“Lil’ sis.” Ngoc Minh smiled, and looked at her. “There isn’t much time.”
“I don’t understand,” Ngoc Ha said. “Why are you here?”
“Because you called,” Ngoc Minh said. With her free hand, the Bright Princess gestured to The Turtle’s Golden Claw: the ship had moved, to stand by her side; though she said nothing. “Because blood calls to blood, even in the depths of time.”
“I—” Ngoc Ha took a deep, trembling breath. “I wanted to find you. Or not to. I wasn’t sure.”
Ngoc Minh laughed. “You were always so indecisive.” Her eyes—her eyes were twin stars, their radiance burning. “As I said—I am here.”
“Here?” Ngoc Ha asked. “Where?” The light streamed around her, blurring everything—beyond the arch, the world was still shattered splinters, meaningless fragments.
The Turtle’s Golden Claw said, slowly, softly. “This is nowhere, nowhen. Just a pocket of deep spaces. A piece of the past.”
Of course. They weren’t like Grand Master Bach Cuc, destroyed in the conflagration within her laboratory; but were they any better off?
“Nowhere,” Ngoc Minh said, with a nod. She looked, for a moment, past Ngoc Ha; at the two engineers huddled together in a corner of the laboratory, holding hands like two long-lost friends. “That’s where I am, lil’ sis. Everywhere. Nowhere. Beyond time, beyond space.”
No. “You’re dead,” Ngoc Ha said, sharply; and the words burnt her throat like tears.
“Perhaps,” Ngoc Minh said. “I and the Citadel and the people aboard—” she closed her eyes; and for a moment, she wasn’t huge, or beyond time; but merely young, and tired, and faced with choices that had destroyed her—”Mother’s army and I could have fought each other, spilling blood for every measure of the Citadel. I couldn’t do that. Brother shall not fight brother, son shall not slay father, daughter shall not abandon mother…” The familiar litany of righteousness taught by their tutors, in days long gone by. “There was a way out.”
Death.
“Nowhere. Everywhere,” Ngoc Minh said. “If you go far enough into deep spaces, time ceases to have meaning. That’s where I took the Citadel.”
Time ceases to have meaning. Humanity, too, ceased to have any meaning—Ngoc Ha had read Grand Master Bach Cuc’s notes—she’d sent The Turtle’s Golden Claw there on her own, because humans who went this far dissolved, turning into the dust of stars, the ashes of planets. “You’re not human,” Ngoc Ha said. Not anymore.
“I’m not human either,” The Turtle’s Golden Claw said, gently.
Ngoc Minh merely smiled. “You place too much value on that word.”
Because you’re my sister. Because—because she was tired, too, of dragging the past behind her; of thirty years of not knowing whether she should mourn or move on; of Mother not giving her any attention beyond her use in finding her sister. Because—
“Did you never think of us?” The words were torn out of Ngoc Ha’s mouth before she could think. Did she never see the sleepless nights, the days where she’d carefully moulded her face and her thoughts to never see Ngoc Minh—the long years of shaping a life around the wound of her absence?
Ngoc Minh did not answer. Not human. Not anymore. A star storm, somewhere in the vastness of space. Storms did not think whether they harmed you, or cared whether you grieved.
There isn’t much time, she’d said. Of course. Of course no one could live for long, in deep spaces.
“Good-bye, lil’ sis. Be at peace.” And the Bright Princess withdrew her hand from Ngoc Ha’s; turning back towards the light of the harmonisation arch, going back to wherever she was, whatever she had turned into—the face she showed now, the one that didn’t seem to have changed, was nothing more than a mask, a gift to Ngoc Ha to comfort her. The real Ngoc Minh—and everyone else in the Citadel—didn’t wear faces or bodies anymore.
But still, she’d come; for one last glimpse, one last gift. A moment, frozen in time, before the machine was turned off, or killed them all.
Be at peace.
If such a thing could ever happen—if memories could be erased, wounds magically healed, lives righted back into the proper shape, without the shadow of jealousy and love and loss.
“Wait,” Ngoc Ha said; and Bright Princess Ngoc Minh paused—and looked back at her, reaching out with a translucent hand; her eyes serene and distant, her smile the same enigmatic one as the bodhisattva statues in the temples.
The hand was wreathed in light; the blue nimbus of the harmonisation door; the shadow of deep spaces where she lived, where no one could survive.
Nowhere. Everywhere.
“Wait.”
