Owen grew distressed. “You are making her homesick for a world she’s never known,” he told me. I didn’t care. I wanted her to know, to understand where she had come from. So I kept telling her the stories, answering her questions. I never noticed how often we returned to the subject of food.
“Shellfish tastes better than anything else in the universe,” I told her. “Especially if you caught it yourself. The fresh air seasons it, we say. But it’s because you put the effort in, you made the food happen.”
“But specifically, what is it like? What do cockles and mussels taste of?”
I didn’t know how to answer that. She had never eaten anything that wasn’t full of preservatives and salt. “They taste like the sea. They taste slick and primordial. They taste of brine and dark blue depths. It’s an Earth flavour. I can’t explain.” She glared at me and stomped out of the room. She wanted facts, not metaphors. She wanted to know and I wasn’t helping. She wanted to go home and taste them for herself.
The silt of the shore is soft and powdery, nothing like the golden sand of Swansea Bay. When I press my fingers into it, the edges of my gloves begin to singe against the damp soil underneath. Everything about this planet is poison. It was never meant for families.
The day Megan told me she had a stomach ache, I didn’t think too much about it. “Have you finished your school work?” I asked her. She had daily one-on-one tutorials, taught by some the best scientists of our time, not that an education was any use up here. Still, we stuck to the routines, pretended there was a future.
“I don’t feel well at all,” she said. Those were her last coherent words. She collapsed before I made it across the room to feel her forehead. I carried her to the med station myself, her long legs dragging along the polished hallways. Megan’s eyes opened as I screamed for the nurse to help me. She twisted and began to vomit blood as they pulled her onto the bed and wheeled her into the back rooms. Within a few hours, she was dead.
Owen found refuge in process. He told me they thought she might have the same bacteria that stopped us returning to Earth, that she might be the key to finding the cure. I turned away as he stuttered platitudes, that maybe they would solve the quarantine, that maybe her death wouldn’t be in vain. I couldn’t stand to hear him try to make sense of the tragedy. He stayed at the medical station, signing consent forms, overseeing the process as they cut her open and examined her insides.
I went home and sat in her room, touching her things. I bunched her favourite dress in my fists, hoping to banish the last sight of her, flesh pale as marble, splattered with blood, blue eyes colder than any ice. I collapsed onto her bunk. Once the tears slowed, I ran my fingers over her stuffed octopus like a blind woman, touching the ragged cloth and glassy eyes as if it might hold some of her essence.
The sharp edges of something under her pillow stopped me. I opened my eyes and moved the pillow to see a pair of stolen protective gloves, singed away at the tips, and half a dozen blood-red shells. Two of them were cracked and pried open; the insides sparkled like mother of pearl, wiped clean. Licked clean.
Owen told me that Megan’s death was not preventable. It was an unknown illness, he said, there was nothing that we could have done. He cried as he told me that she’d ingested some sort of parasites. They had rampaged through her flesh, feasting on her organs. He promised me that it was quick, as if I didn’t already know that, as if that was a consolation. I took the shells she’d hidden under her pillow and said nothing.
I press my bare toes into the powdery silt of the barren shore of G851.5.32. It stings, a million pins and needles pricking my flesh. When I was a girl, we would dare each other to dash into the frigid waves of the sea, the water so cold that it burned.
I wonder if it will feel the same, in this alien sea so far from home. I clench the broken shells in my fists and run forward into the breaking waves.
I think it will feel just the same.
NEBULA AWARD WINNER
BEST NOVELETTE
“THE WAITING STARS”
ALIETTE de BODARD
Aliette de Bodard has won a Nebula Award, a Locus Award, a British Science Fiction Association Award, and Writers of the Future. “The Waiting Stars” was first published in The Other Half of the Sky.
The derelict ship ward was in an isolated section of Outsider space, one of the numerous spots left blank on interstellar maps, no more or no less tantalising than its neighbouring quadrants. To most people, it would be just that: a boring part of a long journey to be avoided—skipped over by Mind-ships as they cut through deep space, passed around at low speeds by Outsider ships while their passengers slept in their hibernation cradles.
Only if anyone got closer would they see the hulking masses of ships: the glint of starlight on metal, the sharp, pristine beauty of their hulls, even though they all lay quiescent and crippled, forever unable to move—living corpses kept as a reminder of how far they had fallen; the Outsiders’ brash statement of their military might, a reminder that their weapons held the means to fell any Mind-ships they chose to hound.
On the sensors of The Cinnabar Mansions, the ships all appeared small and diminished, like toy models or avatars—things Lan Nhen could have held in the palm of her hand and just as easily crushed. As the sensors’ line of sight moved—catching ship after ship in their field of view, wreck after wreck, indistinct masses of burnt and twisted metal, of ripped-out engines, of shattered life pods and crushed shuttles—Lan Nhen felt as if an icy fist were squeezing her heart into shards. To think of the Minds within—dead or crippled, forever unable to move . . .
“She’s not there,” she said, as more and more ships appeared on the screen in front of her, a mass of corpses that all threatened to overwhelm her with sorrow and grief and anger.
