Clarkesworld Magazine
Issue 100
Table of Contents
Three Cups of Grief, by Starlight
by Aliette de Bodard
A Universal Elegy
by Tang Fei
Cat Pictures Please
by Naomi Kritzer
The Apartment Dweller's Bestiary
by Kij Johnson
Ether
by Zhang Ran
The Long Goodnight of Violet Wild
by Catherynne M. Valente
An Exile of the Heart
by Jay Lake
This Wind Blowing, and This Tide
by Damien Broderick
Laika's Ghost
by Karl Schroeder
Song for a City-Universe: Lucius Shepard's Abandoned Vermillion
by Jason Heller
Exploring the Frontier: A Conversation with Xia Jia
by Ken Liu
Another Word: #PurpleSF
by Cat Rambo
Editor's Desk: On the Road to One Hundred
by Neil Clarke
Disciple
Art by Julie Dillon
© Clarkesworld Magazine, 2015
www.clarkesworldmagazine.com
Three Cups of Grief, by Starlight
Aliette de Bodard
Green tea: green tea is made from steamed or lightly dried tea leaves. The brew is light, with a pleasant, grassy taste. Do not over-steep it, lest it become bitter.
After the funeral, Quang Tu walked back to his compartment, and sat down alone, staring sightlessly at the slow ballet of bots cleaning the small room—the metal walls pristine already, with every trace of Mother’s presence or of her numerous mourners scrubbed away. He’d shut down the communal network—couldn’t bear to see the potted summaries of Mother’s life, the endlessly looping vids of the funeral procession, the hundred thousand bystanders gathered at the gravesite to say goodbye, vultures feasting on the flesh of the grieving—they hadn’t known her, they hadn’t cared—and all their offerings of flowers were worth as much as the insurances of the Embroidered Guard.
“Big brother, I know you’re here,” a voice said, on the other side of the door he’d locked. “Let me in, please?”
Of course. Quang Tu didn’t move. “I said I wanted to be alone,” he said.
A snort that might have been amusement. “Fine. If you insist on doing it that way . . . ”
His sister, The Tiger in the Banyan, materialized in the kitchen, hovering over the polished counter, near the remains of his morning tea. Of course, it wasn’t really her: she was a Mind encased in the heartroom of a spaceship, far too heavy to leave orbit; and what she projected down onto the planet was an avatar, a perfectly rendered, smaller version of herself—elegant and sharp, with a small, blackened spot on her hull which served as a mourning band. “Typical,” she said, hovering around the compartment. “You can’t just shut yourself away.”
“I can if I want to,” Quang Tu said—feeling like he was eight years old again, trying to argue with her—as if it had ever made sense. She seldom got angry—mindships didn’t, mostly; he wasn’t sure if that was the overall design of the Imperial Workshops, or the simple fact that her lifespan was counted in centuries, and his (and Mother’s) in mere decades. He’d have thought she didn’t grieve, either; but she was changed—something in the slow, careful deliberation of her movements, as if anything and everything might break her . . .
The Tiger in the Banyan hovered near the kitchen table, watching the bots. She could hack them, easily; no security worth anything in the compartment. Who would steal bots, anyway?
What he valued most had already been taken away.
“Leave me alone,” he said. But he didn’t want to be alone; not really. He didn’t want to hear the silence in the compartment; the clicking sounds of the bots’ legs on metal, bereft of any warmth or humanity.
“Do you want to talk about it?” The Tiger in the Banyan asked.
She didn’t need to say what; and he didn’t do her the insult of pretending she did. “What would be the point?”
“To talk.” Her voice was uncannily shrewd. “It helps. At least, I’m told it does.”
Quang Tu heard, again, the voice of the Embroidered Guard; the slow, measured tones commiserating on his loss; and then the frown, and the knife-thrust in his gut.
You must understand that your mother’s work was very valuable . . .
The circumstances are not ordinary . . .
