The Sky Above, the Rivers Below, Ch 11: Old Ties, New Conflicts

The traditions Sook-ja had carried across the void of time, once as solid and grounding as the earth of her village, now felt like fragile, fading silks, threatening to unravel completely in the harsh, indifferent light of the future.

It had been five years since Yong-joon, her husband, her rough, often difficult, but steady companion through the confusing journey from Joseon, had finally died. His body had given out from the accumulated tiredness of a life lived too hard in two very different worlds. His passing had left an emptiness that grew wider with each morning. The advanced time, with all its technological wonders and promises of progress, seemed completely unable to notice this emptiness, let alone fill it.

In Joseon, grief had a shape, a rhythm, a shared voice. There were rituals of mourning that lasted for months, even years - wearing coarse hemp clothes, the wailing of mourners, the carefully prepared ancestral rites, the shared meals of remembrance with family and neighbors. These customs, however painful, had provided a structure, a way to deal with the raw feelings of loss, to honor the dead and confirm that life went on.

Here, in this clean Chronic apartment, high above the glittering, impersonal city, Yong-joon's absence was a silent, private ache. There were no ancestral tablets to bow before, no village elders to offer comforting words steeped in ancient wisdom. The "Grief Counseling" program Chronic's automated well-being system had suggested felt like a cold, clinical insult. Its synthesized voice offered empty phrases about "processing loss" and "moving towards acceptance" that struck Sook-ja as completely hollow.

"Yong-joon is with the ancestors," she would murmur to herself. She would light a stick of cheap, artificially scented incense she'd found in a "Temporal Nostalgia" shop. Its smell was a pale imitation of the rich, smoky fragrance of real temple incense. "But where are the proper offerings, the bowls of rice and fruit, the shared remembrance?" She pressed her palms together. "A private burden. Carried alone. This cold... it seeps into the bones."

She tried, in her own quiet way, to keep up the appearance of her old life. She rose before the artificial dawn. Her movements were precise as she performed the morning washing. The water hissed from the clean tap, sterile and without the familiar chill of mountain stone. She carefully prepared her simple meals. She tried to get the familiar flavors of home from the bland, nutrient-rich ingredients provided by the Chronic food dispenser. Even the kimchi she painstakingly made in small batches, using ingredients bought at great expense from a specialist "heritage foods" supplier, seemed to lack something - the taste of Korean soil, perhaps, or the shared work of village women, the true spirit of home. "It tastes… different," she'd sigh. The familiar tang on her tongue now carried a note of deep displacement.

Her attempts to connect with other Korean migrants often left her feeling even more isolated. Many of the older generation, those who had arrived with her, had passed on or retreated into their own private worlds of memory and regret. The younger ones, those like her Min-ji who had grown up in this time, were a different kind altogether. They spoke Korean, yes, but their accents were flat. Their vocabulary was full of the slang of the advanced world. They used the complex technologies with an effortless ease that shamed Sook-ja's clumsy attempts. They attended "Korean Culture Clubs" that felt more like shows for Chronic's diversity programs than real expressions of heritage. They wore their traditional hanboks stiffly, the silk pristine and unfamiliar with the stains of daily life. The garments hung on them like costumes for a play.

When Sook-ja tried to speak of the old ways, of the complex social duties, the subtle details of Joseon manners, she was often met with polite confusion or, worse, a kind of affectionate pity for her "outdated" ideas. The threads connecting her to her past were breaking, one by one. She felt herself becoming a relic, a living ghost from a forgotten age, even among her own people.

The one bright, fierce light in Sook-ja's often-gray life was Min-ji. Her daughter. The child who had clung to her hand in terror during those first confusing days was now a woman, a scholar, an Assistant Professor at one of this time's most respected universities. Sook-ja would sometimes attend Min-ji's public lectures. She would sit anonymously at the back of the vast, holographic hall, her chip translating her daughter's fluent, academic English into Korean.

A warmth, fierce and almost painful, bloomed in Sook-ja's chest as she watched Min-ji command the stage. Her arguments cut through the air with precision, her passion for justice a force you could feel. "My brilliant daughter," Sook-ja would think, her eyes burning. "She speaks with the authority of a court minister, the wisdom of an elder, yet she is so young." She pressed her hand to her mouth. "That mind, that fire in a woman... back home, a tragedy. A beautiful bird with its wings clipped. But here... she soars."

