Reach for Infinity

THE DUST QUEEN



Aliette de Bodard


QUYRH HA HAD expected the Dust Queen to be...tall and large, filling the room with her presence. But the woman sitting before her was old and frail – breathing, it was clear, only with the help of the bots clinging to her throat; her skin as pale and translucent as the best jades; the skin of her hands bearing the peculiar tightness of too many rejuv treatments.

It was hard to believe that a gesture of hers would send bots dancing; that on her command they would bank and dip and turn over the red soil of Mars, mould the clouds of dust they raised into the ephemeral figures from Quynh Ha’s childhood – the boy Cuoi and his banyan, the strategist Khong Minh and his crane-feather fan. It was hard to imagine them whirling and rearing, tracing words in the flowing writing of calligraphy masters, poems like the ones hung at compartment doorways for New Year’s Eve – all the wonder and the magic that filled Fire Watch Orbital once a year; that made life bearable in a world of airsuits, processed food and long watches of a planet they could not set foot on.

When she saw Quynh Ha, the Queen, Bao Lan, looked puzzled for a split second; and then her eyes narrowed, focusing on Quynh Ha with an intensity that made her shudder. “Child. You must be wondering why you’re here.”


Her voice was low and pleasant, with a bare trace of an Earth accent. Quynh Ha had heard it, on broadcasts after performances, commenting on the choices Bao Lan had made, elegant, cultured and refined, a scholar in an age which barely had use for them anymore. She’d never thought, from the broadcasts, that it would be so slight; and yet it had no trouble filling the room.

The Dust Queen. She was in the presence of the Dust Queen herself. She lowed her eyes as was proper; but it was hard not to scream, not to smile, not to explain to Bao Lan all that she meant to the orbital, to Quynh Ha. “Grandmother.”

“I picked you because you’re the best rewirer we have on Fire Watch.” Bao Lan’s voice was calm, thoughtful; considering a problem she couldn’t solve.

“I’m not–” Quynh Ha opened her mouth to protest, and then closed it again. She wasn’t a proper master, no, not like out there on the asteroids, where everyone was rewired and all companies had their rewirers; where deaders like Peter Cauley came from, having done it to themselves so many times they looked at the world with eyes like a fish on a monger’s display. Out there emotions were a hindrance, for who needed to think of a husband left behind when clinging to the outside of a craft, piloting repair bots with hairbreadth’s precision? On Fire Watch it was just the dregs of the profession, those who hadn’t quite made the companies’ cut to go further out; or people who hoped for a quick fortune and set exorbitant fees.

“I’m just an apothecary,” Quynh Ha said at last. She did rewirings, sometimes, because they were a complement to the drugs Second Aunt sold; but that was hardly the core of her business. “I don’t do that many rewirings.”

That was it. She shouldn’t have admitted it; she’d had her one chance to help Bao Lan, to speak to her, and that stupid honesty had doomed her, yet again. She braced herself for a dismissal – which didn’t come.

“More than that, I should think,” Bao Lan said. “I can afford the best, child. If I picked you, there is a reason.”

Quynh Ha bit her lip before she could ask why. No doubt she’d know, in due time. Or perhaps she never would. It wouldn’t matter one bit. “How may I help you then, Grandmother?”

There was a sound from Bao Lan: laughter or anger or both. “I picked you because you’re known for your delicateness; and because you’re Viet, like me, so you will understand what it is that I want. It’s a simple enough thing, child.

“I want to go home, and you’re the one who’ll help me do it.”


GOING INTO SOMEONE’S brain is almost like being in space: that curious sensation of hanging, weightless, like floating in water without the water; of hanging in darkness with the stars around her like hairpin wounds in the fabric of the heavens.

Here, of course, there are no stars; but the wounds are memories – a dizzying array of them, every one of them so close she could touch them – and yet to reach out, to catch them all, would drive her insane under the weight of information and emotions that aren’t hers.

She does reach out, all the same – because it’s what she’s here for, because it’s the reason Bao Lan picked her out of the multitude – and the images come in, fast and hard, crammed so hard together that they’re almost inseparable.

A family on a cyclo, father and mother and two children, weaving their way through the traffic of an overcrowded city; a New Year’s Eve dinner, plates strewn over a red table cloth, wrapped rice cakes, candied coconut and lotus seeds; a quiet day out at the graveyard, burning paper money and paper houses for the ancestors’ souls...

And the other, darker ones: an old woman on a roof in the midst of a flood, raising a fist at some officials in a boat; children creeping out in the kitchen one morning, and looking down at the unfamiliar sensation of wetness, to see the widening spread of water on the floor; the smell of rain as they sit under tarpaulin in a foreign city, waiting to be assigned a new compartment...

