Nebula Awards Showcase 54

by Nibedita Sen

  Deep spaces. She hadn’t returned to them since the Ten Thousand Flags uprising—since her entire crew died and left her stranded. The Shadow’s Child hesitated again—a moment only—and said, “I don’t want to be responsible for accidents. With all that you have in your body, I’d want to monitor you quite closely after you drink the blend.”

  “I’ll have your bots.”

  “Bots won’t be able to react fast enough, with the time differentials. I want to be with you in deep spaces. And it won’t come cheap.”

  Long Chau was silent for a while, staring at her. At length, she stretched, like a sated cat. “I see.” She smiled. “I hadn’t thought you’d want to return to deep spaces, even for a price. Not after what happened to you there.”

  It was like a gut punch. For a brief, startling moment The Shadow’s Child was hanging, not in a comforting void, but somewhere else, where the stars kept shifting and contorting. The dead bodies of her crew littered her corridors, and the temperature was all wrong, everything pressing and grinding against her hull, a sound like a keening lament, metal pushed past endurance and sensors going dark one after the other, a scream in her ears that was hers, that had always been hers…

  “How—” The Shadow’s Child shifted, showing her full size, a desperate attempt to make Long Chau back away. But Long Chau sat in the chair with a mocking, distant smile, and didn’t move. “It’s not public, or even easily accessible. You can’t possibly have found—”

  Long Chau shook her head. Her lips, parted, were as thin as a knife. “It is my business to work out things that other people don’t pick up on. As I said—I’m more focused. You hesitated before saying yes.”

  “Because you’re a difficult customer.”

  “It could have been that. But you kept hesitating afterwards. If you’d simply decided to accommodate a difficult customer, the moment of decision would have been the only time you slowed down. There was something else about this bothering you.”

  “It was a fraction of one of your heartbeats. Humans don’t pick up on this.”

  “They don’t.” Nothing ventured, again; no hint that she found the silence awkward or unpleasant.

  The Shadow’s Child hesitated—again for a bare moment, because what her customers did with her blends was none of her business. But she’d just committed to being in deep spaces again, and that was beyond her short limit of unpleasant surprises for the day. “You haven’t told me what you need to find in deep spaces.”

  Again, that lazy, unsettling smile. “A corpse.”

  Then again, perhaps she was wrong about the unpleasant surprises.

  • • •

  The Shadow’s Child was putting the finishing touches to a test batch of Long Chau’s blend. The sweet, intoxicating smell of honeydreamer saturated the room. Two bots clung to the inside of the teapot, taking samples and comparing them to the simulations’ results—almost done…

  Someone knocked at the door.

  “Go away,” The Shadow’s Child started, and then she saw it was Bao, the woman who collected the rent for the compartment that served as her office and laboratory. Her heart sank. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be rude.” The rent. It had to be the rent. The Shadow’s Child had scrapped together everything she could in the last days of the year and barely met the deadline, but there were few rules where the Inner Habitat families were concerned.

  “May I?” Bao asked.

  The Shadow’s Child hesitated, but of course Bao would simply be back, if she said no. Bao was polite and pleasant, but unrelenting—which was why the Western Pavilion Le family, who owned The Shadow’s Child’s compartment, employed her.

  “Come in,” The Shadow’s Child said. She and Bao had this uneasy relationship, not quite friendship but almost. Bao had been one of the only people willing to risk renting space to a mindship—someone who needed a compartment to receive visitors in-habitat, but who didn’t really live there, physically speaking, whom you couldn’t easily intimidate or frighten with a couple of toughs if the rent wasn’t paid.

  The Shadow’s Child had the bots prepare tea, but Bao waved a hand. “I won’t be long.” She pulled up the same chair Long Chau had settled in, and sat, gazing back at The Shadow’s Child, cool and collected. Unlike Long Chau, her tunic was the latest fashion. The calligraphied verses, bold and forceful, came from Ngu Hoa Giang, the current darling of the Imperial Court. Bao’s face was impeccable, with the peculiar smoothness of successive rejuv treatments—and her bots, instead of riding in her sleeves, hung in a jewelled cascade from both her shoulders, an effect that was all the more striking because Bao wore her hair short, in defiance of all conventions. “This is a business visit, in case you had doubts.”

