The Very Best of the Best

by Gardner Dozois

  * * *

  By the time I came to, I had missed the entire Alaskan leg of the journey.

  Yeling, who had the helm, was playing a Chinese song through the speakers. It was dark outside, and a round, golden moon, almost full and as big as the moon I remember from my childhood, floated over the dark and invisible sea. I sat down next to Yeling and stared at it.

  After the chorus, the singer, a woman with a mellow and smooth voice, began the next verse in English:

  But why is the moon always fullest when we take leave of one another?

  For us, there is sorrow, joy, parting, and meeting.

  For the moon, there is shade, shine, waxing and waning.

  It has never been possible to have it all.

  All we can wish for is that we endure,

  Though we are thousands of miles apart,

  Yet we shall gaze upon the same moon, always lovely.

  Yeling turned off the music and wiped her eyes with the back of her hand.

  “She found a way out of the storm,” she said. There was no need to ask who she meant. “She dodged that lightning at the last minute and found herself a hole in the storm to slip through. Sharp eyes. I knew it was a good idea to repaint the left eye, the one watching the sky, before we took off.”

  I watched the calm waters of the Pacific Ocean pass beneath us.

  “In the storm, she shed her scales to make herself lighter.”

  I imagined the tung oil lines drawn on the ship’s hull by Yeling, the lines etching the ice into dragon scales, which fell in large chunks into the frozen sea below.

  “When I first married Barry, I did everything his way and nothing my way. When he was asleep, and I was flying the ship, I had a lot of time to think. I would think about my parents getting old and me not being there. I’d think about some recipe I wanted to ask my mother about, and she wasn’t there. I asked myself all the time, what have I done?

  “But even though I did everything his way, we used to argue all the time. Arguments that neither of us could understand and that went nowhere. And then I decided that I had to do something.

  “I rearranged the way the pots were hung up in the galley and the way the dishes were stacked in the cabinets and the way the pictures were arranged in the bedroom and the way we stored life vests and shoes and blankets. I gave everything a better flow of qi, energy, and smoother fengshui. It might seem like a cramped and shabby place to some, but the ship now feels like our palace in the skies.

  “Barry didn’t even notice it. But, because of the fengshui, we didn’t argue anymore. Even during the storm, when things were so tense, we worked well together.”

  “Were you scared at all during the storm?” I asked.

  Yeling bit her bottom lip, thinking about my question.

  “When I first rode with Barry, when I didn’t yet know him, I used to wake up and say, in Chinese, who is this man with me in the sky? That was the most I’ve ever been scared.

  “But last night, when I was struggling with the ship and Barry came to help me, I wasn’t scared at all. I thought, it’s okay if we die now. I know this man. I know what I’ve done. I’m home.”

  * * *

  “There was never any real danger from lightning,” Icke said. “You knew that, right? The American Dragon is a giant Faraday cage. Even if the lightning had struck us, the charge would have stayed on the outside of the metal frame. We were in the safest place over that whole sea in that storm.”

  I brought up what Yeling had said, that the ship seemed to know where to go in the storm.

  Icke shrugged. “Aerodynamics is a complex thing, and the ship moved the way physics told it to.”

  “But when you get your Aurora, you’ll let her paint eyes on it?”

  Icke nodded, as though I had asked a very stupid question.

  * * *

  Las Vegas, the diadem of the desert, spread out beneath, around, and above us.

  Pleasure ships and mass-transit passenger zeppelins covered in flashing neon and gaudy giant flickering screens dotted the air over the Strip. Cargo carriers like us were constricted to a narrow lane parallel to the Strip with specific points where we were allowed to depart to land at the individual casinos.

  “That’s Laputa,” Icke pointed above us, to a giant, puffy, baroque airship that seemed as big as the Venetian, which we were passing below and to the left. Lit from within, this newest and flashiest floating casino glowed like a giant red Chinese lantern in the sky. Air taxis rose from the Strip and floated towards it like fireflies.

