Aliette de Bodard
Ships didn’t grieve the way humans did.
To a mindship—an organic intelligence implanted in a spaceship, shepherding their passengers between the numbered planets, diving in and out of deep spaces where time and space merged together—loss was a different thing.
The Pine’s Amber got the message from her wife, Autumn’s Red Bird, late at night, as she was boarding the last passengers from Felicity Station.
It came, the way it usually did, via their encrypted comms channel, the one they’d first set up when they met on the First Planet.
Amber ignored it at first, because she wanted to make the proper space for it. Messages from Red Bird were getting increasingly rare, and she savored every one of them, deliberately tamping down the twinge of sorrow every time she opened one.
So instead, Amber focused on her passengers: the usual assortment of private fare-payers and imperial officers: the magistrates and clerks sitting up straight, marching on her floors with the straightness and assurance of those who’d served in the military; the private passengers a more variegated lot, from merchants with brash and ostentatious virtual overlays on their clothes to smaller children who ran, shrieking with excitement—their weight slight, irregular, their peals of laughter echoing in Amber’s corridors, a sound that should have been familiar in the years after the war and yet felt odd and disturbing, like running water on a barren moon.
There was one passenger in particular who caught Amber’s attention. She walked up through the boarding airlock at the very end. Amber’s bots—small, fist-sized, spider-like constructs spread throughout the maintenance conduits—flagged her through low-level routines, because she stood out so much. The imperial officials were focused and grim; the passengers were taut with the excitement of going to the First Planet—the home of the Imperial Court, of the White Horse Pagoda, of all the bustling tourist and business locations. This one … this one walked upright, but her bearing wasn’t military. She was of middle age, with the faint line of rejuv visible to the bots’ sensors. Her eyes—fox-shaped, at a sharp downward angle—surveyed Amber’s corridors for a while, and it took a while for her heartbeat to slow down enough.
Something was off.
Was Fox-Eyes trying to blow up Amber?
There were security protocols to run further checks on the passenger, though their use had been greatly decreased after the war ended. As the other passengers settled into their cabins and the common spaces, the greater part of Amber’s processing power remained with Fox-Eyes. The manifest said her name was Hạnh, no surname or middle name given. Not illegal, but …
As Amber considered whether to listen to Red Bird’s message, she watched Hạnh. Hạnh hadn’t invoked any privacy rights in her cabin, which meant Amber could continue to watch what Hạnh was doing. Nothing that seemed particularly egregious: merely unpacking and settling down. She put down a small tea set in nondescript porcelain and set water to boiling. The smell of hazelnut and cut grass filled the room. Hạnh had called up a screen in the middle of the cabin and was standing in front of it, frowning. Her heart rate was up again, her face scrunched up in thought.
Hạnh finally settled down. She made a gesture with her hands, and the screen was replaced by a larger holographic display: bits and pieces of images and vids that were flashing too fast for Amber to see. Hạnh withdrew a contraption from her luggage: a filigree of cables and electrodes that she affixed to her head, each setting careful and deliberate. Then further cables, running down her arms, splitting so that each of them ended on a fingertip. When she raised them, the display moved with her; and when she made a particular stabbing gesture with one hand, an image winked out of existence.
Oh.
A mem-hazer. Amber should have known. Mem-hazers were the latest fad in the wake of the war, though they’d existed for much longer. The equipment had just recently become affordable, though one look at Hạnh—inputting commands, fluidly moving her hands to bring about minute changes to the display—made it abundantly clear she’d been practicing for a while. The equipment she had was serious, too: not ostentatious and not overexpensive, but built to be used, and built to last.
Hạnh’s heartrate was settling down now, but it remained elevated. She was obviously doing the mem-haze to soothe herself. But what from?
Should Amber run the security protocols? But no, her intuition told her that this wasn’t about protocols.
All the same …
All the same, it was like an itch Amber couldn’t quite get rid of.
Better forget it. There were more important things.
Like Red Bird’s message.
She sighed, and withdrew—to her heartroom, the place where all her processing equipment was concentrated, a ship’s equivalent to the human brain, a space no passenger could access. As she dived into deep spaces—that area where time and space contracted together for faster-than-light space travel, where only mindships could go—she monitored both the passengers and herself.
She felt … odd. As if she were too small and too large for her body at the same time, as if something was twisting all her bots out of shape.
Sorrow.
Loss.
She opened the message from Red Bird.
