by John Barnes
There is no happiness for her, and no future. She’s here now, in the only time and place that make sense to her; and Sixth Aunt’s voice is within the chorus of the dead – and Mother is dead too, forever lost to her, her only presence in memories that are too raw and too painful – limned with the bitter knowledge that Thich Tim Nghe will miss her; that, at the one time in her life when Mother would have had need of her, she won’t be there.
She closes her eyes – and steps away, into the past.
“SHE WAS IN the heartroom,” Gia Minh said to Yen Oanh – the images of the past fading, replaced by the room of the Communion – everything was suffused with a warm, red light: a shade that was no doubt meant to be reassuring, but which reminded Yen Oanh of nothing so much as freshly spilled blood. “Wrapped around the connectors of the Mind as though it was a lifeline. Covered in Blue Lily bruises.” He shivered. “I don’t even know how she survived.”
Who knew, Yen Oanh thought, but didn’t say. They might have a vaccine; and a better understanding of Blue Lily; but survival in those first few years had been left to Heaven’s Will. The younger and fitter people had more chance, obviously; and Thich Tim Nghe had been young – thirteen, a child still.
And The Stone and Bronze Shadow had been dead. Quite unmistakably so – a miracle that she had survived far enough to exit deep spaces; to deliver her cargo and passengers to the Sixth Planet, even though it hadn’t been her scheduled route.
In the end, there had been only two survivors: Thich Tim Nghe; and an older boy, twenty years or so, who had walked away with the scars of the disease all over him – back to the Twenty-Third planet, and his decimated family.
Thich Tim Nghe had not walked away; as Yen Oanh knew all too well.
“Grandmother?” Yen Oanh tore herself from the Communion, and looked at Hue Mi—who was waiting for her in front of an open door – the arch seemingly leading into darkness. “She’s ready for you now.”
But Yen Oanh wasn’t ready for her – she never would be, not across several lifetimes.
She took a deep breath, and stepped into the corpse of the ship.
Inside, it was dark and cool; with that same feeling Gia Minh had had – he’d described it, but there was no way to get it across – that disquieting sense that someone – something – was watching. Normally it would be The Stone and Bronze Shadow, making sure that everything was right onboard – controlling everything from the ambient music to the temperature of the different sections – but The Stone and Bronze Shadow was dead. And yet...
“You feel it,” Hue Mi said. Her smile was tight; her eyes bruised – not the Blue Lily bruises, but close enough, something that seemed to leech all colour from her skin – until it was stretched as thin and as fragile as the inner membrane of an egg – until a careless finger pressure or a slight sharp breath were all it would take to break it.
“It’s almost as though it’s still alive.” There were tales, on the planets; of the unburied dead, the ones without children to propitiate them, the hungry, needy dead roaming the fields and cities without surcease. But The Stone and Bronze Shadow had had a family – she remembered seeing them, remembered their wan faces; the sheer shock that a ship should have died – the same shock they’d all felt.
Hue Mi was walking ahead, in a darkened corridor where doors opened – cabins, probably, the same ones where the passengers had died. Too many ghosts here.
“There is a shrine, isn’t there?” Yen Oanh asked. There would be, as on all dead ships: a place to leave offerings and prayers, and hope that the soul of The Stone and Bronze Shadow was still looking fondly on them. “May I stop by?”
Hue Mi nodded, barely hiding her surprise. “This way,” she said.
The shrine was at a crossroads between five corridors: a simple wooden table (though the wood itself, fine-grained and lustrous, must have come all the way from the outlying planets), framed by two squat incense burners, and a simple offering of six tangerines in a bowl. The smell of incense drifted to Yen Oanh; a reminder of more mundane temples, cutting through the unease she felt.
She stood in front of the altar, and bowed – unsure what she could say, or if she should say anything at all. “It’s been too long,” she said, at last, in a low voice. “I apologise if it’s not what you wanted – and I ask your forgiveness – but eleven years is enough time to grieve.”
