Seven of Infinities, page 1
ALSO BY ALIETTE DE BODARD
OBSIDIAN AND BLOOD
Servant of the Underworld*
Harbinger of the Storm*
Master of the House of Darts*
DOMINION OF THE FALLEN
The House of Shattered Wings
The House of Binding Thorns
The House of Sundering Flames*
DOMINION OF THE FALLEN STORIES
Of Books, and Earth, and Courtship
Of Dragons, Feasts, and Murder*
XUYA UNIVERSE
On a Red Station, Drifting
The Citadel of Weeping Pearls*
Of Wars, and Memories, and Starlight*
The Tea Master and the Detective*
Seven of Infinities*
OTHER SHORT FICTION & NOVELLAS
In the Vanishers’ Palace*
*available as a JABberwocky ebook
Seven of Infinities
Copyright © 2020 by Aliette de Bodard
All rights reserved.
Published as an eBook in 2020 by JABberwocky Literary Agency, Inc., in association with the Zeno Agency LTD.
Originally published in North America in 2020 by Subterranean Press
ISBN 978-1-625675-32-3
Cover art by Dirk Berger
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
JABberwocky Literary Agency, Inc.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Also by Aliette de Bodard
Copyright
Seven of Infinities
Acknowledgments
About the Author
SEVEN OF INFINITIES
HIGH-RANKING VISITOR in the antechamber, waiting for you.
When her bots pinged her unexpectedly with that message, Vân opened the door of her room, and found the mindship The Wild Orchid in Sunless Woods in the narrow space that served as common access to the quarters she and her student Uyên occupied.
What was the mindship doing there?
She was a member of Vân’s poetry club, except that she was a mindship and a celebrated scholar who’d graduated from the imperial examinations—whereas Vân was the daughter of a shopkeeper, with no degree to her name, making ends meet as a private tutor rather than enjoying the largesse of being a state official. Sunless Woods and Vân spent time together in the context of the poetry club, but certainly they’d never been intimate enough for the ship to pay her a private call.
Vân stepped into the antechamber. “Elder aunt. Are you here for me?”
“Child.” The ship rose, and bowed. “Yes, I am.” She wasn’t physically there: she was parked in orbit somewhere in the Scattered Pearls Belt, projecting down an avatar when she needed to be in the habitats. Her avatar was as unconventional as her name (which was itself a reference to scholars whose merit wasn’t recognised, a borderline criticism of the examinations system). Instead of a miniature version of herself, it was a vaguely humanoid shape: at first glance, she appeared to have two arms and two legs and to be about Vân’s size, but whenever she moved Vân would catch a glimpse of something far, far larger—sleek and polished metal, the reflection of distant stars, and a feeling the room, the entire habitat were twisting and folding back on themselves, unable to contain the vastness of her.
“Is there a place we could talk privately?” Vân couldn’t place Sunless Woods’s tone.
“Yes, of course.” She led Sunless Woods back into her compartment: her own private space, a small room with a bed, a table and a series of overlays of paintings and ceramics whose physical version Vân could certainly never have afforded. “Do you want tea?”
“Please.” The ship inclined her head.
The bots poured Vân a cup of tea—and a ghostly cup shimmered into existence for Sunless Woods, in an overlay of Vân’s room. The mindship didn’t need food to sustain her body, but to her the complex, layered flavour of the tea would suggest pleasant memories—the same for Vân, reminding her of New Year’s Eve and the smell of banana leaves, and the crinkle of red envelopes handed to children.
The ship waited until Vân was almost done with her cup of tea before speaking. “I came here because there have been… discussions.”
“Discussions?”
Sunless Woods’s tone was dark. “On the suitability of your presence at the poetry club.”
For a moment—a suspended, agonising, horrible moment—Vân thought they had found her out. That they knew about Laureate An Thành, that the scandal she’d been running away from had finally caught her.
How could they know? Laureate An Thành said, in Vân’s mind. They can’t possibly tell the difference. Her voice was withering. Vân could feel An Thành in her thoughts—a personality on a mem-implant offering Vân the knowledge she needed to go from passably good scholar to an excellent one. Mem-implants were commonplace, but they were ancestors of those who held them, physical people preserved as study-aids—and An Thành, whom Vân had put together from fragments of other people’s personalities, was the height of impropriety, disrespectfully scavenged from the dead and not related to Vân in any way.
They— Vân struggled for words amidst the bottomless pit in her stomach, and saw Sunless Woods, head cocked, watching her. “Elder aunt—”
The ship shrugged. It was a curiously expansive gesture that seemed to drag the air away from Vân. Her voice was dark. “They think you commonplace. Vulgar.”
Vulgar. Vân stared at her: this was familiar territory. Her heart sank. “This isn’t about my ability as a scholar at all, is it?”
For a moment she thought the ship would smile and lie, but Sunless Woods merely shook her head, her face taking on the hard planes of some faceted gem. “This is about your birth.” She smiled, but it was darker and a great deal less amused than Vân would have thought. “They use words like unsuitable, brash, unaware of the codes by which they all live.”