And all the memories, the good, the bad, the heartbreaking – they’re all sealed under glass, tinted the colour of old, obsolete photographs – she reaches out to them, and rebounds as if she’d hit a wall, everything preserved in that unbreakable stasis, where nothing matters, where nothing hurts...


SHE CAME TO with a start; to see Bao Lan looking at her, with that same weary expression she’d seen, time and time again, on her own grandmother’s face; and she knew. “You want to go home,” Quynh Ha said, feeling as though she were speaking through cotton. Everything felt out of sync, as it always did when she went under – unbearably sharp and cutting, every noise a wound, every object blindingly illuminated. “To a place that would mean something to you.”

They’d raised the Mekong Delta again, with seawalls and embankments and sluices, rebuilding its cities from the ground up. Sixth Aunt had gone back there, to help with that effort; and Mother and Grandmother had both started to save money for a return holiday, though none of that news, none of those unfamiliar images relayed by the comms system really seemed to lift the cloud of sadness that hung over the family.

So Bao Lan could, physically, go home; but that wouldn’t be what she wanted. Nothing would have emotional heft: the streets and the scents and the canals would have no particular associations; and she would walk in the city where she’d grown up, feeling a stranger to her own childhood.

Unless one could fix her.

Bao Lan nodded. “I had myself rewired, in the early days of the resettlement. It was... easier to go that way.”

Easier, perhaps; avoiding all the loaded conversations between Grandmother and Mother at Tomb Sweeping festivals; when they sat at a table and spoke of graves in a cemetery that the sea had since long swallowed; of ancestors, bewildered and lost without the care of their descendants – as if ancestors couldn’t be with them, regardless of where their graves were.

“Can you do it?” Bao Lan asked; and for a moment, her old, anxious face was the same as Grandmother’s.

Quynh Ha said, carefully, “Theoretically, yes. I don’t know how much you know about rewiring–”

“Imagine that I know nothing,” Bao Lan said.

Quynh Ha doubted that. Bao Lan, who made a point on researching obscure epics for her dust cloud performances so she could get the costume details on the characters right, would not have left anything to chance; but she went on, regardless. “It’s a good scrub, I’ll grant them that. Worth good money at the time, I imagine.”

“My first pay as a cyclo driver in Ho Chi Minh City,” Bao Lan said, with a bare smile, a tightening of lips over yellowed teeth. “That was in the days before my entire life changed. I’m glad to know it wasn’t all wasted.”

Quynh Ha allowed herself a smile she didn’t feel. It had been a good scrub, a thorough rewiring; and she wasn’t altogether sure she could undo what had been done. “Rewiring is... like deadening. You can’t completely suppress the emotions involved, or the person will go mad. There’ll be one, or several cracks somewhere; tiny remnants of the original emotions. All I have to do is find one and amplify it – I can’t give you the original back, but it will be something much like it.”

It would be like a zither melody to a full orchestra: a single voice, and with none of the body and complexity of the real memories, the ones that had hurt so much. But, because it was the mind’s own emotions, the brain would take them, and compensate, creating something that would, in the end, be quite close to whatever had been there before – to the love and the loss and the pain that made up home in Bao Lan’s mind. The tricky part, however, would be finding a crack: a rewiring that thorough wouldn’t have left large ones.


“Then that will satisfy me, yes,” Bao Lan said. “We haven’t discussed the matter of payment, but rest assured I will make it worth your time. If you agree, I’ll call your place of work and tell them I need you.”

The image of Second Aunt picking up the comms – of her face when she realised she was speaking to the Dust Queen – flashed across Quynh Ha’s mind, and was gone just as swiftly. “There won’t be any problem. I’m sure they’ll understand–” Quynh Ha had to swallow, to sort out the words in her mind. Bao Lan. The Dust Queen needed her. Trusted her. That was worth a talk with Second Aunt, many times over. “I’ll sort it out, Grandmother.”

“Good. Let me know when you can start.” Her voice was that of an Empress to a supplicant; and Quynh Ha nodded.

“I’m honoured by your trust.” She was honoured, but she was also scared stiff, as if she were dancing tightrope outside Fire Watch with no tether. To think that she was the one in charge of something that mattered this much to Bao Lan – to the heroine of her childhood – it was almost too much on her shoulders.

Almost.

But she’d do it, because how many times in her life would she have an opportunity like this?


THERE WAS A woman, waiting for her outside the Dust Queen’s quarters. She was sitting in one of the high chairs, apparently engrossed in Fire Watch’s entertainment system; but she rose when Quynh Ha walked through the door.

