mara sov mommy issues compilation
this is long uh. sorry.
transcript: So then. The brave voyagers' fate, the timeless birthing-place, my Milton reenactment, the ruins made ours, the riven twice riven, the daughter's blood scabbed hard on mother's wound. All things told, all truth revealed, if through mist and mystery. If you have grace, then see our sorrows, but swallow back your tears. We were made to pay this price. I led us to our fate. End transcript.
these are all going to be screenshots followed by transcripts, with no added text.
"You can't keep doing this," Uldwyn complains, as the big woman stares at Mara in awe. "Mom is going to die of worry."
"I really don't care what risks you take," Mara's mother sighs. "That's the deal we made, my little yellow star—"
She is also very blunt: "Mara, even when you were little, you wanted me to treat you like an adult. So I have. But you remember what I told you, don't you? If you don't want to be my daughter, I can't watch over you like a mother would. I can't put you first, like a mother would. I will always be your friend, but I have to make my own choices too."
"I didn't do anything. People liked my captures. People left me presents, spare parts, tips—then Uldwyn got into it, you know how he is—"
"Don't!" Osana wheels on her. "For shame, Mara. You know your brother will follow anywhere you lead. You know he's not capable of the same, ah," her lips twitch, "imperial remove. You knew he'd brag about you living on the hull—and you let him do it. It is one thing to have a particular power over people, Mara. But it is another to deny that you are using it."
She has gone outside Yang Liwei to die in starlight. She cannot bear to let anyone see her fear or her awe at the scale of destruction or her pity for the billions of souls dying in darkness back around Sol. She cannot be among the other crew as they cling to each other and whisper reassurances; not even with her mother. She cannot surrender her mystery.
So she kicks off the hull on fifty kilometers of tether.
But there's no starlight to die in. The darkness is absolute. Gravity waves tug on her line, pulling her back toward Yang and then hurling her away. In time, she feels another vibration in the line. "Sister," the tether transmits. "I'm coming out to get you."
Brother, she thinks, you'll lose yourself trying to follow me.
"Mara!" Uldwyn shouts. "Mara, you're too far out!"
Mara thinks of her mother's face. She hears Osana say: I can't watch over you like a mother would. I have to make my own choices now.
She fires the detach command into the tether.
But there remained in the forests many tribes of huntresses who preferred their lightfooted freedom-from-comfort-and-duty to the painstaking surplus of the city. Among these tribes, Mara lived with her brother—whose name had returned as Uldren—and with Osana, their mother. It is said that Osana lived as a negotiator and that her son brought her news from other tribes, for he was a scout and hunter of renown. Mara dwelt alone on a mountaintop.
Up these hills comes a man and his mother. The man moves with practiced wariness. But his mother is tired of walking, so she sits down on a giant melon and bellows, "MARAAA!"
A fountain of startled birds shoots up into the dawnlight. Not far away, the woman looks up from the broken body of a juvenile gray parrot and softly says, "Mom?"
That night over the fire, after Mara and Osana talk around the oddness of long separation,
A shear force as powerful as tectonics has divided Mara's heart. She wants to sit down with her mother and ask her everything, but she is afraid of Osana's insight. "What brings you to my little camp, Mother?"
"Lies," Osana says. "Lies and secrets. And the girl who didn't want to be my daughter, who doesn't know the difference between them."
"I know the difference between a girl and a daughter," Mara says, purposefully misunderstanding. The drip pan sizzles beneath golden meat. Her stomach growls. "Your daughter picks up your baton at the end of the race, and goes on living the life you've taught her. You wouldn't want that, Mother. Because then I'd be all your fault."
"That's true," Osana sighs, "but you know what I meant."
Osana takes her portion of pheasant meat and rolls it in the bowl of sweet cooked nuts her daughter has prepared. The stars are coming out over the mountains, and the forest birds sing. "This place is good," she says. "This world. Whatever you remember of our lives before, Mara… I know they cannot have been this good."
"No," Mara says. "But you were both with me. I hope you always will be."
"Always," her brother promises.
"Eat well." Mara claps her hands and stands. "Tomorrow we journey."
"Where?" her mother asks.
