“Not—” Dong Huong swallowed, unable to dispel a memory of her own barren homeworld. “Not this kind, I’m afraid.”
Anh smiled, indulgently. “Come. Let’s get you to the funeral.”
After disembarking from the shuttle, Dong Huong felt … naked, a warrior without a sword. She had her gun at her hip, and her armour on her; Anh hadn’t even attempted to remove it from her, as if it all didn’t matter much. She also had the voice and video loop of The Tortoise in the Lake to carry in her thoughts, but still … the higher gravity was grinding her bones against one another; and unfamiliar people, each dressed in more elaborate clothes than the previous one, turned and stopped, staring at her with the same odd expression on their faces—appraisal, disapproval?
Everything around her was freakish, different: buildings that were too tall, streets that were too wide, crisscrossed by alien vehicles. Everything was stately, orderly, so far from the chaotic traffic that marked Nam streets. Even the sky above was out of place; a deep, impossible blue with a thin, gleaming overlay: weather control, Anh said indulgently, as if it were the most natural thing in the world.
Weather control. Dong Huong breathed in rain, and the distant smell of flowers; and thought of the gardens of her home planet—ochre ground, cacti breaking out in large, breathtaking flowers—but nowhere as rich, nowhere as pointlessly complicated.
The funeral place was huge. Dong Huong had expected a funeral hall; a temple or a larger complex. But certainly not a city within the city, a whole area of tall buildings sprouting the white flags of mourning: every street filled with a stream of people in hempen garments, all wearing the strip of cloth that denoted the family of the dead.
When Dong Huong fell in battle—as she must, for it was the fate of all warriors—her lineage would weep for her. Her husband and her husband’s brothers as well, perhaps, and that was all: two dozen people at the most, perhaps fifty if one included the more distant cousins. “Who are they?” she asked.
Anh paused at the entrance to a slender, white spire, and smiled. “I told you. Her descendants.”
“The—”
“She was old,” Anh said. Her voice was low, hushed. “Her mother was born in the Hieu Phuc reign; and she bore a Mind and four human children; and the children in turn had children of their own; and the children had children, on and on through the generations…”
“How—” Dong Huong moistened her tongue, tried again. “How long had it lived?” The Tortoise in the Lake was ten years old, a veteran by Nam standards.
“Four centuries. Our ships live long; so do our stations. How else shall we maintain our link to the past?”
“The shuttles?” Dong Huong asked, at last, her voice wavering, breaking like a boat in a storm.
Anh nodded, gravely. “Their pilots, yes. I told you that she had many descendants. And many friends.”
Within Dong Huong’s thoughts, The Tortoise in the Lake recoiled, watching the ballet of the dozen largest ships in the skies. Every one of them had a Mind; every one of them was as old as The Two Sisters in Exile. Every one of them …
“Is this her?” The speaker was a man, who, like Anh, didn’t look a day older than sixteen—a face Dong Huong ached to see older, more mature—less naive about the realities of the war.
“Minh. I see you were waiting for us.” Anh did not smile.
Minh’s eyes were wide, almost shocked. “News gets around. Is it true?”
Anh gestured upwards, to the ballet of ships in the sky. “Do you think we’d all gather, if it wasn’t true?”
Dong Huong hadn’t said anything, waiting to be recognised. At last, Minh turned to her.
“Dong Huong, this is Teacher Minh,” Anh said. “He leads our research programs.”
Minh’s gaze was on her, scrutinising her as one might look at a failed experiment. “Dong Huong. A beautiful name. It ill-suits you.”
“It’s been said before,” Dong Huong said.
Minh sighed. He looked at Anh, and back at her. “She’s so … hard, Anh. Too young to be that callous.”
“Nam,” Anh said, with the same tinge of contempt to her voice. “You know how they are. Shaped by war.”
Minh’s face darkened. “Yes. There is that.”
“You disapprove?” Dong Huong felt a need, a compulsion to challenge him, to see him react in anger, in fear.
