by Neil Clarke
Who sent you?
I sent myself.
Two years ago, an eternity ago, Ai Thi looked at that same gaze in the mirror, working herself down to the bone for not enough money, not enough food, going to bed hungry every night and listening to Dieu Kiem’s hacking cough, and knowing that no doctor would tend to the poor and desperate. She made a choice, then: she volunteered for implantation, knowing she might not survive it—volunteered to serve the Everlasting Emperor in spite of her doubts. But, if she hadn’t made that choice—if she’d let fear and frustration and hunger whittle her down to red-hot rage—
This might have been her, with a gun.
Ai Thi is meant to call for the enforcers, to turn the woman over to them for questioning, so that they can track down and break the dissident cell or foreign agency that sent her. That would be the loyal, righteous thing to do. But …
But she’s been here. She knows there’s no cell—merely the end of a road; a last, desperate gesture that, if it doesn’t succeed, will at least end everything.
Ai Thi walks back to the barracks with the woman over her shoulder—by then she’s all spent, and lies in Ai Thi’s grip like wrung cloth. Ai Thi lays her down in an alcove before the entrance, a little out of sight. “Wait here,” she says.
By the time Ai Thi comes back, she half expects the woman to be gone. But she’s still there, waiting—she sits on the floor with her legs drawn against her, huddling as though it might make her smaller.
“Here,” Ai Thi says. She grabbed what she could from the refectory— couldn’t dally, or she’d be noticed: two small rice cakes, and a handful of cotton fish.
The woman looks at her, warily; snatches all three things out of her hand.
“Go gently, or you’ll just vomit it.” Ai Thi crouches, watching her. The appeaser within her is quiet. Curious. “It’s not poisoned.”
The woman’s laugh is short, and unamused. “I didn’t think it was.” She nibbles, cautiously, at the rice cakes; eating half of one before she slips the rest inside her sleeves.
“What’s your name?”
A hesitation, then: “Hien Hoa. You’d find out, anyway.”
“I don’t have supernatural powers,” Ai Thi says, mildly.
“No, but you have the powers of the state.” Hoa stops, then; afraid she’s gone too far.
Ai Thi shakes her head. “I’m not going to turn you in. I’d have done it already, if I was.”
“Why—”
Ai Thi shrugs, though she doesn’t quite know what to say. “Everyone deserves a second chance, I guess.” She rises, ignoring the twinges of pain in her muscles. “Stay out of trouble, will you? I’d hate to see someone else bring you in.”
Straying from the Everlasting Emperor’s path is a grievous misconduct, but every misconduct can be atoned for—every fault can be forgiven, if the proper amends are made, the proper re-education achieved.
To Sergeant Bac, at her debriefing in the squad room, Ai Thi says nothing of Hoa. She heads next to Captain Giang’s office, for her weekly interview.
The captain sits behind her desk, staring at the aggregated reports of her company, nodding, from time to time, at something that pleases or bothers her. On the desk before her is a simple am and duong logo, a half-black, half-white circle curved in the shape of an appeaser: the emblem of the harmonisers. “I see your last check-up was three months ago,” she says.
Ai Thi nods.
“You’re well, I trust?” Captain Giang says—only half a question. “No stomach pains. No headaches that won’t go away. No blood in your urine.”
The danger symptoms—the ones Ai Thi could recite by heart—a sign that the delicate symbiosis that links her and the appeaser is out of kilter, and that they could both die. “I … I don’t think so,” Ai Thi says.
Giang looks at her, for a while. “You don’t look like yourself,” she says, frowning.
She knows. No. There is no way she can know. Ai Thi draws a deep, ragged breath. “There’s much unease,” she says, finally, a half-truth. “People are … taut. Like a string about to snap.” And there is only so much slack the harmonisers can pick up, only so much wisdom they can dispense to people whose only thoughts and worries are what they’ll be eating come tomorrow.
“I see. Why do you think that is?”
Gaunt eyes, and Hoa’s thin, bruised lips, and the careful way she’s hoarded the food; for giving to someone else. Ai Thi says, finally, “May I speak freely?”
