Robots: The Recent A.I.

by Elizabeth Bear

  Hanh, much as she tried, didn’t understand. She’d always wanted to be a scholar, had always known that she’d grow up to love another woman. She’d always got what she wanted, and she was convinced she only had to wish for something hard enough for it to happen.

  And Hanh had never wished, would never wish, for children.

  “It’s not the same,” Dac Kien said at last, cautiously submitting to Hanh’s caresses. It was something else entirely, and even Hanh had to see that. “I chose to come here. I chose to make my name that way. And we always have to see our choices through.”

  Hanh’s hands on her shoulders tightened. “You’re one to talk. I can see you wasting yourself in regrets, wondering if there’s still time to turn back to respectability. But you chose me. This life, these consequences. We both chose.”

  “Hanh . . . ” It’s not that, Dac Kien wanted to say. She loved Hanh, she truly did, but . . . She was a stone thrown in the darkness; a ship adrift without nav, lost, without family or husband to approve of her actions, and without the comfort of a child destined to survive her.

  “Grow up, lil’ sis.” Hanh’s voice was harsh, her face turned away, towards the paintings of landscapes on the wall. “You’re no one’s toy or slave—and especially not your family’s.”

  Because they had all but disowned her. But words, as usual, failed Dac Kien, and they went to bed with the shadow of the old argument still between them, like the blade of a sword.

  The next day, Dac Kien pored over the design of the ship with Feng and Miahua, wondering how she could modify it. The parts were complete, and assembling them would take a few days at most, but the resulting structure would never be a ship. That much was clear to all of them. Even excepting the tests, there was at least a months work ahead of them—slow and subtle touches laid by the bots over the overall system to align it with its destined Mind.

  Dac Kien had taken the cube from her quarters and brought it into her office under Hanh’s glowering gaze. Now, they all crowded around it voicing ideas, the cups of tea forgotten in the intensity of the moment.

  Feng’s wrinkled face was creased in thought as he tapped one side of the cube. “We could modify the shape of this corridor, here. Wood would run through the whole ship, and—”

  Miahua shook her head. She was their Master of Wind and Water, the one who could best read the lines of influence, the one Dac Kien turned to when she herself had a doubt over the layout. Feng was Commissioner of Supplies, managing the systems and safety—in many ways Miahua’s opposite, given to small adjustments rather than large ones, pragmatic where she verged on the mystical.

  “The humours of water and wood would stagnate here, in the control room.” Miahua pursed her lips, pointed to the slender aft of the ship. “The shape of this section should be modified.”

  Feng sucked in a breath. “That’s not trivial. For my team to rewrite the electronics . . . ”

  Dac Kien listened to them arguing, distantly, intervening with a question from time to time to keep the conversation from dying down. In her mind she held the shape of the ship, felt it breathe through the glass of the cube, through the layers of fibres and metal that separated her from the structure outside. She held the shape of the Mind—the essences and emotions that made it, the layout of its sockets and cables, of its muscles and flesh—and slid them together gently, softly, until they seemed made for one another.

  She looked up. Both Feng and Miahua had fallen silent, waiting for her to speak.

  “This way,” she said. “Remove this section altogether, and shift the rest of the layout.” As she spoke, she reached into the glass matrix, and carefully excised the offending section, rerouting corridors and lengths of cables, burning new decorative calligraphy onto the curved walls.

  “I don’t think—” Feng said, and stopped. “Miahua?”

  Miahua was watching the new design carefully. “I need to think about it, Your Excellency. Let me discuss it with my subordinates.”

  Dac Kien made a gesture of approval. “Remember that we don’t have much time.”

  They both took a copy of the design with them, snug in their long sleeves. Left alone, Dac Kien stared at the ship again. It was squat, its proportions out of kilter, not even close to what she had imagined, not even true to the spirit of her work, a mockery of the original design, like a flower without petals, or a poem that didn’t quite gel, hovering on the edge of poignant allusions but never expressing them properly.

  “We don’t always have a choice,” she whispered. She’d have prayed to her ancestors, had she thought they were still listening. Perhaps they were. Perhaps the shame of having a daughter who would have no descendants was erased by the exalted heights of her position. Or perhaps not. Her mother and grandmother were unforgiving. What made her think that those more removed ancestors would understand her decision?

  “Elder sister?”

  Zoquitl stood at the door, hovering uncertainly. Dac Kien’s face must have revealed more than she thought. She forced herself to breathe, relaxing all her muscles until it was once more the blank mask required by protocol. “Younger sister,” she said. “You honour me by your presence.”

  Zoquitl shook her head. She slid carefully into the room, careful not to lose her balance. “I wanted to see the ship.”

  The birth-master was nowhere to be seen. Dac Kien hoped that he had been right about the birth—that it wasn’t about to happen now, in her office, with no destination and no assistance. “It’s here.” She shifted positions on her chair, invited Zoquitl to sit.

  Zoquitl wedged herself into one of the seats, her movements fragile, measured, as if any wrong gesture would shatter her. Behind her loomed one of Dac Kien’s favourite paintings, an image from the Third Planet: a delicate, peaceful landscape of waterfalls and ochre cliffs, with the distant light of stars reflected in the water.

  Zoquitl didn’t move as Dac Kien showed her the design. Her eyes were the only thing which seemed alive in the whole of her face.

  When Dac Kien was finished, the burning gaze was transferred to her—looking straight into her eyes, a clear breach of protocol. “You’re just like the others. You don’t approve,” Zoquitl said.

  It took Dac Kien a moment to process the words, but they still meant nothing to her. “I don’t understand.”

