The Year's Best Science Fiction - Thirty-Third Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  But she never had.

  On the following morning, as they docked into the Central orbital of the Scattered Pearls, the news came via mindship: that the Citadel had vanished in a single night with all its citizens, and was nowhere to be found. The Empire’s invading army—the soldiers tasked by the Empress to burn the Citadel to cinders—had reached the designated coordinates, and found nothing but the void between the stars.

  Not a trace of anyone aboard—not Mother, not the Bright Princess, not the hermits—everyone gone as though they had never existed.

  As time went on, and the hopes of finding the Citadel dwindled, the memory wavered and faded; but in Diem Huong’s dreams, the scene went on. In her confused, fearful dreams, she knew every word of the conversation Mother had had; and every single conversation she had ever listened to—playing with her doll Em Be Be on the floor while Mother cooked in her compartment, with the smell of garlic and fish sauce rising all around them, an anchor to the childhood she had lost. In her dreams, she knew why Mother had chosen to abandon them.

  But then she would wake up, her heart in her throat, and remember that she was still alone. That Father was never there; drowning his sorrows in his work aboard a merchant ship, coming home from months-long missions stupefied on fatigue, sorghum liquor, and Heaven knew what illegal drugs. That she had no brother or sister; and that even her aunts would not understand how crushingly alone and frightened she was, in the darkness of her cradle bed, with no kind words to banish the nightmares.

  After a while, she started adding her own offerings to the ancestral altar, below the hologram of Mother, that treacherous image that would never change, never age; her tacit admission that Mother might not be dead, but that she was as lost to them as if she had been.

  But that didn’t matter, because she had another way to find the answers she needed.

  Thirty years after the Citadel disappeared, Diem Huong woke up with the absolute knowledge that today was the day—and that, whatever she did, the trajectory of her life would be irrevocably altered. This time, it would work: after Heaven knew how many setbacks and broken parts. She wasn’t sure where that certainty came from—certainly not from her trust in a prototype made by a handful of half-baked engineers and a disorganised genius scientist in their spare time—but it was within her, cold and unshakeable. Perhaps it was merely her conviction that she would succeed: that the machine would work, sending her where she needed to be. When she needed to be.

  She did her morning exercises, flowing from one Piece of Brocade to the next, effortlessly—focusing on her breath, inhaling, exhaling as her body moved through Separating Heaven and Earth to Wise Owl Gazing Backwards; and finally settling on her toes after the last exercises, with the familiar, energised feeling of sweat on her body.

  They didn’t have a lab, of course. They were just private citizens with a hobby, and all they’d managed to get hold of on the overcrowded orbital was a deserted teahouse, cluttered with unused tables and decorative scrolls. Lam, always practical, had used some of the celadon drinking cups to hold samples; and the porcelain dishes with painted figures had turned out to withstand heat and acid quite nicely.

  The teahouse was deserted: not a surprise, as most of the others were late risers. In the oven—repurposed from the kitchen—she found the last of the machine’s pieces, the ceramic completely hardened, the bots scuttling onto the surface to check it withdrew as she reached for it. The etching of circuits was perfect, a silvery network as intricate as woven silk.

  Diem Huong turned, for a moment, to look at the machine.

  It wasn’t much to look at: a rectangular, man-sized frame propped with four protruding metal struts, reminiscent of a high-caste palanquin with its all-but-obsolete bearers. They had used tables and chairs to get the materials; and some of the carvings could still be seen around the frame.

  It had a roof, but no walls; mostly for structural reasons: all that mattered was the frame—the rods, cooled below freezing temperature, served as anchors for the generated fields. A lot of it was beyond her: she was a bots-handler, a maker and engraver of circuits on metal and ceramic, but she wasn’t the one to design or master the machine. That was Lam—the only scientist among them, the holder of an Imperial degree from the prestigious College of Brushes, equally at ease with the Classics of Mathematics as she was with the Classics of Literature. Lam had been set for a grand career, before she gave it all up and came home to take care of her sick father—to a small, insignificant station on the edge of nowhere where science was just another way to fix failing appliances.

