The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 24

by Gardner Dozois

  Dac Kien’s stomach roiled, as if an icy fist were squeezing it. “You’re early. The ship — ”

  “The ship has to be ready.”

  The interjection surprised her. All her attention had been focused on the Mexica – Zoquitl – and what her coming here meant. Now she forced herself to look at the other passenger of the shuttle: a Xuyan man in his mid-thirties. His accent was that of Anjiu province, on the Fifth Planet; his robes, with the partridge badge and the button of gold, were those of a minor official of the seventh rank – but they were marked with the yin-yang symbol, showing stark black-and white against the silk.

  “You’re the birth-master,” she said.

  He bowed. “I have that honour.” His face was harsh, all angles and planes on which the light caught – highlighting, here and there, the thin lips, the high cheekbones. “Forgive me my abruptness, but there is no time to lose.”

  “I don’t understand — ” Dac Kien looked again at the woman, whose eyes bore a glazed look of pain. “She’s early,” she said, flatly, and she wasn’t speaking of their arrival time.

  The birth-master nodded.

  “How long?”

  “A week, at most.” The birth-master grimaced. “The ship has to be ready.”

  Dac Kien tasted bile in her mouth. The ship was all but made – and, like a jade statue, it would brook no corrections nor oversights. Dac Kien and her team had designed it specifically for the Mind within Zoquitl’s womb: starting out from the specifications the imperial alchemists had given them, the delicate balance of humours, optics and flesh that made up the being Zoquitl carried. The ship would answer to nothing else: only Zoquitl’s Mind would be able to seize the heartroom, to quicken the ship, and take it into deep planes, where fast star-travel was possible.

  “I can’t — ” Dac Kien started, but the birth-master shook his head, and she didn’t need to hear his answer to know what he would say.

  She had to. This had been the posting she’d argued for, after she came in second at the state examinations – this, not a magistrate’s tribunal and district, not a high-placed situation in the palace’s administration, not the prestigious Courtyard of Writing Brushes, as would have been her right. This was what the imperial court would judge her on.

  She wouldn’t get another chance.

  “A week.” Hanh shook her head. “What do they think you are, a Mexica factory overseer?”

  “Hanh.” It had been a long day, and Dac Kien had come back to their quarters looking for comfort. In hindsight, she should have known how Hanh would take the news: her partner was an artist, a poet, always seeking the right word and the right allusion – ideally suited to understanding the delicacy that went into the design of a ship, less than ideal to acknowledge any need for urgency.

  “I have to do this,” Dac Kien said.

  Hanh grimaced. “Because they’re pressuring you into it? You know what it will look like.” She gestured towards the low mahogany table in the centre of the room. The ship’s design hung inside a translucent cube, gently rotating – the glimpses of its interior interspersed with views of other ships, the ones from which it had taken its inspiration: all the great from The Red Carp to The Golden Mountain and The Snow-White Blossom. Their hulls gleamed in the darkness, slowly and subtly bending out of shape to become the final structure of the ship hanging outside the habitat. “It’s a whole, lil’ sis. You can’t butcher it and hope to keep your reputation intact.”

  “She could die of it,” Dac Kien said, at last. “Of the birth, and it would be worse if she did it for nothing.”

  “The girl? She’s gui. Foreign.”

  Meaning she shouldn’t matter. “So were we, once upon a time.” Dac Kien said. “You have short memories.”

  Hanh opened her mouth, closed it. She could have pointed out that they weren’t quite gui – that China, Xuya’s motherland, had once held Dai Viet for centuries; but Hanh was proud of being Viet, and certainly not about to mention such shameful details. “It’s the girl that’s bothering you, then?”

  “She does what she wants,” Dac Kien said.

  “For the prize.” Hanh’s voice was faintly contemptuous. Most of the girls who bore Minds were young and desperate, willing to face the dangers of the pregnancy in exchange for a marriage to a respected official. For a status of their own, a family that would welcome them in; and a chance to bear children of good birth.

