The Tea Master and the Detective by Aliette de Bodard

Subterranean, 96 pages, $40 (special edition)

Available for $4.99 in digital formats

“The Tea Master and the Detective” is a novella about a spaceship with a human mind at its core. Shades of Anne McCaffrey’s “The Ship Who Sang.”

“The Shadow’s Child” is the ship. She has survived a traumatic loss of her crew and big doses of “unreality” in “deep spaces.” Long Chau is maybe a human. The depiction of Long Chau on the front cover of the book certainly looks human. Let’s say she’s human. She has a mysterious background and it eventually is revealed she, too, suffers from trauma. So much space trauma.

Mindships like “The Shadow’s Child” can brew “teas” to help clients overcome psychological difficulties, including handling the transition into deep spaces, or “the unknowable space shipminds used to travel faster than light.” The ship (via an avatar) offers Long Chau a congenial brew and they settle in to discuss Long Chau’s needs.

Long Chau needs to find a corpse lost in deep spaces. Any corpse. The one the ship and human find turns out to have been murdered. Traversing the hierarchies necessary to find information on the dead woman leads to an involuntary examination of both the ship’s and human’s pasts. In the end they are both put to an extreme test of their ability to hang on to their rational selves long enough to solve a case and prevent another murder.

Short and enjoyable. A complex and intriguing other world.