by Yoon Ha Lee
All of them were coming for Ilion.
Discord. War of wars.
* * *
A few ways the war transpired:
In one version of the story, Ilion took on the garments of nine-tailed fox spirits, robing itself in their keen eyes and their curling riddles. Vast armies, with sun chariots and fire arrows and star spears, rode across forever shores of smoke and scratchless glass, never reaching their goal; rode in random walks across maps that changed each time they took a reckoning. Their generals conferred among themselves. Chief among them was a woman old in battle but young in the ways of cities. Her counsel, to the others’ dismay, was to withdraw instead of wandering across the mire of their own impatience. After many days of argument they finally agreed. All that time Ilion whispered into her visions, wearing the face of her own ambitions.
In the meantime, Ilion of the many shapes, Ilion of the nine-veiled walls, was overtaken by a procession of numerate factions. Every plant in the spinward gardens hung with fruit whose flesh had the texture of cooked eyes. The Nines went about in fox-masks, and a civil war ensued between those who poured libations to prime numbers upon silicate altars and those who poured libations to composite numbers. Paris parted ways with his family in the early days, withdrawing behind the fortress’s occlusions to design improved defenses. He studied Zhuge Liang and Vauban and Mardi bin Ali al-Tarsusi, he steeped his dreams in the properties of degenerate matter, and for all his care he was caught half-drowsing in Ilion’s arms when at last bird-cloaked insurgents caused the fortress to fold in on itself like crushed paper.
The generals waited, and waited, and waited, and at last their chief sacrificed her face to the sky and sea and liminal shore. Concealed by a helmet from which three eyes stared lidlessly, she went before her lieutenants and told them the time had come to sack the city-fortress. Even now Ilion’s fame had not waned. Songs of its treasures, of its metal heart and petal beauty, were still chanted in the sky courts and hell chasms and the surfeit of night roads.
By the time they arrived, they were much diminished in number, but great in glory. Ilion itself welcomed its new rulers. “We are the same,” it said to the chief, and smiled at her with her own face. She realized then how she had been tricked, but it was too late. Her generals were only too content to become part of the prize they had sought so long.
This victory was not without its price. Ilion’s people took up the obeisances and rituals of their new masters, and even the numerate factions fell into disarray.
In another version of the war, Ilion descended upon an immense artificial world of ocean, concealing itself in its depths like a belated pearl-irritant. Braids of kelp became her hair, and during the festivals of war preparation, she decorated herself with the whorled dances of transparent eels and algal blooms.
Fleets upon fleets came to orbit the world of ocean, intending to boil away the waters layer by layer. Instead, they were subsumed by the sea reverie. Spherical dreadnoughts condensed into whale shapes. Flights of missiles became voracious finned schools, themselves consumed by carriers that sprouted anemone banners. It was not long before the invaders had joined Ilion’s ecology of untided longings.
Ilion’s children learned the undulant languages, applied themselves to the study of fluid dynamics, and wrote disparaging treatises that, misconstrued in realities slightly aslant their own, birthed legends of sunken civilizations.
In yet another, Ilion, like a great maw, began digesting the beings sentient and non-sentient who dwelt within it. As it did so, it encrusted itself with minerals and mirrors, an armor of prolix crystallography. The voices of its victims thundered through the space-time membrane, threnody absolute. Every guidestar that knew Ilion’s name was unmoored from the firmament and crushed into singularity specks. Of Ilion itself, nothing remained but a vast jeweled simulacrum of apple-plague.
We could go on in this manner, but these examples suffice to demonstrate Ilion’s inability to escape the apple’s nature.
