by Rich Horton
Street after street after street—under unfamiliar trees that sway in the breeze, listening to the distant music broadcast from every doorway, from every lamp. The air is warm and clammy, a far cry from Felicity’s controlled temperature; and over her head are dark clouds. She almost hopes it rains, to see what it is like—in real life, and not in some simulation that seems like a longer, wetter version of a shower in the communal baths.
At length, as she reaches a smaller intersection, where four streets with unfamiliar signs branch off—some residential area, though all she can read are the numbers on the buildings—Wen stops, staring up at the sky. Might as well admit it: it’s useless. She’s lost, thoroughly lost in the middle of nowhere, and she’ll never be on time for the funeral.
She’d weep; but weeping is a caprice, and she’s never been capricious in her life. Instead, she turns back and attempts to retrace her steps, towards one of the largest streets—where, surely, she can hammer on a door, or find someone who will help her?
She can’t find any of the streets; but at length, she bypasses a group of old men playing Encirclement on the street—watching the shimmering holo-board as if their lives depended on it.
“Excuse me?” she asks, in Mheng.
As one, the men turn towards her—their gazes puzzled. “I’m looking for White Horse Hall,” Wen says. “For the funeral?”
The men still watch her, their faces impassive—dark with expressions she can’t read. They’re laden with smaller bots—on their eyes, on their hands and wrists, hanging black like obscene fruit: they look like the San-Tay in the reconstitution movies, except that their skins are darker, their eyes narrower.
At length, the eldest of the men steps forwards, and speaks up—his voice rerouted to his bots, coming out in halting Mheng. “You’re not from here.”
“No,” Wen says in the same language. “I’m from Felicity.”
An odd expression crosses their faces: longing, and hatred, and something else Wen cannot place. One of the men points to her, jabbers in High Mheng—Wen catches just one word she understands.
Xu Anshi.
“You’re Anshi’s daughter,” the man says. The bots’ approximation of his voice is slow, metallic, unlike the fast jabbering of High Mheng.
Wen shakes her head; and one of the other men laughs, saying something else in High Mheng.
That she’s too young, no doubt—that Mother, Anshi’s daughter, would be well into middle age by now, instead of being Wen’s age. “Daughter of daughter,” the man says, with a slight, amused smile. “Don’t worry, we’ll take you to the hall, to see your grandmother.”
He walks by her side, with the other man, the one who laughed. Neither of them speaks—too hard to attempt small talk in a language they don’t master, Wen guesses. They go down a succession of smaller and smaller streets, under banners emblazoned with the image of the phuong, Felicity’s old symbol, before the Honored Leader made the new banner, the one that showed the station blazing among the stars—something more suitable for their new status.
Everything feels . . . odd, slightly twisted out of shape—the words not quite what they ought to be, the symbols just shy of familiar; the language a frightening meld of words she can barely recognize.
Everything is wrong, Wen thinks, shivering—and yet how can it be wrong, walking among Grandmother’s own people?
Summoning bots I washed away
Ten thousand thousand years of poison
Awakening a thousand flower-flames, a thousand phoenix birds
Floating on a sea of blood like cresting waves
The weeping of the massacred millions rising from the darkness
We received this poem and its memories for safekeeping at a time when Xu Anshi was still on Felicity Station: on an evening before the Feast of Hungry Ghosts, when she sat in a room lit by trembling lights, thinking of Lao, her husband who had died in the uprisings—and wondering how much of it had been of any worth.
It refers to a time when Anshi was older, wiser—she and Zhiying had escaped from Shattered Pine, and spent three years moving from hiding place to hiding place, composing the pamphlets that, broadcast into every household, heralded the end of the San-Tay governance over Felicity.
On the night that would become known as the Second Ring Riots, Anshi stood in one of the inner rings of Felicity Station, her bots spread around her, hacked into the network—half of them on her legs, pumping modifiers into her blood; half of them linked to the other Mheng bot-handlers, retransmitting scenes of carnage, of the Mheng mob running wild in the San-Tay districts of the inner rings, the High Tribunal and Spaceport Authority lasered, and the fashionable districts trashed.
