“Sure they could—once. But if the Magistracy found out it wouldn’t be just the one ship that paid, it would be all Travellers, forever.” He pushed his queen’s pawn one space ahead. “I don’t think you could offer them anything that’d be worth taking that risk.”
They played for another dozen moves, but she still couldn’t figure out his gambit: he seemed to be making moves almost at random, exposing several of his most valuable pieces. She began to feel excited at the possibility that she might win a game for the first time since he had started playing in earnest, but a suspicion gnawed at her that he was only laying a trap.
Finally Wiesen stood up. “Listen, Shi Jin. . . .”
“Yes?”
Wiesen was silent for a moment. “Nothing.” He gave a small shrug, then bowed to her. “I’ll see you in the morning.”
Jin returned the bow and then watched him go. She studied the board for a few moments, then stood up and headed for the dining room. She peeled open the ration pack that lay on the table—one meal for one person, in theory, though this one had been open for two days now—took out a sheet of pressed soymeat and began chewing at it.
“Shi Jin?”
Her father’s voice made her jump, and she held her hand over her mouth: she had long since given up trying to eat Wiesen’s rations with sticks, but up ‘til now had managed to keep her father from seeing her eating with her hands. “I’m sorry,” she mumbled, sitting down.
“Are you well?” he asked, giving her a head-bow and apparently choosing to ignore what he had just seen.
She stood up again to return the bow. “Yes, I’m fine.”
“Sit,” he said. When she sat down he joined her at the table, delicately seized a sheet of soymeat with his sticks and nibbled at one end. “I am concerned that you may be falling behind in your study of the Book of Shang,” he said after a few moments. “Even the keenest knife grows dull without use.”
“I could add readings to my schedule. . . .”
He shook his head. “Let us first test your edge, to see if that is necessary. Tell me, what are the duties of a gentleman?”
“To obey his superiors,” Shi Jin began. She knew this as well as her own name, but that brought little reassurance. “To bring honour to his ancestors. To serve the Borderless Empire. To inspire others by his example.”
Her father nodded. “And are they different from one another, these duties?”
“What do you mean?”
“If he obeys his superiors, will he not always serve the Empire?”
Jin took a breath. She had always felt nervous when they discussed her readings, afraid of making a mistake, but now found she was looking forward to it: it felt more like Wiesen’s game than a lesson, trying to find the perfect quote to counter what her father had said. “‘The wise man creates laws while the dullard is controlled by them,’” she said, quoting the Master and Student Dialogue. “‘Gentlemen alter the rites while the rabble are held fast by them.’”
“What good are orders, then, if the gentleman is not bound to follow them?”
The answer came to her immediately—a quotation from the Sun zi that Lieutenant Wiesen was particularly fond of: “‘The general in the field is not bound by the orders of his sovereign.’ An order may be wise in the court but foolish on the battlefield.”
“But the general, with his view of the whole battlefield, may know things his officers do not. ‘A baby will always cry when his boils are lanced, even if his mother holds him, for he cannot see that today’s pain will heal him tomorrow.’ Should a gentleman not have faith in the wisdom of his superiors?”
Jin frowned. This was more than just a discussion of her readings, she realized; he was asking her opinion, using the debate to help him make a decision. “‘A wise emperor is like a carpenter who chooses straight timber to make shafts and curved timber to make wheels,’” she said. “‘As a good carpenter does not discard any timber, so a wise emperor does not discard any gentleman.’”
Her father shook his head slowly. “Don’t make the error of putting too much value on any one man. ‘If only straight shafts were made into arrows, and round ones into wheels, only one man in a hundred could ride and shoot.’”
She crossed her arms. “But isn’t it wrong to waste the ones that are straight or round, by using them for the wrong things? Or not using them at all?” Jin bit her lip, trying to think of a quote that would support her point, but nothing came to her. “It’s like the game Lieutenant Wiesen taught me. Each piece is different, so you have to understand the nature of each one and use it accordingly.”
“I see. And supposing we may discuss this game as we do the Book of Shang, does each piece act according to its own benefit?”
“A knight cannot ride straight and a bishop’s path cannot turn, but each will give his life for the king. Just so will a gentleman violate an order to better serve the Empire, then stand and pay the price.” She took a breath. “Wouldn’t Lieutenant Wiesen do more good if he rejoined the Fleet, instead of staying here?”
For a long moment her father was silent. “Is that what we’ve been talking about?”
Jin looked down at the table, wondering if she had crossed a line by addressing the subject directly. She hadn’t been able to help herself: she had been able to feel her father wavering, knew that this was the moment to press her attack. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Should I schedule more time studying the Book of Shang?”
Her father shook his head. “No,” she said. “I have no doubts about the keenness of your edge.” He stood, gave her a brief head-bow and left the room. She sat at the table for a long time, wondering just what it was she had won or lost.
That night Jin awoke to the sound of thunder; when she sat up, though, she heard no other signs of a storm—no keening winds or patter of rain on the dome—and went back to sleep. When she awoke in the morning she found that she had overslept, past the time of her usual Earthlang lesson. She went to the dining room, wondering if her father or Lieutenant Wiesen might be there, but it was empty except for an unopened ration packet. A strong smell of fermentation filled the air as she opened the lid, revealing a mass of stringy green curds in a thick brown goo.
