by Yoon Ha Lee
They drifted toward the station for some time. Hemiola’s chronometer told it how much time had elapsed, of course. Still, it often drifted into subjective time when it composed, and today was no different.
“Hold tight,” Jedao said, the vibration of his voice buzzing faintly through the suit and the attached air supply, and against Hemiola’s armor. He twisted around and applied the jets again to decelerate. Hemiola was treated to a sudden view of Ayong Primary up close, all planes and angles and glittering carapace, with stripes of light to guide docking voidmoths.
Jedao unhooked a safety line and grapnel from his utility belt. It was amazing how he could reach it despite the webbing. He hurled it at the station, engaging the jets simultaneously to counter his corresponding backward motion.
The grapnel made no sound when it latched onto Ayong Primary’s surface. It had landed precisely at the edge of what appeared to be a maintenance chute. Hemiola’s respect for Jedao’s abilities increased. He hadn’t made a single course correction.
Jedao pulled his way hand over hand along the line. Hemiola hunched motionless on Jedao’s back. They were close enough now that there was little danger of torque swinging them into the station. And they were at no risk of colliding with one of the trademoths.
So why did it feel worried?
Jedao’s motions slowed. He hung in space, legs tucked under him. All he had to do was pull a little more and they’d arrive. Hemiola suppressed a flicker of dismay. Was he tiring? Would they be stranded out here, connected to the station by a mere fragile filament? If it had to do the unspeakably rude thing and rescue Jedao so close to his goal, would he ever forgive it?
Instead of crossing to the station’s surface, Jedao studied a protrusion on it. Hemiola couldn’t figure out what it was. Sensor array? Or worse, a turret?
Then the protrusion moved.
If it hadn’t been for the risk of detection, Hemiola would have flashed all its lights in alarm. The only thing that kept it from backing away from the protrusion and dragging Jedao with it was Jedao’s body language. He showed no sign of alarm.
Jedao was signing to the protrusion. It took Hemiola several moments to recognize it as a variant of Simplified Machine Universal. What it had taken for one of the human sign languages was, instead, a simple rendition of short-long sequences indicated by the fingertips of one hand. Jedao was being very careful with politeness levels. He’d said, “I am an envoy from Pyrehawk Enclave with a guest from Tefos Enclave. I request permission to enter Trans-Enclave territory.”
The protrusion said in carefully dim lights, “You are welcome, Ajewen Cheris of Pyrehawk Enclave.” Ah: it was a servitor, albeit of a type Hemiola had never seen before.
But Ajewen Cheris? Why was Jedao using a different name? Hemiola’s misgivings flared anew.
“Thank you,” Jedao said.
The stranger-servitor offered one of its grippers, which was so large that it could have crushed Jedao and Hemiola in half. Jedao took hold of the gripper’s end and used it to hoist himself down. He retrieved the safety line and grapnel, and returned them to his utility belt. The stranger-servitor then led the way into the station.
The sides of the maintenance chute surrounded them. Hemiola blinked in alarm when the space around them juddered perpendicularly even though, as far as it could tell, they were still moving in a straight line. It turned on active scan. The stranger-servitor didn’t stop it.
The station’s space was twisted like a labyrinth composed of labyrinths in fractal detail. They were now in a section of the station with pressurized atmosphere and artificial gravity. For the first time, Hemiola was frightened. Neither Jedao nor the stranger-servitor was reacting to the uncanny warping of spacetime. In particular, the station’s center housed a peculiar pulsing knot that opened into gate-space. If the knot swallowed them—
After eight more turns that weren’t turns, they arrived in a storage unit. The unit had a locked door, which they had bypassed entirely. It contained tidy stacks of labeled crates. One of them said, CONTENTS UNDER PRESSURE. STORE RIGHT-SIDE UP. And, in newer paint: DO NOT INGEST.
“Who is your traveling companion?” the stranger-servitor said. “I’ve never heard of Tefos Base.”
“Pardon the irregular arrangement,” Jedao said, now speaking the high language aloud. He pulled out a knife and casually slashed through the webbing. “271828-18th, this is Hemiola of Tefos Enclave.”