The slow, pompous tones of the scholar; the convoluted official language he knew by heart—the only excuses the state would make to him, couched in the over-formality of memorials and edicts.
“She—” he took a deep, trembling breath—was it grief, or anger? “I should have had her mem-implants.” Forty-nine days after the funeral; when there was time for the labs to have decanted and stabilized Mother’s personality and memories, and added her to the ranks of the ancestors on file. It wasn’t her, it would never be her, of course—just a simulation meant to share knowledge and advice. But it would have been something. It would have filled the awful emptiness in his life.
“It was your right, as the eldest,” The Tiger in the Banyan said. Something in the tone of her voice . . .
“You disapprove? You wanted them?” Families had fallen out before, on more trivial things.
“Of course not.” A burst of careless, amused laughter. “Don’t be a fool. What use would I have, for them. It’s just—” She hesitated, banking left and right in uncertainty. “You need something more. Beyond Mother.”
“There isn’t something more!”
“You—”
“You weren’t there,” Quang Tu said. She’d been away on her journeys, ferrying people back and forth between the planets that made up the Dai Viet Empire; leaping from world to world, with hardly a care for planet-bound humans. She—she hadn’t seen Mother’s unsteady hands, dropping the glass; heard the sound of its shattering like a gunshot; hadn’t carried her back to bed every evening, tracking the progress of the disease by the growing lightness in his arms—by the growing sharpness of ribs, protruding under taut skin.
Mother had remained herself until almost the end—sharp and lucid and utterly aware of what was happening, scribbling in the margins of her team’s reports and sending her instructions to the new space station’s building site, as if nothing untoward had ever happened to her. Had it been a blessing; or a curse? He didn’t have answers; and he wasn’t sure he wanted that awful certainty to shatter him.
“I was here,” The Tiger in the Banyan said, gently, slowly. “At the end.”
Quang Tu closed his eyes, again, smelling antiseptic and the sharp odor of painkillers; and the sour smell of a body finally breaking down, finally failing. “I’m sorry. You were. I didn’t mean to—”
“I know you didn’t.” The Tiger in the Banyan moved closer to him; brushed against his shoulder—ghostly, almost intangible, the breath that had been beside him all his childhood. “But nevertheless. Your life got eaten up, taking care of Mother. And you can say you were only doing what a filial son ought to do; you can say it didn’t matter. But . . . it’s done now, big brother. It’s over.”
It’s not, he wanted to say, but the words rang hollow in his own ears. He moved, stared at the altar; at the holo of Mother—over the offering of tea and rice, the food to sustain her on her journey through Hell. It cycled through vids—Mother, heavily pregnant with
his sister, moving with the characteristic arrested slowness of Mind-bearers; Mother standing behind Quang Tu and The Tiger in the Banyan in front of the ancestral altar for Grandfather’s death anniversary; Mother, accepting her Hoang Minh Medal from the then Minister of Investigation; and one before the diagnosis, when she’d already started to become frailer and thinner—insisting on going back to the lab; to her abandoned teams and research . . .
He thought, again, of the Embroidered Guard; of the words tightening around his neck like an executioner’s garrote. How dare he. How dare they all. “She came home,” he said, not sure how to voice the turmoil within him. “To us. To her family. In the end. It meant something, didn’t it?”
The Tiger in the Banyan’s voice was wry, amused. “It wasn’t the Empress that comforted her when she woke at night, coughing her lungs out, was it?” It was . . . treason to much as think this, let alone utter it; though the Embroidered Guard would make allowances for grief, and anger; and for Mother’s continued usefulness to the service of the Empress. The truth was, neither of them much cared, anyway. “It’s not the Empress that was by her side when she died.”
She’d clung to his hand, then, her eyes open wide, a network of blood within the whites, and the fear in her eyes. “I—please, child . . . ” He’d stood, frozen; until, behind him, The Tiger in the Banyan whispered, “The lights in Sai Gon are green and red, the lamps in My Tho are bright and dim . . . ”— an Old Earth lullaby, the words stretched into the familiar, slow, comforting rhythm that he’d unthinkingly taken up.
