“Every Dyson is built to its own blueprint. Getting anything bigger than a breadbox—or an unarmed clone with a popular genecode—inside without going through channels or breaking the seal and blowing everything inside to hell is virtually impossible.” Rona held out her hand. As always, it was jarring to see my face so cold, so calculating. I’m a businesswoman. All Nona-Rs have a streak of ruthlessness to them. But Rona . . . Rona was a monster. “Give me the schematics, Violet. Once I have them, I’ll know that you’re with me, and we can move forward.”
“Do you have a ship here?” I asked. “How did you even get on this sphere?”
“I don’t see where it’s any of your concern.”
“Everything you do is my concern. You’re my sister.”
“I’m your clone,” corrected Rona gently. “I’m your other self. You could have been me. We could have grown up perfectly synchronized. We could rule the universe. The best criminals ever known. But you chose to run a children’s entertainment gallery and waste yourself on frivolities. Everything you do reflects poorly on me as well, you know; you make me look soft.”
“At least I’m not trying to crack a Dyson sphere for profit.”
Rona laughed. “No. But I’m succeeding at it. Violet? The schematics?”
“Yes, Rona,” said the professor meekly. She took a step forward, putting herself on the level with me. I tensed.
She winked.
That was all the warning I got before my gun—her gun—was pressed back into my hand and she was hitting the deck, leaving Rona staring at me in wide-eyed confusion.
“Duck hunt!” I shouted. Doc flung himself hard to the side. I pulled the trigger, aiming not for Rona but for the wall behind her. She laughed, delighted, as my shot flew right past her ear. She never had been one for paying attention during our science classes. I guess when you’re planning on life as a criminal mastermind, little things like “the laws of physics” don’t seem to have that much relevance.
Me, I run a children’s entertainment gallery, and as anyone who’s ever played terrestrial pool or one of the old bubble-popping games can tell you, physics matters, especially when you’re playing with energy beams. My shot hit the wall, bounced off, hit the opposing corner, and bounced again, this time slamming right into the middle of Rona’s back. She didn’t even have time to scream before she collapsed.
I lowered the gun. “Doc? You okay?”
“You could have told me Rona was in the sector!” He stood laboriously, glaring at my crumpled clone. “The ship let her in. I keep telling you we should install a fingerprint lock.”
“And I keep telling you, we can’t afford it.” I turned to find Violet staring at me. “What?”
“You—you shot her!”
“Yeah, but I shot two walls first, and these things don’t have that much of a charge in them. She’s stunned, but she’ll be fine. Doc?”
“On it.” He bent, scooping Rona up like she was one of the prize ragdolls we sometimes distributed in the arcade. He paused long enough for me to pass him the gun. He nodded, and walked past us toward the entry hall.
Violet looked back to me, paling as the enormity of the situation sunk in. “I’m sorry about everything. I didn’t know . . .”
“Rona takes after our genemother. She’s a great actress, as long as you don’t mind that everything’s an act. You really steal those schematics for her?”
“Not stole, exactly.” Her cheeks reddened. It was a miracle she was still upright, with as often as the blood rushed into and out of her head. “My parents were on the design team. They made backups. I must have triggered something when I copied all that data over, but I thought you were . . . were her.”
“And as soon as she caught the alert, she realized she was about to lose her payday, so she came running.” I looked around the ship and sighed. “I have no idea what we’re going to do next. We can’t leave, and it’s not like you’re in a position to buy that game now—or like the creds would clear before the guards figured out that Rona wasn’t me.” Doc was dumping her outside.
“You said the gravity generator was broken?”
I nodded. “Crapped out on the trip over.”
Professor Whitman’s smile was as sudden as a black hole’s event horizon, and pulled twice as hard. “Given the size and make of your ship—is it by any chance a Whitman Industries model?”
I stopped. I blinked. “I . . . what?”
“Whitman Industries. We, uh, designed most of the gravity generators currently in use in this sector.” She was still blushing. It was a good look for her. “I can fix it.”
“You can fix it.”
She nodded. “Just give me a wrench.”
“You realize you’re going to have to leave. You can’t . . . The guards will arrest Rona, but they came for you.”
“I know.” Professor Whitman shrugged. “I have the schematics. Maybe I can ride with you until I find someplace where they’ll do what Rona promised me. I’ll keep this place running until we get there.”
Doc wouldn’t be thrilled. But Doc wouldn’t mind getting a free mechanic. “Do you need any special tools?”
“I usually start by hitting it, actually—”
I was still laughing when Doc came back into the room.
There’s nothing in the universe that can’t be repaired if you have the right tools.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
SEANAN MCGUIRE is an American author of speculative fiction, living on the West Coast and doing her best to avoid all forms of weather. She won the 2010 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, and can regularly be found wandering off into haunted cornfields, haunted houses, and whatever amusement parks she can find. Since her debut novel in 2009, Seanan has released more than twenty traditionally published novels, under both her own name and the name “Mira Grant.” Many people believe that Seanan does not sleep. They may be right. Keep up with her at seananmcguire.com.
