The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy Novellas 2016

by Paula Guran

  “It’s nothing,” Diem Huong said. The kitchen was almost unfamiliar—she remembered the underside of the table, the feet of chairs, but all of it from a lower vantage. Had she played there, once? But then she saw the small doll on the tiling, and knelt, tears brimming in her eyes. Em Be Be—Little Baby Sister. She remembered that; the feel of the plastic hands in hers; the faint sour, familiar smell from clothes that had been chewed on and hugged and dragged everywhere.

  Em Be Be.

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” Mother said. “My daughter left this here, and I was too lazy to clean up.”

  “It’s nothing,” Diem Huong said again. She rose, holding the doll like a fragile treasure, her heart twisting as though a fist of ice were closing around it. “Really.” She wasn’t going to break down and cry in the middle of the kitchen, she really wasn’t. She was stronger than this. “Tell me about the Citadel.”

  Mother was having that frown again—she was in the middle of a conversation that kept slipping out from under her. It was only a matter of time until she called the militia—except that the militia wouldn’t remember her call for more than a few moments—or asked Diem Huong to leave, outright—something else she wouldn’t remember, if it did happen.

  Diem Huong watched the doll in her hands, wondering how long she had before it vanished; how long before she, too, vanished. “Please, elder aunt.” She used the endearment; the term for intimates rather than another, more distant one.

  “It’s going to fall, one way or another,” Mother said, slowly, carefully. “The empress’s armies are coming here, aren’t they?” She put a plate full of dumplings before Diem Huong and stared for a while at the doll. “I have to think of this. We’re not defenseless—of course we’re not. But the harm . . . ” She shook her head. “You don’t have children, do you?”

  Diem Huong shook her head.

  “Sometimes, all you have are bad choices,” Mother said.

  Diem Huong carefully set the doll aside, and reached for a dumpling—it’d vanish too, because Mother had only baked it for her. All traces of her presence would go away, at some point; all memories of her. “Bad choices,” she said. “I understand, believe me.” The dumpling smelled of dough and meat and herbs, and of that indefinable tang of childhood, that promise that all would be well in the end; that the compartment was and forever would be safe.

  All dust, in the end; all doomed to vanish in the whirlwind.

  “Do you?” Mother’s voice was distant. Had she forgotten again? But instead, she said, “One day, my daughter will grow up to be someone like you, younger aunt—a strong and beautiful adult. And it will be because I’ve done what I had to.”

  “I don’t understand,” Diem Huong said.

  “You don’t have to.” There were—no.

  Mother—

  There were tears in Mother’s eyes. “No one leaves. We stand, united. Always. For those of us who can.”

  Mother, no.

  Mother smiled, again. “That’s all right,” she said. “I didn’t feel you’d understand, younger aunt. You’re too young to have children, or believe in the necessity of holding up the world.” And then her gaze unfocused again, slid over Diem Huong again. “Can you remind me what I was saying? I seem to be having these frightful absences.”

  She was crying; young and vulnerable and so utterly unlike Mother. Diem Huong had wanted . . . reassurances. Explanations. Embraces that would have made everything right with the world. Not—not this. Never this. “I’m sorry,” she said, slowly backing away from the kitchen. “I’m really sorry. I didn’t mean—”

  It was only after she passed it that she realized her arm had gone through the door. She barely had enough time to be worried, because, by the time she reached the street, the Embroidered Guard was massed there, waiting for her with their weapons drawn.

  The Empress

  Mi Hiep sat in her chambers, thinking of Ngoc Minh, of weapons, and of lost opportunities.

  Next to her, a handful of ancestors flickered into existence. They cast no shadow: below them, the ceramic tiles displayed the same slowly changing pattern of mist and pebbles—giving Mi Hiep the impression she stood in a mountain stream on some faraway planet. “There is news,” the first emperor said. “Their fleet has jumped.”

  The La Hoa drive. “How far?” Mi Hiep asked.

  “Not far,” the twenty-second emperor said, fingering his beardless chin. “A few light-days.”

  Not mindships, then.

  “They’re going to jump again,” Mi Hiep said, flatly. It wasn’t a question.