  The machine, naturally, had been a welcome challenge to her. Lam had pored over articles from everywhere in the Empire; used her old networks of scientists in post in various branches of the Imperial Administration, from those designing war mindships to the ones on far-flung planets, tinkering with bots to help the local magistrate with the rice harvest. And, somehow, between all their late-night sessions with too much rice wine and fried soft crabs, between all their early-morning rushes with noodle soup heavy and warm in their bellies, they had built this.

  Diem Huong’s fingers closed on the piece. Like the previous one, it was smooth: the etchings barely perceptible, the surface cold. Would it be unlike the previous one, and hold the charge?

  She knelt by the machine’s side, finding by memory and touch the empty slot, and gently slid the piece into its rack. She could have relied on the bots to do it—and they would have been more accurate than her, to a fraction of measure—but some things shouldn’t be left to bots.

  Then she withdrew, connected to the room’s network, and switched the machine on.

  A warm red light like the lanterns of New Year’s Eve filled the room as the machine started its warm-up cycle. She should have waited, she knew—for Lam and the others, so they could see what they had laboured for—it wasn’t fair to them, to start things without their knowledge. But she needed to check whether the piece worked—after all, no point in making a ceremony of it if the piece snapped like the previous one, or if something else went wrong—as it had done, countless times before.

  Put like that, it almost sounded reasonable. But, in her heart of hearts, Diem Huong knew this wasn’t about tests, or being sure. It was simply that she had to see the machine work; to be sure that her vision would come to fruition.

  The others wouldn’t have understood: to them, the Citadel of Weeping Pearls was an object of curiosity, the machine a technical challenge that relieved the crushing boredom of mining the asteroid fields. To Diem Huong, it was her only path to salvation.

  Mother had gone on ahead, Ancestors only knew where. So there was no way forward. But, somewhere in the starlit hours of the past—somewhere in the days when the Citadel still existed, and Bright Princess Ngoc Minh’s quarrel with the Empress was still fresh and raw—Mother was still alive.

  There was a way back.

  The temperature in the room plummeted. Ice formed on the rods, became slick and iridescent, covered with a sheen like oil—and a feel like that of deep spaces permeated the room, a growing feeling of wrongness, of pressures in odd places the body wasn’t meant to have. The air within the box seemed to change—nothing obvious, but it shimmered and danced as if in a heat wave, and the harmonisation arch slowly revved up to full capacity, its edges becoming a hard blue.

  “Up early?”

  Lam. Here? Startled, Diem Huong turned around, and saw her friend leaning against the door, with a sarcastic smile.

  “I was—” she said.

  Lam shook her head. Her smile faded; became something else—sadness and understanding, mingled in a way that made Diem Huong want to curl up in a ball. “You don’t need to explain.”

  But she did. “I have to—”

  “Of course you do.” Lam’s voice was soft. She walked into the laboratory; stopped, looking at the machine with a critical frown. “Mmm.”

  “It’s not working?” Diem Huong asked, her heart in her throat.

  “I d
on’t know,” Lam said. “Let me remind you no one’s tried this before.”

  “I thought that was the point. You said everyone was wrong.”

  “Not in so many words, no.” Lam knelt by the rods, started to reach out a hand; and changed her mind. “I merely said some approaches had no chance of working. It has to do with the nature of deep spaces.”

  “The mindships’ deep spaces?”

  “They don’t belong to the mindships,” Lam said, absent-mindedly—the role of teacher came to her naturally, and after all, who was Diem Huong to blame her? Lam had built all of this; she deserved a little showing off. “The ships merely … cross them to get elsewhere? Space gets weird within deep spaces, that’s why you get to places earlier than you should be allowed to. And where space gets weird, time gets weird too.”

  She called up a control screen: out of deference to Diem Huong, she displayed it rather than merely keeping it on her implants. Her hand moved in an ever-quickening dance, sliding one cursor after the other, moving one dial after the next—a ballet of shifting colours and displays that she seemed to navigate as fast as she breathed, as utterly focused and at ease as Diem Huong was with her morning exercises.