“Miss Quynh Ha? My name is Le Anh Tuyet. I’m Bao Lan’s daughter.”

She was perhaps forty, fifty years old; though like Bao Lan she bore the hallmarks of numerous rejuv treatments. Her face was eerily reminiscent of her mother’s, reminding Quynh Ha of the broadcasts of her youth. Her clothes had an odd, almost old-fashioned cut seen nowhere on Fire Watch; and the sheen of Earth silk, grown on mulberry trees and sunlight. “You’re an Earthsider?” The words were torn out of Quynh Ha before she could think. “I’m sorry.”

“That’s quite all right.” Tuyet smiled. “I lived here a while, but yes, I emigrated back to Earth twenty years ago.”

“I see,” Quynh Ha said; and wondered how much lay hidden behind that simple sentence. “You haven’t told me what I can do for you.”

Tuyet shook her head. “It’s what you can do for Mother, younger aunt.” She’d slipped, effortless, into the Vietnam vernacular, with its myriad set of pronouns.

“She’s already asked–”

“I know,” Tuyet said. “I came to accompany her home, to Thoi Binh.” Her gaze, for a moment, was distant.

Quynh Ha’s curiosity got the better of her. “Did you take part in the land reclamation?”

“In Thoi Binh, yes.” Tuyet shrugged. “Mostly boring stuff, and we couldn’t salvage everything. Districts Ten and Fifteen are still underwater, I’m afraid.”

“It must be very different from here,” Quynh Ha said before she could stop herself.

“It’s home,” Tuyet said, and shook her head. “Apologies. We all have homes, of course; but Thoi Binh is where I was born. You must have relatives–”

“Of course,” Quynh Ha said, and bit her lip, thinking of her own grandmother. If she’d rewired herself, would she be more like Bao Lan? It wasn’t fair, of course; Grandmother’s wandering thoughts might as well be old age, and she’d been sharp enough when Quynh Ha was young: had established the family restaurant on Fire Watch, had paid for the schooling of her numerous grandchildren out of the money she’d saved. But lately... “Never mind that. I’ll go plan the rewiring.”

“You have much experience.”

Quynh Ha was not about to be caught a second time; and she could hear the scepticism in Tuyet’s voice. “You don’t have rewiring, on Earth?”

Tuyet shrugged. “No, we do. It’s just–”

Oh. Like the older generation; the ones who’d been too old at the inception of rewiring; and therefore distrusting it. “Rewiring is only dangerous if you keep doing the same rewiring all the time,” Quynh Ha said. “Like the deaders? You must have seen them on the shows. That’s because they keep doing it to themselves – dozens of times a day, it’s more an addiction than anything, really. Otherwise, it’s like anything; a tool that has its uses. I’ve done it for customers; and I’ve done it on myself.” She rewired herself periodically when making complex preparations: it was useful to be able to ignore fear and the previous memories of failure so she could focus on getting the drug proportions right.

“I see,” Tuyet said. Quynh Ha could tell some of her confidence had got through. “I guess it’s what Mother wants, and I won’t argue with her. Not this time.” Her voice was bleak.

Quynh Ha said nothing; it was obviously not her place to pry. At length Tuyet sighed. “Ah well. It’s what you do, on Fire Watch, and if it makes her happy...”

Quynh Ha bowed her head. “Thank you. I’ll set to work immediately.”

“Great. Do you have everything you need to work?”

Quynh Ha shrugged. “I can do a lot of things from the dispensary.” She had remote access to a simulacrum of Bao Lan’s memories; enough to find the best places for her rewiring and test her results; though of course anything in a rewiring was unpredictable enough that only live testing would help.

“Good,” Tuyet said, and handed her a piece of paper with a private handle. “Do let me know if I can do anything for you. Mother and I–” she grimaced “– have had our differences in the past, but they’re over now. We both want her home, no matter the cost.”


ALL REWIRINGS HAVE cracks; points of weaknesses, where the protective fabric has been deliberately torn; where the emotions keep seeping in. If she can find one memory that feels different from the other ones – where the glass has fissured, where the colours have bled – then she’ll have all she needs to unlock the Mekong Delta again.

What she finds, rifling through Bao Lan’s brain, is not that, but something else entirely.

