Sometimes, she wondered what it would be like, to be truly alone—not to be the last descendent of a line of twenty-four emperors and empresses, her ancestors embodied into simulations so detailed they needed an entire wing of the palace to run. Sacrilege, of course; and the ancestors were useful, but still …
Of course, in truth, she was lonely all the time.
“Let him in,” she sent to her bodyguards.
Suu Nuoc came in, out of breath; followed by the small, fist-sized avatar of The Turtle’s Golden Claw. He took one quick glance around the room; and slowly lowered himself to the floor, his head touching the slats of the parquet.
“Your Highnesses,” he said. The Emperors and Empresses frowned, the temperature in the room lowered by their disapproval. “Empress.”
“General.” Mi Hiep gestured at him to rise, but he remained where he was, his gaze stubbornly fixed on the floor. “Something bad?” she asked. The disapproval of the ancestors turned to her—her choice of words too familiar for a relationship between Empress and general.
Lady Linh used the commotion caused by Suu Nuoc’s arrival to slowly and discreetly slide out of the room—correctly judging Mi Hiep’s desire to be alone; or as alone as one could be, with twenty-four ancestors in her thoughts.
Suu Nuoc was in the mindset she’d jokingly called “the arrow”—clear and focused, with little time for propriety or respect. “Grand Master Bach Cuc has disappeared,” he said. “The ship here says she had found the trail of the Citadel.”
Oh.
“Close the door,” Mi Hiep said to the guards outside. She waited for them to comply, and then turned her vision back into the room. She, too, was deadly focused, instantly aware of every single implication of his words. “You mean she would have found my daughter.” She didn’t need to name Bright Princess Ngoc Minh; that much was obvious. “And her Citadel.”
Suu Nuoc was still staring at the floor—all she could see of him was an impeccably manicured topknot, with not a grey hair in sight. How young he was; thirty-five full years younger than her at least—even younger than Ngoc Minh. A lover to remind her of life and youth, which she’d lost such a long time ago; a caprice, to sleep with someone who was not one of her concubins—one of the few impulses she could allow herself.
“Did she leave out of her own volition?” Mi Hiep asked.
Suu Nuoc said nothing for a while. “I—don’t think so. The timing is convenient. Too convenient.”
“Then you think someone abducted her. Who?” Mi Hiep asked.
“I don’t know,” Suu Nuoc said. “I judged it pertinent to inform you ahead of every other consideration.” She probably didn’t imagine the faint sarcasm in his voice—he had never been one for common courtesies. Without her support, he would not have risen far at court.
“I see.” There were many reasons people disapproved of Grand Master Bach Cuc and The Turtle’s Golden Claw—thinking it unnatural that Bach Cuc should create a mindship who was part of the Imperial Family; fearing the return of Bright Princess Ngoc Minh and what it would mean to court life; even disapproving of her policy of war against the Nam Federation. Some advocated passionately for peace as the only way to survival.
She didn’t begrudge them their opinion; the court would think as it desired, in a multiplicity of cliques and alliances that kept the scholars busy at each other’s throats. But acting against Grand Master Bach Cuc …
“You will find her,” she said to Suu Nuoc. “Her, or her corpse. And punish whoever has done this.”
Suu Nuoc bowed, and left the room. The Turtle’s Golden Claw didn’t; it hovered closer, and said, in a calm and dispassionate voice, “Grandmother.”
Mi Hiep nodded, noting with a sharp pang of perverse pleasure the discomfort of the gathered Ancestors at this acknowledgement of their relationship. “You are sure of what you told the General Who Read the Book of Heaven?”
The ship bobbed from side to side, thoughtfully. “Bach Cuc sounded confident enough. And she usually—”
Never sounded confident until it actually would work. Grand Master Bach Cuc had been cautious, unlikely to give in to fancies or announce results ahead of time solely to please her or the Board of Military Affairs. Everything she valued in a research scientist. “I see,” Mi Hiep said. And, more softly, “How are you?”
Bach Cuc had been her Grand Master of Design Harmony, after all, the other grandmother The Turtle’s Golden Claw could count on—the only family that would accept her and trust her. Mi Hiep’s other children had not been so welcoming; and even Thousand-Heart Princess Ngoc Ha, who had carried The Turtle’s Golden Claw in her womb, was not affectionate.
