by Yoon Ha Lee
Except—
“There’s someone on your moth,” Hemiola said, stopping as the moth unfurled a ramp. Its scan had picked up another servitor, although it wasn’t yet visible to human eyes.
“That’s my traveling companion,” Jedao said, his voice muffled through the suit’s comm. “I’ll introduce you once we get aboard.”
Despite its trepidation, Hemiola floated up the ramp and into the airlock after Jedao. Once the airlock had cycled, Jedao unsuited with impressive dexterity and led the way into the moth’s cockpit. The hexarch would never have endured a space this cramped.
A deltaform servitor whirred forward, then flashed in alarm, even though it had to have detected Hemiola’s approach.
“This is Hemiola of Tefos Enclave,” Jedao said to the deltaform. “Why don’t you tell it a little about yourself? Hemiola is supervising the archive copy I brought with me.”
The deltaform blinked a distinctly noncommittal green-blue. “I’m 1491625 of Pyrehawk Enclave,” it said. “Pleased to make your acquaintance.”
It came from one of the Kel-affiliated enclaves, then. Hemiola wasn’t sure how it felt about that, but questioning the other servitor’s allegiance would have been rude. It confined itself to saying, “Likewise.”
“Have you properly introduced yourself?” 1491625 said to Jedao.
“Jedao is how everyone knows me,” he said with a shrug.
Hemiola blinked a query.
Jedao ignored it and webbed himself into the copilot’s seat.
Hemiola said, “You’re not piloting?”
“1491625 is better at it than I am.”
1491625’s answering flash was just this side of smug. “You too,” it said to Hemiola. “You’ll have to squeeze in behind us, unless you’re any good at piloting yourself?”
“Unfortunately, no,” Hemiola said. It didn’t need webbing, strictly speaking, but it obliged the others by securing itself to the back of Jedao’s seat. “Where are we going?”
“Resupply,” Jedao said. “I don’t know when’s the last time you’ve seen a map of the hexarchate, Hemiola, but Kujen picked Tefos because it’s in the middle of nowhere. Which is saying a lot considering how much nowhere there is in space. Get comfortable.”
Servitors didn’t sleep. Hemiola could, however, observe the other two as they set course for a system it had never heard of. 1491625 and Jedao discussed a particularly unstable region they had bypassed on the way in, and whether going through it would shave some days off their travel time.
The voidmoth lifted off cleanly using its invariant maneuver drive. After a couple hours had passed, Hemiola realized 1491625 still hadn’t engaged the mothdrive, which was orders of magnitude faster. Rude though it was, Hemiola extended scan toward the mothdrive’s harness. It wasn’t a technician, but it didn’t spot anything obviously wrong. “Is there some difficulty with the mothdrive?” it asked diffidently.
“The mothdrive harness has been unreliable outside of high calendar space,” Jedao said. “Since I’d rather we not randomly swerve into the nearest neutron star...”
So that was why Jedao was so concerned about resupply: extended travel time. “How long has this been going on?” Hemiola asked. The hexarch hadn’t mentioned any such problems eighty years ago.
“The past nine years,” Jedao said. He lapsed into a troubled silence after that.
Not wishing to bother its hosts, Hemiola meditated on a favorite gavotte. The hexarch and Jedao had liked to dance to it, once upon a time. It remembered the way the hexarch had looked at Jedao, leading him around the walls of a room kept for that purpose.
“You’re humming,” Jedao said after a while. “Or playing something back, I can’t tell which. I guess when you can reproduce any sound at will, you can be an orchestra all by yourself.”
Hemiola flickered in embarrassment. “I didn’t mean to—”
“Don’t apologize,” Jedao said. “It’s nice to know someone around here can hold a tune in a bucket. I used to... but it doesn’t matter.”
1491625 snickered.
“You used to what?” Hemiola said. If it recalled correctly, Jedao could find a beat but not much else.
“My mother taught me to sing some old songs, long ago and far away,” Jedao said. “Can’t do it anymore, though. Kel Command ruined me for that. Enough about me. I was wondering if you’d be willing to help me look through the records?”
