Seven of Infinities, page 5
* * *
VN SAT, STIFFLY, on the shuttle, her own bots clinging to her topknot, as rigid and as unmoving as she was.
“That’s not quite what I had in mind,” she said. She was trying very hard to prevent the excruciating flush growing in her from spreading to her face. Though Sunless Woods doubtless had bots and sensors and would likely sense her heightened body temperature.
Great. Just great.
Gentle laughter, echoing through the metal walls of the shuttle. “You asked for my help getting to a ship,” Sunless Woods said. Her avatar coalesced in the room, leaning on the table that occupied most of it. “What did you think it was going to involve?”
She’d had no idea, to be honest. She’d thought that Sunless Woods was going to pull rank or favours or both to get them access to a spaceship—not that she was going to send one of her own shuttles to pick her up.
It was like any of the other shuttles that she’d taken: a square metal box with a table in the centre, and benches recessed into the sloping walls. The overlay was minimalist: just a few images of garlands of flowers.
Nevertheless, it was decidedly awkward, like being shown into someone’s intimacy without the proper introductions.
“It’s just a shuttle,” Sunless Woods said. When she moved from the table to one of the benches, the stars outside the shuttle lingered under her feet. Vân found her breath hurting in her chest. “You’re acting like I just disrobed in front of you.” Laughter again. “Though that wouldn’t have as much meaning for me as it would for you.”
In spite of herself, Vân said, “You must have slept with humans.”
“Some. We both have slightly different expectations about what this entails. It’s all about making sure everyone’s needs are amply…satisfied.” The smile hadn’t left Sunless Woods’s face. Vân felt her presence all around her, a palpable heartbeat running through the shuttle and through her own body. Then the ship grew serious. “We haven’t had time to talk about the poetry club.” A pause, then, “If you need another job, I’d be quite happy to recommend you for one.”
“Oh.” Vân felt herself turning beetroot red again. “Thank you. I don’t think that will be necessary.”
“Oh?”
“Uyên said the family wouldn’t care about what happened with the poetry club.”
A silence. Then the ship’s hard, cutting voice. “Good. They shouldn’t. And there are other clubs, if that’s what you want.”
“I don’t know,” Vân said. “Perhaps not right now.” She saw again Uyên’s hard face, heard her student’s absolute certainty that she would sort things out.
My mother would want me to be taught by the best scholar in the Belt.
Except Uyên didn’t know about An Thành, did she? She tried to breathe past the obstruction in her chest. “Shouldn’t we be talking about the dead ship?”
“Mmm,” Sunless Woods said. She shimmered in and out of existence, muttering to herself words that Vân could barely parse. Star coordinates, Laureate An Thành said.
Vân said, aloud, “Looking for something. You know, I don’t much care about what it is they’re after, as long as it’s not Uyên. But there might be something on that ship that’ll help us track her companions down.”
A pause. Sunless Woods said, at last, “You know, they didn’t find what they were looking for in Uyên’s room. They might let the matter rest.”
“Might? Be honest, elder aunt. We have a corpse in Uyên’s room—not only that, but one so deeply modified the militia hasn’t been able to identify it. Which means no proper funeral rites, and no burial with the rest of her family.” Vân shook her head. “They might have come here to steal, but now it’s going to be about revenge.” And it was going to be ugly.
They needed to track down the accomplices and turn them over to the militia before that happened.
When she looked up again, the ship’s avatar was sitting next to her, and Sunless Woods’s bots were on both her shoulders, gently squeezing—it was like being held in a ghostly embrace. “You’re upset.”
“Uyên being a target of some shadowy underworld’s revenge wasn’t on my priority list, no,” Vân said, stiffly. Warmth was spreading to her shoulders and spine, an odd breathless kind of feeling she couldn’t quite name.
“I was going to say you don’t have to do this, but you would do it anyway, wouldn’t you?”
“She’s my student,” Vân said, simply. “I have obligations to her.”