“Always.” Giang frowns. “This isn’t a jail or a re-education camp. We trust your loyalty.”
Of course they do, and of course they can. Ai Thi would never do anything against the Everlasting Emperor: he keeps the fabric of society together. “The war effort against the Quynh Federation is costly. Food is more and more expensive, and this creates … anger. Jealousy. They think the soldiers favoured.” And the harmonisers, and the enforcers, and the scholars that keep the machinery of the Empire going.
Giang doesn’t speak, for a while. Her broad face is emotionless. “They would,” she says. “But the soldiers pay dearly for that food. People on the station aren’t at risk of losing limbs or pieces of their mind, or being tortured for information on the Empire.” Ai Thi can feel, distantly, Giang’s own appeaser, a thin thread at the back of her mind, whispering about love and need and duty, all the sayings she already knows by heart.
She says, “I know this.”
“And they don’t?” Giang sighs. “I’m not questioning your conclusions, private. But as you know, the war isn’t going well. The Everlasting Emperor is going to announce an increase of the war effort.”
“You said the soldiers paid for the food because they were at greater risk. But we—” Ai Thi says.
Giang raises an eyebrow. “Are we not?” Her gaze is sardonic, and Ai Thi remembers Hoa’s gun going off, the thunder filling her ears. “We’ll be the first against the wall, if things do break down.” It sounds like a warning, though Ai Thi isn’t sure who she means it for.
Perhaps us, the appeaser whispers, but they barely sound worried. Only about Hoa, which surprises Ai Thi; but of course they would know all about hunger and need.
“There’s much unrest,” Giang says. “I don’t want you to patrol in pairs— you cover less ground—but it might become necessary. Private Khanh was attacked by a group of three dissidents masquerading as beggars, and only barely escaped.”
“Is he—” Ai Thi asks, but Giang shook her head.
“He’s fine. We didn’t manage to catch them, though.” Giang sounds annoyed. “Cinnabar Mansions Quadrant reported two riots in as many weeks. As you said, people are wound taut.”
“But we’ll be fine,” Ai Thi says, before she can think.
“Of course we will. The Empire has weathered wars and fire and riots long before we were both born,” Giang says. She makes a gesture with her hands. “Dismissed, private. Enjoy your rest.”
It’s only after Ai Thi has left the office, halfway to her room and the light comedy vid she was looking forward to, that she realises that the warm feeling of utter certainty within her is from Giang’s appeaser.
The foundations of the Everlasting Empire: the censors, rooting out disinformation from vids and newscasts. The scholars, making the laws everyone must abide by. The harmonisers and enforcers, keeping the fabric of the Empire clear of dissidence. And the soldiers, defending the borders against enemy incursions.
“There’s someone at the gates asking after you, lil sis,” Lan says. She laughs, throwing her head back in a gesture so familiar it’s barely annoying anymore. “A menial. From your old life?”
Lan comes from the Inner Rings, the wealthiest Station inhabitants. She caused some scandal at an examination, and her family gave her the choice of enlisting with the harmonisers, or with the soldiers on the front. She’s Ai Thi’s roommate, and she means well, but sometimes her assumptions about people grate. To wit: Ai Thi didn’t keep contact with anyone from her old workplaces—such attach
ments aren’t encouraged, in any case.
It can’t be Second Aunt, because Ai Thi is currently in communication with home, and spoke to her not a minute past. “Can you ask them to wait?” Ai Thi says. Her time for outside calls is almost up, in any case. She turns back to Dieu Kiem. “Sorry. Duty calling.”
Her daughter makes a grimace in her field of vision. She’s a ghostly overlay in Ai Thi’s implants, a tall and willowy girl who seems to have shot up three heads since Ai Thi was last given a permission home. “Captain Giang.” She looks as though she’s about to laugh. “Fine, but can you tell Great Aunt I want the network key?”
Ai Thi purses her lips. “She told me you hacked it and had every wall display copies of Huong Trang’s poems. The more explicit ones.”
“As practise,” Dieu Kiem snorts. “Too easy.”
