The Tea Master and the Detective

by Aliette de Bodard

  The Tea Master and the Detective

  Copyright © 2018 by Aliette de Bodard

  All rights reserved.

  Originally published by Subterranean Press in North America.

  Published as an ebook in 2018 by JABberwocky Literary Agency, Inc.

  www.awfulagent.com/ebooks

  Cover art © 2018 by Dirk Berger

  All characters and events in this publication, other than those in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that which it is published and without similar a condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  ISBN 978-1-625673-66-4

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  The Tea Master and the Detective

  Acknowledgments

  About Aliette de Bodard

  Also by Aliette de Bodard

  The Tea Master and the Detective

  The new client sat in the chair reserved for customers, levelly gazing at The Shadow’s Child—hands apart, legs crossed under the jade-green fabric of her tunic. The tunic itself had been high-quality once, displaying elegant, coordinated patterns, but it was patched, and the patterns were five years old at least, the stuff that got laughed at even in a provincial backwater such as the Scattered Pearls belt. Her skin was dark, her nose aquiline. When she spoke, her accent was flawlessly Inner Habitats. “My name is Long Chau. You have a good reputation as a brewer of serenity. I want to use your services.”

  The Shadow’s Child stifled a bitter laugh. Whatever her reputation was, it hadn’t translated into customers fighting to see her. “Go ahead.”

  That gaze again from Long Chau. The Shadow’s Child was used to respect or fear; to downcast eyes; to awkwardness, even, with people who weren’t used to dealing with a shipmind, especially one that wasn’t involved in passenger service.

  The Shadow’s Child’s body—the metal hull that encased her heartroom and her core—was far away from the office compartment they were both in. The avatar she projected into the habitat wasn’t much different from it: a large, sweeping mass of metal and optics that took up most of the office, shifting between different angles on the hull and ports, giving people a glimpse of what she was really like—vast enough to transport merchant crews and supplies, the whole of her hanging in the cool vacuum of space outside the orbitals of the Scattered Pearls belt, with bots crowding her hulls and sensors constantly bombarded by particles. She could have made herself small and unthreatening. She could have hovered over people’s shoulders like a pet or a children’s toy, as was the fashion amongst the older shipminds. But she’d lived through a war, an uprising and a famine, and she was done with diminishing herself to spare the feelings of others.

  Long Chau said, “I’m going into deep spaces to recover something. I need you to make a blend that keeps me functional.”

  Now that was surprising. “Most of my customers prefer oblivion when they travel between the stars,” The Shadow’s Child said.

  A snort from Long Chau. “I’m not a drugged fool.”

  Or a fool at all. The name she’d given, Long Chau, was an improbable confection of syllables, a style name, except as style names went it was utterly unsubtle. Dragon Pearl. “But you’re drugged, aren’t you?” The Shadow’s Child asked. She kept her voice gentle, at that tricky balance point where customers had trust, but no fear.

  An expansive shrug from Long Chau. “Of course I’m drugged.” She didn’t offer further explanation, but The Shadow’s Child saw the way she held herself. She was languid and cool, seemingly in utter control, but that particular stillness was that of a spring wound so tight it’d snap.

  “May I?” The Shadow’s Child asked, drifting closer and calling up the bots. She wasn’t physically there, but physical presence was mostly overrated: the bots moved as easily as the ones onboard her real body.

  Long Chau didn’t even flinch as they climbed up her face. Two of them settled at the corner of her eyes, two at the edge of her lips, and a host clung to the thick mane of her hair. Most people, for all their familiarity with bots, would have recoiled.

  A human heartbeat, two: data flowed back to The Shadow’s Child, thick and fast. She sorted it out easily, plotting graphs and discarding the errant measurements in less than the time it took the bots to drop down from Long Chau’s head.

