The citadel.
At last.
Mother …
She was back; standing in what would become the memories of her childhood home, and she didn’t know what to feel anymore—if she should weep or shout or leap for joy. She simply stood, breathing it all in; savouring that feeling—for a moment, she was a child again, running down the corridors with Thuy and Hanh, reprogramming the kitchen’s bots to manufacture fireworks they could set off in the little park; secure in the knowledge that she’d find Mother in the kitchen, her hands smelling of garlic and lime and fish sauce, and there would be rice on the table and broth boiling away on the stove, clinging to her hands and clothes like perfumed smoke.
A moment only; but in so many ways, she was no longer a child. She had lived six years on the Citadel in blissful ignorance; but ignorance was no longer bliss.
She needed to find Mother.
In the alcove by her side was a little altar to gods, with fruit and sticks of burning incense; she reached out and touched it, feeling the stickiness on her hands; the smell clinging to her clothes—whispering a prayer to whoever might be listening. Her touch set the mangos slightly askew, and she did not dare touch them again: superstition, but who knew what might help her, in this strange place that was neither now nor then?
Lam had given her a speech, once, about going back in time; about paradoxes and the fact she wouldn’t be able to affect anything; but Diem Huong hadn’t been paying enough attention. She wished she had. She wished she knew what would happen, if she met herself; if she harmed Mother, one way or another.
There was a stack of eight incense sticks by the altar: on impulse, she lit one, and kept one with her, for good luck. As she did so the screen above the altar came alive, asking her what she wanted—as if it had seen her, recognised her as a citizen, even though she didn’t have the implants that would have enabled such a thing. She felt a thrill run through her, even as she told the screen to go dark.
The Citadel.
She wanted to run, to leap or scream—to rush to where Mother would be, to talk to her before it all vanished, before whatever miracle had brought her here vanished, before Lam somehow found a way to bring her back, before she died. She forced herself to stop; to hold herself still, as if Mother were still standing with her, one hand steadying her shoulder, her body very still besides her, absorbing all her eagerness to move. She needed …
She needed to think.
As she walked out of the corridor and onto a large plaza, she saw people giving her odd looks—she wore the wrong clothes, or walked the wrong way. As long as she didn’t stop for long, it wouldn’t matter. But, eventually …
Diem Huong closed her eyes. Once, thirty years ago, Mother had had her memorise the address and network contact for the house, in case she got lost. She’d had so many addresses and contacts since then; but this was the first and most treasured one she’d learnt.
Compartment 206, Eastern Quadrant, The Jade Pool. And a string of numbers and symbols that, input into any comms system, would call home.
The network implants she’d had as a child had been removed, six months after the Citadel vanished, when Father finally decided there was no coming back—when he started the long slow slide into drinking himself to death. She’d been too young to be taught by the hermits, and couldn’t teleport or weaponise her thoughts, the way the others did.
She would need to ask someone for help.
The thought was enough to turn her legs to jelly. She wanted to keep her head down—she didn’t need to be noticed as a time traveller or a vagrant, or whatever they’d make of her.
To calm herself down, she walked farther. The plaza was flanked by a training centre: citizens in black robes went through their exercises—the Eight Pieces of Brocade, the same ones she still did every morning—under the watchful eyes of a yellow-robed Order member. At the farthest end, an old woman was staring at sand; eventually the sand would blow up, as if there had been a small explosion; and then she’d stare at some other patch.
Who to ask? Someone who would take her seriously, but who wouldn’t report her. So not the Order member, or the trainees. The noodle seller on the side, watching negligently as her bots spun dough into body-length noodles, and dropped them into soup bowls filled with greens and meat? The storyteller, who was using his swarm of bots to project the shadows of a dragon and a princess on the walls?
Something was wrong.
Diem Huong looked around her. Nothing seemed to have changed: the noodle seller was still churning out bowl after bowl; the same crowd of people with multiple body mods was walking by, idly staring at the trainees.
