The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy Novellas 2016

by Paula Guran

  “You assume he will return home,” Lady Linh said.

  “I see no indication he won’t,” Suu Nuoc said. His intuition—and he’d had time to learn when to trust his intuition—was that Quoc Quang was a witness, not a killer. He’d left well before Grand Master Bach Cuc disappeared, and the analysis of Bach Cuc’s mem-implants showed, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that she’d removed them hours after her meeting with him. But whatever he’d said to her—it had struck home, because he had a record of her pacing the laboratory for half an hour after Quoc Quang had left—the only video he could grab from the feeds. After that, Bach Cuc herself had turned everything off.

  Absolute focus. What had she been doing—or been forced into doing?

  “I see,” Lady Linh said. “You could send the Embroidered Guard to arrest him.”

  “Yes,” Suu Nuoc said. “I could. But I’m not sure he would arrive here alive.” Fast, and blunt, like a gut punch. He saw the other emperor, the thirteenth, wince, his boy’s face twisted and rippling like a visage underwater.

  “Court intrigues?” Lady Linh said, with a slight smile—Heaven only knew how many intrigues she’d weathered. On whose side did she stand? Not with the emperors, that was for sure—she was loyal to the empress, perhaps, seeking only the return of Bright Princess Ngoc Minh. And yet, if Ngoc Minh did come back, her small, comfortable world where she was once more esteemed and listened to might vanish. . . .

  Lady Linh’s eyes unfocused slightly, and the red seal on the floor blinked, slowly, like the eye of some monster. “The empress is informed. She agrees with your assessment. You will take The Turtle’s Golden Claw to the Scattered Pearls Belt, and interrogate this . . . Quoc Quang.” Lady Linh’s tone was slightly acerbic and slightly too resonant: clearly she was still in contact with the empress. “You will also take Thousand-Heart Princess Ngoc Ha with you.”

  What? Suu Nuoc fought the first imprecation that came to his lips. He didn’t need a courtier with him; no, worse than a courtier, a princess who might have direct interest in burying her sister for good. You can’t possibly—He took a deep, shaking breath. “Respectfully—”

  “You disagree.” Lady Linh’s face was the empress’s serene, otherworldly mask, the one she wore when passing judgment; the same one she’d probably worn when exiling Bright Princess Ngoc Minh—though he hadn’t been there to see it, of course, and he wouldn’t have dared ask it of her. He was—had been—the lover of an empress—pleasant, good in bed—but in no way a close confidante or a friend. He’d smiled and never admitted how much it hurt to do so. “That is not a possibility, I’m afraid, General.”

  The thirteenth emperor leant over the table, his hand going through the teapot. “You will need someone versed in court intrigues.” He’d been eight when he’d died; a boy, crowned by the ruling officials because they needed someone malleable and innocent. But in the implants he sounded older and wiser than both of them.

  “I don’t know where Ngoc Ha stands,” Suu Nuoc said, stiffly.

  “The Thousand-Heart Princess stands exactly where I need her, as I need her,” Lady Linh said, except it was neither her voice, nor her expression.

  Suu Nuoc bowed to the face of his empress. “Of course, Empress. As you desire.”

  The Engineer

  When she’d stepped through the harmonization arch, Diem Huong had expected to die. In spite of what Lam had said—that the door did indeed open into the past—it could have led to so many places; an inhabitable planet, the middle of the vacuum, the deadly pressured heart of a star. . . .

  Instead, she’d found herself in a wide, open corridor, with the low, warm light typical of space habitats—and the same sharp, familiar tang of recycled air in her nostrils. She turned and saw the outline of the arch in the wall behind her, half-hidden beneath the scrolling calligraphy of Old Earth characters, spelling out words and poems she could not read.

  So there was a way back, at least. Or something that looked like one.

  The corridor was deserted and silent. She reached out, cautiously, for the wall, and felt the surface slightly give way to her, the text flowing around her outstretched hand, and then back again once she withdrew her hand. She was here, then, for real. Wherever this was, or whenever—but she remembered the smell, that faint memory of sandalwood and incense that was always home to her, and that sense of something large and ponderous always hovering in the background, that feeling of calm before words of condemnation or praise were uttered.