* * *
It was the tenth year of the siege (the hundredth, the billionth). Paris leaned back in Ilion’s arms and listened to the shield beat and the spear chant, the unsound of missiles and catapulted projectiles hurtling through the black depths. “I can’t imagine what it would be like to sleep in a time of peace anymore,” he remarked.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Ilion said. “You’re adaptable.” He shifted his leg, and the gown he wore slipped sideways to reveal a tanned expanse of thigh. Ilion’s clothing was a matter of opinion. Every time Paris thought he had eased all of it off, he found another coy fold of tunic, or tassels covering an ankle. There was no such thing as a completely naked city. You could dig and you could dig, you could walk the walls under the night’s unkind eyes; nevertheless, farther down you’d always find some furrowed bone, some scratched potsherd, some hexadecimal couplet stamped on plastic.
“Do you ever wonder what they’re up to, out there?” Paris said.
“You mean besides throwing glorified space rocks at us?”
Paris snorted. “They must live and love and die, the same as we do,” he said, moved by an unaccustomed swell of sentimentality. “They must have children of circuitry or flesh or cunning brass. And some of them must be as sick of this whole conflict as we are.”
Ilion tapped impatiently on the couch. The walls shivered black, then red-gold-pale with the burstlights of the bombardment, the light of local stars glinting off the barding of massed ships. “Yes,” Ilion said, “they’re so sick of it that they’re going home.”
“They must want something concrete out of all this.”
“Glory,” Ilion said. “Vengeance, spite, security, the sheer unadulterated expression of aggression. None of these, I will note, is concrete.”
“You could vomit up that damn apple. I wish—” Paris bit his tongue.
Ilion refrained from an entirely redundant I told you so. This was, at least, an improvement over the first nine years.
“I am going to fall asleep here,” Paris said. “And I’m going to dream of enjoying silence, and waters unblemished by ships, and eating nothing to do with fruit—no sauces, no preserves, no fresh chilled slices, nothing—for the rest of my life.”
Ilion threaded his fingers through Paris’s hair, untangling a lock. It almost didn’t hurt. “Sleep, then,” he said in a voice sweet as water. “It won’t be much longer.”
Paris meant to ask what he meant by that, but his eyelids drooped, and sleep descended upon him. Whether he had the dreams he had wished for, he never remembered.
* * *
Late in the last year, some but not all of the enemy fleets withdrew. Hector and the defense fleets were on high alert for weeks afterward, patrolling Ilium behind the cover of its flanged force-screens. Paris edited out his need for sleep, as much as he longed for the escape, and oversaw the city’s artillery defenses. Far-archer, Ilion’s guns said of him, mostly with affection, where he could hear them. (They called him other things behind his back, in the way of soldiers and commanders everywhere.)
“I don’t trust it,” Paris said to Ilion as he stared over the pattern-maps and their mystifying gaps. He almost knocked over a tall glass of wine.
Ilion deftly caught the glass. “You need to quit pruning your need for sleep,” she said. “If it’s regenerating this fast, you need the rest more than we need you awake obsessing over the invaders’ whimsies.”
“You’re taking this too lightly.”
Ilion fixed him with an interested stare. “Excuse me,” she said, “somebody is forgetting who’s responsible for coordinating all the systems around here. Even when I’m busy feeding you grapes because you’ve forgotten to show up for dinner again.”
Paris gave it up. He didn’t like the fact that none of their intelligence had anticipated this development. They had spent long hours tracing through what they knew of the invaders’ councils—depressingly little, in spite of their studies of signal traffic, and repeated attempts to crack the en
cryption—in an attempt to decipher its significance. So far they had a lot of speculation and little evidence to back up any of the going hypotheses.
“Stop that,” Ilion said.
Paris realized he had been tapping his foot in a querulous one-two, one-two-three, one-two rhythm. “Sorry,” he said, mostly sincerely.
“Look,” Ilion said, leaning over him. She was tall now, even allowing for the fact that he was slouched in his chair. “If there’s a pattern in there, any shred of meaning or menace, I’ll find it. The young are so”—she smoothed his hair back and kissed the side of his brow—“impatient. We will prevail.”
