by Yoon Ha Lee
Three of the four servitors flickered their lights at each other. Jedao wondered what that meant. Then Pink said, “It’s simpler if we use the high language. You haven’t the time to learn ours.”
“I can only pretend to be absorbed by this stuff”—Jedao waved at the video—“for so long. I think. So let’s get to the point. What do you want?”
“The same thing you do,” Green said, its lights rippling in an intense display of reds. “To get rid of the hexarch.”
“Why,” Jedao said, “is he getting in your way terribly? Or is it that you’d rather not have to step around him? So to speak.” That didn’t make sense to him either, if his experience on the command moth was typical. “Is it just the hexarch, or humans in general?”
“We have to start somewhere,” Pink said. “When I say ‘we,’ I mean a particular enclave consisting of the servitors on the command moth.”
“Enclave?” Jedao asked.
The servitors exchanged a flicker of lights. Then Pink said, “Did you think all servitors were a single group, with united interests?”
“I never thought about it,” Jedao said.
“Well, your candor is worth something,” Pink said. “We have been the hexarch’s own servitors for quite some time. We wish to escape his service. Unfortunately, the hexarch’s own protections make this difficult.”
“Do tell,” Jedao said.
Pink explained Kujen’s particular mode of immortality to Jedao, and its constraints. This took some time, despite Pink’s attempt at succinctness. Jedao asked a few questions along the way, although he was trying not to interrupt too much
“Damnation,” Jedao said when it had finished. “You don’t pick easy targets either, do you?” He thought for a moment. “If I help you against the hexarch, I can take the fall, and you’ll escape notice.”
Pink flashed what Jedao took for acknowledgment.
“I need clarification on a point of astrography before we go any further,” he said. “I can’t rely on any of the maps I’ve been getting.” He said this simultaneously in the speech of moths, for the Revenant’s benefit.
Ask.
“Is Terebeg System really the Compact’s headquarters? Because if it’s true that their calendar only permits the voluntary execution of exotic effects, no one but the suicidal or crazy would permit a threshold winnower to operate on them.”
“Go on,” Pink said.
“The winnower is associated with me as plainly as the Deuce of Gears. The anniversary of Hellspin must exert a powerful fascination over people or Kujen wouldn’t rely on it as the focus of a calendrical attack. But that wouldn’t persuade people to die for a historical reenactment.”
The servitors’ lights dimmed.
“We’re not attacking the Compact, are we? We’re attacking the Protectorate. Our own people. I mean, the Kel’s own people anyway, if not yours specifically.”
Orange spoke for the first time. “You’re the only one who didn’t know it.”
Confirmation at last. “Then the Kel—”
Yes, the Revenant said. The Kel have known all along. The servitors tell me what they whisper to each other. Why do you think they hate you so much?
Well, Jedao supposed he couldn’t blame them. Disheartening as it was for him, it must be worse to be a Kel and have no control over the situation. “I will not permit it,” he said.
You seem to be under that impression, yes, the Revenant said. How? You are the most powerless person in the swarm.
Jedao stared down at his hands. Light from the video washed over it in reddish hues. “As a last resort,” he said bleakly, “I can find a way to kill myself. And hope I can stay dead long enough to jinx the whole thing sky-high. That’ll prevent Hellspin Mark Two, although it won’t get rid of Kujen. Unless you know of a way.”
“Unfortunately not,” Pink said. “Some exotic effects can destroy him, but he does not permit their use anywhere in his presence.”
“You know which effects?”
“No. He guards that information well.”
Jedao saw it now; saw how he could nail Kujen. Except he was still missing a piece. He needed a formation to kill Kujen, if one existed.
Jedao, the Revenant said, you don’t need to torment yourself over this. You can’t lure him into the infantry drill hall. He is not easily infatuated, unlike certain Shuos generals.
He colored. “You don’t see it either,” he said in a rush. “That means he might not. What I need is time to work out the mathematics.” He was by no means sure he had the technical knowledge necessary, but it would have been contemptible not to try. “No, of course I can’t pin him in an infantry training hall. But he’s still aboard this moth. The fact that he plans on immolating the rest of the swarm guarantees it. And if we’re going to be in Protectorate territory, then he’s trapped. If we can figure out how to generate the exotic effects we need, I know how to spike out his heart.
“I need to know how to arrange the formation components to target an effect inward into the swarm. I’ve been studying the mathematics in hopes of unriddling it. I need your help for that part.”
Sudden silence.
“General,” Green said. It flashed almost directly into Jedao’s eyes to get his attention. “We’ll look into it. If you help us with this operation, we will ally with you.”
“What is your stake, Revenant?” Jedao asked, both in moth-speech and out loud.
It was Green who answered, its lights growing softly blue-tinged with melancholy. “The Revenant wishes to fly unharnessed, even if it’s unlikely that any free moths remain. Kujen and the early heptarchate’s masters were very thorough.”
“You mean that—” Free moths. Jedao had never imagined moths elsewhere in the universe, living their own lives.
The chants are fragmented, the Revenant said matter-of-factly. I am less interested in historical accuracy. If they lead me to space empty of humans, that will be good enough.
