by Neil Clarke
Quee Lee shivered.
Perri reached out with one arm, aiming for the face that had to be lurking in the blackness . . . but his hand closed on nothing, and nothing else came from the voice, and after a few moments more of clinging comfort with one another, their camp lights returned—a scorching white glare of photons that left them blinking, blinded in a new way altogether.
13
They didn’t sleep that night, and they didn’t miss sleep until the middle of the following morning. By then, Perri and Quee Lee had thoroughly explored the enormous room and most of the little tunnels leading out from it. But they didn’t find any trace of visitors other than themselves. Their sniffers tasted surgically clean surfaces and cold air uncluttered by even a single flake of lost skin, and just as puzzling, none of their machines could explain why they had failed last night. Whatever the voice was, it had been careful. With its absence, it proved its great power . . . at least when it came to fooling a couple peasants who were ignorant of the real powers of a galaxy that they had barely begun to know.
There was talk about returning to the flex-car, or at least contacting their missing friends.
But one last tunnel needed a quick examination. And with Perri at the lead, they marched up into an increasingly narrow space that turned sharply, revealing a pair of security robots waiting for anyone who might wander where they didn’t belong.
The robots were in slumber-mode, facing in the opposite direction.
Perri retreated, pulling his wife behind him. “They’re the last in a string of sentries,” he decided. “I bet if we found our way to the other side, we’d come across barricades and official warnings from the captains not to take one step farther.”
“The captains don’t know about our route?”
“Not yet,” he said. Then with a soft conspiring voice, he added, “Maybe we should hurry home. Now. Before we get noticed.”
They discovered their friends waiting at the flex-car. An argument had just ended, and one of the twin brothers refused to say anything to anyone. Apparently he had lost on the competition for the rich woman’s affections, and his anger helped Quee Lee and Perri avoid the expected questions.
The tiny expedition abandoned the Vermiculate before evening.
Home again, the old married couple made love and ate enough for ten hungry people, and throughout the sex and the dinner, they discussed what they should do next, if anything. And then Quee Lee slept hard for three dream-laced hours. When she woke, Perri was standing over her. He was smiling. But it was a grim, concentrated smile—the look of a man who knew something enormous but unsatisfying.
“Want to hear a rumor?” he asked.
She sat up in bed, answering him with a look.
“Like we heard before, the captains did discover the hole in their maps, and they sent an old robot down into the hole. But it got lost and climbed out again, and it couldn’t explain where it had gone wrong.”
“That’s the story I remember,” she said.
“Engineers tore open the robot. Just to identify the malfunction. And that’s when they found a message.”
Quee Lee blinked, and waited.
“Addressed to the Master Captain,” he continued, his smile warming by the moment. “After a thousand security checks, the invitation was delivered. Except for the Master Captain, and maybe a few Submasters, nobody knows what the message said. But a few days later, alone, the Master Captain walked down that tunnel and vanished for nearly five hours. And when she emerged again, she looked sick. Shaken sick. The rumor claims that she actually cried in the presence of her security troops, which is why the whole story refuses to get wings and soar. It doesn’t sound at all like the benign despot we know so well.”
His wife agreed with a nod. “When did this happen?” she asked.
“Ten years ago, nearly.”
“And since then?”
“Well,” said Perri, “the Master Captain has quit weeping. If that’s what you’re curious about.”
She lay back on her pillows.
“No,” her husband said.
“What else?”
“I didn’t wake you just to tell you something that might have happened. Or even to give you another mystery to chew on.” “Then why am I awake?”
“I know a man,” Perri said. “And he’s very good at pulling old memories out of very old skulls.”
The magician was named Ash.
He was human, but he lived inside an alien habitat where the false sun never set. Sitting in a room full of elaborate machinery, Ash told his newest clients, “I can make promises, but they don’t mean much. This date is a very big problem, madam. You were alive then, yes. But barely. This is a few years before bioceramic brains came into existence. You could have been the brightest young thing, but my tricks work best with the galactic-standard minds . . . brains that employ quantum many-world models to interface with a trillion sister minds . . . ”
“Can you do anything?” Perri asked.
“I can take your money,” Ash replied. “And I can also dig into the old data archives. You claim you have a place in mind?”
“Yes,” Quee Lee said. Then she repeated the location just as the voice had given it to her.
“I assume you think you were there then,” Ash said.
“I don’t know if I was.”
“And this is important?”
“We’ll see,” she said.
Ash began to work. He explained that on the Earth, for this very brief period of history, security systems as well as ordinary individuals tried to keep thorough digital records of everything that happened and that didn’t happen. The trouble was that the machinery was very simple and unreliable, and the frequent upgrades as well as a few nasty electromagnetic pulses wiped clean a lot of records. Not to mention the malicious effects of the early AIs—entities who took great delight in creating fictions that they would bury inside whatever data banks would accept their artistic works.
“The chances of success,” Ash began to say.
Then in the ancient records, he saw something entirely unexpected, and lifting his gaze, he mentioned to Quee Lee, “You were a pretty young lady.”
