Leaving them the ruins of Lieu Vuong Tinh—not that they would have known what to do, with the ruins of what had been their home, but still.
Still, it is wrong. Still, it shouldn’t have happened.
“You’re my best two pupils,” Professor Nghe says. “Your aptitude with bots—the creativity you show when designing them . . .” She shakes her head. “But it’s all moot if you can’t at least be civil to each other.”
“I know,” Lan says, sullenly. “But he shouldn’t have rubbed it in my face. Not now.” It’s the anniversary of the Dislocation; soon she will walk home, to Mother’s kitchen and the dumplings filled with bitter roots—to the alignment of aunts and uncles that all seem to be in perpetual mourning, as if some spring within them had broken a long time ago.
Vien shifts again, bringing his hands together as if to press a sheet of paper utterly flat. His eyes are pure black, unclouded by any station implants—they say that the station’s Mind won’t allow the Ro standard access to the communal network, because they cause too many problems. “I didn’t mean to.” He winces, again, rubbing his hand against the bruise on his cheek. “Yelling at me was fine. The slap . . .”
The slap had been uncalled-for. Mother would have had her hide, truth be told. She didn’t like Ro either—Tuyet Thanh was right; none of the exiles had forgiven them, but she would have said it was no call to be uncouth. She—
Lan finds herself rubbing her hand against her cheek, in mute sympathy with Vien. “Forget it,” she says, more harshly than she intended to. “I won’t do it again. But just stay away from me.” She won’t talk to him again—she doesn’t want to be reminded of his existence—of his people’s existence.
Professor Nghe grimaces. “I guess I’ll have to be content with that, shall I? Out you go, then.”
Outside, Vien turns to Lan, stiff and prim and with the barest hint of a bow. “Listen,” he says.
“No.”
“I won’t bother you again after this.”
We didn’t mean to do any of it. I realize it’s not an excuse, and that it won’t mean much to you, but I have to try.
We’d been at war for years by then. You were modifying your own people—sending them to camps and facilities. Have you heard of skiff-ghosts? You were the ones who made them—because the soul went on, down the river to the afterworld, and the body remained, with no awareness or affection. You made thousands of them, and not even for soldiering, merely so they would be obedient citizens.
We . . . we were scared. It wasn’t smart, but who knew when you would decide that your own neighbors didn’t suitably conform? You’ve always thought of us as amusing barbarians—with uncombed, uncut hair that we let grow because we won’t use scissors on the body that is the flesh of our fathers, the blood of our mothers—and, if you were ready to do this to your own, why should you hesitate with ours?
There was . . . There were incidents. Ro coming back with a little light missing in their eyes, with movements that were a little too stiff. And one of those incidents pushed us over the edge.
I know you’re angry. Just let me finish. Please.
Lieu Vuong Tinh was small, and isolated, and we thought it would only be a matter of time. If we sent enough fleets, enough ships, then the Dai Viet Empire wouldn’t support you anymore.
But then the war dragged on, and on, and more ships didn’t make any difference. Our soldiers bled and died on foreign moons, suffocating in the void of space, felled at the entrances to habitats—and some came back but never the same, emptied of all thoughts and all feelings, a horde of skiff-ghosts pushing and tugging at the fabric of our life until it unraveled. So, a man named Huu Quang had an idea for a weapon so powerful that it would end things, once and for all.
I’m not trying to excuse him or the people who funded him. They all went on trial for war crimes, after the peace treaty was finally signed. We all saw what happened to the sun. We all saw the ships, and the fleet, and what happened to those who didn’t manage to leave in time. We—
I’m sorry, all right? I know it doesn’t make a difference. I know that I wasn’t even born, back then, but it was a stupid, unforgivable thing to do. Most of us know it.
We’re not monsters.
Lan stands, breathing hard—staring at Vien, who hasn’t moved. She’s raised her hand again, and he watches her with those impossible black eyes, the ones that are too deep, that see too many things. She realizes, finally, that it’s because he’s unplugged to most station activity, that he only has the barest accesses to the communal network and therefore so very few community demands on his time. Mother’s eyes, Tuyet Thanh’s eyes—they always shift left and right, never seem to hold on to anything for long. But Vien . . .