She’s growing up too fast, too strong. Ai Thi wants to tell her to be careful, but there’s nothing illegal or reprehensible in what she’s doing—just harmless pranks, the kind even the Everlasting Emperor would smile upon. But where does dissidence start?
She has no answer. She logs off in spite of Dieu Kiem’s complaints, promising her that she’ll have a word with Second Aunt—wondering, once again, how time passes, how little she sees of her own daughter.
Sacrifices aren’t necessary, but they are all the more valued when they do occur.
The appeaser within her is … sad? There’s a peculiar tautness in her mind, as if the entire world were about to come apart. She understands that they’re sad, too, grieving for time lost.
“Thank you,” she says, aloud, shaking her head. “But it’s nothing we can’t survive.”
Warmth from within her; a sated need. The appeaser curls back to their usual, watchful self, chewing on sayings and wisdom they might need for their next patrol.
Outside the gates, Hoa is waiting for her. Ai Thi fights off the urge to pinch herself. “I didn’t think—”
“That I’d come back?” Hoa is still gaunt and pale, but there’s a light in her eyes that wasn’t there before. Ai Thi is afraid to ask where it comes from, but Hoa merely shakes her head. “I found a second job.” She grins, waving a basket towards Ai Thi. “And I owe you a meal.”
They walk towards a nearby white space in silence. Ai Thi reaches out, deftly shaping a small corner of it into a lush green space, like the jungles in the stories of her childhood. Hoa sits down at the foot of a huge fig tree, setting down the basket between ghostly roots—Ai Thi hasn’t reshaped reality, merely added a layer of illusion that they share across their implants.
Inside the basket are four puffed-up dough pieces, and grilled maize. Hoa hands them out, grimacing. “I wasn’t sure if—” she pauses, embarrassed—“if you ate more.”
Ai Thi guesses the unsaid words. “Because of the appeaser? A little, but not much.” It’s not like being pregnant. The appeaser is small, and will never grow within her: they have already had their children, the next generation of appeasers raised in tanks for implantation in the next generation of trainees.
They eat the first fried dough piece in silence, not quite sure what to say to each other. Ai Thi doesn’t know why Hoa came back. She says, finally, “I saw you take the rice cakes. You have a family?”
Hoa looks at her for a while. “I thought you knew everything.”
Ai Thi laughs. “I wish. But no. I’m not the Census Office.”
“A toddler,” Hoa says. “Three years old.”
“Mine is older,” Ai Thi says, with a sigh. “Thirteen years old and all opinions.” She’s not sure why she says, “I almost never see her. Duty.”
Hoa laughs, a little sadly. It doesn’t sound strained or forced, though the atmosphere is still tense. “You’re different.”
“From other harmonisers?” Ai Thi shrugs, and finally speaks the truth. “I was where you are, once. Working in a restaurant in the daytime, and cleaning the corridors at night. Starving myself to feed my child.”
Hoa is staring at her. “That’s why you became a harmoniser? For money?” There is … an edge to her voice, a hint of disapproval that’s not meant to exist. Captain Giang is right. The fabric of society is fraying.
“Because I had nowhere else to go,” Ai Thi says, simply. “Because … because I listened to the voice of the Everlasting Emperor, and he gave me a second chance.”
“You’ve never seen him,” Hoa says. A question, a challenge.
“Once,” Ai Thi says. She doesn’t need to close her eyes to remember. She was standing at the back of the harmonisers’ ranks, and even from there she felt the radiance of his presence, wave after wave of warmth filling her, the world wavering and bending until it was all she could do not to fall on her knees. “He was everything they say he was, and more.”
Hoa is silent, for a while. “Faith,” she says, and her voice is full of wonder. “I thought—” she shakes her head. “I suppose it takes a lot, to get implanted. May I—” Her hand reaches out, resting close to Ai Thi’s torso.
Ai Thi nods. Hoa’s fingers rest on her gut, pressing down, lightly. The appeaser gurgles within her—kicks towards Hoa, who withdraws as if burnt. The appeaser’s disappointment burns in Ai Thi like acid, spreading outwards through the only channel they know how to use.
Before the Everlasting Emperor, all citizens are weighed equally: the only thing that matters is their loyalty.