But that soaring, that fierce, unblinking engagement with the injustices of this new world, was also the source of Sook-ja's deepest, most constant fear. Min-ji didn't just teach; she fought. She challenged Chronic's carefully made stories. She organized protests. She spoke for the marginalized, the forgotten, the "less valuable" temporal groups. After the "Community Progress Audit," where Director Valerius had so pointedly, if indirectly, criticized Min-ji's activism as "divisive," Sook-ja's anxiety had sharpened into a near-constant dread. She had heard whispers of Chronic's "re-calibration sessions" - those who attended came back quieter, their eyes empty, their voices stripped of fight. She had seen, in her own lifetime in Joseon, what happened to those who dared to defy the powerful, who spoke inconvenient truths. The consequences were swift, brutal, and often irreversible.

"Min-ji-ya," she'd plead, during her daughter's increasingly rare visits to the small apartment. Her voice was laced with a worry Min-ji often seemed to dismiss as old-fashioned fear. "This path you walk… it is lined with tigers. These Chronic officials... you flick sparks at a thatch roof in a dry season. What happens when it catches fire?"

Min-ji would take her mother's worn hands. Her own were so smooth and capable. Her expression was a mixture of love and gentle annoyance. "Eomeoni, I am not a child playing with fire. I understand the risks. But if we all stay silent, if we all bow our heads in fear, then nothing changes. The injustices continue. Is that the world you want for those who come after us?"

Sook-ja's throat tightened. "My clever girl. She twists words like her grandfather might have done. But her words are arrows aimed at the powerful." She looked at Min-ji's face, so young, so certain. "Does she not see the danger? In Joseon, such boldness from a woman... ruin upon herself, upon her entire family." She touched her daughter's cheek. "I pray to spirits I no longer know if they can hear me across this gap of time."

She longed for Min-ji to choose a quieter life, the kind of life Sook-ja herself had once understood as a woman's proper destiny, however changed by this new time. A good husband - perhaps that Mr. Park, who seemed so sensible and kind, and whose family came from a respectable Incheon time. A home, children, the steady comforts of a family hearth. But Min-ji brushed aside such suggestions with a gentle firmness. Her mind was clearly fixed on bigger, more dangerous ambitions. "My work is my husband, Eomeoni," she'd said once, a faint smile playing on her lips, "and my students, my community, they are my family."

Sook-ja understood the words, but the feeling was alien, a language from a future she could visit but never truly live in. The pride she felt for Min-ji's brilliance was deeply tied with a terrifying fear for her safety, for her very soul. This future, which had given her daughter wings, also seemed determined to steer her directly into the heart of the storm. And Sook-ja, a woman from a different earth, a different sky, could only watch, and pray, and smooth the worn fabric of her sleeve, feeling a loose thread catch on her finger.

***

In the echoing silence of her apartment, Min-ji was increasingly busy with her academic battles. The gap of understanding between mother and daughter seemed to widen with each passing year. Sook-ja found herself feeling more deeply alone than ever. The few remaining Korean elders from her arrival group were frail, lost in their own fading memories. The younger generation, for all their polite nods, lived in a different universe. Her fears for Min-ji, the gnawing anxiety about Chronic's displeasure, the constant, dull ache of feeling culturally homeless - these were burdens she felt she could share with no one. Min-ji, with her fierce, forward-looking spirit, would likely dismiss her mother's worries as old-fashioned fears. She wouldn't be able to grasp the deep, instinctual terror Sook-ja felt when thinking about the power of an entity like Chronic.

It was during one of her lonely walks through the perfectly landscaped, yet strangely soulless, common areas of their apartment tower - a habit she'd adopted to escape her apartment - that she met Margaret Shepard. The American woman was sitting alone on a bench overlooking a holographic koi pond. Her gaze was distant, her hands clasped tightly in her lap.

Sook-ja had always kept a polite distance from Mrs. Shepard. The whispers about the Shepard family's past, their connection to the brutal institution of slavery in their home time, were everywhere. It was a dark shadow that clung to them even here, centuries later. Sook-ja, whose own Joseon society had its strict social ranks and forms of forced work, still felt a deep recoil from the sheer scale and commercial brutality of what she understood of the American South's system.

Yet, she also remembered the look in Margaret's eyes during that awful "Community Dialogue Forum" after the Audit. Director Valerius had so coldly referred to the "challenges in overcoming historical-attitude legacies." It had been a look of deep, weary pain, a mother's anguish that Sook-ja recognized with a startling clarity, for it matched her own fears for Min-ji. Both their children, in their own ways, were being judged and found lacking by Chronic.

