by Neil Clarke
Pleased. Will help.<
Da Trang was about to say he didn’t need help, and then Pearl burrowed close to him—a sharp, painful stab straight into his flesh; and before he had time to cry out, he saw—
The hangar, turned into flowing lines like a sketch of a Grand Master of Design Harmony; the remoras, Slicer and Teacher, already on the move, with little labels listing their speed, their banking angles; their age and the repairs they’d undergone—the view expanding, taking in the stars beyond the space station, all neatly labeled, every wavelength of their spectrum cataloged— he tried to move, to think beyond the confines of the vision the ship had him trapped in; to remember the poem he’d been reading—and abruptly the poem was there, too, the lines about mist over the water and clouds and rain; and the references to sexual foreplay, the playfulness of the writer trying to seduce her husband—the homage to the famed poetess Dong Huong through the reuse of her metaphor about frost on jade flowers, the reference to the bird from Viet on Old Earth, always looking southward . . . .
And then Pearl released him; and he was on his knees on the floor, struggling for breath. “What—what—” Even words seemed to have deserted him.
>Will help,< Pearl said.
Teacher, firmer and steadier, a rock amidst the turmoil in his mind. >Built Pearl for you, Architect. For . . . examinations?< A word the remora wasn’t sure of; a concept Da Trang wasn’t even sure Teacher understood.
>For understanding,
“I can’t—” Da Trang pulled himself upward, looked at Pearl again. “You made it?”
>Can build others,< Teacher said.
“Of course. I wasn’t doubting that. I just—” He looked at Pearl again and finally worked out what was different about it. The others looked cobbled together of disparate parts—grabbing what they could from space debris and scraps and roughly welding it into place—but Pearl was . . . not perfect, but what you would get if you saved the best of everything you found drifting in space, and put it together, not out of necessity, not out of a desire for immediate survival or return to full functionality—but with a carefully thought-out plan, a desire for . . . stability? “It’s beautiful,” he said at last.
>We built,< Teacher said. >As thanks. And because . . . < A pause, and then another word, blinking on the screen.
Not beauty, then, but hope, and longing, and the best for the future. Da Trang found his lips twisting in a bitter smile, shaping words of comfort, or something equally foolish to give a remora—some human emotions to a being that had none.
Before he could speak up, though, there came the patter of feet. “Li’l brother, li’l brother!” It was his sister Cam, out of breath. Da Trang got up— Pearl hovering again at his shoulder, the warmth of metal against his neck.
“What—” Cam stopped, looked at him. “What in heaven is this?”
Pearl nudged closer; he felt it nip the surface of his skin—and some of that same trance rose in him again, the same sense that he was seeing the bones of the orbital, the breath of the dragon that was the earth and the void between the stars and the universe—except oddly muted, so that his thoughts merely seemed far away to him, running beneath a pane of glass. He could read Cam—see the blood beating in her veins, the tension in her hands and in her arms. Something was worrying her, beyond her usual disapproval of a brother who dreamt big and spent his days away from the family home. Pearl?
“This is Pearl,” Da Trang said awkwardly.
Cam looked at him—in Pearl’s trance, he saw her face contract; saw electrical impulses travel back and forth in her arms. “Fine,” she said, with a dismissive wave of her hand. “You were weird enough without a remora pet. Whatever.”
So it wasn’t that which worried her. “What’s on your mind?” Da Trang asked.
Cam jerked. There was no other word for it—her movement would have been barely visible, but Pearl’s trance magnified everything, so that for a moment she seemed a puppet on strings, and the puppet master had just stopped her from falling. “How do you know?”
“It’s obvious,” Da Trang said, trying to keep his voice steady. If he could read her—if he could read people—if he could remember poems and allusions and speak like a learned scholar . . .
“The Empress is coming,” Cam said.
“And?” Da Trang was having a hard time seeing how that related to him. “We’re not scholars or magistrates, or rich merchants. We’re not going to see her unless we queue up for the procession.”