  Then she paused; and left the screen hanging in the air, filled with the red of New Year’s lanterns. “Heaven help me. I think it’s working.”

  Working. Emperor in Heaven, it was working. Lam’s words—she knew what she was talking about—made it all real. “You think—” She hardly dared to imagine. She would see the Citadel of Weeping Pearls again—would talk to Mother again, know why she and Father had been abandoned …

  Lam walked closer to the harmonisation arch, frowning. Without warning, she uncoiled, as fluid as a fighter, and threw something she held in her hand. It passed through the door—a small, elongated shape like a pebble—arched on its descent downwards; and faded as it did so, until a translucent shadow settled on the floor—and dwindled away to nothing.

  On the display screen, a cursor slid all the way to the left. Diem Huong looked at Lam, questioningly. “It’s gone back? In time?”

  Lam peered at the display, and frowned again. “Looks like it. I entered the time you gave me, about ten days before the Citadel vanished. “She didn’t sound convinced. Diem Huong didn’t blame her. It was a mad, unrealistic adventure—but then, the Citadel had been a mad adventure in the first place, in so many ways, a rebellion of Bright Princess Ngoc Minh and her followers against the staidness of court life.

  A mad, unrealistic adventure—until it had vanished.

  Lam walked back to the display. Slowly, gently, she slid the cursor back to the right. At first, Diem Huong thought nothing had happened; but then, gradually, she saw a shadow; and then a translucent mass; and then the inkstone that Lam had thrown became visible again on the floor of the machine, as sharp and as clearly defined as though it had never left. “At least it’s come back,” Lam said. She sounded relieved. “But…”

  Back. So there was a chance she would survive this. And if she didn’t—then she’d be there, where it mattered. She’d have her answers—or would, once and for all, stop feeling the shadow of unsaid words hanging over her.

  Diem Huong moved, as though through thick tar—the gestures she had been steeling herself to make since this morning.

  “Lil’sis?” Lam asked, behind her. “You can’t—”

  Diem Huong knew what Lam would say: that they weren’t sure. That the machine was half-built, barely tested, barely run through its paces. For all she knew, that door opened into a black hole; or in the right time, but into a vacuum where she couldn’t breathe, or on the edge of a lava field so hot her lungs would burst into cinders. That they could find someone, or pay someone—or even use animals, though that would be as bad as humans, really, other living souls. “You know how it is,” Diem Huong said. The door before her shimmered blue; and there was a wind on her face, a touch of cold like a bristles of a brush made of ice.

  Answers. An end to her nightmares and the fears of her confused dreams.

  “I’ve known, yes,” Lam said, slowly. Her hands moved; her arms encircled Diem Huong’s chest. “But that’s no reason. Come back, lil’sis. We’ll make sure it’s safe, before you go haring off into Heaven knows what.”

  There was still a chance. Diem Huong could still turn back—if she did turn back, she would see Lam’s eyes, brimming with tears—would read the folly of what she was about to do.

  “I know it’s not safe,” Diem Huong said; and, gently disengaging herself from Lam’s arms, stepped forward—into a cold deeper than the void of space.

  THE EMPRESS

  Mi Hiep had been up since the Bi-Hour of the Ox—as old age settled into her bones, she found that she needed less and less sleep.

  In these days of strife in the Empire, sleep was a luxury she couldn’t afford to have.

  She would receive the envoys of the Nam Federation at the Bi-Hour of the Horse, which left her plenty of time to discuss the current situation with her advisors.

  Lady Linh pulled a map of the nearby star system, and carefully highlighted a patch at the edge of Dai Viet space. “The Nam Federation is gathering fleets,” she said.

  “How long until they can reach us?” Mi Hiep asked.

  Lady Linh shook her head. “I don’t know. The Ministry of War wasn’t able to ascertain the range of their engines.”

  Mi Hiep looked at the fleet. If they’d been normal outsider ships, it would have taken them months or years to make their way inwards—past the first defences and straight to the heart of the Empire. If they’d been normal outsider ships, she would have deployed a mindship in their midst, moving with the deadly grace of primed weapons; a single pinpoint strike that would have crippled any of them in a heartbeat. But those were new ships, with the La Hoa drive; and her spies’ reports suggested they could equal or surpass any mindships she might field.

