The ship would be ready; and Dac Kien would pay its price in full.
Alone again, Dac Kien connected to the system, letting the familiar overlay of the design take over her surroundings. She adjusted the contrast until the design was all she could see; and then she set to work.
Miahua was right: the ship was a mess. They had envisioned having a few days to tidy things up, to soften the angles of the corridors, to spread the wall-lanterns so there were no dark corners or spots shining with blinding light. The heartroom alone – the pentacle-shaped centre of the ship, where the Mind would settle – had strands of four humours coming to an abrupt, painful stop within, and a sharp line just outside its entrance, marking the bots’ hasty sealing.
The killing breath, it was called; and it was everywhere.
Ancestors, watch over me.
A living, breathing thing – jade, whittled down to its essence. Dac Kien slid into the trance, her consciousness expanding to encompass the bots around the structure – sending them, one by one, inside the metal hull, scuttling down the curved corridors and passageways – gently merging with the walls, starting the slow and painful work of coaxing the metal into its proper shape – going up into the knot of cables, straightening them out, regulating the current in the larger ones. In her mind’s view, the ship seemed to flicker and fold back upon itself; she hung suspended outside, watching the bots crawl over it like ants, injecting commands into the different sections, in order to modify their balance of humours and inner structure.
She cut to the shuttle, where Zoquitl lay on her back, her face distorted into a grimace. The birth-master’s face was grim, turned upwards as if he could guess at Dac Kien’s presence.
Hurry. You don’t have time left. Hurry.
And still she worked – walls turned into mirrors, flowers were carved into the passageways, softening those hard angles and lines she couldn’t disguise. She opened up a fountain – all light projections, of course, there could be no real water aboard – let the recreated sound of a stream fill the structure. Inside the heartroom, the four tangled humours became three, then one; then she brought in other lines until the tangle twisted back upon itself, forming a complicated knot pattern that allowed strands of all five humours to flow around the room. Water, wood, fire, earth, metal, all circling the ship’s core, a stabilising influence for the Mind, when it came to anchor itself there.
She flicked back the display to the shuttle, saw Zoquitl’s face, and the unbearable lines of tension in the other’s face.
Hurry.
It was not ready. But life didn’t wait until you were ready. Dac Kien turned off the display – but not the connection to the bots, leaving them time to finish their last tasks.
“Now,” she whispered, into the com system.
The shuttle launched itself towards the docking bay. Dac Kien dimmed the overlay, letting the familiar sight of the room re-assert itself – with the cube, and the design that should have been, the perfect one, the one that called to mind The Red Carp and The Turtle Over the Waves and The Dragon’s Twin Dreams, all the days of Xuya from the Exodus to the Pearl Wars, and the fall of the Shan Dynasty; and older things, too, Le Loi’s sword that had established a Viet dynasty; the dragon with spread wings flying over Hanoi, the Old Earth capital; the face of Huyen Tran, the Viet princess traded to foreigners in return for two provinces.
The bots were turning themselves off, one by one, and a faint breeze ran through the ship, carrying the smell of sea-laden water and of incense.
It could have been, that ship, that masterpiece. If she’d had time. Hanh was right, she could have made it work: it would have been hers, perfect, praised – remembered in the centuries to come, used as inspiration by hundreds of other Grand Masters.
If—
She didn’t know how long she stayed there, staring at the design – but an agonised cry tore her from her thoughts. Startled, she turned up the ship’s feed again, and selected a view into the birthing room.
The lights had been dimmed, leaving shadows everywhere, like a prelude to mourning. Dac Kien could see the bowl of tea given at the beginning of labour – it had rolled into a corner of the room, a few drops scattering across the floor.
Zoquitl crouched against a high-backed chair, framed by holos of two goddesses who watched over childbirth: the Princess of the Blue and Purple Clouds, and the Bodhisattva of Mercy. In the shadows, her face seemed to be that of a demon, the alienness of her features distorted by pain.
“Push,” the birth-master was saying, his hands on the quivering mound of her belly.
Push.
Blood ran down Zoquitl’s thighs, staining the metal surfaces until they reflected everything in shades of red. But her eyes were proud – those of an old warrior race, who’d never bent or bowed to anybody else. Her child of flesh, when it came, would be delivered the same way.
Dac Kien thought of Hanh, and of sleepless nights, of the shadow stretched over their lives, distorting everything.
“Push,” the birth-master said again, and more blood ran out. Push push push – and Zoquitl’s eyes were open, looking straight at her, and Dac Kien knew – she knew that the rhythm that racked Zoquitl, the pain that came in waves, it was all part of the same immutable law, the same thread that bound them more surely than the red one between lovers – what lay in the womb, under the skin, in their hearts and in their minds; a kinship of gender that wouldn’t ever be altered or extinguished. Her hand slid to her own flat, empty belly, pressed hard. She knew what that pain was, she could hold every layer of it in her mind as she’d held the ship’s design – and she knew that Zoquitl, like her, had been made to bear it.
Push.