THE DRAGON THAT FLEW OUT OF THE SUN
ALIETTE DE BODARD
Here’s a story Lan was told, when she was a child—when she lay in the snugness of her sleep-cradle, listening to the distant noises of station life—the thrum of the recycling filters, the soft gurgle of water reconstituted from its base components, the distant noises of the station’s Mind in the Inner Rings, a vast unreality that didn’t quite concern her, that she couldn’t encompass in words.
Mother sat by Lan’s side and smiled at her. Her hands smelled of garlic and fish sauce, with the faintest hint of machine oil. Her face was lined with worry; but then, it always was, those days. She wanted to tell a story about Le Loi and the Turtle’s Sword, or about the girl who was reborn in a golden calabash and went on to marry the king.
Lan had other ideas.
“Tell me,” she said, “about Lieu Vuong Tinh.”
For a moment, Mother’s face shifted and twisted; she looked as if she’d swallowed something that had stuck in her throat. Then she took a deep breath and told Lan this.
In days long gone by, we used to live in Kinh He on Lieu Vuong Tinh. It was a client state of the Dai Viet Empire, on the edge of the Numbered Planets—its name had come from the willow, because high officials posted there would part from their friends and share a willow branch to remember each other.
But we no longer live there.
Because one day the sun wobbled and quivered over Lieu Vuong Tinh, and grew fainter, and a dragon flew out from its core—large and terrible and merciless, the pearl under its chin shining with all the colors of the rainbow, its antlers carrying fragments of iron and diamond that glistened like the tips of weapons. And, because dragons are water—because they are the spirits of the rain and the monsoon, and the underwater kingdoms—because of that, the sun died.
The dragon had always been there, of course. It was nothing more than an egg at first—a little thing thinner than the chips they use for your ancestors’ mem-implants—then the egg hatched and grew into a carp. Carps don’t always become dragons,
of course, but this one did.
No, I don’t know why. Who knows why the Jade Emperor sends down decrees, or why rain happens even when people haven’t kept up prayers and propitiations at the shrines? Sometimes, the world is just the way it is.
But when the dragon flew out, its mane unfolded, all the way down to Lieu Vuong Tinh, and into the ships that were fleeing the dying sun—and into the heart of us all, it marked us all, a little nick on the surface like the indent of a carver on jade. That’s why, even now, when you meet another Khiet from Lieu Vuong Tinh, you’ll instantly know—because it’s in their hearts and their bellies and their eyes, the mark of the dragon that will never go away.
* * * *
“The whole dragon thing is ridiculous,” Tuyet Thanh says. “I mean, what did they do, have a little chat and agree to serve us all this load of rubbish?”
They’re in the communal network—each of them in their own compartment, except Lan has made the station’s Mind merge both spaces in the network, so that Tuyet appears to be sitting at the end of her table, and that the bots-battle they’re having in the free-for-all area of space outside the station appears in the middle, as a semi-transparent overlay.
“I don’t know,” Lan says, cautiously. Tuyet Thanh is older than her by three years, and chafing at the restrictions imposed by older relatives. Lan wants, so badly, to be like her friend, cool and secure and edgy, instead of never knowing what to think on things—because Mother is so often right, isn’t she?
“Fine.” Tuyet Thanh exhales. She rolls up her eyes, and her bots flow out into a pincer movement—slightly too wide of their reserved area, almost clipping a passing ship. “Deal with this.”
Lan considers, for a heartbeat that feels stretched to an eternity—then she sends her bots to drill a hole in the center of the pincer, where Tuyet Thanh’s formation is weaker. “No, but I mean the story is right about one thing, isn’t it? The grown-ups—it’s like . . .” Adequate words won’t come. She makes a gesture with her hand, frustrated—cancels it from the interface, so that the bots don’t interpret it as a command. “They’re marked. They . . . Have you never noticed they can tell who was on those ships? It’s like they have a sensor or something.”
“It’s just clothes. And language, and the way of behaving.” Tuyet Thanh snorts. “A Khiet can tell another Khiet. That’s all.”
“I guess . . .” Lan says, feeling small, and young, and utterly inadequate.
“Look. There was no dragon. Just . . .”
This is what Second Aunt told me, right? She’d know, because she was twenty-five when they left, and she remembers them well—the years before the war, before the sun.
Anyway. There was the Ro Federation—yes, you’re going to tell me they’re at peace with the Empire now, that they’re all fine people. Whatever. Have you never noticed the adults won’t ever talk about them?
In those days, the Ro were our neighbors, and they wanted us gone. They were afraid of us because we were stronger; in the end, they thought that Lieu Vuong Tinh made quite a nice piece of space to have. And one of their—scientists, alchemists—I can’t remember exactly what they have out there—made a weapon that they said was going to change the way of things. Just point it at the sun, they said, and you’ll see.
And they saw, all right. It . . . it did something, to the atoms that made up the sun—accreted them faster than they should have, so that the star’s glow dimmed, and Lieu Vuong Tinh became . . . bombarded. Scoured clean and no longer fit for humans. So that we had to leave, because we no longer had a home.