“This one,” Zhiying said, pointing to a taller door, adorned with what appeared to be a Mheng traditional blessing—until one realized that the characters had been chosen for aesthetic reasons only, and that they meant nothing.
Anshi sent a subvocalised command to her bots, asking them to take the house. The feed to the rioting districts cut off abruptly, as her bots turned their attention towards the door and the house beyond: their sensors analyzing the bots on the walls, the pattern of the aerations, the cables running behind the door, and submitting hypotheses about possible architectures of the security system—before the swarm reached a consensus, and made a decision.
The bots flowed towards the door—the house’s bots sought to stop them, but Anshi’s bots split into two squads, and rushed past, heading for the head—the central control panel, which housed the bots’ communication system. Anshi had a brief glimpse of red-painted walls, and blinking holos; before her bots rushed back, job completed, and fell on the now disorganized bots at the door.
Everything went dark, the Mheng characters slowly fading away from the door’s panels.
“All yours,” Anshi said to Zhiying, struggling to remain standing—all her bots were jabbering in her mind, putting forward suggestions as to what to do next; and, in her state of extreme fatigue, ignoring them was harder. She’d seen enough handlers burnt beyond recovery, their brains overloaded with external stimuli until they collapsed—she should have known better. But they needed her—the most gifted bot-handler they had, their strategist—needed her while the San-Tay were still reeling from their latest interplanetary war, while they were still weak. She’d rest later—after the San-Tay were gone, after the Mheng were free. There would be time, then, plenty of it.
Bao and Nhu were hitting the door with soldering knives—each blow weakening the metal until the door finally gave way with a groan. The crowd behind Anshi roared; and rushed through—pushing Anshi ahead of them, the world shrinking to a swirling, confused mass of details—gouged-out consoles, ornaments ripped from shelves, pale men thrown down and beaten against the rush of the crowd, a whirlwind of chaos, as if demons had risen up from the underworld.
The crowd spread as they moved inwards; and Anshi found herself at the center of a widening circle in what had once been a guest room. Beside her, Bao was hacking at a nondescript bed, while others in the crowd beat down on the huge screen showing a sunset with odd, distorted trees—some San-Tay planet that Anshi did not recognize, maybe even Prime. Anshi breathed, hard, struggling to steady herself in the midst of the devastation. Particles of down and dust drifted past her; she saw a bot on the further end, desperately trying to contain the devastation, scuttling to repair the gashes in the screen. Nhu downed it with a well-placed kick; her face distorted in a wide, disturbing grin.
“Look at that!” Bao held up a mirror-necklace, which shimmered and shifted, displaying a myriad configurations for its owner’s pleasure.
Nhu’s laughter was harsh. “They won’t need it anymore.” She held out a hand; but Bao threw the necklace to the ground; and ran it through with his knife.
Anshi did not move—as if in a trance she saw all of it: the screen, the bed, the pillows that sought to mould themselves to a pleasing shape, even as hands tore them apart; the jewellery scattered on the ground; and
the image of the forest, fading away to be replaced by a dull, split-open wall—every single mark of San-Tay privilege, torn away and broken, never to come back. Her bots were relaying similar images from all over the station. The San-Tay would retaliate, but they would have understood, now, how fragile the foundation of their power was. How easily the downtrodden Mheng could become their downfall; and how much it would cost them to hold Felicity.
Good.
Anshi wandered through the house, seeking out the San-Tay bots—those she could hack and reprogram, she added to her swarm; the others she destroyed, as ruthlessly as the guards had culled the prisoners on Shattered Pine.
Anshi. Anshi.
Something was blinking, insistently, in the corner of her eyes—the swarm, bringing something to her attention. The kitchens—Zhiying, overseeing the executions. Bits and pieces, distorted through the bots’ feed: the San-Tay governor, begging and pleading to be spared; his wife, dying silently, watching them all with hatred in her eyes. They’d had no children; for which Anshi was glad. She wasn’t Zhiying, and she wasn’t sure she’d have borne the guilt.