It had been ten months since the last one, and Amber had almost forgotten. No, of course she hadn’t forgotten. Of course she was a ship and she couldn’t forget. But … as the messages grew further and further apart, Amber had learned to bury the grief. To not talk about it to the few friends she had left, because they grew uncomfortable and concerned, gently suggesting she should find someone else. Resume her life. Stop grieving, as if it were that easy to forget.
And now all of that grief surged back up in a great wave that twisted everything into incoherence.
The reception frequencies had shifted again. Of course. Red Bird was getting closer and closer to the Cloud Floor black hole, and the closer she got, the more distorted comms got.
“The moon shines on a snowy desk,” Red Bird said. Her voice was level, unnaturally so. Amber wanted to scream at her, to tell her to be more afraid, to show emotion, any emotion. She was reciting a poem about loss. About partings. “Your willow branch sighs in the wind, and the memory of the river with nine branches is blurred by the storm.” And then, slowly: “Radiation levels are getting higher. I’m not sure how long the shields will keep up. Tell me how you are. Tell me how fares the empire. Did The Water-Hen’s Call ever get that promotion to General of the Outermost Belt? Did Vy ever get that compartment she wanted on the Second Planet?”
Amber didn’t know. It had been fifteen years, and she’d drifted out of contact with Vy, and with some of their friends from the squad. With most people, really. Amber still saw Water-Hen every once in a while, trading platitudes about ship life. But to Red Bird—caught in an inexorable downward spiral that she couldn’t escape anymore, a slowly decaying orbit that brought her ever closer to the black hole’s event horizon—no time at all had elapsed. To Red Bird, the war was fresh, every ship was clogged up with military troops or refugees, and the Cloud Floor disaster had only just happened.
To Amber …
“I love you,” Amber said, in the silence. To Red Bird, it was all so close in time—their laughing as they chased each other around the streets of the First Planet in avatar shape, as their bots mingled with each other in Amber’s heartroom, and they could both hear the rhythm of their motors going faster and faster, everything seizing up with desire. Red Bird would feel the warmth of Amber’s lips as their avatars kissed, here, in this heartroom.
“How was your run?” Amber had asked.
“Difficult,” Red Bird had said. “I had to argue with spaceport control to let me disembark. They thought I was hauling contraband.”
“And—”
A clattering, from Red Bird’s bots. “I was heavier than the manifest, but it wasn’t contraband. At least not the money-paying kind. It was stowaways.”
“Ah.”
“Are you going to reproach me for that?”
“Because spaceport control did?” Amber snorted. “I know how desperate your stowaways must have been, to steal onto a mindship keenly aware of every breath onboard.”
“They used disruptors,” Red Bird said.
“You know that’s not what I meant. Of course you took them. Do you think I’d have done otherwise?”
“No. You like to pretend you’re all motherly and tough with your passengers, but really it’s all for show. You’re a big softie.” And she’d kissed Amber again.
Amber had leaned into the embrace. “Soft?” she’d said, smiling. “Let me show you where I’m not that soft.” And she’d guided Red Bird’s bots to particular racks in the heartroom, the ones where many of her pleasure centers were located.
To Red Bird, all of this—the conversation, the kisses, the rest of that night—would feel as vivid and as pleasurable as yesterday.
To Amber … she wasn’t sure anymore. Sometimes it seemed dull and far away, and other times—when she got the increasingly infrequent, ever-shifting messages from Red Bird—it seemed like yesterday. She felt alive in a way that she hadn’t since the war, and it all hurt.
“I love you,” she said, again, to an empty, desolate heartroom where only her own bots scurried, and she felt the first swelling of grief in her body, contracting everything to an unbearable, all-encompassing sadness.
Someone was pinging her, insistently. A passenger, using a low-priority comms. So, not an emergency or anything that required her immediate attention. Except that the passenger was Hạnh.
Amber was jolted into responsiveness. What could Hạnh be up to that she would require Amber?
She went to Hạnh’s cabin. Not physically, of course: she couldn’t go anywhere that way. But she could project an avatar: a virtual holographic likeliness that the passengers associated with her. It was easier if it was human—and also, it was with that likeness that she and Red Bird had first fallen in love, and Amber couldn’t let go of it. It would have felt like a betrayal of Red Bird.