“Life is sacred,” Minh said, leading her towards a double-panel door, with Anh in tow. “As we well know. Our bodies are a gift from our parents and our ancestors, and they shan’t be wasted.”
“Wasted?” Dong Huong shook her head. “You mistake us. We give them back, in the most selfless fashion possible. We live for our families, for the Empire. We give our lives so that they might remain safe, unconquered.”
Minh snorted. “You are such children,” he said. “Playing with forces you don’t understand. Which is what brings us here, isn’t it?”
The spire led into a hall vaster than the Northern ships; the walls were decked with images of outside, of the two ships dragging the carcass of The Two Sisters in Exile. And it was full—of grave people in rich clothes, of mourners with tears streaming on their faces. She’d never seen so many people gathered together; and suspected that she would never see them again.
Minh and Anh led Dong Huong to the front, ignoring her protestations, and introduced her to the principal mourner: an old, frail woman who looked more bewildered than sad. “It’s never happened before,” she said. “Ships don’t die. They never do…”
“No,” Minh said, slowly, gently. “They never do.” He wasn’t looking at Dong Huong. “I remember, the summer I came home from the Sixth Planet. She was docked in Azure Dragon Spaceport, looking so grand and beautiful—she’d used the trip to go in for repairs. She laughed on my comms, told me that now she looked as young as me, that she felt she could race anywhere in the universe. She…” His voice broke; he raised a hand, rubbing at reddened eyes.
“It’s our fault,” Dong Huong said. “That’s why I’ve come, to offer amends.”
“Amends.” Minh didn’t blink. “Yes, of course. Amends.” He sounded as though he couldn’t understand any of the words, as though they were an entirely alien concept.
Anh steered Dong Huong away from Minh, and towards her place in the front. “I don’t know anything about this,” Dong Huong protested.
“You’ll watch. You said ‘amends’, didn’t you? Consider this the start of what you owe the ship,” Anh said, firmly planting her at the front of the assembly.
Dong Huong stood, feeling like a particularly exotic animal on display—with the weight of everyone’s gaze on her nape, the growing wave of shock, anger, incomprehension in the room. The ceremony was still going on in the background: monks had joined the mourners, their chanted mantras a continuous drone in the background, and the smell of incense was rising everywhere in the room. She clenched her hand on her gun, struggling to remember her composure.
On the screens, the ship had been towed to what looked like its final destination; while a seething mass of smaller flyers gathered—not ships, not shuttles, but round spheres that looked like a cloud of insects compared to the The Two Sisters in Exile. The old woman took up her place at the lectern amidst the growing silence. “We’re all here,” she said at last. “Gathering from our planets, our orbitals, our shuttles, dancing in the skies to honour her. Her name was The Two Sisters in Exile, and she knew every one of our ancestors.”
Dong Huong had expected anger; or grief; but not the stony, shocked silence of the assembly. “She was assembled in the yards of the Twenty-First Planet, in the last days of the Dai Viet Empire.” Her voice shivered, and became deeper and more resonant—no, it was a ship, speaking at the same time as her, its voice heavy with grief. “Her Grand Master of Design Harmony was Nguyen Van Lien; her Master of Wind and Water Khong Tu Khinh; and her beloved mother Phan Thi Quynh. She was born in the first year of the reign of Emperor Hieu Phuc, and died in the forty-second year of the Tu
Minh reign. Dong Huong of the Nam brought her here.”
The attention of the entire hall turned to Dong Huong, an intensity as heavy as stone. No hatred, no anger; but merely the same shock. This didn’t happen; not to them, not to their ships.
“Today, we are gathered to honour her, and to fill the void that she lives in our lives. She’ll be—missed.” The voice broke; and the swarm of spheres that had gathered in space shuddered and broke, wrapping themselves around the corpse of The Two Sisters in Exile—growing smaller and smaller, slowly eating away at the corpse until nothing remained, just a cloud of dust that danced amongst starlight.
“Missed.” The entire hall was silent now, transfixed by the ceremony. Someone, somewhere, was sobbing; and even if they hadn’t been, the spreading wave of shock and grief was palpable.
