Revenant Gun

by Yoon Ha Lee

  At some point Hemiola resumed reading the hexarch’s notes. Taking inventory was routine work and required little processing power, so it could do both at once. Besides, Cheris and her companion might be fascinated by the sheer variety of sealants that were crammed into this next set of crates, but Hemiola didn’t share their interest.

  Tired of research on dwarf moths, which didn’t seem to be going anywhere, Hemiola returned to an earlier journal. While the files had comprehensive indexes, it had been compiling one of its own based not on the text but on the doodles. The hexarch didn’t consider them important, but they were more engaging than the text and graphs and tables.

  Geometric diagrams drawn in flawless isometric perspective. Beautifully rendered diagrams of the projective plane. The occasional intertwined pornographic figures. Hemiola guessed that some of those had been drawn from reference from multiple partners, judging by the variety of bodies and poses. That, or the hexarch possessed great reserves of imagination.

  Had he ever shown these to anyone? Hemiola tried to imagine what their reactions would have been.

  More diagrams. Not math, nor any technical discipline that Hemiola recognized. Everything divided up into four segments, each segment sometimes subdivided even further into halves. No, not always four—occasionally three larger segments. But usually four.

  Seventeen days away from Ayong Primary, Hemiola deciphered the diagrams. By then it had completed the inventory, dragging out the task as long as it could so it didn’t have to face 1491625’s glower. It was in the middle of taking a break with one of the newer dramas that the Ayong servitors had provided Cheris. 1491625 had grudgingly allowed Cheris to dig out the episodes for Hemiola.

  It was the song-and-dance set-piece at the climax of the eighth episode that gave Hemiola the key, although it didn’t realize it at first. Cheris liked the set-piece. Hemiola didn’t.

  “Why not?” Cheris had said wistfully. “It’s pretty.”

  Hemiola had fluttered distressed red-oranges at her. “None of the colors coordinate! And several of the backup dancers aren’t synchronized, even allowing for human reflexes.”

  “Well, yes,” Cheris said, “that’s part of the charm. Didn’t you know? This particular drama was on the censors’ list for depicting heretics in a friendly light. Not just censored. The hearing went all the way up to the Rahal high court, to the Rahal hexarch.”

  At least faking interest was easier with a human audience than with a servitor one. 1491625’s lights in the ultraviolet rippled with soft, cynical amusement, but it kept its observations to itself.

  “No, that’s not the part you should find thought-provoking,” Cheris said. “The hexarch ruled in the drama’s favor. Because she had watched it too. I don’t know whether she liked it or not. I never knew much about her. But the hexarchs squabbled over it, and eventually the Rahal hexarch gave way to the others. But some of the servitors found out it was going to be wiped and smuggled it out. By the time anyone realized, it was everywhere. The hexarchs had to pretend that had been their intent all along. No one ever figured out the servitors were involved.”

  “So that’s where you got the idea,” 1491625 said from the helm.

  “What idea?” Hemiola said in spite of itself.

  Cheris cracked her knuckles. Her eyes were older than they should have been, and suddenly smudged with exhaustion. “How to pull apart my home and get my people killed.”

  “You mean the Mwennin.”

  Her voice grew distant. “Yes, the Mwennin. Jedao’s people are long lost. The Hafn conquered his homeworld a couple centuries back.”

  Hemiola had no constructive response to that, so it returned its attention to the dreadful song-and-dance number. In fact, it went back and rewatched all the dance routines in the previous seven episodes for good measure. If anything, its opinion of them became more critical.

  Then it returned to the one Cheris liked. That was when it realized what the hexarch had diagrammed in the margins of his notes: dances.

  It made sense, in a way. Hemiola replayed some of its memories of the hexarch’s visits. Yes: that flawless sense of balance, the way he always placed his feet precisely. He hadn’t just danced casually, to pass the time. He had studied the art seriously. Where had he learned that?

  Who are you? Hemiola wondered.

