Seven of Infinities, page 10
“No no no.” Thiên Hoa waggled a finger. Her face had grown stern and distant again: the ancestor in the mem-implant, advising her to rephrase what she’d been saying. “Fine, fine,” she said, somewhat impatiently to her ghostly ancestor. And, to Sunless Woods, “You’re thinking too much like a thief.”
“I was under the impression I was one.”
“Yes, but—” Thiên Hoa waved a hand, again. “You’re thinking ‘great value’ as in the penal code. The threshold of stolen goods that changes the sentence from exile from the Empire to lifelong servitude or death.”
“And I should be thinking of…?”
Thiên Hoa’s eyes glittered. “Legends. The kind of wealth found in jade-and-emerald citadels, or in dragon kingdoms. The way Khê spoke of it, it was the kind of theft that’d go down in historians’ records.”
Fame. Not just the endless march of news channels wondering how she had done it at all, but the kind that’d go enshrined in the official histories, taught in schools—a giant mocking gesture to the Empire that had turned its back on them. A splash big enough to keep her in the limelight for years, and a fortune for Vân and Uyên, something honestly gotten rather than the inacceptable awkwardness of Sunless Woods forcing stolen money on them…
Something was hardening in Sunless Woods’s gut, a mixture of worry for Vân and anger at Hương Lâm, and at herself for being out of the game for so long, for allowing herself to sink into obscurity, to be turned into so much lesser than she was—she’d show Vân, she’d show them all that she wasn’t to be trifled with.
“A legend,” she said, sharply. “That will do quite nicely. Come on, lil’sis. Let’s go pay our respects to Hương Lâm.”
* * *
VN GOT HOME, and found The Bearer of Healing Wine, Sunless Woods’s mindship friend, waiting for her. “Big’sis,” she said, bowing, and the ship laughed.
“That’s not quite what I had in mind when I told you to get less familiar.”
In their common quarters, Uyên was sitting in front of a calligraphy exercise with the nervous, pent-up energy that suggested anything would send her careening down a new train of thought. She fairly jumped up when she saw Vân. “Teacher!”
Wine had followed Vân into the room. Uyên frowned when she saw her—but then she must have checked the label in the network and realised Wine wasn’t another avatar of Sunless Woods.
“She’s a friend.” Vân didn’t want to say bodyguard, because Uyên would have too many questions. “She’s come to help with some questions I had on books.”
Uyên made a face. “Please tell me we’re not about to have a lesson. Not now.”
Vân knew Uyên wouldn’t be able to sit still for it, at least not until she got the curiosity out of the way. She summarised, quickly, what had happened onboard the dead ship, carefully leaving out any mention of the aftermath. Nevertheless, she could tell Uyên wasn’t convinced.
“Uh,” Uyên said when Vân was done. “Murder.”
“I don’t think they have any interest in you anymore,” Wine said. “They’ll be trying to shake off Sunless Woods’s pursuit.” It was very clearly a lie, but apparently enough gravitas from an authority figure was enough to convince Uyên.
Or, to be more accurate: Uyên had other preoccupations. “So Sunless Woods is really digging into this. She sounds pretty…driven.”
Vân tried not to blush, but it was futile. Uyên’s smile was broad.
“She’s nice,” Vân said, non-committal.
Wine made a sound that sounded suspiciously like choked laughter, but mercifully didn’t take it further. Vân wanted to disappear into the floor. “So,” the ship said, “any place where I can set up and work?”
They ended up giving her some space in Uyên’s larger quarters, where she unpacked a simulation of what looked like bot parts and settled down to watch them with the intentness of a monk meditating on the secrets of the universe.
“So,” Uyên said casually—too casually—“what she was saying about Sunless Woods sorting that out—”
Vân breathed in, sharply, thinking of Hương Lâm’s face, of the hardness in Sunless Woods’s voice when she said the problem was as good as dealt with—of what it meant, of who the ship really was—“I believe her,” she said, and her heart felt it was going to burst out of her chest—as if she’d been running in blind panic through darkness from something fanged and clawed.
