Anthology of Speculative Fiction, Volume Two

by Short Story Anthology

  The darkness was almost complete. A cold wind rose, scattering the pine needles on the ground, whispering words of mourning. And Dai-Yu, staring at her maker in the dim light, saw fear in his eyes, and the sallow cast of his skin, and understood that he would not help her, that he had long since forgotten his power. That he, too, was nothing compared to Tiger and Crane.

  “No,” she whispered, but the wind carried the word away.

  Two shadows coalesced at the heart of the darkness. Dai-Yu watched them take on substance, transfixed.

  “Dai-Yu,” Tiger said, in a feline growl. “It is time.”

  “Choose,” Crane said.

  Wind whipped at Dai-Yu’s sleeves.

  Tortoise still stood frozen beside her. “Leave her.”

  Tiger laughed. “Too late, brother. You relinquished your mantle to her. Now she must do what you could not.”

  “Tiger—” Tortoise said, moving to stand in front of Dai-Yu.

  A hand flashed, shining like metal in the darkness. Tortoise fell back, one hand going to his chest, then rising to his face. Blood dripped from it onto the ground, one drop at a time, a soft patter, like rain.

  Dai-Yu felt the cut as if it were in her own chest; she stumbled, gasping, then tried to stand.

  “My child,” Tortoise whispered. Time slowed, stopped; in that single moment when Tortoise reeled back, she heard the words he was not saying.

  Not choosing is a choice.

  So is running away.

  Fear is a choice.

  Dai-Yu, staring at Tortoise’s shocked face, felt a cold certainty rise within her. She moved until she stood before him, seeing the gaping hole in his chest, the same hole Tiger had once opened in Pao’s chest.

  She remembered Lei’s words: It would take an equal to resist them. There is no-one in Wen-Min who has their power.

  Yet Tortoise had been their equal, once. The power was still within him, but fear prevented him using it.

  “Breath from my breath,” she whispered. “Flesh from my flesh.” And, more slowly, “You have relinquished your mantle.”

  She laid a hand on Tortoise’s chest, plunged it deep into the wound until she felt the heart beating under her fingers, the sticky heat of it on her skin. Warmth spread up her arm, into her chest, through her whole body, until she shivered with the same rhythm.

  Flesh from my flesh.

  The warmth rose within her, stronger and hotter. Under her spread fingers, Tortoise was fading, crumbling away to nothing, to dust carried by the wind.

  Breath from my breath.

  There was nothing where he had been: only dust; only a memory, already fading.

  Seed from my seed.

  Every part of her tingled now. She turned, slowly, and made her way to Tiger and Crane, facing them for the first time in centuries.

  “Tiger,” she said. “Crane.”

  All her lives she had run away from the darkness, never once thinking that shadows, undispelled, only grow. She stared at both of them now, shivering, but not with fear. She was their equal.

  She raised her hand.

  Light sprang up, throwing into sharp relief their faces: the lined, wizened masks of old men; the pale skins of things forever living in shadows.

  There was a smell, a musty smell like books left too long untended.

  “You are children,” she said.

  “No,” Tiger growled, but in the light he was no longer as frightening as he had been.

  “Think of the Empire,” Crane sighed.

  They were smaller, now, as if the light had robbed them of their majesty; smaller, and ever dwindling.

  What would you choose? she had once asked Lei.

  She could still remember his answer. Neither. And yet how we need them, to keep us together.

  He had been wrong.

  Old, dead things. Things that do not die, that keep ageing. Things no longer needed.

  “I choose,” Dai-Yu said. And, bending, caught both of them in her hands. “None of you. Let the Empire rise or fall on its own terms.”

  They weighed nothing: a leaf; a breath; a length of silk. They shrank under her touch, shrieking their rage in tinny voices, dwindling ever more until they finally fell silent.

  In Dai-Yu’s hand was nothing but coldness, and then even that was gone.

  She stared at her trembling palm, then at the darkness all around her that distorted the pine trees into demon shadows.

