by Ian Whates
The parts. Thuy blinked, and said aloud, “Can you tell me what the parts would be used for?”
“I don’t know Galactic mindships very well, especially not old models cobbled back together,” The Dragons in the Peach Garden said, slowly. “But this one is a connector for a heartroom. And...” she paused; the scrolling calligraphy on the walls sped up, taking on an orange tinge. “Looks as if she had a thruster to fix, possibly one of the deep space ones.”
“Deep spaces.” Thuy said the words, tasting each syllable on her tongue. “There are no deep spaces involved in travelling from Central to the Apricot Blossom Ho orbital.”
“No, there shouldn’t be,” Sixth Aunt said. “But she just wanted the mindship to be complete, didn’t she?”
Deep spaces. Debris. Smart swarms. Too many ideas and images in Thuy’s mind, overcrowding each other. “Could you...” she hesitated. “Could you remain in deep spaces and emerge just in time to fire your weapons?” Humans didn’t like deep spaces; didn’t go into them until they had to – the weird geometry and compressed timeline that enabled fast travel between the stars had strong, unpleasant side effects on humans, even more so when the mindship wasn’t moving – it did something to your perceptions, twisting everything slightly out of shape until your brain and your body both felt equally sick. But Chi wasn’t... She stopped herself in time before thinking ‘not quite human’, because she didn’t know where that thought would lead – Chi wasn’t like most humans anymore, was she?
“In theory...” The Dragons in the Peach Garden said. “Possible, but...”
“Chi would do it if it were possible,” Thuy said.
Sixth Aunt sniffed. “She could be anywhere in deep spaces.”
“She’ll be close,” Thuy said, with a growing certainty in her belly. “As close as possible to her exit point. She’ll want to feel... connected to them.” Even though she couldn’t, strictly speaking – even though that feeling had been excised from her long ago, by the same mindship she now made her home. “Can you take us into deep spaces, and look for a ship?”
There was silence, for a while. The Dragons in the Peach Garden said, “You haven’t taken any of the standard drugs or thought-dampeners. Child, I’m not sure...”
“There’s no time,” Thuy said. On the table, the Galactics were finishing the boarding of their shuttle; their escort was likewise on board their own ships, the squad in full military formation – what a show they were all putting on, smiling as if all sins and atrocities had been forgiven, as though the orphans and wounded and absences on the ancestral altars could really be wiped clean, given enough years; as though the debris of their weapons wasn’t still harming children. “We have to –”
“As you wish, child.” The world lurched, and contracted; and everything vanished in a blur of darkness.
EVERYTHING SEEMED BLURRED, twisted out of shape, every surface coated with an oily sheen; and, on the edge of hearing, there was a booming noise like the waves of the sea (the sea Thuy had only ever seen on holo reconstitutions of Dai Viet on Old Earth). Thuy moved – with an uneasy feeling that she was doing so through thick tar, a feeling that didn’t seem rooted in anything – her body, her perceptions – but a nagging one that wouldn’t go away, like a distant pain that had yet to bloom.
And there was a presence with her in the room – a huge pressure against her mind, the touch of the mindship she was in – something that should have been familiar but wasn’t, was utterly alien and discomforting and a stark reminder of the gulf between her and The Dragons in the Peach Garden. Her mind felt twisted and stretched and pulled in all directions, her thoughts running slow as honey and pressed against the confines of her skull.
Sixth Aunt still sat at the table, calmly talking to The Dragons in the Peach Garden as though nothing were wrong. “Anything, Great-great aunt?”
“It’s not as easy as putting sensors online,” The Dragons in the Peach Garden protested. “Give me a moment, child. I can’t see anything –”
A screen-view appeared on the walls of the ship – before, it had opened up on stars, but now there was only oily darkness – and, swimming out of the swirls of odd, disjointed colours, Chi’s hollow face. “Clever,” she said. “Much cleverer than I expected of you.”
“You’re here, aren’t you?” Thuy asked. “Waiting for their arrival? Younger sister, you don’t have to do this –”
Chi’s face twisted, in what might have been pain, or anger. “You want to dissuade me? Fine, elder sister. But we’ll do it on my own terms. Come aboard.”
