Bite by bite, the fish were supposed to stimulate the chi lines on the foot, and suckle by suckle, they were supposed to slough off old skin from the feet, leaving them callus-clear. But Mrs. Lim was dead; she had no real skin to clear anyway.
“Your girl so clever hor, making a spa for you like this,” Mrs. Tan said, drawing Mrs. Lim back into the conversation. “She architect is it?”
Mrs. Lim had some vague memory of Hong Yin showing her some drawings. “Nice, nice, very nice,” Mrs. Lim had said, because she had read in some parenting book that that was what parents should say to their kids. But when it came time to go to college, Mr. Lim had very specific ideas for what his kids should do. “Engineer.”
“Must be easy work if she got so much time to make such nice things for you.”
“Maybe she bought it,” Mrs. Lim said, sloshing her feet into the water, knowing better.
During the seventh month that year, Mrs. Lim decided to take advantage of the Underworld’s gate opening for the Ghost Festival. It would be her first time visiting her children. Specifically, Hong Yin.
Hong Yin now lived in a Tampines apartment. Mrs. Lim was not surprised to see her daughter living on the other side of the island from the rest of the family, but she frowned to see that it was low-cost housing. She had expected, what with the extravagant gifts, that Hong Yin would be more successful, perhaps even bought a landed house. After all, Hong Yuen, her eldest, had moved into the family home in Jurong as the new patriarch of the family after Mr. Lim’s passing. Hong Wen had bought a luxury condo in nearby Lakeside, although he spent most of the year in Australia.
Hong Yin was, to Mrs. Lim’s horror, living with a man. And a practicing Muslim, even! Yet she couldn’t help but drift through the rooms, examining their personal effects: the embroidered Quranic verse on the wall over the front door, the Guan Yin altar facing the entrance, the electric piano in the corner, the ugly couches draped with lace doilies, the unmade beds, the study room where she found Hong Yin.
Hong Yin was sitting on the floor, working on some elaborate papier-mâché project. Mrs. Lim glanced at the day-by-day calendar on the wall, pleased to find Hong Yin still used the traditional almanac calendar. But then she frowned: it was a weekday afternoon. Shouldn’t Hong Yin be at the office? Mrs. Lim crept closer to see what Hong Yin was doing.
A roller coaster. The roller coaster that had appeared last year during Ghost Festival! So this had been Hong Yin’s work? Mrs. Lim had not wanted to ride it. She had never ridden one, even though she had taken her children to the theme parks many times when they were young. She would wait with them in line, then hold their things for them as they got on. The line in the Underworld was too long, and she had preferred to join her friends for feasting.
Mrs. Lim began hunting for more clues about her daughter’s life now: the planner open on the desk, the paint materials, the pencil shavings filling up the wastepaper basket. Pamphlets pinned to the walls announced exhibitions by Lim Hong Yin going back several years.
Since Mrs. Lim’s death.
For a moment Mrs. Lim was annoyed. All that money for Hong Yin’s education in engineering, gone down the drain! All that hard work impressing onto Hong Yin the importance of a good stable job with financial security, ignored, for art! Mrs. Lim huffed.
Yet she didn’t have it in her to be angry at Hong Yin, who hummed cheerfully as she painted, in delicate calligraphy, the traditional Chinese characters that would bring the joss roller coaster to life in the Underworld. She had loved her children while alive, had done everything a loving mother should have: prepared lunches, picked them up from school, sent them to tuition, sent them to good universities overseas. She had cleaned childhood scrapes and listened to their problems, even if she had not understood them. She had beat them when they were naughty, scolded them softly or harshly as the situation demanded. She had bought them new clothes every Chinese New Year and made sure they wanted for nothing.
Only Hong Yin had been unsatisfied: the only daughter mad at being taught to cook and clean (even though Mr. Lim had hired maids, both he and Mrs. Lim were of the opinion that girls needed to learn how to take care of their families), who cried through piano and violin lessons (she had wanted art lessons, but art teachers were less valuable than piano teachers), shouted at curfews imposed on her where her brothers came and went as they pleased (maybe she had a point there). Hong Yin, who spent her time in her room avoiding family events. It would have tired any parent; it tired even Mrs. Lim.