“Most teachers would wash their hands of this.”
“I’m not most teachers.” It sounded stiff and boastful, and she clamped her lips on what she might have said afterwards. It’s true, though, An Thành said.
The silence that spread afterwards was awkward, but Vân was used to awkwardness. She’d gotten plenty of it as one of the only poor students in the state school. Sunless Woods was back to navigating, speaking to herself again, and the garlands of flowers fluttered in an invisible wind.
“We’re here,” Sunless Woods said.
* * *
EVEN THE SHUTTLE couldn’t make it that far into the debris field that surrounded The Elephant and Grass. Vân suited up instead, grabbing one of the shadow-skins behind the benches to protect her against the vacuum—if being in one of Sunless Woods’s shuttles was like the ship disrobing to her, she amply repaid Sunless Woods when she put the shadow-skin on: taking off all the clothes in a half-alcove that was all the privacy the ship could afford her, her bots helping her latch the comms module and making sure her topknot didn’t get caught in the skin’s folds.
“I’m not looking,” Sunless Woods said. She sounded amused again. “You’re not the first to change clothes here, you know.”
“How many of these did you sleep with?”
The same gentle laughter. “A question I won’t answer, I fear. But I have done some work as a civilian transport, in another life. I’ve had my share of passengers.”
But she wasn’t doing it anymore. Which begged the question of what she lived on, exactly. Maintaining a ship was expensive, which was why most mindships were in the service of the empire, or in freight transports where the ability to jump into deep spaces and cut short long slow journeys served them well. What did Sunless Woods do for a living? She was a scholar, to be sure; but Vân knew all too well that being a scholar didn’t pay the bills.
Family wealth, An Thành said, gently.
That had to be it.
Nevertheless…nevertheless, her demeanour was off. Vân had hung around enough children of the powerful in her youth, and Sunless Woods didn’t act like any of them. Perhaps a family that had only recently become wealthy?
And why was it any of her business anyway? The ship had been nothing but helpful; and obviously Vân had to wonder about motive—but the why of it was transparent enough, wasn’t it—and would she quibble, really, if things got that far?
This time, the flush started in her belly, and spread to her cheeks and the tips of her fingers. She crossed her legs, but it just made matters worse.
“Child? Child?”
“Sorry,” Vân said, colouring again. “Daydreaming.”
“I can see that.” Again, that repressed laughter. “On to more serious things: I won’t be able to project an avatar once you leave the ship. But I can guide you.”
“Radio comms?”
“My bots, if you’ll have them.”
“Why would I not?”
A silence. “I can see how that’d be awkward.” Bots were highly personal, after all. Vân snorted.
“We’ve come this far. I’d be lacking common sense if I turned away now.”
A charged silence. “It’s not dangerous,” Sunless Woods said. “You’re small and more mobile than a ship. It’ll just take time. You need to be patient.”
“That’s why no one has gone to retrieve The Elephant and Grass?” She was thinking of funerals and of burials—where did they put the dead ships, were there mausoleums large enough to contain the whole of their bodies?
They compact them, Laureate An Thành interjected. And burn them if they cannot. Some have been left as living mausoleums in space, but it’s inconvenient for their descendants to visit.
“Mmm,” Sunless Woods said. “That, and how she died. Multiple explosions left her hull badly damaged. Even if we got her out of the debris she’d likely come apart from the stress of being hauled. And she was pretty thoroughly destroyed, and transporting nothing of value and no passengers—so not worth the time or expenses.”
“She must be so terribly lonely,” Vân said, before she could think. “Drifting in the dark with no one to tend to her grave. Did she—did she have family, at least?” Some holo somewhere on some ancestral altar, some respects and prayers sent her way.
“I don’t know.” Sunless Woods sounded startled. “She had siblings, so I assume she has descendants. But Ngân Chi’s family was penniless, so they wouldn’t have had money to spare for a salvage operation.” A pause.