On that ship? On that monstrosity, that mangled approximation of a mindship, the reconstruction of an entity that had already destroyed Chi and Thuy and the family –
Thuy looked at Chi – at the hollows in her cheeks; at the set expression in her eyes – remembered hanging in the void of space; remembered the heavy breathing in her comms-system, the background noises that still woke her up in her nightmares. Her mouth spoke before her brain caught up. “I’ll do it.”
“No,” Sixth Aunt said. “You’re a fool, child.”
No. She’d been a fool ten years ago. She’d wasted time, racing after the past that could not be erased or changed. “I have to,” she said. “Don’t you see?”
Sixth Aunt sniffed. “I see I’ve lost one child, to all intents and purposes. I don’t want to lose another one.”
On the screen, Chi’s face was frozen in that odd expression – in her eyes, that desperate need for help that could not, would not ever be met; because Thuy had failed her. “You haven’t lost either of us,” Thuy said, firmly. “Please, Younger Aunt.”
“I’ll return her unharmed, if that’s what you’re worried about,” Chi said. “Unless you don’t believe my word?”
It was a challenge – an unseemly one, made from younger to elder, on the borders of insolence – and Sixth Aunt stiffened. “Manners, child,” she said. And then, realising the futility of it, “I don’t doubt your word.”
“Good,” Chi said. “Then we can go ahead, can’t we?”
Sixth Aunt’s mouth set in a frown; she opened and closed her mouth – the first time Thuy had seen her at a loss. Then, finally, she said. “There isn’t much time.”
“All the more reason to hurry, then,” Chi said, with a smile that was cold and without joy. “Tell your ship to synch to mine. I’m sending my deep-space referential.”
IN PHYSICAL SPACE, a transfer from a mindship to another would have involved an access hatch, and a tube extended from one ship to another, a link that Thuy could have walked along.
Here, in deep spaces, none of that happened – The Dragons in the Peach Garden muttered under her breath while she sorted out some ‘technical details’, and cursed several times at obsolete code configurations – and there was a wrenching, and a subtle reconfiguration of space – the oily sheen on the walls taking on slightly different tinges, the table turning from metal to crystal, the sense of the ship’s vast presence increasing tenfold for a moment before receding to scarcely bearable levels. And then, as Thuy was still struggling to comprehend what had happened, The Dragons in the Peach Garden spoke in a voice like thunder overhead, “You can go ahead.”
There was a door in the wall, where Chi’s image had been. It opened only on a well-lit corridor – white-washed walls that looked incongruously normal; a few pictures on them that showed towering buildings under a moon so large it seemed to crush them – a Galactic planet, had to be, because none of the architecture looked familiar.
The ship’s presence in the air was dilute, like a hundred scattered droplets of water; a relief after The Dragons in the Peach Garden.
Or was it? Did she really need so much confirmation that this was no ordinary mindship?
“We’re with you,” Sixth Aunt’s voice said in Thuy’s ears; but it was faint, and fading away already – as Thuy walked deeper and deeper into the ship.
There were no fountains, or scrolling calligraphy on the walls; at most a few symbols, lik
e the cross of the Christian God and the blue-and-red flags of countries from long-dead history, and here and there, the spiral-galaxy and bird silhouette insignia that were the old mark of the Galactic armed forces. Everything smelled – stale, like old books, like a well-scrubbed hospital block, too clean, too empty to be real. And there was the same oily sheen of deep spaces everywhere, curling on the pictures and on the white walls; and the flickering sense of something following her through the corridors, some vast cosmic attention turned her way, in that split-second moment before it turned from vaguely puzzled to hostile...
“Get a grip.” Sixth Aunt’s voice cut through the morass of her thoughts. “The Galactics’ shuttle has left Central. You have half an hour before they reach our position.”
Thuy said nothing. She followed the corridors, struggling to assert a sense of normalcy on something that had never been normal in the first place; followed the rising sense of dread within her until it was all she could do not to stop, not to retch on the crazily shifting floors.
