The Tea Master and the Detective

by Aliette de Bodard

  “I don’t see what makes you think I’d be hurt.”

  The Shadow’s Child was sorting out threads—a low priority one, sending a search query for anyone of Long Chau’s age working for an Inner Habitat family; and a higher one, reading through the report Sharpening the Steel into Needles had sent through.

  In the heartbeat that it took Long Chau to turn towards the table, The Shadow’s Child read and digested the older shipmind’s report. She considered speaking aloud, but then she’d have been no better than Long Chau. Instead, she forwarded her the report, letting Long Chau make her own opinion on it. If nothing else, it would shut her up for a while.

  She needed to keep Tuyet busy during that time. A young girl, an infant by shipminds’ lives, who looked away from her, who didn’t enjoy strangers invading her spaces. Whose prickliness hid a deep unease. Guilt? Not quite that, either—The Shadow’s Child had seen more than enough guilt in the years of the uprising, more than enough soldiers who’d killed or caused to be killed.

  Time for a stab in the dark. “You know how she died, don’t you? Or think you do.”

  No answer.

  “The Sorrow of Four Gentlemen,” The Shadow’s Child said. “I wasn’t aware you had a mindship as a member of the sisterhood.”

  “He has a past,” Long Chau said, unfolding from her trance. “The mindship.”

  “You read it?” The Shadow’s Child said. It had been pages and pages of data, none of it in formats friendly for humans. “It was—”

  “Long, and hard to digest. I know. I’m fast.” Her smile was tight; her movements now fast, with none of that drawn-out languidness, but rather those of a tiger on the trail. “Do you have other questions you want to ask her?”

  “I—”

  Long Chau unfolded. “We’re leaving.”

  “I don’t understand—” Her other search, the one on the Inner Habitat families, was yielding too many results to be of use. Even if she’d known Long Chau’s date of birth it would have been useless. Curses.

  “I told you before: I don’t make guesses,” Long Chau said. “But I can read patterns, and I don’t like what I’m seeing here.”

  “You were the one who told me to look up mindships!”

  “Yes.” Long Chau looked mildly irritated again, as if pausing to explain things to a five-year-old. “Can you trust me for a moment? I know what I’m doing, but I don’t have the leisure to explain.” She looked, again, at Tuyet. And then, to The Shadow’s Child’s surprise, she stopped by Tuyet’s side, one hand resting lightly on her shoulder. “Be careful, will you? With the mindship.”

  The girl looked as Long Chau as if she was mad. “He’s not a killer.” She held herself taut, and behind her was the glimmer of something else—scales and mane and snout, with fine lines showing the gradients of temperature and pressure maintained for her safety and comfort—her own shadow-skin, her life insurance.

  “That’s not what I said,” Long Chau said, shaking her head. She moved away, as if the rest of the conversation was of little import.

  The Shadow’s Child looked, again, at the small room, the remnants of Hai Anh’s life. Tuyet’s shadow-skin had vanished back into her clothes, but a hint of its presence remained, darkening the planes of her face. What was Long Chau up to? “I’m coming,” The Shadow’s Child said, finally, though she wasn’t sure if that was the right thing to do.

  * * *

  Outside the House of Saltless Prosperity, The Shadow’s Child caught up with Long Chau. “Are you ever going to bother explaining?”

  Long Chau waved, irritably. “Let’s find a teahouse. I don’t suppose you do blends outside of deep spaces?”

  “You’re drugged enough as it is,” The Shadow’s Child said. How did Long Chau manage to get her angry so quickly?

  “Not very much,” Long Chau said. “That’s part of the issue.”

  At this hour of the afternoon, the teahouse was deserted, people having left the heart food and tea in favour of dinner in restaurants. Long Chau relaxed back in her chair, her bots clinging to the back of her hands—even without bothering to look, The Shadow’s Child could see the needles slipping into her skin. By the time the food had arrived on the table, Long Chau was languid once more. The bots didn’t vanish. They remained on her hands, their surfaces shining in the teahouse’s shifting light.

