The Best Science Fiction of the Year: 1

by Unknown

  Grandmother. How had she got so old? But then Yen Oanh knew the answer: twenty years of marriage, and another few decades in the Crane and Cedar order, dispatched across the numbered planets to check the spread of the Blue Lily plague in sickhouses and hospitals and private dwellings across the breadth of the Empire, from cramped compartments on the capital to the luxurious mansions of the First Planet, from those who could afford the best care to those who couldn’t.

  Fifty-six years—and only one regret.

  “We don’t often get visitors at this time of the year,” Hue Mi was saying. She was looking at the mass of the ship, looming ever larger in the viewscreen— normally it would be a private display on each passenger’s implants, but Yen Oanh had asked her to make it public.

  “Oh?” Yen Oanh kept her eyes on the ship. The Stone and Bronze Shadow had been small by modern standards. As they approached the sleek hull vanished from view, replaced by a profusion of details: the shadow of a pagoda on the prow; the red fan surrounding the docking bays, and then only splashes of colours on metal, with a faint tinge of oily light. “The order has been here before.” Twice, in fact. She could feel both Sister Que Tu and Brother Gia Minh in the Communion—not saying anything, but standing by, ready to provide her with the information she needed.

  And Yen Oanh had been there too, of course—briefly, but long enough.

  Hue Mi’s face was a closed book. “Of course.” In the communal network— overlaid over Yen Oanh’s normal vision—her hand was branded with the mark of the order, a crane perched in the branches of a cedar tree. Vaccinated, then, but it wasn’t a surprise. Everyone was, those days; and it would have been Yen Oanh’s duty to remedy this (and impose a heavy fine), if it hadn’t been the case. “It was . . . different back then, I’m told.”

  “Very different,” Yen Oanh said. People dying by the hundreds, the Empire and the newly founded order foundering to research a cure or a vaccine or both, the odour of charnel houses in the overcrowded hospitals; and the fear, that sickening feeling that every bruise on your skin was a symptom, a precursor to all the ones blossoming like flowers on the skin; to the fever and the delirium and the slow descent into death.

  At least, now it was controlled.

  Hue Mi didn’t answer; Yen Oanh realised that she was standing still, her eyes slightly out of focus; the contours of her body wavering as though she were no longer quite there—and that the colours on the viewscreen had frozen. A seizure. She hid them well; she’d had another one in the time Yen Oanh had been with her.

  Yen Oanh’s own seizures—like Hue Mi’s, a side effect of the vaccine— were small, and short enough that she could disguise them as access to the Communion; not as bad or as long as the fits that had characterised the plague, the warping of realities that stretched over entire rooms, dragging everyone into places where human thoughts couldn’t remain coherent for long.

  Yen Oanh waited for Hue Mi’s seizure to be over; all the while, the ship was getting closer—closer to the heartroom. Closer to Thich Tim Nghe.

  She didn’t want to think about Thich Tim Nghe now.

  At length, Hue Mi came back into focus, and opened her eyes; the viewscreen abruptly showed the docking bay coming into view, permanently open, with the death of the Mind that had controlled the ship. “We’re here now,” she said.

  Yen Oanh couldn’t help herself. “What did you see?” It was borderline impolite, made only possible because she was much older than Hue Mi, and because she was Crane and Cedar.

  Hue Mi nodded—she didn’t seem to mind. Possibly her teacher was even more impolite than Yen Oanh. “I was older. And back on the planet, watching children run to a pagoda.” She shrugged. “It means nothing.”

  It didn’t. The visions of Blue Lily came from the mind being partially dragged into deep spaces, where time and space took on different significances. Different realities, that was all; not predictions of the future.

  Except, of course, for Thich Tim Nghe. Yen Oanh forced a smile she didn’t feel. “Your teacher does it differently, doesn’t she?”

  Hue Mi grimaced. “Thich Tim Nghe doesn’t get seizures. It’s . . . you’ll see, if you make it there.”

  “If?”

  “Most people don’t like being onboard.”

  No. She hadn’t thought it would be so easy, after all; that Thich Tim Nghe would be so readily accessible. “Brother Gia Minh?” she asked.

