On a Red Station, Drifting

by Aliette de Bodard

  She remembered the crushing loneliness, that same sense of standing on the edge of the abyss with no way but down, into a darkness deeper than that of the underworld, until the Honoured Ancestress had reached out, taken Quyen under Her protection. There had been a promise that she would never be alone until the day she died.

  Broken now, all broken into ten thousand shards, like her five organs.

  “It is the way of the world,” the Honoured Ancestress said. “Oblivion and rebirth, and oblivion again.” She sounded oddly wistful. Perhaps afraid? Quyen couldn’t tell anymore. “As all humans do.”

  “But you’re not human.” Not immortal, but as close as, from their point of view. She’d seen them arrive, had seen children born, old men and women die, generation after generation. She...

  The Honoured Ancestress’ voice was soft. “I was built to watch over this station, for generation after generation. To watch over you all. How can I do my duty, if the madness is upon me?”

  “You’re afraid,” Quyen said, and the Honoured Ancestress did not answer. Quyen realised that she was the one who was afraid, the one who would lose everything.

  At last, a softer touch, almost like a hand stroking her cheek. “I’m sorry, child. I truly am. But I will forget everything. Your arrival, and the years we spent together, and the banquet...”

  “I’ll remind you.” Quyen’s voice was low and fierce, with a fire she hadn’t known she possessed. “Again and again.” And she knew it would mean nothing to the Honoured Ancestress, that the Mind they had known, the person they had known, would be gone. That She would find their reminiscences baffling, like a blind man listening to a description of a painting they couldn’t see, like an illiterate peasant in the old days, struggling to understand allusions from books they’d never read.

  She knew that, once again, she’d stand in the vastness of Prosper and feel loneliness crushing the marrow of her bones, the entire station a strange and alien place that bore no resemblance to the home she’d made.

  “You and Anh,” she said, slowly. The Honoured Ancestress and her husband, the only two things she’d call hers in the entire world.

  It wasn’t fair. But then again, the world wasn’t, was it?

  ***

  The station was all but deserted, and the vapour of Linh’s breath hung before her as she moved between the hologram stands. They were blinking out, one by one, and the lights were dimming, as if some huge hand were cutting off the power to all quarters.

  Ring after ring, and everything was the same: the corridors empty, even more so, with the paintings gone, the music extinguished, and the clever poems faded away into nothingness. There was no noise but Linh’s own footsteps, painfully echoing against the metal walls, with nothing and no one to muffle their echo. Tap, tap, tap, a noise coming back to haunt her, and her breath burning in her throat, as if she walked in the ruins of the war.

  “Honoured Ancestress?” she asked, but got no answer. The trance, too, seemed to be weak and erratic. The only thing it displayed was a simple warning: “Stay inside. This is for the good of Prosper, and for our continued survival.” Some reference to a poem, or a book, but Linh couldn’t figure out which one. And so she walked in the gathering dark, feeling more naked and alone than she’d ever been.

  Was it her doing? A poem. It had been nothing more than a poem. Surely it could not have collapsed Prosper upon itself?

  Surely...

  She’d seen all she needed to see. Before, she’d been locked up inside her quarters, and foraging through the remnants of the trance, trying to find a weakness, any weakness, that she could use against Cousin Quyen...

  What irony, in the end, that she’d found another use for the information, that, instead of tearing the family apart as Huu Hieu had done, she would play her part in preserving its harmony.

  The school was deserted when she arrived, its name blinking in washed-out letters over the entrance. Abode of Brush Saplings. Well named, for a place which trained scholars.

  Linh’s hand lingered on the control panel. She put her weight against the screen and pushed. With the station all but gone, and her status undetermined, it probably wouldn’t work. She wouldn’t be able to use her family’s blood to bypass security.

  The door swung open with a creak like the tortured souls of the underworld. Linh walked through, into an empty courtyard where the wind was rising, gathering whirls of dust. At the centre was a pond. The red carps inside had gone into a frenzy with the loss of light, sending splashes of water all over the central statue.