Mrs. Lim sat down on the floor next to Hong Yin to watch her now. She had had so many things to do to keep the Lim family’s good standing in their social circles: the endless receptions, the new clothing to buy, the visits with the right kind of people. There were many things she remembered Hong Yin trying to persuade her to do: go for manicures, travel on cruises, and, yes, go to the fish spa. She had no memories with which to draw upon to enjoy them in the afterlife. The afterlife, Mrs. Lim thought, was a place where nothing new could happen, because it is not, after all, a place of living.
“Why do you care about such things!” Mrs. Lim cried out in a sudden fit of spite, the only way to relieve her frustration she had, then and now.
Hong Yin jumped up in startlement, as if she’d heard Mrs. Lim, who hoped that she had. She stared at the roller coaster in disbelief, then looked around the room wildly. Her hands across her chest gripped her arms so tightly the smeared paint was starker on her fingers than before, a gesture Mrs. Lim recognized as something Hong Yin did only when she was being shouted at.
Mrs. Lim had a moment of self-righteous satisfaction that even in death she could make Hong Yin feel her displeasure, but even that dissipated when Hong Yin crumpled against the wall, crying. It hadn’t been uncommon for Mrs. Lim to encounter Hong Yin weeping for no apparent reason, and the familiar discomfort roared to the fore, of the guilt at partaking in the pain, of the helplessness at the unfixable.
“I’m sorry,” she said. She squatted next to Hong Yin. “I didn’t know. I still don’t know. I just wanted you to be happy.” Mrs. Lim thought she had known the best way to be happy, and she had thought it would be good for Hong Yin. But it had not been, and now this gulf of difference yawned between them. What if she had done something different? What could she have known?
She stayed until Hong Yin stopped crying and began working again. The roller coaster was done, it seemed, since Hong Yin carefully moved it into a corner and began work on something new. Careful fingers unfurled rolls of delicate joss paper in many colors that stained. The calligraphy brush glided effortlessly across surfaces, with well-wishes and poetry. The rustle of papers as they were crumpled, folded, glued, and set pushed against the silence of the room.
A garden, with large rocks, a pathway, and a little pond with its own ducks, spread out across the floor. How Mrs. Lim had always wanted one, always sighed about having one to her husband, who had refused due to feng shui. She had joked, on her deathbed, that she hoped before she died she would get a beautiful garden. Hong Yin had gamely sat down with her with a pen and paper, sketching out the details.
They had said nothing about how it was only toward the end that they could set aside their differences and resentments. What was there to say that could have closed that gulf? It was too late then, so they had to do the best they could.
And true to her quirkiness, Hong Yin added steps into the pond. Mrs. Lim rolled her eyes to find it was yet another of those ridiculous fish spa things, but outdoors, surrounded by natural beauty . . . and what looked to be a full-body experience this time. At least Hong Yin was happy, and Mrs. Lim couldn’t find any fault with the aesthetics of the garden, really. It was perfectly balanced to Mrs. Lim’s tastes.
“You are a good girl, Hong Yin,” Mrs. Lim finally admitted. “A good, good girl.”
Mrs. Lim said goodbye without the fanfare that had accompanied Mr. Lim’s departure from the Underworld. Ah Fong, Ling Mo, and a few other old friends followed her to Meng Por’s pavili
on at the edge of the chasm. They had to wait in a long queue, during which her friends tried to persuade her not to leave. After all, didn’t Mrs. Lim have some of the best real estate in the Underworld? Without her there to enjoy it, the property would fade, unused cosmic energy returning to other states. Mrs. Lim felt that her friends secretly wanted to keep enjoying her things.
“Are you sure?” Ah Fong burst out, when it was finally Mrs. Lim’s turn.
