If Ngoc Ha closed her eyes, she could see Quoc Quang; could still smell the raw despair from him; could still hear his voice. “My wife disappeared with the Citadel. We were away, thirty years ago, when it happened. I apologise for my presumption; but I share your pain.” And she hadn’t been quite sure what to answer him; had let the emotionless, hardened mask of the imperial princess stare at him and nod, in a way that conveyed acceptance, and a modicum of disapproval. But, in her mind, she’d heard the dark, twisted part of her whisper: what pain? You were glad Ngoc Minh disappeared.
“He was very convincing,” she said.
“So you sent him to Grand Master Bach Cuc,” The Turtle’s Golden Claw said. “And then … Bach Cuc disappeared.”
Ngoc Ha shook her head, irritated at the implications. “Credit me with a little thoughtfulness, General. I sent guards with him; and though he had his interview with Bach Cuc without me, they watched him all the while, and escorted him back to his quarters in the Fifth District. The interview ended at the Bi-Hour of the Dog; Grand Master Bach Cuc was still within the Forbidden City long after that.”
“It was the Bi-Hour of the Tiger,” The Turtle’s Golden Claw said. “Eight hours after that, at least.”
“Right,” Suu Nuoc said, in a way that suggested he didn’t believe any of her intentions, or her words—he could be so terribly, so inadequately blunt some times. “And where is this—Quoc Quang now?”
She had checked, before coming. “He left this morning, with his ship. The destination he announced was his home on the Scattered Pearls belt. I have no reason to disbelieve that.”
“Except that he left in rather a hurry after Bach Cuc disappeared?”
Ngoc Ha did her best not to bristle; but it was hard. “I checked. There was no extra passenger on board. Apart from him, nothing was taken onboard; not even a live woman or a corpse. The airport bots would have seen it otherwise.” She felt more than heard The Turtle’s Golden Claw tense. “Sorry. I had to consider all eventualities.”
“That’s all right,” The Turtle’s Golden Claw said. “I’m sure she’s alive. She’s resourceful.”
Suu Nuoc and Ngoc Ha exchanged a long, deep look; he was as sceptical as her, but he wouldn’t say anything. For her sake, she mouthed, and Suu Nuoc nodded.
“Fine.” Suu Nuoc was silent, for a while. He stared at the harmonisation door, his face hard again; his gaze distant, probably considering something on the network via his implants. He had no mem-implants from ancestors—but then, Ngoc Ha, the unfavoured daughter of the family, had none either. “I will check, and let you know.”
“I see,” Ngoc Ha said. And, to the ship, “Will you come with me to my quarters? We can have tea together.”
“Of course!” The Turtle’s Golden Claw said—happy to spend an afternoon with her mother, a rare occurrence for her. Once again, Ngoc Ha fought a wave of shame. She should be more present in the ship’s life; should see her through her tumultuous childhood into adulthood—surely, it wasn’t easy for her either, to have been born only for the purpose of finding someone else.
“Thank you for your evidence. You will be apprised, one way or another.”
And she wasn’t sure, as she walked away with the ship in tow, if she ought to be relieved or scared, or both.
THE OFFICER
Suu Nuoc found the entrance to his chamber crowded with officials; and his mailbox overflowing with a variety of memorials from the court—from those chastising him for his carefree behaviour; to short messages asking for the results of his investigation. They were all so fresh from the Grand Secretarial office that he could still see the marks of the rescripts—it was bad, then, if even he could see it: the court had to be in disarray; the Grand Secretariat overwhelmed.
“General, general.” A chorus of voices; but the ones that stood out belonged to Vinh and Hanh, two of the heir Huu Tam’s supporters. “What happened to Grand Master Bach Cuc?”
“Are we safe?”
“How soon will we know?”
He closed his eyes, and wished, again, for the serenity that had come over him on the edge of the battlefield. It wasn’t his world. It would never be his world—except that being a general was sleepless, dirty nights in the field with ten thousand bots hacked into his feeds, sending him contradictory information and expecting a split-second decision—and a pay that came too slight and too late to make any difference to his family’s life. Whereas, as a court official, he could shower his relatives with clothes and food, and jewellery so beautifully fragile it seemed a mere breath would cut it in half.