She found Hạnh standing in the middle of her mem-haze, with the filigree modding equipment off. The mem-haze now looked like an intricate holographic display: it took up the entire virtual overlay of the room. Amber only caught flashes of it before Hạnh froze it: ships flying above a planet, a sun shimmering over a sea, a flow of refugees, their haunted faces all blurring into one another. It reminded her, uncomfortably, of the people she’d ferried in the closing days of the war, desperately trying to do some good; to pretend that Red Bird hadn’t disappeared in vain.
But she wasn’t there for that mem-haze, whatever it was meant to represent.
“You called me?” she asked.
“Oh.” Hạnh turned. She looked regal; but her heartbeat was still too elevated, and her pupils too dilated. Still scared, but what was there to be scared of? “Yes. I was wondering if I could leave my things onboard for a while. I have an appointment on the First Planet. And—” A deep breath. “Can you accompany me there, and wait for me outside?”
It was an intriguing and unusual request, but by no means exceptional. Technically, Amber’s duty ended when the passengers disembarked; she’d had plans to meet up with Water-Hen, one of those excruciating meetings during which they would trade stories and Amber would try not to feel dead inside. But she’d seen that Hạnh had applied for a prolongation of her time onboard. Usually passengers did that because they had nowhere to go and needed breathing space to sort out accommodation. Hạnh didn’t strike Amber as someone who failed to plan forward. And all of Amber’s sensors showed that Hạnh felt scared about something. She thought about asking where Hạnh wanted to be ferried to, but instead she asked, “Why?”
Hạnh made a gesture with her hands. An address shimmered into view. Amber felt a chill: it was the address of the War Crimes Tribunal.
“I didn’t ask where,” Amber said, pleasantly, with the voice she reserved for her passengers, maternal and no-nonsense. “I asked why.”
Hạnh sagged, a fraction. “I’m a witness,” she said. “And I—I don’t want to have to juggle transport to get there and back.”
“A witness.” Amber suddenly saw that the regalness, the aloof attitude, was all a mask. “For what?”
Hạnh’s smile was mirthless. “Cloud Floor,” she said.
Cloud Floor. Amber felt a chill, climbing from deep in her heartroom and spreading to every vent and corridor. “You were at Cloud Floor.”
Hạnh looked at Amber. Not as a passenger to a ship, but as a person to a person. “Were you?” she asked.
“No,” Amber said. It wasn’t a lie. She sighed. “I’ll take you to the tribunal.” She thought about leaving the conversation there—venturing nothing—about going back to her journey, leaving Hạnh here with whatever memories she was carrying. But the pain of Red Bird’s message still burned her. “I know what it’s like. My partner was on Cloud Floor when the sun went nova. She was too close. She’s beyond the last stable orbit. Beyond the last point at which she could have slipped into deep space.”
Trapped. Falling. Ever falling, into a spiral that seemed endless from the outside.
“Oh.” A silence. Hạnh said, “I’m sorry.” She made a gesture with her hands. The mem-haze behind her unfroze, and in the center of it the sun went from shimmering to contracting—and then everything went white, and then dark.
Amber felt another chill of the familiar. “These are your memories?” It looked like the food mindships consumed—the cleverly arranged dumplings that were data packets, evoking meaningful memories to the ships that consumed them. But more than that, it reminded her of the first messages she’d received from Red Bird—the ones she’d read while watching the vids and holos of the unfolding tragedy. The chatter of news anchors.
Unknown enemy weapon …
The sun has gone nova …
We cannot evacuate …
No one could possibly have known …
A laugh, from Hạnh. “No, these aren’t my memories. A mem-haze is manufactured brain waves for straight-up brain consumption. Humans don’t remember like that. I’ve been … trying to make something about Cloud Floor. I’m a data artist, and it’s a long journey without much to keep me busy. It’s—” She bit her lip. “It keeps me busy, otherwise I’d choke. Thank you, by the way, for agreeing to take me to my destination.”
Amber nodded. She said, finally, “Were you on the station?” And stopped. It was a wholly inappropriate question for a ship to be asking a passenger.
Hạnh’s laughter had a bitter edge. Behind her, the sun froze—a moment before it expanded and then collapsed, before everything stopped making sense. “No, I wouldn’t have survived if I had been. I was on the third planet. The furthest one. I—” She swallowed. “I was the governor’s daughter. They evacuated us first. They—they had mindships.”