  “The rent,” The Shadow’s Child said. “I can pay—”

  Bao shook her head. The bots moved, slowly. “You did pay.” Her voice was low-pitched, and confident. She picked up the tea from the bots, breathed it in; but didn’t drink. She never did, when on business. She always said she’d feel personally implicated if she shared food or drink, though she enjoyed the smell of it.

  “Then I don’t know why you’re here.” She didn’t mean to be this impolite, but it was out of her before she could think.

  Bao sighed. “The Western Pavilion Le own the compartment. There’s not much that escapes them. Your revenue—”

  “It’s good enough,” The Shadow’s Child said. She forced herself to be nonchalant.

  “Is it?” Bao’s gaze was piercing. “I said business, but perhaps it’d be more accurate to say I’m here as a friend. Or a concerned relative. You may not need much space, or that much money to pay for it—”

  If only. She should have had money for her repairs, but everything had gone into making sure she wouldn’t find herself homeless. Shipminds such as her were meant to be the centre of families: grown by alchemists in laboratories, borne by human mothers and implanted into the ship-bodies designed for them, they were much longer lived than humans—the repositories of memories and knowledge, the eldest aunts and grandmothers on whom everyone relied. They were certainly not meant to be penniless and poor, and The Shadow’s Child would die before she’d beg from her younger relatives—who were, in any case, even worse off than her. Their salaries as minor scholars in the ministries paid them a pittance, and they could barely afford their own food.

  She could have remained as she was, in orbit around the habitats. But without office space, how could she practise her trade? No one would take a shuttle to come onboard a distant shipmind, not when there were closer and better brewers of serenity available. “I get your point,” she said. “And I’m grateful, but—” But she didn’t need more stress. She didn’t need her niggling worst fears to be proved right.

  Bao pulled back the chair, and rose. “But I’m not good news? I seldom am.” She shrugged. “I know you won’t consider passenger service—”

  “No,” The Shadow’s Child said. It was reflex, as if someone had pushed, hard, on an open wound and she’d screamed.

  “The money is far better. Especially you—you’re a troop transport. You could take on a lot of passengers and cargo each run.” Bao’s voice was soft.

  “I know.”

  Bao was smart enough to drop the subject. She looked at the bookshelves: not physical books, because The Shadow’s Child would have needed to read them through her bots, but a selection of the ones in her electronic library, displayed in matching editions in a riot of colours. “I see you have the latest Lao Quy. It’s well worth it, if you need a distraction. She’s really got to be a master of the form.”

  Bao and The Shadow’s Child shared a fondness for epic romances and martial heroes books, the kind of novels scholars looked down on as trash but which sold thousands of copies across the belt. “I haven’t started it yet,” The Shadow’s Child said. “But I liked the previous one. Strong chemistry between characters. And to have set it in a small mining operation was a smart change of setting. I loved the mindship and their h
abitat’s Mind lover, trying to find each other after decades had passed.”

  “Of course you would. She’s good,” Bao said, fondly. “This one is different. I’d argue better. We can talk about it later, if you want, but I wouldn’t want to spoil the experience.” She looked at the blend on the stove, and shook her head. “I’m not going to keep you from your customer.”

  A customer The Shadow’s Child didn’t like, but she’d pay handsomely, and—as Bao had all too clearly reminded her—The Shadow’s Child couldn’t afford to be picky.

  • • •

  The Shadow’s Child had to take Long Chau onboard, of course. When Long Chau’s footsteps echoed in the corridors of her body, it was an odd and unsettling feeling. She’d taken on a few passengers for the army after Vinh and Hanh and her crew died, but everyone had been so careful with her, as if she were made of glass. And after she’d been discharged she’d refused to take on further passengers.

