The Chamber of Souls

by Zora Mai Quỳnh

Today it is announced that our quarantine is over and our refugee camp sufficiently detoxified to enter the Waterlands of Lạc, the home of our rescuers. Cheers and song rise in the air as the airship descends from the sky. A magnificently carved rồng on the bow of the vessel glistens of lacquered red, orange and gold scales, as its body, decorated by gems, wraps under the hull to reappear in a long curved tail on the other side of the vessel.

Thirty days ago, our sinking fishing boat cramped with a hundred refugees fleeing Việt Nam emerged from a hidden corridor of the South China Sea. We were rescued by the Guardians who descended from a similar vessel that barely skimmed the surface of the water and we, arms waving and voices strained in desperation, failed to observe what should have been obvious — that our rescuers bore an element of foreignness that we were wholly unprepared for.

[Full story under the cut.]

Hello! Welcome to GlitterShip Episode 75 for June 20, 2019. This is your host, Keffy, and I’m super excited to be sharing this story with you. Our story for today is The Chamber of Souls by Zora Mai Quynh, read by Zora and Rivia.

Before we get to it, if you’ve been waiting to pick up your copy of the Tiptree Award Honor Listed book, GlitterShip Year Two, there’s a great deal going on for Pride over at StoryBundle. GlitterShip Year Two is part of a Pride month LGBTQ fantasy fiction bundle. StoryBundle is a pay-what-you-want bundle site. For $5 or more, you can get four great books, and for $15 or more, you’ll get an additional five books, including GlitterShip Year Two, and a story game. That comes to as little as $1.50 per book or game. The StoryBundle also offers an option to give 10% of your purchase amount to charity. The charity for this bundle is Rainbow Railroad, a charity that helps queer folks get to a safe place if their country is no longer safe for them.

Zora Mai Quỳnh is a genderqueer Vietnamese writer whose short stories, poems, and essays can be found in The SEA Is Ours, Genius Loci: The Spirit of Place, POC Destroy Science Fiction, Luminescent Threads: Connections to Octavia Butler, Strange Horizons, and Terraform. Visit her: zmquynh.com. Rivia is a Black and Vietnamese Pansexual Teen who has a passion for reading, video games and music. She says “I’m gender questioning but also questioning whether or not I’m questioning…Isn’t gender just a concept?” You can hear her vocals on Strange Horizon’s podcast for “When she sings…”

The Chamber of Souls

by Zora Mai Quỳnh

“Where do you hail from? Are you in need of assistance?” a Guardian called down to us. The language spoken was Vietnamese, but it sounded as if the tongue of the speaker had been wrapped around a poem and restrung in curves back to us. A slight echo of melody lingered after each word.

Silence spread among us at the strangeness of the dialect and though we could make out the gist of what was spoken, it was interwoven with words and tones we did not recognize. Whispers of warning spread that our rescuers may be agents of the very government we fled.

Tentatively, my mother stepped forward to speak what many had waited ten years to voice, “Yạ, greetings, we are refugees, fleeing our homeland of Việt Nam because of the cruelties we experienced there. We respectfully request asylum.”

At that, three Guardians leapt onto our boat. Their long black hair, arranged in motley styles that interlaced colorful braided metallic strands with feathers, flapped in the wind as they examined us in our squalor and malnutrition. Their speech clearly carried Vietnamese tones, but their eyes and skin, the features of their faces, their height—they were as tall as the tallest American soldiers, if not taller, and their strange dark tunics, decorated with metallic accouterment, that sheathed one arm and left the other arm bare spoke of a culture completely unfamiliar to us.

“Yạ, greetings, grandmother,” a Guardian with jet-black hair spiced with metallic blue said, bowing deeply. “The sea has brought you to us and you are now under the protection of the Waterlands of Lạc, we grant you all sanctuary. I am called ‘Jzan Nguyệt’ after the moon that once carried the tides of our Waterlands. And it is in my hands that you will rest the security of your people, for I am jzan who is the protectorate of these Waterlands.”

We were delivered into quarantine soon after our rescue. It was Jzan Nguyệt who brought the news to us: “You will be taken to an atoll island where we will prepare you for entry into our Waterlands.”

Mother’s forehead furrowed instantly with concern. I knew what she was thinking; I saw it in her eyes -- the fear of incarceration. So many stories carried their way back to us from people who made it to refugee camps in Malaysia and Thailand, -- stories of starvation, sickness, and festering away like prisoners while waiting for dreams that never materialized.

“Are we prisoners?” Mother’s voice quivered. “No.”

“Then why...?”

“Because in our country, your senses are severely impaired. You must acclimate. Because you carry toxins and you must detoxify lest you bring death and illness to our people.” In that moment, in Nguyệt’s voice, I did not hear the graceful generosity we were accustomed to, but a fierceness that seemed immovable.

Despite our fears, though, our “quarantine” was more like a paradise vacation. Instead of barbed wire fences, rationed food, and poorly ventilated stalls, we were surrounded by miles of green coral reef, a never-ending buffet of rice, nut dishes, fresh fruits, vegetables, and cool bamboo mats to sleep under the rounded canopy of the sky.

Quarantine reflected the imagined freedom that many among us dreamed of. The freedom that I envision is different though. I want inclusion, to belong somewhere — to be valued – to be more than the label Việt Nam gave to me—the untrustworthy child of a political dissident. How that freedom will look in the rescuers’ land, I do not know. Would we be equal members of their society, or a relief effort from some war-torn country?

As we board their airship, I notice that our steps, frenzied and awkward when we entered quarantine, are replaced by lightness as children skip, lovers hold hands, and elders stroll side-by-side. My own mother is all smiles, her arm crooked unevenly through the arm of my aunt as they board together. Despite all of this, I can’t help but feel an odd mixture of excitement, anxiety, and remorse about journeying to a land that will become our new home -- to replace the one we lost.

The airship picks up speed, rising into the sky and the Guardians pull on ropes and equipment, preparing for flight. I hear sobs break out as we watch them. It is not what they are doing that is disturbing; it is how fast they are moving. Our eyes can only catch their faces and limbs momentarily before they are in different locations on the airship.

In quarantine, they had moved with languor and ease. The thrill of our trip is foreshortened as it becomes apparent that wherever we are going, we will not be among peers.

“What is happening?” someone wails, “how is it that they can move so fast?”

I reflexively dig my fists into my eyes to block out the movements of the Guardians. The sound of balloons filling with hot air and the smell of thick plumes of steam dominate my senses and I breath in the warm humid air wishing I were back home. When I finally lift my fists from my eyes, the vessel is surrounded by a blue film behind which the clouds move by at such a tremendous speed that they are just a blur.

I not only see the movement but I also feel it in the gut of my stomach. It begins as a slow nauseous churning that becomes pain seizing my entire body. I fall over, buckling on the deck, collapsing alongside my countrymen whose kicking legs and flailing arms bruise my sides.

In the din, I hear the gruff shouts of Guardians in their twisted tongue as the vessel decreases markedly in speed.

“Your people cannot travel at our speeds—it appears to result in severe internal degeneration,” a Guardian says to me and immediately my spirit sinks. What was it? What was it that makes us so different from them when they look just like us? When they speak our words? When they bear our faces?

“We must leave you behind. At this decreased acceleration, we will be open to attack. We are charged to take Nan Ngọc swiftly back to the G...