  The Communion rose, to enfold her; a room with watercolours of star-scapes and mountains, the walls of which seemed to stretch on forever—the air crisp and tangy, as if she stood just on the edge of winter—and the shadowy shapes of a hundred, of a thousand brothers and sisters who had gifted their simulacrums to the Cedar and Crane order, their memories of all the Blue Lily cases they’d seen.

  Brother Gia Minh was young—perhaps as young as Hue Mi—wearing not the robes of the order, but the clothes of a poor technician, his hands moving as if he were still controlling bots. “Sister,” he said, bowing—then frowning. “You’re on the ship. The dead one.”

  “Yes,” Yen Oanh said. “I need you to tell me what happened, when you were last here.”

  Brother Gia Minh grimaced, but he waved a hand; and the room faded, to be replaced with the arid surface of the Sixth Planet. “Eleven years ago,” he whispered.

  Eleven years ago, Gia Minh was called because he was nearest; and because he could handle bots—he was barely more than a child then, and not yet a member of the Cedar and Crane; merely a frightened boy with the shadow of Blue Lily hovering over him like a suspended sword.

  He’d seen the ship, of course. It was hard to ignore as it slowly materialised above the planet—not all in one go, as he’d seen other mindships do, but flickering in and out of existence, as if not quite sure whether to remain there, as if it still had parts stuck in the deep spaces mindships used for travel. As if...

  He hadn’t dared to complete the thought, of course. But when he’d boarded the ship with Magistrate Hoa and the militia, it came to him again. The corridors felt wrong—he wasn’t sure why, until he ran a hand on the walls, and found them cool, with none of the warm, pulsating rhythm he’d expected. The words in Old Earth characters should have scrolled down, displaying the poetry the ship loved, but they’d frozen into place; some of them already fading, some of them—

  There were marks, on the wall—faded, dark ones, like giant fingerprints smudging characters.

  “Magistrate,” he whispered.

  Magistrate Hoa was watching them too, her eyes wide in the weary oval of her face. “It can’t be.”

  Bruises. All over the walls and the floor and everywhere his gaze rested— and that uncanny coldness around them; and faint reflections on the edge of his field of vision—the characteristic delirium, the images and visions that spilled out from the sick to everyone else present.

  “Plague,” he whispered. “This ship died of Blue Lily.” But mindships didn’t die of Blue Lily; they didn’t die at all—shouldn’t even fall sick unless they were countless centuries old, far beyond what mortals could remember. . . .

  Magistrate Hoa’s face didn’t even move. “Gear,” she said, to one of the militia. “No one is going any further until we are suited.”

  Gia Minh wanted to ask why she’d have gear onboard the shuttle, but of course he knew—all the sick and the dying and the dead, the houses that had become charnels and temples to fear; Seventh Uncle, lying in a room no one dared to enter for fear of sharing his final delirium, the disjointed hints of ghosts and demons, the shadows that turned and stretched and saw you; Cousin Nhu, too young to talk, whimpering until she had no voice left. . . .

  “We’ll have one for you,” Magistrate Hoa said. “Don’t worry.”

  But of course they were already contaminated, possibly—or worse. No one knew how Blue Lily was contracted, or how it spread—breath or touch or fluids, or Heaven knew what. Everyone knew the Empire was foundering; its doctors and apothecaries overwhelmed, its hospitals overcrowde
d, and still no cure or vaccine for the disease.

  The gear was heavy, and as warm as a portable glasshouse. As they went deeper into those cold, deserted corridors, Gia Minh caught the first hints of the mindship’s delirium—a glimpse of something with far too many legs and arms to be human, running just out of sight; of an older woman bending towards a fountain, in the light of a dying sun. . . .

  Everywhere silence; that uncanny stillness; and a feeling of being watched by far too many eyes; and the sense that the universe was holding its breath. “They’re all dead,” he said; and then he heard the weeping.

  Thich Tim Nghe watches her attendant Vo clean the heartroom; tidying up the cloths wrapped around the empty throne where the Mind once rested.

  “There’s someone coming?” she asks.

