When Dong Huong fell in battle—as she must, for it was the fate of all warriors—her lineage would weep for her. Her husband and her husband’s brothers as well, perhaps, and that was all: two dozen people at the most, perhaps fifty if one included the more distant cousins. “Who are they?” she asked.
Anh paused at the entrance to a slender, white spire, and smiled. “I told you. Her descendants.”
“The—”
“She was old,” Anh said. Her voice was low, hushed. “Her mother was born in the Hieu Phuc reign; and she bore a Mind and four human children; and the children in turn had children of their own; and the children had children, on and on through the generations...”
“How—” Dong Huong moistened her tongue, tried again. “How long had it lived?”
The Tortoise in the Lake
was ten years old, a veteran by Nam standards.
“Four centuries. Our ships live long; so do our stations. How else shall we maintain our link to the past?”
“The shuttles?” Dong Huong asked, at last, her voice wavering, breaking like a boat in a storm.
Anh nodded, gravely. “Their pilots, yes. I told you that she had many descendants. And many friends.”
Within Dong Huong’s thoughts,
The Tortoise in the Lake
recoiled, watching the ballet of the dozen largest ships in the skies. Every one of them had a Mind; every one of them was as old as
The Two Sisters in Exile
. Every one of them...
“Is this her?” The speaker was a man, who, like Anh, didn’t look a day older than sixteen—a face Dong Huong ached to see older, more mature—less naive about the realities of the war.
“Minh. I see you were waiting for us.” Anh did not smile.
Minh’s eyes were wide, almost shocked. “News gets around. Is it true?”
Anh gestured upwards, to the ballet of ships in the sky. “Do you think we’d all gather, if it wasn’t true?”
Dong Huong hadn’t said anything, waiting to be recognised. At last, Minh turned to her.
“Dong Huong, this is Teacher Minh,” Anh said. “He leads our research programs.”
Minh’s gaze was on her, scrutinising her as one might look at a failed experiment. “Dong Huong. A beautiful name. It ill-suits you.”
“It’s been said before,” Dong Huong said.
Minh sighed. He looked at Anh, and back at her. “She’s so... hard, Anh. Too young to be that callous.”
“Nam,” Anh said, with the same tinge of contempt to her voice. “You know how they are. Shaped by war.”
Minh’s face darkened. “Yes. There is that.”
“You disapprove?” Dong Huong felt a need, a compulsion to challenge him, to see him react in anger, in fear.
“Life is sacred,” Minh said, leading her towards a double-panel door, with Anh in tow. “As we well know. Our bodies are a gift from our parents and our ancestors, and they shan’t be wasted.”
“Wasted?” Dong Huong shook her head. “You mistake us. We give them back, in the most selfless fashion possible. We live for our families, for the Empire. We give our lives so that they might remain safe, unconquered.”
Minh snorted. “You are such children,” he said. “Playing with forces you don’t understand. Which is what brings us here, isn’t it?”
The spire led into a hall vaster than the Northern ships; the walls were decked with images of outside, of the two ships dragging the carcass of
The Two Sisters in Exile
. And it was full—of grave people in rich clothes, of mourners with tears streaming on their faces. She’d never seen so many people gathered together; and suspected that she would never see them again.
Minh and Anh led Dong Huong to the front, ignoring her protestations, and introduced her to the principal mourner: an old, frail woman who looked more bewildered than sad. “It’s never happened before,” she said. “Ships don’t die. They never do...”
“No,” Minh said, slowly, gently. “They never do.” He wasn’t looking at Dong Huong. “I remember, the summer I came home from the Sixth Planet. She was docked in Azure Dragon Spaceport, looking so grand and beautiful—she’d used the trip to go in for repairs. She laughed on my comms, told me that now she looked as young as me, that she felt she could race anywhere in the universe. She...” His voice broke; he raised a hand, rubbing at reddened eyes.
“It’s our fault,” Dong Huong said. “That’s why I’ve come, to offer amends.”
“Amends.” Minh didn’t blink. “Yes, of course. Amends.” He sounded as though he couldn’t understand any of the words, as though they were an entirely alien concept.
Anh steered Dong Huong away from Minh, and towards her place in the front. “I don’t know anything about this,” Dong Huong protested.