“I will be fine,” The Turtle’s Golden Claw said, slowly, carefully. “She is alive, isn’t she?”
Mi Hiep could have lied. She could have nodded with the same conviction she’d bring into her interview with the envoys of the Nam Federation; but it wouldn’t have been fair, or kind, to her granddaughter. “I hope she is.”
“I see,” The Turtle’s Golden Claw said, stiffly. “I will help Book of Heaven in his investigations, then.”
“It will be fine,” Mi Hiep said—she only had an avatar, nothing she could hold or kiss for reassurance. Mindships were machines and blood and flesh; and they felt things as keenly as humans. “We will find her.”
“Thank you, Grandmother.”
Mi Hiep watched the ship go—she moved as smoothly as ever, but of course with an avatar it was difficult to determine what she truly felt, wasn’t it? How worried or hurt or screaming she could be, inside?
She thought again of the picture Lady Linh had presented; the crippled ship tricked into believing lies: hijacked, Lady Linh had said. Blinded until their only purpose was to serve their new masters—and she felt a fresh stab of anger at this. This wasn’t the way to treat anyone, whether human or mindship.
But, if she couldn’t halt the progress of the Nam Federation, this would happen. They would take ships and twist them into emotionless tools with forced loyalties.
They needed weapons: not merely war mindships, but something more potent, more advanced; something to strike fear into their enemies’ hearts and dissuade them from ever entering Dai Viet space.
They needed Ngoc Minh’s weapons—and Grand Master Bach Cuc and The Turtle’s Golden Claw had been meant to find them for her.
The Citadel of Weeping Pearls had gone down in history as a refuge of peace; as a place that taught its denizens the serenity that came from not fearing anything—not bandits, or corrupt officials, or apathetic scholars. But such things—the serenity, the lack of fear—did not happen unless one had powerful means of defences.
Mi Hiep remembered visiting Ngoc Minh in her room, once—not yet the Bright Princess, but merely a gangly girl on the cusp of adulthood, always in discussion with a group of hermits she’d found on Heaven knew what forsaken planet or station. Her daughter had looked up from her conversation, and smiled at her: a smile that she’d always wonder about later, about whether it was loving or forced, fearful or genuinely serene. “You haven’t come to your lessons,” Mi Hiep had said.
“No,” Ngoc Minh had said. “I was learning things here.”
Mi Hiep had turned a jaded eye on the horde of hermits—all of them lying prostrate in obedience. As if obedience could make them respectable—their dresses varied from torn robes to rags, and some of them were so withdrawn from public life they were all but invisible on the communal network, with no information beyond their planet of birth showing up on her implants. “You will be Empress of Dai Viet one day, daughter; not an itinerant monk. The Grand Secretary’s lessons are on statecraft and the rituals that keep us all safe.”
“We are safe, Mother. Look.” Ngoc Minh took a vase from a lacquered table: a beautiful piece of celadon with a network of cracks like a fragile eggshell. She pressed something to it—a lump that was no bigger than a grain of rice—and gestured to one of the monks, who bowed and took it out into the adjoining courtyard.
<
br /> What in Heaven?
“This is pointless,” Mi Hiep said. “You will go to your lessons now, child.” She used the sternest voice of authority she could think of, the one she’d reserved for her children as toddlers, and for sentencing prisoners to death.
Ngoc Minh’s face was serene. “Look, Mother.” She was looking at the vase, too, frowning; some Buddhist meditation exercise, focusing her will on it or something similar—not that Mi Hiep had anything against Buddhism, but its philosophy of peace and acceptance was not what an Emperor needed. The Empire needed to fight every day for its survival; and an Emperor needed to choose the hard answers, rather than the most serene ones.
“If you think I have time for your nonsense—”
And then the vase winked out of existence.
There was no other word for it. It seemed to fracture along the seams of the cracks first, even as a soft radiance flowed from within it, as if it had held the pure, bottled light of late afternoon—but then the pieces themselves fractured and fractured into ever-smaller pieces, until nothing but a faint, colourless dust filled the courtyard; a dust that a rising wind carried upwards, into the empty space between the pagoda spires.