Mindships meant one could travel faster than light, as Amber was currently doing—faster than the light and radiation the sun had released in its agony. A miracle. One not available to Red Bird, who was too close to the supernova. “It must have been a tight escape,” Amber said, finally. She wasn’t quite sure how to express the turmoil of feelings within her—anger, sorrow, rage at missed opportunities.
Hạnh closed her eyes. “It was like being chased by ghosts,” she said. “Even in deep spaces, I could feel it. Like some huge, giant dark wave that was cresting behind us, swallowing everything in its path. And—sounds. Like nothing I’ve heard before.” She made a sharp gesture with her hands: the mem-haze unfroze. There was something in the brain waves, on the edge of human hearing, but Amber had her own sensors. An ululation that kept changing in frequencies, a profoundly unsettling thing that did feel like it had come from beyond death.
“Is that what it felt like?” Amber guessed.
A snort from Hạnh. “Yes. This isn’t a pure memory of the sound. Just my way to try and communicate it. It feels inadequate.”
“It’s not—”
“Don’t cut me off,” Hạnh said. “It feels inadequate because it’s not what I heard. And because I need to testify accurately, and how can I do that if I can’t even reproduce a sound?”
“I’m sorry,” Amber said.
A sigh. “No, I’m the one who’s sorry. I’m being unpleasant because I’m stressed, and you’re the one who’s agreed to bring me to the tribunal when you don’t have to. I just need—” she stopped, again. “The officials say they’ll look at the evidence. Determine whose fault it was. Prosecute, if necessary.”
“I can see why that would be comforting.”
“But not to you.” Hạnh’s voice was sharp.
It wasn’t that Amber didn’t believe in fault. It was just … pointless. Fault wouldn’t bring Red Bird back. “No. But again—I’m not faulting you for wanting that. So many people survived Cloud Floor. And so many didn’t. We all find our own paths forward.”
A silence. Hạnh said, finally, “Thank you.”
“For what?”
“For not telling me how to grieve.”
The moment stretched, slow—but not uncomfortable. It was Hạnh who broke it. “Tell me about your wife.”
It was like a shock of cold water. Of course Amber had talked about Red Bird to other mindships, and to her friends. But to a passenger … it felt like some invisible boundary had been breached, one she’d barely been aware existed. “We met on the First Planet. She was trying to get some incense to bring back to her family. I was just there to visit a temple. We—collided.” They’d both gone in physical presence: bots and avatars. And they’d collided quite literally, their bots entangled together in one of the narrow streets, their avatars melding into one another as Amber struggled to regain control of everything, unsure of where she started and where Red Bird ended. “She was a war transport.”
“Ah.”
It was before Amber had been requisitioned, when the war was still in its opening moves. “We’d meet whenever she docked at the stations. Felicity, Prosper, Longevity …” They would wander down together, in the concourses flooded with smells and sights—avatars holding hands even as their ships were docked close together. They would share meals—holos of dumplings and noodle soups designed to evoke memories of Amber’s childhood on the Thirty-Sixth Planet, the smell of the marshes, the caws of the rooks taking flight overhead …
She remembered the last such meeting. They were in one of the main concourses onboard Longevity Station, watching a string of cherry blossoms fall down over the concourse, an intricate and soothing overlay that didn’t quite hide the low quality and high prices of the food that war rationing brought. She’d sat down her avatar, her bots clustering beneath her robes. Red Bird was staring at her like someone whose thirst was finally sated.
“What?” Amber asked.
“You haven’t changed one bit,” Red Bird said.
“Should I have?”
A sigh, from Red Bird. “The world is changing. The war is changing everything.”
Of course, she was a war transport. She was ferrying troops to and from battle, as opposed to Amber’s more sedate runs with civilian passengers. Amber sent her bots to grab the tea, pouring it for Red Bird. They breathed in the scent of layered memories—the tea reminding Amber of their first meeting. “You find that reassuring?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” Red Bird said. “Perhaps it’s just stressful, isn’t it? To wonder when it’s going to get to you, too.”
Amber leaned, running a bot to mingle with Red Bird’s. “It’s not going to change me.”
She’d been so sure, then.
She said aloud to Hạnh, “Afterwards, when we couldn’t meet anymore because our duties pulled us apart, we’d send each other letters.” She thought of Red Bird’s message, still fresh in her memory banks. “Lifelines in the dark.”
