The Best Science Fiction of the Year: 1

by Unknown

  The similarities seemed obvious in retrospect. Not delirium, but the materialisation of other, less accessible realities; of places in the past or in the future, or nowhere at all.

  Deep spaces. Mindships.

  Que Tu hesitated for a while. Then she closed her eyes, and wrote in a strong, decisive hand—she could have composed her report in the communal network, or even on her own implants, but she’d got used to the unreliability of both, in the age of the plague.

  I think the order should consider the possibility that Blue Lily originated in deep spaces, and still abides there. The organism responsible for it seems to bear an affinity for mindships; though it would seem it has become capable of infecting them now.

  Her report was short, and to the point; but it would change the world.

  Thich Tim Nghe stands in the past—in the belly of the ship, staring upwards. The heartroom is now a maelstrom of conflicting realities; half into deep spaces already, the mindship’s throne of spikes and thorns all but vanished. Her own reality is wavering around her; the onset of fever—the same fever that killed Cousin Ly, sending her mind wandering into a delirium it never returned from.

  “Vu Thi Xuan Lan,” The Stone and Bronze Shadow whispers, her voice like the boom of thunder on uncharted seas—calling her old name; and not the new one she gave herself—‘Listening Heart’, as if she could make herself wise; could make herself caring and compassionate.

  “Ship,” she whispers. She’s shivering—holding onto reality only with an effort, and even then she can’t be sure that this is real, that the ship is real— looming large over her while the walls of the heartroom recede into nothingness and shadows like those of nightmares start moving in the darkness—far away like bleeding stars, and then closer and closer, questing hounds, always there no matter where she turns her head...

  “Why?” The Stone and Bronze Shadow twists; or perhaps it’s the realities around her. “Why come here, child?”

  She—she dragged herself out of her cabin—into corridors twisted out of shape; into air that felt too thick, too hot to breathe, searing her lungs with every tottering step—leaning on the walls and feeling the ship wince under her hands—and trying not to think of the other passengers moaning and tossing within their own cabins, each lost in a Hell of their own—the ones she killed as surely as she killed the ship. “I’m here. Because—”

  She wants to say that she knew when she boarded The Stone and Bronze Shadow—that she’d woken up in her student garret on the evening before she left; shaking off confused nightmares in which Mother screamed for her and she was unable to answer—with sweat encasing her entire body like a shroud. That, as she ran through the spaceport, she felt the growing pains in her arms and legs; and the first bruises, barely visible beneath her dark skin. That she said nothing when she came onboard; because it was nothing, because it had to be nothing; that she needed to get home fast—to be by Mother’s side— that the ship was the only way to do that.

  She didn’t intend to infect the ship, of course—mindships are old and wise, and invulnerable—who had ever heard of one catching Blue Lily? She thought she would keep to her cabin until the journey was over—not passing on a contagion, if there was one—all the while believing that she was fine, that everything would be fine. But, when the first bruises bloomed on the floor of her cabin, she had to accept the inevitable reality—the weight of her guilt and shame—because Mother didn’t raise her to be a coward or a fool.

  She didn’t speak up; and now, days later, it’s much too late for her to speak at all.

  “I—” her tongue trips on the words, swallows them as though they were ashes. “I came because you shouldn’t die alone. Because—”

  She’ll die, too. One chance in two, one chance in three—statistics of Blue Lily, the faceless abacuses of fear and rage and grief. In the intervals between breaths, she can see the shadows, twisting closer and closer, taking on the leering faces of boars and fanged tigers—the demons of the King of Hell, waiting to take her with them.

  The Stone and Bronze Shadow doesn’t move, doesn’t speak—there are just shadows, spreading to cover her entire field of vision, blotting out of existence the watercolours and the scrolling texts; an oily sheen, and a noise in the background like the chittering of ten thousand cockroaches. “It’s kind of you, child,” she says at last. Her voice comes back distorted—like the laughter of careless deities. “Come. Let us face the King of Hell together.”

  It’s been eleven years since that night; but it’s the only place where Thich Tim Nghe can hear the voice of the ship—the last, the greatest of her dead, the weight that she can never cast aside or deny.