Four centuries old. Her descendants, more numerous than the leaves of a tree, the birds in the sky, the grains of rice in a bowl. A life, held sacred; more valuable than jade or gold. Dong Huong watched the graceful ballet in the sky; the ceremony, perfectly poised, with its measured poetry and recitations from long-dead scholars; and, abruptly, she knew the answer she’d take back to her people.
Graceful; scholarly; cultured. The Northerners had forgotten what war was; what death for ships was. They had forgotten that all it took was a lance or an accident to sear away four centuries of wisdom.
They had forgotten how capricious, how arbitrary life was, how things could not be prolonged or controlled. And that, in turn, meant that this—this single death, this incident that would have had no meaning among the Nam—would have them rise up, outraged, bringing fire and wind to avenge their dead, scouring entire planets to avenge a single life.
They would say no, of course. They would speak of peace, of the need for forgiveness. But something like this—a gap, a void this large in the fabric of society—would never be filled, never be forgiven. Minh’s research programs would be bent and turned towards enhancing the weapons on the merchant ships; and all those people in the hall, all those gathered descendants, would become an army on a sacred mission.
In her mind, Dong Huong saw the desert plains of her home planet; the children playing in the ochre courtyard of her lineage house; the smell of lemongrass and garlic from the kitchens—saw it all shiver and crinkle, darkening like paper held to a flame.
Quan Vu watch over us. They’re coming.
WAVES
Ken Liu
Ken Liu (http://kenliu.name) is a writer and translator of speculative fiction, as well as a lawyer and programmer. His fiction has appeared in F&SF, Asimov’s, Analog, Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, and Strange Horizons, among other places. He has won a Nebula, a Hugo, a World Fantasy Award, and a Science Fiction & Fantasy Translation Award, and been nominated for the Sturgeon and the Locus awards. He is rapidly becoming a leading writer in the SF field, publishing ten or more new stories each year of notable quality, as he did in 2012.
“Waves” was published in Asimov’s. Liu is gracefully displaying his chops here. This is an impressive and compressed science fiction story that riffs on A. E. Van Vogt’s classic story “Far Centaurus” and transforms into a far larger Stapledonian vision.
LONG AGO, JUST after Heaven was separated from Earth, Nü Wa wandered along the bank of the Yellow River, savoring the feel of the rich loess against the bottom of her feet.
All around her, flowers bloomed in all the colors of the rainbow, as pretty as the eastern edge of the sky, where Nü Wa had to patch a leak made by petty warring gods with a paste made of melted gemstones. Deer and buffalo dashed across the plains, and golden carp and silvery crocodiles frolicked in the water.
But she was all alone. There was no one to converse with her, no one to share all this beauty.
She sat down next to the water, and, scooping up a handful of mud, began to sculpt. Before long, she had created a miniature version of herself: a round head, a long torso, arms and legs and tiny hands and fingers that she carefully carved out with a sharp bamboo skewer.
She cupped the tiny, muddy figure in her hands, brought it up to her mouth, and breathed the breath of life into it. The figure gasped, wriggled in Nü Wa’s hands, and began to babble.
Nü Wa laughed. Now she would be alone no longer. She sat the little figure down on the bank of the Yellow River, scooped up another handful of mud, and began to sculpt again.
Man was thus created from earth, and to earth he would return, always.
* * *
“WHAT HAPPENED NEXT?” a sleepy voice asked.
“I’ll tell you tomorrow night,” Maggie Chao said. “It’s time to sleep now.”
She tucked in Bobby, five, and Lydia, six, turned off the bedroom light, and closed the door behind her.
She stood still for a moment, listening, as if she could hear the flow of photons streaming past the smooth, spinning hull of the ship.
The great solar sail strained silently in the vacuum of space as the Sea Foam spiraled away from the sun, accelerating year after year until the sun had shifted into a dull red, a perpetual, diminishing sunset.