  She gazed, for a moment, at the thick knot of electrical impulses in Long Chau’s brain, a frenzied and complex dance of neuron activation. For all her computational power, she couldn’t hope to hold it all in her thoughts, or even analyse it all, but she’d seen enough patterns to be able to recognise its base parameters.

  Long Chau was drugged to the gills, and more: her triggers were all out of balance, too slow at low stimuli and completely wild past a certain threshold. The Shadow’s Child accessed Long Chau’s public records, again. She finally asked a question she usually avoided. “The drugs—did your doctor prescribe these to you?”

  Long Chau smiled. “Of course not. You don’t need a doctor, these days.”

  “For some things, maybe you should,” The Shadow’s Child said, more sharply than she intended to.

  “You’re not one.”

  “No,” The Shadow’s Child said. “And perhaps not the person who can help you.”

  “Who said I wanted to be helped?” Long Chau shifted, smiling widely—distantly, serenely amused. “I’m happy with what I’ve achieved.”

  “Except that you came to see me.”

  “Ah. Yes.” She shook her head with that same odd languidness. “I do have... an annoying side effect. I’m more focused and faster, but only in a narrow range. Deep spaces are well outside that range.”

  The Shadow’s Child had never dealt very well with dancing around the truth. “What are you talking about? Anxiety? Traumatic reaction?”

  “Fuzziness,” Long Chau said. “I can’t think in deep spaces.”

  It wasn’t unusual. Time and space got weird, especially deeper in. It took effort to remain functional. Some people could, some people couldn’t. The Shadow’s Child had had one lieutenant who spent every dive into deep spaces curled up on the bed, whimpering—it had been a hundred years ago, before the brews got developed, before brewers of serenity started doing brisk business on space stations and orbitals, selling teas and brews that made it easier for humans to bear the unknowable space shipminds used to travel faster than light.

  “You could stop taking the drugs. It would probably help,” The Shadow’s Child said.

  “I could.” Long Chau’s tone made it clear that she wouldn’t even consider it. The Shadow’s Child thought for a while, reviewing evidence as she did. Long Chau was entirely right. She was no doctor; merely a small-rank brewer of serenity struggling to make ends meet. And she just couldn’t afford to ignore a customer.

  “I could make a blend that would suit you,” The Shadow’s Child said.

  Long Chau smiled. “Good. Go on.”

  Deep spaces. She hadn’t returned to them since the Ten Thousand Flags uprising—since her entire crew died and left her stranded. The Shadow’s Child hesitated again—a moment only—and said, “I don’t want to be responsible for accidents. With all that you have in your body, I’d want to monitor you quite closely after you drink the blend.”

  “I’ll have your bots.”

  “Bots won’t be
able to react fast enough, with the time differentials. I want to be with you in deep spaces. And it won’t come cheap.”

  Long Chau was silent for a while, staring at her. At length, she stretched, like a sated cat. “I see.” She smiled. “I hadn’t thought you’d want to return to deep spaces, even for a price. Not after what happened to you there.”

  It was like a gut punch. For a brief, startling moment The Shadow’s Child was hanging, not in a comforting void, but somewhere else, where the stars kept shifting and contorting. The dead bodies of her crew littered her corridors, and the temperature was all wrong, everything pressing and grinding against her hull, a sound like a keening lament, metal pushed past endurance and sensors going dark one after the other, a scream in her ears that was hers, that had always been hers...

  “How—” The Shadow’s Child shifted, showing her full size, a desperate attempt to make Long Chau back away. But Long Chau sat in the chair with a mocking, distant smile, and didn’t move. “It’s not public, or even easily accessible. You can’t possibly have found—”

  Long Chau shook her head. Her lips, parted, were as thin as a knife. “It is my business to work out things that other people don’t pick up on. As I said—I’m more focused. You hesitated before saying yes.”

  “Because you’re a difficult customer.”

  “It could have been that. But you kept hesitating afterwards. If you’d simply decided to accommodate a difficult customer, the moment of decision would have been the only time you slowed down. There was something else about this bothering you.”

