Seven of Infinities, page 6
This close, the trail of light was a muddled soup of faint radiance. “Can you show me where she was?”
An irritated snort from Sunless Woods. “I don’t have enough evidence.”
A probability map, Laureate An Thành said, gently. Vân repeated that aloud, and felt shock ripple through the ship—catching even the bots, which stilled for a brief moment, even the ones on her shoulder and ear.
“You’re not an engineer,” Sunless Woods said.
“I am. And so is my mem-implant,” Vân said, before she could stop herself. She wouldn’t lie and say that An Thành had been an engineer, because An Thành hadn’t existed before Vân had cobbled her together. But the wording was suggestive, and Sunless Woods was observant. Vân was flirting with disaster.
She waited, her heart in her chest. But Sunless Woods merely said, “Hmmm” in that peculiar way of hers, and something gradually shimmered into existence in her overlay: a field of light that was strongest where the probabilities of presence were highest. It shone brightest in two areas: one right to the door, which yielded nothing in particular. The other was a few forelengths from the door. Vân pushed her glider forward, cursing as she overcompensated for the motion and almost smashed into the other wall. When she finally righted herself and pushed the glider upright once more, she was staring at alcoves that looked like the pigeonholes of a library. They were oddly disposed in an elongated diamond: the largest number of them in the centre, and then a tapering off to two points towards ceiling and bottom of the corridor. The death of the ship had shriveled the pigeonholes inwards, and they glittered with frost. Once, they’d been labelled, but the letters were so faint Vân could barely make them out. They had no books on them, which suggested that the books had either been overlay, or that they’d been taken—no, wait. A single one of the holes contained a stiff, frozen roll—not paper but metal, which displayed a title in sharp lights when Vân’s suited hand brushed it.
Destiny woven with Talent.
Quite likely Tale of Kiều, An Thành said. A pre-Exodus work. And, when Vân didn’t react she quoted the opening lines:
Within the hundred years that we all live through
Destiny and talent are woven in bitter struggle
Mulberry fields stretching into vast seas…
Dâu. Mulberry—that metaphor was for upheavals of life, the land turning into the sea—but dâu also meant a daughter-in-law. Vân looked, again, at the peculiar arrangement of the shelves. Her hand brushed the faded letters, which she now knew the nature of. Father. Mother. “It’s a family tree,” she said. “A diagram of degrees of mourning. That’s why it’s so wide at the centre, where the web of relationships is thickest: siblings, cousins, parents’ siblings, ascendants and descendants…” She found the one corresponding to the bride of a son, rummaged in it. Something shifted and clicked.
The door irised open, expanding outwards until it had disappeared into the wall. Vân slid the glider down, preparing to lie down again so she could be propelled through the door. “Wait,” Sunless Woods said, sharply. The bots fell away from her, scuttled towards the opening. “You have no idea what’s beyond that door.” And then a spreading silence. “All clear, but—”
“But what?” Vân was already pointing her glider towards the door; going through as easily as a welding-blade through metal. Beyond the door was some kind of passenger room, with a recessed bed, and a table—everything must have been in overlay, so what remained was oddly desolate, the veins in the walls the colour of celadon—and in the wall, above the bed, a large rectangular shape that had to be Ngân Chi’s secret safe, where most of Sunless Woods’s bots were congregating—surely it would be empty, but perhaps the dead woman had left a trail they could find, like they’d followed the piece of hull to the dead ship…
“Child.” Sunless Woods’s voice was sharp, almost wounding. “Get out. Now.”
The bots fled the safe, a flood of scalded ants, pushing the door open in their panic to scatter—and in that revealed opening Vân finally saw what had been stuffed inside, and why it was still there.
It was a corpse.
They had been wearing a shadow-skin: their death had disintegrated it, and it hung around them in loose filaments. Their body hung at impossible angles. Bones must have been broken to put them there. Vân saw all this with almost clinical detachment—because it would have been pointless to panic, because she couldn’t seem to catch her breath, because she could feel Sunless Woods’s own panic in the way that her bots incoherently scattered, in the fast, heavy heartbeat in her own ear, coming from the body of the ship—because there was a layer of iced blood around the corpse, like a stiffened macabre suit.