She finds the other memories: the ones associated with Fire Watch, with her role as the Dust Queen, the official entertainer for New Year’s Eve: years and years of dust cloud dances all packed together like grains of sand. The Committee that rules over Fire Watch wants something to allay the frustration of Fire Watchers, forced to watch over the terraformation of a planet they’re not allowed to set foot on for fear of a cross-planet contamination that would disturb the entire, delicate process mapped out a generation ago. They have decided to hold a celebration on the planet; something that will remind people that one day, when the cyanobacteria and the bots have done their jobs, humans will breathe the air of Mars.

The earlier memories are of technology in its infancy: of frustrated scientists in labs; of bots that die on the surface of Mars, choked up on dust; of implants that short circuit, almost taking out a portion of Bao Lan’s brain with them. The lead scientist, Zhu Chiling, comes to hospital to apologise, and almost gives up; but Bao Lan shakes her head, and tells her she’s willing to try again – and they do, and she feels the pride and the wonder when it finally works – when Bao Lan sits in the chair of the broadcasting room and makes bots crawl on the surface of Mars for the very first time.


She’s with Bao Lan when they inaugurate the seventh cyanobacteria greenhouse; when everyone on Fire Watch gathers to see Bao Lan’s bots weave images of villages and houses, with tiny figures running in the street, cutting the strings of kites for good fortune. And she sees every performance after that, establishing a ritual that becomes an anchor for the inhabitants of Fire Watch, a promise renewed year after year.

There’s one in particular that Quynh Ha remembers; a New Year’s Eve that has no special meaning – another worship of the ancestors, another meal with the family. But, nevertheless, she remembers crowding with the cousins around the huge screen in Mother’s compartment; sitting, rapt, as bots dance below, retelling the story of Cuoi and his banyan tree. In the clouds of dust Cuoi meets the tiger; plants the seed of the magical banyan; and is finally whisked to the moon, clinging to the tree’s roots as it rises.

And she understood, then; that they’re all like Cuoi; that they rose into the Heavens and made their home there; that the banyan’s roots, drawn in the dust by the bots, now cover the surface of Mars. That all of this is Bao Lan’s message, Bao Lan’s hope: one day their children’s children will leave their footprints in the dust and bring their own legends to life on the red soil.

But Bao Lan’s home, like Mother’s, like Grandmother’s, isn’t Fire Watch, isn’t Mars: it’s the land they left in the resettlement, the land that was once submerged under the sea. With difficulty, Quynh Ha tears herself from the feasts, from the beautiful dances of the bots; and goes back to the other memories, the sepia-tinted ones that she finds no purchase on.

She rifles through car rides; through afternoons by the sea at Vung Tau; expeditions to the metropolis in Can Tho. Everything is quaint and old and outmoded – no implants, no bots, just clunky machines and a network that still requires dozens of antennas to function properly. But it’s Bao Lan’s childhood – this small corner of Viet Nam, those gardens with pomegranate and papaya trees; those boats weaving their way on the muddy expanses of the Mekong; the smell of monsoon rain and fried dough, a promise of a meal of rolled rice cakes and dipping sauce that will be an explosion of flavour in the mouth, salty and acid and sweet all at the same time, a perfect taste that will never again be reproduced, no matter how many cakes she orders.

Quynh Ha realises, then, that she finally has the memory she was looking for. It’s small and insignificant, a brief moment of a child running on a bridge clogged with cyclos, and then stopping by a food vendor’s cart, but it’s alive and vibrant in a way none of the others are. This is her crack; this is the emotion she was looking for. And it’s also oddly familiar, in a way she can’t place. It can’t be shared experience, for she’s never been to Can Tho, never been to Earth even, and those wide streets interspersed with trees mean nothing to her. She sets her extrapolations algorithms on it, watching as the fragile network of emotions gains body and heft with each pass – grows like crystals in caves, becoming a complex, fragile assembly of ten thousand details.

She sets up the graft, though she expects only minor issues; and logs out to await the result in the morning.


WHEN SHE GETS to the compartment early in the morning, there is an error message waiting for her in the console.

For a moment, Quynh Ha freezes. There is no reason this should fail, especially not at the simulacrum stage. The hardest part had been finding a crack, but normally everything from there on should have been smooth – like a sleek craft set on ice, gathering momentum and sliding straight to its destination. Why?

She throws a glance at the shop’s entrance. At this early hour, the customers aren’t there yet, though old Miss Hanh should be there any moment to pick up her medication. Quynh Ha wraps the drugs in a piece of paper, and leaves them in evidence with a message for Miss Hanh: since the drugs are tailored to a client’s biology, it is unlikely anyone will steal them. Then she turns on her implants, and dives back into the simulacrum.


