The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy Novellas 2016

by Paula Guran

“I understood that much,” Suu Nuoc said, wryly. He didn’t know what arguments Grand Master Bach Cuc had used to sway the empress, but Bach Cuc’s theory about deep spaces was well known. Perhaps at the furthest corners, where time flowed at a different rate and folded back onto itself, the past was but a handspan away. If so, then the Citadel, which had vanished without a trace thirty years ago, might be found in the vastness of space.

  If you were a mindship, of course; humans couldn’t go in that deep and hope to survive.

  “Then you’ll understand why she was excited,” The Turtle’s Golden Claw said.

  “Yes.” He could imagine it—Grand Master Bach Cuc would have been cautious, the ship ecstatic. “She thought you were close.”

  “No,” The Turtle’s Golden Claw said. “You don’t understand, Book of Heaven. There were a few analyses to run before she could pinpoint a—a location I could latch onto. But she thought she had the trail. That I could plunge back into deep spaces, and follow it to wherever the Citadel was hiding itself. She thought she could find Bright Princess Ngoc Minh and her people.”

  Suu Nuoc was silent, then, staring at the harmonization arch.

  He wasn’t privy to the thoughts of the empress anymore; he didn’t know why she wanted Bright Princess Ngoc Minh back.

  Some said she was getting soft and regretted quarrelling with her daughter. Some said she wanted the weapons that Bright Princess Ngoc Minh had designed, the technologies that had enabled the Citadel to effortlessly evade every Outsider or Dai Viet battalion sent to apprehend the princess. And still others thought that the empress’s long life was finally running to an end, and that she wanted Ngoc Minh to be her heir, over the dozen daughters and sons within the Purple Forbidden City.

  Suu Nuoc had heard all of those rumors. In truth, he didn’t much care: the empress’s will was absolute, and it wasn’t his place to question it. But he had listened in enough shuttles and pavilions, and his spies had reported enough gossip from poetry club competitions and celebratory banquets to know that not everyone welcomed the prospect of the princess’s return.

  Bright Princess Ngoc Minh had been blunt, and unpleasant; and many had not forgiven her for disregarding her mother’s orders and marrying a minor station-born; and still others didn’t much care about her but thought she would disrupt court life—and thus threaten the privileges they’d gained from attending one or another of the princes and princesses. One was not meant, of course, to gainsay the empress’s orders; but there were other ways to disobey. . . .

  “Book of Heaven?”

  Suu Nuoc swallowed past the bile in his throat. “We must report this to the empress. Now.”

  The Engineer

  Diem Huong had been six when the Citadel of Weeping Pearls had vanished. Her last and most vivid memory of it was of standing on the decks of one of the ships—Attained Serenity, or perhaps Pine Ermitage—gazing out at the stars. Mother held her hand; around them, various inhabitants flickered in and out of existence, teleporting from one to another of the ships that made up the city. Everything was bathed in the same cold, crisp air of the Citadel—a feeling that invigorated the bones and sharpened the breath in one’s lungs until it could have cut through diamonds.

  “It still stands,” Mother said, to her neighbor: a tall, corpulent man dressed in robes of indigo, embroidered with cranes in flight. “The Bright Princess will protect us, to the end. I have faith. . . . ”

  Diem Huong was trying to see the stars better—standing on tiptoe with her arms leaning on the bay window, twisting so that the ships of the Citadel moved out of her way. Thuy had told her that, if you could line things up right, you had a view all the way to the black hole near the Thirtieth Planet. A real black hole—she kind of hoped she’d see ships sucked into it, though Thuy had always been a liar.

  The man said something Diem Huong didn’t remember; Mother answered something equally unintelligible, though she sounded worried. Then she caught sight of what Diem Huong was doing. “Child, no! Don’t shame me by behaving like a little savage.”

  It had been thirty years, and she didn’t know—not anymore—which parts of it were true, and which parts she had embellished. Had she only imagined the worry in Mother’s voice? Certainly there had been no worry when she and Father had boarded the ship back to the Scattered Pearls orbitals—enjoy your holiday, Mother had said, smiling and hugging them as if nothing were wrong. I will join you soon.