  The Citadel.

  At last.

  Mother . . .

  She was back, standing in what would become the memories of her childhood home, and she didn’t know what to feel anymore—if she should weep or shout or leap for joy. She simply stood, breathing it all in, savoring that feeling. For a moment, she was a child again—running down the corridors with Thuy and Hanh, reprogramming the kitchen’s bots to manufacture fireworks they could set off in the little park—secure in the knowledge that she’d find Mother in the kitchen, her hands smelling of garlic and lime and fish sauce, and there would be rice on the table and broth boiling away on the stove, clinging to her hands and clothes like perfumed smoke.

  A moment only; but in so many ways, she was no longer a child. She had lived six years on the Citadel in blissful ignorance, but ignorance was no longer bliss.

  She needed to find Mother.

  In the alcove by her side was a little altar to gods with fruit and sticks of burning incense. She reached out and touched it, feeling the stickiness on her hands; the smell clinging to her clothes—whispering a prayer to whoever might be listening. Her touch set the mangos slightly askew, and she did not dare touch them again: superstition, but who knew what might help her, in this strange place that was neither now nor then?

  Lam had given her a speech, once, about going back in time; about paradoxes and the fact that she wouldn’t be able to affect anything; but Diem Huong hadn’t been paying enough attention. She wished she had. She wished she knew what would happen, if she met herself; if she harmed Mother, one way or another.

  There was a stack of eight incense sticks by the altar: on impulse, she lit one, and kept one with her, for good luck. As she did so the screen above the altar came alive, asking her what she wanted—as if it had seen her, recognized her as a citizen, even though she didn’t have the implants that would have enabled such a thing. She felt a thrill run through her, even as she told the screen to go dark.

  The Citadel.

  She wanted to leap, to rush to where Mother would be, to talk to her before it all disappeared, before whatever miracle had brought her here vanished, before Lam somehow found a way to bring her back, before she died. She forced herself to stop; to hold herself still, as if Mother were standing with her, one hand steadying her shoul.der, her body tranquil beside her, absorbing all her eagerness to move. She needed . . .

  She needed to think.

  As she walked out of the corridor and onto a large plaza, she saw people giving her odd looks—she wore the wrong clothes, or walked the wrong way. As long as she didn’t stop for long, it wouldn’t matter. But, eventually . . .

  Diem Huong closed her eyes. Once, thirty years ago, Mother had had her memorize the address and network contact for the house, in case she got lost. She’d had so many addresses and contacts since then; but this was the first and most treasured one she’d learnt.

  Compartment 206, Eastern Quadrant, The Jade Pool. And a string of numbers and symbols that, input into any comms system, would call home.

  The network implants she’d had as a child had been removed six months after the Citadel vanished, when Father finally decided there was no coming back—when he started the long slow slide into drinking himself to death. She’d been too young to be taught by the hermits, and couldn’t teleport or weaponize her thoughts, the way the others did.

  She would need to ask someone for help.

  The thought was enough to turn her legs to jelly. She wanted to keep her head down—she didn�
��t need to be noticed as a time traveler or a vagrant, or whatever they’d make of her.

  To calm herself down, she walked farther. The plaza was flanked by a training center: citizens in black robes went through their exercises—the Eight Pieces of Brocade, the same ones she still did every morning—under the watchful eyes of a yellow-robed Order member. At the furthest end, an old woman was staring at sand; eventually the sand would blow up, as if there had been a small explosion; and then she’d stare at some other patch.

  Who to ask? Someone who would take her seriously, but who wouldn’t report her. So not the order member, or the trainees. The noodle seller on the side, watching negligently as her bots spun dough into body-length noodles, and dropped them into soup bowls filled with greens and meat? The storyteller, who was using his swarm of bots to project the shadows of a dragon and a princess on the walls?

  Something was wrong.

  Diem Huong looked around her. Nothing seemed to have changed: the noodle seller was still churning out bowl after bowl; the same crowd of people with multiple body mods was walking by, idly staring at the trainees.

