by Yoon Ha Lee
“Security’s not going to approve of you poaching the carp,” Meurran said.
“Oh, this isn’t for the carp,” Ruo said. He flicked his fishing pole, and the line with its enticing nut snaked out toward one of the trees.
Meurran gave Ruo a funny look. “Ruo,” they said, “the fish are in the opposite direction.”
“Please,” Jedao said, “who cares about the fish? No one has anything to fear from the fish. That’s just nonsense.”
“All right,” Meurran said, sounding distinctly unimpressed, “then what?”
Come on, Jedao thought, the nut is right there...
As if on cue, a black squirrel darted down from the tree, then made for the nut.
Ruo tugged the nut just out of reach.
The black squirrel looked around, then headed for the nut again.
“Oh, isn’t that adorable?” Meurran said.
“Don’t be fooled!” Ruo said as he guided the squirrel in a figure-eight through the grass. “Why would the commandant be so stupid as to implant surveillance devices in the carp, which can’t even leave their pond?”
Meurran glanced involuntarily at the pond, where two enormous carp were lazily circling near the surface, as if the carp, in fact, had a habit of oozing out onto the land and spying on lazy cadets. “You’re saying the squirrels—?”
Ruo continued to tease the squirrel with the nut. “It makes sense, doesn’t it? Everyone thinks the black squirrels are the cutest. They’re even featured in the recruitment literature. Damnably clever piece of social engineering, if you ask me.”
Meurran was starting to look persuaded in spite of themself.
Meanwhile, as Ruo made his case, Jedao leaned back and studied the squirrel with a frown. The local population of black squirrels was mostly tame and had proven to be easy to train with the aid of treats. (Ruo had made Jedao do most of this, “because you’re the farm boy.”) But while Ruo and Meurran argued about squirrel population dynamics, Jedao caught a slight flash from behind the squirrel’s eyes—almost like that of a camera?
He opened his mouth to interrupt.
The squirrel made an odd convulsing motion, and the light flashed again, this time directly into Jedao’s eyes.
Jedao closed his mouth and kept his thoughts to himself.
Author’s Note
This story is the result of a few separate things. I read a webpage on “squirrel-fishing” when I was at Cornell University some twenty years ago; I don’t think the site is still up, but it provided me with much-needed laughs during finals week. Later I attended Stanford University for grad school, which is known for its population of black squirrels. My sister, who attended Stanford as an undergrad (we overlapped for one year), later told me that the black squirrel population is self-reinforcing as people feed them preferentially for being so darn cute.
Finally, my then-boyfriend-now-husband and I ran a Legends of the Five Rings tabletop roleplaying campaign in which the Emperor’s carp were both ancient and smarter than any of the PCs. I don’t remember why the joke was so funny. Possibly it wasn’t, but even ridiculous things look funny when you’re trying not to freak out over your prelims.
Silence
I KNEW WHEN I knocked on the door to my mother’s house, with its cheerful wooden plaque painted with a white goose, that my little brother had arrived before me.
For one thing, I heard music, a recording of that viola concerto my mother had liked so much, and which had been performed by my brother’s sire. For another, I heard his laughter. I would have known that laughter anywhere in the heptarchate. If he was laughing, surely things weren’t too bad.
“It’s not locked,” Mother called out. I heard another voice, higher and sharper than hers. My little sister must be visiting as well.
Mother rarely bothered with locks to her living quarters, as opposed to the laboratory buildings where she did her research. I slid the door open, left my shoes by the door, and came in. Nidana had worn knee-high boots. Jedao’s shoes were decidedly unmilitary lavender loafers.
My mother was fussing with a fragrant fruit salad, ruining it past even my brother’s ability to lie about its presentability. I didn’t worry about it being edible, just presentable. She had scared up fruits either dyed or engineered to be Shuos red and a credible gold. I was only mildly surprised that there weren’t juice stains on her cream-colored blouse.
