The Best Science Fiction of the Year

Aliette de Bodard writes speculative fiction: she has won three Nebula Awards, a Locus Award and four British Science Fiction Association Awards, and was a double Hugo finalist for 2019 (Best Series and Best Novella). She is the author of the Dominion of the Fallen series, set in a turn-of-the-century Paris devastated by a magical war, which comprises The House of Shattered Wings, The House of Binding Thorns, and The House of Sundering Flames (July 2019, Gollancz/JABberwocky Literary Agency). Her short story collection Of Wars, and Memories, and Starlight is out from Subterranean Press. She lives in Paris.

She came home to Xarvi, a city she only saw in fits and snatches, to its dizzying towers built from the carcasses of reclaimed spaceships and failed orbitals and wide avenues offering an ever-expanding array of personalised environments, from quaint brushed metal bunkers of the Landfall era to riotous colours of the faraway ÐẠi ViỆt court, with vague plans. She came home because she needed some planet time lest her bones break, because the mining station needed iridium to fuel its machines—and because her girlfriend An Di had asked her for some black sesame pastries and pandanus extract for their shared kitchen.

Nothing happened on the first night. But on the morning of her third day, Giao opened the door to her compartment, thinking of grabbing a noodle soup from Double Happiness Plaza with Cousin Linh and Linh’s infant children—and found oily, inky blackness waiting for her. At its centre were vermillion letters: her own name and avatar ID, and the paintbrush and pine tree seal of the Ministry of Culture and Education.

A memory, sharp and merciless and inescapable, from a New Year’s Eve two or three years ago: Cousin Tâm, smiling at her, the bots in her hair gleaming in the lights of the compartment—her face sharp and cutting, the magistrate’s one before she ordered an execution. Do you think yourself better than us, lil’sis, because you don’t live here any more? The city doesn’t let go. It’ll weigh your usefulness against the value of your memories, and find you wanting in the end. It always does, with us.

She didn’t remember what she’d answered Tâm: she’d been drunk, trying not to count the missing places at the large banquet table, or the greyed-out holos on the ancestral altar—trying very hard to forget what it meant, to be RỒng in Xarvi, to be other. She must have laughed. She must have said something about not needing to worry about preservation or the Repository.

And of course, Tâm was gone now, preserved into the Repository like much of Giao’s family and so many of her friends.

On the threshold of her own house, Giao opened her mouth to speak, to protest, and the darkness rose and leapt inside, leaving a taste on her palate like charred star anise—moments before it swept over her face and everything froze and rushed away from her.

Giao woke up in darkness, groggy and struggling to clear her mind. She sat up: the floor beneath her was hard and cold, and—

There was something in her mind, like a stray thought or something on the verge of recall—an always present shadow in her thoughts. She shook her head—rubbed her face with her hands, struggling to recall something of the past few moments, but nothing made it go away. She got up, shaking—and felt it skitter across her scalp, a touch like ten thousand burning bots. There was nothing in her hair. Or on her scalp. But when she moved again, it happened again, that same skitter—except it started in her scalp and moved deeper—and as it did so, a vast shadow dimmed her field of vision, a shroud thrown across the entire world.

She—she needed to think, to focus, but every time she tried to do so, the shadow would cross again, and her hands would come up to her head, hunting for the bots that didn’t exist, until her nails burnt and ached, gummed with dry skin and broken, brittle hair.

Something within her was moving, slow and vast and ponderous: a memory, long hoarded, of Grandma, her mother’s mother, kneeling by her side, who’d been preserved so long ago. Remember, child. If the Repository takes you, they’ll trawl through your mind to satisfy their visitors. Third Aunt had said something about muscle relaxants and opioids, but Grandma had shaken her head. That’s irrelevant. Remember this, child. Reflexes are hard to eradicate altogether, and muscle memory goes deep.

Grandma’s smile had had nothing of joy in it. Life is sacred, she’d said. You’re preserved, not accused of crimes. They won’t kill you.

Giao brought her hands together. Slowly, carefully, she stretched, bringing her arms up to the Heavens—and then back down again, lowering them all the way to the earth. Then she crouched, drawing an imaginary bow left and right until her calves burnt and she felt her arms vibrate as though she’d truly been loosing arrows into the darkness. And, with each step—with each completed figure, the shadow receded—until it was once more a faint tingle at the back of her hand, and not the endless string of bots nibbling at her brain.

They hung like dead weights, coiled in her topknot and at the shoulder-seams of her jacket—their metal legs locked together so tightly she’d have to break them to make them go. Deactivated, or worse, killed off by the Repository, because why would those preserved ever need personal comforts?

She ran her hand over them, feeling the familiar surfaces under her fingers. Some of them had been purchases—the newer, sleeker ones she’d got prior to leaving for Perse and the mining station. Some of them had been gifts. For the fifteenth return of the apricot flowers, the one from Mom said. The one from Cousin Linh was rowdier, a wish for a sexual partner: to the swallow looking for her oriole. The one from Cousin Tâm was cool and businesslike, much like Tâm herself, with barely any hint of poetry. Let this light scatter the blackness of ink and the darkness of space. Letters so often read she knew them by touch, inscriptions fingered so much while walking in the corridors of the station or operating a drone in the depths of an asteroid, like prayers to the long disappeared.

“I’m sorry,” Giao said aloud to the bots, but of course they couldn’t hear her any more—and what would they have said, even if they could? They were the simpler and non-sentient kind, and had never been equipped to process emotional turmoil. Her voice was rough, her throat parched. What had they given her, when they’d grabbed her? The tingle was still there. She rubbed her hands against her cheeks, and her scalp. It didn’t completely go away. It wasn’t ever going to. And she hadn’t bought herself much time with the khí công forms; just enough to walk a little further.