Guilt? There were children dying all over the station; men and women killed, if not by her, by those who followed her. She spared a bitter laugh. There was no choice. Children could die; or be raised to despise the inferior breed of the Mheng; be raised to take slaves and servants, and send dissenters like Anshi to be broken in Shattered Pine with a negligent wave of their hands. No choice.
Come, the bots whispered in her mind, but she did not know why.
Zhiying was down to the Grand Master of Security when Anshi walked into the kitchens—she barely nodded at Anshi, and turned her attention back to the man aligned in the weapons’ sights.
She did not ask for any last words; though she did him the honor of using a bio-silencer on him, rather than the rifles they’d used on the family—his body crumpled inwards and fell, still intact; and he entered the world of the ancestors with the honor of a whole body. “He fought well,” Zhiying said, curtly. “What of the house?”
“Not a soul left living,” Anshi said, flicking through the bots’ channels. “Not much left whole, either.”
“Good,” Zhiying said. She gestured; and the men dragged the next victim—a Mheng girl, dressed in the clothes of an indentured servant.
This—this was what the bots had wanted her to see. Anshi looked to the prisoners huddled against the wall: there was one San-Tay left, an elderly man who gazed back at her, steadily and without fear. The rest—all the rest—were Mheng, dressed in San-Tay clothes, their skin pale and washed-out in the flickering lights—stained with what looked like rice flour from one of the burst bags on the floor. Mheng. Their own people.
“Elder sister,” Anshi said, horrified.
Zhiying’s face was dark with anger. “You delude yourself. They’re not Mheng anymore.”
“Because they were indentured into servitude? Is that your idea of justice? They had no choice,” Anshi said. The girl against the wall said nothing; her gaze slid away from Zhiying, to the rifle; finally resting on the body of her dead mistress.
“They had a choice. We had a choice,” Zhiying said. Her gaze—dark and intense—rested, for a moment, on the girl. “If we spare them, they’ll just run to the militia, and denounce us to find themselves a better household. Won’t you?” she asked.
Anshi, startled, realized Zhiying had addressed the girl—whose gaze still would not meet theirs, as if they’d been foreigners themselves.
At length, the girl threw her head back, and spoke in High Mheng. “They were always kind with me, and you butchered them like pigs.” She was shivering now. “What will you achieve? You can’t hide on Felicity. The San-Tay will come here and kill you all, and when they’re done, they’ll put us in the dark forever. It won’t be cushy jobs like this—they’ll consign us to the scavenge heaps, to the ducts-cleaning and the bots-scraping, and we won’t ever see starlight again.”
“See?” Zhiying said. “Pathetic.” She gestured, and the girl crumpled like the man before her. The soldiers dragged the body away, and brought the old San-Tay man. Zhiying paused; and turned back to Anshi. “You’re angry.”
“Yes,” Anshi said. “I did not join this so we could kill our own countrymen.”
Zhiying’s mouth twisted in a bitter smile. “Collaborators,” she said. “How do you think a regime like the San-Tay continues to exist? It’s because they take some of their servants, and set them above others. Because they make us complicit in our own oppression. That’s the worst of what they do, little sister—turn us against each other.”
No. The thought was crystal-clear in Anshi’s mind, like a blade held against starlight. That’s not the worst. The worst is that, to fight them, we have to best them at their own game.
She watched the old man as he died; and saw nothing in his eyes but the reflection of that bitter knowledge.
White Horse Hall is huge, so huge that it’s a wonder Wen didn’t see it from afar—more than a hundred stories, and more unveil as her floater lifts higher and higher, away from the crowd massed on the ground. Above the cloud cover, other white-clad floaters weave in and out of the traffic, as if to the steps of a dance only they can see.
