“Maybe she worked for someone else, Mr. Nelson, like UPI, or maybe the Post-Dispatch? I hope I’m not scooped again. I wouldn’t be surprised, with the Spielberg picture coming out and all.”
I turned to focus on him for the first time. “Where is Enceladus, anyway?”
“I beg your pardon?”
I said it again, moving my lips all cartoony, like he was deaf.
“I, well, I don’t know, sir. I’m not familiar with it.”
I thought a spell. “I do believe,” I said, half to myself, “it’s one a them Saturn moons.” To jog my memory, I made a fist of my right hand and held it up—that was Saturn—and held up my left thumb a ways from it, and moved it back and forth, sighting along it. “It’s out a ways, where the ring gets sparse. Thirteenth? Fourteenth, maybe?”
He just goggled at me. I gave him a sad look and shook my head and said, “You don’t know much, if that’s what you know, and that’s a fact.”
He cleared his throat. “Anyway, Mr. Nelson, as I was saying, I’m interviewing all the contactees I can find, like George Van Tassel, and Orfeo Angelucci—”
“Yes, yes, and Truman Bethurum, and them,” I said. “She talked to all them, too.”
“Bethurum?” he repeated. He flipped through his notebook. “Wasn’t he the asphalt spreader, the one who met the aliens atop a mesa in Nevada?”
“Yeah, that’s the one.”
He looked worried now. “Um, Mr. Nelson, you must have misunderstood her. Truman Bethurum died in 1969. He’s been dead eight years, sir.”
I stood there looking at the rhododendron and seeing the pretty face and round hat, hearing the singsong voice, like she had learned English from a book.
I turned and went into the house, let the screen bang shut behind, didn’t bother to shut the wood door.
“Mr. Nelson?”
My chest was plumb hot now. I went straight to the junk room, yanked on the light. Everything was spread out on the floor where I left it. I shoved aside Marilyn, all the newspapers, pawed through the books.
“Mr. Nelson?” The voice was coming closer, moving through the house like a spooklight.
There it was: Aboard a Flying Saucer, by Truman Bethurum. I flipped through it, looking only at the pictures, until I found her: dark hair, big dark eyes, sharp chin, round hat. It was old Truman’s drawing of Captain Aura Rhanes, the sexy Space Sister from the planet Clarion who visited him eleven times in her little red-and-black uniform, come right into his bedroom, so often that Mrs. Bethurum got jealous and divorced him. I had heard that old Truman, toward the end, went out and hired girl assistants to answer his mail and take messages just because they sort of looked like Aura Rhanes.
“Mr. Nelson?” said young Ketchum, standing in the doorway. “Are you okay?”
I let drop the book, stood, and said, “Doing just fine, son. If you’ll excuse me? I got to be someplace.” I closed the door in his face, dragged a bookcase across the doorway to block it, and pulled out Miss Rhanes’ card, which was almost too hot to touch. No writing on it, neither, only a shiny silver surface that reflected my face like a mirror—and there was something behind my face, something a ways back inside the card, a moving silvery blackness like a field of stars rushing toward me, and as I stared into that card, trying to see, my reflection slid out of the way and the edges of the card flew out and the card was a window, a big window, and now a door that I moved through without stepping, and someone out there was playing a single fiddle, no dance tune but just a-scraping along slow and sad as the stars whirled around me, and a ringed planet was swimming into view, the rings on edge at first but now tilting toward me and thickening as I dived down, the rings getting closer, dividing into bands like layers in a rock face, and then into a field of rocks like that no-earthly-good south pasture, only there was so many rocks, so close together, and then I fell between them like an ant between the rocks in a gravel driveway, and now I was speeding toward a pinpoint of light, and as I moved toward it faster and faster, it grew and resolved itself and reshaped into a pear, a bulb, with a long sparkling line extending out, like a space elevator, like a chain, and at the end of the chain the moon became a glowing lightbulb. I was staring into the bulb in my junk room, dazzled, my eyes flashing, my head achy, and the card dropped from my fingers with no sound, and my feet were still shuffling though the fiddle had faded away. I couldn’t hear nothing over the knocking and the barking and young Ketchum calling: “Hey, Mr. Nelson? Is this your dog?”
