The Citadel of Weeping Pearls
Page 12
Linh felt a thread at the back of her mind: Fifth Ancestor Hoang, trying to push her into reading the poems which named each area, to admire the designers’ culture, their clever allusions to the poets of the past. Fifth Ancestor, ever the poet, ever the lover of history. She pushed him back, gently, ignoring the suggestion. It wasn’t time for cleverness or beauty; though Fifth Ancestor whispered in her mind that there was always time for beauty, that one who did not pause to admire beauty might as well be dead to the world.
At length, they reached a room almost hidden away amidst the greenery. The door slid open at a touch of the young man’s fingers; he moved away to let Linh in.
Within, everything seemed almost bare, until she realised that the shimmer on the red walls was text. Word after word scrolled from top to bottom, almost too fast to read. Linh caught fragments about moonlight, and jade, and wild herds of trau cho soi over the plains; verse after verse, more clever allusions than her mind would ever hold, even with her mem-implants.
Beautiful.
A woman was waiting for her there, frozen in the uncertain land between youth and old age, too old to be patronised, too young to be respected. Behind her was a younger girl, waiting with her head bowed, though everything in her spoke of arrested flight. “Be welcome here, cousin.” A brief burst of trance, and Linh was tracing the trees. Yes, they were indeed cousins, through her maternal grandmother, and the woman’s marriage to Lê Nhu Anh, and...
The world wobbled and crumpled, as if it were a sheet of paper the spirits had punched through. There was a presence in the room; the text shimmered, the letters becoming subtly distorted, the red of the walls taking on an oily sheen, like fish sauce mixed with grease, and a wind too cold to be any draught. It was all she could do not to fall to her knees, her mind struggling to cope with it all...
She hadn’t come unprepared, of course. She’d read all about the stations, all about the Minds that held and regulated them, all about stations like Prosper and its Honoured Ancestress, and the family that peopled its core. But the truth of a Mind’s presence shattered the easy descriptions, the facile, clever similes written as glibly as inferior poems: it was its own self, the vast, dark presence that seemed to fold the air around itself, wrapped around the contraption in the centre of the room that might have been a throne, that might have been a tree with too many thorns; metal, twisting and buckling like a fish caught on land, its shifting reflections hurting her eyes...
“Welcome home, child,” a voice said, filling her ears to bursting.
“Great-great-grandmother.” She forced herself to get the words out, even as the trance went wild, seeking a pathway that would connect her to the Mind, ancestor after ancestor overlaid over the twisting texts. “I apologise for disturbing you.”
A sound which might have been laughter. “Nonsense. Whenever did my children ever disturb me? This is your house, and you’re always welcome here.”
Even the words were wrong, subtly off, evoking a burst of recognition from First Ancestor Thanh Thuy, vocabulary and phrases reminding Linh of old memorials, not used for many generations. She triggered her mem-implants, letting First Ancestor’s mem-fragments flood her mind, picking out words as they surfaced. “Heaven and Earth have overturned for me. I seek refuge in the embrace of my family.”
Another vast, ineffable sound: a chuckle or a sniff of anger? The pressure against her mind didn’t seem unfriendly. “This was your great-grandfather’s home. It’s also yours, should you wish it. What is it that you seek refuge from?”
Linh hesitated a fraction of a second, as all six ancestors in her mind howled at her for daring to lie to a superior; and then said, each word as dry as sun-baked chillies on her tongue, “War has come to the Twenty-Third Planet, and to the province of Great Light. My tribunal burns in the riots, and lawless soldiers scour the streets with their war-kites, raping and pillaging as they go.”
It was untrue. The news of the war had reached her only after her ship pulled itself out of the deep planes: pictures of her tribunal in flames, the litany of the dead, of the missing she couldn’t trace. All because her first lieutenant Giap had tricked her into running, into abandoning her own people...
For a moment, a bare, agonising moment, a suspended breath, she thought the Mind had caught her. She felt her pulse race in its wide-spectrum vision, caught the sheen of sweat on her brow, or ten thousand other ways she could have given herself away. But at length, the pressure retreated; and in the centre of the room, the core was inert again, and the only memory of the Mind’s presence in the room was a faint whisper: “You have my blessing, child.”
Linh bowed, very low, as low as she’d have bowed for the Emperor, letting a dozen heartbeats pass before she rose again.
The woman, Lê Thi Quyen, was waiting for her, as unmoving and as expressionless as propriety required. “Come, Cousin,” she said. “We’ll see you settled properly.” But as she turned away from the core Linh caught the slight, impatient shake of her head, and knew the Mind might have believed her, but Quyen would be watching, and waiting, on the lookout to expose her lies.
She might be family, as the Mind had said. But she wasn’t welcome on Prosper Station.
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