She’s alone: her escort left her at the floater station—the older man with a broad smile and a wave, and the second man with a scowl, looking away from her. As they ascend higher and higher, and the air thins out—to almost the temperature of Felicity—, Wen tries to relax, but cannot do so. She’s late; and she knows it—and they probably won’t admit her into the hall at all. She’s a stranger here; and Mother is right: she would be better off in Felicity with Zhengyao, enjoying her period of rest by flying kites, or going for a ride on Felicity’s River of Good Fortune.
At the landing pad, a woman is waiting for her: small and plump, with hair shining silver in the unfiltered sunlight. Her face is frozen in careful blankness, and she wears the white of mourners, with none of the markers for the family of the dead.
“Welcome,” she says, curtly nodding to acknowledge Wen’s presence. “I am Ho Van Nhu.”
“Grandmother’s friend,” Wen says.
Nhu’s face twists in an odd expression. “You know my name?” She speaks perfect Galactic, with a very slight trace of an accent—heard only in the odd inflections she puts on her own name.
Wen could lie; could say that Mother spoke of her often; but here, in this thin, cold air, she finds that she cannot lie—any more than one does not lie in the presence of the Honoured Leader. “They teach us about you in school,” she says, blushing.
Nhu snorts. “Not in good terms, I’d imagine. Come,” she says. “Let’s get you prepared.”
There are people everywhere, in costumes Wen recognizes from her history lessons—oddly old-fashioned and formal, collars flaring in the San-Tay fashion, though the five panels of the dresses are those of the Mheng high court, in the days before the San-Tay’s arrival.
Nhu pushes her way through the crowd, confident, until they reach a deserted room. She stands for a while in the center, eyes closed, and bots crawl out of the interstices, dragging vegetables and balls of rolled-up dough—black and featureless, their bodies gleaming like knife-blades, their legs moving on a rhythm like centipedes or spiders.
Wen watches, halfway between fascination and horror, as they cut up the vegetables into small pieces—flatten the dough and fill up dumplings, and put them inside small steamer units that other bots have dragged up. Other bots are already cleaning up the counter, and there is a smell in the room—tea brewing in a corner. “I don’t—” Wen starts. How can she eat any of that, knowing how it was prepared? She swallows, and forces herself to speak more civilly. “I should be with her.”
Nhu shakes her head. Beads of sweat pearl on her face; but she seems to be gaining color as the bots withdraw, one by one—except that Wen can still see them, tucked away under the cupboards and the sink, like curled-up cockroaches. “This is the wake, and you’
re already late for it. It won’t make any difference if you come in quarter of an hour later. And I would be a poor host if I didn’t offer you any food.”
There are two cups of tea on the central table; Nhu pours from a teapot, and pushes one to Wen—who hesitates for a moment, and then takes it, fighting against a wave of nausea. Bots dragged out the pot; the tea leaves. Bots touched the liquid that she’s inhaling right now.
“You look like your mother when she was younger,” Nhu says, sipping at the tea. “Like your grandmother, too.” Her voice is matter-of-fact; but Wen can feel the grief Nhu is struggling to contain. “You must have had a hard time, at school.”
Wen thinks on it for a while. “I don’t think so,” she says. She’s had the usual bullying, the mockeries of her clumsiness, of her provincial accent. But nothing specifically directed at her ancestors. “They did not really care about who my grandmother was.” It’s the stuff of histories now; almost vanished—only the generation of the Honored Leader remembers what it was like, under the San-Tay.
“I see,” Nhu says.
An uncomfortable silence stretches, which Nhu makes no effort to break.
Small bots float by, carrying a tray with the steamed dumplings—like the old vids, when the San-Tay would be receiving their friends at home. Except, of course, that the Mheng were doing the cutting-up and the cooking, in the depths of the kitchen.
“They make you uncomfortable,” Nhu says.
Wen grimaces. “I—we don’t have bots, on Felicity.”
“I know. The remnants of the San-Tay—the technologies of servitude, which should better be forgotten and lost.” Her voice is light, ironic; and Wen realizes that she is quoting from one of the Honored Leader’s speeches. “Just like High Mheng. Tell me, Wen, what do the histories say of Xu Anshi?”