That was … Mi Hiep looked again at the courtyard: still empty and desolate, with the dust still rising in a fine, almost invisible whirlwind. “That’s impossible,” she said, sharply.
Ngoc Minh smiled; serene and utterly frightening. “Everything is possible, if you listen to the right people.”
Looking back, that was when she’d started to be scared of her daughter. Scared of what she might do; of what she was thinking, which was clearly so different of what moved Mi Hiep. When Ngoc Minh had married her commoner wife, they’d fallen out; but the root of this last, explosive quarrel lay much earlier, in that tranquil afternoon scene where her small, quiet world bounded by ritual and habit had been utterly shattered.
She’d been a scared fool. Ngoc Minh had been right: anything that could safeguard the Empire in its hour of need was a boon. What did it matter where it came from?
It was time for war—and, if anyone had dared to harm her Grand Master of Design Harmony, they would feel the full weight of her fury.
THE YOUNGER SISTER
Thousand-Heart Princess Ngoc Ha found Suu Nuoc and her daughter The Turtle’s Golden Claw in the laboratory, at the tail end of what looked to be a long and gruelling series of interviews with everyone who had worked with Grand Master Bach Cuc. By his look, the Supervisor of Military Research was not having a good day.
Suu Nuoc acknowledged her with a brief nod. He was in one of his moods where he would eschew ritual in favour of efficiency, a frequent source of complaints and memorials against him. Normally, Ngoc Ha would have forced him to provide proper respect: she knew the importance of appearances, and the need to remind people of her place, as an Imperial Princess who was not the heir and only had honorary positions. But today, she needed to see something else.
The laboratory had been cleanly swept. The only virtual notes attached to objects were the ones with the seal of the army, officially warning people of the penalty attached to tinkering with an ongoing investigation. The shielded chamber with its harmonisation arch was swarming with bots, supervised in a bored fashion by an old technician with a withered hand. Ngoc Ha walked closer to the arch, but saw nothing that spoke to her.
“Mother!”
Of course, it was inevitable that The Turtle’s Golden Claw would see her; and churlish of her, really, to ignore the ship. “Hello, daughter.”
She knew she was being irrational when she saw the ship and didn’t feel an ounce of maternal love—merely a faint sense of repulsion, a memory of Mother overwhelming her objections to the implantation of the Mind in her; the scared, sick feeling she’d had during most of the pregnancy; and the sense of exhausted dread when she realised that having delivered the Mind merely meant she was now the mother, stuck in that role until the day she died.
And, if she was honest with herself, it wasn’t the pregnancy, or motherhood; or even the Mind that was the issue—it was that, seeing The Turtle’s Golden Claw, she remembered, once again, that everything in her life had been twisted out of shape for her elder sister’s benefit. Thirty years since Ngoc Minh had disappeared; and still she haunted Ngoc Ha’s life. Even the name bestowed on Ngoc Ha by the court—the Thousand-Heart—was not entirely hers: she was named that way because she’d been filial and dutiful, unlike Ngoc Minh; because she had set up proper spousal quarters and regularly slept with her concubines—even though none of them brought her much comfort; or alleviated the taste of ashes that had been in her mouth for thirty years.
“I’m sorry about Grand Master Bach Cuc,” Ngoc Ha said to The Turtle’s Golden Claw. “I’m sure General Suu Nuoc will find her. He’s good at what he does.”
“I’m sure he is,” the ship said. Her avatar turned, taking in the laboratory. “Mother…”
Ngoc Ha braced herself—surely that sick feeling of panic in her belly wasn’t what one was meant to feel, when one’s child came to them with problems? “Yes, child?”
“I’m scared.” The Turtle’s Golden Claw’s voice was barely audible. “This is too large. How could she disappear like that—with no warning, in the heart of the Purple Forbidden City?”
Meaning inside influence. Meaning court intrigues; the same ones she’d stepped away from after Ngoc Minh’s disappearance. “I don’t know,” Ngoc Ha said. “But not everyone wanted Ngoc Minh to come back.” Including her. She was glad to be rid of her sister the Bright Princess; to never have to be compared to her again; to never look at her and realise they had so little in common—not even Mother’s love. But she wasn’t the only one. Lady Linh was loyal to Mother; but the rest of the scholars weren’t, not so much. Huu Tam, Mother’s choice of heir, was dutiful and wise: not wild, not incomprehensibly attractive like Bright Princess Ngoc Minh; but safe. “Not everyone likes their little worlds overturned.”