  “It was a fraction of one of your heartbeats. Humans don’t pick up on this.”

  “They don’t.” Nothing ventured, again; no hint that she found the silence awkward or unpleasant.

  The Shadow’s Child hesitated—again for a bare moment, because what her customers did with her blends was none of her business. But she’d just committed to being in deep spaces again, and that was beyond her short limit of unpleasant surprises for the day. “You haven’t told me what you need to find in deep spaces.”

  Again, that lazy, unsettling smile. “A corpse.”

  Then again, perhaps she was wrong about the unpleasant surprises.

  * * *

  The Shadow’s Child was putting the finishing touches to a test batch of Long Chau’s blend. The sweet, intoxicating smell of honeydreamer saturated the room. Two bots clung to the inside of the teapot, taking samples and comparing them to the simulations’ results—almost done...

  Someone knocked at the door.

  “Go away,” The Shadow’s Child started, and then she saw it was Bao, the woman who collected the rent for the compartment that served as her office and laboratory. Her heart sank. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be rude.” The rent. It had to be the rent. The Shadow’s Child had scrapped together everything she could in the last days of the year and barely met the deadline, but there were few rules where the Inner Habitat families were concerned.

  “May I?” Bao asked.

  The Shadow’s Child hesitated, but of course Bao would simply be back, if she said no. Bao was polite and pleasant, but unrelenting—which was why the Western Pavilion Le family, who owned The Shadow’s Child’s compartment, employed her.

  “Come in,” The Shadow’s Child said. She and Bao had this uneasy relationship, not quite friendship but almost. Bao had been one of the only people willing to risk renting space to a mindship—someone who needed a compartment to receive visitors in-habitat, but who didn’t really live there, physically speaking, whom you couldn’t easily intimidate or frighten with a couple of toughs if the rent wasn’t paid.

  The Shadow’s Child had the bots prepare tea, but Bao waved a hand. “I won’t be long.” She pulled up the same chair Long Chau had settled in, and sat, gazing back at The Shadow’s Child, cool and collected. Unlike Long Chau, her tunic was the latest fashion. The calligraphied verses, bold and forceful, came from Ngu Hoa Giang, the current darling of the Imperial Court. Bao’s face was impeccable, with the peculiar smoothness of successive rejuv treatments—and her bots, instead of riding in her sleeves, hung in a jewelled cascade from both her shoulders, an effect that was all the more striking because Bao wore her hair short, in defiance of all conventions. “This is a business visit, in case you had doubts.”

  “The rent,” The Shadow’s Child said. “I can pay—”

  Bao shook her head. The bots moved, slowly. “You did pay.” Her voice was low-pitched, and confident. She picked up the tea from the bots, breathed it in; but didn’t drink. She never did, when on business. She always said she’d feel personally implicated if she shared food or drink, though she enjoyed the smell of it.

  “Then I don’t know why you’re here.” She didn’t mean to be this impolite, but it was out of her before she could think.

  Bao sighed. “The Western Pavilion Le own the compartment. There’s not much that escapes them. Your revenue—”

  “It’s good enough,” The Shadow’s Child said. She forced herself to be nonchalant.

  “Is it?” Bao’s gaze was piercing. “I said business, but perhaps it’d be more accurate to say I’m here as a friend. Or a concerned relative. You may not need much space, or that much money to pay for it—”

  If only. She should have had money for her repairs, but everything had gone into making sure she wouldn’t find herself homeless. Shipminds such as her were meant to be the centre of families: grown by alchemists in laboratories, borne by human mothers and implanted into the ship-bodies designed for them, they were much longer lived than humans—the repositories of memories and knowledge, the eldest aunts and grandmothers on whom everyone relied. They were certainly not meant to be penniless and poor, and The Shadow’s Child would die before she’d beg from her younger relatives—who were, in any case, even worse off than her. Their salaries as minor scholars in the ministries paid them a pittance, and they could barely afford their own food.