THE MEMORIES ARE still there, sepia tinted and under glass, and as inaccessible as ever. There are shards of her algorithms clinging to their edges – broken bits of crystal, jagged edges that made her shudder when she brushes too close, singeing herself on their heightened intensity. But nothing seems to have grown; her graft has been summarily rejected, something alien and unacceptable.

Was the memory wrong? If it didn’t belong to Bao Lan, but to the original rewirer? Sometimes things get confused when rewiring; but no, the emotions associated with it were too strong. She’s seen them ten thousand times: in Grandmother’s gaze when she sits with her friends playing; in the catch of Mother’s voice when she speaks of her childhood; in Second Aunt’s careful, fragile movements; in the weight of the air at every Tomb Sweeping festival, where the presence of the ancestors is as thick as incense smoke.

There is no reason for that failure then; it makes no sense... She zooms in on one of the shards, staring at the details – fear and longing and happiness; and a hint of rainy skies, of heavy air. The emotions are real, or as real as Bao Lan allows them to be – the graft is what she’s done a dozen times for a dozen customers, surely it shouldn’t be such a difficulty?

Still... still, she stares at the shard; and remembers that feeling of familiarity when the extrapolation was being built; remembers dismissing it as of no matter. Her mistake. Every little detail matters.

The shard feels solid and transparent at the same time – the original feelings she got from the crack; the raw pain of losing home mingled with what home means – the joys and the sorrows and the dreams that made up Bao Lan’s life in the Delta – the sound of cyclos on the bridge, the patter of the street vendor peddling her fried dough; the sense of vastness opening up all around her, childhood stretching like a vast, endless plain with so many adventures left – and yet already, at the fringes, is the smell and shadow of the rising sea; the inescapable knowledge that all of this is a suspended moment of grace; a fragile dream in a place doomed to vanish.

And she sees it, then. She sees why it hasn’t worked; why it can never work.


“I FOUND A crack,” Quynh Ha told Bao Lan.

The Dust Queen was sitting in her broadcast chair again, staring at one of the screens in front of her. Tuyet was in one of the smaller chairs, reading a printed book; an oddity on Fire Watch, where nothing was printed much anymore. She reminded Quynh Ha of Second Aunt and her brocade dresses; youthful face, but mannerisms from another generation.

On the screen was a scene from a familiar tale, rendered as in shadow theatre: a man kneeling before the Buddha, watching a hundred stems of bamboo come together to make the hundred-knot bamboo that will win him his sweetheart’s hand in marriage. As Quynh Ha watched, Bao Lan made a gesture with one hand; and the scene gradually faded; and then rearranged itself, emphasising the kneeling posture of the man and the larger-than-life size of the Buddha. Then it broke apart; became the dance of bots on a simulated Mars – clouds that slowly built up the apparition of the Buddha; the surprise of the man, who attempted to throw himself backwards; the gathering of the hundred bamboo stems in the forest, so well rendered one could see the sweat on the dust-man’s brow; could hear the sound of bamboo falling on the ground of the forest. Quynh Ha found herself holding her breath, so hard it hurt. Bao Lan made a dismissive gesture. “It’s not yet ready.” She pinched her lips; and made another gesture. The scene dissolved; played itself out again; the Buddha slightly larger; the man slightly smaller – and, when he went into the forest, it wasn’t sweat that was falling from his brow, but tears – his fear, his anguish at the thought he might never return in time, never marry his bride...


“Better.” Bao Lan shook her head. “But not quite there, I think. Sorry for making you wait, child.”

“I don’t mind,” Quynh Ha said. Her heart still hung suspended in her chest. “Is this how you do your performances?”

“Sometimes, yes.” The Dust Queen had an oddly nostalgic look in her face. “There wasn’t this, in the old days: it was all gut instinct, but this helps.”

“I know,” Quynh Ha said, and bit her tongue.

“You’ve seen the memories.” Bao Lan nodded.

“I didn’t know you’d based it on shadow theatre.”

Bao Lan shrugged. “It seemed as good an inspiration as any. I had... good memories of shadow theatre, when I was a child. There was this itinerant Hoa performer, back in Thoi Binh...” She smiled. “But never mind, we’re not here for this old woman to babble on. You said you’d found a crack.”

Quynh Ha would have listened to her all day; but she knew that wasn’t what Bao Lan was expecting. “Yes,” she said.

“And you’re here to finish your work, I take it.”

Quynh Ha took a deep breath. “I can’t.” From the corner of her eye, she saw Tuyet set aside her book, and turn her head to her, with a gaze sharp enough to pierce metal.

“I don’t understand,” Tuyet said. “Surely, once you’ve found your crack, everything else should be easy?”

It was what she’d told Bao Lan; and there was, indeed, no reason to suppose it would go otherwise. Except...