  But she never had.

  On the following morning, as they docked into the central orbital of the Scattered Pearls, the news came via mindship: that the Citadel had vanished in a single night with all its citizens, and was nowhere to be found. The Empire’s invading army—the soldiers tasked by the empress to burn the Citadel to cinders—had reached the designated coordinates, and found nothing but the void between the stars.

  Not a trace of anyone aboard—not Mother, not the Bright Princess, not the hermits—everyone gone as though they had never existed.

  As time went on, and the hopes of finding the Citadel dwindled, the memory wavered and faded; but in Diem Huong’s dreams, the scene went on. In her confused, fearful dreams, she knew every word of the conversation Mother had had; and every single conversation she had ever listened to—playing with her doll Em Be Be on the floor while Mother cooked in her compartment, with the smell of garlic and fish sauce rising all around them, an anchor to the childhood she had lost. In her dreams, she knew why Mother had chosen to abandon them.

  But then she would wake up, her heart in her throat, and remember that she was still alone. That Father was never there; drowning his sorrows in his work aboard a merchant ship, coming home from months-long missions stupefied on fatigue, sorghum liquor, and Heaven knew what illegal drugs. That she had no brother or sister; and that even her aunts would not understand how crushingly alone and frightened she was, in the darkness of her cradle bed, with no kind words to banish the nightmares.

  After a while, she started adding her own offerings to the ancestral altar, below the hologram of Mother, that treacherous image that would never change, never age; her tacit admission that Mother might not be dead, but that she was as lost to them as if she had been.

  But that didn’t matter, because Diem Huong had another way to find the answers she needed.

  Thirty years after the Citadel disappeared, Diem Huong woke up with the absolute knowledge that today was the day—and that, whatever she did, the trajectory of her life would be irrevocably altered. This time, it would work: after Heaven knew how many setbacks and broken parts. She wasn’t sure where that certainty came from—assuredly not from her trust in a prototype made by a handful of half-baked engineers and a disorganized genius scientist in their spare time—but it was within her, cold and unshakeable. Perhaps it was merely her conviction that she would succeed: that the machine would work, sending her where she needed to be. When she needed to be.

  She did her morning exercises, flowing from one Piece of Brocade to the next, effortlessly—focusing on her breath, inhaling, exhaling as her body moved through Separating Heaven and Earth to Wise Owl Gazing Backward; and finally settling on her toes after the last exercises with the familiar, energized feeling of sweat on her body.

  They didn’t have a lab, of course. They were just private citizens with a hobby, and all they’d managed to get hold of on the overcrowded orbital was a deserted teahouse, cluttered with unused tables and decorative scrolls. Lam, always practical, had used some of the celadon drinking cups to hold samples; and the porcelain dishes with painted figures had turned out to withstand heat and acid quite nicely.

  The teahouse was deserted: not a surprise, as most of the others were late risers. In the oven—repurposed from the kitchen—she found the last of the machine’s pieces with the ceramic completely hardened. The bots scuttling over the surface to check on the piece withdrew as she reached for it. The etching of circuits was perfect, a silvery network as intricate as woven silk.

  Diem Huong turned, for a moment
, to look at the machine.

  It wasn’t much to look at: a rectangular, man-sized frame propped with four protruding metal struts, reminiscent of a high-caste palanquin with its all-but-obsolete bearers. They had used tables and chairs to get the materials, and some of the carvings could still be seen around the frame.

  It had a roof, but no walls; mostly for structural reasons: all that mattered was the frame—the rods, cooled below freezing temperature, served as anchors for the generated fields. A lot of it was beyond her: she was a bots-handler, a maker and engraver of circuits on metal and ceramic, but she wasn’t the one to design or master the machine. That was Lam—the only scientist among them, the holder of an Imperial degree from the prestigious College of Brushes, equally at ease with the Classics of Mathematics as she was with the Classics of Literature. Lam had been set for a grand career, before she gave it all up and came home to take care of her sick father—to a small, insignificant station on the edge of nowhere where science was just another way to fix failing appliances.