“You’ll watch. You said ‘amends,’ didn’t you? Consider this the start of what you owe the ship,” Anh said, firmly planting her at the front of the assembly.
Dong Huong stood, feeling like a particularly exotic animal on display—with the weight of everyone’s gaze on her nape, the growing wave of shock, anger, incomprehension in the room. The ceremony was still going on in the background: monks had joined the mourners, their chanted mantras a continuous drone in the background, and the smell of incense was rising everywhere in the room. She clenched her hand on her gun, struggling to remember her composure.
On the screens, the ship had been towed to what looked like its final destination; while a seething mass of smaller flyers gathered—not ships, not shuttles, but round spheres that looked like a cloud of insects compared with the
The Two Sisters in Exile
. The old woman took up her place at the lectern amidst the growing silence. “We’re all here,” she said at last. “Gathering from our planets, our orbitals, our shuttles, dancing in the skies to honour her. Her name was
The Two Sisters in Exile
, and she knew every one of our ancestors.”
Dong Huong had expected anger; or grief; but not the stony, shocked silence of the assembly. “She was assembled in the yards of the Twenty-First Planet, in the last days of the Dai Viet Empire.” Her voice shivered, and became deeper and more resonant—no, it was a ship, speaking at the same time as her, its voice heavy with grief. “Her Grand Master of Design Harmony was Nguyen Van Lien; her Master of Wind and Water Khong Tu Khinh; and her beloved mother Phan Thi Quynh. She was born in the first year of the reign of Emperor Hieu Phuc, and died in the forty-second year of the Tu Minh reign. Dong Huong of the Nam brought her here.”
The attention of the entire hall turned to Dong Huong, an intensity as heavy as stone. No hatred, no anger; but merely the same shock. This didn’t happen; not to them, not to their ships.
“Today, we are gathered to honour her, and to fill the void that she leaves in our lives. She’ll be—missed.” The voice broke; and the swarm of spheres that had gathered in space shuddered and broke, wrapping themselves around the corpse of
The Two Sisters in Exile
—growing smaller and smaller, slowly eating away at the corpse until nothing remained, just a cloud of dust that danced amongst starlight.
“Missed.” The entire hall was silent now, transfixed by the ceremony. Someone, somewhere, was sobbing; and even if they hadn’t been, the spreading wave of shock and grief was palpable.
Four centuries old. Her descendants, more numerous than the leaves of a tree, the birds in the sky, the grains of rice in a bowl. A life, held sacred; more valuable than jade or gold. Dong Huong watched the graceful ballet in the sky; the ceremony, perfectly poised, with its measured poetry and recitations from long-dead scholars; and, abruptly, she knew the answer she’d take back to her people.
Graceful; scholarly; cultured. The Northerners had forgotten what war was; what death for ships was. They had forgotten that all it took was a lance or an accident to sear away four centuries of wisdom.
They had forgotten how capricious, how arbitrary life was, how things could not be prolonged or controlled. And that, in turn, meant that this—this single death, this incident that would have had no meaning among the Nam—would have them rise up, outraged, bringing fire and wind to avenge their dead, scouring entire planets to avenge a single life.
They would say no, of course. They would speak of peace, of the need for forgiveness. But something like this—a gap, a void this large in the fabric of society—would never be filled, never be forgiven. Minh’s research programs would be bent and turned towards enhancing the weapons on the merchant ships; and all those people in the hall, all those gathered descendants, would become an army on a sacred mission.
In her mind, Dong Huong saw the desert plains of her home planet; the children playing in the ochre courtyard of her lineage house; the smell of lemongrass and garlic from the kitchens—saw it all shiver and crinkle, darkening like paper held to a flame.
Quan Vu watch over us. They’re coming.
ANOTHER APOCALYPSE
GARETH L. POWELL
Gareth is the author of the novels
The Recollection
and
Silversands
, both of which were favourably reviewed in The Guardian, and the short story collection
The Last Reef
, which
Morpheus Tales
described as “One of the finest collections of SF short stories I have had the privilege of reading.” He is currently working on a new novel for Solaris Books, entitled
Ack-Ack Macaque
, inspired by his short story of the same name, which won
Interzone
magazine’s Readers’ Poll for best short story of 2007. You can find him online at
www.garethlpowell.com
1.