To Jin’s relief it tasted marginally better than it smelled; she ate half and then returned to her room. The timer was still dark, so she started up her computer and selected the entertainment channel. As she’d hoped, the vids the Travellers had brought had been uploaded, and she began to scroll through the list of new titles. Then she paused, and the curdled algae she had eaten began to rise in her throat as she read two characters, wu shen, that she had only seen together once before. She swallowed hard and held her teeth together as she cued the vid to start.
When she got to her father’s office he was seated at his desk, and he gave her a head-bow as she came in. “Good morning.”
She opened her mouth, but found she had no voice. After a few moments she finally said “I had an Earthlang lesson scheduled this for morning. Have you seen Lieutenant Wiesen?”
“Lieutenant Wiesen is gone,” her father said. “I do not expect you will see him again. For the remainder of your time here you will study only Calligraphy, Rites and Music, and especially the Book of Shang.”
“I saw a vid,” she said, unable to keep the words in. “He was in it—not him, but someone who looked like him—”
Her father pushed his stool back from his desk and stood up. “An actor,” he said, in a voice that was not a whisper but was quiet in a way that commanded her to keep the same volume. “Genuine criminals will rarely follow a script, rebels in particular.”
“You knew?” she said. “How could you—you made him my teacher.”
“We have too few resources to hold a prisoner who contributes nothing to the colony, and I judged this the best use of his talents. ‘A wise emperor is like a carpenter who chooses straight timber to make shafts and curved timber to make whee
ls.’”
“But there’s been no Fleet ship. He must have gone. . . .” Jin felt oddly light, as though she were already in orbit.
“Father—the new ration packs—”
“Nutrient algae—not as palatable as soymeat, but it should last until the food ship arrives.” He sighed. “There is a path ahead of you that leads to being a colonial administrator, Shi Jin, and another that leads to being a Fleet Magistrate. Perhaps you will yet change how characters are written. Perhaps you will change many things. But I could not set you on the second path, and Lieutenant Wiesen could—and so I will stand and pay the price.”
“What do you mean? Are you—”
He shook his head. “I found a wrecked ship, salvaged the food rations, incinerated the body of the pilot and sold the remainder for scrap. There will be an investigation—a formality, but it would delay your entry to the Academy. That is why you must pass the examination before the next ship comes, and go with it when it leaves, so that you will already be on Hanzi when the investigation begins.”
She was silent for a moment and then bowed, giving him the child’s low bow to a parent. After he returned the bow she smoothed her hair with her hand and walked out the door. She did not really know where to go: without thinking she went to Wiesen’s room, or at least the room that had been his. None of his things were there except for the game board and pieces.
She looked over the board and began to play out their unfinished game, imagining how it might have gone. She drew in a sharp breath, and suddenly it was as though she saw the fundamental nature of the pieces, laid plain in white and black like salt and iron. The rooks were the food ships, able to cross the board in one turn but always blocked by other pieces; the bishops, swooping down when you didn’t expect them, were like Fleet ships coming out of Nospace; the queens were the Magistracy, with both Fleet and food ships at their command, but still bound to move in straight lines; only Travellers, the knights, were allowed to break the rules, moving in skips and hops. And of course there were the pawns—but even a pawn could become something greater if it followed the right path, to the deepest part of the enemy’s board. Anything but a king.
Now Jin could see a half-dozen moves ahead of where they had left the game and smiled without meaning to. She could win this game, she saw, as the moves and countermoves played out in her mind. She picked up Wiesen’s king—it was the one piece he had put much work into repurposing, a plastic ball joint he had carved until it vaguely resembled a head and crown—and her smile fell as her fingers brushed over his maker’s mark, the two characters she knew she could never speak again.
Six months later she was on Hanzi, unpacking her meagre belongings in her room at the Academy. It was very small, almost a relief after the number of times she’d had to change her idea of what big was since leaving Garamond. When the ship had docked she had been awed by what she had seen: more people than she had ever known standing in a single room that was full of light and colour, stores and vidscreens. Corridors stretched outward in every direction, promising more wonders. She had turned to her seatmate, a sophisticate from Xerxes, told him she had not imagined even Hanzi could be this big.
“This is just the docking satellite,” he had told her, not bothering to hide his contempt. “We’re going to board a wayship from here to take us down to the city. It’s big.”
After that she had not even bothered trying to gauge the size of what she saw, and the hundreds of buildings they had passed on their way to the dorms—each one at least fifty times larger than the central building back home—had barely registered as real, just a pattern of light and shade. Now that she was in her room, though, in a space she could get her mind around—it was a little under four paces square, actually a bit smaller than her old room—she could finally start to make herself at home.
She put her bag on the bed and opened it, pulling out one-by-one the pieces she and Lieutenant Wiesen had made. She took the board out last, put it on the desk and put the pieces on it, recreating the game that had been left unfinished when he left. Then she lay down on the bed, curled her hand around the carved plastic piece in her pocket and let herself sleep.