“Did you find me?” she asked expectantly.
“Too easily,” he allowed. Then he showed her a portion of the image—a girl who was nine or maybe eight years old, dressed in the uniform mandated by a good private school.
With a shrug, Ash allowed, “No need for paranoia. This does happen, on occasion.” He gave commands to a brigade of invisible assistants, and then said, “If I can dig up a few more records, I think I can piece together what you and the man talked about.”
“What man?” she asked.
Perri asked.
“The man standing beside you,” Ash remarked. “The man with the golden balloon.” Then he showed an image captured by a nearby security camera, adding, “I’m assuming he’s your father, judging by his looks.”
“He’s not,” she whispered.
“And now we have a second digital record,” Ash said happily. “Hey, and now a third. See the adolescent boy down the path from you? Wearing the medallion on his chest? Well, that was a camera and a very good microphone. His video has been lost, but not the audio. I can’t tell you how unlikely it is to have this kind of recording survive this long, in any usable form.”
“What is the man saying to me?” Quee Lee asked nervously.
“Let me see if I can pull it up . . . ”
And suddenly a voice that she hadn’t thought about for eons returned. The young girl and the stranger were standing in Hong Kong Park, on the cobblestone path beside the lotus pond. A short white picket fence separated them from the water. Standing in the background were towers and a bright blue sky. With the noise of the city and other passersby erased, the voice began by saying, “Hello, Quee Lee.”
“Hello,” the young girl replied, nervous in very much the same fashion that the old woman was now. “Do I know you?” “Hardly at all,” t
he man replied.
The girl looked about, as if expecting somebody to come save her. Which there would have been: Quee Lee was the only child to a very wealthy couple who didn’t let her travel anywhere without bodyguards and a personal servant. “Where are my people now?” she seemed to ask herself.
The voice said, “I will not hurt you, my dear.”
Hearing that promise didn’t help the girl relax.
“Ask me where I came from. Will you please?”
The youngster decided on silence.
But the strange man laughed, and pretending the question had been asked, he remarked, “I came from the stars. I am here on a great, important mission, and it involves your particular species.”
The girl looked up at a face that carried a distinct resemblance to her face. Then she looked back down the path, hoping for rescue.
“In a little while,” said the stranger, “my work here will be complete.”
“Why?” the girl muttered.
“Because that is when one of your mechanical eyes will look at the most lucrative portion of the sky, at the perfect moment, and almost everything that you will need to know about the universe will be delivered to your doorstep.”
The pretty black-haired girl hugged her laptop bag, saying nothing.
“When that day comes,” said the man, “you must try and remember everything. Do you understand me, Quee Lee? That one day will be the most important moment in your species’ history.”
“How do you know my name?” she asked again.
“And this is not all that I am doing on your world.” The man was handsome but quite ordinary, nothing about him hinting at anything that wasn’t human. He was wearing a simple suit, rumpled at the edges. His right hand held the string that led up to a small balloon made from helium and gold Mylar. He smiled with fierce joy, telling her, “It has been decided. Your species has a great destiny in service of the Union.”
In the present, two people gasped quietly.
“What’s the Union?” the girl asked.
“Everything,” was the reply. “And it is nothing.”
The girl was prettiest when she was puzzled, like now.
“You won’t remember any portion of our conversation,” the man promised. “Ten minutes from now, you won’t remember me or my words.”
One hand smoothed her skirt, and she anxiously stared at her neat black shoes.
“But before I leave you, I wanted to tell you something else. Are you listening to me, Quee Lee?”
“No,” she claimed.
The man laughed heartily. Then he bent down, placing their faces on the same level, and when he had her gaze, he said, “You were adopted, only your parents don’t know that. The baby inside your mother had died, and I devised you out of things that are human, but also elements inspired by a wonderful old friend of mine.”
The girl tried to step back but couldn’t. Discovering that her feet were fixed to the pavement, she looked down and then up at the other adults walking past the long brown pond, and when she tried to scream, no sound came from her open mouth.
“I am not gracelessly cruel,” the stranger told her. “You may think that of me one day. But even though I live to aid the workings of an enormous power, I make certain that I find routes to kindness, and when it offers itself, to love.”
The little girl couldn’t even make herself cry.
“Part of you,” he said. Then he paused, and from two different perspectives, the audience watched as his free hand touched the girl’s bright black hair. “The shape of your mind was born on another world, a world too distant to be seen today. And I once lied to that mind, Quee Lee. I told it that I could stand aside and watch it die forever.”
She had no tears, but the man was crying, his face wet and sorry.
“I wish I could offer more of an apology,” he said. And then he rose up again, pulling the balloon’s string close to his chest while wiping at his wet face with a wrinkled sleeve. “But much is at stake . . . more than you might ever understand, Quee Lee . . . and this is as close to insubordination as this good servant can manage . . . ”
Then he glanced at the security camera hidden in the trees and handed the string and balloon to the girl beside him. “Would you like this, Quee Lee? As a little gift from your grandfather?”