  They were in a private booth. The overlays had been altered by the habitat’s Mind to create walls that would muffle most sounds. The Shadow’s Child had been offered a choice of music, but wanted none: no possible distraction.

  “The Sorrow of Four Gentlemen,” Long Chau said. “Did you ever hear of the Church of Blissful Atonement?”

  “No,” The Shadow’s Child said. The words were outsider parlance. “An outsider one?”

  “It was outsider-inspired. I doubt whoever set this up really was a believer in their religion.” Long Chau hesitated. “They sent their members into deep spaces as part of their services. It kept them humble.”

  Alone and crushed by unreality—knowing that there were no rules, and that nothing they did or thought would matter, out there—that time was an illusion, death or madness a certainty... Bad for her, considerably worse for humans. The Shadow’s Child shivered. She sipped at her tea—even if it was merely sensory memory heated up and served to her by the teahouse’s network, the taste cleansed her palate. “The mindship.”

  “Yes. And unreality suits. Mindships, no matter how illusory a protection they might be, stand against deep spaces. Remove that comfort, and you’ll have people scared out of their minds and grovelling before you.”

  She could have looked it up; could have asked the network to tell her what had happened. But she’d have had to look at pictures, at vids, at events. “You used the past tense. I presume something went wrong,” she said, slowly. If only her blends worked on herself, and outside of deep spaces.

  Long Chau looked at her, for a while. When she started speaking again, her words were slow and measured. Considered. “They left a ten-year-old girl in deep spaces for some time. As a punishment.”

  “They—” She had no words. At least she was a mindship. At least she could endure it all—even if it wasn’t true, even if the thought of diving in deep made her feel cold and squeezed. “The girl—”

  “She survived,” Long Chau said. “It may not have been a kindness. You’d know this better than I, but the deep spaces altered her brain chemistry.” She looked... angry, in a way she hadn’t been when she’d seen the corpse—closer to the behaviour she’d had with Tuyet. Was it the age? “It was a long time ago. Shortly after the uprising.” She shook her head. “I wasn’t consulting, back then, but it made quite a splash.”

  “I was... not following news,” The Shadow’s Child said. In a dock, being refitted and healed, pored over by an army of doctors and apothecaries, prescribed useless drug after useless drug. Any news like that would have headed the list of things she wasn’t allowed to know. “The mindship—”

  “The Sorrow of Four Gentlemen? Yes,” Long Chau said. “The name has changed, of course. He wouldn’t be such a fool. He’s taking passengers between habitats for a living.”

  “And you think he’s killing people? That’s not what you told Tuyet.”

  “I don’t,” Long Chau said. “The girl was an accident, and everyone involved was investigated. And jailed, exiled or executed. An unbalanced mindship wouldn’t have been allowed to continue carrying people. Or to continue at all.” She picked at a translucent shrimp dumpling with her chopsticks, thoughtfully. The bots on her hands shifted, but the needles didn’t withdraw. She had to be pumped full by now. Not that it made her any more pleasant.

  The Shadow’s Child just couldn’t muster any pretence of eating.

  “He wasn’t jailed.”

  “No,” Long Chau said. “And yet here we find him, a decade later, working with a similar organisation.”

  “There’s no common point—”

  “You know what I mean. A commu
nity of downtrodden people desperate for enlightenment and protection.”

  “You do them a disservice,” The Shadow’s Child said, mildly. She’d heard that exact rhetoric from Inner Habitat families. In fact... she brought up again her research on Inner Habitat families, and relaunched it, using the expression Long Chau had used.

  That was it.

  The head of the Golden Carp Tran family had a verbal tic with exactly those words, and a similar accent. The Shadow’s Child narrowed her search queries again, asking for employment of anyone of Long Chau’s approximate age by that particular family and lineage, and correlating it with militia arrests.

  “Mmm.” Long Chau finished her dumpling, and helped herself to more rice soup. “They’re doing the same thing. The Sorrow of Four Gentlemen is making regular requests to enter deep spaces. I had a look at a few of the recorded logs: it’s always Grandmother Khue, a couple of people from the house, and someone who looks scared.”