JINX
Robert Priest
Einstein and Heidelberg both said
“There’s no simultaneity
over vast distances”
at exactly the same time.
THE BOOK WITH NO END
Colleen Anderson
Lizbet feels much like an ant as she and the others slowly shovel and brush away the fine gritty dirt from the emerging walls. Her specialization in dead languages will give her an edge but does not excuse her from being on hands and knees in the sand. She will decipher any cuneiform tablets uncovered, should they be lucky enough to find any. A month ago ground-penetrating radar indicated several buried chambers in the Sumerian city of Nippur, one of the seats of civilization and the home of the earliest form of writing.
The area has been picked over by hungry archaeologists for decades; it is the land where Gilgamesh and Enkidu went on adventures, where Inanna tromped the unknown caverns of her sister’s realm to overcome death. If any truths are to be found, they will be in the oldest myths, when humans tried to crack open the world’s mysteries. This is what Lizbet needs: to unearth the very genesis of when civilization awoke and grew in might.
What she wants is complete control. Being able to manipulate boys, men, and teachers has always given Lizbet a primordial thrill, as if she were the battery that ran the world.
Two gruelling weeks under a sun that sucks the moisture from skin and withers everyone beneath its glare. Lizbet is ready to take a flight home at the end of the week. They haven’t even found the foundations yet, just walls and more walls. Even an abandoned village would have a few artefacts. Maybe it is time to look at a more illustrious career, a faster road to what she wants.
Markus has just called a halt after twelve hours, a normal day when you’re racing against the time a foreign government gives you. Back-breaking work; they may as well be ancient Sumerian peasants. Lizbet stands and stretches, running her tongue over dry lips. Sipping water from her Camelbak, she wipes from her eyes stray strands of hair now the colour of dunes and peers at the sun lumbering toward its dusty bed. Another tedious day.
She turns toward the tent to find shade and takes a step when the ground capsizes beneath her. There isn’t even time to yell as dirt and stone follow her into a hole.
Her plummet is buffered by sand and the old sandstone beneath her feet. She half-slides, half-falls in a cascade and lands on the hump of the water bag strapped to her back. Dirt and stones rain upon her. She opens her eyes to see a dark shape plunge toward her; she moves her head to the side barely in time to avoid the large piece of masonry. Blinking and scrubbing at the dirt in her mouth and eyes, she coughs and sits up. Her back is sore and her hip is already pulsing with pain. There will be a few bruises from the twenty-foot fall but no bones seem broken. As she stands, she moves each limb then, satisfied, slaps dirt from her clothes and hair. She sucks water from the tube, swishes, and spits out mud. As people’s shouts filter from above Lizbet looks around, still rubbing dirt from her eyes. A treasure trove reveals itself: more artefacts than almost any Sumerian excavation to date.
Someone calls down.
“Yes, I’m all right. Just bruised.”
“We’ll find a rope and ladder and get you out.”
Lizbet barely hears them as she walks around the rectangular chamber that is bathed in amber light and settling dust motes. She has discovered a mystery. The ancients built rituals around them: the Orphic rites, the Dionysian and Mithraic cults, the Eleusinian mysteries—all these had force and endurance. There is something here; she feels it at this ancient nexus of civilization where words were given power, and knowledge was stored for millennia. Lizbet’s fingers tingle. It is here again: that electric vibration, that thrumming resonance she senses when power is within
her reach.
She runs her hands over the contours of three stone bulls and of petite, glazed clay bull dancers, looks at turned wooden bowls full of unsown seeds, and stops in front of a low palette with the dusky bones of some past lord or lady. A wooden chest, several bronze blades, a folded pile of greyed fabric that would disintegrate on touch completes the riches of the funereal chamber. She circles the room again and is drawn to the skeleton, not laid out in any sarcophagus, bare of the shreds of any garment or of the telltale glint of ornaments. Stripped of everything but its bones. Devoid even of any desiccated remnants of hair or flesh.
What can one tell from the bones of the dead, those ivory sculptures no longer corrupted by the indulgences and errors of living? Only the greatest stories, the traumas that embed into a person’s core, only those etch themselves on bones. And yet these are more pristine than baby’s bones. No nicks, no mended breaks, teeth all present, perfectly straight and whole, no axe marks of any untimely death, no disease nor malformation have touched this body. Everything in the room is incredibly fragile and the air that now circulates could destroy some of the artefacts in days. She moves softly, almost reverently, and kneels beside the wooden bed on which the pristine skeleton rests. How could anyone in an age of primitive medicine remain unmarred?
The palette is only about a foot off the ground; beneath it, Lizbet glimpses a shadow on the floor tiles that must have once been brightly painted. She reaches underneath and pulls out a stiff bundle tied with cord that crumbles in her hands. An animal skin, most likely cow, crackles and powders brown hair onto the floor. The bundle is as long as her forearm and twice as thick. Lizbet delicately folds back a tiny portion of the old hide and pokes her finger inside to feel a supple softness, slightly clammy and unpleasant. Tilting it to the light, she distinguishes some form of marking. A parchment or vellum with inked symbols upon it. Her heart thumps harder now than it did from her fall.
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