“It’s not true,” she says, slowly—breathing out, feeling the burning in her lungs. “It’s—all a lie.”
Vien brings the palms of his hands together, as if he were going to bow. “Everything is a lie,” he says, finally. “Everything a fragment of the truth. Don’t you have relatives who remember?”
Mother, in the kitchen, saying she didn’t know what they had done, and looking away. “I—” Lan breathes in again, everything tinged with the bitterness of ashes. “I don’t know,” she says, finally. It’s the only thing that will come to mind.
“Look it up,” Vien says, almost gently. “There’s no shortage of things on the network.”
Written by the Dai Viet Empire, the hegemony’s stories about her own people—what does it mean, if it means anything at all? She’s called on the network before she’s aware she has—and “skiff-ghosts” brings up all kinds of hollow-eyed, shambling monstrosities in her field of vision. “I don’t know,” she says, again, and inwardly she’s calling for Mother, who is as silent as she ever was. Tales for children. Bedtime stories: the only narratives that can be stomached.
Vien says nothing, merely watches her with a gaze that seems to encompass the entire universe. She’d rage and scream and rant at him, if he did speak, but he doesn’t. His mouth is set. “I’ll leave you,” he says, finally, and walks away, his back ramrod straight, except that in the communal network, a little icon blinks, something he has left her, as a farewell gift. Forgive me—this is all I can give you, on this day of all days, the message says, and Lan archives it, because she cannot bear to deal with him or the Ro.
At home, Mother is waiting for her. The compartment smells of meat and spices and garlic. Everyone else is shimmering into existence, the entire family gathering around the meal for the ancestors, for the dead planet. “Child?”
Lan wants to ask about skiff-ghosts and the Ro, but the words seem too large, too inappropriate to get past the block in her mouth.
Instead, she sits down in silence at her appointed place, reaching for a pair of chopsticks and a bowl. As the Litany of the Lost begins, and the familiar names light up in her field of vision—the ones who are still there, still dust among the dust of Lieu Vuong Tinh—she finds herself reaching for Vien’s gift and opening it.
A blur, and a jumble of rocks; then the view pans out, and she sees a scattering of rocks of all sizes tumbling in slow motion, and bots weaving in and out like a swarm of bees, lifting off with dust and fragments of rock in their claws.
The view pans out again, until it seems to rise from behind the bots, slowly filling her entire field of vision—a corona of light and ionized gases, a mass of contracting colors like a stilled heart; a slow, stately dance of clouds and interstellar dust, blurred like the prelude to tears.
A live link to a bot-borne camera; a window into an area of space she’s never gone to but instantly recognizes.
What else could it be, after all?
Lieu Vuong Tinh: what is left of the planet, what the Ro are scavenging from the radiation-soaked areas. The place her people came from, the place her people fled, with the weight of the dying sun like ghosts on their backs.
Ghosts.
She wonders about the dead, and the skiff-ghosts—and mind-alterations a
nd who bears what, in the mess of the war—and who, ultimately, is right, and justified.
The grit of dust against her palate, and the slow, soundless whistle of spatial winds—and, abruptly, it no longer matters, because she sees it.
The dragon’s mane streams in the solar winds, a shining star at the point of each antler; the serpentine body stretched and pockmarked with fragments of rock; the pearl in its mouth a fiery, pulsing point of light; its tail streaming ice and dust and particles across the universe like the memory of an expelled breath—and its eyes, two pits of utter darkness against the void of space, a gaze turning her way and transfixing her like thrown swords.
The mark. The wound. The hole in the heart that they all want to fill, she and Tuyet Thanh and Mother—and Vien—all united in the wake of the dragon’s passage like farmers huddled in the wake of a storm, grieving for flooded fields and the lost harvest, and bowed under the weight of all that they did to one another.