  Yen Oanh’s strongest memory of the Sixth Planet isn’t of the ship, or of the sick—she arrived much too late for that, when the paperwork was already done, and the dead buried and propitiated—but of an interview she had with Magistrate Hoa and Que Tu, at the close of Que Tu’s investigation.

  They didn’t know, then, the storm Que Tu’s report would ignite—the back-and-forth of memorials and reports by enraged biologists and civil servants—the angry declarations she was mistaken, that she’d gone into the field branch of the order because she had no competence in science—the Imperial Court itself getting involved; and all the while, the order tearing itself apart while Que Tu struggled to hold her ground.

  Back then, it was still possible to pretend that everything was normal; insofar as anything could be normal, in the age of the plague.

  They sat in Magistrate Hoa’s library—surrounded by both the old-fashioned books on rice paper, and the communal network with its hint of thousands more—and drank tea from celadon cups. Yen Oanh inhaled the soft, flowery fragrance from hers, and tried to forget about her bone-deep weariness—if she closed her eyes, she’d see her last patient: Lao Sen, an old woman whose death-delirium had created a maze of illusions—ghostly figures and landscapes superimposed over the confines of the sickroom until Yen Oanh wasn’t quite sure of what was real, spending an hour talking with a girl who turned into a fox and then melted back into the shadows...

  She’d monitored her vitals since Lao Sen’s death—no change, no fever, nothing that indicated Blue Lily might be within her. She wasn’t sick.

  Not this time; but there was always the next—and the next and the next, an endless chain of the sick and the dying, stretching all the way across the Empire.

  Que Tu was her usual self, withdrawn and abrasive; Magistrate Hoa looked tired, with deep circles under her eyes, and flesh the colour of wet rice paper—showing the shape of her cheekbones in translucency. “Long week?” Yen Oanh asked.

  Magistrate Hoa shrugged. “No worse than usual. There was an outbreak in Long Quang District, in addition to the other seven that I’m currently managing.”

  Que Tu looked up from her report, sharply. “Long Quang. That’s near the spaceport, isn’t it?”

  “Yes.” Magistrate Hoa didn’t speak for a while; but Yen Oanh did.

  “I don’t have much time,” she said. The order had rerouted her from her original destination—a large outbreak of Blue Lily in a minor official’s holiday house on the First Planet—to here, the site of the unimaginable, universe-shattering death. She was meant to take Que Tu’s report back to the order’s headquarters; and all she could focus on was a bed, and some rest; and a place free of the fear of contagion and the bone-deep weariness of staying by sickbeds.

  “You never do have time.” Que Tu said it without aggressiveness. They’d worked together at a couple venues: small hospitals and private sickrooms. Yen Oanh would have liked to believe their presence had made a difference— that the drugs and the care they provided had helped. But, in her heart of hearts, she knew they didn’t. They’d made people more comfortable; had knocked others insensate: a kindness, in their last hours. But it was hard to fight a disease they knew so little about. “But I’m going to need you to pay attention.”

  “Fine,” Yen Oanh said. She took a sip of tea, bracin
g herself for Que Tu’s dry recitation of facts.

  Her colleague surprised her by not doing that. “I want to know what you think.”

  “What I—I barely arrived, Sister.”

  “I know. Bear with me.”

  “I—I don’t know.” Yen Oanh looked at Magistrate Hoa, who was silent. “Plague onboard a mindship isn’t unusual, per se. But the ship... doesn’t usually die.” Mindships were engineered to be all but immortal—all five khi-elements stabilised to grant them long, changeless lives. They didn’t age; they didn’t fall sick. And they didn’t die of Blue Lily.

  “No.”

  Yen Oanh closed her eyes. “We’re dealing with mindship-human contagion, aren’t we?” It wasn’t the shock it should have been, but that was because she’d had time to think it over on the shuttle. Mindships weren’t human, but they were close enough: the Minds were organic constructs modelled on the human body. Diseases could leap from birds to humans, from plants to humans; why not from humans to mindships? “Who fell sick first?”

  Que Tu shook her head. “The ship.” Her lips were two thin, white lines; her tea lay untouched by her side. “But you know the incubation period varies.”

  “Fine,” Yen Oanh said. It was late, she was tired; and she still had a long way to go before she could finally rest—if she got to rest at all. “Just tell me. Please.”