“You don’t understand.” Cam’s voice was plaintive. “The whole Belt is scraping resources together to make an official banquet, and they asked Mother to contribute a dish.”
Da Trang was going to say something funny, or flippant, but that stopped him. “I had no idea.” Pearl was showing him things—signs of Cam’s stress, the panic she barely kept at bay, the desire to flee the orbital before things got any more overwhelming—but he didn’t need Pearl for that. Imperial favor could go a long way—could lift someone from the poorer, most outward orbitals of the Scattered Pearls Belt all the way to the First Planet and the Imperial Court—but it could also lead someone into permanent disgrace, into exile and death. It was more than a dish; it would be a statement made by Mother’s orbital, by the Belt itself, something they would expect to be both exquisite and redolent with clever allusions—to the Empress’s reign name, to her campaigns, to her closest advisers or her wives . . . .
“Why did they ask Mother?”
“I don’t know,” Cam said. Blood flowed to her face, and her hands were moments away from clenching. “Because there was no one else. Because they wanted us to fail. Take your pick. What matters is that we can’t say no, lest we become disgraced.”
“Can you help?” he asked, aloud, and saw Cam startled, and then her face readjusting itself into a complex mixture of—contempt, pity—as she realized he was talking to the remora.
“You really spend too much time here,” she said, shaking her head. “Come on.”
“Can you help?” Da Trang asked again, and felt Pearl huddle more closely against him, the trance rising to dizzying heights as the remora bit deeper.
>Of course, Architect.<
Days blur and slide against one another; Da Trang’s world shrinks to the screen hovering in front of him, the lines of code slowly turning into something else—from mere instructions and algorithms to semiautonomous tasks—and then transfigured, in that strange alchemy where a programmed drone becomes a remora, when coded behaviors and responses learnt by rote turn into something else: something wild and unpredictable, as pure and as incandescent as a newborn wind.
Movement, behind him—a blur of robes and faces, and a familiar voice calling his name, like red-hot irons against the nape of his neck: “Councillor Da Trang.”
Da Trang turns—fighting the urge to look at the screen again, at its scrolling lines that whisper he’ll fix it if he can write just a few more words, just a few more instructions. “Your Highness.” Forces his body into a bow that takes him, sliding, to the floor, on muscles that feel like they’ve turned to jelly—words surface, from the morass of memory, every one of them tasting like some strange foreign delicacy on his tongue, like something the meaning of which has long since turned to meaningless ashes. “May you reign ten thousand years.”
A hand, helping him up: for a moment, horrified, he thinks it’s the Empress, but it’s just one of the younger courtiers, her face shocked under its coat of ceruse. “He hasn’t slept at all, has he? For days. Councillor—”
There’s a crowd of them, come into the hangar where he works, on the outskirts of the capital: the Empress and six courtiers, and bodyguards, and attendants. One of the courtiers is staring all around him—seeing walls flecked with rust, maintenance bots that move only slowly: the dingy part of the city, the unused places—the spaces where he can work in peace. There is no furniture, just the screen, and the pile of rem
oras—the failed ones— stacked against one of the walls. There’s room for more, plenty more.
The Empress raises a hand, and the courtier falls silent. “I’m concerned for you, councillor.”
“I—” He ought to be awed, or afraid, or concerned, too—wondering what she will do, what she can do to him—but he doesn’t even have words left. “I have to do this, Your Highness.”
The Empress says nothing for a while. She’s a small, unremarkable woman— looking at her, he sees the lines of deep worry etched under her eyes, and the shape of her skull beneath the taut skin of the face. Pearl, were it still here, were it still perching on his shoulder, would have told him—about heartbeats, about body temperature and the moods of the human mind, all he would have needed to read her, to convince her with a few well-placed words, a few devastating smiles. “Pearl is gone, councillor,” she says, her voice firm, stating a fact or a decree. “Your remora was destroyed in the heart of the sun.”
No, not destroyed. Merely hiding—like a frightened child, not knowing where to find refuge. All he has to do is find the right words, the right algorithms . . . “Your Highness,” he says.
