The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy Novellas 2016 Read online

  “What about you?” the ship asked, with simple and devastating perspicacity.

  “I don’t know,” Ngoc Ha lied. She didn’t know what she’d do, if she saw Ngoc Minh again—embrace her, shout at her, show her how much her life had twisted and stretched in the wake of her elder sister’s flight?

  “Princess,” Suu Nuoc said. He stood by her, at quiet ease. “My apologies. I was busy.”

  “I can imagine,” Ngoc Ha said.

  “I’m surprised to see you here,” Suu Nuoc said, slowly. “I thought you had no interest in what Grand Master Bach Cuc was doing.”

  “The Turtle’s Golden Claw is my daughter,” Ngoc Ha said.

  “Of course,” Suu Nuoc said. He watched her, for a while, with that intent expression on his face that made her feel pierced by a spear. “But that’s not why you’re here, is it?”

  Ngoc Ha said nothing for a while. She watched the harmonization arch, the faint blue light playing on its edges. “I did follow what Bach Cuc was doing,” she said, at last. It had taken an effort: Grand Master Bach Cuc was proud, and sometimes unpleasant. “Because it mattered. To me, to my place in court.” It wasn’t quite that, of course. She’d needed to know whether Ngoc Minh would come back. Whether what had passed had been worth it—the agony of being pregnant with The Turtle’s Golden Claw; of giving birth in blood and pain and loneliness, all because her mother, the empress, had ordered it.

  “How did you think things would change?”

  “I don’t know,” Ngoc Ha said. He was assessing her, wondering what she was worth as a suspect. It would have been amusing, if she hadn’t been so nervous already. “I wanted to know what you’d found, but I assume you won’t share it while you’re still working out if I harmed her.”

  “Indeed,” Suu Nuoc said. He made a small, ironic smile, and turned to embrace the lab. “Or perhaps I simply have nothing to share.”

  Ngoc Ha steeled herself—better to tell him now than later, or else she’d become a suspect like everyone else. And she knew better than to expect Mother’s influence to protect her.

  After all, it hadn’t worked for Ngoc Minh.

  “I know who saw Grand Master Bach Cuc last,” she said, slowly, carefully. “Or close to last.”

  There was silence, in the wake of her words.

  “Who?” Suu Nuoc asked, at the same time as The Turtle’s Golden Claw asked “Why?”

  Ngoc Ha smiled, coldly; putting all the weight of the freezing disapproval she sometimes trained on courtiers. “As I said—I was interested. In whether Ngoc Minh would come back. Someone came to me with information on the Citadel of Weeping Pearls.”

  Suu Nuoc’s face had frozen into a harsh cast, as unyielding as cut diamonds. “Go on.”

  “He was a man named Quoc Quang, part of a small merchant delegation that was doing a run between the Scattered Pearls belt and the First Planet.” She’d had her agents check him out: a small, pathetic man addicted to alcohol and a few less savory things: hardly a threat, and hardly worth bringing to her attention, as the chief of her escort had said. Except that he’d said something about Grand Master Bach Cuc.

  Ngoc Ha had her work administering the Twenty-Third Planet—trying to bring Lady Linh’s home back to the glory it had had before the war, building graceful pagodas and orbitals from a pile of ashes and dust. But it was mostly a sinecure to keep her busy; and so, curious, she had made time to see Quoc Quang.

  “He said his daughter was doing something to find the Citadel of Weeping Pearls—her and a woman named Tran Thi Long Lam, a Distinguished Scholar of Mathematics who returned home to mind her sick father. Apparently they thought they could do better than Grand Master Bach Cuc. He said”—she closed her eyes—“he needed to speak to Bach Cuc, to warn her.”

  “Warn her of what?”

  “He wouldn’t tell me.”

  Suu Nuoc’s impeccably trimmed eyebrows rose. Ngoc Ha went on as though she’d seen nothing—after all, it was only the truth, and demons take the man if he didn’t believe it. “And you believed him?” Suu Nuoc asked.