“Teacher? Teacher, are you there?” Uyên’s voice in her ears, except that Vân couldn’t seem to drag up words to answer her.
I’m busy. I can’t talk to you right now.
Wait, please.
“You know that thing we found in the safe? The thin silver of metal you couldn’t figure out? It’s a mạt chược tile, with the artist’s signature—not the regular game chips but an ornamental one to carry in a sleeve, or put on a bedside table. It was encoded, that’s why it didn’t display anything.”
Wait.
Vân’s own bots were unfolding the corpse: no features beyond a layer of ice so thick she couldn’t make out anything. It looked unreal, like a doll, the movements of its limbs stiff and difficult—blood icicles breaking out and floating around it.
“The contamination danger…” Sunless Woods said, but Uyên was speaking again, and her words were as sharp as blades.
“Teacher, can you hear me? It’s the Seven of Threads, and it was painted by someone called Hương Dinh. I’ve called in a favour from one of Second Mother’s friends at the tribunal, and they’ve confirmed what remains of the dead woman’s genetic material matches Lê Thị Hương Dinh’s.”
Hương Dinh.
Dinh.
Hương Lâm.
Seven of Threads, Seven of Infinities, Seven of Barrels.
Vân was twenty-one again, sitting in their garret in the Sword Turtle habitat, with their own clothes pasted at the window to keep out the cold until maintenance could fix the insulation—which they all knew wasn’t going to happen any time soon, so they were drinking rice wine to keep warm. Vân was holding the mạt chược tiles, looking into Hương Lâm’s thin, sharp face—and hearing Dinh’s voice, as she stared at the pile of discards, where three Seven tiles shone in the light, the crude painting flaking off the patterns. “They’re just like us, aren’t they? Poor mismatched sods that no one really values.”
She’d forgotten it, in the wake of the arrest. The tiles, the way they’d styled themselves with their names for a while, pleased with their own pathetic cleverness.
“They’re dead,” she said, aloud. They’d been sent to the closest numbered planet to await their sentencing at the Autumn Assizes, and there had been no imperial amnesty that year. “They’re dead!”
“Child?” Sunless Woods’s voice was distant, and receding with every passing moment. “Child!”
Three of Vân’s bots spun out of control: the arm they were trying to unfold snapped in half, revealing glistening muscle and veins, like meat in a compartment freezer—a sound like the roar of a waterfall in Vân’s ears, growing and growing until it seemed to take over the entire world—until nothing was left but the corpse’s pale, distorted, unrecognizable shape—and Hương Lâm’s face as the militia led her away.
They’re dead. They’ve always been, always been…
Everything spun and spun, and blurred away into nauseous and unfathomable darkness.
* * *
SUNLESS WOODS WATCHED as her bots crawled over the body. She wasn’t squeamish—she’d lived through the uprising, and seen her share of dead bodies. Never killing didn’t protect her against death.
She’d had the bots take it back to one of the sterile chambers in her own body, and thoroughly decontaminated everything that had touched it, from shuttle to bots. Now she was overseeing an autopsy: the bots could have done it themselves, without her direct supervision, a low-level task on a low-priority thread that required no attention from her.
It did, however, serve to keep her occupied.
The bots cut away the remnants of the shadow-skin: in death it had fragmented into blood-stained filaments, saving her the trouble of having to deal with the bloated layer of blood and other body fluids that would have filled the shadow-skin—but also dispersing said fluids all over the ship’s room. Sunless Woods had been too busy wrangling the emergency of Vân’s life at stake to collect these.
The corpse was a woman of uncertain age—early nineties or a hundred, Sunless Woods would have said, perhaps more: she could track the rejuv treatments in the folds of the wrists and the faint lines on the teeth, marking when the enamel had been regenerated. Old, but not ancient yet.
