by Yoon Ha Lee
He stirs slightly at that, as if he had begun to smile. “In that you are mistaken,” he says. “I have no doubt that your queen knows the truth, even if she has misled you. A heart isn’t what you have. It’s what you do.”
Not just the palace but the capital entire is cloaked in strata of silence. The only sounds now are the words that pass between you and the doomed king. You listen for heartbeat drums and hear nothing. Even your soldiers are escorting the captives back to the Stormrose without sound.
“Take the book,” the philosopher-king says. “As a souvenir if nothing else.” And then he tells you something unexpected: “Try not to think too harshly of your queen. She is something of an expert on difficult choices.”
You accept the gift, tucking it into folds of shadow. The snakebite words pass into you; you ignore the scour of stories freeze-dried. “It’s your turn now,” you say, and raise your gun.
* * *
The queen’s people know your gun as Candor. The queen’s idea of a joke, a gift to someone who rarely has the opportunity to speak freely.
You and the queen know the gun’s true name. It is called Combustion.
As a point of fact, the gun’s incomparable lethality is only tangentially related to the vulnerabilities of paper or cloth.
* * *
The Stormrose bears you and the soldiers and the prisoners back to the queen’s starport. You are the first to disembark. The queen awaits you with her customary tiger. “What have you brought for me?” she asks. “The smoke-skeleton of a bird? A scintillant circuit? A mirror of undesired insights?”
“A book,” you say as you salute her, attempting to not express your doubts about the whole endeavor. You produce it for her inspection.
The queen laughs and returns your salute with a mocking wave. “Of course. He always did believe that everyone could be educated. It isn’t the worst fallacy I’ve ever encountered.” She takes the book from you and sets it before the tiger. The tiger bats at it experimentally. Probably just as dubious as you are.
“The disposition of the prisoners?” you ask. What was the point of ferrying them all back here, anyway? The queen has occasionally taken interest in gladiatorial amusements, but she is unlikely to be frivolous at a time like this.
“In your absence I have prepared a dungeon,” the queen says. She gestures, and you see it in the distance: an obtrusion you had mistaken for some recent fantasia of topiary. “The prisoners can reside there for the moment.”
You give the necessary orders, and the soldiers and their freight of unspeaking captives begin to march toward the dungeon. “I don’t understand what use you have for these people,” you say.
She doesn’t smile. “Book, jewel, bird, it’s immaterial,” she says. “The people were the point of this exercise in numbers.”
You should have figured it out earlier. She was never interested in refueling the lanterns through some treasure contrived of riddles, although in a land where starships coexist with chimeras, it wasn’t impossible that such a treasure would perform as specified. No: she means to use the captives as fuel.
“You have never approved of me,” the queen says dryly, “but then, I have never required your approval. It has only been enough that what I do is for the preservation of the realm; any ruler’s duty.”
“You’re going to run out of prisoners,” you say. “The supply of foreigners is finite. And after that, what then—your own people? Incompetent chefs? Birds that sing too early in the morning? Overly demanding consorts?”
“I almost wish you’d lose your temper more often,” she muses. “You’re not incapable of wit.” Her regard narrows. “But the world is dimming, and I have need of you yet.”
* * *
The world beyond has lanterns, which are called stars. Nuclei strike each other, overcome the forces that would repel them from each other, and form new nuclei. Just as shadows can be crushed together, so can particles, and in the process they dance a fury of light. Yet no star burns forever, and no universe warms its inhabitants forever, either.
This process, while it lasts, is known as fusion. A form of combustion, if you like.
* * *
You don’t like the queen, yet she has this virtue: she has always looked out for the best interests of her realm. If the rest of the world has to burn for her people’s welfare, so be it. It is this knifing purity of purpose that has kept you by her side all this time.
“A lesson for you, if you will,” the queen says. She sounds quietly exhausted, and that faint vulnerability alarms you. You do not wish to see weakness in her. It implies weakness in yourself, to the extent that you are her instrument. “There is no convenient isomorphism between the physics of the world beyond and the laws by which we live here. People are shadows, and shadows are souls. Unlike nuclei, they will burn forever: the perfect fuel. Even so, I sought to spare people—not just our people, but our enemies as well—as long as possible.