Hoa takes one, two steps backwards, her face twisting as the full blast of emotions hits her. “What—”
“They’re hurt,” Ai Thi says. “Because you think they’re less than human.”
Hoa opens her mouth. She’s going to say that of course they’re not human, that they’re just an alien parasite, and all the insults Ai Thi has had hurled at her by dissidents. Ai Thi cuts her off before she can speak, “They’re lonely. Always lonely. That’s the price they pay for service to the Everlasting Emperor.”
Hoa closes her mouth. Her face goes through contortions. “I’m sorry.” And she kneels, hand held out, making it clear that it’s not to Ai Thi she’s apologising.
Warmth spreading through Ai Thi—the appeaser. They like her.
Hoa reaches out, holds out a piece of dough again. “Hungry?” she asks.
Ai Thi eats it. It feels sweeter than honey as it slides down her throat, the appeaser’s approval a small sun within her, spreading to all her limbs—an odd, unsettling, but welcome feeling.
At length, Hoa speaks, again. “So they’re starving you, too.”
Ai Thi shakes her head. “I don’t understand—”
“Of love and kin and warmth.” Hoa’s voice is sad. “Hollowing you out, and leaving nothing but words.”
Ai Thi wants to say something about wisdom, about the Everlasting Emperor, about necessary sacrifices, but the words seem to shrivel in her mouth. Hoa’s burning eyes hold her—the same desperate need she saw in them, back when she almost arrested her, except that it’s … pity?
“I’m sorry. You shouldn’t be doing this to yourself,” Hoa says again, and it is pity. Compassion. She doesn’t understand, she doesn’t see how much the Everlasting Emperor keeps Ai Thi going, doesn’t understand how much the words mean, how they keep the world together—except that Dieu Kiem is growing up without her, and all that Ai Thi can remember is the appeaser’s desperate, lonely hunger, a bottomless well that nothing can ever fill …
She’s up, and running away from the park before she can think, heedless to Hoa’s calls. She only stops when she gets to her room, breathing hard and feeling as though the air she inhales never reaches her burning lungs.
The Everlasting Emperor has always been, and will always be. The Empire is as long-lasting as the stars in the heavens. As long as the bonds between mother and daughter, between brother and brother endure, then it, too, shall.
There’s a noise outside like the roar of the sea. Ai Thi wakes up, and the sound swells to fill her entire universe. “Mother? Mother?”
Dieu Kiem, through her implants. “Child. How did you�
��”
Her daughter’s voice is tight, on the verge of panic. “Hacked your coms. That’s not the point. Mother, you need to move. They say there are riots all over the station. “
What—how? Ai Thi fumbles, trying to find something solid—she rubs a hand on her guts, feeling the reassuring mass of the appeaser within her. “Child? Child?”
Dieu Kiem’s voice comes in fast, words jumbled together. “The Everlasting Emperor ordered the closure of half the granaries across all quadrants. An enforcer shot someone, and then—”
“Closure. Why? For the war effort?” Ai Thi asks, but there’s no answer. Nothing but silence on the coms now, but the roar is still there, and she knows it’s that of a crowd massed at the gates. She could call up the outside cameras on her implants, but there’s no point.
It’s night in the barracks. Lan is on patrol—should be, if she wasn’t caught in the riots. Ai Thi has known for a while that things are taut, but for riots to be this widespread, this fast? Things are bad. Very bad. Ai Thi hits the general alert on the network. She heads to the squad room first, but it’s deserted and silent—and shifts course, to get to Giang’s office.
She finds the Captain putting on her jacket, straightening her official rank patch on her chest, the eyes of the tiger shining in the dim light. “Captain—”
“I know.” Giang’s voice is curt.
Mankind is but one step away from lawlessness. Only the word of Heaven and of the Everlasting Emperor keeps us from becoming monsters to one another.
Barely contained panic within Ai Thi—Giang’s appeaser, not hers—hers is silent and watchful, but not surprised.
“We have to hold,” Captain Giang says. “We need to re-establish harmony and order.” She shakes her head. Again that feeling of rising panic within Ai Thi, the edge of something so strong Giang can barely contain it.