“Mother—” The Turtle’s Golden Claw said. “You can’t—”
Ngoc Ha smiled. “Of course I can,” she said; and reached out, and clasped her sister’s hand to hers.
THE OFFICER
From where he stood rooted to the ground, Suu Nuoc saw it all happen, as if in some nightmare he couldn’t wake up from: Ngoc Ha talking with the figure in the doorway; The Turtle’s Golden Claw screaming; and Lam cursing, the bots surging from the floor at her command, making for the arch.
Too late.
Ngoc Ha reached out, and took the outstretched hand. Her topknot had come undone, and her hair was streaming in the wind from the door—for a moment they stood side by side, the two sisters, almost like mirror images of each other, as if they were the same person with two very different paths in life.
“Princess!” Suu Nuoc called—knowing, with a horrible twist in his belly, what was going to happen before it did.
Ngoc Ha turned to look at him, for a fraction of a second. She smiled; and her smile was cold, distant already—a moment only, and then she turned back to look at her sister the Bright Princess; and her other hand wrapped itself around her sister’s other hand, locking them in an embrace that couldn’t be broken.
And then they were gone, scattering into a thousand shards of light.
“No,” The Turtle’s Golden Claw said. “No. Mother…”
No panic. This was not the time for it. With an effort, Suu Nuoc wrenched his thoughts back from the brink of incoherence. Someone needed to be pragmatic about matters, and clearly neither of the two scientists, nor the mindship, was going to provide level-headedness.
“She’s gone,” he said to The Turtle’s Golden Claw. “This isn’t what we need to worry about. How do we shut off this machine before it kills us all?”
“She’s my mother!” The Turtle’s Golden Claw said.
“I know,” Suu Nuoc said, curtly. Pragmatism, again. Someone needed to have it. “You can look for her later.”
“There is no later!”
“There always is. Leave it, will you? We have more pressing problems.”
“Yes, we do.” Lam had come back; and with her was the engineer—Diem Huong, who still looked as though she’d been through eight levels of Hell and beyond, but whose face no longer had the shocked look of someone who had seen things she shouldn’t. “You’re right. We need to shut this thing down. Come on, Huong. Give me a hand.” They crouched together by the machine, handing each other bits and pieces of ceramic and cabling. After a while, The Turtle’s Golden Claw drifted, reluctantly, to join them, interjecting advice, while the bots moved slowly, drunkenly, piecing things back together as best as they could.
Suu Nuoc, whose talents most emphatically did not lie in science or experimental time machines, drifted back to the harmonisation arch, watching the world beyond—the collage of pristine corridors and delicately painted temples; the fragments of citizens teleporting from one ship to the next.
The Citadel. What the Empress had desperately sought. What she’d thought she desperately needed—and Suu Nuoc had never argued with her, only taken her orders to heart and done his best to see them to fruition.
But now … Now he wasn’t so sure, anymore, that they’d ever needed any of this.
“It’s gone,” Diem Huong said, gently. She was standing by
her side, watching the door; her voice quiet, thoughtful; though he was not fooled at the strength of the emotions she was repressing. “The Bright Princess took it too far into deep spaces, and it vanished. That’s what really happened to it. That’s why Grand Master Bach Cuc would never have found it. It only exists in the past, now.”
“I know,” Suu Nuoc said. Perhaps, if another of the Empress’s children was willing to touch the arch—but his gut told him it wouldn’t work again. Ngoc Ha had been close to Bright Princess Ngoc Minh; too close, in fact—the seeds of her ultimate fate already sown long before they had come here, to the Scattered Pearls belt. There was no one else whose touch would call forth the Bright Princess again; even if the Empress was willing to sanction the building of a time machine again, after it had killed a Master of Grand Design Harmony and almost destroyed an orbital.
“There!” Lam said, triumphantly. She rose, holding two bits of cable; at the same time as The Turtle’s Golden Claw reached for something on the edge of the harmonisation arch.
The light went out, as if she’d thrown a switch; when it came on again, the air had changed—no longer charged or lit with blue, it was simply the slightly stale, odourless one of any orbital. And the room, too, shrank back to normal, the furniture simply tables and chairs, and screens, rather than the collage monstrosities Suu Nuoc and his squad had seen on the way in.
Suu Nuoc took a deep, trembling breath, trying to convince himself it was over.