She’d never see Linh or her nieces again. An Di. She’d never see An Di again, never stand around in their small kitchen, feeling the heat of An Di’s body against hers as they passed each other to fetch ingredients. She’d never feel again that thrill in her bones as An Di kissed her and Giao’s entire heart seemed to beat in her lips. She’d never know what she and An Di would have become: if there was a chance, any chance that what they had would turn into something deeper.

Giao was on the landing of a vast staircase. The letters of her name shone, briefly, on the floor as she moved—and so did the seal of the Ministry, and with it a brief flash of the halls on the other side: the continuous flow of visitors going through the Repository, being shown the history and culture of Asphodele—everything the city thought they needed or craved—Landfall, the first satellites, the first hydroponics farms, the first cities outside the domes. For a moment, as she set foot on the first stair leading down, Giao stared through what seemed like a vast window into another room. Sleek metal walls, displays in avatar space—and one particular visitor, a fifteen-year-old girl with pale skin and uncannily dark eyes, and small bots in her pupils: a child of Augmented parents. The room shimmered and became the custom display the Repository had chosen for her: a potted history of Asphodele that lingered longest on the troubled decade prior to Giao’s birth, the labour rights riots, the sentience trials—and the inexorable way Asphodele had found its natural order again. A rebellious girl, then, one who needed to be reassured that straining against authority was futile.

“The Long Haul,” the girl whispered, touching the last of the displays the Repository was showing her, the faraway planet orbiting its sun in the shadow of Asphodele’s burnt-out wormhole gate. Home, Giao thought, as her chest tightened with a feeling halfway between grief and longing—except that TuyẾt NgỌc was her ancestors’ home rather than her own, wasn’t it?

The stairs flickered as something rose from their depths, a vast and ponderous intelligence that sought everything it had, every person it had preserved that could best answer the question. The tingling in Giao’s brain intensified—she dropped into the stance of the archer again, drawing the bow again and again—again and again as the shadow rose and the staircases hovered on the brink of disappearing altogether.

Following its independence from Asphodele, Snow Jade was mired in tensions between factions which devastated the planet’s ecosystem and its economy. Faced with little choice, and with the wormhole gate destroyed in the independence war, some of the natives chose to leave on slow-moving ships in search of better opportunities: a journey named The Long Haul that would form the beginning of Asphodele’s diaspora . . .

Slow-moving ships. Such a glib way of saying the mindships they’d painstakingly put together, their only hope at matching their colonisers’ fast space-travel, had died one after the other on the journey, tearing apart half the ships as they did so, and slowing what should have been a fast journey down to a crawl. Every RỒng had ancestors among the dead of the Long Haul—and other dead, too, the rescue ship sent fifty years later that had simply gotten lost in deep space, too far away to be salvaged.

In Giao’s mind, the Repository’s systems raked claws of ice through her memories—the same ones that flickered, briefly, on the window that separated her from the girl: running with Tâm under the impossibly faraway tables of Mom and Third Aunt’s restaurant, in that brief moment after nap-time when the place was empty and everyone was in the kitchen—a New Year’s Eve with Tâm and Linh helping Mom set up the kumquat tree while Third and Fourth Aunt counted new clothes, making sure every child would be able to change into them come New Year—everything so vivid and so present it brought her, shaking, to her knees.

The Long Haul ended when the remnants of the RỒng flotilla reached Asphodelian space, where they were hauled to safety by our cruisers. The corpses of their ships were towed to the scrap-heap to be recycled—the distinct architecture formed the basis of the RỒng Quarter, and one can still see the curvature of the ship’s hulls in the distinctive window patterns.

Those RỒng who survived found a planet much changed from colonial times: a bright and shining metropolis with plenty of opportunities for hard-working migrants, to which they brought their customs . . .

“Whatever.” The girl shook her head and moved on. The claws of ice opened, and Giao struggled to rise, to breathe—to compose herself. Below her, the huge shadow at the bottom of the stairs was fading away. Each landing was empty. She glanced around her but saw no one else where she was. Above her . . . Above her were only stars, a set of constellations she couldn’t pinpoint, a pretty-looking, suitably arrayed set of constellations . . .

She did know the stars, because she’d been staring at them for so long—nothing much else to do on Perse when they were on energy-saving periods. They were the stars above Xarvi, except slightly distorted and out of place: the constellations above the city, as they had been at Landfall.

Giao was preserved in the Repository—trapped for all of eternity, her blood injected with the nanites that would keep her alive, that would make her part of the city’s living memory. She had pitifully few choices: use the khí công forms to snatch some brief periods of awareness, or to simply sink back into a never-ending fugue of memories called up at need. She had no future, and soon her past would forever overwhelm her, sucking her dry until only a husk was left.

She should have been afraid, but all she had, rising through her, was a cold, cold anger that made her shake. How dare they. How dare they do this to her, to her family? She was twenty-four: preservation didn’t happen so young, so soon.

Not to ethnic Asphodelians, of course, it didn’t—not to the favoured scions, those who had been here for generations, who kept expecting people like Giao to give way for them. But it was a different story for migrants and their descendants; always would be—whether it be RỒng or any of the others.

Giao’s family didn’t have much, but they had researched. They had given what little money they had to ex-government officials and informants, desperately trying to understand the secrets of the Repository.

Downstairs was the heart of the Repository, the resting place of the artificial intelligence that controlled the entire building, and sent its tendrils out, to mark the people it chose to be preserved: those of interest to Asphodelian history who no longer meaningfully contributed to society. Downstairs was a chance at an appeal.