Mother is right, after all. This is the only story of the war that will ever make sense—the only truth that is simply, honestly, heartbreakingly bearable.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ALIETTE DE BODARD lives and works in Paris, where she has a day job as a system engineer. She studied computer science and applied mathematics but moonlights as a writer of speculative fiction. She is the author of the critically acclaimed Obsidian and Blood trilogy of Aztec noir fantasies, as well as numerous short stories, which garnered her two Nebula Awards, a Locus Award, and a British Science Fiction Association Award. Recent works include The House of Shattered Wings (Roc/Gollancz), a novel set in a turn-of-the-century Paris devastated by a magical war, and The Citadel of Weeping Pearls (Asimov’s Oct/Nov 2015), a novella set in the same universe as her Vietnamese space opera On a Red Station Drifting. She lives in Paris with her family, in a flat with more computers than warm bodies, and a set of Lovecraftian tentacled plants intent on taking over the place.
DIAMOND AND THE WORLD BREAKER
LINDA NAGATA
Gliding between worlds on an unchangeable trajectory toward an encounter that would decide the fate of the Nine Thousand, Diamond finally confessed to her mother, Violetta, a long-suspected truth: “I always wanted to be the bad guy . . . but I thought it would be more fun than this.”
Wrapped in the ethereal silence of their two-person bullet pod, Violetta had succumbed to brooding over the ruin of her life. But at Diamond’s words, she roused. She reminded herself the situation was not hopeless. Chaos need not win. The Nine Thousand might still go on.
And Diamond might yet learn right from wrong?
It was possible. She was only twelve, after all.
Faithful to the duties of motherhood, Violetta chided her delinquent daughter: “I hope you choose differently, Diamond, if you ever find yourself tempted again.”
The interior of the bullet pod was close and cramped. It contained two crash couches, nothing more, with no room to move around. Violetta’s couch was behind Diamond’s, so she couldn’t see her daughter’s face until Diamond twisted around, peering past the gap between seatback and hull, one bright black eye showing beneath a scowling brow.
She said, “Sorry I got you in trouble.”
Violetta glanced at the countdown running in her retinal screen. Seven minutes to go until they reached Nexus. “I won’t lie to you, love. This is a bad situation. The Professional Revolutionaries have really gone too far this time.”
Diamond’s scowl deepened. “Dad says if chaos wins, we all lose. But, Mom? I don’t want to lose.”
* * * *
Just three hours earlier, when Violetta Gamiao had spotted an agent of the Professional Revolutionaries stepping from a transit bullet to the platform at Tranquility, she had anticipated swift victory.
The agent did not, of course, announce his affiliation. He wore no badge, no uniform, and there was nothing extraordinary about his appearance. He stood shorter than most in a mixed crowd of tourists and business travelers, but not so much shorter as to draw notice. His gleaming red culottes and gold vest of many pockets were respectable attire—almost conservative—compared to the riotous colors and fantastic embellishments worn by the one hundred twenty-nine other travelers who had arrived on the same long bullet. And he carried only a plain black valise.
But evil had a distinctive swagger.
“Look what we’ve got coming,” Violetta said, speaking to Ash Crafton, her rookie partner. The two hunters shared a table at a balcony café overlooking the platform, a post that let them see everyone who arrived in Tranquility and all those who were leaving.
Ash leaned forward to take another look, scowling as he reassessed the new arrivals. Then he grunted, and asked, “That one?” His index finger traced a little circle in the air in front of him, a gesture that highlighted the revolutionary with an equivalent circle drawn on Violetta’s retinal screen. The circle framed a flat brown face, fierce confidence projected by heavy black eyebrows and a wolfish half-smile.
Violetta nodded her approval. “You’re getting good, Ash.”
“It’s not the way they look,” he said, repeating the dictum she’d drilled into him from day one. “It’s the attitude.”
They arose together from the table, both wearing the shadow-shifting uniform of chartered hunters, operating under the authority of Machina Overlord. It was their duty to oversee the good order and safe operation of the Bullet Transit System within District 24 of the Nine Thousand Worlds, and to ensure the system was not used to spread mayhem.
