…John Kincaid Tom Abel Fortune Bob Swift Pompey Atticus Joseph Wilson Elijah Elijah Jim Jim’s Son Rufus Moses Deerborn Moses Raffity…
“I don’t know altogether why he did it,” Ephraim said. “I think it made him feel better to see the men’s names written down. Just so somebody might know we passed this way, he said.”
Jordan lived in this barracks from eight foot down. And so did shockingly many others.
“This is why you shot at us,” Percy whispered, a kind of awe or dread constricting his throat.
“I make it seem dangerous up here, yes, sir, so that nobody won’t come back and take it down or burn it. And yet I suppose they will sooner or later whether I scare anybody or not. Or if not that, then the weather will wear it down. I keep it best I can against the rain, sir. I don’t let birds or animals inside. Or even the daylight, sir, because the daylight fades things, that ink of Jordan’s is sensitive to it. All be gone one day, I suppose, but I will too, bye and bye, and yourselves as well, of course.”
“Perhaps we can make it last a little longer,” Percy said.
Of course I knew what he meant.
“I’ll need light,” I said.
The fierce, hot light of the fading day.
Ephraim was anxious to help, once Percy explained the notion to him. He threw open the barracks door. He took down the wood he had tacked over the south-facing windows. There were still iron bars in the window frames.
In the corners the light was not adequate despite our best efforts. Ephraim said he had a sheet of polished tin he used for a mirror, which might help reflect the sunlight in. He went to his encampment to get it. By that time he trusted us enough to leave us alone for a short time.
Once again I suggested escape, but Percy refused to leave. So I kept about my work.
There were only so many exposures I could make, and I wanted the names to be legible. In the end I could not capture everything. But I did my best.
Ephraim told us about the end of Pilgassi Acres. He had been nearby, hidden half starving in a grove of dwarf pines, when he heard the initial volley of gunshots. It was the first of many over the several hours that followed. Gunfire in waves, and then the cries of the dying. By that sound he knew he would never see his son Jordan again.
Trenches were dug in the ground. Smoke from the chimneys lay over the low country for days. But the owners had been hasty to finish their work, Ephraim said. They had not bothered to burn the empty barracks before they rode off in their trucks and carriages.
Ever since that time Ephraim had sheltered in the barn of a poor white farmer who was sympathetic to him. Ephraim trapped game in exchange for this modest shelter. Eventually the farmer lent him his rifle so that Ephraim could bring back an occasional deer as well as rabbits and birds. The farmer didn’t talk much, Ephraim said, but there were age-browned copies of Garrison’s Liberator stored in the barn; and Ephraim read these with interest, and improved his vocabulary and his understanding of the world.
Hardly anyone came up to Pilgassi Acres nowadays except hunters following game trails. He scared them off with his rifle if they got too close to Jordan’s barracks.
There was no point leaving the barracks after dark, since we could not travel in the carriage until sunrise. Percy’s condition worsened during the night. He came down with a fever, and as he shivered, his wound began to seep. I made him as comfortable as possible with blankets from the carriage, and Ephraim brought him water in a cracked clay jug.
Percy was lucid, but his ideas began to run in whimsical directions as midnight passed. He insisted that I take Mrs. Stowe’s letter from where he kept it in his satchel and read it aloud by lamplight. It was this letter, he said, that had been the genesis of the book he was writing now, about the three million. He wanted to know what Ephraim would make of it.
I kept my voice neutral as I read, so that Mrs. Stowe’s stark words might speak for themselves.
“That is a decent white woman,” Ephraim said when he had heard the letter and given it some thought. “A Christian woman. She reminds me of the woman that taught me and Jordan to read. But I don’t know what she’s so troubled about, Mr. Camber. This idea there was no war. I suppose there wasn’t, if by war you mean the children of white men fighting the children of white men. But, sir, I have seen the guns, sir, and I have seen them used, sir, all my life—all my life. And in my father’s time and before him. Isn’t that war? And if it is war, how can she say war was avoided? There were many casualties, sir, though their names are not generally recorded; many graves, though not marked; and many battlefields, though not admitted to the history books.”