Never mind that no one, in living memory or otherwise, had ever left the Repository.

Ancestors, watch over me. And another, brief prayer to people who couldn’t hear her: to Cousin Linh and her wife, who had to be sick with worry by now, waiting for the updated preservation lists to be published; to An Di, whom she couldn’t contact, who was still new in her life and whom no one in the family would think of, when it came to news. Hold on, little sisters. I’m coming back.

There was nothing left in the world but these endless landings: empty flights of stairs, the metal resonating under Giao’s feet, and each landing opening on a different room of the Repository, with a different flow of people staring at displays that kept flickering, Giao catching in a heartbeat a glimpse of all the different ways the Repository was filling them, all the different facets of history it was presenting to people.

The first few hundred years after Landfall were a difficult struggle against the planet’s alien fauna and flora. But gradually, settlers were able to introduce food crops and to come to an uneasy truce with the local environment. A thousand years after Landfall, Xarvi, the capital city of Asphodele, rises proudly above the forests, though metal always remains at a premium . . .

Hard work and its value, justice and its inevitable arc, a society always seeking to be more progressive, more inclusive . . .

Various migration waves arrived at Asphodele, drawn by the promise of a new life. In today’s cities, various quadrants pay homage to these: Galactic Town, Tinsel Streets, Dragon Island, the RỒng Quarter . . . And though the ViỆt mind-ships that travelled between the stars were always considered people, the sentience trials finally enshrined the rights of self-aware bots . . .

At some of the landings Giao would feel, again, the Repository rooting in her brain—but nothing quite as hard or as vivid as on the first one. Perhaps it just got easier, after a while.

It was a fist of ice tightening around her entrails. And it was followed by another chilling thought that tightened her entire skin around bones that suddenly felt too sharp and too brittle.

There were hundreds, thousands of the preserved just in Giao’s lifetime—her relatives, but also older people like Jean-Mae or Mer or all the teachers she’d had at university, and Ron’s parents, and Meiluan’s granduncles . . . And . . . Mom and Fourth Aunt and Cousin Tâm and every RỒng the Repository drew on for the history of the Long Haul. The Repository was, in so many ways, a mausoleum, a spider’s web of a building that kept drawing more and more into its bowels. But here was this vast, echoing building with no trace of anyone. Faint, ghostly images on the landing that were dispelled as soon as Giao set foot on them. No people, not even their avatars.

Metal was always a problem: the scant mines in Asphodele didn’t provide enough to sustain even the dome cities. Maker machines could split atoms into many things, but metal produced that way remained unstable and hazardous to human health . . . Hence the civic need to always carefully preserve metal, to respect the sharpening and recycling schedule for all blades, including kitchen knives . . .

At the second, or third landing after the history of metal, Giao saw the corridor.

It was lit with faint wisps of translucent radiance: not lamps, but iridescent butterflies that moved in slow, graceful patterns in the darkness. It couldn’t have been signposted more clearly. But really, what did she have to lose?

She closed her eyes and breathed in—drawing the bow in her head again, against the raking of the Repository’s assault on her memories. Then she followed the corridor, being very careful to count every pace she made, so that she’d be able to go back to the stairs if she needed to.

Two hundred and fifty-five paces in, the corridor flared into a large, huge room with rows and rows of . . .

They looked like the sleeping berths Giao had seen on the Repository’s reconstructions of the Long Haul—when she’d gone there as a child with her school cohort, back when she’d not understood yet what the building would come to mean to her. But there were too many of them, stacked on top of each other in endless rows and columns that ran all the way to the top of the vast, cavernous room, every berth labelled with an ID number and a place number. On the walls of the room was another number, one that kept blinking in and out of focus. Ten thousand, three hundred and six. It meant—it meant it wasn’t the only room. Of course it wouldn’t be.

Giao walked to the closest berth. It was white, opalescent plastic; but not transparent enough to let her see what was in it. Under her touch, it was faintly warm, pulsing like a beating heart; and bots crawled over it, a sleek metallic kind she’d never seen before. The newest ones, private to the highest ranks of government officials? But no, something about them felt . . . off.

There was an open berth further down the line, lit by butterflies. The message was clear and unsubtle: that one was meant for her. Giao didn’t even want to get close to it.

Tâm hadn’t changed. Three years now—Giao may not have remembered which New Year’s Eve they got drunk at, but she’d kept track of all the family’s preservations with the same care as death anniversaries. She still wore her hair in that absurdly impeccable topknot, a hairstyle more suited to their great-grandparents and the Long Haul than to Asphodele, and wore the Asphodelian suit; a tailored jacket with dragons embroidered on the sleeves, and a set of matching trousers with leaping carps.

“Long time no see,” Giao said. She moved away from the berth—and as she did so, someone somewhere queried the Repository, and the light flickered and a memory of folding dumplings in Grandma’s kitchen overwhelmed her for a brief moment—before Tâm’s hand on her shoulder brought her back to reality. “Breathe. In and out with each gesture. That’s it. In, out.”

When Tâm withdrew, Giao bit her lip not to grab her cousin’s hands. “You’ve been here all this time?”

A grimace. Tâm pulled something from the air—a flat oblong box she opened, revealing the shimmering texture of Fisherman’s Opals. She spread the paste on her neck, with the same poise she’d had when alive. “Some things help,” she said.

“Like being intoxicated all the time on imaginary drugs you pull out of thin air?” The words were out before Giao could stop herself. “Sorry. The others—”

“The others don’t come out any more.” Tâm’s voice was a sigh. She gestured, wordlessly, to the berths behind her. “It’s easier to just sleep.”

