This struck Qing-jao to the heart. She was always conscious of her deep unworthiness before the gods, of her filthiness in their sight--even when they weren't requiring her to watch or trace woodgrain lines. Only now did she learn what was at stake: her mother's love for her.
"All my fears are gone now. You are a perfect daughter, my Qing-jao. You already serve the gods well. And now, with your oath, I can be sure you'll continue forever. This will cause great rejoicing in the house in heaven where your mother dwells."
Will it? In heaven they know my weakness. You, Father, you only see that I have not yet failed the gods; Mother must know how close I've come so many times, how filthy I am whenever the gods look upon me.
But he seemed so full of joy that she dared not show him how much she dreaded the day when she would prove her unworthiness for all to see. So she embraced him.
Still, she couldn't help asking him, "Father, do you really think Mother heard me make that oath?"
"I hope so," said Han Fei-tzu. "If she didn't, the gods will surely save the echo of it and put it in a seashell and let her listen to it whenever she puts it to her ear."
This sort of fanciful storytelling was a game they had played together as children. Qing-jao set aside her dread and quickly came up with an answer. "No, the gods will save the touch of our embrace and weave it into a shawl, which she can wear around her shoulders when winter comes to heaven." She was relieved, anyway, that Father had not said yes. He only hoped that Mother had heard the oath she made. Perhaps she hadn't--and so she wouldn't be so disappointed when her daughter failed.
Father kissed her, then stood up. "Now you are ready to hear your task," he said.
He took her by the hand and led her to his table. She stood beside him when he sat on his chair; she was not much taller, standing, than he was sitting down. Probably she had not yet reached her adult height, but she hoped she wouldn't grow much more. She didn't want to become one of those large, hulking women who carried heavy burdens in the fields. Better to be a mouse than a hog, that's what Mu-pao had told her years ago.
Father brought a starmap up into the display. She recognized the area immediately. It centered on the Lusitania star system, though the scale was too small for individual planets to be visible. "Lusitania is in the center," she said.
Father nodded. He typed a few more commands. "Now watch this," he said. "Not the display, my fingers. This, plus your voice identification, is the password that will allow you to access the information you'll need."
She watched him type: 4Gang. She recognized the reference at once. Her mother's ancestor-of-the-heart had been Jiang-qing, the widow of the first Communist Emperor, Mao Ze-dong. When Jiang-qing and her allies were driven from power, the Conspiracy of Cowards vilified them under the name "Gang of Four." Qing-jao's mother had been a true daughter-of-the-heart to that great martyred woman of the past. And now Qing-jao would be able to do further honor to her mother's ancestor-of-the-heart every time she typed the access code. It was a gracious thing for her father to arrange.
In the display there appeared many green dots. She quickly counted, almost without thinking: there were nineteen of them, clustered at some distance from Lusitania, but surrounding it in most directions.
"Is that the Lusitania Fleet?"
"Those were their positions five months ago." He typed again. The green dots all disappeared. "And those are their positions today."
She looked for them. She couldn't find a green dot anywhere. Yet Father clearly expected her to see something. "Are they already at Lusitania?"
"The ships are where you see them," said Father. "Five months ago the fleet disappeared."
"Where did it go?"
"No one knows."
"Was it a mutiny?"
"No one knows."
"The whole fleet?"
"Every ship."
"When you say they disappeared, what do you mean?"
Father glanced at her with a smile. "Well done, Qing-jao. You've asked the right question. No one saw them--they were all in deep space. So they didn't physically disappear. As far as we know, they may be moving along, still on course. They only disappeared in the sense that we lost all contact with them."
"The ansibles?"
"Silent. All within the same three-minute period. No transmissions were interrupted. One would end, and then the next one--never came."
"Every ship's connection with every planetside ansible everywhere? That's impossible. Even an explosion--if there could be one so large--but it couldn't be a single event, anyway, because they were so widely distributed around Lusitania."
"Well, it could be, Qing-jao. If you can imagine an event so cataclysmic--it could be that Lusitania's star became a supernova. It would be decades before we saw the flash even on the closest worlds. The trouble is that it would be the most unlikely supernova in history. Not impossible, but unlikely."
"And there would have been some advance indications. Some changes in the star's condition. Didn't the ships' instruments detect something?"