“I see,” Hạnh said. “I’m sorry,” she said, again. “I’d have liked to meet her.” She stared at the frozen mem-haze display, the art piece that couldn’t quite seem to coalesce. Amber wasn’t quite sure what she saw in it, but it seemed like her cue to slowly fade out of the room—and go back to her own heartroom, trying and failing to wrench her thoughts from Cloud Floor and all the things that she could no longer say to Red Bird.
Of course, Amber couldn’t land on the First Planet. She’d been made for long space trips, not planetside, and even the spaceport was not in the atmospheric limits. Gravity would tear her apart. But she did have shuttles, and it was in one of these that she took Hạnh down.
Piloting required only a fraction of her vast attention. Some of the rest of it went to her last passengers disembarking, some to her bots cleaning the corridors, some to the motors being repaired, the fuel tanks being refilled—and a large part of it went to watching Hạnh.
Hạnh sat, very still, very stiff. As the shuttle banked towards the Capital—a fraction of the conurbation that covered the entire planet, a vast expanse of tall, narrow buildings extending downwards, all the way into the ground—Amber heard her heartbeat. She could track it all with the bots onboard the shuttle, see the way the carotid artery pulsed faster and faster at Hạnh’s neck.
“Are you all right?” Amber asked, knowing what the answer was already.
Hạnh lowered her head, and didn’t answer. She inhaled, sharply, once, twice. “No. But we go on even when we’re not, don’t we?” She said, “Will you—have tea with me?”
“Of course,” Amber said.
There wasn’t much in the way of equipment on the shuttle, but she could find some hot water, and call up a virtual overlay of a cup for her own tea. She appeared in avatar shape, sat facing Hạnh, trying to think of what she could say. Outside, the shuttle was aligning itself with the vast, tree-lined avenue leading to the War Crimes Tribunal: the Empire had made a deliberate statement by leaving the space around it clear of all buildings. Only important temples—and the Imperial Citadel itself—had merited that honor.
Should she say Hạnh wasn’t the only witness called? But no, it would cheapen it. What could she say? She’d looked up the trial. It was a massive affair involving everyone from the former rebels who’d designed the weapon to the officer who had disobeyed orders and decided to trigger the evacuation of the Third Planet.
What if it found guilt?
“Do you want them to find who did it?”
“I want to know what happened,” Hạnh said, finally. “I want people to admit to their part. I—” She sighed. “My parents died on that planet. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t want revenge.” Her eyes glittered. “What about you?”
Amber said, finally, “I want my wife back.” And she thought she was going to cry. She was listening to Red Bird’s messages, one after the other together like the links in a monk’s prayer beads. Ten months between the last two. Longer than ten months for the next one—to hear Red Bird speaking to her from a past that had died. “You’ll be all right,” she said.
Hạnh shifted. Amber could feel her changing weight on her bench, the way she put the weight on one side, then another. “You can’t know that.”
“No. But I have faith.” She laughed. “It was something my wife told me, once.” On that run between the spice mines and Prosper Station, Red Bird transporting troops, Amber carrying crates of medical supplies and wounded civilians—Amber had asked Red Bird how she kept going through it all. She still remembered Red Bird’s laughter.
It hurt to know she’d never hear it again.
A silence. Hạnh said, finally, “Can I ask something else of you?”
“Yes, of course.”
“You don’t have to if you can’t, but … will you take a look at what I’ve done?”
“The art piece?” Amber felt that chill of unease again, that hollow wrenching of anxiety that would overwhelm her, given half a chance. “You want my opinion.”
“I’m not sure what I want,” Hạnh said. Her voice was sharp. Too sharp again. She was trying to hurt someone else, because otherwise she’d be trying to hurt herself. Amber ignored it, or did her best to. Finally Hạnh said, “You’ve been there. You can just … look at it, please.”
“It’s all right,” Amber said. But she wasn’t sure it was, or what moved Hạnh in this moment. She wasn’t sure she could look at it, when every message from Red Bird hurt like a wound. “I’ll do my best.”
Joyless laughter from Hạnh. “That’s all one can ask for. Thank you.”
Amber landed the shuttle in the designated area. The sun was out: it beat on the metal. Light. Radiation. She set her teacup down.
The War Crimes Tribunal was modern, not in the neoclassical style of much of the Capital’s official buildings, but a sleek glass and metal thing made of curved pieces, like bits of spheres put together in a fashion that only seemed haphazard. In reality, the skill it took to assemble these in a way that reached up and out, keeping to a spherical shape but never quite becoming a strict sphere, was immense. At the top, it all came together in the only sharp point: a needle or a knife emerging through it. A reminder that the work done here could be wounding.