“I will pass that thought on to Mrs. Stowe,” Percy whispered, smiling in his discomfort, “although she’s very old now and might not live to receive it.”
And I decided I would pass it on to Elsebeth, my daughter.
I packed up my gear very carefully, come morning.
This is Jordan’s name, I imagined myself telling Elsie, pointing to a picture in a book, the book Percy Camber would write.
This photograph, I would tell her, represents light cast in a dark place. Like an old cellar gone musty for lack of sun. Sunlight has a cleansing property, I would tell her. See: I caught a little of it here.
I supposed there was enough of her grandmother in her that Elsebeth might understand.
I began to feel hopeful about the prospect.
Ephraim was less talkative in the morning light. I helped poor shivering Percy into the carriage. I told Ephraim my mother had once published a poem in the Liberator, years ago. I couldn’t remember which issue.
“I may not have seen that number,” Ephraim said. “But I’m sure it was a fine poem.”
I drove Percy to the doctor in Crib Lake. The doctor was an old man with pinch-nose glasses and dirty fingernails. I told him I had shot my servant accidentally, while hunting. The doctor said he did not usually work on colored men, but an extra ten dollars on top of his fee changed his mind.
He told me there was a good chance Percy would pull through, if the fever didn’t worsen.
I thanked him, and went off to buy myself a drink.
The Unstrung Zither
YOON HA LEE
Yoon Ha Lee (pegasus.cityofveils.com) lives in Pasadena, California. She has a degree in mathematics and writes about mathematics in her website. She has been publishing her carefully crafted stories in the genre for about ten years. Her fiction has appeared in Fantasy & Science Fiction, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Ideomancer, and Shadows of Saturn, among others. When we first included her fiction in a Year’s Best volume, she lived in Massachusetts with “a motley assortment of musical instruments, and a glass Klein bottle.” We hope she still has them.
“The Unstrung Zither” was published in F & SF, a leading magazine that went bi-monthly in 2009, but nevertheless continued to publish a lot of excellent fiction (including two more stories found in this volume). This is the second “math” story in this volume. Kathryn, who has a degree in math, says, “I appreciate the story for its mathematical/musical aesthetic logic. Getting to the ending is like reading a good proof.” David, whose doctorate is in literature, says, “the emotional logic is convincing, and the characterization deep and suggestive.”
“They don’t look very dangerous,” Xiao Ling Yun said to the aide. Ling Yun wished she understood what Phoenix Command wanted from her. Not that she minded the excuse to take a break from the composition for two flutes and hammered dulcimer that had been stymieing her for the past two weeks.
Through a one-way window in the observation chamber, Xiao Ling Yun saw five adolescents sitting cross-legged on the floor in a semicircle. Before them was a tablet and two brushes. No ink; these were not calligraphy brushes. One of the adolescents, a girl with short, dark hair, leaned over and drew two characters with quick strokes. All five studied the map that appeared on the tablet.
“Nevertheless,” the aide said. “They attempted to assassinate the Phoenix G
eneral. We are fortunate to have captured them.”
The aide wrote something on her own tablet, and a map appeared. She circled a region of the map. The tablet enlarged it until it filled the screen. “Circles represent gliders,” the aide said. “Triangles represent dragons.”
Ling Yun peered at the formations. “Who’s winning?”
At the aide’s instigation, the tablet replayed the last move. A squadron of dragons engaged a squadron of gliders. One dragon turned white—white for death—and vanished from the map. The aide smiled. “The assassins are starting to slip.”
Ling Yun had thought that the Phoenix General desired the services of a musician to restore order to the fractious ashworlds. She was not the best person for such a purpose, nor the worst: a master musician, yes, but without a sage’s philosophical bent of mind. Perhaps they had chosen her on account of her uncle’s position as a logistician. She was pragmatic enough not to be offended by the possibility.
