There were three or four men sitting at small tables in the gloom, their backs to the door, and a lean man with a bad complexion at the bar. “Here you are then,” he said without enthusiasm.
“Don’t mind Liam,” Mary said to me. Then, to Liam, “Have you anything fit for drinking?”
“No.”
“Well, that’s not why we came anyway.” Mary jerked her head toward me. “Here’s the recruit.”
“He doesn’t look like much.”
“Recruit for what?” I said. It struck me suddenly that Liam was keeping his hands below the bar, out of sight. Down where a hard man will keep a weapon, such as a cudgel or a gun.
“Don’t let his American teeth put you off. They’re part of the reason we wanted him in the first place.”
“So you’re a patriot, are you, lad?” Liam said in a voice that indicated he knew good and well that I was not.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
Liam glanced quickly at Mary and curled his lip in a sneer. “Ahh, he’s just in it for the crack.” In Irish craic means “fun” or “kicks”. But the filthy pun was obviously intended. My face hardened and I balled up my fists. Liam didn’t look concerned.
“Hush, you!” Mary said. Then, turning to me, “And I’ll thank you to control yourself as well. This is serious business. Liam, I’ll vouch for the man. Give him the package.”
Liam’s hands appeared at last. They held something the size of a biscuit tin. It was wrapped in white paper and tied up with string. He slid it across the bar.
“What’s this?”
“It’s a device,” Liam said. “Properly deployed, it can implode the entire administrative complex at Shannon Starport without harming a single civilian.”
My flesh ran cold.
“So you want me to plant this in the ’port, do yez?” I said. For the first time in weeks, I became aware of the falseness of my accent. Impulsively, I pulled the neuropendant from beneath my shirt, dropped it on the floor, and stepped on it. Whatever I said here, I would say it as myself. “You want me to go in there and fucking blow myself up?”
“No, of course not,” Mary said. “We have a soldier in place for that. But he—”
“Or she,” Liam amended.
“—or she isn’t in a position to smuggle this in. Human employees aren’t allowed to bring in so much as a pencil. That’s how little the Outsiders think of us. You, however, can. Just take the device through their machines – it’s rigged to read as a box of cigars – in your carry-on. Once you’re inside, somebody will come up to you and ask if you remembered to bring something for granny. Hand it over.”
“That’s all,” Liam said.
“You’ll be halfway to Jupiter before anything happens.”
They both looked at me steadily. “Forget it,” I said. “I’m not killing any innocent people for you.”
“Not people. Aliens.”
“They’re still innocent.”
“They wouldn’t be here if they hadn’t seized the planet. So they’re not innocent.”
“You’re a nation of fucking werewolves!” I cried. Thinking that would put an end to the conversation.
But Mary wasn’t fazed. “That we are,” she agreed. “Day by day, we present our harmless, domestic selves to the world, until one night the beast comes out to feed. But at least we’re not sheep, bleating complacently in the face of the butcher’s knife. Which are you, my heart’s beloved? A sheep? Or could there be a wolf lurking deep within?”
“He can’t do the job,” Liam said. “He’s as weak as watered milk.”
“Shut it. You have no idea what you’re talking about.” Mary fixed me with those amazing eyes of hers, as green as the living heart of Ireland, and I was helpless before them. “It’s not weakness that makes you hesitate,” she said, “but a foolish and misinformed conscience. I’ve thought about this far longer than you have, my treasure. I’ve thought about it all my life. It’s a holy and noble thing that I’m asking of you.”
“I—”
“Night after night, you’ve sworn you’d do anything for me – not with words, I’ll grant you, but with looks, with murmurs, with your soul. Did you think I could not hear the words you dared not say aloud? Now I’m calling you on all those unspoken promises. Do this one thing – if not for the sake of your planet, then for me.”