She’d died of multiple stab wounds: one of them had nicked the descending aorta, and there were kidney lacerations as well. All on the back: there was no sign of struggle anywhere. She had trusted whoever had done this enough to turn her back on them—mind you, she had trusted them enough to trek with them to a dead mindship in the middle of nowhere.
On her comms, only silence; broken by the faint scuttling of the bots, and the sharp feel of the corpse’s skin on their claws. Sunless Woods thought, for a while, watching the woman’s still face—bruised and made almost unrecognisable by death and its long sojourn in space. The murder weapon wasn’t clear: whatever it was, it had sheared through the shadow-skin like it didn’t exist. Some kind of tool; except something that had been modified to actually cut through the shadow-skin. Which meant it was black-market and sold to criminals.
She opened a comms line to Thiên Hoa. “Lil’sis?”
“Mmm.” Thiên Hoa shimmered in overlay in Sunless Wood’s perception, translucent and distant. She was kneeling in her library, looking for a scroll. “Account books. You wouldn’t believe the amount of record-keeping one has to do as an honest merchant. Frankly, there are advantages to a life of crime.”
In spite of herself, Sunless Woods was amused. “Less paperwork? Really?”
“That’s because you’ve never had to file taxes in three different jurisdictions,” Thiên Hoa said, darkly. “And don’t get me started on the employees’ paperwork. Anyway…what can I do for you, big’sis?”
“Can you take a look at this?” Sunless Woods said, and granted Thiên Hoa visual access to the dead woman’s corpse.
“Uh.” Thiên Hoa was silent. “Can you do three-dee?” After Sunless Woods had upgraded her access, Thiên Hoa materialised in the room. She knelt, watching the dead woman’s face carefully. At length, she rose, brushing her hands on her embroidered tunic. “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”
“I don’t know,” Sunless Woods said. She called up the picture of Architect Ngân Chi again, stared at it. “How long ago did you say she died again?”
“Nah,” Thiên Hoa said, lapsing away from her refined speech patterns. “Ngân Chi died in her bed five years ago, of a prolonged illness that left her bed bound. I mean, even assuming the militia had been mistaken on the identity of the corpse they declared dead, there’s no way Ngân Chi would have put on a shadow-skin and gone traipsing on a dead spaceship. But…” She pursed her face, the way she always did when facing a particularly thorny problem. Thiên Hoa’s approach to problems was to latch on to them and keeping worrying at them until they shriveled away to nothing. “Hmmmm. Her second younger cousin Ái Hồng on the father’s side is in the right age band.” Her mouth moved, for a while, though no sounds came out. “Let’s see…yeah, what I thought. No one has reported anything, but she hasn’t been pinging the network for a few days.”
Which wasn’t a good outlook. “Are you sure?”
“Who can be sure of anything?” Thiên Hoa shrugged. “The descriptions match, down to the rejuv treatments.”
“So what do we think? That Ái Hồng came down here looking for her cousin’s money and it turned badly?”
Thiên Hoa made a noise through her noise. “Well, she was poor. Her parents were never very wealthy, and they lost the little they had in the Ten Thousand Flags uprising. And she was a power-hungry little bastard, wasn’t she—growing up without any food or money will do that to you.” It was said almost affectionately, with that self-deprecating tone that made it clear Thiên Hoa was partly referring to her own childhood.
Sunless Woods said, “You never stole from a relative.” She wasn’t sure if that was comforting to Thiên Hoa or not.
“Because I’m not lacking common sense,” Thiên Hoa said, sharply. “Stealing from a relative is stiffer penalties.” She cocked her head at Sunless Woods. “Are you expecting me to be filial?”
She was, for all her bluster—sending, quietly, money to her aged mother on the First Planet, which was then passed on to the rest of her elderly aunts and uncles. But she’d also quite cheerfully claw Sunless Woods’s eyes out if Sunless Woods pressed her point. “Back to our dead woman.”
“The first, or the second? Sorry.” Thiên Hoa lowered her eyes for a brief moment. “That was too far. I take it you mean Ái Hồng. I can enquire, but we can safely say she hadn’t found Ngân Chi’s cache, else she would have been more profligate with money over the last five years.”