  She had no need of sensors or bots to follow Long Chau’s progress through her. The footsteps, slow and steady—each of them a jolt in the vastness of her body—went through room after room, unerringly going towards the cabin she’d set aside for Long Chau. From time to time, a longer pause, feet resting lightly on the floor of rooms, a faint heat spreading outward on her tiles: once, near the seventh bay, staring at the scrolling display of fairytales Mother had brought back from the First Planet; another time at the start of the living quarters, reading the Thu Huong quote on houses being a family’s heart—new paint and a new calligraphy, replaced after the ambush. The Shadow’s Child had had network decoration, once: a wealth of intricate interlocked layers only visible with the proper permissions. But she’d lost everything, and she hadn’t seen the point of putting more than basic work into this after she was discharged.

  When Long Chau reached the cabin, she found a table and a chair, and a cup of steaming tea set there. She raised her eyes, as if she could see The Shadow’s Child hovering somewhere above her. It was pointless: everything around her was the ship. All The Shadow’s Child really needed to do was focus her upper layers of attention on this room, while in the background the bots and everything else continued to run without any input, and the solar wind buffeted her hull as her orbit swung her around the habitats—all familiar sensations that barely impinged.

  Long Chau pulled up the chair, settling down into it without any apparent nervousness. Her movements were slow and deliberate. The Shadow’s Child felt it all. The scraping of the chair, all four feet digging into her floors; Long Chau’s weight shifting, lightly pressing down on top of the chair. “You’re quite lovely,” Long Chau said.

  It’d have been a compliment from anyone else. From her, though, said with an utterly impassive face? The Shadow’s Child couldn’t be sure. Not that she should have cared, except that it would affect her relation with a customer. “Your blend is on the table.”

  A raised eyebrow. “So I’ve seen.” Long Chau considered the cup for a while. The Shadow’s Child’s bots climbed up onto her face and head again. She let them, without even so much as a reaction. The dense, urgent pattern of her brain activity was now available to The Shadow’s Child. She’d had enough time now to build a model of what Long Chau considered normal, and nothing there was surprising.

  “It’s not poisoned.” The smell of honeydreamer saturated the room, bringing back, for a brief moment, memories of The Shadow’s Child’s first disastrous attempt at cooking it, when the bots had failed to remove the carapaces and they had popped in the heat, sending shards flying all over her compartment.

  “Of course it’s not,” Long Chau said, with a hint of annoyance. She raised it to the light, lips slightly parted; stared for a while longer. “It’s fascinating, isn’t it, that a few herbs and chemicals can have this effect?”

  Hours of poring over Long Chau’s metabolism and brain patterns, reconstructing the drugs in her system—trying to find out which compounds would keep her functional, guessing at what she might call “slow thoughts”, wondering if the mixture would flat-out short-circuit her neurons, make her suicidal or, more likely, even more reckless and over-confident, with the risk she’d endanger her own life on a whim … “Are you mocking my work?”

  “On the contrary,” Long Chau said. Her face was set in a peculiar expression, one The Shadow’s Child couldn’t read. “Merely appreciating the value of localised miracles.” She sounded… utterly earnest, in a way that disarmed the angry reply The Shadow’s Child would have given her.

  Silence stretched, long, uncomfortable. The Shadow’s Child became aware again of her core in the heartroom, of the steady beat that sustained her—pulsing muscles and optics and brain matter, holding her connectors in an unbreakable embrace. One two, one two…

  In the cabin, Long Chau appeared utterly unfazed. She merely raised the cup to her lips after a long while, and drank from its thin rim in one long, slow go—didn’t even seem to breathe while doing so—and set it down on the table. “Shall we go?”

  The Shadow’s Child didn’t need to move to dive into deep spaces. She’d already asked for permission from Traffic Harmony, and within deep spaces it wouldn’t matter if they overlapped another ship. She watched Long Chau, because it was her job.

  A centiday since she’d taken the blend—fifteen outsider minutes—and no visible effect yet. The tea The Shadow’s Child had given Long Chau was a mix of a downy white Dragon Quills with a stronger, more full-bodied Prosperity Crescent, with fried starvine root and crushed honeydreamer, scattered among the downy leaves. She watched Long Chau’s vitals, saw the minute changes to breath and heartbeat. The hands moved a fraction faster as Long Chau got up and stared at the walls—through the walls.

  “I’m not there,” The Shadow’s Child said.

  “You’re in the heartroom. I know.” Long Chau’s voice was mildly irritated. “I’m familiar with shipminds, though I’ve seldom had the occasion to go into deep spaces.”