  “Yes,” the first emperor said. “They’re still outside the empire; but they won’t be for long.”

  “There has been no news from the Scattered Pearls Belt,” the twenty-second emperor said, with a disapproving frown. “You shouldn’t have sent Suu Nuoc on his own.”

  Again, and again, the same arguments repeated with the plodding patience of the dead. “I sent Ngoc Ha with him.”

  “Not enough,” the first emperor said.

  The door to her chambers opened; let through Lady Linh and Van, the head of the Embroidered Guard; followed by Huu Tam, and two servants bringing tea and dumplings on a lacquered tray. “You wanted to see us,” Lady Linh said. She carried the folder Mi Hiep had toyed with, which she laid on the table. In the communal network, it bulged with ghostly files. Linh wouldn’t have put anything in it unless she had a good reason.

  “You have something,” Mi Hiep said, more sharply than she’d intended to.

  Huu Tam bowed to her: he didn’t look sullen, for once—and Mi Hiep realized the glint in his eyes was all too familiar.

  Fear. The bone-deep, paralyzing terror of those on the edge of the abyss.

  “I have intelligence,” Van said, briefly bowing to Mi Hiep. Van, the head of the Embroidered Guard, was middle-aged now, with a husband and two children, but still as preternaturally sharp as she had been, twenty years ago, when a look from her had sent scholars scattering back to their off ices.

  “I told her about the fleet,” the first emperor said, with a nod to Van. The emperors liked her—she was scary and utterly loyal; and with the kind of contained imagination that didn’t challenge their worldviews.

  Mi Hiep gestured: the pattern on the floor became a dark red—the color of blood and New Year’s lanterns—and the pebbles vanished, replaced by abstract models.

  Van opened the folder and spread the first picture on the table before Mi Hiep, over the inlaid nacre dragon and phoenix circling the word “longevity.” It was an infrared with several luminous stains; even with the low definition it was easy to see that they didn’t all have the same heat signature. “This is what we have on the fleet,” she said.

  “The different stains are different ships?” Mi Hiep asked. She bent closer, trying to keep her heartbeat at a normal rate. They’d leapt, but not far—they wouldn’t be there for a while.

  Van took out two other pictures—still infrared, but close-ups in a slightly different band. One was a ship Mi Hiep had already seen—the squat, utilitarian design of Nam engineers, with little heat signature that she could see, everything slightly blurred and unfocused as if she watched through a pane of thick glass. The second one . . . She’d seen the second one, too, before, or its likeliness: twisted and bent and out of shape, something that had once been elegant but was now deformed by the added, pustulous modules.

  They take ships, Lady Linh had said. Influence what they see and think, with just a few modules. They took living, breathing beings, with a family, with love—and they turned them into unthinking weapons of war.

  “Their ships, and their hijacked mindships.” She was surprised at the calm in her voice. She couldn’t afford to be angry, not now. Van had laid the last picture on top of the first one, but in the communal network it was easy enough to invert the transparency layers so that she was staring at the fleet again.

  Three hijacked mindships, twenty Nam ships. “Do you know anything about the mindships?” Huu
Tam asked.

  Van shook her head. “We have asked the outlying planets for any reports on missing mindships. One of them fits the profile of The Lonely Tiger, a mindship that disappeared near the twenty-third planet. We haven’t apprised the family yet because we’re not sure.”

  Not sure. What would it do to them—what kind of destruction would it wreak among them? Mi Hiep thought of The Turtle’s Golden Claw; but it was different. She’d ordered the ship made for a cause, and that cause outweighed everything else; even the love she might have been able to provide.

  “I see.” Mi Hiep took a deep breath.

  “We need to evacuate,” Huu Tam said.

  Mi Hiep nodded. “Yes. That too. But first, I need you to capture one of these.”

  “The mindships?” Van grimaced. “That’s possible, but we’ll sustain heavy losses.”

  “Yes,” Mi Hiep said. The time for cautiousness—for dancing with diplomats and subtle threats—had long since passed. “I know. But they found a way to turn those against us, and to make them follow the fleet. Did they leap at the same time as the others?”