“You may need a crew,” Jedao said. “For maintenance.” And to disable the harness, but that went without saying.
“Yes,” Orange said, amber-bright with good humor. It added, “You could come with us.”
Jedao choked with the sudden desire to do exactly that. He could carry out his mission to free the Kel, then carve out some unscarred swath of sky for himself and the Revenant and this group of servitors. He could shed his past and begin anew.
Yet no one would then remain to deliver the Kel to some better authority. He was under no illusion that the Revenant or the servitors cared about their welfare. It wasn’t their job to.
On the other hand, how much would they trust him if he declined? “Yes,” he said. He knew the lie was a good one because he wanted so badly for it to be true.
The servitors flashed their agreement.
“You can stop by my quarters whenever it makes sense if you discover anything useful about formation geometries,” Jedao said. “What I’ll do is start messing around with drills throughout the swarm, get Kujen to think I’m bored and playing with my toys. If he notices you, I’ll explain you were checking my math. It will even be true.”
Then we are agreed.
“Kujen will notice if we do this too often,” Jedao said. “You’ll know his surveillance systems better than I do.”
“We are accustomed to discretion.” Pink.
“I just bet. Thank you, then.”
When they had left, Jedao finished the food, then ungloved to wash his hands. In spite of himself, he’d gotten some grease on his fingers. He stripped to the waist and inspected himself in the mirror. Formerly he had been preoccupied with the scars. This time he saw how thin he looked, the prominent ribs, the starved, sunken eyes. How had he not noticed this before?
He hadn’t noticed because he hadn’t cared. Hang in there, he told the reflection with a hint of ghastly humor, then returned to the table and shoved the tray to the side.
The next step was coming up with orders for the tactical group commanders.
He decided he’d leave Talaw in charge of coming up with exercises; Talaw would like that, and he had every faith in their ability. Meanwhile, he meant to speak with his infantry colonel. She would enjoy hearing from him. She had exuded pride in her profession each time he spoke with her. He remembered the beautiful drills she had presented him with, the infantry maneuvering in unison.
But first—
Jedao grabbed a slate. “I want to see my profile,” he said to the grid.
The profile appeared before him, although he couldn’t interpret great chunks of it. Jedao instructed the file to hide itself, then took up a second slate. From memory he took notes on all the battle records Kujen had showed him during their first meeting. He didn’t want the profile to distort his recollections.
He compared the notes to the profile. They matched up pretty well. The early battles were infantry battles. Other than Kujen’s garden, it was hard to imagine what that might be like. Bigger. A sky instead of ceilings. He knew what wind felt like, because of the garden’s artifice.
So the original Jedao had fought on planets. Did you think of them as being planets while you were on them? He had a notion of them as spinning spheres, like a child’s toys caught in the enveloping drift of the void. But they must seem different when you stood on them, looking up past the not-ceiling into the sky. How far up could you see?
While he could play any number of dramas or documentaries, this would make a much better excuse to converse with Muyyed. She would have stories to tell him. Or she would find a way to fake it. Either was fine as long as it convinced Kujen that he was acting out of insecurity about his abilities as a soldier, or boredom. Letting Kujen draw his own conclusions was the best strategy.
How good it is that you think so little of me, Jedao thought, and called Muyyed.
Jedao had memorized the high officers’ duty rosters. There wasn’t a lot to Muyyed’s life at the moment but routines. Her signifier was the Ashhawk Roosting, not normally favored in field officers unless you were in Medical, but she had done well enough for herself if not for the minor matter of serving in a swarm that had run afoul of Kujen.
“Message for Colonel Muyyed,” Jedao said to the grid. “I will be conducting a surprise review. Take advantage of whatever moments you can scrounge between getting this and my arrival to prepare your soldiers. I will start with barracks.”
The surprise review was as much a surprise to him as it was to them, which made it the best kind. Jedao set his uniform to full formal. The uniform’s elaborations of braid, the shimmering brocaded richness of the fabric, no longer struck him as ridiculous. Appearances mattered. The use of full formal would reassure Muyyed’s infantry of his seriousness. He set up a suitable hash of formation elements with the help of the grid’s tactical calculator and saved them to his slate.
This time he used the anonymity of his guards as a shield, smiling at them without permitting them any identity beyond that of their role. They could tell the difference. It was well that they were afraid. For his part, he took solace in the fact that they understood the threat he posed.
The barracks occupied a special level of the Revenant. It wasn’t specific to the Revenant. He had examined the layouts of the cindermoths and bannermoths as well. Jedao got the distinct impression that moth Kel and infantry Kel did not regard each other with affection. The separation of the services had some basis in maintaining their identities as units. A certain competitiveness was the natural result.
“Garden Kel,” one of the officers had called the infantry complement at high table. He remembered Opaira introducing him to the term. “Garden” referred not only to dirtside and planets and gravity wells, but to the much-derided Andan with their love of flowers and distaste for open combat. Having never met an Andan, Jedao had no opinion.
From every spark a fire. The Kel snapped to attention when he arrived. Meanwhile, the black deadened wings of the ashhawks rose from the woven yellow-orange of tapestry-flames.