  We had dropped off the shipment of turbine blades with the wind farm owned by Caesars Palace outside the city, and now we were headed for Caesars itself. Comp rooms were one of the benefits of hauling cargo for a customer like that.

  I saw, coming up behind the Mirage, the tall spire and blinking lights of the mooring mast in front of the Forum Shops. It was usually where the great luxury personal yachts of the high-stakes rollers moored, but tonight it was empty, and a transpacific long-haul Dongfeng Feimaotui, a Flying Chinaman named the American Dragon, was going to take it for its own.

  “We’ll play some games, and then go to our room,” Icke said. He was talking to Yeling, who smiled back at him. This would be the first chance they had of sleeping in the same bed in a week. They had a full twenty-four hours, and then they’d take off for Kalispell, Montana, where they would pick up a shipment of buffalo bones for the long haul back to China.

  I lay in bed in my downtown hotel room thinking about the way the furniture in my bedroom was arranged, and imagined the flow of qi around the bed, the nightstands, the dresser. I missed the faint hum of the zeppelin’s engines, so quiet that you had to listen hard to hear them.

  I turned on the light and called my wife. “I’m not home yet. Soon.”

  * * *

  [This story was inspired in many ways by John McPhee’s Uncommon Carriers.

  Some liberty has been taken with the physical geography of our world: a great circle flight path from Lanzhou to Las Vegas would not actually cross the city of Ordos.

  The lyrics of the song that Yeling plays come from a poem by the Song Dynasty poet Su Shi (1037–1101 A.D). It has remained a popular poem to set to music through the centuries since its composition.]

  Three Cups of Grief, by Starlight

  ALIETTE DE BODARD

  Aliette de Bodard is a software engineer who lives and works in Paris, where she shares a flat with two Lovecraftian plants and more computers than warm bodies. Only a few years into her career, her short fiction has appeared in Interzone, Asimov’s, Clarkesworld, Realms of Fantasy, Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show, Writers of the Future, Coyote Wild, Electric Velocipede, The Immersion Book of SF, Fictitious Force, Shimmer, and elsewhere, and she has won the British SF Association Award for her story “The Shipmaker,” the Locus Award, and the Nebula Award for her stories “The Waiting Stars” and “Immersion.” Her novels include Servant of the Underworld, Harbinger of the Storm, and Master of the House of Darts, all recently reissued in a novel omnibus, Obsidian and Blood. Another British SF Association-winner, The House of Shattered Wings, came out in 2016, followed by a sequel, The House of Binding Thorns. Her website, http://www.aliettedebodard.com, features free fiction, thoughts on the writing process, and entirely too many recipes for Vietnamese dishes.

  The story that follows is another in her long series of “Xuya” stories, taking place in the far future of an Alternate World where a high-tech conflict is going on between spacefaring Mayan and Chinese empires. This one deals with the death of a scientist whose work is considered important enough by the government that they deny her children her mem-implants, consisting of her recorded memories, which tradition dictates should have been given to her family to maintain family continuity. This leaves her children and close associates to somehow deal with their grief over this double bereavement—including one sister who’s become a living starship, The Tiger in the Banyan.

  Green tea: green
tea is made from steamed or lightly dried tea leaves. The brew is light, with a pleasant, grassy taste. Do not over-steep it, lest it become bitter.

  * * *

  After the funeral, Quang Tu walked back to his compartment, and sat down alone, staring sightlessly at the slow ballet of bots cleaning the small room—the metal walls pristine already, with every trace of Mother’s presence or of her numerous mourners scrubbed away. He’d shut down the communal network—couldn’t bear to see the potted summaries of Mother’s life, the endlessly looping vids of the funeral procession, the hundred thousand bystanders gathered at the grave site to say goodbye, vultures feasting on the flesh of the grieving—they hadn’t known her, they hadn’t cared—and all their offerings of flowers were worth as much as the insurances of the Embroidered Guard.