“Ah.” Uyên’s gaze was uncomfortably sharp.
“Come on,” Vân said. “Let’s talk about Quý Xuân and her poetry.”
She taught it on automatic, An Thành interjecting with allusions and the commentary of other scholars—the different interpretations and their weight, and how it called back to earlier poets from before the Exodus. It should have been comforting—she should have been feeling An Thành’s presence in her thoughts like the weight of a shadow-skin in vacuum, the knowledge that someone would be there to catch her if she faltered in her scholarship—but instead all she could see was Uyên’s gaze, the weight of it, the obvious admiration in her eyes—everything that had once made her happy and was now shrivelled by the knowledge of how close she was to losing it all—how Uyên would never forgive her for An Thành or any of the secrets she was keeping as her duty—and the ship and the paintings and lying on Sunless Woods’s chest with the song of the stars in her ears—and how she didn’t know where she stood with her or what any of it meant.
An Thành said, Truth uttered before its time is always dangerous, but sincerity is always the way of Heaven.
No, Vân said. You’re wrong. You’re wrong.
She couldn’t breathe, anymore.
“Teacher? Is anything wrong?”
“I’m fine,” Vân said. “Why don’t you write some commentary on Quý Xuân yourself? I’ll come back and check up on you.”
Uyên threw her a sharp glance but didn’t protest.
In her quarters, everything was smaller and suffocating, and she couldn’t seem to lie down and relax. A blinking light caught her attention: a message that had lain in her queue for a while. She opened it before she could think: a hologram coalesced in the middle of her bedroom.
It was the Seven of Threads.
The exact same design Uyên had found, a stylised painting on the tile with the individual threads of the strings glistening in the light—and behind were the other ones, the Seven of Infinities, the mathematical symbol drawn in ink as black as ebony, with a faint scattering of stars over the strokes; the Seven of Barrels, the circles enclosing a glistening liquid that might have been wine or oil, with translucent, shadowy reflections on their surface like the faces of demons or ghosts.
Then they both faded, and she saw Hương Lâm’s face staring at her.
It was her: not the face she currently wore—because she and Dinh had altered themselves so thoroughly in order to be able to come back to the Belt—but a skillful overlay that mimicked the movements of her gen-modded features, simulating the person Vân had once known.
“Elder sister. We need to talk. Please.” Her voice was raw and exhausted, and even the overlay couldn’t disguise the shadow of pain and fear in her eyes.
Vân opened her mouth. Words crowded behind it: everything that Sunless Woods had warned her about, how much Hương Lâm would want to hurt her—but nothing would come out.
“I—” Hương Lâm swallowed. “I didn’t mean for things to turn out that way. It…” she stopped then, looking for words—she looked small and defeated and in immense pain, and Vân felt her own unsaid words like cold stones in her throat. “It all went wrong, didn’t it? Please, elder sister. I trust you.” She faded away, and the hologram became a set of coordinates somewhere in the outer rings of the habitat.
Elder sister.
Vân’s hands hurt: she unclenched them, realising her nails had dug into her skin hard enough to break it. Blood beaded within her palm: her own bots came to staunch the wound, and still she couldn’t bring herself to move.
I trust you.
She’d trusted Vân, once: to keep her mouth shut, to let Hương Lâm and Dinh sacrifice themselves and remain silent herself, to let them die rather than be implicated.
The smart, sensible thing would have been to tell Sunless Woods; to sit back and let it all happen, the chase, the militia arrest—and then she remembered the harshness of Sunless Woods’s voice, and that murder was the slow death—a flash of a body stretched on a rack, and executioners’ bots slowly slicing away bits of flesh, and blood falling drop by drop on polished metal.
Laureate? she asked, and within her An Thành, startled, stirred.
The one who steals salt dies of thirst unless debts are repaid, An Thành said, and her voice was almost gentle.
Please, elder sister.
She’d failed them once, and Dinh had died in terrible agony—and would she really fail them a second time?
