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Pilar turned the pin over in her hand, running her finger over the cold silver and smooth, colorful enamel. At first glance, she’d thought the gift was to give her another gay accessory to pin to her jacket, but on closer inspection, the bright rainbow had what appeared to be a brilliant gold medallion shining in the center.
“What is it?” She asked. “The gold circle in the middle.”
“It’s the Cusco flag,” Beam explained excitedly. “I’ve been talking Baltimore’s ear off about this for weeks. It’s a bit personal, and it takes some explaining, so I wanted to give it to you before the big party. You know, sister to sister.”
Beam had always been an only-child, and this was Pilar’s first birthday since she’d adopted Beam as an elder sister, so she was excited to dote on her. Pilar could already see that Beam had two more gifts wrapped and poorly hidden behind her back, but she was in no rush to end this bonding moment.
The pin was beautiful, Pilar couldn’t deny, but she was nonetheless confused. “And Cusco is…?”
“It’s a city on Earth– don’t make that face,” Beam said, before Pilar even had a chance to make a face. “It’s in Peru, the city where my parents were born. My aunts and uncles still live there. I may have grown up halfway across the world, but this is my home, and my family… and it’s yours too.”
Pilar smiled. She never thought she’d be happy to receive a token of a city on Earth. She’d been an unflinching red-blooded daughter of the red planet for all of her nineteen years, with no interest whatsoever in the planet they’d had to fend off multiple invasions from.
“Thank you, Beam, I love it,” she said, and hugged Beam tight. “You can’t know what it means to me that you’ve welcomed me into your family.”
Beam smiled. “But it’s not… just that, Pilar,” Beam said. “I mean, it’s not just yours because you and I are, you know, sisters now. It’s always been yours. You’ve had so much taken away from you, I just wanted to give you something back.”
Pilar smiled again. “When we met, I mentioned that my grandparents emigrated from a Unión Sudamericana.”
“And you said you didn’t know where, I remember,” Beam said, “but I did. I recognized something familiar in your accent, and I tried to fish for information, and when you told me you had no idea where your family was from, it… honestly, babe, it broke my heart. I’d never been in Big Sister Mode before so I didn’t even realize I was shifting into it, but god, I felt for you.”
Pilar smiled wistfully. She remembered having been a bit curt with Beam when she asked about her heritage, and she had assumed at the time that Beam had politely let the subject drop, she never expected her to follow up on it.
The truth was, it was honestly a bit of a sore spot for her. Her grandparents had all died when she was very young– natural causes, nothing as traumatic as her parents’ execution– and she’d been too young at the time to know to ask them for information. When her parents were killed, they were on Earth for business. She and Sasha were left without a home, and she suddenly realized how little she’d known about her family as people, and how she now had no way of ever asking them those questions.
A lot of Pilar’s life had been spent trying to find some connection to her past, her family, and her culture. She dressed and styled herself like her late father, and Sasha often told her she even sounded like him when she spoke. If pressed, she would even admit that this is part of why she was so staunch in her Martian patriotism. It was, after all, the only cultural identity she had left.
“So,” Beam said, “when we got back to Earth, I started on a little… project. You told me your original name. María del Pilar Aguilar Amaru, and then Sasha is Sachasisa Anita Aguilar Amaru. That cinched it for me that you guys were Peruvian, Sasha’s name being Quechua. I did some digging on those last names, and found immigration records matching those surnames, in the same decade your grandparents came to Mars.”
This stunned Pilar into silence. It had never occurred to her that there might actually be records on her family she could look into.
“It looks like your mother’s family and your father’s family knew each other before they moved to Mars.”
“It’s how my parents met,” Pilar said, “they grew up together, they were best friends as children.”
“You know how Mars is, there’s more Latinos here than in all of Latin America,” Beam laughed, “few hundred years ago, we saw another round of conquistadors coming and half of us got out of dodge, and the other half dug in their heels and said ‘you won’t get me out of my home without a fight.’ Those two groups maintained ties to one another, which is why Mars will always accept refugees fleeing Earth. The Martians sent any support they could to the resistance on Earth. There were strongholds, in the mountains, of Indigenous Resistance, independent from Earth’s control.”
Pilar loved the sound of this, but it was short-lived.