  “We’re closed,” a peevish voice said, from behind the covered desks.

  Linh smiled, and drew herself upright, effortlessly calling upon her magistrate’s mask. “I think not. Will you deny me, Lê Anh Tu?” Instead of the address of “uncle”, or “teacher”, which she should have given him, she used his full name, as if he’d been called before her tribunal.

  His voice was cold. “You’re no magistrate, woman. You’re a spirits-cursed refugee, even less than I am.”

  “Do you think so?” Linh’s lips curled up.

  “I know perfectly well who you are.” Above them the ceiling was darkening, like night falling across a world that had never known it. “Mistress Quyen’s poor, neglected cousin. A relation she’d deny if she could. Do you wish to regain her favours, after the scandal? It’s too late.” He shook his head, looking at the dust swirling all around them. “Much too late for anything. But we’ll survive. Prosper will survive.”

  “You won’t,” Linh said. “Mistress Quyen will tear you to pieces if she doesn’t find her implants.”

  Tu shrugged. “She won’t dare. I told her already. She can search all she wants, and she won’t find anything. She’s sent her attendants already, and they’ve failed. Without proof, she can’t touch me. There will still be a school, and I will still give my students the chance they deserve. And she can send all the relatives she wants, even the failed magistrates, but it will change nothing. Not one of you will find anything.”

  Magistrate. Bao had seen, after all, what made her so powerful, what made her such an asset to Prosper. Linh’s eyes roamed the courtyard. Everything was empty, deserted, save for the central pond. “Do you know why they call us father-and-mother of the people, Lê Anh Tu?”

  “Because you lord it over us all.” He spat the words like poison snakes. “Because you’re always right, no matter what we do.”

  Linh smiled. “Because we know people like parents know their children.” Her hand rose, pointed towards the desk. “I’ve seen enough. I’ve heard enough. You’re a bitter man, Lê Anh Tu, and an arrogant one. A smarter man would have moved the implants away, but you needed to feel their presence every day. You needed to remind yourself of the victory you’d won over the family.”

  “I don’t care about the family!” Tu snapped, but there was fear in his eyes.

  “They’re here,” Linh said, and she didn’t need to look at him to see the confirmation. “In some place you think people won’t touch, no matter how desperate.” A handful of desks, under the roof, the ancestral shrine for Tu’s own family, with an offering of fruit and the remnants of a stick of incense in a burner. The pond with the frenzied carps, and a door leading into the private quarters. The carps? No, too obvious. Most people would hesitate to gut a fish that stood for wealth. But it wasn’t protection enough.

  She moved, coming to stand before the ancestral shrine. “You can’t...” Tu said, but she cut him by raising a hand.

  “I think, too, that you’re a man who cares little about the rules that keep us working, that you’ll bend anything to the service of your cause.” Had she still been a magistrate, she’d have kept a watch on him. From such fertile earth were murderers born, secure in their conviction that they could do no wrong as long as the cause was just, tearing away the fabric of society in the name of their so-called justice.

  The wall before her was covered in rows of alcoves. In each was a small hologram stand, projecting th
e posthumous name of an ancestor and the distinctions they’d achieved in their lives: the ranks held as an official, the number of children, children and grandchildren; the battles they’d distinguished themselves in.

  At the very top of the wall were distinctions dating back to Old Earth, and battles against kingdoms since long crumbled into dust. Everything seemed neat and ordered, with nothing out of place, strangely reassuring in a station gone mad. Though, of course, the holos would run on emergency power. Ancestors wouldn’t be erased so easily.

  She looked down at the fruit: a papaya, and a mango glistening in the dim light. Neither appeared to have been tampered with. Her gaze, rising, roamed the alcoves again, and caught on one that seemed slightly askew, its display slightly higher than the others, a minute disturbance that should have remained invisible. But Linh’s sight had been modified in the Imperial Palace, giving her far greater accuracy than most ordinary men.

  That one.