“I had not expected prisoners to be offered entertainment,” Ling Yun said, a little dubious. She was surprised that they hadn’t been executed, in fact.
“It is not entertainment,” the aide said reprovingly. “Every citizen has a right to education.”
Of course. The government’s stance was that the ashworlds already belonged to the empire, whatever the physical reality might be. “Including the classical arts, I presume,” she said. “But I am a musician, not a painter.” Did they want her to tutor the assassins? And if so, why?
“Music is the queen of the arts, is it not?” the aide said.
She had not expected to be discussing the philosophy of music with a soldier. “According to tradition, yes,” Ling Yun said carefully. Her career had been spent writing music that never strayed too much from the boundaries of tradition.
The most important music lesson she had had came not from her tutor, but from a servant in her parents’ house. The servant, whose name Ling Yun had deliberately forgotten, liked to sing as he stirred the soup or pounded the day’s bread. He didn’t have a particularly notable voice. It wavered in the upper register and his vowels drifted when he wasn’t paying attention. (She didn’t tell him any of this. She didn’t talk to him at all. Her parents would have disapproved.) But the servant had two small children who helped him with his tasks, and they chanted the songs, boisterously out of tune.
From watching that servant and his children, Ling Yun learned that the importance of music came not from its ability to move the five elements, but from its ability to affect the heart. She wanted to write music that anyone could hum, music that anyone could enjoy. It was the opposite of the haughty ideal that her tutor taught her to strive toward. Naturally, Ling Yun kept this thought to herself.
The aide scribbled some more on the tablet. In response, an image of a mechanical dragon drew itself across the tablet. It had been painted white, with jagged red markings on its jointed wings.
“Is this a captured dragon?” Ling Yun asked.
“Unfortunately, no,” the aide said. “We caught glimpses of two of the assassins as they came down on dragons, but the dragons disappeared as though they’d been erased. We want to know where they’re hiding, and how they’re being hidden.”
Ling Yun stared at the dragon. Whoever had drawn it did not have an artist’s fluency of line. But everything was precise and carefully proportioned. She could see where the wings connected to the body and the articulations that made motion possible, even, if she squinted, some of the controls by the pi lot’s seat.
“Who produced this?”
The aide turned her head toward the window. “The dark-haired girl did. Her name is Wu Wen Zhi.”
It was a masculine name, but they probably did things differently in the ashworlds. Ling Yun felt a rebellious twinge of approval.
Ling Yun said, “Wen Zhi draws you a picture, and you expect it to yield the ashworlders’ secrets. Surely she’s not as incompetent an assassin as all that. Or did you torture this out of her?”
“No, it’s part of the game they’re playing with the general,” the aide said.
“I don’t see the connection,” she said. And why was the general playing a game with them in the first place? Wei qi involved no such thing, nor had the tablet games she had played as a student.
The aide smiled as though she had heard the thought. “It personalizes the experience. When the game calculates the results of combat, it refers to the pilot’s emblem to determine her strengths and weaknesses. Take Wen Zhi’s dragon, for instance. First of all, the dragon’s design indicates that it specializes in close combat, as opposed to Mesketalioth’s—” she switched briefly to another dragon painting “—which has repeating crossbows mounted on its shoulders.” She returned to Wen Zhi’s white dragon. “However, notice the stiffness of the lines. The pilot is always alert, but in a way that makes her tense. This can be exploited.”
“The general has an emblem in the game, too, I presume,” Ling Yun said.
“Of course,” the aide said, but she didn’t volunteer to show it to Ling Yun. “Let me tell you about our five assassins.
“Wu Wen Zhi comes from Colony One.” The empire’s two original colonies had been given numbers rather than names. “Wen Zhi has tried to kill herself three times already. She doesn’t sleep well at night, but she refuses to meditate, and she won’t take medications.”