All the time we’d been talking, the men sitting at their little tables hadn’t made a noise. Nor had any of them turned to face us. They simply sat hunched in place – not drinking, not smoking, not speaking. Just listening. It came to me then how large they were, and how still. How alert. It came to me then that if I turned Mary down, I’d not leave this room alive.
So, really, I had no choice.
“I’ll do it,” I said. “And God damn you for asking me to.”
Mary went to hug me and I pushed her roughly away. “No! I’m doing this thing for you, and that puts us quits. I never want to see you or think of you again.”
For a long, still moment, Mary studied me calmly. I was lying, for I’d never wanted her so much as I did in that instant. I could see that she knew I was lying, too. If she’d let the least sign of that knowledge show, I believe I would have hit her. But she did not. “Very well,” she said. “So long as you keep your word.”
She turned and left and I knew I would never see her again.
Liam walked me to the door. “Be careful with the package outside in the rain,” he said, handing me an umbrella. “It won’t work if you let it get damp.”
I was standing in Shannon Starport, when Homeworld Security closed in on me. Two burly men in ITSA uniforms appeared on either side of me and their alien superior said, “Would you please come with us, sir.” It was not a question.
Oh, Mary, I thought sadly. You have a traitor in your organization. Other than me, I meant. “Can I bring my bag?”
“We’ll see to that, sir.”
I was taken to their interrogation room.
Five hours later I got onto the lighter. They couldn’t hold me because there wasn’t anything illegal in my possession. I’d soaked the package Liam gave me in the hotel room sink overnight and then gotten up early and booted it down a storm drain when no one was looking. It was a quick trip to orbit where there waited a ship larger than a skyscraper and rarer than almost anything you could name, for it wouldn’t return to this planet for centuries. I floated on board knowing that for me there’d be no turning back. Earth would be a story I told my children, and a pack of sentimental lies they would tell theirs.
My homeworld shrank behind me and disappeared. I looked out the great black glass walls into a universe thronged with stars and galaxies and had no idea where I was or where I thought I was going. It seemed to me then that we were each and every one of us ships without a harbor, sailors lost on land.
I used to say that only Ireland and my family could make me cry. I cried when my mother died and I cried when Dad had his heart attack the very next year. My baby sister failed to survive the same birth that killed my mother, so some of my tears were for her as well. Then my brother Bill was hit by a drunk driver and I cried and that was the end of my family. Now there’s only Ireland.
But that’s enough.
GHOSTWEIGHT
Yoon Ha Lee
New writer Yoon Ha Lee lives in Southern California with her family. Her fiction has appeared in Lightspeed, Clarkesworld, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Federation, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and elsewhere. She maintains a website at pegasus. cityofveils.com.
In the wild and exotic space opera that follows, she sweeps us along with a young woman on a desperate quest for revenge, accompanied only by a ruthless and predatory “ghost” who whispers in her ear throughout.
IT IS NOT true that the dead cannot be folded. Square becomes kite becomes swan; history becomes rumor becomes song. Even the act of remembrance creases the truth.
What the paper-folding diagrams fail to mention is that ea
ch fold enacts itself upon the secret marrow of your ethics, the axioms of your thoughts.
Whether this is the most important thing the diagrams fail to mention is a matter of opinion.
“There’s time for one more hand,” Lisse’s ghost said. It was composed of cinders of color, a cipher of blurred features, and it had a voice like entropy and smoke and sudden death. Quite possibly it was the last ghost on all of ruined Rhaion, conquered Rhaion, Rhaion with its devastated, shadowless cities and dead moons and dimming sun. Sometimes Lisse wondered if the ghost had a scar to match her own, a long, livid line down her arm. But she felt it was impolite to ask.
Around them, in a command spindle sized for fifty, the walls of the warkite were hung with tatters of black and faded green, even now in the process of reknitting themselves into tapestry displays. Tangled reeds changed into ravens. One perched on a lightning-cloven tree. Another, taking shape amid twisted threads, peered out from a skull’s eye socket.