  If Ngoc Ha closed her eyes, she could see Quoc Quang; could still smell the raw despair from him; could still hear his voice. “My wife disappeared with the Citadel. We were away, thirty years ago, when it happened. I apologize for my presumption, but I share your pain.” And she hadn’t been quite sure what to answer him; had let the emotionless, hardened mask of the imperial princess stare at him and nod, in a way that conveyed acceptance, and a modicum of disapproval. But, in her mind, she’d heard the dark, twisted part of her whisper: What pain? You were glad Ngoc Minh disappeared.

  “He was very convincing,” she said.

  “So you sent him to Grand Master Bach Cuc,” The Turtle’s Golden Claw said. “And then . . . Bach Cuc disappeared.”

  Ngoc Ha shook her head, irritated at the implications. “Credit me with a little thoughtfulness, General. I sent guards with him; and though he had his interview with Bach Cuc without me, they watched him all the while, and escorted him back to his quarters in the Fifth District. The interview ended at the Bi-Hour of the Dog; Grand Master Bach Cuc was still within the Forbidden City long after that.”

  “It was the Bi-Hour of the Tiger,” The Turtle’s Golden Claw said. “Eight hours after that, at least.”

  “Right,” Suu Nuoc said, in a way that suggested he didn’t believe any of her intentions, or her words—he could be so terribly, so inadequately blunt some times. “And where is this—Quoc Quang now?”

  She had checked, before coming. “He left this morning, with his ship. The destination he announced was his home on the Scattered Pearls Belt. I have no reason to disbelieve that.”

  “Except that he left in rather a hurry after Bach Cuc disappeared?”

  Ngoc Ha did her best not to bristle, but it was hard. “I checked. There was no extra passenger on board. Apart from him, nothing was taken onboard; not even a live woman or a corpse. The airport bots would have seen it otherwise.” She felt more than heard The Turtle’s Golden Claw tense. “Sorry. I had to consider all eventualities.”

  “That’s all right,” The Turtle’s Golden Claw said. “I’m sure she’s alive. She’s resourceful.”

  Suu Nuoc and Ngoc Ha exchanged a long, deep look; he was as skeptical as her, but he wouldn’t say anything. For her sake, she mouthed, and Suu Nuoc nodded.

  “Fine.” Suu Nuoc was silent, for a while. He stared at the harmonization door, his face hard again; his gaze distant, probably considering something on the network via his implants. He had no mem-implants from ancestors—but then, Ngoc Ha, the unfavored daughter of the family, had none either. “I will check, and let you know. “

  “I see,” Ngoc Ha said. And, to the ship, “Will you come with me to my quarters? We can have tea together.”

  “Of course!” The Turtle’s Golden Claw said—happy to spend an afternoon with her mother, a rare occurrence for her. Once again, Ngoc Ha fought a wave of shame. She should be more present in the ship’s life; should see her through her tumultuous childhood and into adulthood—surely it wasn’t easy for the ship either, to have been born only for the purpose of finding someone else.

  “Thank you for your evidence. You will be apprised, one way or another.”

  And she wasn’t sure, as she walked away with the ship in tow, if she ought to be relieved or scared, or both.

  The Officer

  Suu Nuoc found the entrance to his chamber crowded with officials, and his mailbox overflowing with a variety of memorials from the court—from those chastising him for his carefree behavior to short messages asking for the results of his investigation. They were all so fresh from the Grand Secretarial off ice that he could still see the marks of the rescripts—it was bad, then, if even he could see it: the court had to be in disarray; the Grand Secretariat overwhelmed.

  “General, General.” A chorus of voices; but the ones that stood out belonged to Vinh and Hanh, two of the heir Huu Tam’s supporters. “What happened to Grand Master Bach C
uc?”

  “Are we safe?”

  “How soon will we know?”

  He closed his eyes and wished, again, for the serenity that had come over him on the edge of the battlefield. It wasn’t his world. It would never be his world—except that being a general meant sleepless, dirty nights in the field with ten thousand bots hacked into his feeds, sending him contradictory information and expecting a split-second decision—and pay that came too slight and too late to make any difference to his family’s life. Whereas, as a court official, he could shower his relatives with clothes and food, and jewelry so beautifully fragile it seemed a mere breath would cut it in half.