I wouldn’t either, Ling Yun thought.
“The young man with the long braid is Ko. He’s lived on several of the ashworlds and speaks multiple languages, but his accent suggests that he comes from Arani. Interestingly enough, Ko alerted us to the third of Wen Zhi’s suicide attempts. Wen Zhi didn’t take this well.
“The scarred one sitting next to Ko is Mesketalioth. He’s from Straken Okh. We suspect that he worked for Straken’s intelligence division before he was recruited by the Dragon Corps.
“The girl with the light hair is Periet, although the others call her Perias. We haven’t figured out why, and they look at us as though we’re crazy when we ask them about it, although she’ll answer to either name. Our linguists tell us that Perias is the masculine form of her name; our doctors confirm that she is indeed a girl. She comes from Kiris. Don’t be fooled by her sweet manners. She’s the one who destroyed Shang Yuan.”
Ling Yun opened her mouth, then found her voice. “Her?” Shang Yuan had been a city of several million people. It had been obliterated during the Festival of Lanterns, for which it had been famous. “I thought that the concussive storm was a natural disaster.”
The aide gave Ling Yun a singularly cynical look. “Natural disasters don’t flatten every building in the city and cause all the lanterns to explode. It was an elemental attack.”
“I suppose this is classified information.”
“It is, technically, not that many people haven’t guessed.”
“How much help did she have?”
The aide’s mouth twisted. “Ashworld Kiris didn’t authorize the attack. As near as we can determine, Periet did it all by herself.”
“All right,” Ling Yun said. She paced to the one-way window and watched Periet-Perias, trying to map the massacre onto the girl’s open, cheerful expression. “Who’s the fifth one now skulking in a corner?”
“That’s Li Cheng Guo, from Colony Two,” the aide said. “He killed two of our guards on the first day. Actually, they all did their share of killing on the way in, although Periet takes the prize.”
“That’s terrible,” Ling Yun said. But what she was thinking was, The ashworlds must be terribly desperate, to send children. The Phoenix General had had the ashworlds’ leader assassinated two years ago; this must be their counterstroke. “So,” she said, “one assassin from each ashworld.” Colony One and Colony Two; Arani, Straken Okh, and Kiris. The latter three had been founded by nations that had since been conquered by the empire.
“Correct.” The aide rolled the brush around in her hand. “The Phoenix General wants you to discover the assassins’ secret
.”
Oh no, Ling Yun thought. For all the honors that the empress had lavished on the Phoenix General, he was still known as the Mad General. He had started out as a glider pilot, and everyone knew that glider pilots were crazy. Their extreme affinity for fire and wood unbalanced their minds.
On the other hand, Ling Yun had a lifetime’s practice of bowing before those of greater standing, however much it chafed, and the man had produced undeniable results. She could respect that.
“I’m no soldier,” Ling Yun said, “and no interrogator. What would you like me to do?”
The aide smiled. “Each assassin has an emblem in the game.”
Ling Yun had a sudden memory of a self-portrait she had drawn when she was a child. It was still in the hallway of her parents’ house, to her embarrassment: lopsided face with tiny eyes and a dot for a nose, scribbly hair, arms spread wide. “Why did they agree to this game?” she asked.
“They are playing because it was that or die. But they have some hidden purpose of their own, and time may be running out. You must study the game—we’ll provide analyses for you, as we hardly expect you to become a tactician—and study the dragons. Compose a suite of five pieces, one for each dragon—for each pilot.”
“Pilot?”
“They’re pilots in their minds, although we’re only certain that Periet and Mesketalioth have the training. Maybe the secret is just that they found blockade runners to drop them off.” The aide didn’t sound convinced.
“One piece for each dragon. You think that by translating their self-representations into music, the supreme art, you will learn their secret, and how to defeat them.”
“Precisely.”
“I will do what I can,” Xiao Ling Yun said.
“I’m sure you will,” the aide said.
Year’s Best SF 15 Page 8