  The hexarch and Jedao had danced together in one of the rooms at Tefos. Hemiola remembered how it and the other two servitors had changed the decorations each day for the hexarch’s delight. Mostly paper lanterns with black-and-silver moths painted on them. It didn’t know the significance of the lanterns, even now. How solicitously the hexarch had reviewed the steps with Jedao, whispered the patterns to him when he faltered.

  “I have a personal question,” Hemiola said to Cheris.

  Cheris was bent over a subdisplay, reading up on research budgets. “Go ahead,” she said without looking at it.

  “Whenever you visited Tefos,” it said, not knowing of a more tactful way to phrase the question, “you were always clumsy. Here, though—”

  “I’m not?”

  “Yes.”

  “Kujen liked to put Jedao in clumsy bodies,” Cheris said simply. “It was a simple enough modification on his end. Psych surgery isn’t the only kind of medical intervention he’s versed in. He liked reminding Jedao of what he’d lost.”

  A long way from the boy who had wanted to feed hungry children, then. Or perhaps Hemiola had misunderstood the boy all along. “Who taught the hexarch to dance?”

  “He never told me,” Cheris said. “He never talked much about where he came from. He’d seen a great many worlds die, battlefields and testing grounds for weapons we don’t have names for anymore, worlds torn apart by their own problems. By the time he met me, deaths didn’t move him much.” Her mouth twisted up on one side. “We had that in common, anyway.”

  Cheris was much more convincing when she wasn’t trying to tell it how corrupt the hexarch was. As if corruption had any meaning to a hexarch. Did corruption matter, when he had shared his gifts of knowledge and technology with the hexarchate for all his life? It wasn’t sure where it fell on that question.

  Worlds upon worlds knew Cheris, or Jedao, as the Immolation Fox. Those same worlds didn’t know the hexarch’s name. It had learned that much. The hexarch preferred to move in the shadows. And while people didn’t whisper the hexarch’s name with fear, they feared the world he had made.

  What went wrong? Hemiola wondered.

  “Kujen grew homesick from time to time,” Cheris said. “That much I know. I don’t think his home was a good place. But it was his, and it stopped existing, and that kind of thing matters. Shuos Mikodez told me once that Kujen had been a refugee once upon a time. It’s hard to imagine it, but Mikodez’s information tends to be reliable. I usually wish it wasn’t.”

  “You and Kujen must have had the best conversations,” 1491625 said, snidely.

  “We did,” Cheris said, regaining some of her good mood “I remember the one time right after we’d—made an alliance. Back when Jedao was still alive, and our first meeting.” She waved toward Hemiola. “Before Tefos, even, years before.”

  “Do tell,” 1491625 said, its lights strobing with sarcasm.

  “If you hate my stories so much—”

  “I want to know,” Hemiola said.

  Cheris’s smile lacked humor. “We’d agreed that the heptarchate needed to be reborn,” she said. “We... discussed things for a while. It was a precarious moment.”

  From Cheris’s elevated pulse and temperature, Hemiola could guess what form some of that discussion had taken. But it didn’t point that out. If she didn’t want to bring it up, it wasn’t going to either.

  “I was talking about changes to the military code as part of a general program of social reform.” Cheris’s drawl had gotten stronger. “For some reason I was intent on overhauling the section that dealt with courts-martial. Maybe I should have stuck with it. It might have come in useful later.�
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  “I thought they never court-martialed you,” 1491625 said.

  “That’s technically correct.”

  “So your dishonorable discharge—”

  “I wouldn’t dream on standing on regulation,” Cheris lied. Neither 1491625 nor Hemiola called her on it. “Anyway, Kujen propped himself up on an elbow and demanded, ‘While you’re fussing with regs that no one else cares about, who’s going to run the heptarchate?’ And I said that I’d have to do the job while a provisional government was set up, unless he wanted it.” Her mouth twisted. “I suggested we arm-wrestle for it. It was funny at the time. At which point—”

  “Yes?” Hemiola said when Cheris fell silent.