It hesitated.
“Unless you’ve read them already?”
“Oh no,” it said. The hexarch himself had never reviewed the records, only updated them briskly during each visit. “I couldn’t. The hexarch wouldn’t—”
“The hexarch is in trouble,” Jedao said. “The problem is, he was also secretive as fuck. I need to figure out what he was so afraid of down all the years.”
A hundred questions flitted through Hemiola’s mind. Who would dare to threaten a hexarch? And why wasn’t Jedao with him? What had happened to disrupt the reliability of the mothdrives? “You don’t know where he is,” it said. It wasn’t a question.
“He’s been missing for nine years,” Jedao said. “The last time I saw him, he was making eyes at Kel Command. But that’s nothing new. I can only conclude—” He made an abortive gesture. “I was hoping for clues as to where he’s gone, or what he considers a threat. It’s a long shot, but since I knew about Tefos, I had to check here once I freed myself from certain obligations. To be honest, I thought I’d find him holed up here. But for all I know, he has more bases like Tefos scattered throughout the stars.”
“Surely the hexarch could only snatch so much time away from his duties,” Hemiola said.
Jedao smiled humorlessly. “You’d think.”
“Well,” Hemiola said, “I’ll help take a look.”
“Thank you,” Jedao said. “1491625, I’m going to divert one of the subdisplays and hope there isn’t anything hideously distracting in there. Or, foxes help us, that the data format is so obsolete that it crashes the grid, or some damn thing.”
“You just had to make this whole process more nerve-racking, didn’t you,” 1491625 said.
Jedao slid the data solid into a reader slot. “Well, there’s the index,” he said. “It’s compressed, not encrypted. To be frank, I wish it had been. I’d feel safer. Here’s the access key, Hemiola—”
Hemiola received it from the grid. The entire set of records consisted of lowest-denominator text-plus-image files.
“That file format is unspeakably old,” Jedao said. “Kujen was a stickler for backwards compatibility. Still, it means we can read the records without trouble. I never thought I’d be grateful for his obsessive insistence on standardized formats.”
Hemiola was only halfway paying attention to this and had opened up the earliest file, which was... a journal entry? A digression in a laboratory notebook? The Nirai version of a love letter?
The entry began harmlessly enough, with a stylized doodle of an emblem Hemiola had never encountered before, a ringed planet accompanied by a bird in flight. Pencil, at a guess. It could even see the faint eraser marks where the entry’s author had corrected the planet to make it more perfectly round.
I saw the girl again on the way to class, said the elegant columns of handwriting, neatly aligned to a grid of dots. I gave her the rest of my flatbread. She needed it more than I did. During lunches in the cafeteria, the other cadets throw away enough food to feed an army of girls like her.
The author had followed this with three different recipes for flatbread, detailed tasting notes, and cost comparisons.
“What are you looking at?” Jedao said, peering over his shoulder.
“The very first entry,” Hemiola said. It didn’t have a date, but the index implied that everything was in chronological order.
After a pregnant pause, Jedao said, in a flat voice, “That’s Kujen’s handwriting, although not as elegant as it became later. I wonder what he was doing.”
“Feeding a hungry girl?” Hemio
la said, wondering what was so difficult about interpreting the passage.
“Yes, but why?”
It couldn’t see the point of the question. “Because she was hungry and he had food?”
Jedao massaged his temples. “I need to think about this. I wonder what else is in here. According to the index, we have a whole library’s worth of notes here. You read faster than I do, so we have a chance. Especially considering how much time we’re going to be spending in transit anyway.”
Hemiola caught itself admiring the doodle. “I wonder what that is,” it said. “I didn’t know the hexarch liked to draw.”