  Both Hanh and Dac Kien had made the opposite choice, long ago. For them, as for every Xuyan who engaged in same-gender relationships, there would be no children: no one to light incense at the ancestral altars, no voices to chant and honour their names after they were gone. Through life, they would be second-class citizens, consistently failing to accomplish their duties to their ancestors; in death, they would be spurned, forgotten – gone as if they had never been.

  “I don’t know,” Dac Kien said. “She’s Mexica. They see things differently, where she comes from.”

  “From what you’re telling me, she’s doing this for Xuyan reasons.”

  For fame, and for children; all that Hanh despised – what she called their shackles, their overwhelming need to produce children, generation after generation.

  Dac Kien bit her lip, wishing she could have Hanh’s unwavering certainties. “It’s not as if I have much choice in the matter.”

  Hanh was silent for a while. At length, she moved, came to rest behind Dac Kien, her hair falling down over Dac Kien’s shoulders, her hands trailing at Dac Kien’s nape. “You’re the one who keeps telling me we always have a choice, lil’ sis.”

  Dac Kien shook her head. She said that – when weary of her family’s repeated reminders that she should marry and have children; when they lay in the darkness side by side after making love and she saw the future stretching in front of her, childless and ringed by old prejudices.

  Hanh, much as she tried, didn’t understand. She’d always wanted to be a scholar, had always known that she’d grow up to love another woman. She’d always got what she wanted – and she was convinced she only had to wish for something hard enough for it to happen.

  And Hanh had never wished, and would never wish for children.

  “It’s not the same,” Dac Kien said at last, cautiously submitting to Hanh’s caresses. It was something else entirely; and even Hanh had to see that. “I chose to come here. I chose to make my name that way. And we always have to see our choices through.”

  Hanh’s hands on her shoulders tightened. “You’re one to talk. I can see you wasting yourself in regrets, wondering if there’s still time to turn back to respectability. But you chose me. This life, these consequences. We both chose.”

  “Hanh — ” It’s not that, Dac Kien wanted to say. She loved Hanh, she truly did; but . . . She was a stone thrown in the darkness; a ship adrift without nav – lost, without family or husband to approve of her actions, and without the comfort of a child destined to survive her.

  “Grow up, lil’ sis.” Hanh’s voice was harsh; her face turned away, towards the paintings of landscapes on the wall. “You’re no one’s toy or slave – and especially not your family’s.”

  Because they had all but disowned her. But words, as usual, failed Dac Kien; and they went to bed with the shadow of the old argument still between them, like the blade of a sword.

  The next day, Dac Kien pored over the design of the ship with Feng and Miahua, wondering how she could modify it. The parts were complete, and assembling them would take a few days at most; but the resulting structure would never be a ship. That much was clear to all of them. Even excepting the tests, there was at least a month’s work ahead of them – slow and subtle touches laid by the bots over the overall system to align it with its destined Mind.

  Dac Kien had taken the cube from her quarters, and brought it into her office under Hanh’s glowering gaze. Now, they all crowded around it voicing ideas, the cups of tea forgotten in the intensity of the moment.

  Feng’s wrinkled face was creased in t
hought as he tapped one side of the cube. “We could modify the shape of this corridor, here. Wood would run through the whole ship, and — ”

  Miahua shook her head. She was their Master of Wind and Water, the one who could best read the lines of influence, the one Dac Kien turned to when she herself had a doubt over the layout. Feng was Commissioner of Supplies, managing the systems and safety – in many ways Miahua’s opposite, given to small adjustments rather than large ones, pragmatic where she verged on the mystical.

  “The humours of water and wood would stagnate here, in the control room.” Miahua pursed her lips, pointed to the slender aft of the ship. “The shape of this section should be modified.”

  Feng sucked in a breath. “That’s not trivial. For my team to rewrite the electronics — ”

  Dac Kien listened to them arguing, distantly – intervening with a question from time to time, to keep the conversation from dying down. In her mind, she held the shape of the ship, felt it breathe through the glass of the cube, through the layers of fibres and metal that separated her from the structure outside. She held the shape of the Mind – the essences and emotions that made it, the layout of its sockets and cables, of its muscles and flesh – and slid them together gently, softly until they seemed made for one another.