  Cheris’s breath huffed out in remembered irony. “He was incredulous that I’d consider surrendering power. And he was right. I knew, on some level, that if I lingered I was always going to wield power whether I wanted it or not. And I didn’t—but no one who topples an entire government is going to be credible on that point. It’s why I left High General Brezan nine years ago. I didn’t want to get in the way of the transition.”

  This time Hemiola believed her, even if it couldn’t unpuzzle her motives. More troublingly, though—“The hexarch knew? And he didn’t try to stop you?”

  Cheris didn’t laugh at it or mock it. “Hemiola,” she said, “Jedao was a weapon in the Kel Arsenal. I belonged to Kel Command. When Hexarch Nirai Kujen brought me along to Tefos, do you imagine he had their permission?”

  It could guess the answer to that question.

  “Why would he want to destroy the world he built?” Hemiola said.

  “His puppets were becoming less willing to be moved by the master’s hand,” Cheris said. “During Jedao’s lifetime, the Liozh had grown in power. And they were starting to ask inconvenient questions about the remembrances, and whether they could be repealed. This displeased Kujen.”

  We are a nation of thousands upon thousands of worlds, and we can’t prevent a child from starving right next to one of our faction academies.

  “I can’t reconcile the hexarch you remember with the hexarch in his early writings,” Hemiola said. “Later on, though... he’s more absorbed in his studies, and less concerned with people, except as they’re useful to him.”

  “That’s becoming a theme,” Cheris said. “I don’t know how it is for servitors. Humans don’t live for 900 years. Even in the space of a normal lifetime, we change a lot.”

  Hemiola didn’t have to ask how she knew, the part of her that was Jedao. Everyone knew the Immolation Fox’s story. It had even watched some dramas about him, although it hadn’t had the nerve to ask her what she thought of them.

  “He must have told you something of his motives,” Hemiola said. “What did he want?”

  “He claimed it was about watching the world be reborn,” Cheris said. “I didn’t believe it for a moment. Kujen never cared about high-minded abstract principles. The only thing that really matters to him is mathematics. In any case, he wouldn’t have stuck out his neck for a high-minded abstract principle. He devoted himself to the most basic pleasures. Food. Sex. Beautiful clothes. He... didn’t sleep much, but he liked watching other people sleep.” Cheris leaned back in her seat and rubbed her eyes tiredly. “I figured out straight off that he didn’t like being vulnerable. Made himself the perfect defense.”

  “But you cared about principles,” Hemiola said, understanding at last. “And you didn’t like the hexarch’s system.”

  “No.” Cheris’s eyes had gone cold and intent, a killer’s eyes. Jedao was watching it from behind her eyes. “I would have liked to kill him. But killing him wouldn’t have solved the problem even if I’d been able to manage it. I tried, when I first met him. He simply hijacked a new body, and after that I realized I didn’t have a way of getting rid of him permanently. So I had to get close to him to learn what I could, and try to reform his system. Besides,” and she pulled a face, “we needed each other.”

  Ebullient pink-and-yellow lights lit up the entire cockpit of the needlemoth as 1491625 expressed its opinion of that statement. “You mean he was good in bed.”

  “Well, even after ‘only’ a few centuries, he knew a lot of... but never mind.”

  Hemiola had the mortifying and possibly heretical thought of the hexarch starring as a courtesan in a drama. Certainly he was always pretty enough to be one, even in a world dominated by pretty people. Even more mortifyingly, it had enough videos of him to... I am not going to make a music video of the hexarch dancing.

  “If you were allies once,” Hemiola said after it had tamped down that terrible idea, “what changed your mind?”

  Instead of lying again, Cheris propped her chin in her hands and sighed. “He knows I don’t need him anymore, which makes me a liability of the first order. I’ve already defied him by creating the Compact. He wouldn’t destroy me for spite, but he doesn’t tolerate threats to his power, either. And right now I’m the single person best equipped to stop him.” She contemplated some snarl of stratagems invisible to anyone but herself. “I’m sorry you were dragged into this.”

  Hemiola didn’t trust itself to answer. It decided that reinventorying the cargo hold was in order. Just in case some random vermin had scuttled aboard at Ayong Primary and were eating their way through the beloved ration bars.