  “What do you think?” Mi Hiep asked, to her ancestors.

  Around her, holograms flickered to life: emperors and empresses in old-fashioned court dresses, from the five-panels after the Exodus to the more elaborate, baroque style of clothing made possible by the accuracy of bots.

  The First Ancestor, the Righteously Martial Emperor—hoary, wizened without the benefit of rejuv treatments, was the one who spoke. “This much is clear, child: they’re not here to be friends with you.”

  The Ninth Ancestor, the Friend of Reform Emperor—named after an Old Earth emperor who had died in exile—frowned as he studied the map. “Assuming they can move through deep spaces”—he frowned at the map—“I suspect their target is the Imperial Shipyards.”

  “It makes sense,” Lady Linh said, slowly, carefully. She looked older than any of the Emperors around her—and the Twenty-Third Emperor, who stood by her side, had once imprisoned her for treason. Mi Hiep knew well that none of them made her comfortable. “It would enable them to capture mindships—”

  “Who wouldn’t serve them,” Mi Hiep said, more sharply than she’d intended. “They would still remember their families.”

  “Yes,” Lady Linh said, weighing every word. She looked at Mi Hiep, a little uncertainly: an expression Mi Hiep recognised as reluctance. It had to be something serious, then; Lady Linh had never been shy about her opinions—indeed, a misplaced memorial had been the cause of her thirty-year imprisonment.

  “Go on,” Mi Hiep said, inclining her head. She braced herself for the worst.

  Lady Linh reached out to the screen. There was a brief lag while her implants synchronised with it—a brief flowering of colour, the red seal of an agent of the Embroidered Guard clearly visible; and then something else appeared on the screen.

  It was a mindship—looking almost ordinary, innocuous at first sight. There was an odd protuberance on the hull, near the head; and a few more scattered here and there, like pustules. Then the ship started moving, and it became clear something was very, very wrong with it. No deadly grace, no ageless elegance; but the zigzagging, tottering co
urse of a drunkard, curves that turned into unexpectedly sharp lines, movements that started closing back on themselves.

  What had they done? Oh Ancestors, what had they done?

  “It’s a hijack,” Lady Linh said, curtly. “Plug in a few modules at key points, and you can influence what the ship sees and thinks. Then it’s just a matter of … fine manipulation.”

  There was silence, for a while. Then a snort from the First Emperor—who had taken the reign name Righteously Martial after ascending to the throne over the ruins of his rivals. “That doesn’t look like fine movements to me. If that’s all they have against us…”

  “That,” Lady Linh said, gently, almost apologetically, “is almost a full year old. We’ve had reports that the technology has evolved, but no pictures or vids. It has been harder and harder to get Embroidered Guard undercover. The Nam Federation are suspicious.”

  Suspicious. Mi Hiep massaged her forehead. Vast movements of troops. A technology to turn their own mindships against them. The Imperial Shipyards. It didn’t take a Master of Wind and Water to know which way things lay.

  “I see,” she said. The envoys of the Nam Federation were not due for another two hours, but she already knew what they would say. They would make pretty excuses, and tell her about military manoeuvres and the necessity to maintain the peace on their fractious borders. And she would smile and nod, and not believe a word of it.

  The Ninth Emperor turned, a ghostly shape against the metal panelling. “Someone is coming,” he said.

  The Sixteenth Empress raised her head, like a hound sniffing the wind. “Suu Nuoc. The child is in a hurry. He is arguing with the guards at the entrance. You had left orders not to be disturbed?”

  “Yes,” Mi Hiep said, disguising a sigh. None of the ancestors liked Suu Nuoc—it wasn’t clear if they thought he had been an inappropriate lover for an empress, or if they resented his lower-class origins. Mi Hiep was no fool: she had not promoted her former lover to the Board of Military Affairs. She had promoted a smart, resourceful man with utter loyalty to her, and that was what mattered. The ancestors could talk and talk and disapprove, but she was since long inured to being shamed by a mere look or stern talking-to.