  She looked up. Both Feng and Miahua had fallen silent, waiting for her to speak.

  “This way,” she said. “Remove this section altogether, and shift the rest of the layout.” As she spoke, she reached into the glass matrix, and carefully excised the offending section – rerouting corridors and lengths of cables, burning new decorative calligraphy onto the curved walls.

  “I don’t think — ” Feng said; and stopped. “Miahua?”

  Miahua was watching the new design, carefully. “I need to think about it, Your Excellency. Let me discuss it with my subordinates.”

  Dac Kien made a gesture of approval. “Remember that we don’t have much time.”

  They both took a copy of the design with them, snug in their long sleeves. Left alone, Dac Kien stared at the ship again. It was squat, its proportions out of kilter – not even close to what she had imagined, not even true to the spirit of her work: a mockery of the original design, like a flower without petals, or a poem that didn’t quite gel, hovering on the edge of poignant allusions but never expressing them properly.

  “We don’t always have a choice,” she whispered. She’d have prayed to her ancestors, had she thought they were still listening. Perhaps they were. Perhaps the shame of having a daughter who would have no descendants was erased by the exalted heights of her position. Or perhaps not. Her mother and grandmother were unforgiving; what made her think that those more removed ancestors would understand her decision?

  “Elder sister?”

  Zoquitl stood at the door, hovering uncertainly. Dac Kien’s face must have revealed more than she thought. She forced herself to breathe, relaxing all her muscles until it was once more the blank mask required by protocol. “Younger sister,” she said. “You honour me by your presence.”

  Zoquitl shook her head. She slid carefully into the room – one foot after the other, careful never to lose her balance. “I wanted to see the ship.”

  The birth-master was nowhere to be seen. Dac Kien hoped that he had been right about the birth – that it wasn’t about to happen now, in her office, with no destination and no assistance. “It’s here.” She shifted positions on her chair, invited Zoquitl to sit.

  Zoquitl wedged herself in one of the seats, her movements fragile, measured – as if any wrong gesture would shatter her. Behind her loomed one of Dac Kien’s favourite paintings, an image from the Third Planet: a delicate, peaceful landscape of waterfalls and ochre cliffs, with the distant light of stars reflected in the water.

  Zoquitl didn’t move as Dac Kien showed her the design; her eyes were the only thing which seemed alive in the whole of her face.

  When Dac Kien was finished, the burning gaze was transferred to her – looking straight into her eyes, a clear breach of protocol. “You’re just like the others. You don’t approve,” Zoquitl said.

  It took Dac Kien a moment to process the words, but they still meant nothing to her. “I don’t understand.”

  Zoquitl’s lips pursed. “Where I come from, it’s an honour. To bear Minds for the glory of the Mexica Dominion.”

  “But you’re here,” Dac Kien said. In Xuya, among Xuyans, where to bear Minds was a sacrifice – necessary and paid for, but ill-considered. For who would want to endure a pregnancy, yet produce no human child? Only the desperate or the greedy.

  “You’re here as well.” Zoquitl’s voice was almost an accusation.

  For an endless, agonising moment, Dac Kien thought Zoquitl was referring to her life choices – how did she know about Hanh, about her family’s stance? Then she understood that Zoquitl had been talking about her place onboard the habitat. “I like being in space,” Dac Kien said, at last, and it wasn’t a lie. “Being here almost alone, away from everyone else.”

  And this wasn’t paperwork, or the slow drain of catching and prosecuting law-breakers, of keeping Heaven’s order on some remote planet. This – this was everything scholarship was meant to be: taking all that the past had given them, and reshaping it into greatness – every part throwing its neighbours into sharper relief, an eternal reminder of how history had brought them here and how it would carry them forward, again and again.

  At last, Zoquitl said, not looking at the ship anymore, “Xuya is a harsh place, for foreigners. The language isn’t so bad, but when you have no money, and no sponsor . . .” She breathed in, quick and sharp. “I do what needs doing.” Her hand went, unconsciously, to the mound of her belly, and stroked it. “And I give him life. How can you not value this?”

