by Yoon Ha Lee
“Fine,” Brezan said. “Give me the bad news.”
“General Peo wants to know if he should cede the Salient,” Khiruev said. “I have a databurst with his latest report—”
Brezan received the databurst in silence. Glanced over the highlighted sections. He already knew. Peo was, as far as Brezan could tell, a good and loyal Kel. Peo was also losing. And good and loyal Kel, especially ones with any modicum of tactical experience, weren’t so common that Brezan could afford to throw away their service. He was impressed that Peo was consulting him at all. Habits of obedience, perhaps, even if Brezan was hardly in a position to stand in for Kel Command. He relied on Khiruev and, at Khiruev’s suggestion, Ragath for strategic advice.
If the question was coming to him, though, it meant they’d gone beyond strategy to policy.
“You must have an opinion,” Brezan said.
Khiruev shrugged. “My opinion, and Ragath concurs, is that we can’t hold the Vonner Salient. The question is—” She smiled bitterly. “The question is, do we deny the key system to the Protectorate?”
“You don’t mean—” But she wouldn’t be demanding his time unless she did. “You want to blow it up.”
“Well, not literally. But our swarm in the area does have a supply of fungal canisters.”
“Oh,” Brezan said.
Fungal canisters were one of the more recent and reviled additions to the Kel’s arsenal of nasty weapons. “Fungus” was not, strictly speaking, accurate. Nirai researchers had derived the organism from creatures that dwelled beyond the ordinary world, in gate-space. Brezan was no engineer, but he had a basic familiarity with the canisters’ capabilities. They could contaminate an entire world, causing ecological damage that would take centuries to repair.
“That system,” Brezan said slowly, after it was clear that Khiruev wasn’t going to add anything, “is inhabited. Not by a huge population, as these things go, but still, it’s a significant number of people. How the hell are we going to sell ourselves as an attractive alternative to the Protectorate if we—” He couldn’t say it.
Khiruev’s dark eyes were merciless. “It’s not a good option,” she agreed. “But we’re fighting to survive. Inesser’s general has committed a great number of troops to securing the main mining platforms.”
Brezan stared down at the desk. His hands, black-gloved, had clenched into fists, the material straining at his knuckles. Someone has to make the ugly decisions, he thought. He’d volunteered to be that person.
It had seemed so easy, so simple, when he’d first agreed to Cheris’s revolution. Broadcast the new calendar. Let people choose their new governments. But Cheris had vanished, leaving him to oversee the world they’d made together.
Now I know better, Brezan thought.
“High General?” Khiruev said.
“Do it,” Brezan said. The words scratched his throat on the way out. “You know me, I’m not a weapons expert. But you are. Fuck up the orbital platforms. Deny them to Inesser. In particular, we can’t afford for her to resume cindermoth production before we do.” Understatement. Inesser controlled four of them, while Khiruev had ceded the Hierarchy of Feasts to a field general.
“Understood,” Khiruev said. “It’s the sensible decision.”
“You have reservations.” He could tell from the deepened lines around her mouth.
“Who wouldn’t?” Khiruev said. “The day we stop having second thoughts is the day we’ve lost.”
“Pretty words,” Brezan said, “but they won’t do a damn thing for the people who die.”
“It’s war,” Khiruev said. “People always die.”
Brezan made a moue. “I won’t keep you from your job. Burn brightly, General.”
“Burn brightly,” she echoed, and signed off.
FOUR HOURS LATER, after he’d gotten through the meeting with the doctors (fruitless), Brezan was firmly ensconced in a bar in one of the university districts. Brezan had always found that students knew all about cheap ways to get drunk. As head of state, he felt it was incumbent upon him to economize. Despite this, both Lozhoi and Emio conspired to keep him awash in specialty liqueurs. Brezan was weak enough to use them for cooking once in a while (the guest suite boasted a compact kitchen area), mostly because it scandalized his handlers.