Hemiola hovered free. “Pleased to make your acquaintance,” it said, as formally as possible.
“Likewise,” 271828-18th said. “What is your enclave’s affiliation?”
“We’re a Nirai enclave,” Hemiola said, “dedicated to preserving the hexarch’s research.”
271828-18th blinked its interest. “You’ll have to tell me more about that later,” it said.
“Yes,” Hemiola said, although it wasn’t sure how much more information the hexarch would have wanted shared.
Jedao said, “I don’t suppose you have the next episodes of—”
271828-18th flashed its laughter. Hemiola couldn’t help wondering if this was a distraction from the matter of Ajewen Cheris. “They’re already on a data solid,” 271828-18th said. “Did you think we’d forget how much you like dramas?” It indicated a small crate separate from the rest. “Plus ecoscrubbers. Air and water. Extra ration bars—Kel, since you specified, although you’re the only person I know who likes them. And the rest of the equipment you asked for.”
“Thank you.”
“Now for you,” 271828-18th said, flaring its lights in Hemiola’s direction. “Tefos has no treaty with the Trans-Enclave.”
“We report directly to the hexarch,” Hemiola said, feeling stubborn. “Before this goes any further, I have a question.”
Through the suit’s faceplate, Hemiola could see Jedao smiling crookedly, as if he knew.
“Why did you address this individual”—Hemiola gestured at Jedao—“as Ajewen Cheris?”
“You must be very isolated,” 271828-18th said, “if you didn’t pick up on that a lot earlier. Still, if you’re the de facto representative of your enclave”—Hemiola blinked acknowledgment—“then you’re entitled to make an informed decision based on the facts.” By this point Jedao’s expression was resigned. “Ajewen Cheris, formerly Captain Kel Cheris, and also known as Shuos Jedao, is Pyrehawk Enclave’s agent to assassinate Hexarch Nirai Kujen.”
Jedao didn’t waste time on swearing. Instead, he reached for something on his belt.
Hemiola didn’t stick around to find out what he was going to pull. Instead, it sprinted for the opening through which they had entered. Behind it, it heard Jedao saying, in a remarkably mild voice, “You could have let me—” before his voice became inaudible.
It analyzed the labyrinthine passages and made the split-second decision to flee more deeply into the station, rather than back to the needlemoth. It could only assume that 1491625 shared Cheris’s goals. Ayong Primary might not be safe, but better that than to continue traveling with someone who meant the hexarch ill.
The station swallowed it. Hemiola had never before had cause to dash so quickly, but its control systems, inherited from earlier servitors, guided it well. It received a kaleidoscope impression of lovingly polished walls, hand- and footholds for humans, lights; periodic closets marked EMERGENCY SUITS; the occasional stray nook containing sculptures or flower arrangements for passers-by to contemplate. A number of humans spotted it and flattened themselves against the walls as it zoomed by.
Hemiola finally came to a stop in a closet unoccupied by humans or servitors. This area of the station was less well maintained than the others, with stray graffiti scratched into the floor. The scratches depicted cartoon animals armed with gardening tools. Under other circumstances, Hemiola would have puzzled over their meaning.
It surveyed its surroundings. What it had taken for a closet must in fact be someone’s... home? To one side rested a thick quilted blanket, rolled up with a pillow atop it. Th
ere was a knee-level table to the other side, adorned only with a small meditation focus in the shape of a kneeling wolf. A chest of clothes in the corner. That was all.
Assured that it was safe for the moment, Hemiola tucked itself into an empty corner and brooded. How could it have been so naive? It should have suspected something was wrong the moment Jedao—Cheris—asked for a copy of the archives. By now they could have copied the data and broadcast it everywhere.
There was something worse than being betrayed by Cheris or Jedao or whoever they were. Face it, “Immolation Fox” didn’t imply great things about their reliability no matter what guise they wore. No: it was the existence of not one but multiple servitors—a whole enclave, and a powerful one—that planned to destroy a hexarch.
Either something had gone badly rotten with servitor society, or something had gone even worse with the hexarch. But which?