A shrug, from Tâm. “Truth? I wouldn’t have come out either. I was . . . nudged.” Another sigh. “It’s always easier if it’s someone you know welcoming you.”

“Welcoming.” Giao tried to keep her voice from shaking, and didn’t succeed. “Like a party.”

Tâm held out the box of Fisherman’s Opals. “I can probably pull out tea and dumplings, if you insist. The dumplings will taste just like the ones Grandma used to make.”

“Because it’s inside the Repository. Because Grandma is inside the Repository. In one of those berths.” Which one? She couldn’t see the ID number, but of course there were so many berths, and so many other rooms.

Another shrug. “Mostly because we are here. That’s where the vividness of the memory is coming from, not from Grandma’s recipe. Are you going to be choosy?”

“I want to get out,” Giao said, chilled. Three years Tâm had been there. Unchanged, she’d thought, except everything had changed.

Tâm looked away from her. “I’m not going to stop you,” she said in the same tone of voice she’d used when Giao had said she wanted to leave for the mining station. She thought it was futile—that Giao would always come back to her family, that the city would never forget her. That it would always be waiting.

“Of course. And I knew you wouldn’t.” Tâm sighed, her hands closing the clasp of the Fisherman’s Opals box. “Home,” she said in RỒng—a word that meant hearth and kitchen and everything within, everything loved and cherished. Their ancestors had once used it to mean TuyẾt NgỌc, before its meaning irrevocably changed. Some in the family had left Asphodele altogether—a fraught and expensive undertaking, for Asphodele was so far away from other settled systems—but so many of them hadn’t. Because it was their home and their family’s home. Because, like Giao, they kept coming back to their hearths. “Home,” Tâm said again. “Here.” She laid a finger on Giao’s chest, a sharp, almost painful touch that seemed to stab through the cloth of Giao’s shirt. “Where you are. Where your family is.”

Where the Repository was. Giao stifled a bitter laugh. “Where you always keep coming back.” Perse . . . Perse wasn’t that yet; perhaps it would have been one day, if her relationship with An Di had become more . . . But of course, that had been cut short.

“And I you.” Giao closed her eyes for a brief moment, struggling to breathe.

“We don’t always get what we want,” Tâm said. “Except the Repository, of course. It always gets what it wants. What’s best for us.”

Another shrug. “Actually, that’s up to you. The Repository won’t force you, and it’ll always be there waiting for you.”

Oh, so the Ministry had standards. Freedom of choice. Sanctity of life; the same lies they told in the classrooms, as if they meant something. She hadn’t thought she could become even angrier. “You mean I’ll beg to go into it when it becomes unbearable?”

Nothing from Tâm, not even a pitying look. “Are you even there?” Giao asked. “Physically?”

“Does it make a difference?” Tâm asked. “That’s such a regressive attitude. Next you’ll be telling me that shipminds have no rights because they can only project an avatar down into Asphodele.” She moved, and when she did so, something shimmered, like the projection of an avatar into physical space.

Giao’s heart missed a beat. “Are you . . . are you even my cousin?” The Repository had all the memories, and it would be so easy, wouldn’t it, to simulate something passingly familiar? Much easier than waking up Tâm—assuming the preserved could even be woken up, that these berths weren’t simply final resting places. “Big’sis . . . ”

Tâm spread more Fisherman’s Opals on her neck, the way she always did when she was stressed—she’d have one hell of a headache and sense of thirst in the morning, except that who knew if any of that still applied, where they were. “I am your cousin.” And, in smooth and almost too fast to follow RỒng, “I’m the one who told you to stay away from Xarvi.” A sharp, amused smile. “Remember what Grandma said? The Repository hadn’t quite worked out the hang of dialectal variations on RỒng. It always spoke that kind of weird version of the language that sounded off.”

Giao didn’t move. Because it was true, it had happened—and Tâm’s voice and accent were uniquely hers, with nothing that sounded weird—but it proved nothing. “Perhaps it’s learnt.”

Its accent was pure Repository: something that Giao had never heard anywhere else—except in some of the newer dramas that came from TuyẾt NgỌc, the hauntingly disturbing ones that were both familiar and utterly alien, coming from a culture that had diverged from them in the years after the departure of the Long Haul. Its owner, too, was dressed like nothing Giao had ever seen: a mix of Asphodelian fashions and traditional RỒng ones, from the embroidered jacket to the wide, flaring skirts. Behind them was a second person whose gender was equally indeterminate, wearing the jacket of an ao dai with the large panels of cloth falling over their hips, and slimmer trousers with kumquat flowers.

“I’m TrẦn ThỊ HẢi San. You may call me San,” the person said. “And this is NguyỄn Sinh Kim Ngân.” San used feminine pronouns; Kim Ngân gender-neutral ones—except that they weren’t the ones Giao would have expected. They were brutally simple, with none of the nuances of respect and age group she was used to.

“Pleased to meet you,” Giao said, smiling to cover her confusion. Who were they, why were they injecting themselves in the conversation—how had they even known where to find her?

“We’re not having an argument,” Giao said between gritted teeth. “Now if you’ll excuse us . . . ” And, to Tâm, or the thing that pretended to be Tâm: “Drop the avatar. Now.”

“She won’t,” San said in that same pleasant tone. “Because if she did, she’d have to show you what she’s become.”

That stopped her. She looked at Tâm, trying to breathe through a chest that suddenly felt constricted by a vice of metal. “Cousin—”

Tâm smiled. She turned to San, with a smile Giao knew all too well, a thing of teeth and vicious satisfaction, the same face she’d shown Giao on New Year’s Eve. “You’re wrong.” And to Giao, “Here. You wanted to see.”