  Que Tu said nothing. It was Magistrate Hoa who spoke, her voice low, but firm. “I think a passenger fell sick first. Given the timeline, they were incubating before they even boarded—showing a few symptoms, perhaps, the more discrete ones. They probably didn’t suspect the danger.”

  “They knew they would contaminate people,” Yen Oanh said, more firmly than she’d expected. How were they meant to check the progress of Blue Lily, if people stubbornly kept insisting on life as usual—taking long journeys in cramped quarters, and congregating in droves at the temples and teahouses? Could no one think beyond themselves, for once?

  “Oanh. . . .”

  “You know it’s true.”

  “And I know you’re being too harsh.”

  Yen Oanh exhaled; thinking of all the sick—all the rooms in which she’d sat, trying to decide if more saline solution or more ginseng and cinnabar would make a difference; entering the Communion and comparing the patient’s symptoms with the experience of others in the Cedar and Crane, seeking whether anyone’s remedies had made a difference. “No. I’m trying to be realistic. Trying to. . . .” She closed her hands into fists. “There are too many dead. You can’t expect me to rejoice when people get deliberately infected.”

  Que Tu grimaced. Too harsh again; but then wasn’t it the truth? The disease wasn’t going to burn itself out—not while there still were warm bodies to infect.

  “We don’t know how the sickness is passed on.” Que Tu snorted. “Not with enough certainty.”

  “Well, you can count that as new data,” Yen Oanh said, warily.

  “All I have is in the report; I expect the order’s research labs will have plenty to work with. The place will be swarming with their teams before we’re through.” Que Tu set down her cup, and looked at the bookshelves, her face set.

  “You said ‘a passenger,’” Yen Oanh said. “You know which one.”

  Magistrate Hoa turned, to look at Que Tu; but Que Tu said nothing.

  “One of the dead?”

  Still nothing. One of the living, then; which left only two—and she didn’t think Que Tu was going to be moved by a twenty-year-old boy, no matter how pretty he might have been. “The girl in the heartroom.”

  “Yes,” Magistrate Hoa said, at last.

  “Where is she?”

  “She wouldn’t leave the ship,” Que Tu said. “Word came through when we were processing the corpses—her mother died of Blue Lily, six days ago. Oanh...”

  Yen Oanh knew what Que Tu would say—that the girl was young and lost, barely confident enough after her ordeal—that she needed reassurance. “She knew.”

  “You can’t know that for sure,” Magistrate Hoa said. Her face was set. “I certainly wouldn’t prosecute her on that basis.”

  “Fine,” Yen Oanh said, keeping her gaze on Que Tu. “Then look me in the eye and swear that she didn’t know.”

  “I—” Que Tu started; and then stopped, her teeth white against the lividness of her lips, as if she were out in glacial cold. “I can’t tell you that.”

  “Then tell me what you suspect.”

  Que Tu was silent. Then: “I think the incubation time is shorter in mind-ships. Or that symptoms are more visible because they’re so large, who knows. Will you talk to her, Oanh?”

  “And tell her what?”

  “Comfort her,” Que Tu said. “She’s thirteen years old, for Heaven’s sake. This requires a deft touch; and we both know I don’t have it. Whereas you— you were always good with people.”

  Comforting the sick and the dying; keeping them on the razor’s edge of hope, no matter how much of a lie it turned out to be. Yen Oanh took a deep breath; thought, for a moment, of what she would tell a thirteen-year-old about consequences; of the lessons learnt in months of sickrooms and ministering to the dead—of the stomach-churning fear that it would be her that fell sick next; that she’d have to lock herself in, and pray that someone from the order came, so she wouldn’t have to die alone. That anyone would choose to pass this much agony, this much fear onto others. . . . “She killed people, Que Tu. She killed a ship. She’s old enough to know better. Besides, she’s fortunate—she’s alive.”

  Que Tu said nothing, for a while. Then she shook her head. “It’s not always good fortune to survive, is it? Forget I asked.” Her voice was emotionless, her face a careful mask—and that should have been the end of it; but of course it wasn’t.