  She could have remained as she was, in orbit around the habitats. But without office space, how could she practise her trade? No one would take a shuttle to come onboard a distant shipmind, not when there were closer and better brewers of serenity available. “I get your point,” she said. “And I’m grateful, but—” But she didn’t need more stress. She didn’t need her niggling worst fears to be proved right.

  Bao pulled back the chair, and rose. “But I’m not good news? I seldom am.” She shrugged. “I know you won’t consider passenger service—”

  “No,” The Shadow’s Child said. It was reflex, as if someone had pushed, hard, on an open wound and she’d screamed.

  “The money is far better. Especially you—you’re a troop transport. You could take on a lot of passengers and cargo each run.” Bao’s voice was soft.

  “I know.”

  Bao was smart enough to drop the subject. She looked at the bookshelves: not physical books, because The Shadow’s Child would have needed to read them through her bots, but a selection of the ones in her electronic library, displayed in matching editions in a riot of colours. “I see you have the latest Lao Quy. It’s well worth it, if you need a distraction. She’s really got to be a master of the form.”

  Bao and The Shadow’s Child shared a fondness for epic romances and martial heroes books, the kind of novels scholars looked down on as trash but which sold thousands of copies across the belt. “I haven’t started it yet,” The Shadow’s Child said. “But I liked the previous one. Strong chemistry between characters. And to have set it in a small mining operation was a smart change of setting. I loved the mindship and their habitat’s Mind lover, trying to find each other after decades had passed.”

  “Of course you would. She’s good,” Bao said, fondly. “This one is different. I’d argue better. We can talk about it later, if you want, but I wouldn’t want to spoil the experience.” She looked at the blend on the stove, and shook her head. “I’m not going to keep you from your customer.”

  A customer The Shadow’s Child didn’t lik
e, but she’d pay handsomely, and—as Bao had all too clearly reminded her—The Shadow’s Child couldn’t afford to be picky.

  * * *

  The Shadow’s Child had to take Long Chau onboard, of course. When Long Chau’s footsteps echoed in the corridors of her body, it was an odd and unsettling feeling. She’d taken on a few passengers for the army after Vinh and Hanh and her crew died, but everyone had been so careful with her, as if she were made of glass. And after she’d been discharged she’d refused to take on further passengers.

  She had no need of sensors or bots to follow Long Chau’s progress through her. The footsteps, slow and steady—each of them a jolt in the vastness of her body—went through room after room, unerringly going towards the cabin she’d set aside for Long Chau. From time to time, a longer pause, feet resting lightly on the floor of rooms, a faint heat spreading outward on her tiles: once, near the seventh bay, staring at the scrolling display of fairytales Mother had brought back from the First Planet; another time at the start of the living quarters, reading the Thu Huong quote on houses being a family’s heart—new paint and a new calligraphy, replaced after the ambush. The Shadow’s Child had had network decoration, once: a wealth of intricate interlocked layers only visible with the proper permissions. But she’d lost everything, and she hadn’t seen the point of putting more than basic work into this after she was discharged.

  When Long Chau reached the cabin, she found a table and a chair, and a cup of steaming tea set there. She raised her eyes, as if she could see The Shadow’s Child hovering somewhere above her. It was pointless: everything around her was the ship. All The Shadow’s Child really needed to do was focus her upper layers of attention on this room, while in the background the bots and everything else continued to run without any input, and the solar wind buffeted her hull as her orbit swung her around the habitats—all familiar sensations that barely impinged.

  Long Chau pulled up the chair, settling down into it without any apparent nervousness. Her movements were slow and deliberate. The Shadow’s Child felt it all. The scraping of the chair, all four feet digging into her floors; Long Chau’s weight shifting, lightly pressing down on top of the chair. “You’re quite lovely,” Long Chau said.