It was . . . a shambling thing with shrivelled limbs and blood-red muscles beneath translucent skin, a thing that shouldn’t have been able to stand or walk without its bones snapping—except that its—no, her—her hollowed-out face with too-large eyes was Tâm’s, almost unchanged. No, that wasn’t quite true, because Giao suddenly saw that the whites of Tâm’s eyes were the same colour as the berths.

“Preservation liquid,” Tâm said, with a shrug she was trying to keep casual. “It does seep into everything.” The avatar shimmered into existence again, hiding the horror beneath while Giao was still trying to conjure words.

Tâm’s gaze was shrewd. “I wasn’t strong enough. Are you truly going to reproach me for that?”

Three years in a berth. Three years being worn down to the bone, body shrivelled and faded, and all the while the mind being queried, repeatedly, for every scrap of memory the Repository could use to satisfy its visitors . . .

Giao swallowed back words—because she was angry, but not at Tâm. “I have to get out,” she said, and it was almost pleading now. The words she wasn’t saying hung in the air: before the Repository got her too. Before she became like Tâm, like her forever silent family members, those same worn-down bodies locked in opalescent berths. Before it was too late.

Tâm was staring at her. “Downstairs,” she said, finally, and this time she didn’t sound angry or distrustful, but merely tired. She gestured towards San and her companion Kim Ngân. “San knows the way. Remember what we gave you, lil’sis.”

Kim Ngân was already waiting for Giao at the exit to the room, their ao dai silhouetted against the door. San was still by her side.

But Tâm was already turning away. “They’re like you,” she said. “They want to get out.”

Giao knew a dismissal when she saw one. But, nevertheless . . . “Big’sis, please.” And, before Tâm could move away, she hugged her hard—feeling every brittle bone and atrophied limb, every exposed muscle and hollow where the skin had melted away. “Thank you.”

They were going down landing after landing. It was harder than it had been, closer to the top. The Repository didn’t want her to get down—not further than where her berth was. Every landing brought her to her knees, squeezing the breath from her lungs and replacing it with an unending parade of past memories. San and Kim Ngân were the ones who gently guided her out, reminding her of where she was—of who she was, of how to breathe so she wouldn’t choke on her own thoughts.

Sometimes, after she’d lost count of the gruelling descent—after an ageing government official asked about integration policies, and the Repository brought up lion and unicorn dances in the wide tree-lined streets, and kumquat trees and the lemongrass chicken they used to have when Mom worked late nights—that Giao finally got her nerve or lost her patience, or both.

“Seriously.” Giao glared at Kim Ngân, who had the grace to look embarrassed.

When Kim Ngân spoke again, it was in the voice Giao had heard earlier that sounded almost like the Repository. “We set out fifty years after the Long Haul, when the flotilla’s distress calls finally reached TuyẾt NgỌc.” An expansive shrug. “Radio waves are slow. There was a lot of debate in Parliament. Your ancestors weren’t popular, making that decision to leave us and seek their fortune with our old colonisers, but we could understand their desperation. Finally, it was agreed to send a single mindship to see who or what could be salvaged. One that worked, this time. It took us fifty years, but we finally understood how the ÐẠi ViỆt Empire made theirs work, and we used that as the blueprint for our own ships.”

“The rescue ship,” Giao said slowly. “You’re the rescue ship. But you never made it here. You—” It was like a gaping hole opening, even worse than Tâm. Because at least the horror beneath Tâm’s face had been expected. Dreaded, but in the way death was: utterly predictable and mapped. “Why are you in the Repository? Why have we never heard about you?”

“Oh, younger sister . . . ” Kim Ngân shook their head. “Isn’t it obvious? History is written by the winners, and the Repository has been winning at that game for a long, long time. Our ship landed and was taken apart for scrap metal—and every crew member taken for the Repository. We had no use to Asphodele, and so much of value to teach you about the culture of TuyẾt NgỌc.” Their voice was full of irony.

Fifty years after the Long Haul. A century. Three or four generations of RỒng. Giao opened her mouth, shut it, because she couldn’t think of any words to make it better. “I’m sorry.”

“A little.” Kim Ngân’s smile was wide, mocking. “The Repository is the sum of everything you consider history. Of all the lies you tell yourself.”

The lies they told themselves? As if she’d been the one to decide her family would be preserved—to single them out in life and afterwards. “Because TuyẾt NgỌc is better?”

“Of course not,” Kim Ngân said. “But we don’t eat our own and call it justice . . . not any more.”

“Younger sib.” San laid a hand on their arm. “Of course we do. We just do it in different ways.” It sounded like an old, old argument, rehashed until it lost its bite and heat. “This is not the time.”

“Ah.” Kim Ngân’s smile was bright. “I think you’ll find that . . . appeals”—she managed to make the word sound utterly fictional—“are reserved for Asphodelian citizens. Certainly not for aliens from a former colony who’ve turned up in a suspect but highly desirable vessel.”

“A lot of them don’t understand us,” San said. “Or don’t trust us. Or prefer the berths, anyway.” A snort. “But no, you’re not the first. A lot of the RỒng are sympathetic, and some of the other non-Asphodelian ethnicities.”

“No. But you already know that no one has, don’t you?” Kim Ngân’s voice was hard, with nothing of irony in it.

A shrug from San. “You’d see much the same thing. We’ve never gone into the berths. We’re not mined much. Not many people want to know about TuyẾt NgỌc, other than us being desperately poor and fighting each other to extermination.” Another snort. “No one seems to ever ask why we’re poor, or why our planet was stripped of all its natural resources and its cultures set at each other’s throats to make us easier to control. Asphodelians, still hiding from the truth.”