Something—
She opened her hand. The incense stick she’d taken was no longer in it—no, that wasn’t quite accurate. It had left a faint trace: a ghost image of itself, that was vanishing even as she stared at it, until nothing was left—as if she’d never taken it from the altar at all.
That was impossible. She ran her fingers on her hand, over and over again. No stick. Not even the smell of it on her skin. And something else, too: her hands had been sticky from touching the ripe mangoes on the altar, but now that, too, was gone.
As if she’d never touched it at all.
No.
That wasn’t possible.
She ran, then. Heedless of the disapproving stares that followed her, she pelted back to the deserted corridor she’d arrived in—back to that small altar where she’d lit an incense stick and disturbed the fruit.
All the while, she could hear Lam’s lecture in her mind—spacetime projections, presence matrices, a jumble of words bleeding into each other until they were all but incomprehensible—it had been late, and Diem Huong had been on her fiftieth adjustment to a piece’s circuits—waiting by the side of the oven for her pattern to set in, absent-mindedly nibbling on a rice cake as a substitute for dinner. She hadn’t meant to shut Lam out, but she’d thought she could ask again—that there would be another opportunity to listen to that particular lecture.
The altar was there. But other things weren’t: the incense stick she’d lit had disappeared, and the fruit were back to the configuration she’d originally found them in. Her heart madly beating against her chest, she turned to the stack of incense sticks. Eight. Not seven, or even six. Eight, exactly the number she had found.
Bots could have done it, she supposed—could have brought back the missing sticks and straightened out the altar, for some incomprehensible reason—but bots couldn’t remove a stick from her hands, or wash the mangoes’ sugar from her skin. No, that wasn’t it.
Her heart in her throat, she turned towards the space in the wall, to see the imprint of the arch.
But that, too, was gone, vanished as though it had never been.
* * *
You won’t affect anything. That’s the beauty of it. No paradoxes. Don’t worry about killing yourself or your mother. Can’t be done.
Later, much later, after Diem Huong had walked the length and breadth of the ship she was on (The Tiger in the Banyan’s Hollow, one of the smaller, peripheral ones that composed the citadel), she measured the full import of Lam’s words.
She was there, but not there. The things she took went back to where she had taken them; the food she tasted remained in her stomach for a few moments before it, too, faded away. She wasn’t starving, though; wasn’t growing faint from hunger or thirst—it was as if nothing affected her. In her conversations with people, their eyes would start to glaze after anything more simple than a question—forgetting that she stood there at all, that she had ever been there. She could speak again, and receive only a puzzled look—and then only puzzled words as the conversation started over again, with no memory of what had been said before. If she made no effort to be noticed—if she did not run or scream or make herself stand out from the crowd in any way, people’s gazes would pause on her for a split second, and then move on to something else.
You won’t affect anything, Lam had said, but that wasn�
��t true. She could affect things—she just couldn’t make them stick. It was as if the universe was wound like some coiled spring, and no matter how hard she pulled, it would always return to its position of equilibrium. The bigger the change she made, the more slowly it would be erased—she broke a vase on one of the altars, and it took two hours for the shards to knit themselves together again—but erasure always happened.
She moved plates and vases; turned on screens and ambient moods; and saw everything moving back into place, everything turning itself off, and people dismissing it as nothing more than a glitch.
At length, she sat down on the steps before the training centre, and stared at nothing for a while. She was there, and not there—how long would she even be in the Citadel? How long before the universe righted itself, and she was pulled back—into Lam’s laboratory, or into some other nothingness? She stared at her own hands, wondering if they were turning more ghostly; if her whole being was vanishing?
Focus. She needed to. Focus. She looked at the screens: time had passed from morning to later afternoon, and the light of the ship was already dimming to the golden glow before sunset. Ten days before the Citadel vanished—nine and a half, now. And if she was still onboard …
If it was all for nothing, she might as well try to get the answers she’d come here for.