Brezan had lost count of the drinks he’d had. He was discovering that the anti-intoxicants that he ingested every day as a matter of course took real determination to defeat. At this point he was starting to feel a pleasant buzz. He meant to continue until he achieved oblivion.
The bar itself sported cheap decor of the sort you could order off anyone with a matter printer, with rococo curlicue designs that probably had a name that someone with a background in art history would recognize. Brezan’s youngest father, a children’s illustrator, almost certainly would have known. Thinking of him put Brezan in a bad mood. Besides Miuzan, no one in his family had contacted him since his so-called promotion. Given how the conversation with Miuzan had gone, that was just as well.
Most of the bar’s clientele seemed to be students, no surprise there. Maybe the occasional instructor or instructor’s aide. By now he’d gotten a better idea of civilian fashion trends in Tauvit and how different people dressed. He’d taken the entirely ineffectual precaution of wearing one of the gaudy embroidered jackets that the locals favored so much.
Brezan’s next drink arrived. He stared at it blearily, then decided it was time to take a piss. His bladder could only take so much of this abuse.
“Watch my drink,” Brezan said to the bearded young man sitting next to him. The young man didn’t deign to acknowledge this and continued chatting up a bored-looking alt about... breeding miniature trees? Not his hobby of choice, but also not his problem.
The restroom in back smelled of overly strong antiseptic. One servitor was hard at work scrubbing someone’s vomit off the floor. Another was removing graffiti, drawn with eyeliner, from the wall.
“Mind if I take a look at that before you get rid of it entirely?” Brezan said to the second servitor, a mothform.
The mothform blinked blue acquiescence and hovered out of the way.
Brezan had a dim awareness that he shouldn’t be drawing attention to servitors in public, and that he had no way of knowing this particular servitor’s affiliation. In the ordinary course of affairs he avoided talking to them, period. General Khiruev was the one who served as liaison to the Kel servitors. She had, however, emphasized to Brezan that just as humans weren’t united, neither were the servitors. Brezan tried not to think too hard about that. In any case, if anyone looked at him funny, he could pretend to be drunk.
The graffiti was written in one of the local low languages. Brezan recognized the script, which was some fancy syllabary. He snapped a photo of it and sent it to his augment for later investigation. While he did have a theoretically secure connection to the governor’s administrative grid, he didn’t want to deal with it right now. And he didn’t trust the city’s public grid at all.
“You going to piss that away?” a voice said from behind Brezan.
Brezan turned around, quelling his instinct to punch out the speaker. Because that would end so well. “What’s it to you?” he said.
The speaker was either a student or faking it very well. He had a cloud of curly hair and an olive complexion complicated either by decorative indigo-dyed scars or some kind of medical condition, Brezan couldn’t tell which. “Well,” the student said, “I thought for a while there you were about to throw up, but you don’t look that drunk.”
“Good to know,” Brezan said.
“What the hell are you doing messing with us in the university district, anyway? We don’t want you here.”
“Yes,” Brezan said dryly, unsurprised that the student had identified him, “a number of you have made that quite clear. Honestly, it made more sense”—he scrabbled for a number—“five drinks ago.”
“Well,” the student said, “then you can buy me one. I’m
broke.”
It would at least be a distraction from the moral bankruptcy of his decision four hours past. “Sure,” Brezan said, “why not. Just one moment.”
After he’d relieved his bladder, they sauntered out of the restroom together. Several people arguing about a drama looked up, gave Brezan distinctly hostile stares, then resumed their discussion. Brezan slid his drink across the bar to the student. “I hope you like that stuff,” he said.
“I like anything that’s free,” the student said, and tossed the liqueur back. “Your government’s terrible, has anyone told you that?”
Brezan snorted. “I don’t think anyone thinks it isn’t terrible.” He resisted the urge to add “young man” to the end of the sentence. At fifty-three years, he wasn’t all that old by hexarchate standards, which was part of the problem. Even Lozhoi had decades on him, which made it a miracle that she took him seriously.