  “I remember that evening,” Que Tu said to Yen Oanh. Within the Communion, she was smaller and less impressive than Yen Oanh remembered; though her anger could still have frozen waterfalls. “When I asked you to talk to the girl.”

  Yen Oanh said nothing.

  “It wasn’t much to give her, but you didn’t.”

  “I couldn’t lie.” Yen Oanh has had this conversation before: not with Que Tu, but with her own treacherous conscience. What would have happened, if she had been less tired; less overwrought? Would she still have judged Thich Tim Nghe’s actions to be a crime, would she still have blithely moved on? “And do you truly think I would have made a difference?”

  Que Tu’s smile was bitter, but she didn’t answer. She didn’t need to: it wasn’t the answer that mattered. It wasn’t whether Yen Oanh would have made a difference, but that she hadn’t even tried.

  “We’re here, Grandmother,” Hue Mi said.

  Startled, Yen Oanh looked up from the Communion, Que Tu and the others fading into insignificance; and saw a door in front of her, adorned with faded calligraphy—it seemed like she should be able to read the words, but she couldn’t. The swirl of realities was strongest here; that crawling, disorienting sense that she hadn’t been meant to be here; a sheen like oil or soap over everything; and shadows that were too long, or too short—turning, stretching, watching her and biding their time. . . .

  It was no longer the time of Blue Lily; and this was no longer a sickroom.

  A young man was waiting for them, carrying a white cloth which he handed to Yen Oanh. “Put this on. She’s waiting for you.”

  Mourning clothes; or novice’s robes—Yen Oanh wasn’t sure, anymore.

  “Grandmother?” Hue Mi’s voice, in a tone that Yen Oanh couldn’t quite interpret.

  “Yes?”

  “Why are you here?”

  “What do you mean?”

  Hue Mi smiled, and didn’t answer—her arms folded in barely appropriate respect. “To change things,” Yen Oanh said, finally. She’d never been able to lie; as Que Tu well knew.

  “You knew the ship,” Hue Mi said.

  “No. I’m not her family, and I never saw her before. . . .” She closed her eyes, feeli
ng the weight of years; of decisions made in haste. “Your teacher changed the world,” she said. Because she boarded The Stone and Bronze Shadow. Because Que Tu made her report—because Professor Luong Thi Da Linh’s teams read it, and finally isolated the virus responsible for Blue Lily, giving the Empire the vaccine they so desperately needed. Because it was all the small things that bore fruit; all the insignificant acts put together, at the close of one’s existence.

  One of these insignificant acts was Yen Oanh’s; and it had destroyed a life.

  “She needs to know,” Yen Oanh said, finally. “I want to tell her—” It was a truth; what she could give Thich Tim Nghe in all honesty; in the hope that it would get her out of the ship’s corpse; that it would atone for Yen Oanh’s mistake, allow Thich Tim Nghe to build a life again.

  “My teacher changes lives.” Hue Mi sounded mildly amused. “She lays the past to rest. She gives hope. But the world? Don’t grant her powers she doesn’t have.”

  Yen Oanh didn’t. She knew that, deep within Thich Tim Nghe, there was a frightened girl; a thirteen-year-old still carrying her own dead. “I want to help her.”

  Hue Mi sounds amused, again. “She doesn’t need your help.”

  Even outside the Communion, Yen Oanh knew what Que Tu would say. We don’t get what we deserve, or even what we need.

  The door opened slowly, agonizingly slowly; revealing the heartroom—not much that Yen Oanh could see, amidst the swirling of deep spaces; the tight smell of ozone and incense mingled together; fragments of faces mottled with bruises; of eyes frozen in death; of children running and screaming, overlaid with the shadow of death. . . .

  And, in the midst of it, Thich Tim Nghe, turning towards her, stately and slow; and then startled, as if she’d seen something in Yen Oanh’s face: she wasn’t the girl of Yen Oanh’s nightmares; not the emaciated child from Que Tu’s report; not the rake-thin ascetic from the vids Yen Oanh had gleaned online; but a grown woman with circles under her eyes like bruises—as if she still had Blue Lily.

  And Yen Oanh realised, then, that she was wrong: this was a sickroom; and that this was still the time of Blue Lily; not only for Thich Tim Nghe, but also for her.