“I don’t see why you felt the need to ruin perfectly good fruit, Mom,” Nidana was saying as she nursed a glass of wine. She hadn’t taken her beige jacket off, although it was warm inside. “Just because Jay joined the faction with the tackiest colors doesn’t mean you have to inflict them on the rest of us.”
“Rodao!” my brother said over Nidana’s voice, coming around from where he had been looking for a clean glass (my mother was as terrible about dishes as she was fanatical about keeping her laboratory gear in top condition). “How are Teia and the girls?”
My brother Jedao was the smaller of us. Growing up, people had occasionally mistaken me for the deadlier one, which was ridiculous. Both Jedao and our younger sister Nidana could flense you at twenty paces with wit alone, and Jedao had always liked to fight. It hadn’t surprised anyone in the family when he wound up in the Kel army.
Right now Jedao was wearing informal civilian garb in violet and gray, a loose, short-sleeved tunic over well-tailored pants. I had the disturbing realization that he looked foreign to me in these clothes rather than the overdecorated Kel uniforms the news clips showed him in.
Jedao was looking at me inquiringly. “The family’s fine,” I said. “The girls are going to ambush you for presents.”
“You spoil those kids horribly,” Nidana said. But she was smiling. She did her share of spoiling, especially if any of my three daughters wanted books.
Jedao grinned at me. “They’re my nieces, Ro. I’m supposed to spoil them. I found the best thing ever on the way here, by the way. I got them toy assassin’s tools.”
Mother had a coughing fit and hastily put down the fruit salad. “You what?” she said.
Nidana was unimpressed. “Jay, is this going to be like the time you brought home the programmable flying toy moths and you had to take them away because of that manufacturing defect and one of them caught on fire and Mareida thought it was the best trick ever and she wanted you to do it again?”
“Nia, just because I kill people for a living doesn’t mean it’s my fault Ro’s kids are bloodthirsty,” Jedao protested. “Besides, they’re safe now. There are no sharp corners, and the kids are old enough not to eat them so I’m not concerned about choking hazards. The toy hairstick is to die for. The crystal on the end turns different colors and it even plays music if you push a button. I had to disable the fake needler because it worked too much like a real one, bad news if you pointed it at anyone’s eyes, but that wasn’t hard.”
“How the hell do you have a toy hairstick?” I demanded, choosing to ignore the bit about the needler. “Isn’t that like having a toy comb? Exactly like a grown-up comb, except the colors?”
“I thought it was cute,” Jedao said defensively.
Nidana shook her head. “I can’t believe your superiors made you a tactical group commander.” At thirty he was young for it, too.
“Stop ragging on him,” Mother said. “Does anyone want fruit salad?”
“I’ll take some,” Jedao said.
Nidana shuddered. “None for me, thanks. Ro?”
“Sure,” I said. The fact that I hadn’t watched its preparation worked in my favor.
“Besides,” Jedao said, turning to me, “the Kel couldn’t find anyone else stupid enough to do the job. It’s mostly paperwork.”
I didn’t believe him. Jedao’s collection of Kel jokes wasn’t as extensive as his collection of Andan jokes, but if I got him started he’d never shut up. Instead, I helped Nidana find clean bowls and let Mother serve me a portion of the dreadful-looking fruit salad.
“How is it?” Mother asked.
There was only one correct answer. “It’s great,” Jedao said before I could say what I thought. Given how infrequently he was on leave, he had more of a vested interest in keeping our mother happy during his visit than I did. Surreptitiously, I set my bowl down on a side table and slid it away from me.
“How drunk do you want to get tonight?” Nidana asked him, eyes sparkling. “I came up with this fantastic new cocktail.”
Jedao eyed her warily. “In that case, I’ll stick to tea. Are you still adding mood-enhancing substances to your drinks?”
“Spoilsport,” she said.
Mother plucked a grape out of her salad and bit into it with great enthusiasm. I was sure I turned green. The grapes, all peeled, had pale flesh with dark traceries so they resembled eyeballs. “So, Jedao,” she said, “when are you going to bring home a nice tame boy?”