There was a crowd outside that building: scholars, people from the news-vids, and the odd ship. And a queue, too: a flow of witnesses that were making their way into the tribunal. There must have been … a hundred, two hundred people on that plaza.
She hadn’t realized it would be so many.
Hạnh was staring at them with growing horror on her face. Her heartbeat was getting more and more rapid. “I can’t do that. I just can’t walk out there. Will you—”
Slowly, carefully, Amber walked to the shuttle’s door. Stood there, her sensors adjusting to the bright sunlight. The sun that was alive, that beat down on them, that would never go nova within her lifetime.
So many people. They were all staring at her. Taking pictures, vids, holographic snaps. Searching the net for who she was. She saw the first posts going up across the network. The mindship, The Pine’s Amber, had come to the trial. Known to be the wife of Autumn’s Red Bird. Surely her presence here meant something …
She was here and she was seen, and suddenly she could understand the bone-deep terror that Hạnh was feeling. Being at the center of so many people’s attention, and yet a drop of water in an ocean of witnesses. Of survivors. So much devastation in the wake of Cloud Floor.
With an effort, she banished the newsreels impinging on her field of vision.
She could hear Red Bird’s voice, a litany of observations that came from the distant past, or the distant future—a place where time had ceased to have meaning.
In avatar shape, Amber held out a hand to Hạnh, poised between darkness and light. “Come,” she said. “I’ll walk beside you.”
Inside, it was quieter. People got sent to specific holding spaces, and soon a stern-faced ship’s avatar came looking for Hạnh specifically, leaving Amber in the room alone, waiting for Hạnh to come back after her testimony.
The greater part of her attention went back, then—to the shuttle, which was parked on the plaza, under the burning sun. To her body in orbit and the ten thousand things that needed to be done after disembarking her passengers: cleaning cabins, stocking up on fuel, food, and other materials, checking recycling filters and airlock seals, running tens of thousands of bots on her floors and walls and ducts.
All of this, sadly, could be done without much of her own conscious involvement. She felt cooped up and small in a way she hadn’t since she’d been a child. Like ten thousand small burning needles were trying to work their way out of her.
What could be happening in there? Where was this all going? All these people?
This wasn’t the time.
This—
She knew what she was trying to avoid. Everything dredged up. Hạnh’s interview, which had stressed her so much that her stress was bleeding into Amber’s own emotions, Amber’s own wounds. The art piece.
She’d promised she’d take a look. No, not take a look. Do her best. And her best wasn’t going to be done by standing around doing nothing, much as she wanted to.
Amber went, bracing herself, to Hạnh’s cabin.
There were rules, when one was a ship, boundaries that weren’t easy to maintain. Her bots crawled in every cabin, but Amber’s consciousness herself never went inside them unless she had cause. Unless a passenger invited her in, like Hạnh had done.
It felt odd and wrong in so many ways, to be walking an empty cabin. Amber stood, in avatar form, in the middle of the cabin. Choosing to feel the plush of the carpet under her virtual feet, the sharp smell of Hạnh’s sandalwood and cedar perfume. An intrusion, no matter that she’d been given permission for it.
The mem-haze shimmered in its own overlay, a reality that underpinned the physical one. Amber hadn’t activated it yet. She couldn’t quite bring herself to do so.
I’ll do my best.
Bots all over the ship were pulled slightly out of routine because of how tense she was, as if she were a human holding a breath. “Let’s go,” she said—she didn’t know to whom, to Red Bird, to Hạnh, to a world that wasn’t listening.
And reaching out, she brought the mem-haze into full view and activated it.
At first, it was just silence, and static images. Ships above a planet, a sun shimmering over a vast, turquoise sea. Crowds milling in familiar concourses of long-dead spaceports.
At first, Amber thought she could take it.
And then the display started moving. Crowds laughed, children shrieked. Mindships passed each other in deep spaces, over pagodas and lakes and habitats, and it all came alive, vivid and sharp and so fragile, a mix of holos and vids and memories that went straight to Amber’s nerve-processing centers.
Gone, all gone. It was all gone. Amber had time for that single thought before the noise that had been in the back of all the other noises swelled and swallowed everything up. An ululation. A chasing of ghosts, as Hạnh had called it.