San’s face was hard. “I don’t know. We’re never allowed inside. And it seems to be different for every person. What I can tell you is that everything you can think of has already been tried. And everything your family has thought of, most particularly.”

Because her family was nothing more than a weapon the Repository had turned against her. “You think I’m going to be scared?”

Kim Ngân cocked their head. “No,” they said at last. “You don’t scare easily, do you?”

Giao would have laughed, but she suspected if she did, she’d never stop. She’d just sit there on the landing and let the Repository root through her brain. A wave of raking hit her—being sixteen at university, the overt mockeries of childhood becoming polite nods and unexpectedly sharp words in conversations.

RỒng and other minorities are faced with disadvantages, but they have transcended them. Where the first generations of RỒng did menial work, their descendants turn away from the restaurants and gruelling food industry jobs, and complete university courses for bot-makers, architects, or anything to do with the making and maintenance of wormholes.

Demons take them. Of course they didn’t want to run restaurants any more. Mom and Third Aunt had never taken a holiday in their life, and even the best doctors couldn’t straighten out their spines or the repetitive wrist strains from directing the bots in the kitchen.

“Younger sister. Breathe. You’ve got this. Breathe.” They spoke to her but didn’t touch her. They didn’t seem to be having spasms of their own either: it made sense that there would be few queries about TuyẾt NgỌc, fifty years after the Long Haul, and fewer still about a ship that had vanished, but still . . .

She’d expected downstairs to be . . . oh, she didn’t know what. Some kind of lair, or a huge room filled with machines of all kind. But at the bottom of the last staircase—below a landing whose invisible window opened on the atrium of the Repository, where visitors merely glanced at the artifacts on display before moving on—was only a set of double doors, each engraved with the Double Happiness symbol.

Giao looked at them, hard. They had to be avatar space rather than the physical one: a display put on for her sake. As if to confirm her suspicions, the letters of her name flickered on the door—not in the Asphodelian script, but in old-fashioned RỒng, the kind that master calligraphers wrote on New Year’s Banners.

Kim Ngân and San were both waiting for her at the bottom of the stairs. Great. Of course they weren’t going to open the door either.

A pause. Something twisting on Kim Ngân’s face, endless grief like a punch to the gut. The ship was dead. A mind taken apart and recycled for scrap parts. “Her name was The Serpent in the Lychee Garden.”

An allusion to a tale of Old Earth—a long, long lost piece of history about a woman accused of the murder of an emperor. “I see,” Giao said. And then, staring at them, at the perfect clothes, at the way the Repository didn’t even seem to affect them. “You’re dead, aren’t you?”

Kim Ngân detached themself from the stairs and walked closer to her. Their outline flickered: Giao strained to catch a glimpse of what lay beneath but couldn’t. “Not dead,” they said. “But not corporeal any more, no. We’re not Asphodelians. They needed to be sure that they were holding us securely.”

So they couldn’t get out, not without a whole new set of obstacles. “Why the rigmarole then?”

A sigh from San. “You don’t understand. We really are the rescue party. We want you to get out. That was our mission, and we’ve got nothing left but to see it to an end. But most people won’t believe that.”

“Appeal on our behalf?” Kim Ngân’s face was carefully frozen. “You can try.”

“Other people have,” Giao said flatly—because she didn’t know what to make of them any more. Because she didn’t know who or what she could trust any more—the Repository not only presenting history in a biased fashion but erasing it wholesale; Tâm choosing to give up and drug herself; two strangers appearing out of nowhere like a miracle she hadn’t prayed to the ancestors for.

But some, and it hadn’t worked. “You don’t need to believe us,” Kim Ngân said. They held out their hands, their expression carefully controlled—Giao knew it all too well, seconds before breaking into tears. “Just get in there and make your appeal. That’s all that matters.” A century in the Repository, fighting to stay whole, and all she could think of was for ways to disprove their story?

“Thank you,” Giao said, closing her hands over Kim Ngân’s, and feeling only emptiness in her fingers.

Inside was only darkness, and the letters of her name lighting up one by one, forming a path to the centre of the room, where something waited—a column of polished metal like the maker machines on Perse.

She walked there, because there didn’t seem to be anything else to do. The moment she stepped into the room, something within her flickered and died, as if a switch had been thrown, and a dreadful, unnatural silence spread. No, not dreadful: she hadn’t realised how omnipresent the Repository’s tendrils in her mind had been, until now.

She walked towards the pillar, in that silence that she struggled to encompass. Every step on the polished metal floor seemed too loud, like phaser shots—with every one, she’d look up, expecting the militia to burst in, or paralysing bots to hold her down. But nothing happened.

She reached the pillar. It was polished, and really metal: she’d half expected the plastic of the berths, but it was grey, with some oily reflections as if someone had forgotten machine oil. She turned, then, saw Kim Ngân and San waiting for her beyond the open doors of the room.

She laid both hands on the command slot—for a brief moment she was back on Perse, in the mining station, with An Di’s hands on her shoulders—An Di’s perfume of hibiscus flowers and lime wafting into Giao’s nostrils, and An Di’s voice telling her not to be so serious—and then it passed, and she was standing there in the heart of the Repository, blinking back tears.

“My name is Lê ThỊ Khánh Giao,” she said. “ID number 3985332190554. I wish to appeal against my preservation, on my behalf and on behalf of the crew of The Serpent in the Lychee Garden, Trân ThỊ HẢi San and NguyỄn Sinh Kim Ngân.”