And the Ro? Yes, today you’ll find them on the station, trading us their makings and their technology, as cozy as anything. But they’re out there too, in the ruins of Lieu Vuong Tinh, the red-hot slag mess that the Empire abandoned to them when they signed the peace treaty. No humans can go there, but they have bots taking it apart, mining it for precious metals and ice—so that, in the end, they still won everything they hoped for.
Don’t look at me like that. It’s truth, all right? Not the dragon crap—the thing that truly happened.
Yes. I hate them too.
* * * *
“Mother?”
Mother looks up from the dumplings she’s assembling. She only gets marginal help from the bots, preferring to do everything by hand. Once, she says, everyone would gather in the kitchen, helping others to put together the anniversary feast, but now, in the cramped station compartments, there isn’t enough space for that. The aunts and uncles each make their own fraction of dishes, and the meal is shared through the communal network, stitching together the various compartments until it seems like a vast room once more. “Yes, child?”
Lan weighs the words on her tongue, not finding any easy way to bring them up. “Why did you never tell us about the Ro?”
Mother’s face doesn’t move. It freezes in an intricate and complex expression—it would be a key to the past, if only Lan could interpret it. “Because it’s complicated.”
“More complicated than the dragon?”
Mother’s eyes flick back to the table; the bots take over from her, leaving both her hands free. Her voice is calm, too calm. “Lan—I know you’re angry.”
“I’m not!” Lan says, and then realizes she is. Not even at Mother but at herself, for being stupid enough to believe bedtime stories, for not being more like Tuyet Thanh—smarter and harder and less willing to take things on faith. “Did they do it?”
“The Ro?” Mother sighs. “It was one of their scientists who destroyed the sun, yes. But—”
There are no “buts.” “Then it’s their fault.”
“Don’t be so quick to fling blame,” Mother says.
“Why shouldn’t I?” Because of them—because of the sun—they’re here, stuck on the station; in cramped compartments where it seems there’s barely enough room to breathe. “Are you making excuses for them?”
Mother is silent for a long, long while. Lan is sure that Tuyet Thanh would have left a long time ago; turned her face to the wall and ramped up the communal network to maximum, trying to fill her ears with sounds she can control. But Mother always has the right words, always does the right thing. Lan clings to this, as desperately as a man adrift in space clings to faint, fading broadcasts. At last she says, “No. I’m not. Merely saying they had their own motives.”
“Because they were afraid of us.”
“Yes,” Mother said. “And people seldom are afraid for no reason, are they?”
Of course they are, all the time. Like they’re afraid of Lan in class because she’s smarter than them—is there any justification for that? Lan knows prevaricating and false excuses when she hears them—has she been so blind all along? How can she have been so stupid? “Did we do anything to them?” she asks. “Did we?”
Mother’s face closes again. “We never did like each other . . . I don’t know, child.”
“Then we didn’t.” Lan calls up the communal network, lets it fill her from end to end—blocking out Mother and her feeble excuses. “You were right,” she tells Tuyet Thanh. “Adults are idiots.”
* * * *
Today, on the Fourth Day of the Tenth Lunar Month, the Khiet community remembers the Dislocation of Lieu Vuong Tinh, and the Flight of the Evacuation Fleet to the Numbered Planets.
The war between the Khiet and the Ro lasted three years, though it had been brewing for years if not decades. The two had always been uneasy neighbors. While the Khiet rose to prominence with the help of the Dai Viet Empire, to whom they swore allegiance, the Ro were mired under a feudal regime and struggled to survive.
The Khiet’s harsh, authoritarian regime had been making the Ro uneasy for a while. The inciting event was the so-called Skiff-Ghost Return, in the year of the Metal Dragon, in which Ro citizens were discovered to have been mind-altered by the Khiet—which set off an ugly, protracted series of skirmishes in which little quarter was given on either side.
The Dai Viet Empire refused to get involved at fir
st, but could not in good conscience continue to do so after the Dislocation. Refugees were so numerous that they had to be scattered to various places among the Numbered Planets—the Mind-controlled Stations on the edge of the Empire taking on the bulk of them. Today, Khiet culture is a vibrant and ubiquitous part of our own culture, nowhere more so than during the anniversary of the Dislocation, when entire communities will gather in large ceremonies to remember the thousands who were lost in the hasty evacuation.
As usual, on the occasion of this anniversary, Scholar Rong Thi Minh Tu, the Voice of the Empress, has extended the Empire’s sincere condolences, and their wishes for continued prosperity for the Khiet.
* * * *
“So . . .” Professor Nguyen Thi Nghe says, pursing her lips. “What am I to make of you?”
“He started it!” The words are out of Lan’s mouth before she could think.
Beside her, Vien shifts uncomfortably in his chair—at least he has the decency to look guilty. But then he opens his mouth and says, in Viet with the barest trace of an accent, “I . . . should have phrased my words more carefully. I apologize.”
Lan remembers the words like a kick in the gut—the smirking face of him, asking if she was all right, if she’d adapted to life on the station—as if he didn’t know, or care, that his people are the reason she was here in the first place. “Professor—” She can’t find words for her outrage. “He’s Ro.”
“Yes.” Professor Nghe’s voice is quiet, thoughtful. “The Empire and the Khiet signed a peace treaty with the Ro more than thirty years ago, child.”
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