V
ILCA’S MEN WERE
going to kill him. He tried tolose himself in the improvised warrens of the vertical favelas, but knew it was only a matter of time before they found him. He’d been away too long; his memories of the rat runs and back ways were out of date by at least a couple of decades. In the end, two of his pursuers cornered him on one of the innumerable wire footbridges stretched between the barrios that clung coral-like to both walls of the steep, narrow canyon.
“Stay where you are, Jones.” The short one’s name was Faro. He was a tough young street kid. His elder brother Emilio blocked the other end of the bridge. They would have both been small boys the last time Napoleon Jones had been here; but now they were in their mid-twenties and armed with machetes. Caught between them, he realised he had nowhere left to run. The springy bridge was less than two metres in width and fifty in length. Half a kilometre below, corrugated metal rooftops patchworked the canyon’s rocky floor. Other bridges crisscrossed the gap at various heights. Flyers and cargo zeppelins nosed like cautious fish between them. Shanties crusted both the canyon’s cliff faces, layer upon layer. Lines of laundry drooped from window to window. Cooking fires filled the air with the bitter tang of smouldering wood and plastic. He could hear shouts and screams and children’s voices. Somewhere a young woman sang.
“What do you want?” he said, buying time.
The two kids each took a step onto the wire bridge. Napoleon took hold of the handrails to steady himself.
“We got something for you, from Vilca,” Emilio said.
Napoleon tipped back the brim of his Stetson. “Maybe I don’t want it.”
Faro laughed cruelly. He slapped the flat blade of his machete against the palm of his hand. “Maybe you’re going to get it, whether you want it or not.”
Napoleon risked a peep over the handrail. This canyon was just one of hundreds arranged in a vast, sprawling delta, carved out over millennia by the patient action of wind and water. Like the tentacles of an enormous squid, the canyons stretched from the mountains at one end of the planet’s solitary supercontinent to the sea at the other, providing the only shade in what was otherwise a pitiless, UV-drenched desert.
Looking down, he saw a cargo zeppelin about to pass beneath the bridge, its broad back like the smooth hump of a browsing whale; and felt the walkway shudder beneath his feet as the street kids advanced, weapons raised.
He should never have come back to Nuevo Cordoba. At his age, he should have known better. He looked longingly down the canyon, towards the distant ocean. The wind tugged at his lizardskin coat. If he could only get back to his starship, the
Bobcat
, floating tethered at the offshore spaceport, he’d be free. He could finally shake this planet’s dust from his boots. As things stood, though, it looked as if he’d be lucky to make it off this bridge alive; or at least in one piece.
He glanced at the approaching thugs. They were closer now. Emilio swung his machete from side-to-side.
“Nowhere to hide?”
Napoleon glanced from one brother to the other. They were almost within striking distance.
“I don’t want any trouble.”
“Shut it,” Faro said.
Below, the zeppelin slid its blunt nose into the shadow of the bridge. Napoleon took the antique flying goggles that hung around his neck and pulled them up over his eyes. Seeing the movement, Emilio stepped forward with a grunt. He scythed his machete around in a powerful swing aimed at Napoleon’s head. Napoleon ducked the blade and came up hard, grasping for the big lad’s arm while the force of the swing still had him off-balance. He slammed Emilio’s wrist against the rail of the bridge, trying to get him to drop the knife. Emilio roared in annoyance and pushed back. The machete came up in a vicious backhand swipe. Napoleon tried to twist out of the way, but the tip of the blade caught him across the right forearm, biting through lizardskin, cotton and flesh.
“Ah!” He staggered back, clutching the stinging wound. He saw more of Vilca’s men arrive. They began to advance across the bridge, and Napoleon knew this was a fight he couldn’t win. As the brothers dropped into fighting crouches on either side of him, ready to hack him to pieces, he braced himself against the handrail.
“Sorry, boys,” he said.
Using his boot heel to push off, he crossed the width of the walkway in two quick steps and launched himself over the opposite rail, into empty air.
T
HE WIND TORE
at him. His coat flapped. The fall seemed to take forever.