The Citidel of Weeping Pearls
by Aliette de Bodard
Amidst royal intrigue and military escalation, in a place far from Earth and a time
thirty years after a princess and heir to the throne vanished along with the citadel
where she lived, the disappearance still occupies the minds of an ensemble of people, One
of that ensemble, Diem Huong, was a girl when the citadel stole her mother away, but now
Diem Huong is an engineer on a project which is determined to travel back those thirty
years.
Mother had gone on ahead, Ancesters only knew where. So there was no way forward. But
somewhere in the starlit hours of the past—somewhere in the days when the Citadel still
existed, and Bright Princess Ngoc Minh’s quarrel with the empress was still fresh and
raw—Mother was still alive.
There was a way back.
“The Citidel of Weeping Pearls” by Aliette de Bodard,
in Asimov’s Science Fiction, October/November
2015.