  She could be wrong. She could be right. But either way she’d have a mob of howling ghosts after her, angered that she’d dare to disturb their shrine. “I, the magistrate of the Province of Great Light on the Twenty-Third Planet, humbly apologise for my presumption in disturbing you.” And, before she could think on the enormity of what she was doing, reached out, and grasped the hologram stand, as Tu screamed beside her.

  It came away in her hand, far heavier than it should have been. The bottom unscrewed, revealing a cache which contained three mem-implants smelling strongly of disinfectant.

  She slid them in her sleeves, and smiled at Tu. “I think that’s all the proof we need, don’t you? Child.”

  She left him in the darkened courtyard, turning the hologram stand over and over in his hands, his gaunt face twisted out of shape in anger, in grief. The air smelled of stale incense, and everything seemed to be collapsing around him. But, for him, she had no pity.

  Outside night had come, stealing across Prosper like a knife across the throat. The lights that were never turned off were dark, and the walls were all blank, as empty as Linh’s mind. The mem-implants weighed nothing in her hands: a breath, a word, a verse, nothing that should ever have the power to change the world.

  Linh walked in the darkness, in the ruins. Gradually, her ancestors rose at her side: First Ancestor Thanh Thuy, tall and stern in the robes of President of the Metropolitan Court; Second Ancestor Huynh, smiling a crooked smile; Third Ancestor Vu, nonchalantly waving a fan, as if in the gestures of some secret language; Fourth Ancestor Canh in the white robes of mourning for his parents, Fifth Ancestor Hoang, her grandfather, his sleeves stained by ink; and Sixth Ancestor Hanh, Linh’s mother, looking taller than she’d ever had in life.

  And behind them were the shambles of her tribunal; the dead, lying in broken heaps; the streets overrun by the enemy’s armies, and the screams of men and children and Giap, standing on the execution field with the executioner’s garrotte around his neck. He was looking straight at her, his weathered face creased in a satisfied smile.

  Her ancestors, too, were smiling at her; her mother extending a hand as if in blessing, and Fifth Ancestor Hoang was nodding at her. Do what is right, child.

  And Linh said nothing, only walked forward, not feeling the rising wind.

  ***

  “Mistress Quyen.”

  Quyen looked up from the package in her hands to see the face of a stranger. The entire family was still deep in the bowels of Prosper, making the last of Lady Oanh’s adjustments. The Honoured Ancestress’ presence had faded in her mind as time passed, until only a whisper remained, engraved in the flesh of her heart.

  Remember me, child. And then, so faint it might as well have been a dream, I am afraid...

  And then, the station has slowly started up again. Light had returned; the paintings on the walls had re-emerged as if they’d never been gone, though everything seemed subtly different.

  The trance wasn’t back yet, and her calls to the Honoured Ancestress had gone unanswered. Perhaps it was just as well. She was afraid of what would happen when that familiar touch would steal across her mind, and talk to her as if she were a stranger.

  “Mistress Quyen.” The boy waited, eyes lowered. He couldn’t be more than thirteen years old, certainly too young to deliver messages.

  “What is it?” she asked, more acerbically than she’d intended.

  “There is a ship in the docking bays, Mistress Quyen.” The boy swallowed, convulsively. “They say they won’t be long, but...”

  “What ship?” Quyen asked, although she already knew the answer.

  “They say they’re Embroidered Guard.”

  Quyen looked again at the package. Spread across the palm of her hand, as heavy as stone, were Huu Hieu’s mem-implants. All three of them, neatly wrapped up, warm against her flesh, almost too warm to be held up for long.

  There was a message, too, inscribed in a flowing style she recognised from her nightmares, the effortless curves of a trained scholar. She could see where the hand had shaken, when the ink had spilled. But it was all pristine nevertheless, suitable for displaying as an exemplary example of calligraphy that shone a light into the heart and soul of the writer:

  There is nothing I can offer you that would be a suitable apology. Take, then, this small gift as a token. I hope you will, in time, bring yourself to think of me without hatred in your heart.