TWO SISTERS IN EXILE
Aliette de Bodard
Aliette de Bodard lives in Paris and writes science fiction in English. She is a computer engineer, a journeyman cook, and a writer. She has been a finalist for the Hugo, Nebula, and John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. Her stories have appeared in Interzone, Clarkesworld, and Asimov’s. Her first book is the novella On a Red Station, Drifting, part of the Xuya continuity, an alternate history in which Asia reached for the stars ahead of Europe. A number of her short stories are set in this universe.
“Two Sisters in Exile” was published in the e-book anthology Solaris 1.5, edited by Ian Whates. This story is also part of the Xuya continuity. There has been an accident, and the sentient ship The Two Sisters in Exile has been killed. De Bodard presents a deep and moving story without a word wasted, a marvel of brevity.
IN SPITE OF her name (an elegant, whimsical female name which meant Perfumed Winter, and a reference to a long-dead poet), Nguyen Dong Huong was a warrior, first and foremost. She’d spent her entire life in skirmishes against the pale men, the feathered clans and the dream-skinners: her first ship, The Tiger Lashes with His Tail, had died at the battle of Bach Nhan, when the smoke-children had blown up Harmony Station and its satellites; her second had not lasted more than a year.
The Tortoise in the Lake was her fourth ship, and they’d been together for five years, though neither of them expected to live for a further five. Men survived easier than ships—because they had armour, because the ships had been tasked to take care of them. Dong Huong remembered arguing with Lady Mieng’s Dreamer, begging the ship to spare itself instead of her; and running against a wall of obstinacy, a fundamental incomprehension that ships could be more important than humans.
For the Northerners, however, everything would be different.
“We’re here,” The Tortoise in the Lake said, cutting across Dong Huong’s gloomy thoughts.
“I can see nothing.”
There came a low rumble, which distorted the cabin around her, and cast an oily sheen on the walls. “Watch.”
Outside, everything was dark. There was only the shadow of The Two Sisters in Exile, the dead ship that they’d been pulling since Longevity Station. It hung in space, forlorn and pathetic, like the corpse of an old woman; although Dong Huong knew that it was huge, and could have housed her entire lineage without a care.
“I see nothing,” Dong Huong said, again. The ground rumbled beneath her, even as her ears popped with pressure—more laughter from The Tortoise in the Lake, even as the darkness of space focused and narrowed—became the shadow of wings, the curve on vast surfaces—the hulls of two huge ships flanking them; thin, sharp, like a stretch of endless walls—making The Tortoise in the Lake seem small and insignificant, just as much as Dong Huong herself was small and insignificant in comparison to her own ship.
A voice echoed in the ship’s vast rooms, harsh and strong, tinged with the Northerners’ dialect, but still as melodious as declaimed poetry. “You wished to speak to us. We are here.”
* * *
ALL DONG HUONG knew about Northerners were dim, half-remembered snatches of family stories that were almost folk-tales: the greater, stronger part of the former Dai Viet Empire; the pale-skinned people of the outer planets, a civilisation of graceful cities and huge habitats, of wild gardens on mist-filled hillsides, of courtly manners and polished songs.
She was surprised, therefore, by the woman who disembarked onto The Tortoise in the Lake. Rong A
nh was indeed paler than she was under her makeup, but otherwise ordinary looking: though very young, barely old enough to have bonded to a ship in Nam society, she bore herself with a poise any warrior would have envied. “You have something for us.”
Dong Huong made a gesture, towards the walls of the room; the seething, ever-shifting mass of calligraphy; the fragments of poems, of books, of sutras, a perpetual reminder of the chaos underpinning the universe. “I … apologise,” she said at last. “I’ve come to bring one of your ships back to you.” To appease them, her commander had said. To avoid a declaration of war from a larger and more developed empire, a war which would utterly destroy the Nam.
Anh did not move. “I saw it outside. Tell me what happened.”