“Oh, I don’t think you understand,” the student said. He finished the liqueur. “Do you have any more of this stuff? It’s better than the swill I usually drink.” His scars-tattoos-whatever had now brightened to a dull magenta.
“Are your personal decorations supposed to be doing that?” Brezan said, deciding that this was not a conversation where tact was going to be a major feature.
“Oh, yes,” the student said. “I paid extra for that. Had to save from my stipend and all that for the mod. You’re not supposed to spend on frivolous shit, but what good is life without some frivolous shit?”
Brezan shrugged and gestured at the bartender. The bartender yawned and sidled over to refill the glass. At that point, the student and the bartender either began flirting with each other or holding a passionate debate on the fluctuating reliability of public transportation.
He was starting to relax for the first time all day when the door burst open: Emio, accompanied by a woman and a man that Brezan recognized as Shuos security despite their shabby clothes. (“We save the flashy red-and-gold uniforms for when we’re trying to be targets,” Mikodez had explained to Brezan a lifetime ago. “In real life, you think we like being shot at?”)
“High General,” Emio said, “I need you to—” Her gaze fell on the student with the now-blue facial scars, which were glowing faintly. “High General, step away from him now.”
Brezan might have been drunk, and he might be one of the more notorious crashhawks in Kel history, but he knew when to follow an order. He dove out of the way, tripped over a shoe someone had surreptitiously taken off, and went sprawling. He slammed hard into the floor and saw a bright red glare in his field of vision as the sudden fall tripped the automatic medical diagnostics.
Meanwhile, the student backed away from Emio and her fellow agents, made a dreadful choking noise, and collapsed into a heap. The glass tumbled to the floor and shattered. The reek of liqueur grew even stronger.
Despite the blood dripping from his nose, Brezan scrambled to his feet. “Get medical attention,” he said, or thought he said. It was hard to speak clearly through the bubbling froth in his mouth.
One of the Shuos agents had already reached the student. “Dead,” she said. “This establishment is under interdict. Meanwhile—”
“On it,” Emio said. “High General, let’s get you out of here.”
“The student—” Absurdly, he couldn’t seem to think of anything but the scars, which were now glowing brightly. Where have I seen that—
“I’ll debrief you when we get you home,” Emio said in a sharp undertone. “Come on.”
Brezan spent the ride home in a daze. Emio applied first aid to the broken nose, including a painkiller, although Brezan was too stunned by events to notice much of the pain. He stared out the flitter’s windows as the city receded below them. Fog had rolled in from the river that bisected it, and the gray blur suited his mood.
“My bad judgment,” Emio said once she’d gotten him into his office.
“As I recall,” Brezan said, “I’m the one who went out to get drunk.” He had made a hash of that too, but he wasn’t going to admit to that unless pressed.
“Oh,” Emio said, as he had known she would, “we were on site keeping an eye on you. Should have said something when—” Her mouth tightened, and she looked away.
Brezan’s head was starting to pound. “Do tell. It’s the student, wasn’t it? What the fuck was that, an allergic reaction?”
Emio met his eyes. “Yes, but not the way you’re thinking. His name won’t mean anything to you, although I can get you his profile. The relevant part is that he belonged to the Student Calligraphers’ Society.”
Brezan remembered that from one of the many briefings on protest groups. “Fuck. The corpse calligraphers.”
Corpse calligraphy was frowned on in polite society, but it had survived as a practice for centuries despite the hexarchate’s attempt to stamp it out. As Brezan’s fathers had explained to him when he was a child, the regime had never gotten over the embarrassing fact that one of the Andan hexarchs had practiced it. And one of the more successful and long-lived ones, at that.
Brezan queried the grid for a translation of the graffiti he’d seen, relying on its interpolation to figure out the bits that the servitor had already erased. That was when the realization hit him. “The same slogan, or phrase, or whatever the hell,” he whispered. The scars on the student’s face had lit up in the same script.
The grid finally spat out the translation: As I chose my death, let the people choose their rulers.