  The machine, naturally, had been a welcome challenge to her. Lam had pored over articles from everywhere in the Empire; used her old networks of scientists in posts in various branches of the Imperial Administration, from those designing war mindships to the ones on far-flung planets, tinkering with bots to help the local magistrate with the rice harvest. And, somehow, between all their late-night sessions with too much rice wine and fried soft crabs, between all their early-morning rushes with noodle soup heavy and warm in their bellies, they had built this.

  Diem Huong’s fingers closed on the part. Like the previous one, it was smooth: the etchings barely perceptible, the surface cold. Would it be unlike the other one, and hold the charge?

  She knelt by the machine’s side, finding by memory and touch the empty slot, and gently slid the piece into its rack. She could have relied on the bots to do it—and they would have been more accurate than her, to a fraction of measure—but some things shouldn’t be left to bots.

  Then she withdrew, connected to the room’s network, and switched the machine on.

  A warm red light like the lanterns of New Year’s Eve filled the room as the machine started its warm-up cycle. She should have waited, she knew—for Lam and the others, so they could see what they had labored for—it wasn’t fair to them, to start things without their knowledge. But she needed to check whether the piece worked—after all, no point in making a ceremony of it if the piece snapped like the previous one, or if something else went wrong, as it had done, countless times before.

  Put like that, it almost sounded reasonable. But, in her heart of hearts, Diem Huong knew this wasn’t about tests, or being sure. It was simply that she had to see the machine work; to be sure that her vision would come to fruition.

  The others wouldn’t have understood: to them, the Citadel of Weeping Pearls was an object of curiosity, the machine a technical challenge that relieved the crushing boredom of mining the asteroid fields. To Diem Huong, it was her only path to salvation.

  Mother had gone on ahead, Ancestors only knew where. So there was no way forward. But, somewhere in the starlit hours of the past—somewhere in the days when the Citadel still existed, and Bright Princess Ngoc Minh’s quarrel with the empress was still fresh and raw—Mother was still alive.

  There was a way back.

  The temperature in the room plummeted. Ice formed on the rods, became slick and iridescent, covered with a sheen like oil—and a feel like that of deep spaces permeated the room, a growing feeling of wrongness, of pressures in odd places the body wasn’t meant to experience. The air within the box seemed to change—nothing obvious, but it shimmered and danced as if in a heat wave, and the harmonization arch slowly revved up to full capacity, its edges becoming a hard blue.

  “Up early?”

  Lam. Here? Startled, Diem Huong turned around and saw her friend leaning against the door, with a sarcastic smile.

  “I was—” she said.

  Lam shook her head. Her smile faded; became something else—sadness and understanding, mingled in a way that made Diem Huong want to curl up in a ball. “You don’t need to explain.”

  But she did. “I have to—”

  “Of course you do.” Lam’s voice was soft. She walked into the laboratory, stopped, and looked at the machine with a critical frown. “Mmm.”

  “It’s not working?” Diem Huong asked, her heart in her throat.

  “I don’t know,” Lam said. “Let me remind you no one’s tried this before.”

  “I thought that was the point. You said everyone was wrong.”

  “Not in so many words, no.” Lam knelt by the rods, started to reach out a hand, and changed her mind. “I merely said some approaches had no chance of working. It has to do with the nature of deep spaces.”

  “The mindships’ deep spaces?”

  “They don’t belong to the mindships,” Lam said, absent-mindedly—the role of teacher came to her naturally, and after all, who was Diem Huong to blame her? Lam had built all of this; she deserved a little showing off. “The ships merely . . . cross them to get elsewhere? Space gets weird within deep spaces, that’s why you get to places earlier than you should be allowed to. And where space gets weird, time gets weird, too.”

  She called up a control screen: out of deference to Diem Huong, she displayed it rather than merely keeping it on her implants. Her hand moved in an ever-quickening dance, sliding one cursor after the other, moving one dial after the next—a ballet of shifting colors and displays that she seemed to navigate as fast as she breathed, as utterly focused and at ease as Diem Huong was with her morning exercises.

  Then she paused—and left the screen hanging in the air, filled with the red of New Year’s lanterns. “Heaven help me. I think it’s working.”

