The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy Novellas 2016

by Paula Guran

  “I have vids,” Ngoc Ha said, shaking her head. “Or encirclement games, if you feel like you need an adversary.” She hated encirclement games; but she needed a distraction—they’d forced her to cut the vids; to pay attention to what was going on in the cabin . . .

  Suu Nuoc shrugged. “You knew Grand Master Bach Cuc.”

  “A little,” Ngoc Ha said, warily.

  “How were her relationships with the rest of the court?”

  Mother had said something about court intrigues, which had made no sense to Ngoc Ha. Then again, she supposed it was a case of the one-eyed man in the land of the blind—Suu Nuoc was a disaster at anything involving subtlety. “She was like you.” She hadn’t meant to be so blunt, but the faint smell of ozone, the slight yield to the air, the twisting shapes on the walls—they were doing funny things to her. “Blunt and uninterested in anything that wasn’t her mission.” And proud, with utter belief in her own capacities as a scientist in a way that could be off-putting.

  “I see.” Suu Nuoc inclined his head. “But she must have had enemies.”

  “She was no one,” Ngoc Ha said. Oily shadows trailed on the wall, unfolded hands like scissors, legs like knives. They were going to turn, to see her . . . “But her mission—that made her friends and enemies.”

  “Huu Tam?”

  “Maybe.” She hadn’t had a heart-to-heart talk with Huu Tam since he became the heir—ironic, in a way, but then she and her brother had never been very close.

  Unlike her and Ngoc Minh—a memory of fingers, folding her hands around a baby chick, of laughter under a pine tree in a solitary courtyard. She breathed in, and buried the treacherous thought before it could unmake her: She’d never grieved for Ngoc Minh. Why should she, when she’d always believed her sister to be alive?

  But sometimes, the hollows left by absence were worse than those left by death.

  Focus. The last thing she needed was for this grief to intrude on her interview with Suu Nuoc—who would see her hesitation and interpret it as guilt or as Heaven knew what else. “If Ngoc Minh had come back, things would have changed. But you know this already.”

  “Yes.” Suu Nuoc’s face was impassive. “What I want to know is how they would have changed for you.”

  “I don’t know,” Ngoc Ha said, and realized it was the truth. Why did Mother want Ngoc Minh back—for a change of heir, with the wolves and tigers at their doors, or simply because she was old, and wanted reconciliation with the Bright Princess, the only child she’d ever sent away? “Who knows what Mother thinks?”

  “I did, once,” Suu Nuoc said. It was a statement of fact, nothing more.

  “Then guess.”

  “That would be beyond my present attributions.”

  “Of course,” Ngoc Ha said. “Fine. You want to know what I think? I didn’t much care, one way or another.” Untrue—the thought of seeing Ngoc Minh again was a knot in her stomach that only tightened the more she pulled at it. “I wasn’t going to rise higher. We all know it, don’t we? I don’t have the ruthlessness it takes to become empress.” Huu Tam was too amenable to flattery—and his brothers were too weak and too inclined to play favorites. Ngoc Minh . . . Ngoc Minh had been intensely focused, dedicated to what she felt was right. But what was right had not included Mother’s empire.

  “You might still not be very happy to be relegated to the background again. She was your mother’s favorite, wasn’t she?” Suu Nuoc’s voice was quiet. The shadows on the walls were stretching, turning, reaching for her . . . “Would you have been happy to see her back in your life?”

  It wasn’t that. She remembered a night like any other, when she had been tearing her hair out over an essay assigned by the Grand Secretary—remembered Ngoc Minh coming to sit by her—the rustle of yellow silk, the smell of sandalwood. She’d been busy by then—establishing her court of hermits and monks and mendicants, fighting the first hints of Mother’s disapproval. “You’re too serious, l’il sis,” Ngoc Minh had said. “This isn’t what matters.”

  Ngoc Ha wished she’d been smart enough then to ask the unspoken question; to ask her what truly mattered.

  “Leave her alone,” The Turtle’s Golden Claw said: a growl like a tiger’s, sending ripples into the patterns on the wall.

  Suu Nuoc looked surprised, as if a pet bird had bitten him to the bone.

