The Red Scholar's Wake by Aliette de Bodard

Author:Aliette de Bodard [Bodard, Aliette de]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781625676108
Publisher: Jabberwocky Literary Agency, Inc.
Published: 2022-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

14

Connections

Xích Si woke up. It was still dark. A quick check on Khanh showed her daughter still sleeping – but she went to Khanh’s room all the same, because she had to be sure, because it didn’t feel real that her daughter was here with her, in the Citadel. The ship’s corridors were empty, and all she could hear was the sound of her own footsteps – Rice Fish’s attention was elsewhere, and the bots that scurried past her did so without any particular intent.

Khanh was curled around her plush turtle. At some point she’d emptied all the other toys onto the bed, and she was sleeping in the middle of a fortress of cute animals and holograms that provided low-key, relaxing music. Whenever she moved, one of them would start a slow, reassuring melody, and Khanh would relax, though she still clung to the turtle as if it were a lifeline.

Xích Si bent down, stroked her hair.

‘I have you, sweetie,’ she whispered. ‘We’re here. We’re safe. No one is ever going to hurt you again.’

She sat, for a while, in the dark, staring at Khanh, her bots gently pulsing on her fingers. It felt right in so many ways – and so strange in others. She’d left Triệu Hoà Port behind, and would not go back. There was her debt to Censor Trúc, but she didn’t want to think about that. Not here, not now.

‘I thought I’d find you here.’ It was Rice Fish. She was standing at the entrance of the room, framed in the perfect circle of its entrance. Her hair shone; she’d tied it in a loose topknot, the rest of it falling down her back, moving like a sea of black glass as she came into the room. ‘How is she?’

‘Restless,’ Xích Si said.

‘It’s early days.’ Rice Fish sighed. ‘Come. You need tea, and food.’

After a last glance at Khanh, Xích Si got up, following Rice Fish down the corridors. The route they were taking – past alcoves with scuttling bots, more and more of them, and sleeker models she’d never seen before – was utterly unfamiliar.

‘This isn’t the way to my rooms.’

‘I know,’ Rice Fish said. ‘We’re going to mine.’

Xích Si thought that just meant Rice Fish would go to her own quarters. But as the overlays became more and more fragmentary – the images and holograms and vids giving way to long strings of verses, going from modern calligraphy script to something more archaic, closer to the Old Earth alphabet – and as the number of bots increased until she had a clicking, metallic escort around her, both on the floor and on the walls, she realised what Rice Fish had meant.

‘We can’t—’

‘Ssh.’

Ahead, Rice Fish had stopped at an octagonal crossroads in the corridors. There was a single water basin: a physical one, not an overlay, though the myriad silver fish swimming in it were virtual – rice fish, like the ship’s name, no larger than the palm of Xích Si’s hand. Six of the accesses were in absolute darkness, with no overlays or ornaments.

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