The girl discovered that she could move again.
“Take it,” he advised.
She accepted the string with one little hand.
For a brief instant, they were posing, staring across the millennia in a stance that was strained but nonetheless sweet—the image of a little girl enjoying the park with some undefined adult relative.
“I will see you later,” he mentioned.
Quee Lee released the string, watching the gold ball rise faster than she would have expected—shooting into the sky as if it weighed nothing at all.
When her eyes dropped, the stranger had stepped out of view. And a few moments later, her father ran up the path to join her, asking, “Where did you go? I couldn’t find you anywhere.”
“I didn’t go anywhere,” the girl replied.
“Tell me the truth,” the scared little man demanded. “Did you talk to somebody you shouldn’t have talked to?”
She said, “No.”
“Why are you lying?” he asked.
“But I’m not lying,” she protested. Then with a wide, smart grin, the young Quee Lee added, “The sky is going to talk, Father. Did you know that? And he promised me, he did, that I am going to see him again later . . . !”
Since about the age six, Ruth Nestvold wanted to be a writer (or a singer, an actress, or President of the United States), but for many years she put practical pursuits first and writing fiction second. After completing a Ph.D. in literature, she took time off from academic pursuits to attend the Clarion West Writers Workshop, a six week “boot camp” for writers of science fiction and fantasy. She learned more there than she could have dreamed possible, changed her priorities, and gave up theory for imagination. Two years later, she sold her first short story to the acclaimed science fiction magazine Asi-mov’s. Since then, she has sold over fifty pieces of short fiction to a variety of markets, including Baen’s Universe, Strange Horizons, Scifiction, F&SF, Realms of Fantasy, and several year’s best anthologies, and has been nominated for the Nebula, the Sturgeon, and the Tiptree awards. In 2007, the Italian translation of her novella “Looking Through Lace” won the “Premio Italia” for best international work. Her novel Yseult appeared in German translation as Flamme und Harfe with Random House Germany and has since been translated into Dutch and Italian. Other novels include Shadow of Stone and Chameleon in a Mirror. She is the founder of the Villa Diodati workshop for English-speaking writers of speculative fiction in Europe. She maintains a web site at www.ruthnestvold.com and blogs at ruthnestvold.wordpress.com..
LOOKING THROUGH LACE
Ruth Nestvold
1
Toni came out of the jump groggy and with a slight headache, wishing the Allied Interstellar Research Association could afford passage on Alcubierre drive ships—even if they did collapse an unconscionable amount of space in their wake. For a moment, she couldn’t remember what the job was this time. She sat up and rubbed her eyes while the voice on the intercom announced that they would be arriving at the Sagittarius Transit Station in approximately one standard hour.
Sagittarius. Now she remembered. The women’s language. Suddenly she felt much more awake. For the first time, she was on her way to join a first contact team, and she had work to do. She got up, washed her face in cold water at the basin in her compartment (at least AIRA could afford private compartments), and turned on the console again, calling up the files she had been sent when given her assignment to Christmas.
“List vids,” she said. It was time she checked her theoretical knowledge against the real thing again. Just over three weeks she’d had to learn the Megan language, one week on Admetos after getting her new assignment and two weeks in
transit. From the transit station, it would be another week before she finally set foot on the planet. Even with the latest memory enhancements, it was a daunting challenge. A month to learn a new language and its intricacies. A month to try to get a feel for a culture where women had their own language which they never spoke with men.
That had been her lucky break. Toni was the only female xenolinguist in this part of the galaxy with more than a year’s experience. And suddenly she found herself promoted from grunt, compiling grammars and dictionaries, to first contact team.
She scrolled through the list of vids. This time, she noticed a title which hadn’t caught her attention before.
“Play ‘Unknown Mejan water ritual.’”
To judge by the AIC date, it had to be a video from one of the early, pre-contact-team probes. Not to mention the quality, which was only sporadically focused. The visuals were mostly of the bay of Edaru, and the audio was dominated by the sound of water lapping the shore.
But what she could see and hear was fascinating. A fearful young hominid male, tall and gracile, his head shaved and bowed, was being led out by two guards to the end of a pier. A small crowd followed solemnly. When they arrived at the end, another man stepped forward and, in the only words Toni could make out clearly, announced that Sentalai’s shame would be purged. (Assuming, of course, that what had been deciphered of the men’s language to this point was correct.)
The older man then motioned for the younger man to remove his clothes, fine leather garments such as those worn by the richer of the Edaru clans, and when he was naked, the two guards pushed him into the water.
Three women behind them conferred briefly. Then one of the three stepped forward and flung a length of lace after the young man.
Toni stared as the crowd on the pier walked back to shore. She could see no trace of the man who had been thrown in the water. According to her materials, the Mejan were excellent swimmers, growing up nearly as much in the water as out, and it should have been easy for him to swim back to the pier. But for some reason he hadn’t.
It reminded her of nothing so much as an execution.