“Other than the kiss,” Paris said, unimpressed, “you’re starting to sound like my brother. You’re more succinct, though.”
Ilion laughed. “He does like his rallying speeches, doesn’t he? It’s a harmless foible, as these things go.” Her hands trailed lower, began massaging the knots in Paris’s neck. The calluses on her fingers were oddly soothing.
“I would feel so much better if you showed any sign of concern,” Paris said.
“No, you wouldn’t,” she returned, and he couldn’t refute her. But she smiled at him, dangerously. In the light-dark of her eyes he saw the enormous edifices of calculation, systems and subsystems dedicated to analyzing the anomaly in the enemy’s behavior.
As it turned out, he shouldn’t have been reassured after all—not because she wasn’t devoted to the problem, but because she was.
* * *
Everyone in Ilion with a shred of understanding of strategic analysis dedicated a certain amount of their cognitive allocation to the problem of the vanished ships and whether they had, say, gone for reinforcements, or were skulking around doing something even worse, whatever that might be. (The sole exception was Cassandra; even Ilion gave up on coaxing her into joining the effort.) As a result, the enemy general’s mimetic attack, inscribed in the notation of negative space, penetrated the city-fort’s every level, from Ilion’s highest heuristics to the sub-sentient routines that ran the simplest defense grids. And at the appointed time, all of Ilion’s gates flowered open at once.
Even Paris, with his interest in matters mathematical, had been acculturated by the long siege to think of attack in terms of triremes and trebuchets, mass drivers and missiles. When he woke (having fallen asleep, without meaning to, while looking up a theorem concerning network topology), it took him a muddled hour to figure out what was going on.
By then it was too late.
* * *
Paris didn’t recognize the conquering general until she deigned to visit him. He was the last, although he would never know that. She dispensed of the rest of the royal family by fire and sword and bullet, by her annihilating brilliance.
“So you’re the cause of all this trouble,” the general said. She was made of articulated metal, shining in the gray light of the prison. Each time she moved, she made a metal-scrape whisper of bells.
Her voice was familiar and unfamiliar. Nevertheless, he was certain he had never heard it before. His bonds of gravity-weave at least permitted him to raise his head enough to look her in the eye.
The face, now—he knew that face. Once, through a scatter-veil of possibilities, he had seen it, golden-fair and blessed by goddesses three, beautiful in the way of bone and bullets and polished coins.
“I am Helen,” the general said, “and you’ve wasted ten years of everyone’s lives by sparking off a general war. Congratulations.”
Paris laughed painfully, contemplating her. “Damn,” he said. “The fairest isn’t a goddess after all, or a city, even. It’s a general with a slide rule for a heart. That’s a compliment, by the way.”
“You idiot,” Helen said. “You know as well as I do that the gods eavesdrop on everything. I can’t spare you now.”
“Sometimes it’s worth it just to say the truth as you see it,” Paris said.
“It’s over,” she said. “Your city will be dismantled into its constituent quarks, and no more people will have to die for its sake. Until the next fruit’s sprouting, anyway; there’s always some gardener of human dissent. But that’s a problem for the next general.”
“I should have chosen you,” Paris said. In that moment he fell in love the way you fell into a singularity, a moment spun into forever lingering.
Helen’s masked face held no expression except Paris’s own, faintly reflected. “Still an idiot,” she said, and this time there was real pity in her voice. “I know your story. Do you think you were the only one offered a choice?”
He had no answer for her. Even so, when she brought the gun up to his head, he did not close his eyes. His last thought was that Ilion had never had a chance.
About the Author
Yoon Ha Lee is an American science fiction writer born on January 26, 1979 in Houston, Texas. His first published story, "The Hundredth Question," appeared in Fantasy & Science Fiction in 1999; since then, over two dozen further stories have appeared. He lives in Pasadena, California. You can sign up for email updates here.
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Copyright © 2015 by Yoon Ha Lee
Art copyright © 2015 by Wesley Allsbrook
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