  And he could see the empress—and hide the twinge of regret that took him whenever he did so; that deep-seated knowledge that no lover he’d had since her had ever filled the void she’d left.

  It wouldn’t last, of course. It couldn’t last. The empress was old, and the heir Huu Tam had no liking for her discards. Suu Nuoc would go home in disgrace one day, if he was lucky, or rot away in a jail somewhere if he was not. He lived with that fear as he’d lived with the fear of losing his battles when he’d been a general. Most days, it didn’t affect him. Most days, he could sleep quietly in his bed and reflect on a duty carried to its end.

  And sometimes, he would look at these—at the arrogant courtiers before him—and remember they would be among the ones baying for his head after the empress died.

  “You have no business infringing on an imperial investigation,” Suu Nuoc said. “The empress, may she reign ten thousand years, is the one who will decide who is told what, and when.”

  Winces, from the front of the mob—Courtier Hanh was clearly sniggering at this upstart who could not even speak proper Viet, and her companion Vinh was working himself up for a peremptory answer. Meanwhile, in the background of Suu Nuoc’s own consciousness—in the space where he hung motionless, connected to a thousand bots crawling all over the palace, a churning of activities—a taking apart of messages and private notes, an analysis of witnesses’ testimonies, and a forensic report on the state of the laboratory.

  Later.

  He watched the courtiers Vinh and Hanh; dared them to speak. As he had known, they did not have his patience; and it was the florid, middle-aged man who spoke first. “There are rumors that Grand Master Bach Cuc is dead, and Bright Princess Ngoc Minh forever lost.”

  “Perhaps,” Suu Nuoc said, with a shrug, and watched the ripples of that through the crowd. Neither Vinh nor Hanh seemed much surprised, though they could not have sweated more if it had been monsoon season. “That is none of my business. I will find Grand Master Bach Cuc, and then all will be made clear.”

  Again, he watched them—there was no further reaction, but the air was charged, as if just before a storm. Ngoc Minh’s return was not welcome, then. Not a surprise. “I suggest you disperse. As I said—you will be apprised, one way or another.”

  Quick, furtive glances at him; he remembered he’d said much the same thing to Ngoc Ha—had he meant it with her as well? She was an odd one, the younger princess—mousy and silent, by all accounts a dull reflection of her elder sister. They might not have liked each other; but then again, would Bright Princess Ngoc Minh’s return change anything for the worse in her situation? Ngoc Ha was isolated and in disfavor, and her prospects were unlikely to improve.

  “You have heard the general. I would highly suggest you do disperse.” A sharp, aged voice: Lady Linh, with a red seal of off ice imprinted into her clothes that made it clear she spoke as the empress’s voice; and flanked by two ghost-emperors—the twenty-third and the thirteenth, if Suu Nuoc remembered correctly. The bots scuttling around her held the folds of her robe in a perfect circle.

  Lady Linh gestured for him to enter his own room. “We need to talk,” she said, gracefully.

  Inside, the two dead emperors prowled, staring at the rumpled bed and the half-closed chests of drawers as if they were some kind of personal insult. Suu Nuoc did his best to ignore them as he offered tea to Lady Linh, but from time to time one of the emperors would make a sharp sound in his throat, like a mother disapproving of a child’s antics, and the general would freeze, his heart beating like the wings of a caged bird.

  Not his world. Did they know about his relatives—his cousins and aunts and uncles, greedily asking for favors from the court and never understanding why he couldn’t grant them? Did they know about Mother, the poor bots-handler who held her chopsticks close to the tip and slurped her soup like a laborer?

  Of course they did. And of course they would never forgive him that.

  “Tell me,” Lady Linh said. She shook her clothes; in the communal network, the seal unfolded, spreading until it covered the entire room—a red filigree peeking underneath the painted floor, its edges licking at the base of the walls like flames. Bao Hoa. Keeper of the Peace.

  Not so different from the battlefield, after all. Suu Nuoc shut off the bots for a moment, and called to mind all that they’d poured into his brain on the way back from Grand Master Bach Cuc’s laboratory.