With a final heart-wrenching scream, Zoquitl expelled the last of the Mind from her womb. It slid to the floor, a red, glistening mass of flesh and electronics: muscles and metal implants, veins and pins and cables.
It lay there, still and spent – and several heartbeats passed before Dac Kien realised it wouldn’t ever move.
Dac Kien put off visiting Zoquitl for days, still reeling from the shock of the birth. Every time she closed her eyes, she saw blood: the great mass sliding out of the womb, flopping on the floor like a dead fish, the lights of the birthing room glinting on metal wafers and grey matter, and everything dead, gone as if it had never been.
It had no name, of course – neither it nor the ship, both gone too soon to be graced with one.
Push. Push, and everything will be fine. Push.
Hanh tried her best: showing her poems with exquisite calligraphy; speaking of the future and of her next posting; fiercely making love to her as if nothing had ever happened, as if Dac Kien could just forget the enormity of the loss. But it wasn’t enough.
Just as the ship hadn’t been enough.
In the end, remorse drove Dac Kien, as surely as a barbed whip; and she boarded the shuttle to come over to the ship.
Zoquitl was in the birthing room, sitting wedged against the wall, with a bowl of pungent tea in her veined hands. The two holos framed her, their white-painted faces stark in the dim light, unforgiving. The birth-master hovered nearby, but was persuaded to leave them both alone – though he made it clear Dac Kien was responsible for anything that happened to Zoquitl.
“Elder sister.” Zoquitl smiled, a little bitterly. “It was a good fight.”
“Yes.” One Zoquitl could have won, if she had been given better weapons.
“Don’t look so sad,” Zoquitl said.
“I failed,” Dac Kien said, simply. She knew Zoquitl’s future was still assured; that she’d make her good marriage, and bear children, and be worshipped in her turn. But she also knew, now, that it wasn’t the only reason Zoquitl had borne the Mind.
Zoquitl’s lips twisted, into what might have been a smile. “Help me.”
“What?” Dac Kien looked at her, but Zoquitl was already pushing herself up, shaking, shivering, as carefully as she had done when pregnant. “The birth-master — ”
She was smaller than Dac Kien had thought: her shoulders barely came up to her own. She wedged herself awkwardly, leaning on Dac Kien for support – a weight that grew increasingly hard to bear as they walked through the ship.
There was light, and the sound of water, and the familiar feel of qi flowing through the corridors in lazy circles, breathing life into everything. There were shadows barely seen in mirrors, and the glint of other ships, too: the soft, curving patterns of The Golden Mountain; the carved calligraphy incised in the doors that had been the hallmark of The Tiger Who Leapt Over the Stream; the slowly curving succession of ever-growing doors of Baoyu’s Red Fan – bits and pieces salvaged from her design and put together into – into this, which unfolded its marvels all around her, from layout to electronics to decoration, until her head spun and her eyes blurred, taking it all in.
In the heartroom, Dac Kien stood unmoving, while the five humours washed over them, an endless cycle of destruction and renewal. The centre was pristine, untouched, with a peculiar sadness hanging around it, like an empty crib. And yet . . .
“It’s beautiful,” Zoquitl said, her voice catching and quivering in her throat.
Beautiful as a poem declaimed in drunken games, as a flower bud ringed by frost – beautiful and fragile as a newborn child struggling to breathe.
And, standing there at the centre of things, with Zoquitl’s frail body leaning against her, she thought of Hanh again; of shadows and darkness, and of life choices.
It’s beautiful.
It would be gone in a few days. Destroyed, recycled; forgotten and uncommemorated. But somehow, Dac Kien couldn’t bring herself to voice the thought.
Instead she said, softly, into the silence – knowing it to be true of more than the ship – “It was worth it.”
All of it – now and in the years to come, and she wouldn’t look back, or regret.
IN-FALL
Ted Kosmatka
New writer Ted Kosmatka has been a zookeeper, a chem tech, and a steelworker, and is now a self-described “lab rat” who gets to play with electron microscopes all day. He made his first sale, to Asimov’s, in 2005, and has since made several subsequent sales there, as well as to The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Seeds of Change, Ideomancer, City Slab, Kindred Voices, Cemetery Dance, and elsewhere. He’s placed several different stories with several different Best of the Year series over the last couple of years, including this one. He lives in Portage, Indiana, and has a Web site at www.tedkosmatka.com.
“In-Fall” is one of several stories this year to center – literally! – around black holes, this one a suspenseful battle of wills taking place on a spaceship about to plunge into one.
THE DISC CAVED a hole in the starshine.
Smooth, graphene skin reflected nothing, blotting out the stars as it swung through the vacuum – black on black, the perfect absence of color.
It was both a ship and not a ship.
The disc lacked a propulsion system. It lacked navigation. Inside, two men awakened, first one and then the other.
In truth, the disc was a projectile – a dark bolus of life support fired into distant orbit around another, stranger kind of darkness.
This second darkness is almost infinitely larger, massing several hundred thousand sols; and it didn’t blot out the stars behind it, but instead lensed them into a bright, shifting halo, bending light into a ring, deforming the fabric of spacetime itself.