Because she hadn’t grown up with these codes. Laureate An Thành could help, to an extent—could offer knowledge and literary allusions, but of course something would always seem off to the other scholars, the ones whose families had been officials for generations. Vân said, chilled, “If the poetry club throws me out, I’ll lose my job.”
Word would get around. Uyên, her student, the daughter of the house in which Vân lived, wouldn’t want a tutor who was shunned by the scholar community.
Vân would lose everything.
Sunless Woods said, “I know.” It was rather sharper than Vân had expected.
“I don’t understand why you’re here,” Vân said.
A ping, on the network: someone else had entered the antechamber. A woman Vân didn’t know: middle-aged, her skin shining with the particular smoothness of cheap rejuv treatments. She wore only a handful of bots, like jewellery rather than the usual utilitarian approach: three serpentine ones wrapped around both wrists and around her neck—the lacquered, ornamental kind painted with vivid orchids. Vân couldn’t place her socially, which was odd because she usually had an excellent sense of where people fitted in on the habitats. “Hang on,” she said, half-rising.
But the door to the other compartment—Uyên’s compartment—had already opened, and Vân’s student Uyên stepped out. “Oh hello, younger aunt. Do come in.”
And they were both gone into Uyên’s compartment. Vân breathed out. None of her business, then.
Good.
“Why am I here?” Sunless Woods said. “To warn you.”
Vân opened her mouth. That was not the answer she had expected. “You can’t possibly—?”
“Disapprove of what they’re doing?” Sunless Woods’s voice was sharp. “This is about merit, not about who your parents were.”
As if that had ever been the case. Vân said, trying to breathe through the panic—what would she do, if Uyên’s family dismissed her?—“I don’t know what to do.”
“Appeal,” Sunless Woods’s voice was sharp. “Good steeds don’t always get the proper grooms, or jade the right carver to make it come alive.” Metaphors for scholars whose talents were going unrecognised, An Thành pointed out in Vân’s thoughts. The last one is a bit unorthodox.
“I—” Vân opened her mouth, closed it. She couldn’t appeal. She couldn’t afford to appeal. A board would take a look at her scholarly abilities, and if they dug too deep they’d find that Vân couldn’t possibly have a real mem-implant—and the scandal that followed would be even larger and uglier. It would lose her her job anyway, and see her shunned from good society forever. “I can’t, elder aunt.”
“Can’t, or won’t?” Sunless Woods’s gaze held Vân’s, unerringly: in the faint imprint of pupils on the ship’s face Vân saw darkness, an exhilarating and endless plunge into the stars. She shivered.
Either. Both. “If I force the poetry club to keep me on, you know they’ll just resent me for who I am.” She tried, very hard, to make it seem reasonable, to not show Sunless Woods an inkling of fear.
A snort. “You can live with resentment.” The ship cocked her head to watch her. “Or would you rather lose your job?”
“I don’t understand why you’re here,” Vân said, again, stubbornly.
“Because things should be fair. Because you’re talented, and because this would be a colossal, infuriating waste.”
“I’m not—” Vân started, but a voice cut her off.
“Teacher?” Startled, Vân looked up. Her student Uyên was standing in the doorway, and something was off in her pose.
“What’s wrong?”
“I—” Uyên stopped, spoke up again. Her voice was shaking. “I think I have a problem.”
“What kind of problem?”
“My visitor. She’s dead,” Uyên said, and raised hands that were shaking—and would have collapsed, if Vân hadn’t leapt from her chair to catch her as she faltered.
* * *
UYÊN’S CURRENT OVERLAY of her compartment was darkness: a vast and cavernous view of the heavens as if one were in a spaceship or small capsule, and the floor were glass. Beneath Vân’s feet was the River of Stars: a spread of lights underfoot that kept changing, drawing patterns that evoked words—fragments of poems by Hàn Mặc Tử, Lãnh Ngọc, Đông Hải Diễm…
Beautiful, Laureate An Thành said. Uyên is such a very promising student. No wonder her mother has such high hopes for her. The daughter of the Captain who Swam in the River of Stars…
Vân shook her head to dismiss the comments. Now wasn’t the time to let the Laureate take over. Literature later. There’s a body, Laureate.
An Thành subsided, with a regretful sigh, and sank to a bare whisper in Vân’s mind again.
The woman Vân had seen earlier lay on one of those ever-shifting spreads of stars, her face by turns in light and shadow as the composition beneath her changed. Vân couldn’t see any wounds.
“May I?” Sunless Woods had followed her in.
Vân wasn’t sure if she was addressing Vân or Uyên; but Uyên hadn’t moved; was waiting for her to weigh in as the most senior person in the room. She nodded.
Sunless Woods moved, graceful, ethereal. Vân blinked, and all of a sudden Sunless Woods was no longer in the doorway, but kneeling by the corpse’s side, head cocked to stare at it, fingers resting lightly on the woman’s wrists, where her bots still lay coiled. Something spun in the air between them: a thread of light going from one to another, as Sunless Woods tipped her head back, lips parted—she seemed to be inhaling it all.
