my interface running a live feed, and I felt as if I could touch her face. And that was all they caught, for the smile stayed even when there was nothing left behind it.
I turned my face to the cold plastered wall and wept. I did not want to blame anyone, nor to mourn yet another loss. I was not weeping for myself, or at least that is what I thought. I wept for Misha instead.
*****
The years passed. With old Akira and Shizune gone, and only Hideaki and Hana left, my feelings told me that almost all that could be lost had indeed been lost. There were lovely children, and they had children of their own, but none of them were really mine.
Young Akira had visited most often during the Edinburgh days. Although a full generation lay between us, he claimed I fascinated him. He used to say, “You do not know how beautiful you are, Aunty Lils. How would you know? But I will tell you.” He has not stopped telling me, although marriage has reduced the frequency somewhat.
He also once told me his thoughts on the matter of Akiko’s anger towards Shizune and me. Perhaps it existed because Hisao might have had a longer life if we had treated him differently. I was upset, and pointed out that if I had treated Hisao differently, we might have stayed together, and different children would have been born. He coughed gently, in his usual way, and said, “Ah, but we would not have known that, and you would have been happy.”
Kit and Shiny—Kitsune and Shiina, to give them their proper names—were not as profound. It was nice to be admired, but young Akira tended to put me up on a pedestal and wear my feet away with adoration at times. The girls were not like that at all.
Kit graduated from a tiny girl who used to hide behind Hana’s legs, to an intense young lady who admired Shizune and was always asking me questions about food and wine. Her idea of fun included reading science fiction sagas competitively with her mother, interspersed with cooking eggs in a hundred different ways for my breakfast, or accompanying me on my rounds as I visited my eateries.
Shiny had been lanky from the beginning, a tall and ungainly sprout. She grew flamboyant and enjoyed ‘hanging out’ with her godmother whenever Misha was around. No matter how many desserts she consumed, she remained skinny. She often engaged in rude verbal fisticuffs with her father, and one day had her hair dyed green and permed into beaded spirals just to spite him. Even Misha balked at that.
By the time I came to Andorra, they were no longer living with their parents, although they still retained rooms in the tall house that my friends had built in the shadow of the mountains. Shiny had gone to school in Montpellier and was practicing medicine in Toulouse, so I saw her every weekend, her huge motorbike trundling up the steep road most Saturdays for lunch.
Kit was more ‘Japanese’, whatever that might mean. She preferred life in large cities, and her base had been Tokyo for a while before she had moved to Osaka. I saw her less frequently, but she never forgot to bring me a little gift of something new to eat. I once asked her, in jest, whether she would consider something that was not food. She looked shocked, and then crestfallen. I reassured her that food was something I enjoyed, and never made that joke again.
*****
I shall end my writing soon. Very little remains to be told, but I have just remembered a little incident that took place perhaps four years ago.
Natsume visited once, with news of our friend, the shadow conspirator. “He’s fine. Always was one for the gadgets and whatnot. Keeps fit, but not too obvious. My Kinnosuke likes you, by the way. Says you are very kind. Kit and he want to call their third child Lillian or something. Told them to ask you.”
“My, surely you’re joking. That’s no fit name for a Japanese girl!” I laughed.
“Kin thinks that more Japanese girls should look like Aunt Lilly. It’s the curse of a generation brought up on globalized anime and holomanga. There’s no place for authenticity, these days. Only we old dinosaurs slowly perishing in distant places. So many of us have gone.”
I turned my sensorium on her. Nat had gone thin, but was still fit. I could sense the little nanomachines industriously doing their good works in the parish of her body. The arthritis was gone, and so were many of the weaknesses of her youth. Age had left its marks on her, however, as it had with all of us.
“Do you really want to live forever?” I said to her, only realizing belatedly that I was quoting the lyrics of a long-forgotten song.
She grinned, and I could almost feel the old Natsume, a grouchy teenager of more than six decades past, sitting quietly in the corner of an old classroom, stealthily taking out her notebook and preparing to scribble down her observations of us all. “Do you want to pay the price?” she quoted back at me.
*****
It is the Year of Our Lord 2074 now, and I will be going to Mass in the morning. Tonight’s work is over—and if I have said what should be said, well, then that should be all there is.
Dear reader, do you think all this has been a tragedy? I am eighty-five years old. I have outlived many of my peers, and I have had their children come to me and treat me like a goddess, or a saint, or an object of pity and sadness. But all I am is Lillian Alexandra Anderson Satou. I have lived, and loved, and ridden a beautiful horse who was devoted to me. I have had all the days of a long and fruitful life. This is what I have been, this is who I have been.
Do you know, or would you even care, that each night I say ‘good night’ to Hisao first, and sometimes also to others who have gone before me? It is not just the sentimentality of an old lady in the mountains. It is about being human. You see, it was never all about ‘the boy’, even if on some lonely nights I indeed wished it had been. It has sometimes been about remembrance—both holding on, and letting go. Mostly, it has been about doing things that were important to me—and celebrating the lives of those whom I have had the pleasure to know.
I sat with Hana once as she handled a fragile old book of poetry. She had given it to Hisao during their university days; before his death, he had given it back to her. Hana quoted to me the poem whose last line reads: “To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”
That, my dear reader, is advice I should have taken once upon a time. But the rest of that poem says many other things. When Rika told me about her great project, of what she intended to do, I sent her a link to it.
“You are most correct, respected elder,” she said—some habits never go away, “It is indeed not too late. Will you come with us?”
She sounded as if she were only thirty-five, not a day older. I remembered my afternoon tea with Natsume. I smiled and said to her, “I do not want to live forever.”
END
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