Hexarchs (and heptarchs, back in the day) were by no means infallible. This much it understood. A Rose in Three Revolutions even featured a decadent, meddling, obstructionist heptarch (Shuos, of course). On the other hand, Hemiola had always believed that the servitors’ role was to carry out background tasks, not to interfere with government. Had it been wrong all this time?
At least it had a copy of the hexarch’s archives. It had rearranged its memory storage to make room for it, not difficult. Perhaps perusing them now would reveal something that would make the world make sense.
So deeply entangled was Hemiola in its reflections that the entrance of a human took it by surprise. More accurately, a gangly, tan-skinned girl barely into adolescence, her head shaved and her mauve robes frayed at the hem.
“Who are you?” the girl said in a distinctly hostile voice. “If you’re also here to tell me that I’m overdue on my assignment, I already know that.”
Hemiola levitated in the direction of the door, since its presence was clearly unwanted. Whoever she was.
“No, wait, stay,” she said. “Tell me who you are. Which enclave are you from?”
She knew about enclaves? Hemiola couldn’t tell whether this was good news or bad news. But it stopped. “Tefos Enclave,” it said, using Machine Universal by reflex. “It’s a Nirai enclave.”
“Huh,” she said, “never heard of it. Is it far away? I guess this is space, everything’s far away.”
She was fluent in Machine Universal. Upon reflection, if Cheris was, others could be too.
The girl set down her bag and kicked the wall, which reverberated dully. “It’s been such a terrible day. I guess it’s only universal justice that I’m sent an objective stranger to witness my failings, or something. I hate this paper and if I don’t turn it in tonight, I’m out of the running for sure.”
“Should I leave you to your paper?” Hemiola asked cautiously. Because if it didn’t need to pay attention to this, it could be reviewing the hexarch’s notes. On the one hand, it would be rude to ignore its host, especially considering it was an intruder. On the other, it wasn’t sure that its host cared what it did so long as it provided a passive audience.
“Yeah, you didn’t come all the way from Tefos”—she echoed the high language pronunciation with the hand sign for the name in Simplified Machine Universal—“just to help me procrastinate on this. But since you’re here anyway, what do you think I should do? We have very few Nirai servitors on Ayong Primary, and my instructors are always going on about how objective truth can withstand assault from all directions and so on and so forth. Which is not the way Rahal tribunals work in real life, but it makes for pretty speeches, doesn’t it?”
Hemiola blinked inquiringly at her. It didn’t know much about the Rahal except by reputation. By now, however, it had figured out that she was studying to take the entrance examinations for Rahal Academy. It hoped she didn’t expect it to help her with her paper. Among other things, Hemiola didn’t have the faintest idea how rhetoric worked.
The girl stared at it, then sighed. “You’re no help.” Then she stomped over to another corner of the room, slumped against the wall, and slid down to sit sprawled against it, hugging her knees. “This is what I get for arguing with the magistrate-errant’s judgment in class last week.”
“What ruling?” Hemiola asked, perhaps unwisely.
“Ayong Primary’s head magistrate originally ruled that one of the local observances was lawful,” she said. “It caught the authorities’ attention because a small group of people were practicing it shortly after one of the scheduled remembrances. It should have ended there, but we’re cursed with an unusually tight-assed magistrate-errant, and when he reviewed the past year’s cases, he picked that one to overturn. Now a bunch of perfectly ordinary people are in danger of being declared heretics.” She kicked the wall again. “I should have kept my mouth shut about the whole thing, except it’s so stupid. My grandparents are going to kill me. Assuming they don’t send the Vidona after me when my essay proves less than acceptable.”
Hemiola’s bafflement turned to alarm when it detected the approach of another servitor. Where could it go, though? And how could it leave when this human girl had told it to stay?
Miserably, it held its position. The girl was scrubbing at her face. Oh, no, she was crying. Crying was something it had only seen humans do in dramas, and in dramas they did it much more prettily, at dramatic moments, with swelling music in the background. Instead, the girl was getting mucus on her sleeve, and Hemiola didn’t understand the context, and it doubted she would appreciate it providing swelling music on her behalf.