Jedao blushed, and I hid a grin. Mother didn’t make any secret of the fact that she wanted a bigger flock of grandchildren so she could fatten them like the geese. Jedao hadn’t been this easy to fluster as a teen. I still remembered the time when he was fifteen and he wanted to impress the Ghirout boy so he hacked the locks on my floater and they went on a ride. He thought he’d gotten away with it until the next afternoon, when I interrupted his make-out session to lecture him on covering his tracks. I always figured he’d gone fox as vengeance.
“I’m not seeing anyone, Mom,” Jedao said in a long-suffering voice. “I don’t care what they say about what we get up to in the military, most of it is very dull.”
“Or is it girls or alts now?” Mother said, ignoring him. “It’s so hard to keep track with you.”
“Mom.” Jedao poured himself a cup of lukewarm tea and made a show of being very interested in it, which fooled no one.
“I wouldn’t worry about you so much if you wrote more often,” Mother complained.
“Be fair,” Nidana said, “he writes every seven weeks like clockwork. It’s not his fault the censors hold up the mail.”
Jedao had the good sense not to get involved in the ensuing squabble between our mother and Nidana, and instead polished off his salad with no sign that its resemblance to body parts bothered him.
Afterward, Mother went to check on something at the facility. Nidana excused herself because the taste of the salad had inspired her and she had to start a new poem. I loved my sister, but I would never pretend to understand art and artists.
For our part, Jedao and I went out to the flower garden, carrying cups of tea. The garden sported a stone bench with patches of dark moss growing around its base, and was indifferently weeded. No one around here had the time for it. Mother’s idea of growing flowers was to scatter wildflower seeds and order bizarre cocktails of specialized hungry insects to inhibit pests.
Jedao plucked one of the bluebonnets and stuck it behind his ear. It made him look like he was ten all over again.
“I’m glad you’re home safely,” I said, to see if he would flinch.
Jedao set the teacup down on the bench. “It’s nice to run into someone who doesn’t think I have magical powers of survival,” he said. He smiled at me, the tilted smile that he and Nidana and our mother shared, but I didn’t, because he and Nidana and I all had different sires. Shparoi culture didn’t approve of some of Mother’s life choices; Jedao had gotten into his share of fights over it.
I almost believed he was fine. There was nothing wrong with his smile, or the easy, affectionate light in his eyes. As far as I knew, the last time he’d cried was when he was eight, after he’d gotten into a fight and lost. I didn’t know why I was thinking of that.
After an awkward pause, I said, “If they had to rebuild half your face anyway, you could have asked them to make you devastatingly handsome.”
“What, so Mom can nag me about my inadequate love life some more?” Jedao said. He was still smiling. “Hey, they gave me back a face, period. I’m not greedy.”
“I almost can’t tell,” I said. It was true. They hadn’t bothered putting back the scar on his chin from that time he fell out of the tree when he was seven. And his face was more symmetrical than it had been, hard to pin down unless you looked hard at the bone structure, especially around the eyes.
He kicked at an empty overturned flowerpot. “You know, I stared in the mirror for the longest time after all the operations, and it was the strangest thing, like I was looking at someone I’d never met before. Or trying to find one of those especially elusive zits when I was thirteen.”
“How the hell do you take a grenade to the face as a moth commander, anyway?”
Jedao pulled a face. “Technically classified, but since Mom already dragged that much out of me and is obviously talking to you about it... There was a riot on the station where we put in for repairs. Not even heretics, just ordinary disgruntled workers. As far as we can tell, they didn’t have anything against me personally. Anyone in a Kel uniform would have sufficed.”
“A grenade?” I demanded.
“It was practically homebrew. If it’d been the stuff the Kel infantry are issued, I’d be dead.”
“Mother worries about you,” I said.
Jedao cocked an eyebrow at me but generously refrained from accusing me of projecting. “I’ll write home more often if she promises to send fewer of those horrible cookies,” he said. “I can’t fob them off on anyone anymore. All my fellow officers know they’re hard enough to be used as bricks.”
I huffed a laugh. “I can’t do that. She’d make me eat them.”