A silence. The room around her flickered—and for a moment became something else, something that was all metallic, inhuman sheen. “The Serpent in the Lychee Garden. TrẦn ThỊ HẢi San. NguyỄn Sinh Kim Ngân. These names do not exist in the records.” The voice was high-pitched and expressionless. It spoke Asphodelian, but with the slow laboriousness of someone who’d not finished learning it. And something about it was hauntingly familiar, though Giao couldn’t put her finger on why. “I cannot record an appeal on their behalf.”

Didn’t exist. Because they’d been purged. Because they’d been absorbed. Because Asphodele had erased that rescue ship, pretended it had been lost. “They’re at the doors,” Giao said, biting back the more angry words. “HẢi San and Kim Ngân. Tell them to come in, and you’ll see.”

“They’re not citizens,” the Repository said. “Only citizens are allowed here, and only for the duration of their appeal.”

“I thought everyone was equal, before the law of preservation? That everyone had the right to ask for their experience to be weighed again?” Giao couldn’t help it: the words weren’t even hers, they were the ones her family had crafted and hoarded. The ones that wouldn’t help, San had said.

“What harm do you think they can cause, being here? You control everything.” The bots and the berths and the environment, and even the thoughts of every preserved person. “You don’t have to take their appeal, but they could come here. Please.” She’d slipped into RỒng with the last sentence, and hadn’t realised it—painstakingly, she forced herself to think in Asphodelian. “Please.”

The words wouldn’t work, not for getting out. But it was a very different thing, what she was asking the Repository for.

“You didn’t kill them,” Giao said, and knew, suddenly, why they had not. Sanctity of life. Freedom of choice. Like the berths, a twisted kindness that stretched the knife’s kiss over endless years, endless centuries. “They still have value to you. Please let them in.”

At last the Repository said, “They may come in. But I cannot log an appeal on their behalf, or on that of a mind that doesn’t exist any more.” Darkness fell across the room as it continued to speak. “ID number 3985332190554, Lê ThỊ Khánh Giao,” the Repository said. “Your appeal is duly logged. Please present your defence.”

She didn’t know what she’d say. In her heart, she’d always believed the injustice of it would be so flagrant, that she would just need to make them see—and then old memories of Tâm’s schooling took over. “I’m twenty-four,” she said. “I work in the Perse mining station to provide the metal for Asphodele. I would like to allege undue discrimination against me and my family.”

A pause. On the metal pillar, her family tree appeared, with the various people preserved greyed out. A few stragglers: Cousin Linh and her children, Cousin BẢo and his electro-engineering company, Fourth Aunt, still serving in the army well past her age of retirement. The floor under Giao’s feet flickered.

At last the Repository said, “I see no undue discrimination. The higher frequency of preservation is due to your family’s interest to Asphodelian history.”

Four generations. They’d been there four generations, and they’d always be curios in Asphodele. A study in how people adapted and evolved. A population to be studied rather than be allowed to live. The more polite, deadlier version of the mockery she’d received as a child.

“As to your age . . . ” A pause, there, while some lights she couldn’t tell flickered, and she realised what the laboriousness was: it was a RỒng accent, except subtly wrong, the same way San and Kim Ngân’s were.

“That’s pointless,” Kim Ngân said. She and San had come in, were now standing in front of the metal pillar. San was standing still, but Kim Ngân was looking at everything, darkly fascinated.

“I can’t,” San’s voice was toneless. “You forget: no one has come out.” Meanwhile Kim Ngân reached out, slowly, carefully—their hand brushed the pillar for a brief moment, and in that moment, it changed colours to the deep yellow of gold.

“Kim Ngân.” The Repository’s voice changed. It spoke RỒng, and its voice had the exact same accent as theirs. “Why—”

The room flickered; and then the metal pillar was back, and the moment gone. “Your age, and the usefulness of your work, is being re-evaluated against the value of your experience.”

San grabbed her arm. Or tried to: her hand went right through Giao’s. “Don’t anger it,” she said. “That’s never ended well.”

On the metal pillar, a slow pattern of blinking lights was slowly coalescing together, symbols that meant nothing to Giao but had to somehow represent the sum of her life.

The Repository had paused, when Kim Ngân had touched it. “San,” Giao said. “Please. Can you—” She tried to grab San’s hand, but San wasn’t moving. San was desperately trying to think of words that would save Giao, but San and Tâm had been right: everything had been tried. Giao was still clinging to the hope of an appeal, to the notion that things were fair, when she’d known the truth all along: the decision had been made already. Eating its own, Kim Ngân had said, and they had been harsh, but not incorrect. “Put your hand on it.”

“I already told you. Neither Kim Ngân nor I can appeal. You’re wasting your time.”

The lights were climbing on the pillar. When they were done—and it couldn’t be much to weigh, couldn’t it? Twenty-four years, a childhood on Asphodele, five years on Perse in the mines. Giao considered, dispassionately, the entirety of her existence, and knew it was nothing. To her, everything; but to the Repository, to the thing that Asphodele had made of itself, not more than a moment’s pause. “You said I had to trust you. Just do it. Please.”

San’s hand—ghostly, flickering, only a visual avatar—reached, touched the pillar. The room flickered, then, showed that same oily sheen on metal walls Giao had seen before. Kim Ngân moved, put their own hand on top of San—and left it there, unmoving.

“San?” The Repository asked in that same voice. The flickers were getting stronger and stronger now, and it wasn’t just the room: Kim Ngân and San, too, were flickering. Somewhere in a room of the Repository, in the berths where they were locked, bots would be crawling to cut the connection to their avatars. Just a matter of time; but Giao didn’t need much of it any more.