Hesitantly, Sook-ja approached the bench. "Mrs. Shepard-nim?" she tried, the Korean honorific a soft, almost unconscious offering of respect.

Margaret looked up, startled. Her eyes cleared from their distant focus. A flicker of surprise, then a guarded politeness, settled on her face. "Mrs. Kim. Please, sit if you wish."

Sook-ja sat, a small, proper distance away. An awkward silence fell, filled only by the gentle, artificial gurgle of the holographic pond.

"It is… a fine day," Sook-ja said finally. The translated words sounded stiff even to her own ears. It was what one said in Joseon when there was nothing else to say.

Margaret gave a small, humorless smile. "As fine as any day can be in a place with no real sky, I suppose."

The unexpected frankness, the shared acknowledgment of their fake surroundings, opened a tiny crack in the wall of polite reserve. "Yes," Sook-ja agreed. "The light is always… the same."

They sat in silence again, but it was a different kind of silence now, less awkward, more companionable. Sook-ja looked at the lines etched around Margaret's eyes, the set of her mouth. The same worry. The same weight. She recognized it as if it were her own reflection in a still pond.

"Your son, Thomas-ssi," Sook-ja found herself saying, "he plays music very beautifully. I have heard him sometimes, in the community hall."

A genuine, if fleeting, smile touched Margaret's lips. "Thank you. It is… his comfort. His way of speaking when words fail." Then, her smile faded. "But even his music, they… they find ways to criticize. To say it is not… useful enough. Not aligned with their 'progress.'"

Sook-ja nodded slowly. "My Min-ji, too. They say her words are 'divisive.' Because she asks for fairness. It is a strange kind of progress that fears fairness."

The words, once hesitant, began to find a rhythm between them. They spoke of the always-mild weather, of strange new foods. In the space between their sentences, a quiet understanding grew. They began to meet more regularly, sometimes by the holographic pond, sometimes for a cup of tea in Sook-ja's small apartment. Sook-ja would prepare boricha, roasted barley tea. Its nutty, comforting smell was a small taste of home.

Margaret, in turn, would sometimes bring a small, artificially made "sweet treat" from the Chronic dispensers, an offering made with a shy kindness. They rarely spoke directly of their deepest fears, or the details of their children's struggles with Chronic's judgments. Instead, they spoke of the weather (always predictably mild), of the strange new foods, of the small, confusing absurdities of life in the advanced time.

They had held long conversations before, but this was different. Before, Sook-ja had always been conscious of her accent, her limited vocabulary, her cultural ignorance. She had felt a constant, nagging worry about saying something wrong, embarrassing herself, making others laugh behind her back. Here, with Margaret, she felt none of that. She spoke simply, freely. The language of her native land was present in her words, but its meanings were shaped, enriched, by the new world, her new home.

Margaret, too, spoke more freely, more openly, than she had done before. Perhaps because her audience was someone who understood her past, without fully judging her for it, the words came more easily.

One afternoon, as they sat in Sook-ja's apartment, Margaret's gaze fell on the framed photograph of Yong-joon. She was quiet for a long moment. "My father," she said finally, her voice barely above a whisper, "was a plantation owner."

Sook-ja waited, her hands still around her teacup.

"A hard man." Margaret's fingers traced the rim of her own cup. "He would beat me if I dared question him." She paused, then slowly turned her hand over, revealing a deep, ragged scar across her palm. "His whip didn't discriminate."

The scar was old, the tissue thick and white. Sook-ja reached out, her own rough fingers hovering near Margaret's hand but not quite touching.

"I used to tell myself," Margaret continued, her voice hollow, "that they were like cattle. The slaves." She closed her eyes. "My father spoke those words often. And I believed him. Because if they were people, then I was a monster, and monsters don't deserve to live."

The silence stretched between them, heavy with the weight of confession.

"So I kept silent," Margaret whispered. "I watched. I did nothing."

Sook-ja would sometimes touch Margaret's hand, her own rough and worn from a lifetime of hard, physical labor, the other woman's smooth, soft. "What was done, was done," she would say, the words a mixture of her own and Chronic's automated well-being programs. "We cannot change the past. We can only choose how we go on. Do we stay silent, or do we speak out? That is the true question."