  “Big brother, I know you’re here,” a voice said, from the other side of the door he’d locked. “Let me in, please?”

  Of course. Quang Tu didn’t move. “I said I wanted to be alone,” he said.

  A snort that might have been amusement. “Fine. If you insist on doing it that way…”

  His sister, The Tiger in the Banyan, materialized in the kitchen, hovering over the polished counter, near the remains of his morning tea. Of course, it wasn’t really her: she was a Mind encased in the heartroom of a spaceship, far too heavy to leave orbit; and what she projected down onto the planet was an avatar, a perfectly rendered, smaller version of herself—elegant and sharp, with a small, blackened spot on her hull which served as a mourning band. “Typical,” she said, hovering around the compartment. “You can’t just shut yourself away.”

  “I can if I want to,” Quang Tu said—feeling like he was eight years old again, trying to argue with her—as if it had ever made sense. She seldom got angry—mindships didn’t, mostly; he wasn’t sure if that was the overall design of the Imperial Workshops, or the simple fact that her lifespan was counted in centuries, and his (and Mother’s) in mere decades. He’d have thought she didn’t grieve, either; but she was changed—something in the slow, careful deliberation of her movements, as if anything and everything might break her …

  The Tiger in the Banyan hovered near the kitchen table, watching the bots. She could hack them, easily; no security worth anything in the compartment. Who would steal bots, anyway?

  What he valued most had already been taken away.

  “Leave me alone,” he said. But he didn’t want to be alone; not really. He didn’t want to hear the silence in the compartment; the clicking sounds of the bots’ legs on metal, bereft of any warmth or humanity.

  “Do you want to talk about it?” The Tiger in the Banyan asked.

  She didn’t need to say what; and he didn’t do her the insult of pretending she did. “What would be the point?”

  “To talk.” Her voice was uncannily shrewd. “It helps. At least, I’m told it does.”

  Quang Tu heard, again, the voice of the Embroidered Guard; the slow, measured tones commiserating on his loss; and then the frown, and the knife-thrust in his gut.

  You must understand that your mother’s work was very valuable …

  The circumstances are not ordinary …

  The slow, pompous tones of the scholar; the convoluted official language he knew by heart—the only excuses the state would make to him, couched in the over-formality of memorials and edicts.

  “She—” He took a deep, trembling breath—was it grief, or anger? “I should have had her mem-implants.” Forty-nine days after the funeral; when there was time for the labs to have decanted and stabilized Mother’s personality and memories and added her to the ranks of the ancestors on file. It wasn’t her, it would never be her, of course—just a simulation meant to share knowledge and advice. But it would have been something. It would have filled the awful emptiness in his life.

  “It was your right, as the eldest,” The Tiger in the Banyan said. Something in the tone of her voice …

  “You disapprove? You wanted them?” Families had fallen out before, over more trivial things.

  “Of course not.” A burst of careless, amused laughter. “Don’t be a fool. What use would I have for them. It’s just—” She hesitated, banking left and right in uncertainty. “You need something more. Beyond Mother.”

  “There isn’t something more!”

  “You—”

  “You weren’t there,” Quang Tu said. She’d been away on her journeys, ferrying people back and forth between the planets that made up the Dai Viet Empire; leaping from world to world, with hardly a care for planet-bound humans. She—she hadn’t seen Mother’s unsteady hands, dropping the glass; heard the sound of its shattering like a gunshot; hadn’t carried her back to bed every evening, tracking the progress of the disease by the growing lightness in his arms—by the growing sharpness of ribs, protruding under taut skin.

  Mother had remained herself until almost the end—sharp and lucid and utterly aware of what was happening, scribbling in the margins of her team’s reports and sending her instructions to the new space station’s building site, as if nothing untoward had ever happened to her. Had it been a blessing; or a curse? He didn’t have answers; and he wasn’t sure he wanted that awful certainty to shatter him.

  “I was here,” The Tiger in the Banyan said, gently, slowly. “At the end.”