There was no answer; but then Yen Oanh hadn’t expected one.
“Yen Oanh,” a voice said – from deep within the Communion.
Que Tu. She ought to have known.
In the Communion, her friend was unchanged; middle-aged, with the casual arrogance of the privileged, her topknot held in place by thin, elegant hairpins, tapering to the heads of ky lan – she’d worn them eleven years ago, an odd statement to make, the ky lan announcing the arrival of a time of prosperity and peace – nothing like what they had, even now.
“You’re on the ship,” Que Tu said. It wasn’t a question.
“Yes,” Yen Oanh said. Que Tu was a living legend by now, of course; though it hadn’t changed her either. “What do you want?”
Que Tu smiled. “Nothing. Just to remind you.”
QUE TU CAME to the Sixth Planet because she had once been a biologist, a rarity in the field branch of the Cedar and Crane: most biologists were closeted in the order’s labs, desperately trying to find a cure. She stayed a week; interviewed everyone from Gia Minh to the survivors on the ship, and retreated to Magistrate Hoa’s library to compile her report.
Her most vivid memory is of an evening there – sitting at the foot of a watercolour of temples on a mountain and trying to pretend she was back at the order’s headquarters on the First Planet; working on reports and statistics that couldn’t touch or harm her.
She considered the evidence, for a while: the bruises on the ship; the bruises on the humans. The countless dead – there was no need for her to write the obvious, but she did, anyway.
Human-mindship contagion.
No one knew how Blue Lily was passed on, or had managed to isolate the organism responsible for it. Only the obvious had been eliminated: that it wasn’t food, or sexual contact. Airborne or skin contact, quite possibly; except that outbreaks had happened outside of any contact with the sick – as if there had been a spontaneous generation, which was impossible.
Que Tu sipped her tea, and thought on the rest of what she knew. What she’d gleaned from the Communion – the detailed database of the order’s memories, available to her at a moment’s glance.
The inexplicable outbreaks, many of which bore some connection to mindships.
The symptoms of Blue Lily: the fever, the bruises, the delirium that seemed to be contagious – but only until the person died or the attendants contracted Blue Lily – as if all the visions were linked to the sick, or the sickness itself.
Deep spaces: the alternate realities explored by mindships to facilitate space journeys. Most people in the Empire knew deep spaces as a shortcut which avoided months or years on a hibernation ship. But they were more than that – places where time and space, compressed and stretched, had become inimical to human life.
The similarities seemed obvious in retrospect. Not delirium, but the materialisation of other, less accessible realities; of places in the past or in the future, or nowhere at all.
Deep spaces. Mindships.
Que Tu hesitated for a while. Then she closed her eyes, and wrote in a strong, decisive hand – she could have composed her report in the communal network, or even on her own implants, but she’d got used to the unreliability of both, in the age of the plague.
I think the order should consider the possibility that Blue Lily originated in deep spaces, and still abides there. The organism responsible for it seems to bear an affinity for mindships; though it would seem it has become capable of infecting them now.
Her report was short, and to the point; but it would change the world.
THICH TIM NGHE stands in the past – in the belly of
the ship, staring upwards. The heartroom is now a maelstrom of conflicting realities; half into deep spaces already, the mindship’s throne of spikes and thorns all but vanished. Her own reality is wavering around her; the onset of fever – the same fever that killed Cousin Ly, sending her mind wandering into a delirium it never returned from.
“Vu Thi Xuan Lan,” The Stone and Bronze Shadow whispers, her voice like the boom of thunder on uncharted seas – calling her old name; and not the new one she gave herself – ‘Listening Heart’, as if she could make herself wise; could make herself caring and compassionate.
“Ship,” she whispers. She’s shivering – holding onto reality only with an effort, and even then she can’t be sure that this is real, that the ship is real – looming large over her while the walls of the heartroom recede into nothingness and shadows like those of nightmares start moving in the darkness – far away like bleeding stars, and then closer and closer, questing hounds, always there no matter where she turns her head...