  “Insofar as we can tell, yes,” Van said. “Not as far as the others—it was very clear they were waiting for them to play catch-up.”

  Which meant they weren’t as efficient as they could be, yet—that they couldn’t harness the full potential of a mindship; leaping any distance they wanted when they wanted. Which was good news, in a way. “They’re not up to speed yet,” Mi Hiep said. “Which means we can study their shunts, and find a way to break them.”

  Van looked dubious. “With respect—”

  “I know,” Mi Hiep said. It wasn’t so much the research—Grand Master Bach Cuc hadn’t been the only genius scientist she’d had available, and there were plenty of war laboratories knowledgeable in Nam technology. “We don’t have much time.”

  “And we’ll pay a horrendous price.” Van grimaced. She knew all about the calculus of cruelty, the abacuses that counted losses and gains as distant beads, ones that could not cause grief or sorrow or pain. “I’ll send the order. You do realize this is a declaration of war.” Huu Tam looked sick, but he said nothing. She hadn’t misjudged him: alone of her surviving children he had the backbone to realize what must be done, and to carry it through.

  “Then war it is,” Mi Hiep said. “Round up the Nam envoys, will you? And send them home.” The Galactic outsiders considered them in, but both the Nam and the Dai Viet took a different position: they were their master’s voices, and as such, the letters they bore, the words they uttered, were sacred. Their persons were not. But in this case, executions would not achieve anything, and it wasn’t as though they had seen much that they could take back to their masters.

  Van shrugged. She was more bloodthirsty than Mi Hiep. “As you wish.”

  The twenty-second emperor fingered the image, frowning. “Are they headed for the imperial shipyards?” he asked.

  “Too early to tell with certainty,” Lady Linh said. She gestured, and another image—of the ships’ trajectories—was overlaid over the old one. “The trajectory is consistent, though.”

  Mi Hiep watched the red line, weaving its way through the outer reaches of the numbered planets. There was not, nor had there ever been, much choice. “There are ships at anchor, in the shipyards?”

  “And Mind-bearers,” the simulation of her mother said. “They’re heavily pregnant: they won’t be in a state to travel.”

  “They will have to,” Huu Tam said. His face was harsh—good, he was learning. One did not become emperor of the Dai Viet by being squeamish. “How many are there?”

  “Six.”

  “They’ll fit onboard one of the ships.” She spared a thought for what they were about to do; a shred of pity: she’d been pregnant, though not with a ship-mind, and she remembered all too well what it had felt like—deprived of sleep, gravid and unable to move without being short of breath. “Have them evacuate the station. Don’t let the ship into deep spaces.”

  Everything got weird in deep spaces—and something as fragile as a fetus or the seed that would become a ship-mind would probably not bear it. “Probably”—no one had run experiments, or at least no one had admitted to it, though the sixteenth empress—who’d had a fondness for questionable science ethics—had come dangerously close to admitting it in Mi Hiep’s hearing.

  Lady Linh was looking at something on the network—a list of names. “There are four ships at anchor in the yards,” she said. “The Dragons in the Peach Gardens. The Blackbirds’ Bridge. The Crystal Down Below. The Bird that Looked South.” She moved text around and remained for a while, absorbing information. “The first two were here for refits. The others are young.”

  Young and vulnerable; still being taught by their mothers—children, in truth. Children whom she would have to send to war. Unless—“What about the military mindships?”

  Van grimaced. “They’re here already—we sent them a while ago. I’ve deployed them as protection.”

  “Good,” Mi Hiep said. “Have the women and their birth-masters board The Dragons in the Peach Gardens.” An experienced ship was what they needed; not a younger, more panicked one who would be more likely to make mistakes. “Keep the young ships at anchor until the other ships have arrived.” They wanted ships and the building facilities of the yard; she had to provide bait. Like Van, she had long since gotten used to making ruthless decisions in a heartbeat: two young ships against a chance to turn the tide—against the protection of dozens of others? It was an easy choice.