Given the number of philosophical gangs whose sole purpose was to create mayhem, it was a challenging occupation—with the Professional Revolutionaries a particular nemesis.
Violetta turned, pulling her stunner from a hip holster, her other hand on the balcony railing. “Ready?” she asked Ash.
“Right behind you,” he assured her, stunner in hand.
But the revolutionary had sensed the motion above him. He glanced up, saw the threat.
And as they vaulted over the railing, he bolted for the arched entrance of the transit station and the bright plaza beyond it, lit by sunlight from an artificial sky.
Violetta dropped to the concourse, startling the tourists as she landed among them with a soft thump. Ash dropped down two meters away. They both raised their weapons. The tourists yelled at one another to get down, get out of the line of fire, and within three seconds, an alley opened in the crowd with the revolutionary at the far end, silhouetted against the morning glare.
“I’ve got it,” Violetta told Ash. Rarely was it this easy to find her prey and bring it down.
She pulled the trigger—but the revolutionary anticipated her. He turned and dropped to one knee. The pellet she’d shot burst open in an electrified net that swirled past him, over his head and into the plaza beyond.
Her retinal screen adjusted her vision, dimming the light from the plaza so she could see his face. He was looking right at her, showing no fear, no concern. Smiling.
She adjusted her aim. Pulled the trigger just as he moved again: standing up, stepping forward, swinging the valise up in a long arc. The stunner net smacked him in the chest just as the bag left his fingers. It shot straight up toward the transit station’s high ceiling while he wilted to the floor.
“Oh, shit,” Ash said.
Violetta shouted at the crowd. “Get down! Everyone down!”
Chaos erupted. Tourists screamed, fled, dropped to the ground, tripped over one another, while Ash and Violetta fell back, crouching against the wall, taking what shelter they could against the expected explosion.
But to Violetta’s surprise, the valise did not blow up.
She heard a loud click instead.
She looked up in time to see a device spin out of the falling valise: a little winged drone, powered by buzzing tiltrotors. With its four insect-like legs, it gripped a black cylinder. Painted on the underside of its wings was a caricature face: slanting eyes and a devil’s leering grin glowing in fiery colors. Madness i
n cartoon form. The symbol of the Professional Revolutionaries.
This time, Ash was ahead of her. As the now-empty valise hit the floor, he stepped away from the wall, targeting the drone as it executed a tight half-circle, coming around on a flight path that would let it exit to the plaza. The revolutionary remained on the floor, trembling from the effects of the stunner, still unable to control his large muscle groups, but he could see what Ash was doing and he had enough volition to shriek a warning: “No! Don’t set it off in here!”
His warning came too late.
Ash had pulled the trigger.
* * * *
“The Nine Thousand” was the name given to the swarm of artificial worlds in orbit around the sun—not that there were actually nine thousand worlds. Not yet. But there were many, and “Nine Thousand” rolled easily off the tongue, a good round number and full of possibility, so the name had stuck. Linking the worlds together was the Bullet Transit System—kilometers-long magnetic tracks used to launch and decelerate bullet pods along complex paths calculated by the artificial intelligence known as Machina Overlord.
The AI’s computational strata were housed in the artificial world of Nexus—a tiny, ring-shaped habitat where no one lived and few were allowed to visit, but because it was the home of Machina Overlord, Nexus was the nucleus of the Nine Thousand.
From Nexus, the AI controlled all aspects of navigation. It adjusted each world’s orbital path to ensure an ideal distribution around the Sun. It supervised an automated mining operation among the moons of Jupiter. It oversaw the assembly of artificial comets from the resources harvested there, and it determined the paths those comets followed when they were lobbed toward the sun.
The Nine Thousand could exist only because of Machina Overlord’s dedication to navigational harmony. But the AI had a quirk. In its unfathomable calculations, it had come to a determination that harmony was not a fit goal for human society. Modeling the future had convinced it that an excess of peace and prosperity was slow poison. That if the Nine Thousand was allowed to settle naturally into utopia, the result must be stagnation and decline.
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