  She used the animate pronoun, without a second thought.

  Dac Kien shivered. “He’s — ” she paused, groping for words. “He has no father. A mother, perhaps, but there isn’t much of you inside him. He won’t be counted among your descendants. He won’t burn incense on your altar, or chant your name among the stars.”

  “But he won’t die.” Zoquitl’s voice was soft, and cutting. “Not for centuries.”

  The ships made by the Mexica Dominion lived long, but their Minds slowly went insane from repeated journeys into deep planes. This Mind, with a proper anchor, a properly aligned ship – Zoquitl was right: he would remain as he was, long after she and Zoquitl were both dead. He – no, it – it was a machine – a sophisticated intelligence, an assembly of flesh and metal and Heaven knew what else. Borne like a child, but still . . .

  “I think I’m the one who doesn’t understand.” Zoquitl pulled herself to her feet, slowly. Dac Kien could hear her laboured breath, could smell the sour, sharp sweat rolling off her. “Thank you, elder sister.”

  And then she was gone; but her words remained.

  Dac Kien threw herself into her work – as she had done before, when preparing for the state examinations. Hahn pointedly ignored her when she came home, making only the barest attempts at courtesy. She was working again on her calligraphy, mingling Xuyan characters with the letters of the Viet alphabet to create a work that spoke both as a poem and as a painting. It wasn’t unusual: Dac Kien had come to be accepted for her talent, but her partner was another matter. Hanh wasn’t welcome in the banquet room, where the families of the other engineers would congregate in the evenings – she preferred to remain alone in their quarters, rather than endure the barely concealed snubs or the pitying looks of the others.

  What gave the air its leaden weight, though, was her silence. Dac Kien tried at first – keeping up a chatter, as if nothing were wrong. Hanh raised bleary eyes from her manuscript, and said, simply, “You know what you’re doing, lil’ sis. Live with it, for once.”

  So it was silence, in the end. It suited her better than she’d thought it would. It was her and the design, with no one to blame or interfere.

  Miahua’s team and Feng’s team were
rewiring the structure and re-arranging the parts. Outside the window, the mass of the hull shifted and twisted, to align itself with the cube on her table – bi-hour after bi-hour, as the bots gently slid sections into place and sealed them.

  The last section was being put into place when Miahua and the birth-master came to see her, both looking equally pre-occupied.

  Her heart sank. “Don’t tell me,” Dac Kien said. “She’s due now.”

  “She’s lost the waters,” the birth-master said, without preamble. He spat on the floor to ward off evil spirits, who always crowded around the mother in the hour of a birth. “You have a few bi-hours, at most.”

  “Miahua?” Dac Kien wasn’t looking at either of them, but rather at the ship outside, the huge bulk that dwarfed them all in its shadow.

  Her Master of Wind and Water was silent for a while – usually a sign that she was arranging problems in the most suitable order. Not good. “The structure will be finished before this bi-hour is over.”

  “But?” Dac Kien said.

  “But it’s a mess. The lines of wood cross those of metal, and there are humours mingling with each other and stagnating everywhere. The qi won’t flow.”

  The qi, the breath of the universe – of the dragon that lay at the heart of every planet, of every star. As Master of Wind and Water, it was Miahua’s role to tell Dac Kien what had gone wrong, but as Grand Master of Design Harmony, it fell to Dac Kien to correct this. Miahua could only point out the results she saw: only Dac Kien could send the bots in, to make the necessary adjustments to the structure. “I see,” Dac Kien said. “Prepare a shuttle for her. Have it wait outside, close to the ship’s docking bay.”

  “Your Excellency — ” the birth-master started, but Dac Kien cut him off.

  “I have told you before. The ship will be ready.”

  Miahua’s stance as she left was tense, all pent-up fears. Dac Kien thought of Hanh – alone in their room, stubbornly bent over her poem, her face as harsh as that of the birth-master, its customary roundness sharpened by anger and resentment. She’d say, again, that you couldn’t hurry things, that there were always possibilities. She’d say that – but she’d never understood there was always a price; and that, if you didn’t pay it, others did.