  “You know my orders.”

  “Yes,” The Turtle’s Golden Claw said. “Go to the Scattered Pearls Belt and find and arrest Quoc Quang. Nowhere in this do I see a justification for what you’re doing now, Book of Heaven.”

  Suu Nuoc’s eyes narrowed at the over-familiar choice of nickname. “I do what needs to be done.”

  The Turtle’s Golden Claw did not answer, but the atmosphere in the room tightened like an executioner’s garrote. Ngoc Ha, drained, merely watched—were they going to have it out? Such a stupid, wasteful idea to argue with a mindship in deep spaces.

  At length, Suu Nuoc looked at Ngoc Ha. “I will leave you then, Your Highness.” He bowed and left the room, and the tension in the air vanished like a burst bubble—leaving only the oily sheen and faint background noise of deep spaces around them, a cangue she could not escape.

  “Thank you,” Ngoc Ha whispered.

  “It’s nothing, Mother.” The Turtle’s Golden Claw’s avatar materialized in the center of the room, spinning left and right. “Just filial duty.”

  And what about motherly ones? Ngoc Ha suppressed the thought before it could undo her. No point in rehashing old wounds. “You wanted to find Ngoc Minh,” she said. “How—”

  The ship spun like glass blown by a master, gaining substance with every spin. “Grand Master Bach Cuc thought that deep spaces could be used—to go further. That there was something—” she stopped, picked her words again, “some place that was as far beyond them as deep spaces are to normal space. Places where time ceased to have meaning, where thirty years ago was still as fresh as yesterday.”

  “That’s—” Ngoc Ha tried to swallow the words before they burnt her throat, and failed. “Esoteric babble. Unproved nonsense. I’m sorry.” Grand Master Bach Cuc sounded as though she’d taken lessons from Ngoc Minh—like the Bright Princess, listened to hermits in some remote caves for far too long.

  “That’s all right.” The Turtle’s Golden Claw sounded disturbingly serene—Ngoc Minh again, standing in the courtyard by her room, smiling as Ngoc Ha shouted at her to behave, to see the plots being spun around her, the growing disenchantment of off icials for an heir who did not follow Master Kong’s teachings. “I knew you’d say that. That’s why I brought you this.”

  She wanted nothing of this—nonsense. She recoiled, instinctively, before realizing that The Turtle’s Golden Claw had given her nothing tangible: just a link to a database that hovered in the air in front of her. It was labeled quoc tuan’s personal files: Suu Nuoc’s personal name, as grandiloquent as he had been obscure. “You can’t.”

  “Of course I can.” The Turtle’s Golden Claw laughed, childish and almost carefree. “You forget—he stored everything in my databanks. I have the highest access credentials here.”

  Suu Nuoc would kill her—drag her so far down into the mud she’d never breathe again, with a few well-placed words in Mother’s ears. “You can’t do that,” Ngoc Ha said, again. “I’m a suspect in that investigation.”

  “Are you?” The avatar of her daughter shifted, for a moment; became the head of a woman who took her breath away—a heartbreakingly familiar face with Mother’s thin eyebrows and Ngoc Minh’s burning eyes—a gaze that pierced her like a lance of fire.

  No, Ngoc Ha thought, no. She had wished many things; some of them unforgivable—but she had never acted against anyone, let alone Grand Master Bach Cuc.

  “I will leave you,” The Turtle’s Golden Claw said, and out of courtesy, opened the door and crossed through it rather than gradually fading away. The link remained in Ngoc Ha’s field of vision, shifting to a turtle’s scale, then a polished disc of jad
e, and other things of value beyond measure. The Turtle’s Golden Claw really had a peculiar sense of humor.

  Ngoc Ha stared at it for a while, and thought of the last time she had seen her sister—a brief message on the night before the Citadel vanished, asking news from her and assuring her everything was well. She dragged it up from her personal space, where she’d sat on it all those years, and stared at it for a while. Nothing seemed to have changed about Ngoc Minh in the years she’d been away from the First Planet—the same burning intensity, the same eyes that seemed to have seen too much. She had to know about Mother’s army on its way to her; had to know that her Citadel would soon be embroiled in a war with no winners; but nothing of that had shown on her face.