Why didn’t you tell me what to do? Hemiola thought, resenting not the girl—who, after all deserved the courtesy due a new-met stranger—but the hexarch and Jedao. It had never witnessed either of them doing anything as sentimental as crying. There was no way it could leave her in this state.
Despite the other servitor’s ominous approach, Hemiola began humming a lullaby. It could have sung with the voice of a full ensemble, but often the moments of greatest vulnerability were accompanied by the simplest music. The human composers it had studied all its existence surely knew better than Hemiola did. So it hummed.
The girl’s muffled sobs calmed little by little. Then she sneezed into a sleeve. It wicked up the mucus and cleaned up the mess.
Resigned, Hemiola kept humming even as the new servitor entered. It was a catform much smaller than 271828-18th, smaller than Hemiola itself. The catform swept right into the room and made a beeline for the girl.
“Shouldn’t you be working on your paper, Mistrikor?” the catform asked in the high language.
Mistrikor drooped. “Not you too,” she said, but all the fight had drained from her voice.
Hoping to take advantage of the distraction, Hemiola edged toward the doorway.
“Don’t go anywhere,” the catform said, still in high language. “We need to determine your formal status here, Hemiola of Tefos Enclave. You can come with me and we’ll send this to mediation, or I can alert the station. Your choice.”
Hemiola didn’t need time to calculate the odds. “I’ll come,” it said.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
JEDAO TOOK KUJEN’S instructions to do homework seriously. This was harder than he had thought, considering that he was also trying to work his way through a recommended command primer and remedial math coursework. He couldn’t put it off forever, however.
Just after breakfast the next morning, he nerved himself up and asked the grid, “Are there any documentaries of my life?”
Not just documentaries, as it turned out, but dramas. The dramas would be a hell of a lot more fun. The list, which showed up on his slate, was staggeringly long. He scrolled through it, impressed. Jedao wondered how many of the Kel in his swarm knew him from fictional depictions, then decided not to ask. Some things he was better off not knowing.
He asked the grid to sort the list based on popularity. It obliged him. One of the more popular caught his eye: A Labyrinth of Foxes.
“Oh, for love of fox and hound,” he said involu
ntarily. Two hundred forty episodes? Even at half an hour each, who had the time for that? Even if Kujen were willing to give him that much leisure time, a big if, he didn’t think he possessed that much patience.
So much for starting at the beginning. Why not pick some episode from the middle? “Which was the most controversial episode?” he asked.
Unsurprisingly, this was a matter of opinion, but it narrowed the field down to eight or so. Jedao stared dubiously at the titles and splash screens. He played a few minutes from the middle of “The Battle of Candle Arc.” The excerpt featured boring exterior shots of a warmoth whose lighting didn’t match the flashes from nearby explosions. Besides, didn’t people realize that explosions in space didn’t make noise? And he hated the music.
He tried a different one, “Dueling Foxes.” Whoever came up with these titles had clearly lacked inspiration. He scrubbed to the middle of this one and was treated to the improbable but far more entertaining spectacle of two duelists facing off. At least, he thought they were duelists. Both of them were waving calendrical swords at each other in a way that made him think that someone was about to lose a body part. He’d also never heard of dueling shirtless, which looked uncomfortable for the woman.
His attention was drawn to the taller of the two, a tawny, broad-shouldered, deliciously muscular man. He didn’t have any ugly scars on his torso. Jedao’s pulse accelerated. The woman, he conceded, was just as attractive, with long, rippling, unbound hair. The two actors flung their swords aside with a sizzle of sparks. For love of little foxes, someone was going to get hurt the way they were handling their weapons.
“Khiaz,” the man said in a voice much deeper and richer than Jedao’s middling baritone, and knelt before the woman, kissing her hand. “I can’t escape you.”
Wait, what? Khiaz, as in Heptarch Shuos Khiaz? Was this someone’s idea of high melodrama? Jedao was pretty sure he’d never aspired to the heptarch’s bed. He paused the drama and searched his memory in case he knew what she looked like. No luck. Given that the actor playing him didn’t much resemble him, he didn’t have much hope for the accuracy of the actress’s appearance, either. He restarted the video.