  Vo nods. “She’s with Hue Mi now.” He’s a teenager, but he still has ghosts with him—flickering realities around him, the shadows of his own dead, of his own losses—he’s never had Blue Lily, but it doesn’t matter. The virus left its mark on him all the same, through the vaccine he received as a child. Thich Tim Nghe could reach out, and pick images like so many strands of straw from a child’s hair; could disentangle the skeins of his past and follow them forward into his future; tell him if he will find what he has lost; or what he needs to do to regain the happiness of his childhood, before his uncle left his aunt and tore two households apart.

  But Vo has never asked her to see into his future. He knows the cost of it. She gives people what they need, not what they want; and she does it, not to impress people, but to atone, even though there is no atonement for what she has done. To lay the dead to rest, even though they are not her dead; to give hope, even though she has none to share.

  She has helped a scholar find the grave of her lost love; whispered to a bots-handler the words he needed to grasp a career-changing opportunity and leave the planet where his daughters are buried; told a painter when and how to meet his future wife, to found the family he so bitterly missed—given so many things to so many people, a countless chain of the living freed from the weight of the past.

  She doesn’t know why she has those powers; though she suspects that it’s the ship, the death that they almost shared; the deep spaces that still remain accessible onboard, even though The Stone and Bronze Shadow has since long departed.

  It doesn’t matter.

  Her own future doesn’t exist. There is only the past—she watched Mother die, shivering and wasting away while Thich Tim Nghe was still onboard the dying ship; and saw Sixth Aunt’s face change and harden—if she were still alive, she would have cut Thich Tim Nghe off, but she’s dead too, touched by Blue Lily—her face curiously slack and expressionless, all the bitterness smoothed away under the bruises; and Thich Tim Nghe doesn’t know, anymore, what to think about it; if she should weep and grieve, or if she’s simply grown too numb under the weight of her litany of losses to care.

  There is no happiness for her, and no future. She’s here now, in the only time and place that make sense to her; and Sixth Aunt’s voice is within the chorus of the dead—and Mother is dead too, forever lost to her, her only presence in memories that are too raw and too painful—limned with the bitter knowledge that Thich Tim Nghe will miss her; that, at the one time in her life when Mother would have had need of her, she won’t be there.

  She closes her eyes—and steps away, into the past.

  “She was in the heartroom,” Gia Minh said to Yen Oanh—the images of the past fading, replaced by the room of the Communion—everything was suffused with a warm, red light: a shade that was no doubt meant to be reassuring, but which reminded Yen Oanh of nothing so much as freshly spilled blood. “Wrapped around the connectors of the Mind as though it was a lifeline. Covered in Blue Lily bruises.” He shivered. “I don’t even know how she survived.”

  Who knew, Yen Oanh thought, but didn’t say. They might have a vaccine; and a better understanding of Blue Lily; but survival in those first few years had been left to Heaven’s Will. The younger and fitter people had more chance, obviously; and Thich Tim Nghe had been young—thirteen, a child still.

  And The Stone and Bronze Shadow had been dead. Quite unmistakably so—a miracle that she had survived far enough to exit deep spaces; to deliver her cargo and passengers to the Sixth Planet, even though it hadn’t been her scheduled route.

  In the end, there had been only two survivors: Thich Tim Nghe and an older boy, twenty years or so, who had walked away with the scars of the disease all over him—back to the Twenty-Third planet, and his decimated family.

  Thich Tim Nghe had not walked away; as Yen Oanh knew all too well.

  “Grandmother?” Yen Oanh tore herself from the Communion, and looked at Hue Mi—who was waiting for her in front of an open door—the arch seemingly leading into darkness. “She’s ready for you now.”

  But Yen Oanh wasn’t ready for her—she never would be, not across several lifetimes.

  She took a deep breath, and stepped into the corpse of the ship.

  Inside, it was dark and cool; with that same feeling Gia Minh had had— he’d described it, but there was no way to get it across—that disquieting sense that someone—something—was watching. Normally it would be The Stone and Bronze Shadow, making sure that everything was right onboard— controlling everything from the ambient music to the temperature of the different sections—but The Stone and Bronze Shadow was dead. And yet. . . .