Lisse didn’t need any deep familiarity with mercenary symbology to understand the warning. Lisse’s people had adopted a saying from the Imperium’s mercenaries: In raven arithmetic, no death is enough.
Lisse had expected pursuit. She had deserted from Base 87 soon after hearing that scouts had found a mercenary war-kite in the ruins of a sacred maze, six years after all the mercenaries vanished: suspicious timing on her part, but she would have no better opportunity for revenge. The ghost had not tried too hard to dissuade her. It had always understood her ambitions.
For a hundred years, despite being frequently outnumbered, the mercenaries in their starfaring kites had cindered cities, destroyed flights of rebel starflyers, shattered stations in the void’s hungry depths. What better weapon than one of their own kites?
What troubled her was how lightly the war-kite had been defended. It had made a strange, thorny silhouette against the lavender sky even from a long way off, like briars gone wild, and with the ghost as scout she had slipped past the few mechanized sentries. The kite’s shadow had been human. She was not sure what to make of that.
The kite had opened to her like a flower. The card game had been the ghost’s idea, a way to reassure the kite that she was its ally: Scorch had been invented by the mercenaries.
Lisse leaned forward and started to scoop the nearest column, the Candle Column, from the black-and-green gameplay rug. The ghost forestalled her with a hand that felt like the dregs of autumn, decay from the inside out. In spite of herself, she flinched from the ghostweight, which had troubled her all her life. Her hand jerked sideways; her fingers spasmed.
“Look,” the ghost said.
Few cadets had played Scorch with Lisse even in the barracks. The ghost left its combinatorial fingerprints in the cards. People drew the unlucky Fallen General’s Hand over and over again, or doubled on nothing but negative values, or inverted the Crown Flower at odds of thousands to one. So Lisse had learned to play the solitaire variant, with jerengjen as counters. You must learn your enemy’s weapons, the ghost had told her, and so, even as a child in the re-education facility, she had saved her chits for paper to practice folding into cranes, lilies, leaf-shaped boats.
Next to the Candle Column she had folded stormbird, greatfrog, lantern, drake. Where the ghost had interrupted her attempt to clear the pieces, they had landed amid the Sojourner and Mirror Columns, forming a skewed late-game configuration: a minor variant of the Needle Stratagem, missing only its pivot.
“Consider it an omen,” the ghost said. “Even the smallest sliver can kill, as they say.”
There were six ravens on the tapestries now. The latest one had outspread wings, as though it planned to blot out the shrouded sun. She wondered what it said about the mercenaries, that they couched their warnings in pictures rather than drums or gongs.
Lisse rose from her couch. “So they’re coming for us. Where are they?”
She had spoken in the Imperium’s administrative tongue, not one of the mercenaries’ own languages. Nevertheless, a raven flew from one tapestry to join its fellows in the next. The vacant tapestry grayed, then displayed a new scene: a squad of six tanks caparisoned in Imperial blue and bronze, paced by two personnel carriers sheathed in metal mined from withered stars. They advanced upslope, pebbles skittering in their wake.
In the old days, the ghost had told her, no one would have advanced through a sacred maze by straight lines. But the ancient walls, curved and interlocking, were gone now. The ghost had drawn the old designs on her palm with its insubstantial fingers, and she had learned not to shudder at the untouch, had learned to thread the maze in her mind’s eye: one more map to the things she must not forget.
“I’d rather avoid fighting them,” Lisse said. She was looking at the command spindle’s controls. Standard Imperial layout, all of them – it did not occur to her to wonder why the kite had configured itself thus – but she found nothing for the weapons.
“People don’t bring tanks when they want to negotiate,” the ghost said drily. “And they’ll have alerted their flyers for intercept. You have something they want badly.”
“Then why didn’t they guard it better?” she demanded.
Despite the tanks’ approach, the ghost fell silent. After a while, it said, “Perhaps they didn’t think anyone but a mercenary could fly a kite.”