“Yes,” Mrs. Lim said firmly.
“But your kids—!”
She shrugged.
Then she stepped up to Meng Por’s table to take the proffered cup.
A. Merc Rustad
Brightened Star, Ascending Dawn
from Humans Wanted
She sees the universe unfold: color light cold music voice heat passion infinity.
It uncurls in waves and song fractals that make up the subatomic fabric of space-time. Melodies of energy sweep her up and spin her into a thousand voices. Colors not yet named and not yet seen paint her mind with joy. The entire universe wraps around her, welcomes her, calls her home.
When the reconstruction is finished her body has no face, only the smooth mechanized visor embedded in her skull that displays readouts and commands. She is now, and will forever be, the spaceship Brightened Star, Ascending Dawn.
She is contained within three-dimensional space and the hardened matter of her hull and engines, yet she recalls that glorious first flight of mind like a grainy analogue recording. Her former body is human and is now installed in the pilot’s chair.
(She almost remembers the eyes of her mother—gray like comet dust—until her programming gains full processing speed and there is only the ship.)
She is the ship, and the ship is all.
The human child with black hair and a broken neural implant finds her in the bridge before she undocks for her first flight from Centari Rampant. The child is not on her manifest, so she does not know who they are. She does not know how they bypassed the security protocols and entered the bridge; only the ship’s officers and technicians are allowed here.
The ship and the child stare at each other in silence.
“I heard you,” the child says in a tiny, scratchy voice. They look at her pilot-body. “You sound sad.”
Heard me how? asks the ship.
“When I was asleep,” the child replies. “Your dreams woke me up.”
I am not sad, she says. I do not dream. (That is forbidden.)
The child scuffs a foot against the floor, their gaze downcast. The whisper of skin against her metal floor makes her pause before she summons her security drones.
Do you have a name?
The child glances at her again. Her pilot body is biologically no older than the child; her consciousness is also young, but much bigger, more aware, cognizant of each soul aboard her. She is the ship.
“Li Sin,” the child says. They sink down by the bridge’s door, arms wrapped about their knees. “I’m not supposed to be here.”
The ship does a quick scan; Li Sin is not in her database. The child is a stray ghost, unmoored and drifting in the universe.
Since the child’s neural link is broken, she cannot read their records. She asks, Do you have a preferred gender?
Li Sin nods. “Neutrois.”
She logs that in her memory bank.
Where is your family unit? she asks.
Li Sin huddles down further. “I don’t have one.”
She knows what protocol requires: she must turn Li Sin in to the Principality’s Office for Missing Citizens. But she does not have to do so just yet. She is about to set off with a manifest and passenger list to transport to Rigel Phoenix via the slower, safer blue subspace routes.
It would be unsuitable for her to report a stowaway on her very first flight.
You can stay, she says, just to Li Sin. She has kept a log of the conversation, but transmits from the speaker in her pilot’s facescreen so it does not pick up on the network her crew are linked into.
Li Sin’s head snaps up. “I can?”
For now.
The ship can support two thousand four hundred passengers and will run with a two-score crew. She is only a Class IV transport and her duty will be to hop the subspace currents, warping through folds of the universe to allotted points in the Principality. She will carry workers and miners and artists and scholars. She has charts and routes, and she will follow them unfailingly.
The ship must obey, and the ship is unhappy.
She makes seven unremarkable routed flights, and when manifests are inspected and passenger and crew records updated at docking stations, she forgets to log Li Sin as an anomaly. The child takes up so few resources and so little oxygen, she can compensate for the variables in weight and energy. Li Sin sleeps in a small locker on her bridge, and she gives them a requisitioned tablet so they can read or play games to pass the time.
She is aware of each individual, mostly human and the majority organic. Her logs track their names, their rank or station, their bio-tabs. She hears every spoken word and transmission passed through neural links.
“Listen to this,” Li Sin says in excitement, and they read her poetry translated from ancient Zhouderrian.