Brezan looked up at Emio. “That means—”
“Suicide calligrapher,” Emio said, unsentimental. “This is a new development. I should have been prepared.”
“Oh, quit with the fucking self-recriminations,” Brezan said, painfully aware of the hypocrisy of his saying that to anyone else. “I’m physically safe. The issue is public relations, isn’t it?”
Emio smiled thinly. “You’re learning.”
“Not fast enough.” Definitely a headache. Out of a possibly misguided sense of self-punishment, he didn’t reach for a painkiller, which he was going to regret soon. “If I wanted to drown my sorrows, I should have picked a less public way to do it. Instead of exposing myself to a suicide calligrapher. Because I’m going to be blamed for the death. And if there’s one, there will be more. Am I right?”
She didn’t shield him from the truth. “There were one to three suicide calligraphers in every district that hour. They coordinated this. I advise you not to bother trying to cover it up. Rumor has wings, as they say.”
“Emio,” Brezan said, putting his head in his hands, “what the fuck did I do so wrong that a bunch of kids are killing themselves to become corpse pamphlets?”
“Wrong?” she said. “No more wrong than anyone else who comes in and tries to change the way things have always been done. No more right, either.”
“That ends today,” Brezan said, springing up despite her frantic attempts to get him to sit back down. “I have to do better than this. If it means sitting down every day in the middle of the university district and listening to what they have to say to me, I’ll do that. If it means bringing in riot police, I’ll do that too. Whatever it takes.”
“You don’t get it,” Emio said. “There’s no easy answer. There never has been. Just hard work. Even the Andan know that.”
He didn’t respond to the limp attempt at humor. “Then the work I’ve been doing hasn’t been enough. That changes now.”
“Fine,” Emio said. “Fine. If that’s what you want, that’s what we’ll do. But burning yourself out won’t do anyone any favors, either.”
“Out,” Brezan said. “I want to talk to Mikodez.” In real life, he knew that Mikodez was a busy man and that he was, in all likelihood, going to have to wait to talk to him. But if anyone knew how to deal with people doing stupid things because they hated you, it would be Mikodez.
Emio didn’t argue. She put in the call, then withdrew.
Brezan dozed off while waiting for it to go through. Three
hours passed before he received a response.
“High General,” Mikodez said. “Emio told me about what happened.”
Of course she had. Brezan couldn’t work up any outrage. She was doing her job, after all.
“I didn’t want the boy to die,” Brezan said. He was shocked by how raw his voice sounded.
“No,” Mikodez said, more gently than Brezan had expected. “I don’t imagine you did. But for love of little foxes, don’t let on that it hurts you so much. They’ll use it against you if they figure that out.”
“I have to fix this,” Brezan said. “All of this. I’m tired of people dying for stupid reasons. The corpse calligraphers could have sent me a letter, or gathered outside the government building and chanted protest songs. Suicide? Really?”
Mikodez regarded him for a moment, then put his chin in his hands. “A few years after I took the seat,” he said, “several senior administrators—not Shuos, but Shuos-affiliates that we depended on for operations in the remoter marches—threatened suicide if I didn’t cede my position to their favored candidate.”
“What did you do?”
“I called their bluff. Said favored candidate, given a choice between my assassins and a comfortable post at one of the academies, chose the posting. Every so often he still contemplates moving on me, but that’s just habit. If he gets serious, he’ll lose his head so fast he won’t have time to blink.”
“Yes,” Brezan said bleakly, “except the students weren’t bluffing, and I’d rather not resort to assassins.”
“Learn to separate rhetorical techniques from the content of the argument,” Mikodez said.
“Coordinated suicide isn’t a rhetorical technique, Mikodez.”
“That’s debatable,” Mikodez said. “Certainly they intended it as such.”
“How do you endure this?” Brezan asked. “Any of this?”
“Ah,” Mikodez said, “that’s a different question.” His expression sobered. “Knitting and crochet and a good supply of candies, mostly. You like cooking, don’t you? Find more time to do that. Have dinner with friends when you can.”