But the other one... the one whose hand Ngoc Ha was still holding, even now...
She had changed, and not changed. She was all of Ngoc Ha's memories—the hands closing hers around the baby chick; the tall, comforting presence who had held her after too many nights frustrated over her dissertations; the sister who had stood on the view-screen with her last message, assuring her all was well—and yet she was more, too. Her head was well under the harmonisation arch, except that there was about her a presence, a sense of vastness that went well beyond her actual size. She was faintly translucent, and so were her clothes, shifting from one shape to the next, from yellow brocade to nuns' saffron; the jewellery on her hands and wrists flickering in and out of existence.
“Elder sister.” Nothing but formality would come past her frozen lips.
“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.
“Goodbye, 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 b
ots 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?
About the Author
Aliette de Bodard lives and works in Paris, where she has a day job as a System Engineer. She studied Computer Science and Applied Mathematics, but moonlights as a writer of speculative fiction. She is the author of the critically acclaimed Obsidian and Blood trilogy of Aztec noir fantasies, as well as numerous short stories, which garnered her two Nebula Awards, a Locus Award and a British Science Fiction Association Award.
Works include The House of Shattered Wings (2015 British Science Fiction Association Award), a novel set in a turn-of-the-century Paris devastated by a magical war, and its standalone sequel The House of Binding Thorns. She lives in Paris with her family, in a flat with more computers than warm bodies, and a set of Lovecraftian tentacled plants intent on taking over the place.
This novella is set in the same universe as her Vietnamese space opera On a Red Station Drifting.
Visit her website www.aliettedebodard.com for short fiction set in the same universe as this book, as well as Vietnamese and French recipes.
Read on for an excerpt of On A Red Station, Drifting, a short novel set in the same universe as this book and featuring a younger Lady Linh...
Linh arrived on Prosper Station blown by the winds of war, amidst a ship full of refugees who huddled together, speaking tearfully of the invading armies: the war between the rebel lords and the Empire had escalated, and their war-kites had laid waste to entire planets.
Linh kept her distance, not wanting to draw attention to herself on the way there; but, when they disembarked from the mindship and joined the immigration queue, she found herself behind an old woman in a shawl, who glanced fearfully around her, as if she expected soldiers to come out of the shadows at any moment. Bent and bowed, she looked so much like Linh’s long-dead mother that Linh found herself instinctively reaching out.
“It’s going to be all right, Madam,” she said.
The woman looked at her: past her, in that particular way of old people whose mind wasn’t steady anymore. “They’ll come here,” she whispered, her eyes boring into Linh’s, uncomfortably bright and feverish. “There is no escape.”
“We’re safe,” Linh said.
The woman looked sceptical. Linh drew herself to her full height, calling on a hint of the dignity and poise she’d taken when heading her tribunal sessions. “We are the children of the Emperor, and he will protect us.”
The old woman looked at her for a while, as if seeing her for the first time. “If you say so, child.”
“I know it to be true,” Linh said. She mouthed the words, the platitudes, effortlessly, as though she believed them: a good scholar, a good magistrate, able to engage in any argument, no matter how trivial or nonsensical. Of course she knew the Emperor had no desire to engage the rebel lords; that he was young, and badly advised, and would prefer to retreat. She knew all the words. After all, her denunciation of that policy was what had tarred her with the red ink of criminals; sent her on the run to this spirits-forsaken place with nothing but her wits to rely on.
The old woman had turned away. They were almost at the beginning of the queue now, and Linh could see three men in livery, checking papers and directing refugees into the station itself. Linh took a deep breath, bracing herself. Every instinct she had called for her to slip through like the other refugees.
Every instinct but one, and she could feel, through the mem-implants, her First Ancestor Thanh Thuy’s presence, the old woman as strong and querulous as ever, reminding her that ties of blood held up Heaven and Earth; that even though Linh didn’t know Prosper Station and had never met the family, they were still relatives, and entitled to far more than minimal courtesies.
And, of course, as usual, First Ancestor was right.
Linh shook her head, shaking off the slight dissociation that always came with mem-implants. It was becoming harder and harder to tell implants from her own mind, a side-effect of being so good with them.
She waited until they’d checked papers, and given her the permissions that would allow her to access the trance, Prosper’s internal network. Then, when the queue of refugees had wandered away in search of their fortune, she sought someone in charge, who turned out to be a young man with a quivering voice, barely old enough to have passed his exams.
“I am Lê Thi Linh,” she said. Lê, like all Dai Viet names, was common. But the way she held herself, and her utter certainty, was enough to shake him.
She stood silent and unmoving as he dragged her into the trance: she got a brief flash of his credentials as Keeper of the Outer Gates for Prosper Station, and an even briefer flash of his family tree, the line of his greater ancestors lighting up in
red, warm tones, all the way up until it intersected her own lineage. A cousin, somewhat removed. Hardly surprising, as most of Prosper Station came, ultimately, from the same stock that had bred her: Lê Thi Phuoc, who had borne in her womb the Honoured Ancestress and Her four human siblings.
“I see.” She could see him swallow, convulsively, could track the beads of sweat on his pale skin: everything thrown into merciless clarity, as if he were a witness before her tribunal. “Welcome, Aunt Linh. I’ll take you to the Inner Quarters.”
She followed him, not into the refugee hall, but into another, smaller corridor and then another, until they seemed to be wandering into a maze; and, like a maze, Prosper Station unfolded its wonders to her.
In many ways, it did not belie its name. The corridors were vast and warm, decorated with hologram works of art, from images of waterfalls on the Fifth Planet, to a lonely house clinging to the mountain, lost in morning mist. Here and there, quatrains spoke of the wonders of coming home, of the sorrow of parting and the fall of the Old Empire...
In other ways...Linh had once been to the capital, and had seen the epitome of refinement there—the inlaid marble panels, brought all the way back from Old Earth, the exquisite calligraphy that breathed and seemed to move with a life of its own, like a coiled dragon hidden within text. For all its wealth, Prosper Station remained a small, isolated station at the back end of nowhere, on the edge of the Dai Viet Empire. The poems were quotations taken from old books, and not the vibrant, searing words traded in the literary clubs on First Planet; the paintings, too, were old, and looked like they hadn’t been refreshed for a while; and the architecture of the corridors was a little too bulky, a little too clumsy, lacking the effortless flowing grace of more central habitats.
There was a faint music of zither in the background, which got stronger as they crossed room after room; and a faint smell, like the one after the rain. The walls flared out, and they were walking through carefully preserved gardens, with the smell of bamboo and phuong grass heavy in the air, a luxury that must have all cost a fortune in air and water and heat.
The Citadel of Weeping Pearls Page 11