“It was an accident,” Dong Huong said. The Two Sisters in Exile—a merchant vessel from the Northerners’ vast fleet—had just happened to cross the line of fire at the wrong time. “A military exercise that went wrong. I’m sorry.”
Anh hadn’t moved; but the ceruse on her face looked less and less like porcelain, and more and more like bleached bone. “Our ships don’t die,” she said, slowly.
“I’m sorry,” Dong Huong said, again. “They’re as mortal as anyone, I fear.” The vast majority of attacks on a ship would do little but tear metal: a ship’s vulnerable point was the heartroom, where the Mind that animated it resided. Unlike Nam ships, Northerner ships were large and well shielded; and no pirate had ever managed to hack or pierce their way into a heartroom.
But fate could be mocking, uncaring: as The Two Sisters in Exile passed by Dong Huong’s military exercise, a random lance of fire had gone all the way to the heartroom on an almost impossible trajectory—searing the Mind in its cradle of optics. They’d heard the ship’s Mind scream its pain in deep spaces long after the lance had struck; had stood in stunned silence, knowing that the Mind was dying and that nothing would stop that.
Anh shook her head; looked up after a while, and her mask was back in place, her eyebrows perfectly arched, like moths. “An accident.”
“The people responsible have been … dealt with.” Swiftly, and unpleasantly; and firmly enough to make it clear this would be not tolerated. “I have come to bring the body back, for a funeral. I’m told this is the custom of your people.”
Nam ships and soldiers didn’t get a funeral, or at least not one that was near a planet. They lay frozen where they had fallen—stripped of all vital equipment, the cold of space forever preserving them from decay, a permanent monument; a warning to anyone who came; a memory of glory, which the spirits of the dead could bask into all the way from Heaven. It would be Dong Huong’s fate; The Tortoise in the Lake’s fate, in a few years or perhaps more if Quan Vu, God of War, saw fit to extend His benevolence to them both. Dong Huong had few expectations.
“It is our custom.” Anh inclined her head. Her eyes blinked, minutely: it looked as if she was engaged elsewhere, perhaps communicating with her own ships. “We will bring her back where she was born, and bury her with the blessing of her descendants. You will come.”
It wasn’t a question, or even an invitation; but an order. “Of course,” Dong Huong said. She hesitated, then said, “The military exercise was under my orders. If you want to clear my blood debt…”
Anh paused, halfway through one of the ship’s dilating doors. “Blood debt?” Her head moved up, a fraction, making her seem almost inhuman. “What would we do with your life?”
Take it as a peace offering, Dong Huong thought, biting her tongue. She couldn’t say it; she’d been forbidden. Never admit what you’d come from; say just what was needed. Admit your guilt but say nothing about your hopes, lest they betray you as everything in life was bound to do.
“Did you know her?” she asked.
Anh did not move. At long last, still not looking at Dong Huong, she said, “She was of my lineage.”
“Kin to you,” Dong Huong said, unsure of the implications. Minds were borne within a human womb before being implanted in their ships: this made them part of a lineage, as much as human children.
“Yes,” Anh said. “I’ve known her since I was a child.” Her hand had clenched on the wall; but she walked away without saying anything more.
* * *
AFTER ANH HAD gone, Dong Huong opened her usual book of poetry, one of the only treasures she’d brought on board the ship. But the words blurred in her eyesight, slid away from her comprehension like raindrops on polished jade; and, rather than bringing her peace as they always did, the poems only frustrated her.
Instead, she turned off the lights, and lay back in the darkness, thinking of Xuan and Hai—of their faces, frozen in the instant before she ordered The Tortoise in the Lake to fire, and transfixed them as surely as their ships had transfixed The Two Sisters in Exile—she saw them, falling, fading from her ship’s views—leaving nothing but the memory of their shocked gazes, weighing her, accusing her.
She’d had to do it. Quickly, decisively, as she’d done everything in life; as she’d parted from her husband when he failed to uphold the family’s honour; as she’d forged her path in the military, never looking back, never regretting. And, as she’d told Anh, the matter had been closed: the perpetrators punished, order and law upheld, justice dealt out.
But still …
“You’re brooding,” The Tortoise in the Lake said.