"I have star charts to share." And heresies to tend to. And a new eagle-crow to find for her bereft brother.
Yet she has never been so lonely or so worried for the future. Mother has told her that she, Mara, uses her power over Uldren too freely; that she must learn to stop, or her mother will no longer be her friend.
"Conventional relativity would suggest that time outside an event horizon passes quickly compared to a clock within, but our universe has a peculiar relationship with its mother. Thousands of years have passed”
"I know." Alis lays a hand on Mara's, and for a moment the touch almost makes Mara sigh in gratitude: to be seen, to be known, without revulsion. Then Alis' old strength pins her palm to the table.
"Please," Mara begs. "Please don't say that."
Alis Li rises from her chair. "I'll support your fleet," she says. "I'll use every favor and connection I have to get your Hulls completed and through the gateway—and I will do it so that I can hasten your departure from this world. I will do it out of hate for you; I will do it so that every good and great thing we achieve here will ever after be denied to you, you snake. No forgiveness. Do you understand me? It is unforgivable. Go. Go!"
"I'd be very glad if you didn't tell my mother," Mara says.
Mara thinks of her mother. She doesn't want to but she does, and the memory blindfolds her and muzzles her and plugs her ears so she can hear nothing but Osana's voice on that final night. They're tipsy together, and the evening has wrapped around to morning. Now they sit side by side, mother and daughter, watching the sun rise over the Chriseiad range from Osana's little ranch house on the tundra.
"I'm not coming with you," Osana says.
Mara has been so afraid of this answer for so long that she actually giggles. This can't be happening, of course. This is a nightmare; one of those stress dreams where your powers of persuasion and manipulation fail. "Sure, Mom," she says, "you've got a ranch to run, after all. More?"
"No thank you." Osana squints into the dawn. Little age creases surround her eyes, illegible encryption, unbroken despite Mara's centuries of effort. The rising light draws a tear. "You'll have to send my goodbyes to Uldren. He's not speaking to me."
"What?" Mara gasps, as if this is the real shock, and not losing her mother forever. "Why?"
"Because I already told him I wasn't coming with you. I'm happy here."
"Mom," Mara says, with rising anger, "I'm happy here too. That's not the point—" A conversation that did not so much end as beat itself to an unsustainable emotional pulp, hours later. No catharsis. No closure.
The Hull screams with thrust. Mara's suit floods with cushioning gel. She thinks of her mother's face, trying to fix it perfectly in her mind, and her sensorium tries, vainly, to open a channel to Osana. As the Hull plunges into the singularity, the last thing Mara sees is the mournful error message: No connection. No connection. No connection. Cannot connect to Osana.
Numberless are the spaces that surround the universe. Subordinate and superordinate are their relationships to the intrinsic world-that-is-only-itself. We pass now through analogy space that will reify what was once subject into object. That power I held, which was agonist to a mother's rapprochement, will be realized and reified.
Last of all, leaving Mara imperious with disdain toward her own feelings, curtly aloof toward all who asked her what troubled her, it showed her Osana, who had remained behind.
First of all, Mara went into the gardens and planted a flower for her mother, who she thought must still live: though she might by now have forgotten her first daughter and her first son.
"Mother," she said, "I asked to be your sister rather than your daughter, and so I denied you the chance to tell me your secret, the mothertruth that is mapped in the negative space defined by the lies mothers tell their daughters. Well, here are my secrets. I love you. I have always loved you. Without you, I could never have been anything at all."
Shuro Chi: Osana Sov. She does not deserve the respect my lady grants her with that statue. Uldren argued against putting it up; he thought Osana should be forgotten. But Queen Mara chose to remember.
Queen Mara Sov: If it is still unclear, the twin kestrels represent Uldren and myself. Their mother is Osana Sov. Uldren found Osana's prescriptions restrictive. I never considered her a mother myself, but her dreams of foresight interested me. We both saw calamity looming, Osana and I. In the Distributary, where the Awoken were born, we were eternal. Osana would hide there forever rather than face the enemy. When we left to form the Reef, many chose to hide with her. You're done here. I'll send for you when more skews reveal themselves.
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