“Just before your grandparents came here, the last of these communities was located and forced out,” Beam said, “it looks like your family came here because they had lost their home, and faced death back on Earth. Mars welcomed them, and they built a home there. It’s what Mars has always stood for”
“They were Peruvian,” Pilar said, repeating the words three or four times just to celebrate the fact that she could. “My family… they were Peruvian.”
Beam produced the second of the three gifts, a small but heavy parcel. “Unwrap it,” she said, “I think you’ll appreciate this one.”
Pilar complied, she couldn’t wait to see where Beam was going with it. Inside was a small metal statue of a man with long hair and an intense gaze, resting on a book with a portrait of the same man on it.
“Amaru?” Pilar asked. “Is this a relative of mine too?”
“Túpac Amaru? I mean, that’d be awesome, but I doubt it,” Beam laughed. “He fought and died for the Indigenous peoples, to free them from colonial rule. inspired billions. You’ll read all about it in the book, my old history professor Dr. Maravi wrote it.”
Pilar ran her finger along the contours of the man’s face. The prominent cheekbones and aquiline nose, so much like her own. It felt like Beam had unlocked a part of her heart that she thought she’d forever lost access to.
“I’d bet your ancestors took on his name because he was a hero of theirs,” Beam said. “It might not be information on your family specifically, but it is their history, and their culture, and I hope it makes you feel connected to them, to us,anyway. And the book’s long as fuck, you’re not gonna run out of history to dig into anytime soon.”
“Beam, this is…” Pilar said, “this is the nicest gift anyone’s ever gotten me.”
Beam grinned as though she had been caught in a prank. “Well, give it a minute.”
“What,” Pilar said anxiously, “why, what have you got planned?!”
Beam produced the third gift, a thin, flat package.
“So, before you open this one, just remember, your parents owned a mom-and-pop grocery, and that most stores stay in business by advertising,” Beam said, “okay now OPEN IT.”
Pilar tore it open and was immediately unable to continue, as she began to cry almost immediately. Her mother’s face stared out at her through the tear in the wrapping paper.
“Here, I’ll help,” Beam jumped in, and pulled the rest of it away. In a sleek black metal frame, was a coupon circular for the NewMo Mercado, proudly advertising it as a family-owned business, with a photo of the precious family who owned it. Her father, looking like he was cut from stone, with his long hair tied back and beaming through a full black beard, his muscular arms exposed by his sleeveless shirt so you could see they were painted in intricate tattoos. He held the hand of a five-year-old Pilar, who was smiling so wide her eyes couldn’t stay open, and his other arm was tightly around the waist of her mother, whose flowing hair was tucked behind her ears, and it was amazing to behold how much the baby in her arms had grown up to look like her.
“Beam, I… Beam!” Pilar couldn’t get out the full sentence. She had no photos of her parents, they had lost everything when they died. She hadn’t seen their faces since before they died. The day-care center they had been left in for a week turned them out onto the streets, and they had no other family to go to. There wasn’t even anyone to hold a funeral for them. By the time they got back to their house, the bank had already staked its claim on it and sold their possessions to cover their parents’ remaining debt on the supermarket, which naturally, the bank had also repossessed ownership of.
Pilar had assumed her parents’ faces now only existed in soft focus, fading with every passing year from her and Sasha’s distant memories. It was now as though Beam had given them back to her.
She embraced Beam and squeezed her so tight it almost hurt, and she was sure she could hear Beam’s spine pop and began to openly sob into her shoulder, expressing her thanks over and over.
“That’s about what I thought,” Beam joked, “that’s why I wanted to give you this one privately. You don’t seem like the type who likes letting people see you cry.”
“How?!” Pilar asked.
“The Free Library Of New Moyamensing has an excellent records department,” Beam explained. “And that little girlfriend of yours was very helpful getting me and Baltimore over the border to page through it. Come on, clean yourself up, we’ve got a party to get to, and I want to see you make Sasha cry with that photo too.”
Six years on, Pilar sat awaiting Ariadne to be done preparing her new tattoo, and read the letter Beam had sent her that year. The letter was written in Quechua, which the two sisters had begun learning together on her 20th birthday. Beam’s mother, a native speaker, had been thrilled at this news, and ever since, they had begun speaking it conversationally among themselves, as well as practicing it in their letters.