And he could see the Empress—and hide the twinge of regret that took him whenever he did so; that deep-seated knowledge that no lover he’d had since her had ever filled the void she’d left.
It wouldn’t last, of course. It couldn’t last. The Empress was old, and the heir Huu Tam had no liking for her discards. Suu Nuoc would go home in disgrace one day, if he was lucky; or rot away in a jail somewhere if he was not. He lived with that fear; as he’d lived with the fear of losing his battles when he’d been a general. Most days, it didn’t affect him. Most days, he could sleep quietly in his bed and reflect on a duty carried to its end.
And sometimes, he would look at these—at the arrogant courtiers before him, and remember they would be among the ones baying for his head after the Empress died.
“You have no business infringing on an imperial investigation,” Suu Nuoc said. “The Empress, may she reign ten thousand years, is the one who will decide who is told what, and when.”
Winces, from the front of the mob—Courtier Hanh was clearly sniggering at this upstart who could not even speak proper Viet; and her companion Vinh was working himself up for a peremptory answer. Meanwhile, in the background of Suu Nuoc’s own consciousness—in the space where he hung motionless, connected to a thousand bots crawling all over the palace, a churning of activities—a taking apart of messages and private notes, an analysis of witnesses’ testimonies, and a forensic report on the state of the laboratory.
Later.
He watched the courtiers Vinh and Hanh; dared them to speak. As he had known, they did not have his patience; and it was the florid, middle-aged man who spoke first. “There are rumours that Grand Master Bach Cuc is dead; and Bright Princess Ngoc Minh forever lost.”
“Perhaps,” Suu Nuoc said, with a shrug; and watched the ripples of that through the crowd. Neither Vinh nor Hanh seemed much surprised; though they could not have sweated more if it had been monsoon season. “That is none of my business. I will find Grand Master Bach Cuc; and then all will be made clear.”
Again, he watched them—there was no further reaction, but the air was charged, as if just before a storm. Ngoc Minh’s return was not welcome, then. Not a surprise. “I suggest you disperse. As I said—you will be apprised, one way or another.”
Quick, furtive glances at him; he remembered he’d said much the same thing to Ngoc Ha—had he meant it with her as well? She was an odd one, the younger princess—mousy and silent, by all accounts a dull reflection of her elder sister. They might not have liked each other; but then again, would Bright Princess Ngoc Minh’s return change anything for the worse to her situation? Ngoc Ha was isolated and in disfavour; and her prospects were unlikely to improve.
“You have heard the general. I would highly suggest you do disperse.” A sharp, aged voice: Lady Linh, with a red seal of office imprinted into her clothes that made it clear she spoke as the Empress’s voice; and flanked by two ghost-emperors—the Twenty-Third and the Thirteenth, if Suu Nuoc remembered correctly. The bots scuttling around her held the folds of her robe in a perfect circle.
Lady Linh gestured for him to enter his own room. “We need to talk,” she said, gracefully.
Inside, the two dead emperors prowled, staring at the rumpled bed and the half-closed chests of drawers as if they were some kind of personal insult. Suu Nuoc did his best to ignore them as he offered tea to Lady Linh; but from time to time one of them would make
a sharp sound in his throat, like a mother disapproving of a child’s antics, and he would freeze, his heart beating like the wings of a caged bird.
Not his world. Did they know about his relatives—his cousins and aunts and uncles, greedily asking for favours from the court and never understanding why he couldn’t grant them? Did they know about Mother, the poor bots-handler who held her chopsticks close to the tip and slurped her soup like a labourer?
Of course they did. And of course they would never forgive him that.
“Tell me,” Lady Linh said. She shook her clothes; in the communal network, the seal unfolded, spreading until it covered the entire room—a red filigree peeking underneath the painted floor, its edges licking at the base of the walls like flames. Bao Hoa. Keeper of the Peace.
Not so different from the battlefield, after all. Suu Nuoc shut off the bots for a moment, and called to mind all that they’d poured into his brain on the way back from Grand Master Bach Cuc’s laboratory.