  Ngoc Ha had not answered that message. She had gone back to bed, telling herself she would think of something, that she would find words that would make it all better, as Ngoc Minh had once done for her. By morning, the Citadel was gone, and Ngoc Minh forever beyond her reach.

  Where was the Bright Princess now—hiding somewhere she wouldn’t be perceived as a threat to Mother’s authority? Dead all those years? No, that wasn’t possible. Ngoc Ha would have known—surely there was something, some shared connection remaining between them that would have told her?

  And then she looked again at that last communication, and realized, with a wrench in her stomach like the shutting of doors, that Ngoc Minh’s face had become that of a stranger.

  In the end, as The Turtle’s Golden Claw had known, Ngoc Ha couldn’t help herself. She took the link, and everything that the ship had given her, and started reading through it.

  The bulk of the early pieces was Grand Master Bach Cuc’s correspondence: her directions and discussions with her team, her memorials to Suu Nuoc, her letters asking scientists on other planets for advice—buried in there, too was an account of The Turtle’s Golden Claw’s conception, implantation, and birth, which Ngoc Ha gave a wide berth to—no desire to see herself as a subject of Bach Cuc’s scientific curiosity, dissected with the same precision she’d put into all her experimental reports.

  What interested her were the last communications. The earlier reports had been verbose, obfuscating the lack of progress. These were terse to the point of rudeness—but it wasn’t rudeness that leapt off the page—just a slow rising excitement that things were moving, that Bach Cuc’s search would succeed at last, that she would be honored by her peers for her breakthrough, her discovery of spaces beyond deep spaces where time and individuality ceased to have meaning.

  Esoteric nonsense, Ngoc Ha would have said—except that Grand Master Bach Cuc was one of the most pragmatic people she had ever met. If she believed it . . .

  She read the correspondence from end to end, carefully. She wasn’t a scientist, but unlike Suu Nuoc her broad education had gone deep into mathematics and physics, and the understanding of the rituals that bound the world as surely as Master Kong’s teachings bound people. She could—barely—understand what it had been about from skimming the reports, and from what Bach Cuc had told her, before and after she’d carried The Turtle’s Golden Claw.

  And Bach Cuc had written a few reports already. She’d found a trail from the samples The Turtle’s Golden Claw had brought back: trace elements that could only come from the Citadel’s defenses; clouds of particles from the technology Ngoc Minh had used to blast vases to smithereens in the courtyard of the palace. Bach Cuc had started to draw a plan for following these to a source, hoping to reconstitute the path the Citadel had taken after it had vanished from the world.

  Hoping to find Ngoc Minh.

  And then something had happened. Was it Quoc Quang? Ngoc Ha remembered the man’s despair, his quiet, strong need to convince her that he needed to see Grand Master Bach Cuc. It had been that—the entreaty with no expectations—that had convinced her, more than anything.

  What had he said? That in the Scattered Pearls Belt his daughter and Tran Thi Long Lam were working on something to do with the Citadel? She hadn’t recorded the conversation for future use, but she remembered the name.

  Tran Thi Long Lam. She had the profile on her implants: a scholar from the College of Brushes, the kind of brilliant mind that would never work well within the strictures of the imperial civil service. It was, in many ways, a blessing for her that she’d left to take care of her sick parent. But . . .

  Yes, there were several communications from a Tran Thi Long Lam—or, more accurately, from her literary name, the Solitary Wanderer. Addressed to Grand Master Bach Cuc, and never answered—opened and read with a glance, perhaps? They didn’t come from a laboratory or a university; or anyone Bach Cuc would have recognized as a peer—she could be a snob when she wanted to, and Lam might be brilliant, but she was also young, without any reputation to her name beyond the abandonment of what Bach Cuc would perceive as her responsibilities to science.

  Ngoc Ha gathered all the communications, and stared at them for a while. The first few sentences of the first one ran, “I humbly apologize for disturbing you. A common colleague of ours, Moral Mentor Da Thi from the Laboratory of Applied Photonics, has forwarded me some of your published articles on your research . . . ”

  No, Grand Master Bach Cuc would not have read very far into this kind of inflammatory statement, which barely acknowledged her as a superior before going on to question her research—the things that were going to make her fame and wealth. But Ngoc Ha was not Bach Cuc.