She got up, and went to one of the monks in the training centre: she picked one that was not teaching any students, and simply seemed to be sitting in a bench in the centre of the gardens, though not meditating either: simply relaxing after a hard day’s work. “Yes, daughter?” he asked, looking at her. His eyes narrowed; wondering what she was doing there—she stood out in so many painful ways.
She had perhaps a handful of moments before he started forgetting that she was there. “I was wondering if you could help me. I need to get to The Jade Pool.” Compartment 206, Eastern Quadrant.
“You need to get elsewhere. Like the militia’s offices,” the monk said. He was still watching her, eyes narrowed. “You’re not a citizen. How did you steal onboard?”
“Please,” she said.
His eyes moved away from her; focused again, with the same shocked suspicion of the first look. “How can I help you, daughter?”
“I need to get to The Jade Pool,” Diem Huong said. “Please. I’m lost.”
“That’s not a matter for me. I need to report this to the Embroidered Guard.”
She felt a spike of fear; and then remembered that no one would remember the report minutes after he had made it. “You don’t need to do this.” But his eyes, again, had moved away. It was useless. “Thank you,” she said.
She walked away from him, feeling his eyes on the back of her head; and then, as time passed, the gaze lessen in intensity; and he looked right past her, not remembering who she was or that he had talked to her.
A ghost. Worse than a ghost—a presence everyone forgot as soon as she left their life. A stranger in her own childhood, fighting against the spring of the universe snapping back into place. How was she ever going to get to Mother?
Lam. Help me. But it was useless. Her friend couldn’t hear her. No one could.
Unless—
She wasn’t really here, was she? She walked and took things like anyone else; except nothing stuck. She didn’t have the implants everyone had; the ones that enabled them to teleport from one end of the Citadel to another; but she didn’t really have any presence here, and yet she could still move things for a while; could still make screens respond to her.
Mother had talked about teleportation; and so had Father, in his cups or on the long nights when he railed against the unfairness of the world. It had been a matter of state of mind, they’d both said—of being one with the mindships that composed the Citadel; to see the world in their terms until everything seemed to be connected; until the world itself was but a footstep away. And of implants; but perhaps it wasn’t about implants after all. Perhaps the rules of the past were different from those of the present.
Compartment 206, Eastern Quadrant. The Jade Pool.
Diem Huong closed her eyes, and concentrated.
THE EMPRESS
Mi Hiep prepared for her audience with the envoys of the Nam Federation as if she were preparing for war. Her attendants gave her the dress habitually reserved for receiving foreign envoys: a yellow robe with five-clawed dragons wending their ways across her body; a headdress bedecked with jewels. For the occasion, she had the alchemists alter her body chemistry to grow the fingernails of her two smallest fingers on each hand to three times their usual size, encasing them into long, gold protectors that turned her fingers into claws.
Huu Tam, her heir, waited by her side, decked in the robe with the five-clawed dragons that denoted his position. He looked nervous—she’d had him leave his usual mob of supporters at the door, and she knew it would make him feel vulnerable, a small child scolded for wrongdoing. Good, because he needed vulnerability; needed to be off-balance and question himself, to negate his tendency to be so sure of himself he didn’t stop to consider what was best for the Empire. “Mother,” he said, slowly, as Mi Hiep dismissed the attendants. “I’m not sure—”
“We’ve been over this,” Mi Hiep said. “Do you think peace is worth any sacrifice?”
“We can’t fight a war,” Huu Tam said. He grimaced, looking for a moment much older than he was.
“No,” Mi Hiep said. “And I’ll do my best to see we don’t. But we might have to, nevertheless.”
Huu Tam nodded, slowly. He didn’t like war; an occupation unworthy of a scholar. But he’d never been faced with decisions like these—wasn’t the one who’d looked into Ngoc Minh’s face, and sent ships towards the Citadel of the Bright Princess with the order to raze it—wasn’t the one who’d lain down on his bed afterwards, waiting for the sound of his heartbeat to become inaudible again, for the pain against her ribs to vanish into nothingness.