“You think I’m weird,” Vân said, defensively.
“Not at all.” Sunless Woods’s voice was pensive, her avatar barely there at all, just an outline almost merging with the metal walls. “I think most people wouldn’t have cared about what happened to a long-dead ship.” The shuttle shuddered, as if it were coming apart—and one of the benches seemed to collapse on itself—scrunching itself tightly until it revealed the darkness of space. “There. That’s your airlock. Let’s go pay our respects.”
* * *
IT WAS ODD, being out there.
Like almost everyone in the Belt, Vân had received basic security training which included space mobility as well as handling the various protective suits from the old metal shells to the newer shadow-skins; and, like almost everyone in the Belt, she’d never had to use that training.
It came back to her as she launched—the particular way every movement would carry her much further than she’d expected, how she’d turn and spin, keeping at bay her brain’s atavistic panic that she was falling, trying to remember where she put her up and her down, and to find a reference point in the asteroids around her. The shadow-skin clung to her clothes like a damp shirt, and the only sound was that of her breath. In her hands was the glider she’d use to weave her way around asteroids, securely clamped to one of her wrists: a metal heaviness that felt both familiar and utterly alien, like a half-remembered thing from a dream. And in her ears a faint sound: a half-remembered, rhythmic thing that felt like the edge of a poem in a dream, an overlapping chorus of radio waves coming from the sun and the stars and everything around her.
“You’re doing very well,” Sunless Woods said.
She turned, briefly—saw the shuttle outlined in the glare of the sun, metal glinting on its facets; felt the faint scritching of bots on the shadow-skin, like a ghostly touch. She was warm again, her heartbeat easing down. Within her, Laureate An Thành was silent—not interjecting anything, but simply drinking in the view.
She turned on the glider. Its rumble spread to her wrists and arms: she lay down and nudged herself into position, gently nosing between the asteroids—they seemed so small seen from far away, children’s rocks, and then as she got closer they dwarfed her, growing from small fist-sized specks to huge craggy walls around her.
“Slowly. Any hit you take is going to be linked to their speed and yours.”
Two centidays in, she saw the ship. It was nothing special, at first: a speck that seemed like all the other specks scattered around her—and then as she got closer, weaving her way through the various scattered debris, it grew and grew, from a speck into a sleek silhouette—and then, as the glider carried her closer, what had looked like the outline of a ship became a confused, broken jigsaw of pieces hanging together in some mysterious alchemy—the forces that had blown them apart in the first place now spent, and their own gravity, and the distant ones of the more massive asteroids, drawing them into unfathomable patterns—An Thành was in her thoughts, trying to bring forth poetry on the vagaries of space and struggling; but it didn’t matter because that distant symphony of the stars was there, filling her to bursting.
She passed one more asteroid, nudging the glider past the floating debris—no longer rocks but leftovers of the explosion that had torn the ship apart: bits of oily metal, fragments of motors and painted walls. It felt like going through a graveyard: a particular kind of mausoleum with only one occupant, broken and stretched thin.
Unbidden, the name of the Buddha of Infinite Splendor came to her lips, as if she were attempting to meditate, except on the ship’s behalf.
Nam mô A Di Đà Phật, Nam mô A Di Đà…
Over and over until her mind went into a trance—and the ship growing larger and larger around her—now she was deep inside its ruins, and the profound silence was that of the grave—and all she could see was a splayed corpse.
“I have no idea where our dead woman went,” she said, aloud.
One of the bots crawled closer to her face, gripped the top of her ear. “I do,” Sunless Woods’s voice said. An overlay shimmered on top of Vân’s field of vision, showing a faint trail. “That’s the trail of her glider.”
“Heat? Surely…”
“Not heat. The remnants of the elements it burnt to get there. It’s an unusual enough activity in the vicinity that I’m able to pick them up. Hang on…” Sunless Woods did something, and the trail coalesced into something harder and more luminous—though it widened faintly as it went on. “I’m a little more uncertain once she slowed down: the pattern is more spread out and fainter. Hopefully I’ll be able to refine it somewhat if you get closer.”