  “She removed the implants herself,” he said, finally. “It might have been under duress, all the same—for someone who was skilled with bots, it’s a shoddy job—bits of flesh still sticking to the connectors, and a few wires twisted. Nothing irreplaceable, of course. If I were to guess—”

  “Yes?”

  “I think she was about to do something that needed absolute focus, and that’s why the implants were removed. No distractions.” No ancestors whispering in her mind; no ghostly manifestations of the past—he could only imagine it, of course; but it would be a bit like removing all his network syncs before leaping into battle.

  “Go on,” Lady Linh said, sipping her tea.

  “Her correspondence is also interesting. The mails taper off: I think she was so busy with her work, so close to a breakthrough, that she wasn’t answering as quickly as usual. I asked, but nothing seemed to be going on in her personal life—she had a girlfriend and a baby, but the girlfriend didn’t see anything wrong.”

  “The girlfriend?” Lady Linh asked.

  Suu Nuoc knew what she meant. The partner was often the first suspect. “I don’t think so,” he said. He’d interviewed her—Cam Tu, a technician in a city lab, working so far away from court intrigues she hadn’t even had any idea of who he was or what he wanted. “She wasn’t in that night, nor was she aware of any of the context behind Grand Master Bach Cuc’s research.” It was—sad, in a way, to see this hunched woman with the child at her breast and realize that Bach Cuc had deliberately shut her out of her life. But then again, he barely talked about the court when he did go home, so who was he to criticize? “Whatever happened to her, it was linked to the court.”

  “You talked of a breakthrough. The trail of the Citadel?”

  “I think so, yes,” Suu Nuoc said, slowly. “But that’s not all.” Something felt off to him, and he couldn’t pinpoint what. “I’m still analyzing the communications.” It was the one thing the bots couldn’t do for him; and he wasn’t too sure he would be able to do it by himself either—where were the mem-implant ancestors when one needed them? A lot of it was abstruse mathematics; communications with other scientists in faraway labs, discussing methods and best practices, and screen after screen of equations until it felt his brain would burst. He was a soldier, a general, a passable courtier, but certainly never a mathematician. “There is . . . something,” he said. He hesitated—looking at the two emperors, who had stopped walking around the room, and come to stand, like two bodyguards, by Lady Linh’s side. “I’m not sure—”

  Lady Linh set her teacup down, and looked at him for a while, her seamed face inexpressive. “I was forty years old when I wrote my memorial,” she said, with a nod to the twenty-second emperor. “The one that sent me to trial. I’ve never regretted speaking up, Suu Nuoc; and you don’t strike me as the type that would regret it, either.” Her voice had lost the courtly accent, and taken on the earthy tones of the outlying
planets—he couldn’t quite place it, but of course there were dozens of numbered planets, each of them with a multitude of provinces and magistrate fiefs.

  The twenty-second emperor spoke—still in the body of a boy, his youthful face at odds with the measured voice, the reasonable tone. “Speaking up is sometimes unwise,” he said, with a pointed look at Lady Linh. “But one should always tell the truth to emperors or their representatives.”

  “Indeed,” Lady Linh’s face was, again, expressionless. A truth that had sent her to jail for years, but that wasn’t what Suu Nuoc feared.

  He looked again at her, at the two emperors. Someone at court might be responsible for Grand Master Bach Cuc’s disappearance, and they wouldn’t take too kindly to efforts to make her reappear. Who could he trust?

  It was a sacrilegious thought, but he wasn’t even sure he could trust the dead emperors. Yet, because he would not disobey a direct order, or the intimation of one: “A man came to see Grand Master Bach Cuc. A merchant from the Scattered Pearls Belt named Quoc Quang, who said he needed to warn her.”

  “Warn her? Why should he need to warn her? A peasant from the outreaches of the empire, to see the best Grand Master of Design Harmony in the empire?” The twenty-second emperor asked.

  “I don’t know,” Suu Nuoc said. “But he did see her; and she disappeared after that. And then he disappeared, too. With your permission, I would like to go to the Scattered Pearls Belt and question him.” He’d thought long and hard about this: the Belt was a few days’ journey from the First Planet via mindship; and, should he leave now, he wouldn’t be far behind Quoc Quang.