  “That’s guesswork, surely,” The Shadow’s Child said, with less bite than she’d meant to. She was distracted by her search, which was showing progress on a high-priority thread. So far, no results. But it was far from done: the list of people who had worked for the family at one time or another was huge.

  “No. Analysis of evidence, and converging hypotheses. Call it guesswork if you want. The likelihood of my being right is high enough that I’m confident putting this on the table.”

  “Still not explaining why Hai Anh would get into deep spaces without an unreality suit.”

  But the rest of it would fit. It would explain why both Grandmother Khue and Tuyet had felt so guilty. “You think it’s a disciplinary matter gone bad?”

  “Now that,” Long Chau said, “would be guesswork. I don’t know. There are no recordings for the evening Hai Anh boarded. Someone wiped them, but they weren’t thorough enough to go back and wipe every single trip that mindship took into deep spaces.” She shook her arms. The bots detached from her hands, and slid back into her sleeves.

  “It could also be simple malfunction,” The Shadow’s Child said. “I had a look at the records. The Sorrow of Four Gentlemen is in bad shape. The sisterhood doesn’t have the money to maintain him. It’s a wonder anyone is confident enough to leap into deep spaces with him.”

  “You’re being disingenuous,” Long Chau said. “Mindship critical functions and security systems are the last things to go. If he’s still able to move and plunge into deep spaces, he wouldn’t be able to lose a human life because of a systems failure.”

  Disingenuous? An easy and hurtful thing to say, as casual as the rest of her comments. “I’m not,” The Shadow’s Child said, slowly. The search was distracting her. “Hai Anh was caught in strong currents. She could very well have drifted out of sight of the mindship within just a few moments.” She forestalled Long Chau’s raised hand by speaking faster. “The newer ships would have caught up with her if this happened. But The Sorrow of Four Gentlemen is old. Reflexes would be slower.”

  “I’m going to the docks,” Long Chau was saying. “That ship takes regular trips with passengers, which means he’ll be around one way or another. I want to have a look at him.”

  “Mmm.” The search was ending: only one result. She opened the related files; stared as she processed.

  Long Chau said, “If there’s any regularity, their next trip into deep spaces should be quite soon.”

  The Shadow’s Child listened distractedly, because of the file. She’d intended to process its contents quietly and have a chance to confront Long Chau after due deliberation, but what she saw—

  “Kim Oanh,” The Shadow’s Child said.

  Long Chau had been about to rise from the table. She sat down now. The languidness was gone, leaving only the sharp, fast and wounding edge of a blade. “What did you say?”

  “Tran Thi Kim Oanh,” The Shadow’s Child said, slowly, deliberately. “You were her teacher, weren’t you?” Long Chau had changed her appearance. Not a very deep or a particularly careful job, but it didn’t need to be, not when the uprising had upended so many things in the Scattered Pearls belt—and of course seven years would change a person, regardless.

  “That’s none of your business.”

  “I think,” The Shadow’s Child said, slowly, “that I’d want to know what happened, before letting you loose into the company of girls like Tuyet.”

  Long Chau stared, and said nothing.

  A sixteen-year-old girl, chafing at the strictures of family life—vanished without a trace, with dark speculations she’d simply been sold into slavery, or to a bidder with tastes for a young and pliant concubine. An entire household, relatives and servants taken into the tribunal for interrogation—nothing of any significance turning up, just a girl that remained missing, seven years down the line, and everyone knowing what this really meant.

  Long Chau’s hands were shaking. The bots came out again. They hovered on her wrists, but didn’t inject anything. She spoke at last, saying, simply, “The tribunal questioned me. Extensively. I’m still here. Not jailed or exiled or executed.”

  “Like The Sorrow of Four Gentlemen?” The Shadow’s Child said.

  “Touché.”

  “Talk to me.”

  “Why should I?”

  “Because you got me to come along. Because the least you owe me is the truth.” Because she’d split open The Shadow’s Child like a pomegranate, leaning on old wounds until they bled red and ripe—dissecting her like the corpse in the hangar bay, and then walking away when the problem was no longer of interest.