  And a small, inscribed couplet, almost as an afterthought:

  I have eaten the fresh cooked rice and the millet, and drunk the warm wine in the golden cups

  And found it all tasted as bitter, like old stains upon lacquered wood

  Let the wild goose fly away, much as it has arrived.

  All of which was transparent enough. Even the poem which a child could have deciphered. Except that it made no sense.

  “You were never very good at verses, were you?” Quyen said, aloud, and the boy, startled, looked up at her.

  “Mistress?”

  “Never mind,” Quyen said. She laid the mem-implants in her chest, and took a last look at them before closing it. Their edges winked at her in the returned light, making the world waver and fold back upon itself. She thought of Du Khach, the ancestor in the implants, who had known the Honoured Ancestress such a long time ago, whom She might even recognise and cherish. She thought of Linh, and of the odd way the ties of blood pulled at each other.

  “Get me to the docking bays. Quickly.”

  As they ran from the family’s quarters to the docks, she felt it, rising in her bones: the fledging Mind, spreading from the core outwards, tentatively testing Her powers. Like a child, she thought, except that the Honoured Ancestress would remember more, wouldn’t She? Lady Oanh had said She’d lose only a generation, but only if it were done right, precisely and painstakingly. And how did she know that what they’d done had been right at all?

  I’m afraid, the Honoured Ancestress whispered, over and over in her memory.

  She felt the pressure at the back of her mind, saw the oily stains, spreading across the paintings, cutting across the poems, felt the station buckle and strain, and still she ran. Alone.

  At the docks she followed the signs to the doors of the only docked ship. It lay on the other side of Prosper’s walls, with only a tube-door extending into the station, and she couldn’t see it. But she could imagine it, only too well, sleek and sharp and deadly, tearing through the deep spaces as it made its way towards Prosper, towards its waiting quarry.

  Towards them. She slowed, remembering that it wasn’t only Linh at stake, but quite possibly the entire family, if orders had been given in that direction.

  She walked the last turning in the corridor, as regal as any lady-scholar, as any court-spouse. She held her head high, hands relaxed at her side, in spite of the spreading cold, wrapping around her heart like a tightening fist.

  There was a knot of people standing by the ship’s tube-door, as if waiting for her. Burly Embroidered Guards surrounded a figure—Cousin Linh?—who faced away, to
wards the waiting ship.

  Ahead of the group of guards, a single man stood, watching her approach with narrowed eyes. His skin was as dark as any Viet’s, but the clear green eyes in the circle of his face attested to some mixed ancestry. He held himself straight, with the easy grace of those in power. Like all the Embroidered Guards, his body had been enhanced with metal, and the weapons grafted on his arms glinted in the harsh light of the corridor.

  Quyen bowed, slowly, carefully, as if she were in the presence of the Emperor, which wasn’t far away from the truth. The Embroidered Guard was the Emperor’s will, and they bowed to no one else. “This station is honoured by your visit, my Lord.”

  The man grunted. “No need for politeness, Mistress. I presume you’re Quyen, the Administrator.”

  Of course they’d be well informed. “Of course,” she said, slowly, forcing herself not to tremble, “if there is anything you need...”

  She let the words hang in the air, like the silken thread of the executioner’s garrotte. At length the man grunted again. “No need, Mistress. Your cousin has made things quite clear to us.”

  “I don’t understand.” Her gaze moved from Linh to the Embroidered Guard, and back to Linh again, who wouldn’t meet her gaze.

  “She said that she was here without your knowledge. That you gave her no shelter, and only recently discovered that she was there at all when she threw the entire station into an uproar.” His gaze roamed upwards, into the weak lights, the shuddering walls, all the signs that the Honoured Ancestress wasn’t there. “That you acted as no kin to her.”

  No kin to her!

  That meant Prosper would be safe. The Embroidered Guard’s eyes were still on her, lightly ironic. She could tell that he didn’t believe a word of it. “You...” she said.

  “I have heard what I have heard.” His voice was expressionless. “Seen what I have seen, Mistress. We questioned the station while still in space, and it confirmed that it had no record of welcoming Linh aboard.”