“Why?” The Stone and Bronze Shadow twists; or perhaps it’s the realities around her. “Why come here, child?”
She – she dragged herself out of her cabin – into corridors twisted out of shape; into air that felt too thick, too hot to breathe, searing her lungs with every tottering step – leaning on the walls and feeling the ship wince under her hands – and trying not to think of the other passengers moaning and tossing within their own cabins, each lost in a Hell of their own – the ones she killed as surely as she killed the ship. “I’m here. Because –”
She wants to say that she knew when she boarded The Stone and Bronze Shadow – that she’d woken up in her student garret on the evening before she left; shaking off confused nightmares in which Mother screamed for her and she was unable to answer – with sweat encasing her entire body like a shroud. That, as she ran through the spaceport, she felt the growing pains in her arms and legs; and the first bruises, barely visible beneath her dark skin. That she said nothing when she came onboard; because it was nothing, because it had to be nothing; that she needed to get home fast – to be by Mother’s side – that the ship was the only way to do that.
She didn’t intend to infect the ship, of course – mindships are old and wise, and invulnerable – who had ever heard of one catching Blue Lily? She thought she would keep to her cabin until the journey was over – not passing on a contagion, if there was one – all the while believing that she was fine, that everything would be fine. But, when the first bruises bloomed on the floor of her cabin, she had to accept the inevitable reality – the weight of her guilt and shame – because Mother didn’t raise her to be a coward or a fool.
She didn’t speak up; and now, days later, it’s much too late for her to speak at all.
“I –” her tongue trips on the words, swallows them as though they were ashes. “I came because you shouldn’t die alone. Because –”
She’ll die, too. One chance in two, one chance in three – statistics of Blue Lily, the faceless abacuses of fear and rage and grief. In the intervals between breaths, she can see the shadows, twisting closer and closer, taking on the leering faces of boars and fanged tigers – the demons of the King of Hell, waiting to take her with them.
The Stone and Bronze Shadow doesn’t move, doesn’t speak – there are just shadows, spreading to cover her entire field of vision, blotting out of existence the watercolours and the scrolling texts; an oily sheen, and a noise in the background like the chittering of ten thousand cockroaches. “It’s kind of you, child,” she says at last. Her voice comes back distorted – like the laughter of careless deities. “Come. Let us face the King of Hell together.”
It’s been eleven years since that night; but it’s the only place where Thich Tim Nghe can hear the voice of the ship – the last, the greatest of her dead, the weight that she can never cast aside or deny.
YEN OANH’S STRONGEST memory of the Sixth Planet isn’t of the ship, or of the sick – she arrived much too late for that, when the paperwork was already done, and the dead buried and propitiated – but of an interview she had with Magistrate Hoa and Que Tu, at the close of Que Tu’s investigation.
They didn’t know, then, the storm Que Tu’s report would ignite – the back-and-forth of memorials and reports by enraged biologists and civil servants – the angry declarations she was mistaken, that she’d gone into the field branch of the order because she had no competence in science – the Imperial Court itself getting involved; and all the while, the order tearing itself apart while Que Tu struggled to hold her ground.
Back then, it was still possible to pretend that everything was normal; insofar as anything could be normal, in the age of the plague.
They sat in Magistrate Hoa’s library – surrounded by both the old-fashioned books on rice paper, and the communal network with its hint of thousands more – and drank tea from celadon cups. Yen Oanh inhaled the soft, flowery fragrance from hers, and tried to forget about her bone-deep weariness – if she closed her eyes, she’d see her last patient: Lao Sen, an old woman whose death-delirium had created a maze of illusions – ghostly figures and landscapes superimposed over the confines of the sickroom until Yen Oanh wasn’t quite sure of what was real, spending an hour talking with a girl who turned into a fox and then melted back into the shadows...
She’d monitored her vitals since Lao Sen’s death – no change, no fever, nothing that indicated Blue Lily might be within her. She wasn’t sick.