From the perspective of the orbiting disc, the stars seemed to flow around an enormous, circular gap in the star field. It had many different names, this region of space. The astronomers who discovered it centuries earlier had called it Bhat 16. Later physicists would call it “the sink.” And finally, to those who came here, to those who dreamed of it, it was known simply as “the maw.”
A black hole like none ever found before.
By the disc’s third day in orbit, it had already traveled three hundred and eighteen million miles, but this is only a tiny fraction of its complete trajectory. At the end of the disc’s seventy-second hour in orbit, a small lead weight, 100 kilograms, was fired toward the heart of the gravity well – connected to the ship by a wire so thin that even mathematicians called it a line.
The line spooled out, thousands of kilometers of unbreakable tetravalent filament stretching toward the darkness until finally pulling taut. The line held fast to its anchor point, sending a musical resonance vibrating through the disc’s carbon hull.
Inexorable gravity, a subtle shift.
Slow at first, but gradually, on the fourth day, the ship that was not a ship changed course and began to fall.
The old man wiped blood from the young man’s face.
“Ulii ul quisall,” the young man said. Don’t touch me.
The old man nodded. “You speak Thusi,” he said. “I speak this, too.”
The young man leaned close and spat blood at the old man. “It is an abomination to hear you speak it.”
The old man’s eyes narrowed.
He wiped the blood from his cheek. “An abomination,” he said. “Perhaps this is true.”
He held out his hand for the young man to see. In his hand was a scalpel. “Do you know why I’m here?” he asked.
Light gleamed off the scalpel’s edge. This time, it was the old man who leaned close. “I’m here to cut you.”
The old man placed the scalpel’s blade on the young man’s cheek, just beneath his left eye. The steel pressed a dimple into his pallid skin.
The young man’s expression didn’t change. He stared straight ahead, eyes like blue stone.
The old man considered him. “But it would be a kindness to cut you,” he continued. “I see that now.” He pulled the blade away and ran a thumb along the young man’s jaw, tracing the web of scar tissue. “You wouldn’t even feel it.”
The young man sat motionless in the chair, arms bound to the armrests by thick straps. He was probably still in his teens, the beginnings of a beard making patchy whorls on his cheek. He was little more than a boy, really.
He had probably once been beautiful, the old man judged. That explained the scars. The boy’s psychological profile must have shown a weakness for vanity.
Or perhaps the profiles didn’t matter anymore.
Perhaps they just scarred them all now.
The old man rubbed his eyes, feeling the anger slide out of him. He put the scalpel back on the tray with the other bright and gleaming instruments.
“Sleep,” he told the boy. “You will need it.” And the universe ticked on.
“Where are we going?” the boy said, after several hours.
Whether he’d slept or not, the old man wasn’t sure, but at least he’d been silent.
The old man rose from his console on creaking knees. Acceleration accreted weight into the soles of his feet, allowing the simple pleasure of walking. He brought the boy water. “Drink,” he said, holding out the nozzle.
The boy eyed him suspiciously, but after a moment, took a long swallow.
“Where are we going?” he repeated.
The old man ignored him.
“They have already tried to interrogate me,” the boy said. “I told them nothing.”
“I know. If you told them what they wanted, you wouldn’t be here.”
“And so now they’re sending me someplace else? To try again?”
“Yes, someplace else, but not to try again.”
The boy was silent for a long moment. Then he said, “For that they have you.”
The old man smiled. “You are a smart one.”
Rage burned in the boy’s eyes, and pain beyond measuring. The earlier interrogations had been harsh. He pulled against his straps again, trying to jerk his arms free.
“Where are you taking me?” he demanded.
The old man stared down at him. “
You are scared,” he said. “I know what you are thinking. You want out of your restraints. You’re thinking that if you could get loose . . . oh, the things you would do to me.” The old man glanced toward the tray of gleaming steel. “You wish you could use that blade on me. You wish that you were in my shoes, that I was sitting where you are.
“But you don’t understand,” the old man said, then whispered into the boy’s ear. “It is I who envy you.”
The ship hummed as it fell. Charged ions blasted carbon skin.
“Why won’t you tell me where we’re going?”
The boy repeated the question every few minutes.
Finally the old man walked to the console and pressed a button. A viewscreen opened in the wall, exposing deep space, the looming maw. “There,” the old man said. “We are going there.”
The black hole filled half the screen.
Abyss, if there ever was one.
The boy smiled. “You try to scare me with death? I don’t fear death.”
“I know,” the old man said.
“Death is my reward. In the afterlife, I will walk again with my father. I will tread the bones of my enemies. I will be seated at a place of honor with others who fell fighting for the side of God. Death will be a paradise for me.”
“You truly believe that, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
“That is why I envy you.”
The boy was a mass murderer. Or a freedom fighter.
Or maybe just unfortunate.
The old man looked at the boy’s scars, noting the creative flourish that had been lavished on his face during previous interviews. Yes, unfortunate, certainly. Perhaps that above all.
Life in deep space is fragile. And humans are as they have always been.
The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 24 Page 100