“I could stop it,” the Empress said. “Have you bodily dragged from this room and melt every piece of metal here into scrap.” Her hand makes a wide gesture, encompassing the quivering remoras stacked against the walls; the one he’s working on, with bits and pieces of wires trailing from it, jerking from time to time, like a heart remembering it has to beat on.
No. “You can’t,” he starts, but he’s not gone far enough to forget who she is. Empress of the Dai Viet Empire, mistress of all her gaze and her mindships survey, protector of the named planets, raised and shaped to rule since her birth. “You—” and then he falls silent.
The Empress watches him for a while but says nothing. Is that pity in her face? Surely not. One does not rise high in the Imperial Court on pity or compassion. “I won’t,” she says at last, and there is the same weariness in her voice, the same hint of mortality within. “You would just find another way to waste away, wouldn’t you?”
He’s not wasting away. He’s . . . working. Designing. On the verge of finding Pearl. He wants to tell her this, but she’s no longer listening—if she ever was.
“Build your remoras, councillor.” The Empress remains standing for a while, watching him. “Chase your dreams. After all—” And her face settles, for a while, into bleak amusement. “Not many of us can genuinely say we are ready to die for those.”
And then she’s gone; and he turns back to the screen, and lets it swallow him again, into endless days and endless nights lit only by the glare of the nearby star—the sun where Pearl vanished with only its cryptic good-bye.
He isn’t building a single remora but a host of them, enough that they can go into the sun; enough to comb through layer after layer of molten matter, like crabs comb through sand—until they finally find Pearl.
None of them comes back, or sends anything back; but then, it doesn’t matter. He can build more. He must build more—one after another and another, until there is no place in the sun they haven’t touched.
The first Da Trang knew of the banquet was footsteps, at the door of the hangar—Mother, Pearl’s trance said, analyzing the heavy tread, the vibrations of the breathing through the hangar’s metal walls. Worried, too; and he didn’t know why.
“Child,” Mother said. She was followed by Cam, and their sister Hien, and a host of aunts and uncles and cousins. “Come with me.” Even without Pearl, he could see her fear and worry, like a vise around his heart.
“Mother?” Da Trang rose, dismissing the poetry he’d been reading—with Pearl by his side, it was easier to see where it all hung together; to learn, slowly and painstakingly, to enjoy it as an official would; teasing apart layers of meaning one by one, as though eating a three-color dessert.
Mother’s face was white, bloodless; and the blood had left her hands and toes, too. “The Empress wants to see the person who cooked the Three Blessings.”
Three Blessings: eggs arranged around a hen for happiness and children; deer haunches with pine nuts for longevity; and carp with fishmint leaves cut in the shape of turtle leaves, for prosperity and success as an official. “You did,” Da Trang said mildly. But inwardly, his heart was racing. This was . . . opportunity: the final leap over the falls that would send them flying as dragons, or tumbling down to earth as piecemeal, broken bodies.
“And you want me to come.”
Mother made a small, stabbing gesture—one that couldn’t disguise her worry. It was . . . unsettling to see her that way; hunched and vulnerable and mortally afraid. But Da Trang pushed the thought to the back of his mind. Now wasn’t the time. “You were the one who told me what to cook.” Her eyes rested on Pearl; moved away. She disapproved; but then she didn’t understand what Pearl could do. “And . . . ” She mouthed silent words, but Pearl heard them, all the same.
I need you.
Da Trang shook his head. He couldn’t—but he had to. He couldn’t afford to let this pass him by. Gently, slowly, he reached for Pearl—felt the remora shudder against his touch, the vibrations of the motors intensifying—if it were human, it would be arching against his touch, trying to move away—he didn’t know why Pearl should do this now, when it was perfectly happy snuggling against him, but who could tell what went through a remora’s thought processes?
“It’s all right,” he whispered, and pressed the struggling remora closer to him—just a little farther, enough for his mind to float, free of fear—free of everything except that strange exhilaration like a prelude of larger things to come.