There’s something you should see, João, Maggie’s husband and the First Officer, whispered in her mind. They were able to speak to each other through a tiny optical-neural interface chip implanted in each of their brains. The chips stimulated genetically modified neurons in the language-processing regions of the cortex with pulses of light, activating them in the same way that actual speech would have.
Maggie sometimes thought of the implant as a kind of miniature solar sail, where photons strained to generate thought.
João thought of the technology in much less romantic terms. Even a decade after the operation, he still didn’t like the way they could be in each other’s heads. He understood the advantages of the communication system, which allowed them to stay constantly in touch, but it felt clumsy and alienating, as though they were slowly turning into cyborgs, machines. He never used it unless it was urgent.
I’ll be there, Maggie said, and quickly made her way up to the research deck, closer to the center of the ship. Here, the gravity simulated by the spinning hull was lighter, and the colonists joked that the location of the labs helped people think better because more oxygenated blood flowed to the brain.
Maggie Chao had been chosen for the mission because she was an expert on self-contained ecosystems and also because she was young and fertile. With the ship traveling at a low fraction of the speed of light, it would take close to four hundred years (by the ship’s frame of reference) to reach 61 Virginis, even taking into account the modest time-dilation effects. That required planning for children and grandchildren so that, one day, the colonists’ descendants might carry the memory of the three hundred original explorers onto the surface of an alien world.
She met João in the lab. He handed her a display pad without saying anything. He always gave her time to come to her own conclusions about something new without his editorial comment. That was one of the first things she liked about him when they started dating, years ago.
“Extraordinary,” she said as she glanced at the abstract. “First time Earth has tried to contact us in a decade.”
Many on Earth had thought the Sea Foam a folly, a propaganda effort from a government unable to solve real problems. How could sending a centuries-long mission to the stars be justified when people were still dying of hunger and diseases on Earth? After launch, communication with Earth had been kept to a minimum and then cut. The new administration did not want to keep paying for those expensive ground-based antennas. Perhaps they preferred to forget about this ship of fools.
But now they had reached out across the emptiness of space to say something.
As she read the rest of the message, her expression gradually shifted from excitement to disbelief.
“They believe the gift of immortality should be shared by all of humanity,” João said. “Even the furthest wanderers.”
The transmission described a new medical procedure. A small,
modified virus—a molecular nano-computer, for those who liked to think in those terms—replicated itself in somatic cells and roamed up and down the double helices of DNA strands, repairing damage, suppressing certain segments and overexpressing others, and the net effect was to halt cellular senescence and stop aging.
Humans would no longer have to die.
Maggie looked into João’s eyes. “Can we replicate the procedure here?” We will live to walk on another world, to breathe unrecycled air.
“Yes,” he said. “It will take some time, but I’m sure we can.” Then he hesitated. “But the children…”
Bobby and Lydia were not the result of chance but the interplay of a set of careful algorithms involving population planning, embryo selection, genetic health, life expectancy, and rates of resource renewal and consumption.
Every gram of matter aboard the Sea Foam was accounted for. There was enough to support a stable population but little room for error. The children’s births had to be timed so that they would have enough time to learn what they needed to learn from their parents, and then take their place as their elders died a peaceful death, cared for by the machines.
“… would be the last children to be born until we land,” Maggie finished João’s thought. The Sea Foam had been designed for a precise population mix of adults and children. Supplies, energy, and thousands of other parameters were all tied to that mix. There was some margin of safety, but the ship could not support a population composed entirely of vigorous, immortal adults at the height of their caloric needs.
“We could either die and let our children grow,” João said, “or we could live forever and keep them always as children.”
Maggie imagined it: the virus could be used to stop the process of growth and maturation in the very young. The children would stay children for centuries, childless themselves.
Something finally clicked in Maggie’s mind.
“That’s why Earth is suddenly interested in us again,” she said. “Earth is just a very big ship. If no one is going to die, they’ll run out of room eventually, too. Now there is no other problem on Earth more pressing. They’ll have to follow us and move into space.”
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