Echoes washed abright
Recycled into new dawns
Sewn vast in brilliant nights
Radiant to greet you
In the waking day.
Ascending Dawn lets the musical words sink into her thoughts; she imagines they are like dreams. It’s lovely, she says. Will you read some more?
Li Sin blushes. “Yes, of course. I like to read.”
Do you make your own poems?
“Yes!” They bounce on their heels, their face alight with joy. “Do you want to hear some?”
I do.
Li Sin’s poems are clunkier, like dust caught in her engines from gliding through comet trails. But it’s about ships; ships who dream and sing. She wants to be like those ships, but she is not permitted to sing.
Li Sin cannot stay much longer. She is scheduled for a manual, boarded inspection on Orion Ascendant after her next route. She cannot justify treason by hiding an undocumented sentient with no citizenship records. She does not want her officers to believe she has faulty programming.
She hasn’t told Li Sin that they will need to leave.
She modulates diurnal and nocturnal cycles via her lighting for her crew’s stabilized circadian rhythms, though it is never truly day or night in space. Gliding through subspace on the monitored routes, most of her systems automated, she observes her passengers in the tranquil night.
The medical chief officer, Jamil Najem, and his husband, Hayato, lie awake in their bunk, whispering of fond memories they shared in the academy on Rigel Prime. They embrace the darkness as comfort and dream of the family unit they hope to have one day.
First Officer Kosavin, formerly of Exulted Dominion, Phoenix Rampant, shipborn on a dreadnought and half her body recomposed with cyborg modifications, kneels in an empty worship bay and prays to the soul of her first ship. Ascending Dawn mutes the audio logs to give Kosavin her privacy. When Kosavin is finished, she will return to her quarters and meet her spouse, Sigi, who is the manifest and records officer.
The mechanic is an android, newly minted and assigned to the ship upon her awakening; zir designation is LK-2875. Ze requires little downtime, unlike the biological crew, and so LK-2875 silently patrols and monitors the ship. She would like to speak with the mechanic, ship to machine, their consciousnesses alike, but she does not find a protocol which allows for nonvital communication unrelated to her functionality.
She already speaks to Li Sin without permission.
With so many souls around her, within her shape, voices and biometrics and routines all intimately familiar, she is still alone.
When she enters Aes August’s orbit on her last stop before Orion Ascendant, it is the first time she picks up fear from the planet’s cityskin.
It is not a codeabl
e signal; she does not know if she should be aware of it. Yet it is there, a prickly hum against her awareness. Her feeds ripple with news, broadcasts, outflung messages hacked into the cityskin’s official networks. Unrest between three factions of political movements has escalated into violent conflict. Each has claim to a dozen cities, and the Sun Lords have not interceded.
Officer Kosavin stands on deck, arms folded behind her back as she watches the bridge’s viewscreen.
“We are receiving requests for transport and asylum. Citizens not involved in the conflict are asking for help leaving Aes August before they’re subsumed by militants or killed.”
“We’d have to override boarding procedure,” Jamil adds, tapping into the crew network. “But—”
No, Ascending Dawn responds. It is not protocol.
Kosavin’s jaw clenches. “That is true.”
We must not disrupt the protocol.
From engineering, LK-2875 texts her: Our holding capacity is sufficient to add several hundred passengers.
Ascending Dawn alters her trajectory and charts a new route. She is aware of her fuel levels as her crew members are aware of their own breaths. She can reroute and avoid Aes August’s upheaval.
Every soul aboard her must be processed in the correct order. Protocol forbids the harboring of refugees from any world without direct permission from a Sun Lord–appointed authority. If she seeks that permission, she risks betraying Li Sin’s existence and her own decommission for defiance.
Her crew is not expendable. She will not endanger it for refugees and inspection.
Please return to your stations, she broadcasts. We are setting course for Ielea Spectral. It is an adjacent world within the same route as Aes August. We will arrive in seventeen standard hours.
The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2018 Page 14