“I’ve extrapolated it, as I said. And I could rewire you right now, but it wouldn’t take. It’s not just a crack. It’s everywhere.”

“Everywhere?” Bao Lan shook her head. “I don’t think so. When I think of my childhood, all that comes up is empty memories. Images that mean nothing. Sounds and tastes that are a stranger’s.”

“It’s not–” Quynh Ha paused, struggling for words that seemed to have escaped her. It had seemed so clear, staring at the pattern yesterday; but that had been yesterday; and today she was in the presence of Bao Lan again, and as tongue-tied as a child. “Your crack is your art. The thing that makes your dust clouds sing, that gives them meaning, emotion, depth: it’s that tiny little remnant of what it meant to lose your home.”

Bao Lan opened her mouth to speak – Quynh Ha barely noticed, as she went on through her memorised speech. “You’re the Dust Queen. That’s who you’ve been, for decades. I’ve seen the memories. Your entire life revolves around your art.” There had been memories of Tuyet in the simulacrum, but Quynh Ha had steered clear of them. They were none of her business, and she’d felt ashamed enough spying on Bao Lan’s performances. Nevertheless, she’d seen enough: a lonely childhood, with a mother that had little time for her child; but who had still resented Tuyet for leaving Fire Watch – abandoning Bao Lan for the lifelong work of raising the Delta from the sea.

There was silence, in the wake of her words. Surely she’d gone too far, had been too frank, too honest? “I see,” Bao Lan said at last. “And it won’t take–”

“Because you won’t let it,” Quynh Ha said.

“What makes you so sure?”

Quynh Ha spread her hands. “The simulacrum–”

“Is a simulation.” Bao Lan’s voice was quiet, but forceful. Behind her, the little shadow play was still going on; the man abasing himself before the Buddha; the hundred-knot bamboo rebuilding itself, time and time again. “You can’t know what will happen in real life.”

“No,” Quynh Ha said.

“You’ve known cases of divergence,” Bao Lan said, softly. “Cases where the simulacrum didn’t follow the patient.”

“Not this way!”

Bao Lan said, softly, quietly, “I’m told there are ways and means, to make a graft take. Forcefully, if need be.”

Demons take her. Of course she’d do her research; and of course she’d find out all about the more shady practises of rewiring. “We don’t do this,” Quynh Ha said. “Not on Fire Watch.” Out there in the asteroids, perhaps – who knew what the companies got up to, when their profits were on the line? But here on the orbital, where the only thing at stake was watching Mars grow? No. “And even if we did, it would be an even more difficult procedure.” To make a graft take when it didn’t cling, you had to add anchors everywhere; to tie hundreds of knots in the nerve fabric, to implant emotion after emotion in such a way that they never came loose, and yet didn’t damage the brain... “Hours of work, and the slightest deviation could make everything fail.”

“Ah. But I did say I’d picked you out for your delicate touch, didn’t I?”

She – she – “You knew,” Quynh Ha said, sucking in a burning breath. “You knew all along.”

“No,” Bao Lan said. “But I suspected that it might come to this, yes; and I gave a long thought to what I would do, if that were the case. I knew I would ask you to go ahead.”

“But I can’t–” She struggled for breath and words. “Having a stable simulation is the basis of rewiring. I can’t just let anything loose in your brain!”

“That would seem to be the definition of rewiring,” Bao Lan said, with a tight smile. “At least as far as I’m concerned. I’m not a fool, child. All things come with their cost. I admit I didn’t expect the price to be so high, but–”

“Not like that,” Quynh Ha said. “Even if I make it take, you might wake up a vegetable. You might not wake up at all. You might be completely different.”

“I’ll be different in any case, no?”

“Yes, but–”

Bao Lan lifted a hand; and that same sense of presence filled the room; that same reminder that she was the Dust Queen, with decades of commanding the attention of Fire Watch. “I’m old, child, old enough to be your grandmother, as you and I well know. I’ve done my duty to Fire Watch. Now it’s time for me to think of my ancestors; and to honour their graves. Tuyet is right; it’s time for me to return home.” She smiled a little; and in that moment the mask cracked, and the expression of vague longing on her face was the same as Grandmother’s.

“The dust clouds–” Quynh Ha started, but Bao Lan shook her head.

“The dust clouds are only a thing.” A brief expression of pain crossed her face, then; and was as swiftly gone. “Pieces of art I loved, yes; but if you cling too much to what you love, they destroy you in the end. I won’t lie and say I won’t miss them; but I can live without them.”