“So she was looking for it. And the other woman was too?”
“She came to Uyên’s house after the first murder. I’d say she intended to incapacitate Uyên and then search the room, but she saw an opportunity when Uyên left.”
“Mmm. And she committed the first murder? That of Ái Hồng?”
Thiên Hoa’s face was grave. “Almost certainly,” she said. “Look at the wounds.”
“I’ve seen them,” Sunless Woods said.
“That’s a vacuum blade. The instrument maintainers use for minute cuts to metal when repairing a habitat.” She pointed to the shadow-skin: Sunless Woods’s bots scuttled over, their sensors zooming in on the burn marks around the cut. “You’ll have matching burn marks on her, too—less easily seen because of all the bruising and freezing. You’ll remember the dead woman in Uyên’s room had burn marks on her hands.”
A silence. Sunless Woods broke it. “Amateur,” she spat. She wasn’t sure what made her angrier: the lack of thought, or the death of Ái Hồng, or both. “She used a blade that cuts through shadow-skin and never thought it’d burn through her own protection.”
“Yeah, that’s what you get when people turn to crime without the proper training.” Thiên Hoa’s face was grave, but her voice was taut, angry. “No forethought and no drive.”
“I don’t know.” Sunless Woods manifested near the dead woman in her usual avatar, feet resting lightly on the floor by Thiên Hoa’s side. She looked down at the corpse, trying to think of something, of anything that would bring it all into sharp focus. “She seemed pretty driven to me. She came back in spite of the exile-implants. That much money is worth fraud, or even murder, isn’t it?”
“You say this like you’re considering it. At least the non-murdering part.”
Sunless Woods grimaced. It was an odd feeling: she saw the change of colours across her own walls while also feeling it deep in her own body—not that often that she had people on board. “You know I’m not. Framing someone for a grave crime is as good as murder. They have an overwhelming chance of being executed or exiled, and the militia wouldn’t take precautions. They’d just pressure and torture them into a confession, regardless of whether any of it is true.”
“Look at you.” Thiên Hoa’s voice was fond. “Firebrand.”
“Always. My position hasn’t changed.”
“Mm. Anyway, I don’t have our little band of thieves yet, but this changes things.” Thiên Hoa smiled, wickedly, the way she did when vicariously enjoying Sunless Woods verbally tearing people to shreds—“A murder investigation is a serious thing, and a lot of people won’t want that heat. They’ll talk. And then we’ll have them.”
Sunless Woods thought of the body—of the vacuum blade biting into the shadow-skin, of blood spurting, spreading, of every organ shutting itself while the suit desperately scrambled to maintain integrity; and of the indignity of it stuffed in a safe with no one to mourn or propitiate their ancestor’s spirit as it fled towards Hell. “Good,” she said. “And I’ll take great pleasure in delivering them to the militia in a neat little package.”
“Though not before relieving them of their valuables.”
“The treasure?”
“Yes. The one you’re very carefully not telling Vân about.”
“Careful,” Sunless Woods said. Her voice was cold: a warning to Thiên Hoa she was pushing it too far, that she remained the eldest in their band and its leader. That she wouldn’t be questioned on her questionable decisions. “I’m not telling her about the treasure because as of now, it doesn’t exist. It’s killed two people, and neither appears to have much enjoyed riches prior to their deaths. Do you really think it’s worth worrying her to death for a mirage?” But she wanted to tell Vân. She wanted to present her and Uyên with riches beyond their wildest dreams; to see the shock on Vân’s face as she realised she no longer needed to hide anymore, that she didn’t need to scrimp and bow down to society to earn a living.
She’d make that happen, and then she’d disappear again, if need be, if it got too hot for her. She’d take on another identity and another face in another system, and find another way to pass the time.
“Aw. Look at you. All caring and concerned.” Thiên Hoa’s face softened. “It’s been such a long time since you allowed yourself to be like that.”
“Shut up,” Sunless Woods said. And knew she’d said too much, or not enough, when her friend rose and cocked her head at her, thoughtfully—as if Sunless Woods were the problem and not the corpse.
