* * *

  Fashard was waiting for Latifa in the bus station. He spotted her before she saw him—or rather, he spotted the bright scarf, chosen from the range she sold in the shop, that she’d told him she’d be tying to the handle of her suitcase.

  He called out, then approached her, beaming. “Welcome, cousin! How was your trip?” He grabbed the suitcase and hefted it onto his shoulders; it did have wheels, but in the crowded station any baggage at foot level would just be an impediment.

  “It was fine,” she said. “You’re looking well.” Actually, Fashard looked exhausted, but he’d put so much enthusiasm into his greeting that it would have been rude to mention anything of the kind.

  Latifa followed him to the car, bumping into people along the way; she still hadn’t adjusted to having her peripheral vision excised.

  The sun was setting as they drove through the city; Latifa fought to keep her eyes open, but she took in an impression of peeling advertising posters, shabby white-washed buildings, crowds of men in all manner of clothing and a smattering of women in near-identical garb. Traffic police stood at the busiest intersections, blowing their whistles. Nothing had changed.

  Inside the house, she gratefully shed her burqa as Fashard’s five youngest children swarmed toward her. She dropped to her knees to exchange kisses and dispense sweets. Fashard’s wife, Soraya, his mother, Zohra, eldest daughter, sister, brother-in-law and two nephews were next to greet her. Latifa’s weariness lifted; used as she was to comparative solitude, the sense of belonging was overpowering.

  “How is my brother?” Zohra pressed her.

  “He’s fine. He sends his love to you especially.”

  Zohra started weeping; Fashard put an arm around her. Latifa looked away. Her grandfather still had too many enemies here to be able to return.

  When Latifa had washed and changed her clothes, she rejoined the family just as the first dizzying aromas began escaping from the kitchen. She had fasted all day and the night before, knowing that on her arrival she was going to be fed until she burst. Soraya shooed her away from the kitchen, but Latifa was pleasantly surprised: Fashard had finally improved the chimney to the point where the wood-fired stove no longer filled the room with blinding smoke.

  As they ate by the light of kerosene lamps, everyone had questions for her about life in Mashhad. What did things cost now, with the new sanctions in place? What were her neighbors like? How were the Iranians treating Afghanis these days? Latifa was happy to answer them, but as she looked around at the curious faces she kept thinking of eight-year-old Fatema tugging on her sleeve, accepting a sweet but demanding something more: What was school like? What did you learn?

  * * *

  In the morning, Fashard showed Latifa the room he’d set aside for their work. She’d sent the kilns, the winders, and the current buckets to him by three different carriers. Fashard had found a source for the superconductor precursors himself: a company that brought a variety of common industrial chemicals in through Pakistan. It was possible that news of some of these shipments had reached Ezatullah, but Latifa was hoping that it wouldn’t be enough to attract suspicion. If Fashard had decided to diversify into pottery, that hardly constituted a form of betrayal.

  The room opened onto the courtyard, and Fashard had already taken up the paving stones to expose a patch of bare ground. “This is perfect,” Latifa said. “We can run some cable out along the wall and bury the current buckets right here.”

  Fashard examined one of the halved diving cylinders she’d adapted to the purpose. “This really might burst?” he asked, more bemused than alarmed.

  “I hope not,” Latifa replied. “There’s a cut-off switch that should stop the charger if the magnetic field grows too strong. I can’t imagine that switch getting jammed—a bit of grit or friction isn’t going to hold the contacts together against a force that’s threatening to tear the whole thing apart. But so long as you keep track of the charging time there shouldn’t be a problem anyway.”

  It took a couple of hours to dig the holes and wire up the storage system. Late in the morning the power came on, giving them a chance to test everything before they covered the buckets with half a meter of soil.

  Latifa switched on the charger and waited ten minutes, then she plugged a lamp into the new supply. The light it produced was steadier and brighter than that it had emitted when connected to the mains: the voltage from the buckets was better regulated than the incoming supply.

  Fashard smiled, not quite believing it. The largest of the components inside the cylinders looked like nothing so much as the element of an electric water heater; that was how Latifa had described the ceramic helices in the customs documents.