  “It is ended,” she whispered, and did not know whether to smile or laugh. Tortoise’s power coursed within her, begging to be used, to shape things as they should be. But she, who had seen what power could do, quelled it.

  She saw, for the first time, the life that would be hers: free from the shadow of fear; free to make her own choices, to love and be loved in return; to raise her children in peace. Free at last, she thought, with a smile.

  She walked away from the pool, her hands as empty as when she came, seeing the paths of her future before her, like so many flowers she could pick.

  ***

  Epilogue: the Wheel

  In the Tenth Court of Hell, the Lady waits before the Wheel. To every soul that passes she hands the celadon cup, and watches them drink until every memory has scattered away.

  There is no exception.

  Not any more.

  © 2010 by Aliette De Bodard

  The Weight of a Blessing, by Aliette de Bodard

  On her third visit to Sarah—on the last occasion that she sees her daughter, even if it is only in V-space—Minh Ha says nothing. There are no words left, no message of comfort that she could give her.

  Instead, she takes Sarah’s hand, holds it tight until the last of the warmth has leached from her body into her daughter’s; and braces herself for the future.

  ***

  Even in the visitors’ V-space, Sarah looked awful—thin and wasted and so ethereal that Minh Ha wanted to take her daughter home and ply her with rich dish after rich dish to bring some fat back on her bones. But, of course, it was too late for that; had been too late ever since the much publicized arrest and the even more publicized trial, all the grandstanding that had brought a taste of bile in Minh Ha’s throat.

  The white prison garb and featureless holding room background were imposed by the Guardians, but Sarah had basic access permissions to the V-space, enough to manipulate her appearance—to fill in the hollows under her eyes, color the stretched skin until the shapes of the bones receded into invisibility, and smooth out her hair until it hung once again as lustrous as polished turtle scales. Minh Ha wasn’t sure if her daughter’s appearance was a statement of some sort, instructions given by the leaders of the Vermilion Seal to their recruits before the police sweep-up, or if it was simply that Sarah saw no need to hide the truth from her—or the depth of her contempt.

  “Hello, child,” she said to Sarah.

  Sarah frowned. “Speak Rong.”

  Minh Ha shook her head. “There’s no point. They’ll understand Rong just as easily as Galactic.” The machines that ran V-space were notoriously bad at Rong, a language that relied on human instinct to separate the words—but interpreters were cheap, their services easily bought.

  “That’s not the problem, Mother.” But Sarah didn’t elaborate—merely pointed to the low table that was the only feature of the V-space, a pretense of normality in a situation so far from normal it was risible. Nor did Minh Ha probe further; after all, she already knew what the answer was going to be.

  “The verdict was upheld today in the State Council,” Minh Ha said, as she pulled out a chair, feeling the solidity of old wood under her fingers—an illusion, perfectly woven by the machines. She’d applied for an interview in physical space, but had been summarily rejected; told that the risk presented by her daughter was too great, and that they would rather have everything take place at a remove; that she could visit Sarah three times, one time for every day that separated them from the execution of the sentence. “But of course, you already knew that.”

>   Sarah’s face was perfectly still—caught by the warm light from the ceiling, reminding Minh Ha so much of Charles that her heart seemed to stutter in her chest. “Active Rehabilitation on Cygnus? All things considered, I got off rather light, didn’t I?” Her voice had the sharpness of a broken blade.

  There was an awkward silence, only broken by Sarah’s even breaths. “You shouldn’t have come here,” Sarah said, at last.

  “Don’t be a fool. You’re my daughter. My only child.” And Minh Ha was about to lose her, and she still couldn’t express her own feelings in a way that Sarah would understand.

  It had been publicized enough: the ship left for Cygnus, an outlying planet in Galactic space, in three days, carrying in its holds the sentenced Vermilion Seal members. Better cut out the infection at the root and expel it from society, rather than have it spread, undermining the foundations of Galactic society. It was a one-way trip—the passengers drugged and stuffed into hibernation cradles, locked tight until they finally could be released and herded into the holding facilities—staring at the mercilessly sharp horizon and the cracked fields that would be the boundary of their world until death.