* * *
SNEAKING OUT WAS surprisingly easy. Wine was setting up surveillance devices and chatting to a concerned Uyên, and was focusing on problems coming from outside rather than people under her charge leaving. Vân caught scraps of their conversation as she came out: “wound tight…she needs to rest…a shock.”
They were concerned about her—which might have stopped her in other circumstances.
The address Hương Lâm had given her was in the Six Families district, on the outskirts of the habitat. As she moved away from the central districts, the overlays got more and more lurid and elaborate to disguise the rundown structures, the corridors where the paint was flaking and dull. And then there were no overlays at all, just metal so roughly polished it looked pitted, people’s personal bots rather than the habitat ones painting over the blank walls, and doors that only fitted into their frame because they’d been melted and twisted into shape.
The address Hương Lâm had given her was one of those doors. It bulged outwards, and someone had painted a sprig of apricot flowers that had got torn in half when the metal piece was cut. The faint sheen on the metal reminded her, for a moment, of Sunless Woods’s hull, and she had to breathe slowly and quietly before she could knock, punching in the code that Hương Lâm had given her.
The door didn’t so much swing open as collapse inwards with a shriek. Inside was only darkness. “Younger sister? It’s me.”
“In here,” a distant voice said.
Vân’s heart beat so strongly she felt it was going to burst through her chest. She walked forward, and the darkness engulfed her—the air felt stale, and with that rancid aftertaste of not passing through enough purifiers. Almost as if she were back in space, except that there was nothing ahead of her but the price for her own foolish mistakes.
An Thành was silent within her: Vân could feel the mem-implant’s wary watchfulness, but of course she’d never been meant to judge anything.
Sunless Woods would judge, a small, treacherous voice said, within Vân. Sunless Woods would care.
Vân shushed it.
The corridor opened on a space that was almost obscenely wide: a former teahouse, except that the profusion of tables were gone, and only a single one remained in the centre of the room. There were no overlays. No, that wasn’t true. For as Vân went deeper into the room, towards the waiting figure of Hương Lâm behind the table, something shimmered into existence under her feet: mạt chược tiles, the same ones drawn by Dinh, the brushstrokes of the Infinities, the Barrels and their glistening contents, the Threads, sharply delineated—and the other tiles too; the replacement tiles with their coloured, sweeping calligraphy, the flowers scattered across the pristine white of the tiles; the winds, represented not as words or characters, but as serpentine shapes stretching towards the top of the tiles, with the patterns of nebulas on their scales…
“Elder sister.” Hương Lâm looked up from the table, where three cups of steaming tea waited for Vân. “I hadn’t expected you to come.” She sounded exhausted and hurt: the face she was wearing was the new one, but her mannerisms and voice had barely changed. They could almost have been back five years ago, in that faraway lifetime before the thefts, before the militia. Behind Hương Lâm was the Seven of Infinities, slowly morphing into the other two Seven tiles.
Vân pulled out the chair and sat. In her thoughts was only silence, with even Laureate An Thành at a loss for words. “I had to,” she said, because nothing but the truth was left. She saw that the third cup was merely a hologram, much like the ones on the ancestral altars. “Dinh…”
“I can’t speak about her. Not now.” Hương Lâm inhaled, sharply. “Here. Have your tea.”
It wasn’t an overlay, but something with a faint, acrid taste of grass that burnt all the way down into the nauseous emptiness of Vân’s belly. Hương Lâm sipped hers, grimacing—watching Vân intently.
Vân said, finally, “I’ve always thought you were dead,” which was trite but needed to be said.
“We might as well have been.” Hương Lâm moved slowly, carefully, as if her body were made of glass—and Vân remembered what Wine had said about Dinh, the constant agony she’d been in that had finally killed her. “Exiled beyond the Belt and beyond the numbered planets. It’s the places no one wants to go to, the fire-scorched lands, the atmospheres that can’t be breathed.” Her breath was slow and ragged. “We were on Hoả Giả Sơn Tinh. It’s mostly lava and sulphur, and one dome. If you want to go out, you need an expensive suit that exiles like us can’t afford. We couldn’t get work, because no one would hire us. We couldn’t contact anyone, because the network was local, and everything else needed to be sent through the government array. That’s more money you didn’t have.”
