The Shipmaker

The Shipmaker

Aliette de Bodard (Excerpt. You can read the full text in The Year’s Best Science Fiction, twenty-eighth annual collection, edited by Gardner Dozois, 2011)

Ships were living, breathing beings. Dac Kien had known this, even before she’d reached the engineering habitat – even before she’d seen the great mass in orbit outside, being slowly assembled by the bots.

Her ancestors had once carved jade, in the bygone days of the Le dynasty on Old Earth: not hacking the green blocks into the shape they wanted, but rather whittling down the stone until its true nature was revealed. And as with jade, so with ships. The sections outside couldn’t be forced together. They had to flow into a seamless whole – to be, in the end, inhabited by a Mind who as much a part of the ship as every rivet and every seal.

An abstract dolphin. “Beautiful as a poem declaimed in drunken games, as a flower bud ringed by frost – beautiful and fragile as a newborn child struggling to breathe” (Aliette de Bodard). Illustration: © Megan Jorgensen (Elena)

The Easterners of the Mexica didn’t understand. They spoke or recycling, of design efficiency: they saw only the parts taken from previous ships, and assumed it was done to save money and time. They didn’t understand why Dac Kien’s work as Grand Master of Design Harmony was the most important on the habitat: the ship, once made, would be one entity, and not a patchwork of ten thousand others. To Dac Kien – and to the one who would come after her, the Mind-bearer – fell the honour of helping the ship into being, of transforming metal and cables and solar cells into an entity that would sail the void between the stars.

The door slid open. Dac Kien barely looked up. The light tread of the feet told her this was one of the lead designers, either Miahua or Feng. Neither would have disturbed her without cause. With a sigh, she disconnected from the system with a flick of her hands, and waited for the design’s overlay on her vision to disappear.

“Your Excellency.” Miahua’s voice was quite, the Xuyan held herself upright, her skin as pale as yellowed wax. “The shuttle has come back. There’s someone on board you should see.”