  At least it wasn’t an execution. At least it wasn’t Moc Tinh Hau—but of course the planet of Minh Ha’s birth had been sealed off from interstellar traffic, for fear that the war that had engulfed it would spread to other, more “ civilized” parts of the universe.

  Sarah exhaled, noisily. “Fine time to show your support, isn’t it?”

  Minh Ha found her hands clenching in her lap. “I don’t stand by any of what you’ve done.”

  Sarah smiled—sharp and bitter. “Of course not. I should have known.”

  “We taught you otherwise,” Minh Ha said, all the anger she’d hoarded during the trial irrepressibly bubbling up; all the smiling and keeping silent while Charles all but accused her of corrupting their daughter, of failing to teach her the proper Galactic values that would have prevented that needless tragedy. “How to care for a tree when you’ve eaten its fruit; how to remember the man who dug a well when you’ve drunk its water. Segundus is your home. Why did you need to—”

  “What did you want me to do? To keep my head down and accept it all? To lie to myself, over and over, until the lie became reality? I had to do it,” Sarah said. “Had to make the truth known.”

  The truth. The absolute that the younger generation found and clung to like lifelines; as if it could protect them. The truth hadn’t prevented the Eastern continent’s war-kites from laying waste to the delta; hadn’t brought harvested rice into the besieged cities; hadn’t even been able to save Xuan Huong, in the end. “There is no truth,” Minh Ha said.

  Sarah was silent for a while, staring at the wood of the table as if she saw something within, some mysterious message that Minh Ha couldn’t make sense of. At last, she said, raising her gaze, “You saw the war, didn’t you? I thought you’d understand—I thought you’d want our stories to be worth something, too—” And, in that moment, she was no longer the hardened criminal of the news feeds, or the angry young woman of Charles’ imagination, but simply the child Minh Ha had raised—the round-faced daughter who’d come home after being stung by a bee, and who’d looked up at her mother, confident that Minh Ha would know how to make the pain go away. In that moment, Minh Ha’s heart, patched and glued together from so many shards of childhood, broke yet again.

  ***

  There’s a moment which comes every time Minh Ha enters the Hall of the Dead: a single, agonizing moment of hope when she sees the streets before the bombs extinguished the lanterns hanging in the trees—when she sees Mother and the aunts exactly as she remembers them, their faces creased like crumpled paper—when she hears them say, “Come to us, child,” in Rong, just as they once did, when handing her the red envelopes of the New Year celebration.

  It never lasts.

  The filters always kick in; always change and blur everything—always turn the V-space of the city into a labyrinth of featureless, drenched buildings, and the Dead into . . . something else, something alien and utterly incomprehensible. Mother and the aunts flicker and blur, too, and change—their skin taking on a metallic sheen, their words melding and merging until they become altogether meaningless.

  It’s for her own safety, she knows—for her own sanity, so that she is not contaminated by the twisted and ineffable brain patterns that have been preserved by the Hall, a crazed and blurred memory of what it means to be alive. She knows; but it doesn’t make it any easier to bear.

  There are eight of the Dead: Mother and three of her sisters, and four more distant cousins who escaped with them. They were all young when they died—too young. Like all of the generation that had fled the Western continent of Moc Tinh Hau before the fall of Xuan Huong, they dwindled away on Segundus. Perhaps it was the stress of living through the first, most bitterly intense years of the war, scraping themselves to the bone to help their families escape from the gathering storm; or perhaps merely the pain of exile, but for some reason their roots never dug deep into Galactic soil. Minh Ha was but seven when they fled, and Moc Tinh Hau is a confused jumble of memories— all of it quite forgotten as she grew up, papered over until Sarah’s acts dragged it out again, in all its exquisite pain.

  Until she finds herself, here, now, standing before the Dead; and looking for comfort where there is none.

  ***

  On her way home, Minh Ha’s shuttle passed by the Memorial.