  “Do I?” Long Chau watched her, for a while. The Shadow’s Child didn’t move—cycling between pictures of her pitted hull, of the dark and blackened shape of her motors—of the painting of the Azure Dragons gardens on the front, the one Mother and her long-dead sister had carefully etched.

  At length, Long Chau rose from the table. Her hands were still again, her movements slow and careful. There was none of that cooped energy about her now, simply anger. “You’re mistaken. I don’t have to talk to you. I told you before: deductions, not guesses.”

  “I’m not you!”

  “Patently not. Now if you’ll excuse me—”

  “You’re just going to walk away?”

  Long Chau didn’t even bother to turn.

  “I’ll tell them,” The Shadow’s Child said. “The house.” And then she stopped, for why would they trust her more than they did Long Chau?

  “Feel free,” Long Chau said. And she walked out, without looking back.

  * * *

  When she got back to her office, the lights were still on, and the remnants of the abortive interview with her previous customer were still on. The bots scattered across the floor, picking themselves up when she entered, the activity map automatically opening up for her to check.

  She didn’t feel like any of that.

  A sixteen-year-old girl.

  She’d thought Long Chau was prickly and uncaring, but that was something else.

  Control, Sharpening Steel into Needles had said. A currency you’ve always been short of.

  Currently, she had so little she could have laughed. Or wept, or both.

  In the end, she did the only thing she could think of, though it was neither pleasant nor relaxing: she called Bao.

  Bao took the call almost immediately. She was in her office, in the midst of immaculate bookshelves with carefully aligned books, all matching editions, battered and creased. “Ship?” Wary surprise.

  The Shadow’s Child said, carefully, “It’s not about the rent.” It was, in a way—because Long Chau was no longer going to be paying her, because she’d wasted all that time on an investigation she couldn’t trust when she should have been taking care of her pitifully few customers—but she couldn’t tell Bao that. Not now.

  “Oh?”

  “I need some information,” The Shadow’s Child said. “On an Inner Habitat family.” She saw Bao shift, and said, “Not the Western Pavilion Le.”


  Bao relaxed a fraction. No conflicting loyalties, then. The book on her desk was physical: yellowed with age, stained with brown like an old man’s skin. It looked like one of the cheap editions of an early Lao Quy, The Jade and the Deer, something that didn’t actually have that much value except sentimental. “Why not. Ask.”

  “Tran Thi Kim Oanh,” The Shadow’s Child said.

  “The Golden Carp Tran.” Bao watched her, carefully. Her bots moved, like the swaying branches of a willow tree. “That’s old history. What’s the interest?”

  “It came up,” The Shadow’s Child said.

  Bao raised an eyebrow. “Really.”

  She—she was going to have to give something, or she’d get nothing. “The teacher. I think—” Far, far away in her heartroom, she tasted bile. “I think she’s one of my customers.”

  She’d thought Bao was going to mock her about morality, but instead the woman’s face went still: a truly unsettling effect, because it’d had very little expression to start with. “It was a sordid affair,” she said, finally. “It made a big impression in high society when it happened. Kim Oanh was sixteen and rather sheltered. You know how those things go. She wanted more of life; her family wanted to keep her safe, and to ensure the best future for her.”

  “And her teacher?”

  “The teacher was arrogant.”

  What a surprise. “Trouble with the family?”

  “She’d gone past some lines, yes. Following her own ideas and reproving the elders as if she weren’t a subordinate years their junior.”

  Typical Long Chau—seven years ago, and not so different. “I’m surprised they kept her on.”

  “The eldest grandmother liked her. There were... many arguments on the proper behaviour, which slowed things down. And before they could dismiss her—”

  “Kim Oanh vanished.”

  “Yes. It was the birthday of the family’s eldest grandmother, and everyone had gone to pay their respects. Kim Oanh was sick and it looked contagious, so she was meant to attend through the network, with the teacher keeping an eye on her. When she didn’t come on, they came back in a panic. She was gone, and the teacher professed not to have noticed anything.”