  “Oh, and one more thing,” Mi Hiep said. “The shells for those ship-minds?” The beautiful, lovingly crafted bodies, the shells of ships into which the Minds would be inserted after birth—months and months of painstaking work by the alchemists and the Grand Masters of Design Harmonies, fine-tuning every turn of the corridors to ensure the flow of khi would welcome the Mind within its new carapace. “Destroy them.”

  “Your highness,” Van said, shocked. That stopped her, for a moment: she hadn’t thought it was possible to shock Van.

  To her surprise, it was Huu Tam who spoke. “The empress is right. They’ve come here for our technologies. Let us leave nothing for them to grasp.”

  Technologies. Mindships. Weapons. How she wished they had something better—everything she’d feared from Ngoc Minh. If only they had the Bright Princess on their side.

  But they didn’t, and there was no point in weeping for what was past or hoping for miracles. Whatever Suu Nuoc found in the Scattered Pearls Belt, it would be too late. War had come to her, as it had thirty years ago, and, as she had done in the past, she met it head-on rather than let it cow her into submission. She nodded to Huu Tam. “You understand.”

  Her son bit his lip, in an all too familiar fashion. “I don’t approve,” he said. “But I know what has to be done.”

  Good. If they didn’t agree on most things, they could at least agree on this. “Send word to Suu Nuoc,” Mi Hiep said, ignoring Huu Tam’s grimace. “Tell him we’re at war.”

  The Younger Sister

  Suu Nuoc took the head of a detachment of three men and stepped forward, into the maelstrom of light. Ngoc Ha watched him from behind one of the overturned tables—something crackled and popped when he stepped inside, like burning flesh on a grill, but he didn’t seem to notice it.

  He said something, but the words came through garbled—he moved at odd angles; faster than the eye could see at moments, slow enough to seem frozen at others, every limb seemingly on a different rhythm like those nightmarish collages Ngoc Ha had seen as a child—a narrow, lined eye of an old Dai Viet within the pale, sallow face of a horse, the muzzle of a tiger with the smiling lips and cheeks of a woman, the familiar boundaries shattered until nothing made sense. Children’s fancies, they had been, but what she saw now dragged the unease back into daylight, making it blossom like a rotting flower. “Suu Nuoc? Can you hear me?”

  The Turtle’s Golden Claw was hovering near the boundary, bobbing li
ke a craft in a storm. “There’s a differential,” she said. “Different timelines all dragged together. If you gave me time—”

  “No,” Ngoc Ha said. She didn’t even have to think; it came welling out of her like blood out of a wound.

  Silence. Then The Turtle’s Golden Claw said, sullenly, “I’m not a child, you know. You can’t protect me forever.”

  “I wasn’t trying,” Ngoc Ha said, and realized, with a horrible twist in her gut, that this was true. She hadn’t abandoned the ship—had played with her, taught her what she knew—but it had always been with that same pent-up resentment, that same feeling that the choice to have this child had been forced upon her, that Ngoc Minh was reaching from wherever she was and deforming every aspect of Ngoc Ha’s life again. Thirty years. The Bright Princess had been gone thirty years, and in that time she had tasted freedom.

  And loss; but the word came in her thoughts so quickly she barely registered it.

  The Turtle’s Golden Claw, heedless of her hesitations, was already skirting the boundary, making a small noise like a child humming—except the words were in some strange language, mathematical formulas and folk songs mingled together. “A to the power of four, the fisherman’s lament on the water—divide by three times C minus delta, provided delta is negative—the Citadel was impregnable, the Golden Turtle Spirit said, for as long as his claw remained on the crossbow, and the crossbow remained in the Citadel . . . ”

  But the Citadel had fallen, and her sister was forever silent. Except, perhaps, inside, where all the answers awaited.

  Ngoc Ha was hardly aware of moving—hardly aware of her slow crawl toward the boundary, until she stood by the side of The Turtle’s Golden Claw—her hand trailing on what should have been air—feeling the hairs on her skin rise as if in a strong electrical current.

  “Deep spaces,” The Turtle’s Golden Claw said. Her voice came out weird, by turns tinny and booming, as if she couldn’t quite make up her mind at which distance she stood.

  “Here? That’s not possible—”

  “Why not?” The Turtle’s Golden Claw asked, and Ngoc Ha had no answer.