Dong Huong said nothing. She felt the weight of her armour on her body; the cold touch of metal on her skin; the solidity of everything around her, from the poetry on the wall to the folded clothes besides her bed. The present, which was the only thing that mattered. “I’m the officer whose crew shot the ship in the first place. By my presence here, I endanger everything,” she said.
“Nonsense.” The room seemed to contract, become warmer and more welcoming, down to the words palpitating on the walls; the ship’s voice grew less distant. “Have you not seen their ships?”
“I have. They’re huge.”
“They’re weaponless.” There was a tinge of contempt in The Tortoise in the Lake’s voice. “Cargo transport, with a little reserve against pirates; but even less well-armed than the smoke-children.”
Dong Huong shivered, in the darkness. “Did you have to pick that example?”
“No,” the ship said, after a while. “You’re right, I didn’t think.”
“I saw her face,” Dong Huong said at last. “She looks young, but doesn’t act like it.”
“Rejuvenation treatments?”
“Among other things.” Dong Huong shivered. The Nam were a small, fractured empire; beset on all sides by enemies. The Northerners, on the other hand … They were large; they hadn’t fought a large-scale war in centuries; and they had had time to develop everything from medical cures to advanced machinery. If they wanted war, the South, for all its warrior heritage, would be badly outgunned and outnumbered.
“They love their peace,” the ship said. “Go to sleep, younger sister. There will be plenty of time in the morning.”
Younger sister. Nothing more than convention by now; though the Mind of her first ship, The Tiger Lashes with His Tail, had shared blood with her: the mother that had borne it in her womb had been a cousin of Dong Huong’s own father.
She did sleep, in the end. In her dreams, she walked in the lineage house again: on ochre ground, amidst cacti and shrunken bushes, and shrieking children playing rhyme-games in the courtyards. The smell of lemongrass and garlic rose from the kitchens like a balm to her soul, a reminder of the future she was fighting for; of what it meant to safeguard the Empire against its enemies. She saw her aunt, the mother of The Tiger Lashes with His Tail, standing tall and proud—her face unmoving as she learnt of the ship’s fall at Bach Nhan, her eyes dark and dry; as if she’d already wept beforehand.
Surely she had known, or suspected. Ships didn’t live long; but then, neither did human children. They both spread their wings like butterflies, like phoenixes, and ascended into the Heavens with the ancestors, watching ov
er the Nam people. Dong Huong had tried to whisper such platitudes to her aunt; but nothing had come; and in her dreams—which were not real, not a true recollection—she stood looking into her aunt’s eyes, and saw the tears welling up, as black and opaque as ink from a broken brush.
* * *
DONG HUONG DIDN’T come from a family of warriors, but from a very old lineage of scholars, who had turned merchants rather than bond to ships and take up knives and guns. Fifth Uncle, her favourite when she was a child, regularly went to Northern planets; and he would speak to her of Northern wonders, always with the same misty, open-eyed sense of awe. He would remind her that the Northerners hadn’t fallen from grace, that they still remembered the original Dai Viet Empire and its culture that had stretched from one end of the galaxy to another; that they still had literature and poetry about beauty and dreams, and knew a life that wasn’t a succession of one battle after another.
As a child, Dong Huong had drunk those words like tea or sugar cane juice. As an adult, within her combat unit, she had dismissed them. A civilisation that barely knew war would be weak, a stunted, dying flower rather than the magnificent blossoming her relatives described.
But the view beneath her now, as she and Anh descended in a shuttle towards the planet … As vast and as overwhelming as the two Northerner ships that had been her first contact—continents of chrome and verdant trees, sweeping away from her, seas glittering a vivid turquoise, with the glint of ten thousand boats on the waves—and, around them, in the atmosphere, a ballet of ships, as numerous as birds in the skies—a few huge spaceships like her own, carrying a Mind in their heartrooms; and myriad simple shuttle ships, manually driven, that nevertheless wove in and out of each other’s way, dancing like the rhythms of a song, the words of a poem—
“You seem impressed,” Anh said. “Have you never seen a planet?”
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