“What about you?” the ship asked, with simple and devastating perspicacity.
“I don’t know,” Ngoc Ha lied. She didn’t know what she’d do, if she saw Ngoc Minh again—embrace her, shout at her—show her how much her life had twisted and stretched in the wake of her elder sister’s flight?
“Princess,” Suu Nuoc said. He stood by her, at quiet ease. “My apologies. I was busy.”
“I can imagine,” Ngoc Ha said.
“I’m surprised to see you here,” Suu Nuoc said, slowly. “I thought you had no interest in what Grand Master Bach Cuc was doing.”
“The Turtle’s Golden Claw is my daughter,” Ngoc Ha said.
“Of course,” Suu Nuoc said. He watched her, for a while, with that intent expression on his face that made her feel pierced by a spear. “But that’s not why you’re here, is it?”
Ngoc Ha said nothing for a while. She watched the harmonisation arch, the faint blue light playing on its edges. “I did follow what Bach Cuc was doing,” she said, at last. It had taken an effort: Grand Master Bach Cuc was proud, and sometimes unpleasant. “Because it mattered. To me, to my place in court.” It wasn’t quite that, of course. She’d needed to know—whether Ngoc Minh would come back. Whether it had been worth it, the agony of being pregnant with The Turtle’s Golden Claw; of giving birth in blood and pain and loneliness, all because her mother the Empress had ordered it.
“How did you think things would change?”
“I don’t know,” Ngoc Ha said. He was assessing her, wondering what she was worth as a suspect. It would have been amusing, if she hadn’t been so nervous already. “I wanted to know what you’d found, but I assume you won’t share it while you’re still working out if I harmed her.”
“Indeed,” Suu Nuoc said. He made a small, ironic smile, and turned to embrace the lab. “Or perhaps I simply have nothing to share.”
Ngoc Ha steeled herself—better to tell him now than later, or else she’d become a suspect like everyone else. And she knew better than to expect Mother’s
influence to protect her.
After all, it hadn’t worked for Ngoc Minh.
“I know who saw Grand Master Bach Cuc last,” she said, slowly, carefully. “Or close to last.”
There was silence, in the wake of her words.
“Who?” Suu Nuoc asked, at the same time as The Turtle’s Golden Claw asked “Why?”
Ngoc Ha smiled, coldly; putting all the weight of the freezing disapproval she sometimes trained on courtiers. “As I said—I was interested. In whether Ngoc Minh would come back. Someone came to me with information on the Citadel of Weeping Pearls.”
Suu Nuoc’s face had frozen into a harsh cast, as unyielding as cut diamonds. “Go on.”
“He was a man named Quoc Quang, part of a small merchant delegation that was doing a run between the Scattered Pearls belt and the First Planet.” She’d had her agents check him out: a small, pathetic man addicted to alcohol and a few less savoury things: hardly a threat, and hardly worth bringing to her attention, as the chief of her escort had said. Except that he’d said something about Grand Master Bach Cuc.
Ngoc Ha had her work administering the Twenty-Third Planet—trying to bring Lady Linh’s home back to the glory it had had, before the war, building graceful pagodas and orbitals from a pile of ashes and dust. But it was mostly a sinecure to keep her busy; and so, curious, she had made time to see Quoc Quang.
“He said his daughter was doing something to find the Citadel of Weeping Pearls—her and a woman named Tran Thi Long Lam, a Distinguished Scholar of Mathematics who returned home to mind her sick father. Apparently they thought they could do better than Grand Master Bach Cuc. He said”—she closed her eyes—“he needed to speak to Bach Cuc, to warn her.”
“Warn her of what?”
“He wouldn’t tell me.”
Suu Nuoc’s impeccably trimmed eyebrows rose. Ngoc Ha went on as though she’d seen nothing—after all, it was only the truth, and demons take the man if he didn’t believe it. “And you believed him?” Suu Nuoc asked.
The Year's Best Science Fiction - Thirty-Third Annual Collection Page 105