  Either Cheris’s favorite flavor was roasted dried squid, because that was the one disappearing at the fastest rate, or she hated it and was trying to get rid of it so she could get to something tastier. She cleaned up after herself conscientiously enough; the needlemoth’s systems recycled the wrappers tidily. But each wrapper came with a scannable code identifying its flavor, expiration date, and manufacturing facility of origin, presumably for quality control purposes. Servitors’ work, which they could do without even opening up crates to look at the redundant human-readable labels.

  Hemiola returned to browsing through the hexarch’s notes. They finally revealed why assassinating the hexarch was impossible. It didn’t recognize the revelation for what it was. It came in the form of a map, although it wasn’t to scale, which bothered it more than it cared to admit. The hexarch had inked it in several different colors. After searching its own databases, updated with information from Ayong Primary, Hemiola concluded that the colors denoted different calendrical zones of influence. Yellow represented the hexarchate. Other pastel colors represented the Taurag Republic, the Hafn, Hausse, the Gwa Reality, and more.

  The Gwa-an keep to themselves, the hexarch had written—in shorthand, but by now this posed no challenge. The Hafn and Taurags are the most likely to be problematic in the next decades.

  And: This is the first time in 237 years that our borders have been under serious threat of collapse, even if only along the Entangled and Crescendo Marches. I can feel the pressure of the encroaching calendrical rot like a disease under my skin.

  There followed a long sequence of equations and feverish side notes under the heading black cradle. Hemiola had to study them intensely for several days, disguising its interest with judicious applications of bad dramas. Even the incompetently choreographed dance sequences no longer mattered. The stakes were too high for it to spare much thought for its former hobbies.

  The hexarch and Jedao could switch bodies. Jedao did so only with the hexarch’s assistance, which perhaps explained some of his ambivalent attitude toward the hexarch.

  On the other hand, the hexarch could jump at will. This explained how he had survived the past 900-odd years. Jedao hadn’t murdered the hexarch in bed (or while dancing, or at dinner) because it wouldn’t have done any good. The hexarch would simply have jumped into another body. So Cheris had told the truth about that.

  Here, at last, came the explanation for the hexarch’s interest in his nation’s borders, and how intimately his welfare was bound up with them, beyond the obvious. His immortality—his ability to inhabit other bodies—was an exotic effect. It only worked within the high calendar’s sphere of influence.

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nbsp; With ruthless paranoia, the hexarch had teased out the existence of other exotic effects that could destroy him. He’d even prototyped a couple of weapons, presumably for use against Jedao. This struck Hemiola as singularly dangerous, but then again, Jedao hadn’t managed to obtain those weapons while he had the hexarch in his sights.

  Some Kel formation effects could also sever the hexarch from his host body and annihilate him. But the Kel would never disobey their commanders, and Hemiola couldn’t imagine that the hexarch would allow those commanders enough freedom to act against him.

  The current fragmentation of the hexarchate must worry the hexarch. After all, if the nation fell, so did he. Even worse, the Protectorate and Compact had joined forces and were transitioning away from the high calendar.

  Determined to make further sense of this, Hemiola skimmed rapidly through Kujen’s earlier notes. If it had been human, it was sure it would have developed a headache. But it found the answer it had sought in the research on moths it had earlier thought insignificant. Not the material on dwarf moths, but even earlier, at the very beginning of the mothdrive research program.

  The moths are alive, the hexarch had written. The evidence can’t be ignored: they are almost certainly sentient. If we proceed with this line of research we will be enslaving aliens who have done as no harm.

  On the other hand, the heptarchate is losing its battles. I watch the news daily. Despite the propaganda I can tell. Whole worlds eaten by the invaders at our borders. A faster stardrive would make all the difference.

  Two days later: I wish it didn’t hurt to think about the moths. About dying children. About starving populations. Every time I think about it, I remember my own childhood. I wish I could stop caring.

  And the day after that, scrawled in the margin in jagged, shaky letters almost entirely unlike his usual handwriting: I know how to do that.