“Be patient, child,” The Cinnabar Mansions said. The Mind’s voice was amused, as it always was—after all, she’d lived for five centuries, and would outlive Lan Nhen and Lan Nhen’s own children by so many years that the pronoun “child” seemed small and inappropriate to express the vast gulf of generations between them. “We already knew it was going to take time.”
“She was supposed to be on the outskirts of the wards,” Lan Nhen said, biting her lip. She had to be, or the rescue mission was going to be infinitely more complicated. “According to Cuc . . .”
“Your cousin knows what she’s talking about,” The Cinnabar Mansions said.
“I guess.” Lan Nhen wished Cuc was there with them, and not sleeping in her cabin as peacefully as a baby—but The Cinnabar Mansions had pointed out Cuc needed to be rested for what lay ahead; and Lan Nhen had given in, vastly outranked. Still, Cuc was reliable, for narrow definitions of the term—as long as anything didn’t involve social skills, or deft negotiation. For technical information, though, she didn’t have an equal within the family; and her network of contacts extended deep within Outsider space. That was how they’d found out about the ward in the first place . . .
“There.” The sensors beeped, and the view on the screen pulled into enhanced mode on a ship on the edge of the yard, which seemed even smaller than the hulking masses of her companions. The Turtle’s Citadel had been from the newer generation of ships, its body more compact and more agile than its predecessors: designed for flight and manoeuvres rather than for transport, more elegant and refined than anything to come out of the Imperial Workshops—unlike the other ships, its prow and hull were decorated, painted with numerous designs from old legends and myths, all the way to the Dai Viet of Old Earth. A single gunshot marred the outside of its hull—a burn mark that had transfixed the painted citadel through one of its towers, going all the way into the heartroom and crippling the Mind that animated the ship.
“That’s her,” Lan Nhen said. “I would know her anywhere.”
The Cinnabar Mansions had the grace not to say anything, though of course she could have matched the design to her vast databases in an eyeblink. “It’s time, then. Shall I extrude a pod?”
Lan Nhen found that her hands had gone slippery with sweat, all of a sudden; and her heart was beating a frantic rhythm within her chest, like temple gongs gone mad. “I guess it’s time, yes.” By any standards, what they were planning was madness. To infiltrate Outsider space, no matter how isolated—to repair a ship, no matter how lightly damaged . . .
Lan Nhen watched The Turtle’s Citadel for a while—watched the curve of the hull, the graceful tilt of the engines, away from the living quarters; the burn mark through the hull like a gunshot through a human chest. On the prow was a smaller painting, all but invisible unless one had good eyes: a single sprig of apricot flowers, signifying the New Year’s good luck—calligraphied on the ship more than thirty years ago by Lan Nhen’s own mother, a parting gift to her great-aunt before the ship left for her last, doomed mission.
Of course, Lan Nhen already knew every detail of that shape by heart, every single bend of the corridors within, every little nook and cranny available outside—from the blueprints, and even before that, before the rescue plan had even been the seed of a thought in her mind—when she’d stood before her ancestral altar, watching the rotating holo of a ship who was also her great-aunt, and wondering how a Mind could ever be brought down, or given up for lost.
Now she was older; old enough to have seen enough things to freeze her blood; old enough to plot her own foolishness, and drag her cousin and her great-great-aunt into it.
Older, certainly. Wiser, perhaps; if they were blessed enough to survive.
There were tales, at the Institution, of what they were—and, in any case, one only had to look at them, at their squatter, darker shapes, at the way their eyes crinkled when they laughed. There were other clues, too: the memories that made Catherine wake up breathless and disoriented, staring at the white walls of the dormitory until the pulsing, writhing images of something she couldn’t quite identify had gone, and the breath of dozens of her dorm-mates had lulled her back to sleep. The craving for odd food like fish sauce and fermented meat. The dim, distant feeling of not fitting in, of being compressed on all sides by a society that made little sense to her.
It should have, though. She’d been taken as a child, like all her schoolmates—saved from the squalor and danger among the savages and brought forward into the light of civilisation—of white sterile rooms and bland food, of awkward embraces that always felt too informal. Rescued, Matron always said, her entire face transfigured, the bones of her cheeks made sharply visible through the pallor of her skin. Made safe.
Catherine had asked what she was safe from. They all did, in the beginning—all the girls in the Institution, Johanna and Catherine being the most vehement amongst them.
That was until Matron showed them the vid.
They all sat at their tables, watching the screen in the centre of the amphitheatre—silent, for once, not jostling or joking among themselves. Even Johanna, who was always first with a biting remark, had said nothing—had sat, transfixed, watching it.
The first picture was a woman who looked like them—smaller and darker-skinned than the Galactics—except that her belly protruded in front of her, huge and swollen like a tumour from some disaster movie. There was a man next to her, his unfocused eyes suggesting that he was checking something on the network through his implants—until the woman grimaced, putting a hand to her belly and calling out to him. His eyes focused in a heartbeat, and fear replaced the blank expression on his face.