  When Ngoc Ha was done reading, she stared at the wall, barely seeing, for once, the twisting, oily shadows that moved like broken bodies in slow motion. Warn Grand Master Bach Cuc, Quoc Quang had said, and now she understood a little of what he had meant.

  Lam had been interested in Bach Cuc’s research—possibly because whatever she was doing on her isolated orbital intersected it. She’d read it, carefully, applying everything she knew or thought she knew, and thought it worth writing to Bach Cuc.

  Your research is dangerous.

  Not because it could be weaponized; not because it was things mankind wasn’t meant to know or any arrant outsider nonsense. No, what Lam had meant was rather more primal: that Grand Master Bach Cuc was wrong, and that it would kill her. Something about stability—Ngoc Ha read the second to last letter again—the stability of the samples The Turtle’s Golden Claw was bringing back to the laboratory. Because they came from spaces where time had different meanings, they would tend to want to go back to those spaces. Lam thought this might happen in a violent, exothermic reaction—that all the coiled energy from the samples would release in one fatal explosion.

  No, not quite. That wasn’t what she’d said.

  “Things disturbed have a tendency to go back to their equilibrium point. In this particular case, I have reasons to believe this would be in a single, massive event rather than multiple small ones. I hold the calculations of this at your disposal, but I enclose an outline of them to convince you . . . ”

  Things disturbed. She hadn’t been saying “be careful, your samples might explode.” She had been saying “be careful, do not experiment on your samples.” She’d told Grand Master Bach Cuc that the manipulations she was doing in her shielded chamber could prove fatal.

  That was the warning Quoc Quang had passed on to Bach Cuc, with enough desperation and enough personal touch to make her pay attention.

  Except . . .

  Except Grand Master Bach Cuc was proud, wasn’t she? Unbearably so. She had listened, but she’d done the wrong thing. Ngoc Ha would have put the project on hold while she worked out the risks, but she wasn’t the one whose reputation had been impugned by an uppity young scholar and an unimportant engineer and her drunken failure of a father.

  She knew exactly what Bach Cuc had done. She had shown Quoc Quang out with a smile and her thanks—hiding the furious turmoil that must have seized her at receiving such a warning. She’d sat for a while, thinking on things—staring at the wall, just as Ngoc Ha was doing, trying to collect her thoughts, to think on the proper course of actio
n.

  And then she’d gone into the shielded chamber. She’d taken off her mem-implants because she’d needed absolute focus on what she was going to do; because she’d believed there might be a danger, but not to the level Lam was describing. Because she’d wanted to show the young outworlder upstart that she was wrong.

  And it had killed the Grand Master.

  She had to—no, she couldn’t tell that to The Turtle’s Golden Claw—couldn’t distress the ship without any evidence.

  But she had to tell Suu Nuoc.

  The Officer

  Suu Nuoc was surprised by the Scattered Pearls Belt. He couldn’t have put his finger on what he’d expected—something both larger and less pathetic, more in tune with his mental image of what the Citadel had been?

  It wasn’t grand, or modern: everything appeared to have been cobbled together from scraps of disused metal, the walls looking like a patchwork of engineering, the communal network so primitive it required hard-wiring implants to have access to it—Suu Nuoc had refused, because who knew what they’d put in if he allowed them access?

  Beside him, Ngoc Ha was silent, her escort trailing after her with closed faces. She had walked up to him earlier, on the shuttle taking them from the mindship to the central orbital, and had asked to speak with him in private. What she had then said . . .

  He wasn’t sure what to think of it. It sounded like the weakest chain of evidence he’d ever seen—wrapped into a compelling story, to be sure, but anyone could spin words, and especially a princess educated by the best scholars of the empire. He’d read the research, and Lam’s emails to Grand Master Bach Cuc—and had noticed none of this. But he knew his weaknesses, and unlike scholars, he didn’t have any mem-implants to compensate for his lack of education.