“The old Nirai emblem, before they replaced it with the modern voidmoth. He told me once he learned draughtsmanship the old-fashioned way, before all this grid assistance business. Showed me a collection of T-squares and compasses and ellipse templates. Although by the time I knew him, he could draw circles damn near perfect freehand. It must have been required in the Nirai curriculum once.” His mouth pulled up on one side. “He scared me once by telling me the Shuos used to require their cadets to speak in code for an entire semester. Or maybe that was the Andan, back before the Shuos split off from them, I can never remember.”
Jedao shook his head. “Some of this material is bound to get technical. I can handle mathematics if necessary”—again that note of irony—“but I’m no engineer.”
“Neither am I,” Hemiola said. “I don’t suppose—?”
“I’m hardly a gate mechanics specialist,” 1491625 said from the pilot’s seat, “although we have some textbooks and what Jedao says is a truly terrible interactive tutorial.”
“Well, we’ll have to make the most of it,” Jedao said.
“How fast do you read?” Hemiola said.
“I can read 200 words per minute of this kind of text. Assuming there aren’t secret codes hidden in the recipes. Which is a possibility with someone like Kujen.”
“All right,” Hemiola said, “would you rather read from the beginning, or take the more modern material?”
“More modern material,” Jedao said after a pause. “On the grounds that I need to know where he is now, not what he was up to almost a millennium ago.”
It calculated the dividing line. “Start with that file, then,” it suggested.
Jedao called up the relevant file. “Works for me. If anything interesting comes up, flag it for my attention. For whatever values of ‘interesting’ seem useful to you.” He settled in to read.
Hemiola did likewise. It was prying. It knew it was prying. Yet it couldn’t help warming to the hexarch. Whatever Jedao found disturbing about the incident recounted in that first entry, surely taking care of a hungry child was laudable?
“Do people still go hungry in the hexarchate?” it asked as it turned to the next entry.
“They probably do now,” 1491625 said with a cynical greenish flicker. “In the past, less so, unless you lived right up against some battle. Which describes a lot of places these days.”
Hemiola invited elaboration.
“Civil unrest,” Jedao said, “as the result of some necessary reform.”
“If that’s what you want to call it,” 1491625 said.
Hemiola blinked inquisitively.
“Old argument,” Jedao said, his eyes troubled.
Hemiola kept reading until it found another mention of the hungry girl. This one was embedded in notes on neuropsychology. The notes themselves were brief to the point of being telegraphic. Not surprising; it couldn’t imagine that the material had posed a challenge to the hexarch even as a cadet. If it had been skimming any faster, it would have missed the paragraph entirely.
Spotted her again, the hexarch said in what looked like quickly dashed-off handwriting. And, in the margin of the next page: My sister was about her age when she died.
“Jedao?” Hemiola said.
Jedao didn’t look up. “Mmm?”
“Who was the hexarch’s sister?”
“The hexarch’s what?”
Hemiola pointed out the marginal note.
“I never heard of any siblings,” Jedao said, “much less that he cared—” He checked himself from whatever he’d been about to say. “I don’t suppose we have any idea how old Kujen was when he wrote this.”
“If we can figure out which course he was taking notes on,” 1491625 said after it glanced over the page, “we can compare it to the standard Nirai curriculum.”
“He was admitted at the age of fourteen,” Jedao said. “He mentioned that to me once. Thought it was amusing how many people thought he needed ‘protection.’ And he graduated early, too, in four years instead of the usual five. He said it could have been three if he hadn’t studied multiple specialties. I don’t think he was being boastful.”
Hemiola tried to imagine the hexarch as a fourteen-year-old cadet experimenting with flatbread recipes and failed. “I wonder why he didn’t report the girl, whoever she was, to the authorities,” it said. “Surely someone would have taken her in.”
While 1491625 and Jedao puzzled over Nirai Academy’s curricula, Hemiola kept reading. It found the answer to its question not long afterward. This one was tucked away next to a cryptic table of data—this one dated. (The hexarch had also showed his work on a number of computations, in what Hemiola would have called a sarcastic manner. It was certain that the hexarch could have done all of that in his head.)
One of my classmates asked me why I don’t just call the Vidona, the hexarch said. As if I don’t remember what life was like in a Vidona orphanage. I’m not sure the girl would thank me.