“You have spawn,” Jedao said unsympathetically. “Feed the cookies to them. They still have some of their baby teeth, they can afford to lose a few.”
I reached over and ruffled his hair the way I used to when he was a kid. He made a humming contented sound. Touching a soldier without invitation wasn’t bright of me, but all I could think of was the boy he’d been.
That wasn’t all. Long ago, during the first break when he’d come home after his first year at Shuos Academy, Jedao had seemed fine, the same cocky teenager who occasionally cut class to play jeng-zai and pattern-stones. (Mother had made him clean a scary amount of glassware after she caught him. More accurately, I’d ratted him out.) Yet every time I watched him, I was convinced he’d been replaced by some hollow marionette: nothing real except negative space.
No one else had noticed anything amiss. I’d spent time with Jedao—chores, tea, board games. He gave a great performance. Once or twice when we were alone together, I almost came out and asked. He was an excellent liar, but I was the one person who’d always been able to tell.
Once again, I almost asked. On the other hand, he was a grown man and a Shuos and a soldier. It was none of my damn business.
“You look tired,” Jedao said. “Sleeping all right?”
“Long shifts at work, that’s all,” I said. And that was that: we talked about my new supervisor, and once again I let the subject slide.
Fourteen years later, when I heard of Hellspin Fortress, I’d discover how badly I’d fucked up by keeping quiet; and then, of course, it was too late to fix anything.
Author’s Note
I originally wrote this as an exercise in first person, and chose Rodao as the viewpoint character because I thought his perspective on Jedao would be interesting. I’d always conceived of him as the annoyingly straitlaced oldest sibling (confession: I was the annoyingly straitlaced older sibling, for which I hope my kid sister has forgiven me), the one who could always catch Jedao out in whatever tall tales he tried to fob off on everyone else. Just imagine if the Shuos had ever taken advantage of that.
Jedao’s genetic father is a violist for the simple reason that I used to play viola, although it’s been years and I lost my instrument to the Louisiana floods of 2016. I have always had a soft spot for the viola, even if I imagine every violist eventually gets sick of that one Telemann concerto. And the detail about Jedao cutting class to play games is stolen from my father’s life (hi, Dad!). Apparently when he was young,
he’d cut class to play baduk (go, wei qi—what I’ve chosen to call pattern-stones in the h*archate). It paid off; during my abortive childhood attempts to learn to play chess, Dad needed me to remind him how all the different pieces moved, and he still won every time!
Extracurricular Activities
WHEN SHUOS JEDAO walked into his temporary quarters on Station Muru 5 and spotted the box, he assumed someone was attempting to assassinate him. It had happened before. Considering his first career, there was even a certain justice to it.
He ducked back around the doorway, although even with his reflexes, it would have been too late if it’d been a proper bomb. The air currents in the room would have wafted his biochemical signature to the box and caused it to trigger. Or someone could have set one up to go off as soon as the door opened, regardless of who stepped in. Or something even less sophisticated.
Jedao retreated back down the hallway and waited one minute. Two. Nothing.
It could just be a package, he thought—paperwork that he had forgotten?—but old habits died hard.
He entered again and approached the desk, light-footed. The box, made of eye-searing green plastic, stood out against the bland earth tones of the walls and desk. It measured approximately half a meter in all directions. Its nearest face prominently displayed the gold seal that indicated that station security had cleared it. He didn’t trust it for a moment. Spoofing a seal wasn’t that difficult; he’d done it himself.
He inspected the box’s other visible sides without touching it, then spotted a letter pouch affixed to one side and froze. He recognized the handwriting. The address was written in spidery high language, while the name of the recipient—one Garach Jedao Shkan—was written both in high language and his birth tongue, Shparoi, for good measure.
Oh, Mom, Jedao thought. No one else called him by that name anymore, not even the rest of his family. More importantly, how had his mother gotten his forwarding address? He’d just received his transfer orders last week, and he hadn’t written home about it because his mission was classified. He had no idea what his new general wanted him to do; she would tell him tomorrow when he reported in.