“I should have sent you some.”
“Why would you? You thought we were dead.”
“I had no idea.”
“I know you didn’t.” Hương Lâm’s face twisted. “I’m not here to reproach you. You did what you had to. You kept your silence, and look at you.” She sounded fond. “You have a post. You have success, although you could have gone so much higher.”
Vân thought, uncomfortably, of her discussion with Uyên. “I don’t want to go higher. I’m happy here.” Why did the second sentence sound like a lie? “Why are you here, younger sister?” And, because she had to, “People died. Not just Dinh.”
Hương Lâm exhaled. She stared at her tea for a while, while the bots on her shoulders descended to fetch more leaves. “We didn’t have a choice. You have to understand. What it’s like to not be condemned to death, but to slowly choke. To be exiled. To be marked. To be cut off from our families, from society. From everything that matters. We might as well have been dead: it would have been kinder, even the slow death.”
“I’m sorry,” Vân said, and it sounded small and inadequate. But another, irrepressible thought came right afterward—one An Thành silently nodded in acquiescence to: “You killed Ái Hồng. Everything that happened to you cannot be an excuse.”
Bitter laughter, from Hương Lâm. She reached into her sleeves, and set a single tile on the table: one of the Four Noble Professions, the Scholar: a silhouette holding a brush and an inkstone, the background adorned with a single hollow bamboo under the moon, Dinh’s forceful drawing, shadowed and sinister, laying bare the pain that had killed her, the pain that was tearing Hương Lâm apart. “That’s you all over, isn’t it. Refusing to understand how things truly work. How dark it can get.”
“I’m no stranger to darkness.”
“You’re sheltered.”
“Because you sheltered me?”
“Is that not the way it happened?” Hương Lâm smiled, and for a bare moment Vân saw, beneath the overlay, the tautness of the face, the creases of agonising pain, and her heart, stretched thin and desperate, broke.
“Please,” she said. “Please stop. I know I wasn’t there for you, but this can’t go on. You have to see there’s only one ending to all of this. If you turn yourself in, they’ll be merciful.”
“A reduction of one degree? From agonising death to being sent painlessly into Hell?”
“Please.” Vân’s hands were shaking. The teacup wobbled in her grasp—she tried to put it back on the table, and something went wrong and sent it crashing to the floor. Hương Lâm barely glanced at it as her bots gathered to pick up the shards. “I’m sorry,” Vân said. “I should have said something. I would have sent you money—I should have sent you money—but it’s too late.” She’d prospered while they suffered; had let the debt she owed them grow as large and heavy as a banyan tree. But it had all been an impossible, ephemeral dream.
“Is it?” Hương Lâm’s eyes glinted in the darkness. She set down her own teacup, and a wave of incontrollable nausea racked Vân from head to toe. “You can’t pay, elder sister. You genuinely can’t. If you were an official—if you’d sat for the exams and been posted as a magistrate, if you’d entered the Brush Forest Academy, then perhaps you’d have a fortune to spend.”
“You don’t need a fortune,” Vân said, chilled. Every word felt like weighted stones: even shaping her mouth around them exhausted her.
“I deserve a fortune.”
“Ngân Chi…”
“Ngân Chi never had one. But fortunately, you still do.”
The room was growing dark, and warm, unbearably so: Vân tried to rise, but found that her legs wouldn’t obey her—her hands, scrabbling to hold the arms of the chair, except that nothing would move, and something as vast and tenebrous as the abyss of space opened beneath her, only waiting to drag her in.
Hương Lâm said, matter-of-factly, “You made a mem-implant. You created an ancestor. Don’t you understand?”
An Thành—she could feel An Thành in her mind, could feel her steely disapproval of Hương Lâm and all she stood for, but it was as if she were behind a pane of glass.