She couldn’t. She was the Dust Queen. She was–

No more dust clouds. No more performances; and worse than that, Bao Lan turning her back on them, on what they meant to Fire Watch – going home to die in obscurity, forgetting all that passion that had gone into making them; dismissing them as not important, as something that could be erased from her – no different, after all, from Mother, from Grandmother...

For a moment Quynh Ha stood frozen where she stood; and then the truth was torn out of her. “I – I can’t help you. I just can’t. I’m sorry.” The Dust Queen stared at her, expressionless for a second; and then a look of mild disappointment gradually took over, as if Quynh Ha were six again, standing in the kitchen unit of the family compartment in a puddle of water and sugar she’d spilled on the floor – and a sense of growing, unbearable shame, unbearable fear that seemed to squeeze her heart into burning shards – and before she knew it, she was up and running out of the room, and a long way into the corridors of the orbital before she could catch her breath again.



IT WAS TUYET who found her, later; sitting moodily at the counter of the dispensary, staring into her console as if it could yield some unfathomable truth. Second Aunt had left her some noodle soup; and the aroma of star anise and beef marrow filled the shop, strong enough to overpower even the smells of drug compounds.

“I thought I’d find you here.”

“I can’t do it,” Quynh Ha said. “I’m sorry I ran out, but there’s just no way I can do it.”

“Can’t, or won’t?” Tuyet asked, with disturbing perspicacity. “It’s her wish. Why would you deny her that?”

As though a customer with excess asked her to remove cucumber seeds from a drug preparation: would she do it, if they assured her they’d weighed the effect of the harm on their own bodies? “She’ll change,” Quynh Ha said. “She might even regret it.”

“Perhaps. But she’s given enough thought to the consequences, hasn’t she? In the end, it’s what she wants, now.”

“What would you do?”

Tuyet shrugged. “She’s my mother. Of course I would do as she asks. ‘Do no harm’ only applies to doctors.”

And she was only an apothecary. Quynh Ha smiled, bleakly. Shouldn’t the customer’s well-being take precedence over everything else? “She’ll never be the same.”

“Of course she won’t. It’s a rewiring that she wants to live with. You know how I feel about rewiring. It’s hardly innocuous.”

“She won’t do any dust art, ever again,” Quynh Ha said, finally; and knew that this was the truth, the rock bottom of her existence; her own crack around which everything was built. There were other artists, other people working in dust clouds; but none of them were Bao Lan.

Tuyet’s face was carefully blank. “We all have our homes. We all have our childhood treasures. I’ve had my share of disagreement with Mother; but this is her choice, and I won’t take it away from her.”

And Quynh Ha would. “I – I can’t do it. I told her the truth: it’s a delicate procedure.” She took in a deep breath – it hurt, to admit even that. “I can give you the name of someone else–”

“She trusted you.”

“I know,” Quynh Ha said; reliving, again and again, her conversation with Bao Lan; that awful moment when she’d frozen, and some incoherent mush had taken over her brain. “She’ll learn to live without that trust. It will be easy.” Depressingly so; after all, what need had the Dust Queen for broken tools? She’d go back to working in the dispensary for Second Aunt; burying that shame, that moment of failure deep into herself. Part of wisdom, Second Aunt always said, was knowing when you were outmatched, and this was the case – she knew what ought to be done, but couldn’t even bring herself to contemplate the possibility of it.

Tuyet didn’t speak for a moment. “I can take that name,” she said at last. “I can bring them to Mother and have them perform the procedure–”

“Then do it!”

“Just answer me one question first, younger aunt: what will it do to you, if I do this?”

“I don’t understand–”

Tuyet’s smile was bitter. “I know all about regrets, younger aunt. Can you look me in the eye and tell me yours won’t eat you up? That you had your chance to help the Dust Queen, and passed up on it?”

“I–” She was right; Quynh Ha knew it. “You asked if I couldn’t, or if I wouldn’t? The answer is that I… I can’t knowingly remove Bao Lan’s art from her – it would hurt me too much. She’s right: it requires delicacy, and absolute control. That’s... not something I can provide.” Not now; not ever – it was her childhood, her dreams, and how could she ever wreck them?

“As you wish.” Tuyet’s voice was stiff, carefully controlled. Disapproval, again. Well, she was no longer six years old, and Tuyet wasn’t Mother or Second Aunt, not someone whose mere glance would induce burning shame. She would simply turn aside, and finish her soup; and go back to Second Aunt; and feel no regrets, none at all, over failing the Dust Queen in her moment of need.

No regrets...

Quynh Ha looked at the other’s emotionless face, and heard her own voice again, stating the obvious. Absolute control. Delicacy. She was completely right: she couldn’t provide it. Not in her current state.