  “If everyone had these…” he began enthusiastically, but then he stopped and thought it through. “If everyone had them, every household would be drawing more power, charging up their buckets to use through the blackouts. The power company would only be able to meet the demand from an even smaller portion of its customers, so they’d have to make the rationing periods even shorter.”

  “That’s true,” Latifa agreed. “Which is why it will be better if the buckets are sold with solar panels.”

  “What about in winter?” Fashard protested.

  Latifa snorted. “What do you want from me? Magic? The government needs to fix the hydro plant.”

  Fashard shook his head sadly. “The people who keep bombing it aren’t going to stop. Not unless they’re given everything they want.”

  Latifa felt tired, but she had to finish what she’d started. She said, “I should show you how to work the kilns and the winders.”

  * * *

  It took three days for Latifa and Fashard to settle on a procedure for the new factory. If they waited for the current buckets to be fully charged before starting the kilns, that guaranteed they could finish the batch without spoiling it—but they could make better use of the time if they took a risk and started earlier, given that the power, erratic though it was, usually did stay on for a few hours every day.

  Fashard brought in his oldest nephew, Naqib, who’d be working half the shifts. Latifa stayed out of these training sessions; Naqib was always perfectly polite to her, but she knew he wasn’t prepared to be shown anything by a woman three years younger than himself.

  Sidelined, Latifa passed the time with Fatema. Though it was too dangerous for Fatema to go to school, Fashard had taught her to read and write and he was trying to find someone to come and tutor her. Latifa sat beside her as she proudly sounded out the words in a compendium of Pashtun folk tales, and practiced her script in the back of Latifa’s notebook.

  “What are these?” Fatema asked, flicking through the pages of calculations.

  “Al-jabr,” Latifa replied. “You’ll understand when you’re older.”

  One day they were in the courtyard, racing the remote-control cars that Latifa had brought from Mashhad for all the kids to share. The power went off, and as the television the other cousins had been watching fell silent, Fatema turned toward the factory, surprised. She could hear the winders still spinning.

  “How is that working?” she asked Latifa.

  “Our cars are still working, aren’t they?” Latifa revved her engine.

  Fatema refused to be distracted. “They use batteries. You can’t run anything big with batteries.”

  “Maybe I brought some bigger batteries from Iran.”

  “Show me,” Fatema pleaded.

  Latifa opened her mouth to start explaining, her mind already groping for some simple metaphors she could use to convey how the current buckets worked. But … our cousin came from Iran and buried giant batteries in the ground? Did she really want that story spreading out across the neighborhood?

  “I was joking,” Latifa said.

  Fatema frowned. “But then how…?”

  Latifa shrugged. Fatema’s brothers, robbed of their cartoons, were heading toward them, demanding to join in the game.

  * * *

  The bus station was stifling. Latifa would have been happy to dispense a few parting hugs and then take her seat, but her cousins didn’t do quiet farewells.

  “I’ll be back at Eid,” she promised. “With Amir.”

  “That’s months away!” Soraya sobbed.

  “I’ll phone every week.”

  “You say that now,” Zohra replied, more resigned than accusing.

  “I’m not leaving forever! I’ll see you all again!” Latifa was growing tearful herself. She squatted down and tried to kiss Fatema, but the girl turned her face away.

  “What should I bring you from Mashhad next time?” Latifa asked her.

  Fatema considered this. “The truth.”

  Latifa said, “I’ll try.”

  3

  “I did my best to argue your case,” Ms Daneshvar told Latifa. “I told the principal you had too much promise to waste. But your attendance records, your missed assignments…” She spread her hands unhappily. “I couldn’t sway them.”

  “I’ll be all right,” Latifa assured her. She glanced up at the peg that held the key to the chemistry lab. “And I appreciate everything you did for me.”

  “But what will you do now?”

  Latifa reached into her backpack and took out one of the small ceramic pots Fashard had sent her. Not long after the last spools of wire had left Kandahar, two men had come snooping on Ezatullah’s behalf—perhaps a little puzzled that Fashard didn’t seem quite as crushed as the terms of the deal should have left him. He had managed to hide the winders from them, but he’d had to think up an alibi for the kilns at short notice.