“Go home to study,
I shall wait nine months, I shall wait ten autumns . . . ”
She’d relaxed, then, against him; and they had gone on singing songs until—he didn’t know when she’d died; when the eyes lost their luster, the face its usual sharpness. But he’d risen from her deathbed with the song still in his mind; and an awful yawning gap in his world that nothing had closed.
And then—after the scattering of votive papers, after the final handful of earth thrown over the grave—the Embroidered Guard.
The Embroidered Guard was young; baby-faced and callow, but he was already moving with the easy arrogance of the privileged. He’d approached Quang Tu at the grave site, ostensibly to offer his condolences—it had taken him all of two sentences to get to his true purpose; and to shatter Quang Tu’s world, all over again.
Your mother’s mem-implants will go to Professor Tuyet Hoa, who will be best able to continue her research . . .
Of course, the Empire required food; and crops of rice grown in space; and better, more reliable harvests to feed the masses. Of course he didn’t want anyone to starve. But . . .
Mem-implants always went from parent to child. They were a family’s riches and fortune; the continued advice of the ancestors, dispensed from beyond the grave. He’d—he’d had the comfort, as Mother lay dying, to know that he wouldn’t lose her. Not for real; not for long.
“They took her away from us,” Quang Tu said. “Again and again and again. And now, at the very end, when she ought to be ours—when she should return to her family . . . ”
The Tiger in the Banyan didn’t move; but a vid of the funeral appeared on one of the walls, projected through the communal network. There hadn’t been enough space in the small compartment for people to pay their respects; the numerous callers had jammed into the corridors and alcoves, jostling each other in utter silence. “She’s theirs in death, too.”
“And you don’t care?”
A side-roll of the avatar, her equivalent of a shrug. “Not as much as you do. I remember her. None of them do.”
Except Tuyet Hoa.
He remembered Tuyet Hoa, too; coming to visit them on the third day after the New Year—a student paying respect to her teacher, year after year; turning from an unattainable grown-up to a woman not much older than either he or The Tiger in the Banyan; though she’d never lost her rigid awkwardness in dealing with them. No doubt, in Tuyet Hoa’s ideal world, Mother wouldn’t have had children; wouldn’t have let anything distract her from her work.
“You have to move on,” The Tiger in the Banyan said, slowly, gently; coming by his side to stare at the memorial altar. Bots gathered in the kitchen space, started putting together fresh tea to replace the three cups laid there. “Accept that this is the way things are. They’ll compensate, you know—offer you higher-level promotions and make allowances. You’ll find your path through civil service is . . . smoother.”
Bribes or sops; payments for the loss of something that had no price. “Fair dealings,” he said, slowly, bitterly. They knew exactly the value of what Tuyet Hoa was getting.
“Of course,” The Tiger in the Banyan said. “But you’ll only ruin your health and your career; and you know Mother wouldn’t have wanted it.”
As if . . . No, he was being unfair. Mother could be distant, and engrossed in her work; but she had always made time for them. She had raised them and played with them, telling them stories of princesses and fishermen and citadels vanished in one night; and, later on, going on long walks with Quang Tu in the gardens of Azure Dragons, delightedly pointing at a pine tree or at a crane flying overhead; and animatedly discussing Quang Tu’s fledging career in the Ministry of Works.
“You can’t afford to let this go sour,” The Tiger in the Banyan said. Below her, the bots brought a small, perfect cup of tea: green, fragrant liquid in a cup, the cracks in the pale celadon like those in eggshells.
Quang Tu lifted the cup; breathed in the grassy, pleasant smell—Mother would love it, even beyond the grave. “I know,” he said, laying the cup on the altar. The lie slipped out of him as softly, as easily as Mother’s last exhaled breath.