The Turtle’s Golden Claw drifted back to the machine—now nothing more than a rectangle with a de-activated harmonisation arch, looking small and pathetic, and altogether too diminished to have caused so much trouble. “I’ll find her,” she said. “Somewhere in deep spaces…”
Suu Nuoc said nothing. He’d have to gather them all; to bring them back to the First Planet, so they could be debriefed—so he could explain to the Empress why she had lost a second daughter. And—if she still would have him, when it was all accounted for—he would have to help her fight a war.
But, for now, he watched the harmonisation arch; and remembered what he had seen through it. The past. The Citadel, like some fabled underground treasure. Ghostly apparitions, like myths and fairytales—nothing to build a life or a war strategy on.
The present was all that mattered. The past’s grievous wounds had to close, or to be ignored; and the future’s war and the baying of wolves could only be distant worries. He would stand where he had always stood; by his Empress’s side, to guide the Empire forward for as long as she would have him.
The Citadel was gone, and so were its miracles—but wasn’t it for the best, after all?
honorable mentions: 2015
Allora & Calzadilla & Ted Chiang, “The Great Silence,” e-flux journal 56th Venice Biennale.
Ken Altabef, “Laika,” Interzone 251.
Charlie Jane Anders, “Ghost Champagne,” Uncanny 5.
______, “Rat Catcher’s Yellows,” Press Start to Play.
Michael Andre-Driussi,” Atomic Missions,” Kaleidotrope, Winter.
Eleanor Arnason, “Telling Stories to the Sky,” Fantasy & Science Fiction, January/February.
Madeline Ashby, “Memento Mori,” Meeting Infinity.
Charlotte Ashley, “La Héron,” Fantasy & Science Fiction, March/April.
Megan Arkenberg, “Like All Beautiful Places,” The End Has Come.
Julia August, “Rites of Passage,” Kaliedotrope, Autumn.
Daniel Ausema, “Among the Sighs of the Violoncellos,” Strange Horizons, April.
Alec Austin and Marissa Lingen, “Human Trials,” Abyss & Apex, 4th Quarter.
Paolo Bacigalupi, “A Hot Day’s Night,” Fantasy & Science Fiction, September/October.
Dale Bailey, “The Ministry of the Eye,” Lightspeed, April.
John Barnes, “My Last Bringback,” Meeting Infinity.
Kathleen Bartholomew and Kage Baker, “Pareidolia,” Asimov’s Science Fiction, March.
Aria Bauer, “Bones of Steel,” Daily SF, November 19.
Stephen Baxter, “Endurance,” Endurance.
Elizabeth Bear, “The Balance in Blood,” Uncanny 7.
______, “The Bone War,” Fantasy & Science Fiction, September/October.
______, “The Heart’s Filthy Lesson,” Old Venus.
______, “In Libres,” Uncanny 4.
______, “Margin of Survival,” The End Has Come.
______, “Skin in the Game,” Future Visions.
Greg Bear, “The Machine Starts,” Future Visions.
Helena Bell, “Needle on Bone,” Strange Horizons, November 2.
Annie Bellet, “Goodnight Earth,” The End Has Come.
Gregory Benford, “Aspects,” Meeting Infinity.
M. Bennardo, “Ghosts of the Savannah,” Asimov’s, June.
______, “We Jump Down into the Dark,” Asimov’s, December.
Paul M. Berger, “The Mantis Tattoo,” Fantasy & Science Fiction, March/April.
Deborah Biancotti, “Look How Cold My Hands Are,” Cranky Ladies of History.
Michael Bishop, “Rattlesnakes and Men,” Asimov’s, February.
Holly Black, “1Up,” Press Start to Play.
Jenny Blackford, “The Sorrow,” Hear Me Roar!
Brooke Bolander, “And You Shall Know Her by the Trail of Dead,” Lightspeed, February.
Gregory Norman Bossart, “Twelve and Tag,” Asimov’s, March.
Elizabeth Bourne, “The Algebra of Events,” Clarkesworld, September.
Richard Bowes, “The Duchess and the Ghost,” Fantasy, December.
______, “Rascal Saturday,” Fantasy & Science Fiction, September/October.
David Bowles, “Winds That Stir Vermillion Sands,” Strange Horizons, 6/29.
David Brin, “The Tell,” Future Visions.
______, “The Tumbledowns of Cleopatra Abyss,” Old Venus.
Eneasz Brodski, “Red Legacy,” Asimov’s, February.
Christopher Brown, “Festival,” Stories for Chip.
Maria A. Buchkachi, “Jestocost, Djinn,” Afrofuture(s).
Tobias S. Buckell, “Pale Blue Memories,” Old Venus.