  “I’m going to sell a few knickknacks in the bazaar,” Latifa said. “Like this.” She placed the pot on the desk and made as if to open it. When she’d twisted the lid through a quarter-turn it sprung into the air—only kept from escaping by three cotton threads that remained comically taut, restraining it against the push of some mysterious repulsive force.

  Ms Daneshvar gazed in horror at this piece of useless kitsch.

  “Just for a while!” Latifa added. “Until my other plans come to fruition.”

  “Oh, Latifa.”

  “You should take a closer look at it when you have the time,” Latifa urged her. “There’s a puzzle to it that I think you might enjoy.”

  “There are a couple of magnets,” Ms Daneshvar replied. “Like pole aimed at like. You were my brightest student … and now you’re impressed by this?” She turned the pot over. “Made in Afghanistan. Patent pending.” She gave a curt laugh, but then thought better of mocking the idea.

  Latifa said, “You helped me a lot. It wasn’t wasted.” She stood and shook her former teacher’s hand. “I hope things go well for you.”

  Ms Daneshvar rose and kissed Latifa’s cheek. “I know you’re resourceful; I know you’ll find something. It just should have been so much more.”

  Latifa started to leave, but then she stopped and turned back. The claims had all been lodged, the details disclosed. She didn’t have to keep the secret any more.

  “Cut one thread, so you can turn the lid upside-down,” she suggested.

  Ms Daneshvar was perplexed. “Why?”

  Latifa smiled. “It’s a very quick experiment, but I promise you it will be worth it.”

  The Waiting Stars

  ALIETTE DE BODARD

  Aliette de Bodard is a software engineer who lives and works in Paris, where she shares a flat with two Lovecraftian plants and more computers than warm bodies. Only a few years into her career, her short fiction has appeared in Interzone, Asimov’s, Clarkesworld, Realms of Fantasy, Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show, Writers of the Future, Coyote Wild, Electric Velocipede, The Immersion Book of SF, Fictitious Force, Shimmer, and elsewhere, and she has won the British SF Association Award for her story “The Shipmaker,” the Locus Award, and the Nebula Award for her story “Immersion.” Her novels include Servant of the Underworld, Harbinger of the Storm, and Master of the House of Darts, all recently reissued in a novel omnibus, Obsidian and Blood. Her most recent book, On a Red Station, Drifting, is a chapbook novella set in the same universe as the following story. Her Web site, www.aliettedebodard.com, features free fiction, thoughts on the writing process, and entirely too many recipes for Vietnamese dishes.

  The engrossing story that follows takes us to the far future of an alternate world, where a high-tech conflict is going on between spacefaring Mayan and Chinese empires and women give birth to children who are prenatally altered in the womb to become the control systems of living spaceships—and it takes us along on an unusual kind of rescue mission to a graveyard of dead spaceships, where one turns out to be not quite as dead as it seems.

  The derelict ship ward was in an isolated section of Outsider space, one of the numerous spots left blank on interstellar maps, no more or no less tantalising than its neighbouring quadrants. To most people, it would be just that: a boring part of a long journey to be avoided—skipped over by Mind-ships as they cut through deep space, passed around at low speeds by Outsider ships while their passengers slept in their hibernation cradles.

  Only if anyone got closer would they see the hulking masses of ships: the glint of starlight on metal, the sharp, pristine beauty of their hulls, even though they all lay quiescent and crippled, forever unable to move—living corpses kept as a reminder of how far they had fallen; the Outsiders’ brash statement of their military might, a reminder that their weapons held the means to fell any Mind-ships they chose to hound.

  On the sensors of The Cinnabar Mansions, the ships all appeared small and diminished, like toy models or avatars—things Lan Nhen could have held in the palm of her hand and just as easily crushed. As the sensors’ line of sight moved—catching ship after ship in their field of view, wreck after wreck, indistinct masses of burnt and twisted metal, of ripped-out engines, of shattered life pods and crushed shuttles—Lan Nhen felt as if an icy fist were squeezing her heart into shards. To think of the Minds within—dead or crippled, forever unable to move …

  “She’s not there,” she said, as more and more ships appeared on the screen in front of her, a mass of corpses that all threatened to overwhelm her with sorrow and grief and anger.