The curve arced through one of the largest pieces of debris in the field. Vân nudged her own glider forward, towards the gaping hole in its centre.
“You said there was a hidden safe,” Sunless Woods said.
“Yes,” Vân said. Up close, the hull looked as if a giant, distorted flower of metal had burst outwards from the heart of the ship—and behind that hole was a vast, profound darkness in which nothing lived or breathed, a silence more final than that of stars or planets. Vân toggled, with a flick of her fingers, the light on her own glider. It illuminated a large structure that looked like a hangar, with the scattered debris of shuttles, and a single bloodied thread linking each of them back to the ship.
The trail of light went through the hangar, and through a small space at the other end—a door, Vân realised, something that suddenly made sense and was at her scale. “You think she hid another safe in the ship?”
Sunless Woods said, “I don’t know. It’s one thing to modify a habitat. A ship is a living body, as you can see. It’d be a little like someone opening up your chest to safeguard valuables: unpleasant, and risky.”
“But—”
“But?”
“Surely the rooms in the ship were built.” And then she stopped. It would have been before, wouldn’t it—when the Mind in the ship’s heartroom was still incubated in her mother’s belly, and a Master of Wind and Water went over this ship, making sure everything was perfect, that the khi-elements flowed the proper way in every corridor and hangar and store-room. Before the birth and the implantation of the Mind in the body that had always been meant for her—before she came alive and grew up yearning for the stars under whose light she died. “The mother doesn’t design the ship’s body, does she?”
A pause. “It’s unusual. But not impossible.” Sunless Woods was grudgingly impressed.
“I don’t understand what they hope to find in those safes.” Vân had checked: the architect had died five years ago—around the time Vân was designing Laureate An Thành. An uneasy coincidence—she’d had to breathe hard after finding that out, but of course so many things had happened that year across the Belt. And there’d been nothing of note in that death.
Sunless Woods said, casually, “I imagine something of value. It’s always tempting.”
“To rob the dead? Or her descendants? That’s just…” Cowardly. Illegal, yes—but also profoundly disrespectful.
Another bot had climbed on her shoulder, as if the ship were standing right there, gripping it again—trying to comfort her, a touch that made her flushed and yearning. At length, “I’m sorry,” Sunless Woods said. “I shouldn’t have brought it up. It was in poor taste.” Vân was used to pity, or condescension, open questioning of her common sense—but this sounded almost like…envy?
“It’s all right,” she said. “I have impossibly high standards.”
A lengthier silence. She’d reached the door now: she pushed the glider up, so that she could stand in the corridor behind it. For a bare moment she was, not in a ruin, not in a corpse or a mausoleum, but in a darkened ship, the walls glistening with paintings of starscapes and waterfalls, with calligraphied texts. For a bare moment she felt wind whistle in her ears, and saw the walls slowly contract under the beat of a giant heart. And then it passed, and she was once more in the shipwreck, the paintings nothing more than faint splashes, the walls utterly still, the space around her nothing but vacuum with not a trace of wind.
Her comms blinked. It looked like a call from Uyên. “Child?” she asked. Uyên’s voice came back excited and garbled—fragments of words scythed into nothingness by the distance. “I don’t have network where I am.” And she cut it off, hoping Uyên would at least get that.
The trail arced through the corridor, and finally ended at a door that wouldn’t budge no matter how hard Vân or the bots tried to tug at it.
“It’s warped in the explosion.” Sunless Woods sounded faintly irritated. “Hang on. The bots don’t have enough strength, but I can find something else…”
But the dead woman had still managed to get through it. Which meant there was a way. Or that she’d had some industrial equipment with her? Had she come prepared, for whatever she’d hoped to take from the ship? If her accomplices had been with her, it should have been easier to wield heavier objects.