“They might be right,” Lisse said darkly. She strapped herself into the commander’s seat, then pressed three fingers against the controls and traced the commands she had been taught as a cadet. The kite shuddered, as though caught in a hell-wind from the sky’s fissures. But it did not unfurl itself to fly.
She tried the command gestures again, forcing herself to slow down. A cold keening vibrated through the walls. The kite remained stubbornly landfast.
The squad rounded the bend in the road. All the ravens had gathered in a single tapestry, decorating a half-leafed tree like dire jewels. The rest of the tapestries displayed the squad from different angles: two aerial views and four from the ground.
Lisse studied one of the aerial views and caught sight of two scuttling figures, lean angles and glittering eyes and a balancing tail in black metal. She stiffened. They had the shadows of hounds, all graceful hunting curves. Two jerengjen, true ones, unlike the lifeless shapes that she folded out of paper. The kite must have deployed them when it sensed the tanks’ approach.
Sweating now, despite the autumn temperature inside, she methodically tried every command she had ever learned. The kite remained obdurate. The tapestries’ green threads faded until the ravens and their tree were bleak black splashes against a background of wintry gray.
It was a message. Perhaps a demand. But she did not understand.
The first two tanks slowed into view. Roses, blue with bronze hearts, were engraved to either side of the main guns. The lead tank’s roses flared briefly.
The kite whispered to itself in a language that Lisse did not recognize. Then the largest tapestry cleared of trees and swirling leaves and rubble, and presented her with a commander’s emblem, a pale blue rose pierced by three claws. A man’s voice issued from the tapestry: “Cadet Fai Guen.” This was her registry name. They had not reckoned that she would keep her true name alive in her heart like an ember. “You are in violation of Imperial interdict. Surrender the kite at once.”
He did not offer mercy. The Imperium never did.
Lisse resisted the urge to pound her fists against the interface. She had not survived this long by being impatient. “That’s it, then,” she said to the ghost in defeat.
“Cadet Fai Guen,” the voice said again, after another burst of light, “you have one minute to surrender the kite before we open fire.”
“Lisse,” the ghost said, “the kite’s awake.”
She bit back a retort and looked down. Where the control panel had once been featureless gray, it was now crisp white interrupted by five glyphs, perfectly spaced for her outspread fingers. She resisted the urge to snatch her hand away. “Very well,” she said. “If
we can’t fly, at least we can fight.”
She didn’t know the kite’s specific control codes. Triggering the wrong sequence might activate the kite’s internal defenses. But taking tank fire at point-blank range would get her killed, too. She couldn’t imagine that the kite’s armor had improved in the years of its neglect.
On the other hand, it had jerengjen scouts, and the jerengjen looked perfectly functional.
She pressed her thumb to the first glyph. A shadow unfurled briefly but was gone before she could identify it. The second attempt revealed a two-headed dragon’s twisting coils. Long-range missiles, then: thunder in the sky. Working quickly, she ran through the options. It would be ironic if she got the weapons systems to work only to incinerate herself.
“You have ten seconds, Cadet Fai Guen,” said the voice with no particular emotion.
“Lisse,” the ghost said, betraying impatience.
One of the glyphs had shown a wolf running. She remembered that at one point the wolf had been the mercenaries’ emblem. Nevertheless, she felt a dangerous affinity to it. As she hesitated over it, the kite said, in a parched voice, “Soul strike.”
She tapped the glyph, then pressed her palm flat to activate the weapon. The panel felt briefly hot, then cold.
For a second she thought that nothing had happened, that the kite had malfunctioned. The kite was eerily still.
The tanks and personnel carriers were still visible as gray outlines against darker gray, as were the nearby trees and their stifled fruits. She wasn’t sure whether that was an effect of the unnamed weapons or a problem with the tapestries. Had ten seconds passed yet? She couldn’t tell, and the clock of her pulse was unreliable.
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