  “Be patient, child,” The Cinnabar Mansions said. The Mind’s voice was amused, as it always was—after all, she’d lived for five centuries, and would outlive Lan Nhen and Lan Nhen’s own children by so many years that the pronoun “child” seemed small and inappropriate to express the vast gulf of generations between them. “We already knew it was going to take time.”

  “She was supposed to be on the outskirts of the wards,” Lan Nhen said, biting her lip. She had to be, or the rescue mission was going to be infinitely more complicated. “According to Cuc…”

  “Your cousin knows what she’s talking about,” The Cinnabar Mansions said.

  “I guess.” Lan Nhen wished Cuc was there with them, and not sleeping in her cabin as peacefully as a baby—but The Cinnabar Mansions had pointed out Cuc needed to be rested for what lay ahead; and Lan Nhen had given in, vastly outranked. Still, Cuc was reliable, for narrow definitions of the term—as long as anything didn’t involve social skills, or deft negotiation. For technical information, though, she didn’t have an equal within the family; and her network of contacts extended deep within Outsider space. That was how they’d found out about the ward in the first place …

  “There.” The sensors beeped, and the view on the screen pulled into enhanced mode on a ship on the edge of the yard, which seemed even smaller than the hulking masses of her companions. The Turtle’s Citadel had been from the newer generation of ships, its body more compact and more agile than its predecessors: designed for flight and manoeuvres rather than for transport, more elegant and refined than anything to come out of the Imperial Workshops—unlike the other ships, its prow and hull were decorated, painted with numerous designs from old legends and myths, all the way to the Dai Viet of Old Earth. A single gunshot marred the outside of its hull—a burn mark that had transfixed the painted citadel through one of its towers, going all the way into the heartroom and crippling the Mind that animated the ship.

  “That’s her,” Lan Nhen said. “I would know her anywhere.”

  The Cinnabar Mansions had the grace not to say anything, though of course she could have matched the design to her vast databases in an eyeblink. “It’s time, then. Shall I extrude a pod?”

  Lan Nhen found that her hands had gone slippery with sweat, all of a sudden; and her heart was beating a frantic rhythm within her chest, like temple gongs gone mad. “I guess it’s time, yes.” By any standards, what they were planning was madness. To infiltrate Outsider space, no matter how isolated—to repair a ship, no matter how lightly damaged …

  Lan Nhen watched The Turtle’s Citadel for a while—watched the curve of the hull, the graceful tilt of the engines, away from the living quarters; the burn mark through the hull like a gunshot through a human chest. On the prow was a smaller painting, all but invisible unless one had good eyes: a single sprig of apricot flowers, signifying the New Year’s good luck—calligraphied on the ship more than thirty years ago by Lan Nhen’s own mother, a parting gift to her great-aunt before the ship left for her last, doomed mission.

  Of course, Lan Nhen already knew every detail of that shape by heart, every single bend of the corridors within, every little nook and cranny available outside—from the blueprints, and even before that, before the rescue plan had even been the seed of a thought in her mind—when she’d stood before her ancestral altar, watching the rotating holo of a ship who was also her great-aunt, and wondering how a Mind could ever be brought down, or given up for lost.

  Now she was older; old enough to have seen enough things to freeze her blood; old enough to plot her own foolishness, and drag her cousin and her great-great-aunt into it.

  Older, certainly. Wiser, perhaps; if they were blessed enough to survive.

  * * *

  There were tales, at the Institution, of what they were—and, in any case, one only had to look at them, at their squatter, darker shapes, at the way their eyes crinkled when they laughed. There were other clues, too: the memories that made Catherine wake up breathless and disoriented, staring at the white walls of the dormitory until the pulsing, writhing images of something she couldn’t quite identify had gone, and the breath of dozens of her dorm-mates had lulled her back to sleep. The craving for odd food like fish sauce and fermented meat. The dim, distant feeling of not fitting in, of being compressed on all sides by a society that made little sense to her.