  Zoquitl’s lips pursed. “Where I come from, it’s an honour. To bear Minds for the glory of the Mexica Dominion.”

  “But you’re here,” Dac Kien said. In Xuya, among Xuyans, where to bear Minds was a sacrifice—necessary and paid for, but ill-considered. For who would want to endure a pregnancy, yet produce no human child? Only the desperate or the greedy.

  “You’re here as well.” Zoquitl’s voice was almost an accusation.

  For an agonising moment, Dac Kien thought Zoquitl was referring to her life choices—how did she know about Hanh, about her family’s stance? Then she understood that Zoquitl had been talking about her place onboard the habitat. “I like being in space,” Dac Kien said at last, and it wasn’t a lie. “Being here almost alone, away from everyone else.”

  And this wasn’t paperwork, or the slow drain of catching and prosecuting lawbreakers, of keeping Heaven’s order on some remote planet. This was everything scholarship was meant to be: taking all that the past had given them, and reshaping it into greatness, every part throwing its neighbours into sharper relief, an eternal reminder of how history had brought them here and how it would carry them forward, again and again.

  Zoquitl said, not looking at the ship anymore, “Xuya is a harsh place, for foreigners. The language isn’t so bad, but when you have no money, and no sponsor . . . ” She breathed in, quick and sharp. “I do what needs doing.” Her hand went to the mound of her belly and stroked it. “And I give him life. How can you not value this?”

  She used the animate pronoun, without a second thought.

  Dac Kien shivered. “He’s . . . ” She paused, groping for words. “He has no father. A mother, perhaps, but
there isn’t much of you inside him. He won’t be counted among your descendants. He won’t burn incense on your altar, or chant your name among the stars.”

  “But he won’t die.” Zoquitl’s voice was soft, and cutting. “Not for centuries.”

  The ships made by the Mexica Dominion lived long, but their Minds slowly went insane from repeated journeys into deep planes. This Mind, with a proper anchor, a properly aligned ship . . . Zoquitl was right: he would remain as he was, long after she and Zoquitl were both dead. He—no, it—it was a machine, a sophisticated intelligence, an assembly of flesh and metal and Heaven knew what else. Born like a child, but still . . .

  “I think I’m the one who doesn’t understand.” Zoquitl pulled herself to her feet, slowly. Dac Kien could hear her laboured breath, could smell the sour, sharp sweat rolling off her. “Thank you, elder sister.”

  And then she was gone, but her words remained.

  Dac Kien threw herself into her work, as she had done before, when preparing for the state examinations. Hanh pointedly ignored her when she came home, making only the barest attempts at courtesy. She was working again on her calligraphy, mingling Xuyan characters with the letters of the Viet alphabet to create a work that spoke both as a poem and as a painting. It wasn’t unusual: Dac Kien had come to be accepted for her talent, but her partner was another matter. Hanh wasn’t welcome in the banquet room, where the families of the other engineers would congregate in the evenings. She preferred to remain alone in their quarters rather than endure the barely concealed snubs or the pitying looks of the others.

  What gave the air its leaden weight, though, was her silence. Dac Kien tried at first, keeping up a chatter, as if nothing were wrong. Hanh raised bleary eyes from her manuscript, and said, simply, “You know what you’re doing, lil’ sis. Live with it, for once.”

  So it was silence, in the end. It suited her better than she’d thought it would. It was her and the design, with no one to blame or interfere.

  Miahua’s team and Feng’s team were rewiring the structure and rearranging the parts. Outside the window, the mass of the hull shifted and twisted, to align itself with the cube on her table, bi-hour after bi-hour, as the bots gently slid sections into place and sealed them.

  The last section was being put into place when Miahua and the birth-master came to see her, both looking equally preoccupied.

  Her heart sank. “Don’t tell me,” Dac Kien said. “She’s due now.”

  “She’s lost the waters,” the birth-master said. He spat on the floor to ward off evil spirits, who always crowded around the mother in the hour of a birth. “You have a few bi-hours at most.”

  “Miahua?” Dac Kien wasn’t looking at either of them, but rather at the ship outside, the huge bulk that dwarfed them all in its shadow.

  Her Master of Wind and Water was silent for a while—usually a sign that she was arranging problems in the most suitable order. Not good. “The structure will be finished before this bi-hour is over.”

  “But?” Dac Kien said.

  “But it’s a mess. The lines of wood cross those of metal, and there are humours mingling with each other and stagnating everywhere. The qi won’t flow.”

  The qi, the breath of the universe—of the dragon that lay at the heart of every planet, of every star. As Master of Wind and Water, it was Miahua’s role to tell Dac Kien what had gone wrong, but as Grand Master of Design Harmony, it fell to Dac Kien to correct this. Miahua could only point out the results she saw; only Dac Kien could send the bots in, to make the necessary adjustments to the structure. “I see,” Dac Kien said. “Prepare a shuttle for her. Have it wait outside, close to the ship’s docking bay.”

  “Your Excellency—“ the birth-master started, but Dac Kien cut him off.

  “I have told you before. The ship will be ready.”

  Miahua’s stance as she left was tense, all pent-up fears. Dac Kien thought of Hanh, alone in their room, stubbornly bent over her poem, her face as harsh as that of the birth-master, its customary roundness sharpened by anger and resentment. She’d say, again, that you couldn’t hurry things, that there were always possibilities. She’d say that—but she’d never understood there was always a price, and that, if you didn’t pay it, others did.

  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—and 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 reassert 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 Dragons 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.

  I
f . . .

  She didn’t know how long she’d been 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.