Not this time; but there was always the next – and the next and the next, an endless chain of the sick and the dying, stretching all the way across the Empire.
Que Tu was her usual self, withdrawn and abrasive; Magistrate Hoa looked tired, with deep circles under her eyes, and flesh the colour of wet rice paper – showing the shape of her cheekbones in translucency. “Long week?” Yen Oanh asked.
Magistrate Hoa shrugged. “No worse than usual. There was an outbreak in Long Quang District, in addition to the other seven that I’m currently managing.”
Que Tu looked up from her report, sharply. “Long Quang. That’s near the spaceport, isn’t it?”
“Yes.” Magistrate Hoa didn’t speak for a while; but Yen Oanh did.
“I don’t have much time,” she said. The order had rerouted her from her original destination – a large outbreak of Blue Lily in a minor official’s holiday house on the First Planet – to here, the site of the unimaginable, universe-shattering death. She was meant to take Que Tu’s report back to the order’s headquarters; and all she could focus on was a bed, and some rest; and a place free of the fear of contagion and the bone-deep weariness of staying by sickbeds.
“You never do have time.” Que Tu said it without aggressiveness. They’d worked together at a couple venues: small hospitals and private sickrooms. Yen Oanh would have liked to believe their presence had made a difference – that the drugs and the care they provided had helped. But, in her heart of hearts, she knew they didn’t. They’d made people more comfortable; had knocked others insensate: a kindness, in their last hours. But it was hard to fight a disease they knew so little about. “But I’m going to need you to pay attention.”
“Fine,” Yen Oanh said. She took a sip of tea, bracing herself for Que Tu’s dry recitation of facts.
Her colleague surprised her by not doing that. “I want to know what you think.”
“What I – I barely arrived, Sister.”
“I know. Bear with me.”
“I – I don’t know.” Yen Oanh looked at Magistrate Hoa, who was silent. “Plague onboard a mindship isn’t unusual, per se. But the ship... doesn’t usually die.” Mindships were engineered to be all but immortal – all five khi-elements stabilised to grant them long, changeless lives. They didn’t age; they didn’t fall sick. And they didn’t die of Blue Lily.
“No.”
Yen Oanh closed her eyes. “We’re dealing with mindship-human contagion, aren’t we?” It wasn’t the shock it should have been, but that was because she’d had t
ime to think it over on the shuttle. Mindships weren’t human; but they were close enough: the Minds were organic constructs modelled on the human body. Diseases could leap from birds to humans, from plants to humans; why not from humans to mindships? “Who fell sick first?”
Que Tu shook her head. “The ship.” Her lips were two thin, white lines; her tea lay untouched by her side. “But you know the incubation period varies.”
“Fine,” Yen Oanh said. It was late, she was tired; and she still had a long way to go before she could finally rest – if she got to rest at all. “Just tell me. Please.”
Que Tu said nothing. It was Magistrate Hoa who spoke, her voice low, but firm. “I think a passenger fell sick first. Given the timeline, they were incubating before they even boarded – showing a few symptoms, perhaps, the more discrete ones. They probably didn’t suspect the danger.”
“They knew they would contaminate people,” Yen Oanh said, more firmly than she’d expected. How were they meant to check the progress of Blue Lily, if people stubbornly kept insisting on life as usual – taking long journeys in cramped quarters, and congregating in droves at the temples and teahouses? Could no one think beyond themselves, for once?
“Oanh...”
“You know it’s true.”
“And I know you’re being too harsh.”
Yen Oanh exhaled; thinking of all the sick – all the rooms in which she’d sat, trying to decide if more saline solution or more ginseng and cinnabar would make a difference; entering the Communion and comparing the patient’s symptoms with the experience of others in the Cedar and Crane, seeking whether anyone’s remedies had made a difference. “No. I’m trying to be realistic. Trying to...” She closed her hands into fists. “There are too many dead. You can’t expect me to rejoice when people get deliberately infected.”