At last, at long last, she reached what must have been the heartroom. There was nothing in it, save a huge rectangular box marked with a spiral-galaxy – masking the innards of the ship’s Mind – and Chi, standing by the side of the box with one hand negligently trailing on its surface.
She wore a white ao dai. The traditional tunic hung loose on her frame, and in the freak geometry of deep spaces its colour seemed to have turned into the grimy hempen of mourning. “Elder sister. How pleasant of you to visit me. This is The Frost on Jade Buds.”
A typically Rong name. “Not its original name,” Thuy said.
“No,” Chi said. “He had a Galactic name once, but it would have been... inappropriate, in the circumstances. Though” – she smiled, as if amused by a joke only she could understand – “his original name was Despoiler.”
Thuy could feel the ship’s Mind everywhere now – the unpleasant sharp tang of it; the pent-up aggressiveness coiled in the air, the eagerness. It was a war mindship, and Chi had rebuilt it. “You have to stop,” she said, not knowing what other words to use. “Don’t you see? You can’t just target the Galactics –”
“Oh, but I can.”
You’re my younger sister, Thuy wanted to say. I know you’re not a murderer. But she no longer knew what Chi was; what she’d been turned into.
“You don’t understand,” Thuy said. “I know you want your revenge, but what good would it do? The delegates aren’t the ones who planted the mindship here; they’re not the ones who... damaged you. What –?” What do you want to achieve, she wanted to ask, what do you think you can do, start yet another war that will destroy us all? But the words remained stuck in her throat.
“I don’t know what you hoped to achieve, coming here.” It was such a matter-of-fact declaration it chilled Thuy to the bone.
“Come home,” Thuy said. “Please. Sixth Aunt and the rest of the family want you back. Please leave this ship; this breaker of families, this maker of the dead.”
Chi laughed, bitterly. “I think it’s already too late for this, isn’t it?”
“It’s never too late. One drop of blood is always heavier than a body of water.”
“Received wisdom.” Chi grimaced. “You should know the value of that.”
“I know the value of that.” Thuy rubbed her fingers, feeling the grit of the ship between them, like the ash from burnt incense sticks. “That’s the only thing that kept us standing. What else but values and received wisdom do you have to guide you through bitter times?” She knew all about that: the platitudes said at her parents’ funerals, at those of her elders, of her youngers – all the meaningless words she’d said to herself at night, to lull herself back to sleep after the nightmares.
“You know what else there is.”
“Revenge?” Thuy said the word, letting it hang in the air like a blade. “You have to let go of this.”
“Because I should forgive? Here’s the thing, elder sister. It’s easy to say this when you’re the one receiving the forgiveness. Have they come here contrite, asking for reconciliation? Have they admitted what is it that they did – have they said they’re sorry for the thousands of deaths and orphans, all the attempts to utterly own or destroy us, all the debris that’s still polluting and shattering our families? No. Instead they’ve come here for their own gain, offering us their meaningless protection against the Dai Viet Empire. And we’ll indulge them again, because we can’t afford not to.” It should have been an impassioned tirade; but Chi’s voice was utterly emotionless.
“Lil’ Sis,” Thuy said. She didn’t understand. She didn’t see.
“Look at this ship.” Chi swirled around, her hands spread out. “Look at what they built. A living weapon.”
A weapon, Thuy thought, fighting against a bout of nausea. A weapon that took smiling, happy girls like Chi – and made them into... this. Something that removed... love, compassion, filial piety. Chi knew, intellectually, that Thuy was her sister, that Sixth Aunt was the woman who had raised her; but felt nothing more for them than she did for random strangers. And she never would. The capacity to build new connections had been excised from her as neatly as with a surgeon’s knife, taken from her by the ship in which she stood.
A weapon that turned people themselves into weapons, that struck at the heart of a society built on kinship and respect for one’s elders, leaving only ashes in its wake.
“You see,” Chi said. She had gained a disturbing ability to read Thuy’s thoughts; or perhaps her disgust was evident on her face.