“She removed the implants herself,” he said, finally. “It might have been under duress, all the same—for someone who was skilled with bots, it’s a shoddy job—bits of flesh still sticking to the connectors, and a few wires twisted. Nothing irreplaceable, of course. If I were to guess—”
“Yes?”
“I think she was about to do something that needed absolute focus, and that’s why the implants were removed. No distractions.” No ancestors whispering in her mind; no ghostly manifestations of the past—he could only imagine it, of course; but it would be a bit like removing all his network syncs before leaping into battle.
“Go on,” Lady Linh said, sipping her tea.
“Her correspondence is also interesting. The mails taper off: I think she was so busy with her work, so close to a breakthrough, that she wasn’t answering as quickly as usual. I asked, but nothing seemed to be going on in her personal life—she had a girlfriend and a baby, but the girlfriend didn’t see anything wrong.”
“The girlfriend?” Lady Linh asked.
Suu Nuoc knew what she meant. The partner was often the first suspect. “I don’t think so,” he said. He’d interviewed her—Cam Tu, a technician in a city lab, working so far away from court intrigues she hadn’t even had any idea of who he was or what he wanted. “She wasn’t in that night, nor was she aware of any of the context behind Grand Master Bach Cuc’s research.” It was—sad, in a way, to see this hunched woman with the child at her breast, and realise that Bach Cuc had deliberately shut her out of her life. But then again, he barely talked about the court when he did go home, so who was he to criticise? “Whatever happened to her, it was linked to the court.”
“You talked of a breakthrough. The trail of the Citadel?”
“I think so, yes,” Suu Nuoc said, slowly. “But that’s not all.” Something felt off to him; and he couldn’t pinpoint what. “I’m still analysing the communications.” It was the one thing the bots couldn’t do for him; and he wasn’t too sure he would be able to do it by himself either—where were the mem-implant ancestors when one needed them? A lot of it was abstruse mathematics; communications with other scientists in faraway labs, discussing methods and best practises, and screen after screen of equations until it felt his brain would burst. He was a soldier; a general; a passable courtier, but certainly never a mathematician. “There is … something,” he said. He hesitated—looking at the two emperors, who had stopped walking around the room, and come to stand, like two bodyguards, by Lady Linh’s side. “I’m not sure—”
Lady Linh set her teacup down, and looked at him for a while, her seamed face inexpressive. “I was forty years old when I wrote my memorial,” she said, with a nod to the Twenty-Third Emperor. “The one that sent me to trial. I’ve never regretted speaking up, Suu Nuoc; and you don’t strike me as the type that would regret it, either.” Her voice had lost the courtly accent; taken on the earthy tones of the outlying planets—he couldn’t quite place it, but of course there were dozens of numbered planets, each of them with a multitude of provinces and magistrate fiefs.
The Twenty-Third Emperor spoke—still in the body of an adolescent, his youthful face at odds with the measured voice, the reasonable tone. “Speaking up is sometimes unwise,” he said, with a pointed look at Lady Linh. “But one should always tell the truth to Emperors or their representatives.”
“Indeed,” Lady Linh’s face was, again, expressionless. A truth that had sent her to jail for years; but that wasn’t what Suu Nuoc feared.
He looked again at her, at the two emperors. Someone at court might be responsible for Grand Master Bach Cuc’s disappearance; and they wouldn’t take too kindly to efforts to make her reappear. Who could he trust?
It was a sacrilegious thought, but he wasn’t even sure he could trust the dead emperors. But, because he would not disobey a direct order, or the intimation of one: “A man came to see Grand Master Bach Cuc. A merchant from the Scattered Pearls belt named Quoc Quang, who said he needed to warn her.”
“Warn her? Why should he need to warn her? A peasant from the outreaches of the empire, to see the best Grand Master of Design Harmony in the Empire?” The Twenty-Third Emperor asked.
“I don’t know,” Suu Nuoc said. “But he did see her; and she disappeared after that. And then he disappeared, too. With your permission, I would like to go to the Scattered Pearls belt and question him.” He’d thought long and hard about this: the Belt was a few days’ journey from the First Planet via mindship; and, should he leave now, he wouldn’t be far behind Quoc Quang.
“You assume he will return home,” Lady Linh said.