  “You feel it,” Hue Mi said. Her smile was tight; her eyes bruised—not the Blue Lily bruises, but close enough, something that seemed to leech all colour from her skin—until it was stretched as thin and as fragile as the inner membrane of an egg—until a careless finger pressure or a slight sharp breath were all it would take to break it.

  “It’s almost as though it’s still alive.” There were tales, on the planets; of the unburied dead, the ones without children to propitiate them, the hungry, needy dead roaming the fields and cities without surcease. But The Stone and Bronze Shadow had had a family—she remembered seeing them, remembered their wan faces; the sheer shock that a ship should have died—the same shock they’d all felt.

  Hue Mi was walking ahead, in a darkened corridor where doors opened— cabins, probably, the same ones where the passengers had died. Too many ghosts here.

  “There is a shrine, isn’t there?” Yen Oanh asked. There would be, as on all dead ships: a place to leave offerings and prayers, and hope that the soul of The Stone and Bronze Shadow was still looking fondly on them. “May I stop by?”

  Hue Mi nodded, barely hiding her surprise. “This way,” she said.

  The shrine was at a crossroads between five corridors: a simple wooden table (though the wood itself, fine-grained and lustrous, must have come all the way from the outlying planets), framed by two squat incense burners, and a simple offering of six tangerines in a bowl. The smell of incense drifted to Yen Oanh; a reminder of more mundane temples, cutting through the unease she felt.

  She stood in front of the altar, and bowed—unsure what she could say, or if she should say anything at all. “It’s been too long,” she said, at last, in a low voice. “I apologise if it’s not what you wanted—and I ask your forgiveness— but eleven years is enough time to grieve.”

  There was no answer; but then Yen Oanh hadn’t expected one.

  “Yen Oanh,” a voice said—from deep within the Communion.

  Que Tu. She ought to have known.

  In the Communion, her friend was unchanged; middle-aged, with the casual arrogance of the privileged, her topknot held in place by thin, elegant hairpins, tapering to the heads of ky lan—she’d worn them eleven years ago, an odd statement to make, the ky lan announcing the arrival of a time of prosperity and peace—nothing like what they had, even now.

  “You’re on the ship,” Que Tu said. It wasn’t a question.

  “Yes,” Yen Oanh said. Que Tu was a living legend by now, of course; though it hadn’t changed her either. “What do you want?”

 
; Que Tu smiled. “Nothing. Just to remind you.”

  Que Tu came to the Sixth Planet because she had once been a biologist, a rarity in the field branch of the Cedar and Crane: most biologists were closeted in the order’s labs, desperately trying to find a cure. She stayed a week; interviewed everyone from Gia Minh to the survivors on the ship, and retreated to Magistrate Hoa’s library to compile her report.

  Her most vivid memory is of an evening there—sitting at the foot of a watercolour of temples on a mountain and trying to pretend she was back at the order’s headquarters on the First Planet; working on reports and statistics that couldn’t touch or harm her.

  She considered the evidence, for a while: the bruises on the ship; the bruises on the humans. The countless dead—there was no need for her to write the obvious, but she did, anyway.

  Human-mindship contagion.

  No one knew how Blue Lily was passed on, or had managed to isolate the organism responsible for it. Only the obvious had been eliminated: that it wasn’t food, or sexual contact. Airborne or skin contact, quite possibly; except that outbreaks had happened outside of any contact with the sick—as if there had been a spontaneous generation, which was impossible.

  Que Tu sipped her tea, and thought on the rest of what she knew. What she’d gleaned from the Communion—the detailed database of the order’s memories, available to her at a moment’s glance.

  The inexplicable outbreaks, many of which bore some connection to mindships.

  The symptoms of Blue Lily: the fever, the bruises, the delirium that seemed to be contagious—but only until the person died or the attendants contracted Blue Lily—as if all the visions were linked to the sick, or the sickness itself.

  Deep spaces: the alternate realities explored by mindships to facilitate space journeys. Most people in the Empire knew deep spaces as a shortcut which avoided months or years on a hibernation ship. But they were more than that—places where time and space, compressed and stretched, had become inimical to human life.