Every year, Beam gave Pilar another gift that connected her back to Peru, to the Inca, to her family, and this not only strengthened her newfound love for her culture back on Earth, but her pride in being a Martian, as Mars had offered a lifeline that allowed her family and her heritage to persist even through the latest attempt to stamp it out.
Pilar treasured this connection to her culture and her identity, and being able to share it with family.
The letter informed here of the excellent news from Earth– a new leader had been appointed to the Council of Sovereign Leaders of the gradually decentralizing government of Earth: the new leader of an autonomous Peru. Evidently, Peace Upendo had pushed for not only the autonomy and self-determination of the region, but also giving authority to the local Indigenous communities, and allowing them to select their own leader to send to the Council of Sovereigns.
She looked over at the framed image of her parents, and to a photograph next to it of herself, with the entire Beam family, both of her sisters and her young nieces, on her previous birthday, when Beam had organized a trip to hike the Andes, and see the ancient ruin of Machupicchu. She looked at the statue of Túpac Amaru on her bookshelf, and wondered what he’d say if he knew that his homeland was, after all these centuries, finally back in the hands of its native people.
“Sorry it took so long,” Ariadne came in, her hands clutching her tattoo gun, “even with augmented eyes, it’s a bit difficult to figure out how to work with invisible ink, on already-tattooed skin.”
“But think of how cool it’s gonna look,” Pilar said, “think of how meaningful it’s gonna be!”
“Yeah, yeah, you know I’m all in favor of you being cool and meaningful and whatever,” Ariadne says, “it doesn’t make it any faster.”
Pilar removed her top completely, and offered her shoulder to Ariadne.
“I remember giving you this spiral,” Ariadne said. “You were so sad you couldn’t remember what your dad’s real tattoo looked like, beyond that it was a spiraling shape. This was as close as we could get from memory.”
“Now I know what it is, and why he got it,” Pilar said. “It was for my mother.”
“I can just use regular ink,” Ariadne said, “turn it into the same basic design. You have a photo of him now, it wouldn’t be hard.”
“No,” Pilar said. “I don’t want to lose the reminder of what was taken from me, or the fact that even with my connection severed, I did my best with what I had.”
Ariadne eyed the special ink she’d had to write her old mentor, Blue, to get her hands on. It was infused with nanotechnology that could interface with Pilar’s nervous system, so that with a thought, she could make it visible.
“Your wish is my command, querida,” Ariadne said, applied the topical numbing lotion Sasha had given her a bottle of for tattooing purposes, and got to work carving the intricate designs into the same skin she’d put the spiral on when they were teenagers. When she was finished, she sprayed Pilar with Sasha’s topical healing spray, waited for it to take effect, and gave Pilar the signal to try it out. Pilar stood up, looked in the mirror, and thought about her father.
Taking the signal from her thoughts, the tattoo lit up a pale, ghostly white. Overlaid over the spiral on her shoulder, an image of Amaru, the serpent that shared its name with the legendary freedom fighter, her mother, and herself.
She smiled, and the tattoo faded back into its old black spiral, the one that had vexed her since she was a child with its only passing resemblance to what she remembered from her childhood.
When she looked at the new tattoo, she could practically feel her father’s strong arms around her, his bellowing laugh, the smell of his cooking. She could hear her mother’s lilting singing voice, the perfume she always wore a little too much of, and her soft hands cupping Pilar’s face.
She wondered how she could ever repay Beam for giving all of this back to her. She had asked her once, two or three years back, and gotten a loud laugh in return.
“Why would you need to repay me? We’re family!” Beam had said. “But if you insist, I do have a couple of hungry kids who I’d love to have a connection to their culture, too,” she continued, and that’s how Pilar had agreed to cook Beam and her wife and kids a large feast full of traditional Peruvian foods with Beam’s father, which is how she was able to convey Beam’s family recipes to Cookie, the crew’s chef, who would be in shortly to deliver a dish prepared special for her birthday– Papa a la Huancaína, a dish she’d had many times as a child on Mars, but had only ever heard them called “Papas de la Patria.” She had no idea they weren’t originally a Martian dish.
But she was glad to know it now, and with each passing birthday, grew more and more excited for her elder sister to give her more ways to connect with the home and family she thought she’d lost forever.