“I see no indication he won’t,” Suu Nuoc said. His intuition—and he’d had time to learn when to trust his intuition—was that Quoc Quang was a witness, not a killer. He’d left plenty of time before Grand Master Bach Cuc disappeared; and the analysis of Bach Cuc’s mem-implants showed, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that she’d removed them hours after her meeting with him. But whatever he’d said to her—it had struck home, because he had a record of her pacing the laboratory for half an hour after Quoc Quang had left, the only video he could grab from the feeds. After that, Bach Cuc herself had turned everything off.
Absolute focus. What had she been doing—or been forced into doing?
“I see,” Lady Linh said. “You could send the Embroidered Guard to arrest him.”
“Yes,” Suu Nuoc said. “I could. But I’m not sure he would arrive here alive.” Fast, and blunt, like a gut punch. He saw the other Emperor, the Thirteenth, wince, his boy’s face twisted and rippling like a face underwater.
“Court intrigues?” Lady Linh said, with a slight smile—Heaven only knew how many intrigues she’d weathered. On whose side did she stand? Not the Emperors, that was for sure—she was loyal to the Empress, perhaps, seeking only the return of Bright Princess Ngoc Minh; and yet, if Ngoc Minh did come back, her small, comfortable world where she was once more esteemed and listened to might vanish …
Lady Linh’s eyes unfocused, slightly; and the red seal on the floor blinked, slowly, like the eye of some monster. “The Empress is informed. She agrees with your assessment. You will take The Turtle’s Golden Claw to the Scattered Pearls belt, and interrogate this … Quoc Quang.” Lady Linh’s tone was slightly acerbic, and slightly too resonant: clearly she was still in contact with the Empress. “You will also take Thousand-Heart Princess Ngoc Ha with you.”
What? Suu Nuoc fought the first imprecation that came to his lips. He didn’t need a courtier with him; no, worse than a courtier, a princess who might have direct interest in burying her sister for good. You can’t possibly— He took a deep, shaking breath. “Respectfully—”
“You disagree.” Lady Linh’s face was the Empress’s serene, otherworldly mask, the one she wore when passing judgment; the same one she’d probably worn when exiling Bright Princess Ngoc Minh—though he hadn’t been there to see it, of course, and he wouldn’t have dared to ask her about those events. He was—had been—the lover of an Em
press—pleasant, good in bed—but in no way a close confidante or a friend. He’d smiled, and never admitted how much it hurt to do so. “That is not a possibility, I’m afraid, general.”
The Thirteenth Emperor leant over the table, his hand going through the teapot. “You will need someone versed in court intrigues.” He’d been eight when he’d died; a boy, crowned by the ruling officials because they needed someone malleable and innocent. But in the implants he sounded older and wiser than both of them.
“I don’t know where Ngoc Ha stands,” Suu Nuoc said, stiffly.
“The Thousand-Heart Princess stands exactly where I need her, as I need her,” Lady Linh said, except it was neither her voice, nor her expression.
Suu Nuoc bowed to the face of his Empress. “Of course, Empress. As you desire.”
THE ENGINEER
When she’d stepped through the harmonisation arch, Diem Huong had expected to die. In spite of what Lam had said—that the door did indeed open into the past—it could have led to so many places, an inhabitable planet, the middle of the vacuum, the deadly pressured heart of a star …
Instead, she’d found herself in a wide, open corridor, with the low, warm light typical of space habitats—and the same, sharp familiar tang of recycled air in her nostrils. She turned, and saw the outline of the arch in the wall behind her, half-hidden beneath the scrolling calligraphy of Old Earth characters, spelling out words and poems she could not read.
So there was a way back, at least. Or something that looked like one.
The corridor was deserted and silent; she reached out, cautiously, for the wall, and felt the surface slightly give way to her; the text flowing around her outstretched hand, and then back again once she withdrew her hand. She was here, then; for real. Wherever this was, or whenever—but she remembered the smell, that faint memory of sandalwood and incense that was always home to her; and that sense of something large and ponderous always hovering in the background, that feeling of calm before words of condemnation or praise were uttered.
The Year's Best Science Fiction - Thirty-Third Annual Collection Page 106