Oliver Buckram, “The Quintessence of Dust,” Fantasy & Science Fiction, July/August.
Mike Buckley, “An Original Brightness,” Clarkesworld, March.
Karl Bunker, “Caisson,” Asimov’s, August.
Matthew Burrows, “The Exception That Proves the Rule,” War Stories from the Future.
Chris Butler, “The Deep of Winter,” Interzone 259.
C.A.L, “Bitter Medicine,” Kaleidotrope, Autumn.
Rebecca Campbell, “Unearthly Landscape by a Lady,” Beneath Ceaseless Skies, October 15.
Stephen Case, “The Wizard’s House,” Beneath Ceaseless Skies, February 5.
Erin Casher, “Swallowing Silver,” Beneath Ceaseless Skies, April 30.
Michael Cassutt, “The Sunset of Time,” Old Venus.
Rob Chilson, “A Turkey with Egg on His Face,” Fantasy & Science Fiction, May/June.
______, “The Tarn,” Analog, July–August.
Roshani Chokshi, “The Star Maiden,” Shimmer 26, July/August.
Gwendolyn Clare, “Holding the Ghosts,” Asimov’s, March.
______, “Indelible,” Clarkesworld, February.
Ron Collins, “Tumbling Dice,” Analog, July–August.
Glen Cook, “Bone Eaters,” Operation Arcana.
Brenda Cooper, “Biology at the End of the World,” Asimov’s, September.
______, “Iron Pegasus,: Mission: Tomorrow.
James S. A. Corey, “The Vital Abyss,” Orbit.
Albert E. Cowdrey, “The Laminated Man,” Fantasy & Science Fiction, May/June.
______, “The Lord of Ragnarök,” Fantasy & Science Fiction, September/October.
______, “Portrait of a Witch,” Fantasy & Science Fiction, January/February.
Ian Creasey, “My Time on Earth,” Asimov’s, October/November.
John Chu, “(Influence Is
olated, Make Peace,”) Lightspeed, June.
Richard Chwedyk, “Dixon’s Road,” Fantasy & Science Fiction, July/August.
Dennis Danvers, “Adult Children of Alien Beings,” Tor.com, August 19.
Indrapramit Das, “Psychopomp,” Interfictions, November.
Aliette de Bodard, “In Blue Lily’s Wake,” Meeting Infinity.
______, “Of Books, And Earth, and Courtship,” Nine Dragon Rivers.
Emily Devenport, “The Servant,” Clarkesworld, August.
Malcolm Devlin, “Five Conversations with My Daughter (Who Travels in Time),” Interzone 251.
______, “Her First Harvest,” Interzone 258.
Jeste de Vries, “Echoes of Life,” Kaleidotrope, Spring,
Seth Dickinson, “Morrigan in Shadow,” Clarkesworld, December.
______, “Please Undo This Hurt,” Tor.com, 9/15.
Brian Dolton, “This Is the Way the Universe Ends: With a Bang,” Fantasy & Science Fiction, March/April.
Brendan Dubois, “The Master’s Voice,” Analog, December.
Andy Dudak, “Anarchic Hand,” Apex, January.
______, “Asymptotic,” Clarkesworld, June.
______, “Samsara and Ice,” Analog, January/February.
Tananarive Due, “Carriers,” The End Has Come.
Thoraiya Dryer, “Houdini’s Heart,” Apex, March.
Greg Egan, “The Four Thousand, the Eight Hundred,” Asimov’s, December.
Kate Elliott, “On the Dying Winds of the Old Year and the Birthing Winds of the New,” The Very Best of Kate Elliott.
Amal El-Mohtar, “Madeleine,” Lightspeed, June.
______, “Pockets,” Uncanny 2.
______, “The Truth About Owls,” Strange Horizons, January 26.
Ruthanna Emrys, “The Deepest Rift,” Tor.com, June 24.
Timons Esaias, “Exit Interview,” Analog, November.
______, “Hollywood After 10,” Asimov’s, October/November.
Paul Evanby, “Utrechtenaar,” Strange Horizons, June 15.
Fábio Fernandos, “Eleven Stations,” Stories for Chip.
Gemma Files, “The Salt Wedding,” Kaleidotrope, Winter.
C.C. Finlay, “Time Bomb Time,” Lightspeed, May.
Eugene Fischer, “The New Mother,” Asimov’s, April/May.
The Year's Best Science Fiction - Thirty-Third Annual Collection Page 113