  Quang Tu closed his eyes, again, smelling antiseptic and the sharp odor of painkillers; and the sour smell of a body finally breaking down, finally failing. “I’m sorry. You were. I didn’t mean to—”

  “I know you didn’t.” The Tiger in the Banyan moved closer to him; brushed against his shoulder—ghostly, almost intangible, the breath that had been beside him all his childhood. “But nevertheless. Your life got eaten up, taking care of Mother. And you can say you were only doing what a filial son ought to do; you can say it didn’t matter. But … it’s done now, big brother. It’s over.”

  It’s not, he wanted to say, but the words rang hollow in his own ears. He moved, stared at the altar; at the holo of Mother—over the offering of tea and rice, the food to sustain her on her journey through Hell. It cycled through vids—Mother, heavily pregnant with his sister, moving with the characteristic arrested slowness of Mind-bearers; Mother standing behind Quang Tu and The Tiger in the Banyan in front of the ancestral altar for Grandfather’s death anniversary; Mother, accepting her Hoang Minh Medal from the then Minister of Investigation; and one before the diagnosis, when she’d already started to become frailer and thinner—insisting on going back to the lab; to her abandoned teams and research …

  He thought, again, of the Embroidered Guard; of the words tightening around his neck like an executioner’s garrotte. How dare he. How dare they all. “She came home,” he said, not sure how to voice the turmoil within him. “To us. To her family. In the end. It meant something, didn’t it?”

  The Tiger in the Banyan’s voice was wry, amused. “It wasn’t the Empress that comforted her when she woke at night, coughing her lungs out, was it?” It was … treason to much as think this, let alone utter it; though the Embroidered Guard would make allowances for grief, and anger; and for Mother’s continued usefulness to the service of the Empress. The truth was, neither of them much cared, anyway. “It’s not the Empress that was by her side when she died.”

  She’d clung to his hand, then, her eyes open wide, a network of blood within the whites, and the fear in her eyes. “I—please, child…” He’d stood, frozen; until, behind him, The Tiger in the Banyan whispered, “The lights in Sai Gon are green and red, the lamps in My Tho are bright and dim…” An Old Earth lullaby, the words stretched into the familiar, slow, comforting rhythm that he’d unthinkingly taken up.

  “Go home to study.

  I shall wait nine months, I shall wait ten autumns…”

  She’d relaxed, then, against him; and they had gone on singing songs until—He didn’t know when she’d died; when the eyes lost their luster, the face its usual sharpness. But he’d risen from her deathbed with the song sti
ll in his mind; and an awful yawning gap in his world that nothing had closed.

  And then—after the scattering of votive papers, after the final handful of earth thrown over the grave—the Embroidered Guard.

  The Embroidered Guard was young; baby-faced and callow, but he was already moving with the easy arrogance of the privileged. He’d approached Quang Tu at the grave site, ostensibly to offer his condolences—it had taken him all of two sentences to get to his true purpose; and to shatter Quang Tu’s world, all over again.

  Your mother’s mem-implants will go to Professor Tuyet Hoa, who will be best able to continue her research …

  Of course, the Empire required food; and crops of rice grown in space; and better, more reliable harvests to feed the masses. Of course he didn’t want anyone to starve. But …

  Mem-implants always went from parent to child. They were a family’s riches and fortune; the continued advice of the ancestors, dispensed from beyond the grave. He’d—he’d had the comfort, as Mother lay dying, to know that he wouldn’t lose her. Not for real; not for long.

  “They took her away from us,” Quang Tu said. “Again and again and again. And now, at the very end, when she ought to be ours—when she should return to her family…”

  The Tiger in the Banyan didn’t move; but a vid of the funeral appeared on one of the walls, projected through the communal network. There hadn’t been enough space in the small compartment for people to pay their respects; the numerous callers had jammed into the corridors and alcoves, jostling each other in utter silence. “She’s theirs in death, too.”