Colonel Muyyed stomped up to greet him. Her tread would never have any delicacy, nor was there anything but forthright eagerness in the eyes she raised to him. “General Jedao, sir,” she said. Full formal looked good on her, not because she was beautiful—his acquaintance with Kujen was making him jaded about beauty—but because it reinforced the impression of her as an officer who lived within the boundaries of her duty, and nowhere else.
“Show me what you have,” Jedao said.
He selected portions of the barracks to walk through, taking his time. The Kel stood stiff and hushed. He could have heard the dropping of a moth’s wing. Sharp-eyed, he pointed out scuffed shoes, slouched postures, people out of position. The scuffed shoes impressed him, given the ability of modern materials to heal themselves. But it wouldn’t be the first time army boots were deficient in some way.
Jedao found other problems, although he exercised judgment about what he dressed the Kel down for. He made a fumble-fingered corporal disassemble and reassemble her scorch pistol in front of him. Her eyes went hot with mixed humiliation and hatred. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t have to. She would remember the lesson. While he didn’t imagine that people worried about doing push-ups for a mass murderer, he needed them to be ready. The success of his plan depended on these people as much as it did on the math.
His back prickled when he and Muyyed exited the last of the barracks. “Your office,” he said, mildly enough.
Her face sobered even more, which he hadn’t thought possible. “Naturally, sir.”
No one shot Jedao in the back on the way out, always a plus. Perhaps word had gotten around that it wouldn’t do any good.
Muyyed’s office was on an administrative level above the barracks level. Did people ever think of taking power tools and opening up holes in Muyyed’s floor? On second thought, Muyyed wasn’t the one he’d fear if he damaged the moth. Kujen probably did nasty things to people who messed with his handiwork.
Muyyed’s office had decor in restrained good taste. This included an icon of the hexarchate’s wheel on a corner of the desk. It was a simple carved disc of wood, the grain showing through the finish where handling had worn it through. Upon the other side of the desk rested a statuette of four interlocked figures. They looked as though they were locked in battle, or copulating, or possibly inventing a new kind of macrame.
“Foci for meditations during the remembrances,” Muyyed said. She sounded reverent. “It’s an excellent reminder of the world the way it ought to be.”
Jedao confined himself to a nod despite a flash of unwelcome memory of the prisoner of war the Vidona had killed in front of him. If Kujen represented the world the way it ought to be, then the world was a terrible place, but that was no surprise. He would achieve nothing by alienating the colonel.
“Anything to drink?” Muyyed named several possibilities that he didn’t recognize.
Jedao demurred. Let her draw what conclusions she wanted.
Muyyed looked wistful, but she wasn’t about to pour herself a drink if he wasn’t having one.
“What was your most memorable experience groundside?” he asked abruptly. He didn’t want to give her time to think, especially since she had revealed that she was fundamentally sympathetic to the hexarch’s cause, if not his methods.
She answered immediately, which he liked. “You wouldn’t find it remarkable. I was a junior lieutenant, second assignment out. Not even heretics. We were loaned out to the Andan for police work, something they didn’t trust the local Vidona with. The rumor was there had been a row between the local Andan and Vidona governors. I never found out the story and at this end of time it doesn’t matter.
“Anyway, I ended up in a deserted street by one of the smaller city colleges.” She meant one of the civilian institutions, rather than a faction academy. “They taught architecture, graphic design, things like that. I figured they’d be harmless. But they had definite opinions. Not heretical opinions so much as a certain flavor of, hmm, civic involvement. I spent that eveni
ng getting drunk and discovering that architects are much better at debate than I am.”
Jedao tried to picture her as a young officer, pulled into the dramatics of local politics out of boredom or frustration or even sincerity. He couldn’t get there.
“You thought it was going to be some horrible moment in a trench, or someone dying in my arms, didn’t you?” Muyyed said. “No. It was the surreal experience of being a Kel with a gun that I wasn’t going to use. As it turned out, most of my life was spent hanging around not using my gun, but as an excitable young Kel you never think about that.”
He couldn’t picture Muyyed as ever having been excitable, either, with or without the help of alcohol. “Tell me about a battle, then,” Jedao said. “What it was like your first time.”
“It was different from the textbooks,” Muyyed said. She smoothed an infinitesimal wrinkle in one glove. Not smiling, not unsmiling either. “You expect there to be mud, or to have to spend weeks in rehabilitation after having your eyes regrown. But it’s not real until you’re there. Just like everything else in life.”
Muyyed was sixty-eight years old. She had spent her entire adult life with the Kel. Would have seen a lot, to be promoted from groundside to the infantry commander for a swarm complement. “Do you miss groundside?” Jedao said.
“It’s duty,” she said. Not an answer.
“I was going through the archives,” Jedao said. No need to get more specific. “I had some thoughts about some old battles, but I want more data on the human element.” Let her think he was taking her into his confidence.
She nodded as if he had confirmed something she had been thinking. “Whatever you need, sir.”
Excellent. Jedao gave her the files’ key. “As of now,” he said, “these are your training assignments.”