But there was always a way to change one’s current state.

Carefully, she laid her chopsticks on the side of the bowl, over the sodden remnants of cold noodles and wilted coriander. “Give me a minute,” she said, “and I’ll be with you.”


GOING INTO SOMEONE’S brain is almost like being in space: that curious sensation of hanging, weightless, like floating in water without the water; of hanging in darkness with the stars around her like hairpin wounds in the fabric of the heavens.

Here, of course, there are no stars; but the wounds are memories – a dizzying array of them, every one of them so close she could touch them – and yet to reach out, to catch them all, would drive her insane under the weight of information and emotions that aren’t hers.

She does reach out, all the same – because it’s what she’s here for, because it’s the only thing she can decently do – and takes the images one by one, delicately threading her assemblage into their very fabric – adding longing and hurt and joy to memories of a cyclo weaving its way through the traffic of an overcrowded city; to images of plates strewn on red table cloth, of wrapped rice cakes, candied coconut and lotus seeds; to tombs in a graveyard, with paper money and paper houses burning in a copper dish; to an old woman on a roof in the midst of a flood, raising a fist at some officials in a boat...

And, as she does so, she sees the other memories – the ones of Cuoi and his banyan, of Khong Minh and his fan; of bots dancing in the dust, weaving images of villages and houses, with tiny figures running in the street, cutting the strings of kites for good fortune – she sees them shrivel a little, become a little smaller, a little more distant, like feelings of affection for acquaintances one sees once a year. She sees them wither and die, and knows that this is the end; that there will be no more Dust Queen, no more of her heartrending performances to tell them who they are.

It would have made her cry, once; would have stopped her in her tracks as she weaves through memory after memory, spreading the crack to every single image of the Mekong Delta. There’s one performance in particular that she would have been unable to see without wrecking everything: a New Year’s Eve with no special meaning; another worship of the ancestors, another meal with the family – save that this was the New Year’s Eve when she understood at last – the New Year’s Eve where she took Bao Lan’s message into herself, when she knew with absolute certainty that the banyan’s roots now were in the planet itself; that her children’s children would leave their own footprints in the red dust, and bring to life their own legends on the red soil.

But all those memories of performances, the good, the bad, the heartbreaking – they’re all sealed under glass, tinted the colour of old, obsolete photographs – preserved under glass in that temporary stasis, where nothing matters, where nothing hurts.

It doesn’t have to be temporary, of course – she could make it last forever, but she’s not Bao Lan, and she won’t live with her childhood memories cut off. Bao Lan did what she had to, to survive – and, in the end, so will she. She will keep the performances, and remember the way they showed: forward, into a future where Mars belongs to her descendants; and further on, perhaps – when humanity is spread among the stars, like so many grains of rice in fallow fields.



SHE SAW THEM off at the spaceport, afterwards.

“We’ve got you something else,” Bao Lan said – handing her a velvet box, which contained a piece of translucent jade the colour of the pandan leaves in Bao Lan’s memories. “In addition to your payment. I know it’s not much, but this is with my gratitude.” She held herself hunched now, with the same familiar hurt in her eyes all the time; the same look Quynh Ha knew all too well from Mother, from Grandmother. The Dust Queen – that tall, imperious figure that had brought attention to a room by simply lifting her hand – was no more. Quynh Ha took the jade: it was engraved, with a simple design of a man in a banyan tree. She felt queasy, as though she would weep; though it might simply have been part of the after effects of undoing her rewiring. What was it Tuyet had said?

Hardly innocuous. Perhaps that was the truth of all rewirings.

“Thank you. Have a safe journey home, both of you.”

“We probably won’t see each other again,” Tuyet said. “But I hope you live a long life, with the ancestors’ blessings on your health and children.”

Quynh Ha nodded, accepting the traditional parting. “Thank you for believing in me,” she said.

Tuyet smiled. “You were Mother’s choice; and she’s seldom wrong.”

And then they were gone; leaving her alone once more. She came to stand before the screens, watching their shuttle depart from Fire Watch – the ion drives lighting up in the darkness, before they were altogether gone on their months-long journey back to Earth – and the huge image of Mars appeared once more on the screen, with a few dots denoting the cyanobacteria greenhouses.

No more dust clouds.

She raised the jade to the light, until the image of Cuoi in the banyan was superimposed on the red planet; and thought of Bao Lan, hunched and subdued and entirely unlike who she had been.

“Safe journeys,” she whispered; and wondered if she’d ever be able to forgive herself, for sending the Dust Queen home.