He was her heir. He had to learn; and better early on, while she was still flesh-and-blood and not some disembodied, loveless ancestor on the data banks.
Mi Hiep sat on her throne, and waited—muting the communal network, as it would be a distraction more than anything else. She didn’t need to see the banners above her head to know her full name and titles; and neither did she need access to her implants to remember everything Lady Linh and her advisors had told her.
The envoys would deny everything; dance and smile and pretend nothing was wrong. She, in turn, would have to make it clear that she was ready for war; and hint that she was not without resources, in the hopes the Nam Federation would seek easier prey.
Huu Tam moved, to stand on her left; and she summoned, with a gesture, all of her ancestors’ simulations, from the First Emperor to her mother, the Twenty-Fourth Empress: her chain of uninterrupted wisdom, all the way since the beginning of the dynasty, her living link to the past. Her true ancestors might well be dead, spun by the Wheel of Rebirth into other lives, but their words and personalities lived on, preserved with the same care Old Earthers had preserved poems and books.
They stood, on either side of her, as the envoys approached.
It was a small delegation: a florid, rotund woman flanked by a pinch-faced man and another, more relaxed one who reminded Mi Hiep of the hermits that had once attended Bright Princess Ngoc Minh. They both knelt on the floor until Mi Hiep gave them permission to rise: they remained on their knees, facing her; though there was nothing servile or fearful in their attitude. They looked around the lacquered pillars of the hall, at the proverbs engraved on the floor; and the exquisite constructs of the communal network—and their eyes were those of tigers among the sheep.
The woman’s name was Diem Vy; after the exchanges of pleasantries and of ritual gifts, she spoke without waiting for Mi Hiep to invite her to do so. “We are pleased that you have accepted to receive us, Empress. I understand that you have expressed some … concerns about our exercises.”
Interesting. Mi Hiep expected dancing around the
evidence, but Vy clearly did not care for this. Two could play this game. “Indeed,” Mi Hiep said, wryly. “Massive movements of ships entirely too close to my borders tend to have this effect.”
Vy’s face crinkled in a smile—a pleasant, joyful one. Mi Hiep didn’t trust her one measure. “Military exercises happen at borders,” she said. “Generally, doing them near the capital tends to make citizens nervous.”
“Fair point,” Mi Hiep said. “Then this is nothing more than the norm?”
Vy did not answer. It was the other envoy, the serene-faced hermit—a man named Thich An Son, who answered. “A federation such as ours must always be ready to defend itself, Empress; and our neighbours have had … troubling activities.”
“Not us,” Mi Hiep said. If they were determined to be this transparent, she would not obfuscate. “We have no interest, at this time, in cryptic military games.” Let them make of that what they willed.
Thich An Son smiled. “Of course not, Empress. We know we can trust you.”
As if anyone here believed that, or the reverse. Mi Hiep returned the smile. “Of course. We will honour the treaties. We trust that you will do the same.” And then, slowly, carefully, “I have heard … rumours, though.”
Vy froze. “Rumours?”
Mi Hiep gestured to Lady Linh, who handed her a ghostly image of a folder stamped with the seal of the Embroidered Guard: a gesture merely for show, as she knew the contents of said folder by heart, and had no need to materialise it in the communal network. “Troubling things,” she said, coldly, as if she already knew it all. “Ships that look like distorted versions of mindships.”
“Copying designs is not a crime,” Vy said, a touch more heatedly than the occasion warranted.
“Indeed, not,” Mi Hiep said. “If that is all there is to it.” She opened the folder in network space, making sure that it was as theatrical as possible—letting them see blurred images of ships and planets seen in every wavelength from radio to gamma rays.
The Year's Best Science Fiction - Thirty-Third Annual Collection Page 107