The images and vids crinkled on the edges. The memories grew tainted with fear. The shimmering sun grew and grew, and everything went to black—for a moment only, and then everything came back, but the blackness was creeping in. The habitats were distorting and falling, people were screaming, pressing each other to evacuate, except there was no sound of their voices. Just that noise that went on and on, relentless.
Ghosts. What it had been like, for Red Bird, for the ship Hạnh had escaped on. What Amber saw when she was at rest, that wrenching feeling of loss, of so much extinguished in a single moment, and the despair that it couldn’t be brought back. Not just her despair: the magnitude of that devastation and everything it had taken, every person, every place, every breath of life.
Over the habitats, ships took off, accelerating. Desperate attempts to outrun the darkness, to outrun the dead sun and what it was becoming. Half of them were swallowed up, became darkness—and then the display panned on a single ship, one that looked so much like Red Bird it gave Amber that jolt in her heartroom, a recognition that pierced her. But it wasn’t her. It couldn’t be her, because the ship in the display was still flying, still outrunning the darkness, and the brain waves that went with it were desperation and panic and that single, painful thread of hope. The people onboard her were praying, grieving, snapping at each other in panic and anger, all without sound—and the ship was flying, flying, flying, ahead of that sound, ahead of that darkness. Flying until she was the only pinpoint left, all hopes pinned on a single vessel.
Flying, flying, flying in darkness.
And Amber found herself praying in answer to that faint hope.
Please make it. Please survive. Please let so much devastation have survivors. Please please please.
The display blinked back, to the darkness that had engulfed everything else from habitats to sea to concourses, their outlines slowly fading away until nothing remained but the noise, and then that, too, faded away alongside the last of the brain waves.
It ended.
Amber came back to the awareness of her own body and feelings—the shuttle parked before the War Crimes Tribunal, the ones in her hangars, their weight pressing down on her floors, the bots scurrying in corridors that were hers—the vastness of cabins and corridors and hangars and motors and hull, with the core of her slowly beating in her heartroom. The rhythm of her motors was fast and syncopated: she’d forgotten to keep them going as she became absorbed in the art.
She was vast and terrible, and yet everything felt too small, too cramped—no pressure of atmosphere around her, no sense of time. Just feelings racing each other, and nothing to help them pass. A wound at her heart that hurt like the first day: painful memories of Red Bird, of what it had all been like, of not knowing. Of bi-hours and days stretching, hope slowly dying until she’d understood that Red Bird wasn’t ever going to escape. Hope brought flaring up with each message, and then dying again, leaving a bloodied gap in her heartroom.
Amber took the shuttle round for a fly, hoping to clear her head. Around that vast empty space of the War Crimes Tribunal. The crowd of people was still there, patiently waiting in the midday sun. She’d expected a flight interdiction, so close to the tribunal, but there was nothing, so long as she kept far enough away from buildings.
She sent the shuttle climbing upwards, over the round shape of the building. Metal reflected sunlight, and a hint of pagodas and habitats. Far, far away, a ballet of shuttles and land-based transports—so far away it might well have been another world. And beneath her, spreading, the roof of the building. It was composed of other portions of spheres: a transparent circle shape with other circular bulges. Sunlight refracted on it, but with only a little effort on her sensors Amber could see through it.
It was like staring into two mirrors facing each other: an infinity of reflections, except in this case it was all small rooms, in which investigators conducted interviews—people sat, one or two or three, single and in families, from all walks of life—humans, ships’ avatars, a cross-section of everything in the empire. Amber felt a sense of dislocation, of dizzying scale: so many people, so many rooms. So many touched by this, such a wake of devastation that swelled within her until she could hardly breathe.
So much lost.
A ping, on her comms. It was Hạnh, telling her she was finished with the interview. Amber forced herself to focus on the present, and descended the shuttle back to the landing area, to pick up Hạnh.
Hạnh was Silent on the Ride back to Amber. Amber had asked how it had gone, and only got a curt nod, followed by “as well as it could.” She could see Hạnh’s discomfort: the way her hand rose to cover her neck, her elevated heartrate and activation levels in the amygdala. But Hạnh was visibly not talking, and Amber knew better than to interject.
She walked with Hạnh back to her cabin, and stood for a while, in the doorway in avatar shape, watching her. Feeling the weight of Hạnh on her floors. The fight-or-flight reflex had come and gone, and now Hạnh just looked drained, like it was just sheer willpower holding her up.
Amber said, finally, “Where will you go?”
A shrug, from Hạnh. “Back home. I’ll need to book myself a berth on another ship. You?”