There was a split second before the language overlays kicked in—a moment, frozen in time, when the words, the sounds of the syllables put together, sounded achingly familiar to Catherine, like a memory of the childhood she never could quite manage to piece together—there was a brief flash, of New Year’s Eve firecrackers going off in a confined space, of her fear that they would burn her, damage her body’s ability to heal . . . And then the moment was gone like a popped bubble, because the vid changed in the most horrific manner.
The camera was wobbling, rushing along a pulsing corridor—they could all hear the heavy breath of the woman, the whimpering sounds she made like an animal in pain; the soft, encouraging patter of the physician’s words to her.
“She’s coming,” the woman whispered, over and over, and the physician nodded—keeping one hand on her shoulder, squeezing it so hard his own knuckles had turned the colour of a muddy moon.
“You have to be strong,” he said. “Hanh, please. Be strong for me. It’s all for the good of the Empire, may it live ten thousand years. Be strong.”
The vid cut away, then—and it was wobbling more and more crazily, its field of view showing erratic bits of a cramped room with scrolling letters on the wall, the host of other attendants with similar expressions of fear on their faces; the woman, lying on a flat surface, crying out in pain—blood splattering out of her with every thrust of her hips—the camera moving, shifting between her legs, the physician’s hands reaching into the darker opening—easing out a sleek, glinting shape, even as the woman screamed again—and blood, more blood running out, rivers of blood she couldn’t possibly have in her body, even as the thing within her pulled free, and it became all too clear that, though it had the bare shape of a baby with an oversized head, it had too many cables and sharp angles to be human . . .
Then a quiet fade-to-black, and the same woman being cleaned up by the physician—the thing—the baby being nowhere to be seen. She stared up at the camera; but her gaze was unfocused, and drool was pearling at the corner of her lips, even as her hands spasmed uncontrollably.
Fade to black again; and the lights came up again, on a room that seemed to have grown infinitely colder . . .
“This,” Matron said in the growing silence, “is how the Dai Viet birth Minds for their spaceships: by incubating them within the wombs of their women. This is the fate that would have been reserved for all of you. For each of you within this room.” Her gaze raked them all; stopping longer than usual on Catherine and Johanna, the known troublemakers in the class. “This is why we had to take you away, so that you wouldn’t become brood mares for abominations.”
“We,” of course, meant the Board—the religious nuts, as Johanna liked to call them, a redemptionist church with a fortune to throw around, financing the children’s rescues and their education—and who thought every life from humans to insects was sacred (they’d all wondered, of course, where they fitted into the scheme).
After the class had dispersed like a flock of sparrows, Johanna held court in the yard, her eyes bright and feverish. “They faked it. They had to. They came up with some stupid explanation on how to keep us cooped here. I mean, why would anyone still use natural births and not artificial wombs?”
Catherine, still seeing the splatters of blood on the floor, shivered. “Matron said that they wouldn’t. That they thought the birth created a special bond between the Mind and its mother—but that they had to be there, to be awake during the birth.”
“Rubbish.” Johanna shook her head. “As if that’s even remotely plausible. I’m telling you, it has to be fake.”
“It looked real.” Catherine remembered the woman’s screams; the wet sound as the Mind wriggled free from her womb; the fear in the face of all the physicians. “Artificial vids aren’t this . . . messy.” They’d seen the artificial vids; slick, smooth things where the actors were tall and muscular, the actresses pretty and graceful, with only a thin veneer of artificially generated defects to make the entire thing believable. They’d learnt to tell them apart from the rest; because it was a survival skill in the Institution, to sort out the lies from the truth.
“I bet they can fake that, too,” Johanna said. “They can fake everything if they feel like it.” But her face belied her words; even she had been shocked. Even she didn’t believe they would have gone that far.
“I don’t think it’s a lie,” Catherine said, finally. “Not this time.”
And she didn’t need to look at the other girls’ faces to know that they believed the same thing a
s her—even Johanna, for all her belligerence—and to feel in her gut that this changed everything.
Cuc came online when the shuttle pod launched from The Cinnabar Mansions—in the heart-wrenching moment when the gravity of the ship fell away from Lan Nhen, and the cozy darkness of the pod’s cradle was replaced with the distant forms of the derelict ships. “Hey, cousin. Missed me?” Cuc asked.
“As much as I missed a raging fire.” Lan Nhen checked her equipment a last time—the pod was basic and functional, with barely enough space for her to squeeze into the cockpit, and she’d had to stash her various cables and terminals into the nooks and crannies of a structure that hadn’t been meant for more than emergency evacuation. She could have asked The Cinnabar Mansions for a regular transport shuttle, but the pod was smaller and more controllable; and it stood more chances of evading the derelict ward’s defences.
“Hahaha,” Cuc said, though she didn’t sound amused. “The family found out what we were doing, by the way.”
“And?” It would have devastated Lan Nhen, a few years ago; now she didn’t much care. She knew she was doing the right thing. No filial daughter would let a member of the family rust away in a foreign cemetery—if she couldn’t rescue her great-aunt, she’d at least bring the body back, for a proper funeral.