And, tucked in next to a scatter plot: I learned her name today, in exchange for more flatbread and candies. It’s Meveri. She’s probably lying about that. I used to do that too. Six years old and she already knows.
Hemiola was about to point this out to Jedao, too, in case he was interested. But 1491625 spoke first. “Advanced course of study,” it said. “The kind of thing senior Nirai come back to the academy to research if they’re good enough to be invited back. He was doing that as a cadet.”
“It wouldn’t have been a surprise to anyone that he was going to end up a heptarch,” Jedao said. “Still, it would probably have been toward the end of his stay at academy.”
“I found a date on this entry,” Hemiola said. “The year was 359.” It also pointed out the orphanage comment.
Jedao looked grim. “I suppose he had his reasons, but did he honestly think that passing scraps of food to a street child that young, rather than getting her to the authorities, was doing her any favors?”
“We don’t know what the authorities were like back then,” 1491625 said. “Maybe someone else was looking out for this Meveri.”
“If only your people had existed in those days,” Jedao said. “We might have some chance of tracking down additional records of her.”
“We have our own archivists,” 1491625 said, “but the heptarchate was a big place.”
Hemiola tuned them out. It wanted to know what had become of Meveri. While the hexarch and Jedao had never brought children with them to Tefos Base, the heroine of A Rose in Three Revolutions had an eight-year-old niece. It supposed six-year-old children behaved differently from eight-year-olds. And how was a six-year-old surviving on only the occasional gift of flatbreads, anyway?
The next swathe of pages made no mention of Meveri whatsoever. Hemiola suffered through confidence intervals, strange attractors, and cryptic chains of biochemical reactions before finding her again. This time the hexarch devoted an entire page to her, along with several scratched-out sketches. While the hexarch might have been a competent draughtsman, his portraits left something to be desired. He eventually settled for a verbal description.
Her hair was matted. She might have had pretty eyes once. They were swollen shut by the time I got to her. My friend was right.
Several more columns of text written, then blotted out; the hexarch knew how to redact material so it was unreadable. Then he added, If I’d waite
d any longer, the city watch would have taken her for cremation. One of the local fruit peddlers who’d seen me with her earlier finally told me where the beggars’ association had abandoned her. I sat and held her hand until she stopped breathing. Toward the end, she was babbling at me in one of the local low languages. I just made reassuring noises because that was all there was left to do.
We are a nation of thousands upon thousands of worlds, and we can’t prevent a child from starving to death right next to one of our faction academies.
The page looked as though it had been crumpled. Even though it knew better, Hemiola caught itself trying to smooth the paper out. The image, of course, was amenable to no such thing.
“Jedao,” it said, “you had better see this.”
After reading the page, Jedao sat in silence for a time. Eventually he said, “This sister of his. I wonder what happened to her, and why he never spoke of her. It’s not the question I thought I was going to be asking.”
“There are going to be a lot more of those,” 1491625 said.
“Maybe that was what drove him to become heptarch,” Hemiola said, “in a world long ago.”
“Yes,” Jedao said. “In all the years I’ve known him, I never would have guessed. I’m starting to think I never understood him at all. And now we have to figure out what he’s been thinking all this time, what his plan for the heptarchate was, before it’s too late for the rest of us.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
WHEN NIRAI KUJEN returned the next day, Jedao and Dhanneth were taking a break with a game of jeng-zai. Jedao had asked Dhanneth to check his plan for the first battle, and then the two of them had looked over the logistics. Among other things, Jedao couldn’t help wondering if all majors were this well-versed in tactics, or if Kujen had picked him an unusually competent aide. There was no tactful way to ask, so he didn’t. Dhanneth had told him that the staff should double-check the details, but Jedao felt better having Dhanneth’s opinion nonetheless, and Dhanneth had improved the presentation. In the course of the discussion it had emerged that Dhanneth played jeng-zai and had brought a deck with him. Jedao was beating Dhanneth, but he was putting up a good fight.