Our ship landed and was taken apart for scrap metal—and every crew member taken for the Repository.

They wouldn’t have dared to kill a mindship, but they could repurpose it. They could replace an aging AI with a newer, better one—taking it apart for scraps just as they had the ships.

Giao said in RỒng, “The Serpent in the Lychee Garden. That was your name, wasn’t it?”

The room vanished. Instead of the metal pillar was a contraption of thorns and protruding arms, metal twisted and pulled together until it hardly seemed to be able to hold together any more—and in the centre of it was a glistening mass of flesh and electronics, with tendrils extended along every arm, and bots crawling everywhere on stray cables and spikes, in the light of stars—and then it flickered again, and she was staring at the curved expanse of a hull, moments before the view panned out and she saw the vast sleekness of a ship, fragile fins and stabilisers and pitted, sheening metal whose opalescence took Giao’s breath away.

“Child,” The Serpent in the Lychee Garden said in RỒng. And then the image of the ship twisted away, and it said again, in the polished metal darkness of the room where Giao had entered, “Your contribution has been weighed, and does not offset the value of your experience.”

“She’s theirs,” Kim Ngân said, and they were weeping, with not a trace of sarcasm or irony on their face. “You can’t change that, younger sister.”

And they were right, weren’t they? Tâm was right. It was pointless. The die was rigged. They could learn all they wanted about the Repository and how it worked, could remember all the movements to defeat its obliviousness, but in the end all they bought themselves was a few moments of agony, a last struggle before they gave way to the inevitable.

“You may return to the berths, or wander the halls,” the Repository said. “This place will be closed to you henceforth, and your rights of appeal have been exhausted.”

She’d tried to run away from Asphodele, and Asphodele had taken her the way it was always going to; the way it would take Cousin Linh and her children, and the children of their children, until the Long Haul was a faint memory—and even then something in the Repository would remember that they had come here impoverished and shipwrecked, and forever alien—

Something, long held taut, finally snapped in her: the same cold anger within her that had steadily risen as she was descending the stairs the first time, the same as when Tâm had said that the choice to enter the berths was hers.

They thought they held all the cards; that they owned her body; that there was no right to appeal—because there had never been one, because everything had been decided by society long before her life reached twenty-four.

But they scraped and recycled, and never gave a thought to what lay beneath the surface of what they had taken.

Giao drew herself up to her full height and laid her hand against the pillar, the same way San and Kim Ngân had, feeling its coldness seize her. “Your right to appeal—” the Repository started, but before she could be thrown out of the room, Giao said, “My name is Lê ThỊ Khánh Giao, daughter of NguyỄn ThỊ BẢo LỄ, granddaughter of TrẦn ThỊ MỸ Nhi”—the personal names of her ancestors burnt on her tongue—one didn’t name ascendants, and even less the dead or the preserved—“great-granddaughter of TrẦn ThỊ NgỌc Lan, who crossed the Long Haul on The Dragon Away from the Clouds”—and on and on, reciting her full genealogy until she’d named her sixteen great-grandparents—“and great-granddaughter of NguyỄn HỮu KhẢ ái, who died with The Willow as Quiet as Rice. You came here to rescue us.”

The floor under her shook—except it wasn’t an earthquake but the frantic, panicked heartbeat of someone living. The metal pillar was gone, and it was only her, standing in the chamber that was the ship’s heart, watching the stars.

“Child?” the Repository asked, and it was the ship’s voice again, trembling and unsteady and as fragile as spun glass.

Giao stood on the bridge of the ship, watching Asphodele recede in the distance. In the centre of Xarvi was the polished dome of the Repository, the building’s connections to the city shining faintly in Giao’s choice of overlay.

She ran her hands through her hair, half expecting to feel dead bots again, surprised when they turned out to be alive. Her thoughts were empty, silent, in a way that felt almost wrong.

“You look thoughtful,” Kim Ngân said, slipping into the seat next to her. San brought, wordlessly, drinks that she laid on the table. “Unhappy to be free?”

They both looked the worse for wear: pale and skeleton-thin, with the marks of bots’ needles on their arms and neck—San wore a high-collar necklace to cover the worst of them, but there was no regrowing the shorn hair or hiding the pearlescent colour their eye-whites had turned, after a century in the berths. Kim Ngân wore an avatar, and San long sleeves and jewelry—as if anything could hide that they were a century or more out of sync, coming back to a planet that had all but forgotten them.

Giao stared at the Repository—at the shape of the ship she couldn’t see, the Mind that was now irrevocably part of the canker at the heart of the city. She had let them go, but they’d never had more than that single moment of clarity from her. The Repository still held Mom and Tâm and the rest of Giao’s family—still continued to mark the RỒng for preservation.

She felt, again, Tâm’s fingers on her chest, sharp and painful, saw again the ruin that her cousin had become. Home. Where you are. Where your family is.

“Home is the place that welcomes you,” Giao said aloud. She clenched her fingers on the edge of the drink, thought of Tâm, and of Linh and her children, and all the others that still lived in the shadow of the Repository’s biased choices. She thought of An Di, and all that might have happened—would An Di even understand or approve of Giao’s choices?

“You should find another such place,” San said, softly, and stopped when Kim Ngân laid a hand on her arm: a silent warning.

It was their home as much as anyone else’s, but all it thought of was value, and it had found too little in them. She traced the contour of the Repository on the screen, imagined the ship lifting itself free of its cage of rooms and staircases, in the wreck of empty displays and darkened windows—of the preserved finally stumbling out of the ruins of the building, freed from berths that would never be used again.

I’ll come back, Giao said, to the silently receding city that was her home. I’ll come back, and everything will change.