“No,” Thuy said. “Listen to me. If they die – if anything happens to them – we’ll have another war. Is that what you want?”
“Is it what I want?” Chi shrugged. “Do I have a choice? Because they’ll conquer us anyway, won’t they? Trade is another way of waging war. We’ll be seeing their holo-movies and their soldiers and their factories worm their way into the Scattered Pearls Belt once more – exactly as we did seventy years ago. Now,” she said, in quite a different tone of voice.
Now. What –? Thuy opened her mouth to ask a question, and then realised that her sister hadn’t been addressing her.
“As you wish,” the mindship – The Frost on Jade Buds – said. His voice was low and cultured, that of a scholar, that of an official; the aggressiveness in the air almost incongruous by comparison.
The world spun and spun, and collapsed – Thuy reached for one of the walls – felt a slimy cold seize her, climbing into her heart, slowing down each of her heartbeats until they became a pain against her ribs – felt the entire ship lurch so hard the wall suddenly seemed to rise up against her, and she found her left cheek pressed against it, but it was normal once more, cold metal and polished plastic, nothing like the odd textures of deep spaces.
She pushed against the wall and turned to stare at Chi.
Her sister stood immobile – her hand had gone back on the box, trailing on it as if this were the most beautiful thing under Heaven. How could she –?
On one of the walls was a screen, showing the same trajectory The Dragons in the Peach Garden had shown Thuy – except that there was now a dark blue point, the position of the delegation’s ship and its escort. And another point – their own position? Another image, side-by-side with the trajectory, was plugged in straight from the newsfeed, showing the same image Thuy had seen, the one with the Galactics walking down the stairs, smiling at the crowds as they wended their way to the shuttleport and their next destination.
“Please, Lil’ Sis,” Thuy said, making a last, desperate attempt. How could she find the words to convince Chi – how could she appeal to emotions Chi could no longer feel? “You’re not a murderer. You –” Chi wouldn’t survive this; not if the Galactics died. All their resources and firepower would go into tracking her down, into killing her; if their escort didn’t manage to vaporise her here and now in retaliation for the attack.
“You know this is wrong,” Chi said.
“I –” Thuy t
hought of the Galactics, smiling like sharks, like tigers as they strolled down the stairs of the Hall of Supreme Harmony.
“They’ll settle here again; do what they did seventy years ago as if nothing had ever been wrong. Do you think that’s fair?”
Thuy said, in the end, “Life is never fair. You should know that. It’s one of the first lessons Sixth Aunt taught us.”
Chi’s hand tightened on the rectangle. “Arm systems, please.”
Nothing changed perceptibly; but The Frost on Jade Buds said, “Systems ready. What weapon do you want to deploy, child?”
“Swarm-missiles,” Chi said. “Or anything you think they won’t counter.”
The ship appeared to mull on this for a moment. “They’re in an Immortal-model shuttle. They’ll probably have lures against swarm-missiles. I believe a wide-radius electromagnetic blast would be more appropriate.”
“As you wish.” Chi shook her head. “As long as it blows them out of the Belt.”
Thuy stood, struggling to take it all in, to make sense of this casual talk of death and destruction – coming from her own younger sister, from her own blood... It was the same as ten years ago: she hung in the darkness of space, powerless to do anything, to help her sister, to save Chi from herself.
She – she wished Sixth Aunt was there, but there was no sign of her or of The Dragons in the Peach Garden. They were probably still in deep spaces, with no easy way to determine whether Chi and Thuy were still with them. Now there were only the two dots, getting closer and closer to each other; and the voice of the ship going through the details of the weapons setup procedure in dry, technical language Thuy couldn’t understand.
“They’ll hunt you down,” Thuy said. “They’ll –” She thought of Chi, alone and unable to feel anything for anyone; thought of her single-mindedness, the sheer bloody obstinacy that had led to years and years of work, rebuilding the ship that had damaged her. And, for the first time, seeing the way her younger sister’s hand clung to the Mind’s resting place, Thuy thought of what The Frost on Jade Buds could mean, to someone who had nothing else to call hers in the whole of the world. “They’ll destroy the ship,” she said.