  Working. Emperor in Heaven, it was working. Lam’s words—she knew what she was talking about—made it all real. “You think—” Diem Huong hardly dared to imagine. She would see the Citadel of Weeping Pearls again—would talk to Mother again, know why she and Father had been abandoned. . . .

  Lam walked closer to the harmonization arch, frowning. Without warning, she uncoiled, as fluid as a fighter, and threw something she held in her hand. It passed through the door—a small, elongated shape like a pebble—arched on its descent downward, and faded as it did so, until a translucent shadow settled on the floor and dwindled away to nothing.

  On the display screen, a cursor slid all the way to the left. Diem Huong looked at Lam, questioningly. “It’s gone back? In time?”

  Lam peered at the display and frowned again. “Looks like it. I entered the time you gave me, about ten days before the Citadel vanished.” She didn’t sound convinced. Diem Huong didn’t blame her. It was a mad, unrealistic adventure—but then, the Citadel had been a mad adventure in the first place, in so many ways, a rebellion of Bright Princess Ngoc Minh and her followers against the staidness of court life.

  A mad, unrealistic adventure—until it had vanished.

  Lam walked back to the display. Slowly, gently, she slid the cursor back to the right. At first, Diem Huong thought nothing had happened. But then, gradually, she saw a shadow; and then a translucent mass; and then the inkstone that Lam had thrown became visible again on the floor of the machine, as sharp and as clearly defined as though it had never left. “At least it’s come back,” Lam said. She sounded relieved. “But . . . ”

  Back. So there was a chance she would survive this. And if she didn’t—then she’d be there, where it mattered. She’d have her answers. Or would, once and for all, stop feeling the shadow of unsaid words hanging over her.

  Diem Huong moved—as though through thick tar—and made the gestures she had been steeling herself to make since this morning.

  “L’il sis?” Lam asked, behind her. “You can’t—”

  Diem Huong knew what Lam would say: that they weren’t sure. That the machine was half-built, barely tested, barely run through its paces. For all she knew, that door open
ed into a black hole; or in the right time, but into a vacuum where she couldn’t breathe, or on the edge of a lava field so hot her lungs would burst into cinders. That they could find someone, or pay someone—or even use animals, though that would be as bad as humans, really, to use other living souls. “You know how it is,” Diem Huong said. The door before her shimmered blue, and there was a wind on her face, a touch of cold like the bristles of a brush made of ice.

  Answers. An end to her nightmares and the fears of her confused dreams.

  “I’ve known, yes,” Lam said, slowly. Her hands moved; her arms encircled Diem Huong’s chest. “But that’s no reason. Come back, l’il sis. We’ll make sure it’s safe, before you go haring off into Heaven knows what.”

  There was still a chance. Diem Huong could still turn back. If she did turn back, she would see Lam’s eyes brimming with tears—would read the folly of what she was about to do.

  “I know it’s not safe,” Diem Huong said, and, gently disengaging herself from Lam’s arms, stepped forward—into a cold deeper than the void of space.

  The Empress

  Mi Hiep had been up since the Bi-Hour of the Ox—as old age settled into her bones, she found that she needed less and less sleep.

  In these days of strife in the empire, sleep was a luxury she couldn’t afford to have.

  She would receive the envoys of the Nam Federation at the Bi-Hour of the Horse, which left her plenty of time to discuss the current situation with her advisors.

  Lady Linh pulled a map of the nearby star system, and carefully highlighted a patch at the edge of Dai Viet space. “The Nam Federation is gathering fleets,” she said.

  “How long until they can reach us?” Mi Hiep asked.

  Lady Linh shook her head. “I don’t know. The Ministry of War wasn’t able to ascertain the range of their engines.”

  Mi Hiep looked at the fleet. If they’d been normal outsider ships, it would have taken them months or years to make their way inward—past the first defenses and straight to the heart of the empire. If they’d been normal outsider ships, she would have deployed a mindship in their midst, moving with the deadly grace of primed weapons; a single pinpoint strike that would have crippled any of them in a heartbeat. But these were new ships, with the La Hoa drive, and her spies’ reports suggested they could equal or surpass any mindships she might field.