The banquet room was huge—the largest room in the central orbital—filled with officials in five-panel dresses, merchants in brocade dresses, and, here and there, a few saffron-dressed monks and nuns, oases of calm in the din. Pearl was labeling everyone and everything—the merchants’ heart rate and body temperature; the quality of the silk they were wearing; the names of the vast array of dishes on the table and how long each would have taken to prepare. And, beyond the walls of the orbital—beyond the ghostly people and the mass of information that threatened to overwhelm him, there was the vast expanse of space, and remoras weaving back and forth between the asteroids and the Belt, between the sun and the Belt—dancing, as if on a rhythm only they could hear.
At the end of the banquet room was the Empress—Da Trang barely caught a glimpse of her, large and terrible, before he prostrated himself to the ground along with Mother.
“Rise,” the Empress said. Her voice was low, and not unkind. “I’m told you’re the one who cooked the Three Blessings.”
“I did,” Mother said. She grimaced, then added, “It was Da Trang who knew what to do.”
The Empress’s gaze turned to him; he fought the urge to abase himself again, for fear he would say something untoward. “Really,” she said. “You’re no scholar.” If he hadn’t been drunk on Pearl’s trance, he would have been angry at her dismissal of him.
“No, but I hope to be.” Mother’s hands tightening; her shame at having such a forward son; such unsuitable ambitions displayed like a naked blade.
The Empress watched him for a while. Her face, whitened with ceruse, was impassive. Beyond her, beyond the courtiers and the fawning administrators, the remoras were slowing down, forming up in a ring that faced toward the same direction—neither the sun nor the Belt, but something he couldn’t identify. Waiting, he thought, or Pearl thought, and he couldn’t tell what for.
“Master Khong Tu, whose words all guide us, had nothing to say on ambition, if it was in the service of the state or of one’s ancestors,” the Empress said at last. She was . . . not angry. Amused, Pearl told him, tracking the minute quirking of the lips, the lines forming at the corner of her eyes. “You are very forward, but manners can be taught, in time.” Her gaze stopped at his shoulder, watching Pearl. “What is that?”
“Pearl,” Da Trang said slowly.
One of the
courtiers moved closer to the Empress—sending her something via private network, no doubt. The Empress nodded. “The Belt has such delightful customs. A remora?”
To her, as to everyone in the room, remoras were low-level artificial intelligences, smaller fishes to the bulk and heft of the mindships who traveled between the stars—like trained animals, not worth more than a moment’s consideration. “Yes, Your Highness,” Da Trang said. On his shoulder, Pearl hesitated; for a moment he thought it was going to detach itself and flee; but then it huddled closer to him—the trance heightened again, and now he could barely see the Empress or the orbital, just the remoras, spreading in a circle. “Pearl helps me.”
“Does it?” The Empress’s voice was amused again. “What wisdom does it hold, child? Lines of code? Instructions on how to mine asteroids? That’s not what you need to rise in the Imperial Court.”
They were out there—waiting—not still, because remoras couldn’t hold still, but moving so slowly they might as well be—silent, not talking or communicating with one another, gathered in that perfect circle, and Pearl was feeling their sense of anticipation too, like a coiled spring or a tiger waiting to leap; and it was within him, too, like a flower blossoming in a too-tight chest, pushing his ribs and heart outward, its maddened, confused beating resonating like gunshots in the room.
“Watch,” he whispered. “Outside the Belt. It’s coming.”
The Empress threw him an odd glance—amusement mingled with pity.
“Watch,” he repeated, and something in his stance, in his voice, must have caught her, for she whispered something to her courtier and stood.
Outside, in the void of space, in the freezing cold between orbitals, the remoras waited—and, in the center of their circle, a star caught fire.
It happened suddenly—one moment a pinpoint of light, the next a blaze— and then the next a blaring of alarms aboard the station—the entire room seeming to lurch and change, all the bright lights turned off, the ambient sound drowned by the alarms and the screaming, the food tumbling from the tables, and people clinging to one another as the station lurched again—a merchant lost her footing in a spill of rice wine and fell, her brocade dress spread around her.