  While she was speaking, The Shadow’s Child plunged into deep spaces—not far in, just enough on the edge that she could see Long Chau’s reactions. “Tell me about the corpse,” she said. Around her, the corridors shifted and changed. A faint, trembling sheen like spilled oil spread across the walls, always in the corner of one’s eyes. Outside, the same sheen stole across the habitats, the sun and the distant stars—a distorted rainbow of colour that slowly wiped them out. Her hull was awash with faint cold, the brisk flow of stellar wind around her replaced by a faint, continuous pressure. It should have felt like coming home—like a fish diving into a river at the end of a long, breathless interval onshore—but all she could feel within her was tautness, and the rapid beat from her heartroom, everything pulsing and contracting in ways she couldn’t control.

  It would be fine. She wasn’t where it had happened. She wasn’t deep in—just at the very edges, just enough to keep Long Chau satisfied. It would be fine.

  “You said any corpse would do,” she said.

  “Of course.” Long Chau appeared utterly unfazed by deep spaces. The Shadow’s Child would have liked that to be a front, but Long Chau’s heartbeat, even and slow, said otherwise. “I’m writing a treatise on decomposition. How the human body changes in deep spaces is a shamefully undervalued area of study.”

  “I can see why you’d be a success at local poetry clubs,” The Shadow’s Child said, wryly.

  It didn’t seem to faze Long Chau. “I would be, if I had anything to do with them.” She looked around her. The walls had caved in now, receding in what seemed a long and profound distance; the table was folding back on itself, showing the metal it had been made from, the bots that had hammered it into shape—the broken scraps of what it’d be, when it finally broke down, every moment existing tightly folded on top of one another. “How deep are we?”

  Two centidays since she’d taken the blend. She seemed fine. Unfair. Heartbeat normal, veins slightly dilated but not past the expected top of the range, pupil constriction slowly easing up—the activ
ity map almost a match for when she’d sat in The Shadow’s Child’s office. The Shadow’s Child tried to calm herself down. She stretched her core in the heartroom, slowly and deliberately, away from Long Chau’s prying eyes. A good thing she hadn’t boosted up the arrogance: it was an easy way to keep people functional in deep spaces if they had enough self-confidence to start with, but she didn’t think she could have borne the result for long.

  “Not very deep,” The Shadow’s Child said. “I’d rather keep you in safe areas.” It was untrue.

  “And yourself from unpleasant memories,” Long Chau said. “It makes sense.” And then, with an odd expression in her voice, “You’re not recovered. Even being here makes you nauseous.”

  “Shipminds don’t get nausea,” The Shadow’s Child said. It was a lie—especially now, with no distance between her body and herself, she felt rocked by alternating waves of warmth and cold, her core coming apart in ten thousand pieces in the heartroom. She forced herself to be calm. “And you have no idea what you’re talking about. You’re guessing.”

  “I don’t guess.” Long Chau’s voice was curt. “You were in an accident during the uprising. A mission gone bad because of lack of information. Something that badly crippled you, and left you in deep spaces for some time.”

  She—she’d hung around in places where nothing made sense anymore, with no one alive onboard anymore. The crew was gone, and Captain Vinh was lying curled just outside the heartroom, her hands slowly uncurling as death took hold. Nothing but the sound of her panicked heartbeat, rising and rising through empty corridors and cabin rooms until it seemed to be her whole and only world—she was small and insignificant and she would be forever there, broken and unable to move and forever forgotten, her systems always keeping death at bay…

  Long Chau was still speaking, in that same dispassionate tone. As if nothing were wrong, as if she could not feel the chills that ran up and down the corridors, the pressure that was going to squeeze The Shadow’s Child into bloody shards. “There is no information about you during the uprising, and you’re in surprisingly good shape considering your age, and the fact that you’re barely scraping by earning your living. That means either a wealthy family—but you don’t have the accents of wealth—or that the military shouldered your maintenance until a few years ago.” Every word hurt—the currents of deep spaces pressing against her hull, again and again, drawing the will to live out of her—but she couldn’t commit suicide because everything was offline or broken.