  It was open, though surrounded by a horde of Galactic policemen: the queue of visitors was dwarfed by the gleam of exoskeletons and battle armor, by the metallic sheen of huge cars which uncomfortably reminded Minh Ha of the Eastern continent’s linked-machines on Moc Tinh Hau, and the sharp thuds of bombs dropping over the river delta in the hours before New Year’s Eve—when the entire Western continent had been welcoming their families home for the feast.

  “See? I told you they’d have fixed it,” a woman said beside Minh Ha.

  Minh Ha, startled, turned away from her contemplation of the dome; but the woman had been talking to someone else: a small and slight redhead with freckles whose hands were wrapped around a small leather case. “I wasn’t sure—” the redhead paused then, nervously fidgeting.

  “You’d have stayed home,” the older woman said. She snorted. “On this day of all days—his thirty-year anniversary. Come on. Let’s go.” Her gaze lingered for a moment on Minh Ha, and her face twisted. “The Rong vermin won’t prevent us from honoring our war heroes.”

  Minh Ha, shocked,—it had been many years since anyone had made disparaging comments to her face—opened her mouth to say something, but the shuttle had already stopped, and the women had got off. She had no doubt they would join the queue of Galactics in front of the Memorial. The leather case the girl had been holding was familiar to Minh Ha: it held a V-space offerings chip, probably a wreath of flowers or a commemorative stele to lay in the streets of the reconstituted Xuan Huong—paying homage to a Galactic ancestor who’d died there, helping the Western continent fight for its freedom.

  Minh Ha could hear Sarah’s voice in her head as clearly as if her daughter were sitting by her side. What wonderful stories they tell themselves. What convincing lies.

  It didn’t matter. That was what her daughter didn’t understand. There was no coming back to Moc Tinh Hau; no return home to the tombs of their ancestors. Segundus was their home and would be their final resting place; and they couldn’t afford to antagonize the people among whom they lived.

  Too late, Sarah’s voice whispered in Minh Ha’s mind; and Minh Ha turned her face back to the receding shape of the Memorial, trying to think about something other than her daughter and the Vermilion Seal—but the gleam of metal from the policemen’s armor didn’t recede from her field of vision for the longest time.

  ***

  The Dead are to be broached with caution. Patterns saved on the edge of brain failure are no longer those of the living, but strangely corrupted things, belon
ging to one world and to the next; indistinct whispers, ghost images, and worse—self-replicating patterns that can utterly alter the shape of a mind.

  The Dead, in other words, are a virus—skewed code that uses tactile contact in V-space to propagate itself; and to infect the brain patterns of the living. Those touched by the Dead become changed, unfit for Galactic society—speaking in barbaric tongues; sinking into despondence and instability; following visions all the way into mad fits, which render them dangerous to public safety.

  In the past year, there have been 2319 instances of filters failing across the 79731 Halls of the Dead on Segundus, out of which 227 resulted in tactile contact—a tendency that is on the decrease thanks to better prevention at Preservation Office level. In most cases, contact is brief; and the afflicted are detected early enough to prevent further complications.

  Some, of course, are not so lucky; that is why every Hall of the Dead works in close tandem with appropriate institutions, where the hopelessly corrupted can be prevented from harming themselves and others.

  ***

  On her second visit, Minh Ha found Sarah on the floor of the V-space room, which had subtly changed. A section of it, walled behind glass, now showed the inside of the Memorial: the wide streets of the reconstituted Xuan Huong, the sky dotted with the glimmer of orbitals, the women carrying shoulder yokes with two baskets of fruit balanced on either end, the Galactics walking side by side with the Rong, smiling and laughing.

  It was very clearly the original Memorial, not the hack the Vermilion Seal had succeeded in imposing for a few hours before security kicked in: the Galactics were still prominently there, haggling in their own language with meat sellers at the market; and the heads of whole fish glared at them from the trestle tables. It was . . . all there, and still somehow not there, every detail papered over with the Galactic gaze, the shoulder yokes as exotic curiosities, the fish heads monstrous and vacant instead of promising a meal fresh from the sea, the Galactics blending in the population instead of behaving like condescending masters.