“What happened?” Vân asked.
“I don’t know,” Uyên said, and Vân measured the depth of her student’s panic. Uyên would rather deflect conversation than admit ignorance. “She said she had important business. I left her in there thirty seconds to rustle up some cooking bots for tea and refreshments, and when I came back she was on the floor. She had no pulse!”
Vân raised a hand, trying to stem Uyên’s panic. She was wound up too tight, still worrying about the poetry club and all that it might entail for her. She was meant to project reassurance, but she felt small and scared and vulnerable. She forced herself to breathe. “All right. Back up. What happened before that? Who was she?”
Uyên made a face. “I don’t know.”
“What do you mean, you don’t know? You—” Vân breathed in, again, slowing down. She wanted to say Uyên had been so effortlessly certain when she’d welcomed the woman in, but then she realised that Uyên would never look uncertain. She was so deeply worried of being judged and found wanting that her mask had become second nature to her. “So you didn’t know her?”
“No,” Uyên said. “She said she had some urgent business, and that it had to do with the examinations.”
The ones Uyên was meant to be sitting for in a couple of months—the ones Vân had been hired to help her pass, to make Uyên worthy of the first mother who had died for the Empire and given Uyên and her second mother the grace of an imperial title. “With the examinations?” Vân frowned. “Surely she’d know better than selling questions or cheating methods. The law is quite drastic on the matter.”
The only things allowed in the candidates’ cells during the examinations would be mem-implants—like the one Vân had, like the two Uyên had, the memory traces of her first mother and grandmother, offering advice and suggestions, the ancestors’ blessings made manifest.
Sunless Woods shifted. “You’re aware,” she said to Uyên, “that if she’d been found guilty of examination fraud you’d have been judged guilty as well.” She brought her fingers from the corpse’s wrist to her mouth, held them there for a while, as if pondering a particularly difficult problem.
An expansive shrug from Uyên. “I know the code. If I haven’t accepted anything then there’s no offence.”
Sunless Woods took the fingers out of her mouth. “You’d need to prove it. Jurisprudence isn’t on your side. It’s a really odd corpse.” She shifted—her eyes rolled up for a moment, and in that fraction of a heartbeat Vân saw the deepness of space in them, like a gateway to a place that would swallow her whole. “There’s no pulse, but there’s also no wounds whatsoever. Burn marks on her hands, but these aren’t lethal, and they’re also a few days old, at the least.”
“Poison?” Uyên asked.
Focus. Focus. She needed to think less on herself and more about her student, or she was going to fail Uyên. “Look, none of it is the point. The point is that we need to call the militia and let them handle this, to get you off the hook. Now.”
Uyên looked puzzled.
“Examination fraud is bad enough. Murder is worse,” Vân said.
If she closed her eyes she’d see the interrogation rooms again; the officious looking clerk smiling at her and gently, carefully insinuating that she knew more than she let on about the affairs of her friends—that surely one had to be spectacularly stupid, or unaware, or a poor elder sister, to fail to see what was right in front of her eyes—and Vân, remaining silent and not knowing what she could do…
It was past. She had survived, but Hương Lâm and Dinh had not. She remembered the day both sisters had been transferred to the Twenty-Third Planet for their execution—standing in the crowd of the spaceport, trying to catch a glimpse of them, and Hương Lâm’s gaze finding her as the militia pushed her towards the transport mindship—the way her friend’s face had set, lips tightening, the little shake of her head that warned Vân no to do anything stupid.
We protected you, big’sis. Don’t go and waste it all.
It was in the past. Five years ago, and all that remained of it was dark and confused nightmares in which she never ran fast enough to escape.
A touch, on Vân’s shoulders—a warmth that was too sudden and too spread to be that of a human hand, but rather something processed through an overlay. She looked up. Sunless Woods had effortlessly crossed the room and was standing by her side—and behind her, along her trajectory, was a faint imprint on Uyên’s overlay, like the radiance of ten thousand stars fading against the daylight sky. “Can I have a word with you, child? In private.”
Vân clamped her lips on the obvious “why?” that filled her thoughts. “Of course.”
She walked with Sunless Woods to a quieter corner of the room. A hush descended: the mindship, accessing the habitat’s command and asking for privacy. “I didn’t know you could do that.”
A smile that transformed Sunless Woods’s entire face, making her seem less distant and less severe. “Technically, no. But I have ways.”
“All right,” Vân said. “What do you want?”
Sunless Woods’s face was gentle. “Are you all right? You looked upset.”
Vân’s lips moved before her brain caught up with them. “Why do you care?”
A fraught silence. Sunless Woods moved to put a hand on Vân’s shoulder again. When she raised her arm oily darkness glinted in the space between arm and torso, as if she were trailing a cape of the cloth of Heaven—an unsettling and yet oddly welcome sight, a reminder that all of Vân’s concerns were, in the end, short-lived. Warmth spread, again, diffuse and unoppressive. She’d never craved anything so much.