  Something—

  She opened her hand. The incense stick she’d taken was no longer in it—no, that wasn’t quite accurate. It had left a faint trace: a ghost image of itself, that was vanishing even as she stared at it, until nothing was left—as if she’d never taken it from the altar at all.

  That was impossible. She ran her fingers on her hand, over and over again. No stick. Not even the smell of it on her skin. And something else, too: her hands had been sticky from touching the ripe mangoes on the altar, but now that, too, was gone.

  As if she’d never touched it at all.

  No.

  That wasn’t possible.

  She ran, then. Heedless of the disapproving stares that followed her, she pelted back to the deserted corridor she’d arrived in—back to that small altar where she’d lit an incense stick and disturbed the fruit.

  All the while, she could hear Lam’s lecture in her mind—spacetime projections, presence matrices, a jumble of words bleeding into each other until they were all but incomprehensible. It had been late, and Diem Huong had been on her fiftieth adjustment to a piece’s circuits—waiting by the side of the oven for her pattern to set in, absent-mindedly nibbling on a rice cake as a substitute for dinner. She hadn’t meant to shut Lam out, but she’d thought she could ask again—that there would be another opportunity to listen to that particular lecture.

  The altar was there. But other things weren’t: the incense stick she’d lit had disappeared, and the fruit was back to the configuration she’d originally found it in. Her heart madly beating against her chest, she turned to the stack of incense sticks. Eight. Not seven, or even six. Eight, exactly the number she had found.

  Bots could have done it, she supposed—could have brought back the missing sticks and straightened out the altar, for some incomprehensible reason—but bots couldn’t remove a stick from her hands, or wash the mangoes’ sugar from her skin. No, that wasn’t it.

  Her heart in her throat, she turned toward the space in the wall, to see the imprint of the arch.

  But that, too, was gone; vanished as though it had never been.

  You won’t affect anything. That’s the beauty of it. No paradoxes. Don’t worry about killing yourself or your mother. Can’t be done.

  Later, much later, after Diem Huong had walked the length and breadth of the ship she was on (The Tiger in the Banyan’s Hollow, one of the smaller, peripheral ones that composed the Citadel), she measured the full import of Lam’s words.

  She was there, but not there. The things she took went back to where she had taken them; the food she tasted remained in her stomach for a few moments before it, too, faded away. She wasn’t starving, though; wasn’t growing faint from hunger or thirst—it was as if nothing affected her. In her conversations with people, their eyes would start to glaze after anything simpler than a question—forgetting that she stood there at all, that she had ever been there. She could speak again, and receive only a puzzled look—and then only puzzled words as the conversation started over again, with no memory of what had been said before. If she made no effort to be noticed—if she did not run or scream or make herself stand out from the crowd in any way—people’s gazes would pause on her for a split second, and then move on to something else.

  You won’t affect anything, Lam had said, but that wasn’t true. She could affect things—she just couldn’t make them stick. It was as if the Universe was wound like some coiled spring, and no matter how hard she pulled, it would always return to its position of equilibrium. The bigger the change she made, the more slowly it would be erased—she broke a vase on one of the altars, and it took two hours for the shards to knit themselves together again—but erasure always happened.

  She moved plates and vases, turned on screens and ambient moods, and saw everything moving back into place, everything turning itself off, and people dismissing it as nothing more than a glitch.

  At length, she sat down on the steps before the training center and stared at nothing for a while. She was there, and not there—how long would she even be in the Citadel? How long before the Universe righted itself, and she was pulled back—into Lam’s laboratory, or into some other nothingness? She stared at her own hands, wondering if they were turning more ghostly, if her whole being was vanishing?

  Focus. She needed to. Focus. She looked at the screens: time had passed from morning to later afternoon, and the light of the ship was already dimming to the golden glow before sunset. Ten days before the Citadel vanished—nine and a half, now. And if she was still onboard . . .

  If it was all for nothing, she might as well try to get the answers she’d come here for.