“I have some leave,” Amber said. “I’ll visit some friends.” Water-Hen had already answered her, asking how she was after Amber told her she’d gotten another message from Red Bird. Amber hadn’t been sure how to answer, so she’d ignored her. She said, finally, because it looked like Hạnh was going to leave with everything still unsaid, “I looked at your art.”
Hạnh’s head whipped up, sharp, tense. “You did?”
“Yes.”
Hạnh moved, to stand in front of her, so that there was only the doorway between them—and then she gestured with her hands, and the mem-haze was between both of them, separating them. “And?” she asked.
Amber said, “You said you didn’t know what to tell the investigators, if your testimony was going to be accurate. I’ve watched this. It’s heart-wrenching. And it’s all the testimony—”
“The testimony I need?” Hạnh’s voice was bitter. “Of course not. They listened to me, and they didn’t want emotions. They wanted facts.”
Ah. Amber said, carefully, “They thought you too angry.”
A sigh, from Hạnh. “No, it’s not even how the interview itself went. It’s just.” She gestured to the mem-haze. “You saw how many people there were. It’s going to take years before they’re done. Decades. Centuries. I wanted—” She clenched her fists. “I wanted it to be over.”
A silence. Amber thought of that lone ship at the end, fleeing towards nowhere, that eternal question mark of whether it had escaped at all. “You wanted permission to stop grieving.”
Another silence. “Wouldn’t you?”
No. Of course she couldn’t. “She’s my wife!” Amber said, and felt again that twist in her innards, in her heartroom, the sheer pain each of those infrequent messages brought her. “I—” she tried to speak again, and words felt like they’d dried up, her avatar impossibly light and distant from her.
Hạnh said, “It will never be over. It’ll always be there. Cloud Floor and everything that happened afterwards. I—I wanted to live my life. I wanted to move on. I wanted—” It was an anguished plea, a primal scream as from a lost child. Amber moved then, through the mem-haze, arms outstretched to hug her—not with bots, but merely with the avatar, a light pressure Hạnh would feel through the interface.
“It’s all right,” she said, holding Hạnh. “Ssh. It’s all right.”
Hạnh was weeping—not just tears, but large sobbing breaths that wracked her, whole body shuddering, every movement shifting her weight on Amber’s floors and avatar. “No,” she said. “It’s not all right. It’s over. It’s all gone. Forever gone.”
The mem-haze was frozen in those last moments, with the darkness sweeping over the habitats. Happening as though for the first time, and as for the first time, it hurt as if someone was wrenching bits and pieces from Amber’s hull.
It hurt. The same way each of Red Bird’s messages hurt, something that would never end. The messages would grow more and more distant, but Amber’s life—frozen in grief, like Hạnh’s—would not resume. She would grieve and it would tear her apart, because there was nothing to be done. There was no bringing back the habitats or those who had died. No bringing Red Bird beyond the black hole’s grasp. There was no closure and no rescue or miracle, and that was what Hạnh’s mem-haze was about, in the end: the gaping hole left by loss.
All gone. Forever gone.
Gone the way Red Bird was, except Amber could never bring herself to accept it or move on; keeping the memory—and the hurt—alive.
And for what purpose?
She saw herself from the outside then: like that ship in the darkness, beholden to the dead. Tangled in grief beyond measure and beyond end.
How long was she going to be doing that to herself?
Amber said, slowly, softly, “We move on. We escape because we want to. Because we need to. Because we choose to.” Because it hurt too much. Because it was never going to end. It was just going to become a string of smaller, more spaced-out hurts played out over and over again, messages from the past bringing it into sharp, unbearable focus.
It was over.
Hạnh was silent, under her. Amber half-expected her to lash out, but when she stepped away from her and back into the doorway, Hạnh was still staring at her over the mem-haze, eyes glistening. “It’s over,” she said, softly, plaintively. “Life goes on.” Bitter, but without the sting it should have had, like a painful truth slowly swallowed. “Ever and ever.”
I love you. Amber thought of Red Bird’s last message, of the long string of callbacks to the past.
Red Bird was dead.
“Yes,” she said, slowly and carefully, feeling for a bite of pain that never came. “It’s over. Here.”
She held out her hand and Hạnh took it. And together they watched, in a frozen, fragile moment, the ship on the mem-haze, moving away from the devastation—in that one moment before it finally broke free, before it finally came out whole.