Wu Long tea: those teas are carefully prepared by the tea masters to create a range of tastes and appearances. The brew is sweet with a hint of strength, each subsequent steeping revealing new nuances.
Tuyet Hoa woke up—with a diffuse, growing sense of panic and fear, before she remembered the procedure.
She was alive. She was sane. At least . . .
She took in a deep, trembling breath; and realized she lay at home, in her bed. What had woken her up—above the stubborn, panicked rhythm of her heart—was a gentle nudge from the communal network, flashes of light relayed by the bots in the lightest phase of her sleep cycle. It wasn’t her alarm; but rather, a notification that a message classified as “urgent” had arrived for her.
Not again.
A nudge, at the back of her mind; a thread of thought that wasn’t her own; reminding her she should look at it; that it was her responsibility as the new head of department to pay proper attention to messages from her subordinates.
Professor Duy Uyen. Of course.
She was as forceful in life as she had been in death; and, because she had been merely Hoa’s head of department, and not a direct ancestor, she felt . . . wrong. Distant, as though she were speaking through a pane of glass.
Hoa was lucky, she knew—receiving mem-implants that weren’t your own family’s could irretrievably scramble your brain, as fifteen different strangers with no consideration or compassion fought for control of your thoughts. She could hear Professor Duy Uyen; and sometimes others of Duy Uyen’s ancestors, as remote ghosts; but that was it. It could have been so much worse.
And it could have been so much better.
She got up, ignoring the insistent talk at the back of her mind, the constant urge to be dutiful; and padded into the kitchen.
The bots had already set aside Hoa’s first tea of the day. She’d used to take it at work, before the procedure; in the days of Professor Duy Uyen’s sickness, when Duy Uyen came in to work thinner and paler every day—and then became a succession of memorials and vid-calls, injecting her last, desperate instructions into the project before it slipped beyond her grasp. Hoa had enjoyed the quiet: it had kept the desperate knowledge of Professor Duy Uyen’s coming death at bay—the moment when they would all be adrift in the void of space, with no min
dship to carry them onwards.
Now Hoa enjoyed a different quiet. Now she drank her tea first thing in the morning—hoping that, at this early hour, the mem-implants had no motive to kick in.
Not that it had worked, this particular morning.
She sat down to breathe in the flavor—the faint, nutty aroma poised perfectly between floral and sweet—her hand trembling above the surface of the cup—mentally blocking out Professor Duy Uyen for a few precious minutes; a few more stolen moments of tranquility before reality came crashing in.
Then she gave in, and opened the message.
It was from Luong Ya Lan, the researcher who worked on the water’s acidity balance. On the vid relayed from the laboratory, she was pale, but perfectly composed. “Madam Hoa. I’m sorry to have to inform you that the samples in Paddy Four have developed a fungal disease . . . ”
Professor Duy Uyen stirred in the depths of Hoa’s brain, parsing the words as they came in—accessing the station’s private network and downloading the pertinent data—the only mercy was that she wasn’t faster than Hoa, and that it would take her fifteen to twenty minutes to parse all of it. The Professor had her suspicions, of course—something about the particular rice strain; perhaps the changes drafted onto the plant to allow it to thrive under starlight, changes taken from the nocturnal honeydreamer on the Sixteenth Planet; perhaps the conditions in the paddy itself . . .
Hoa poured herself another cup of tea; and stared at the bots for a while. There was silence, the voice of Duy Uyen slowly fading away to nothingness in her thoughts. Alone. At last, alone.
Paddy Four had last been checked on by Ya Lan’s student, An Khang—Khang was a smart and dedicated man, but not a particularly careful one; and she would have to ask him if he’d checked himself, or through bots; and if he’d followed protocols when he’d done so.
She got up, and walked to the laboratory—still silence in her mind. It was a short trip: the station was still being built, and the only thing in existence were the laboratory and the living quarters for all ten researchers—a generous allocation of space, far grander than the compartments they would have been entitled to on any of their home stations.
Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 100 Page 1