  She got up and went to one of the monks in the training center: she picked one who was not teaching any students, and simply seemed to be sitting on a bench in the middle of the gardens, though not meditating either: simply relaxing after a hard day’s work. “Yes, daughter?” he asked, looking at her. His eyes narrowed, wondering what she was doing there—she stood out in so many painful ways.

  She had perhaps a handful of moments before he started forgetting she was there.

  “I was wondering if you could help me. I need to get to The Jade Pool.” Compartment 206, Eastern Quadrant.

  “You need to get elsewhere. Like the militia’s off ices,” the monk said. He was still watching her, eyes narrowed. “You’re not a citizen. How did you steal onboard?”

  “Please,” she said.

  His eyes moved away from her, then focused again, with the same shocked suspicion of the first look. “How can I help you, daughter?”

  “I need to get to The Jade Pool,” Diem Huong said. “Please. I’m lost.”

  “That’s not a matter for me. I need to report this to the Embroidered Guard.”

  She felt a spike of fear, and then remembered that no one would remember the report minutes after he had made it. “You don’t need to do this.” But his eyes again had moved away. It was useless. “Thank you,” she said.

  She walked away from him, feeling his eyes on the back of her head, and then, as time passed, the gaze lessen in intensity, until he looked right past her, not remembering who she was or that he had talked to her.

  A ghost. Worse than a ghost—a presence everyone forgot as soon as she left their life. A stranger in her own childhood, fighting against the spring of the Universe snapping back into place. How was she ever going to get to Mother?

  Lam. Help me. But it was useless. Her friend couldn’t hear her. No one could.

  Unless—

  She wasn’t really here, was she? She walked and took things like anyone else, except nothing stuck. She didn’t have the implants everyone had that enabled them to teleport from one end of the Citadel to another. She didn’t really have any presence here, and yet she could still move things for a while; could still make screens respond to her.

  Mother had talked about tel
eportation, and so had Father, in his cups or on the long nights when he railed against the unfairness of the world. It had been a matter of state of mind, they’d both said—of being one with the mindships that composed the Citadel—to see the world in their terms until everything seemed to be connected—until the world itself was but a footstep away. And of implants; but perhaps it wasn’t about implants after all. Perhaps the rules of the past were different from those of the present.

  Compartment 206, Eastern Quadrant. The Jade Pool.

  Diem Huong closed her eyes, and concentrated.

  The Empress

  Mi Hiep prepared for her audience with the envoys of the Nam Federation as if she were preparing for war. Her attendants gave her the dress habitually reserved for receiving foreign envoys: a yellow robe with five-clawed dragons wending their ways across her body; a headdress bedecked with jewels. For the occasion, she had the alchemists alter her body chemistry to grow the fingernails of her two smallest fingers on each hand to three times their usual size, encasing them in long, gold protectors that turned her fingers into claws.

  Huu Tam, her heir, waited by her side decked in the robe with the five-clawed dragons that denoted his position. He looked nervous—she’d had him leave his usual mob of supporters at the door, and she knew it would make him feel vulnerable, a small child scolded for wrongdoing. Good, because he needed vulnerability; needed to be off-balance and question himself to negate his tendency to be so sure of himself that he didn’t stop to consider what was best for the empire. “Mother,” he said, slowly, as Mi Hiep dismissed the attendants. “I’m not sure—”

  “We’ve been over this,” Mi Hiep said. “Do you think peace is worth any sacrifice?”

  “We can’t fight a war,” Huu Tam said. He grimaced, looking for a moment much older than he was.

  “No,” Mi Hiep said. “And I’ll do my best to see we don’t. But we might have to, nevertheless.”

  Huu Tam nodded, slowly. He didn’t like war; an occupation unworthy of a scholar. But he’d never been faced with decisions like these—wasn’t the one who’d looked into Ngoc Minh’s face and sent ships toward the Citadel of the Bright Princess with the order to raze it—wasn’t the one who’d lain down on his bed afterward, waiting for the sound of his heartbeat to become inaudible again, for the pain against her ribs to vanish into nothingness.