"Perhaps you're right, Sook-ja-ssi," Margaret would say, the words slow and thoughtful. "Maybe it is my turn to make a choice, instead of just following the path laid down for me. My father, God curse his memory, wanted me to marry well, to carry on his name. But here, I could have a different destiny. A better destiny. Perhaps I can, in some small way, atone for my own sins, and help others avoid the same mistakes."

***

The Chuseok moon, the Harvest Moon Festival of her Joseon childhood, was not visible in the perpetually twilight sky of Neo-Kyoto. There were no rice fields to have produced a plentiful harvest, no ancestral gravesites to visit with offerings of newly harvested grains and fruits. Yet, as the date approached on the old lunar calendar Sook-ja still mentally tracked, a deep, instinctual longing stirred within her.

It was a need to connect with something ancient, something sacred, something that came before Chronic and its cold, sterile future.

She decided, with a quiet determination, to observe Chuseok in her own small way. It would be an imperfect ritual, a pale shadow of the lively communal celebrations of her youth, but it would be something. She spent days carefully preparing songpyeon, the small, half-moon shaped rice cakes. She used ingredients she'd painstakingly found or adapted. The red bean paste was from a can, the mugwort powder a synthetic copy. But as she kneaded the rice dough, shaping each small cake with practiced fingers, she felt a flicker of connection to the generations of Korean women who had performed this same ritual before her.

On the morning of Chuseok, she rose before the artificial dawn and set up a small, makeshift charye table in her living area. A framed photograph of Yong-joon, taken shortly after their arrival in the advanced time, served as his spirit tablet. Beside it, she placed a small bowl of rice, a few carefully arranged pieces of fruit from the dispenser, and a plate of her imperfect songpyeon. She lit her last stick of cheap incense. Its scent was thin but brought back memories.

She was in the middle of her deep bows, her forehead touching the cool floor, murmuring the names of Yong-joon's ancestors and her own, when a soft chime indicated a visitor at her door. Her heart lurched. It was early. Min-ji was teaching. Who could it be?

It was Margaret Shepard. She was holding a small, potted orchid with delicate, pale blooms. "Sook-ja," she said, her voice a little hesitant. "I… I hope I am not intruding. I was just passing, and I saw these… I thought you might like them."

Sook-ja, flustered at being discovered in the middle of her private ritual, her face still bearing the imprint of the floor from her bows, could only stare for a moment. Then, an impulse she didn't quite understand made her step back, gesturing Margaret inside. "Please, come in, Mrs. Shepard-nim."

Margaret entered. Her gaze fell on the small, laden table. Sook-ja felt a flush of embarrassment. How strange, how… primitive, this must look to an American lady from a different century, in this world of advanced technology. She braced herself for polite confusion, perhaps even a hint of condescension.

But Margaret's expression was one of quiet respect, a gentle curiosity. She looked at the offerings, at the photograph of Yong-joon, at the smoking incense. "This is… a day of remembrance for you?" she asked softly.

Sook-ja nodded, her throat suddenly tight. "It is Chuseok," she explained. The Korean word felt foreign yet precious on her tongue. "A time to honor our ancestors, to give thanks for the harvest… even if there is no harvest here."

Margaret walked closer to the table. Her movements were slow, respectful. She studied the songpyeon. "They are beautiful," she said. "The shapes… like little moons." She looked at Sook-ja. Her eyes held a surprising depth of understanding. "My people… we had days like this too, in my old home. Days for family, for remembering those who came before. Different customs, of course, but… the heart of it feels the same." She placed the orchid gently on the edge of the table. "A small offering, if it is acceptable."

A warmth spread through Sook-ja's chest, loosening a knot she hadn't known was there. The scent of the cheap incense, the pale orchid, the shared quiet. Something settled in her that had been adrift for years.

Later, after Margaret had gone, leaving the orchid as a silent proof of her visit, Sook-ja sat sipping her barley tea.

Her fear for Min-ji remained a constant, dull ache. Her grief for Yong-joon and her lost world was a shadow that would likely never fully lift. But the sight of the orchid next to her wooden wedding duck warmed her in a delicate, surprising way.

The old traditions were indeed fading, their silks unraveling. Sook-ja looked from the small, cherished wooden wedding duck Yong-joon had carved for her to the pale, elegant orchid Margaret had brought. Side by side on her table, they seemed to belong.

They could draw strength from the shared humanity that endured, even in this bewildering, often heartless, future.

***