“Look up—not toward the cut-out shapes of star and crescent, but up out of the plane of the world-tapestry, up along the perpendicular. All the stars out there have burned out. Everything is cooling. We have denuded a universe of lanterns for our own survival. The only ones left to us are those we nourish ourselves.”
You are learning to ask questions too late. You look up, then back at the queen. “There weren’t just lanterns in that universe,” you say.
* * *
Civilizations come to terms with the heat death of the universe in various ways, if they do at all. A small selection of possibilities:
Some of them attempt to rewrite the laws of entropy, as though statistical mechanics were amenable to postmodern narrative techniques.
Some of them research ways to punch through into other universes, anthropic principle notwithstanding. It is rarely the case that other universes are more hospitable than the current one.
Some of them build monuments of the rarest materials that they can devise, even knowing that everything will be pulverized to the same singularity punctuation. Not all of the art thus created is particularly worthy of the effort put into it, but neither will there be anyone left to judge.
And some of them simply commit mass suicide, on the grounds that they would prefer to choose the manner of their passing. At this end of time, weapons of incandescent destruction are commonplace. We may assume that a sufficiently determined civilization can contrive to obtain some.
Each of these trajectories ends in darkness.
* * *
“You want the captives to burn forever,” you say. “Then, as a corollary, the people you put into those lanterns will never escape through death.”
“You’re learning about consequences,” the queen says. “Yes. That’s exactly what I’m saying.”
You know why the queen chose you for this task, and not some other, although it’s not inconceivable that there are backups. She cut you from the paper of a lantern, sacrificing its light forever. You remember being raked by fire, and the shearing scissors. You remember being constructed without a heart.
Knight of Pyres. Combustion. She needs you to light the lanterns for her.
A heart isn’t what you have. It’s what you do, the philosopher-king had said. You wonder what would have happened if someone had said it to you a lifetime ago. It’s unlikely that you would have listened. Only now, as you behold a universe comprehensively dissipated, do you realize what service you have rendered all this time.
“I can’t do this for you,” you say.
“So you are no longer content to be a knight,” the queen says, unnervingly composed. The queen’s hands. “I advise you to consider your decision carefully. Once you start making choices of your own, you move into the realm of consequence, and in most matters you cannot erase mistakes, or responsibility. Are you certain this is what you want? Our world slowly waning to a forever black?” Her mouth curves as you hesitate.
You raise your gun.
She raises the scepter.
You’re
faster. And you don’t shoot her, anyway. You shoot the scepter. It goes up in a hellscream of fire and smoke and uncoiled volition.
The queen doesn’t let go, and the fire spreads to her hand. “In the darkness you will be outnumbered,” she says, raising her voice over the crackling. “People will attempt to relight the lanterns themselves. They will seek weapons deadlier than Combustion. They will come to you and beg in words like broken wings for any pittance of light. You will have to stand vigil alone in the forever night, listening, in case someone in the mass of shadow is clever enough to undo what you have done and start the furnace of souls.”
“Drop the scepter,” you cry. The gun is specific in its effect. This is an airless world and all fire is, in a sense, artificially sustained. She could survive a little while yet, one-armed.
“The realm of consequence,” she says remindingly.
Time does not pass here as it does in the world beyond, but it passes quickly enough when it cares to. The queen burns up like a candle, like a torch, like a star of guttering ambitions.
The queen’s people haven’t yet figured out what has transpired, but they will know soon enough.
You settle back, gun smoking endlessly, and wait as the darkness settles over the world by smothering degrees. You have a long vigil ahead of you: time to begin.
* * *
There is nothing left of this story but a whispering condensate of shadow, and a single unknight standing apart.
Copyright © 2014 by Yoon Ha Lee
Art copyright © 2014 by Jeffrey Alan Love