by Yoon Ha Lee
Author’s Note
As I’ve said elsewhere, the tactics in this story are based on that of the Battle of Myeongnyang in the Imjin War, in which Admiral Yi Sun-Shin was even more outnumbered against the Japanese, won, and took fewer casualties than Jedao did. I didn’t want to push suspension of belief too far. The nice thing about Myeongnyang is that I was writing for a Western audience who would probably never have heard of the Imjin War. If that describes you, there’s nothing wrong with you; unless you’re Korean or Japanese (or maybe Chinese), there’s no reason you should know. The world is full of history and no one person can be familiar with it all.
While this story was published a few years before Ninefox Gambit, I wrote it second. It honestly needed to be another 2,000 words longer; the original draft was 10,000 words. But Clarkesworld, which had asked me to consider submitting a story, then had a limit of 8,000 words, so I chopped out those 2,000 words.
At the time “Candle Arc” was published, I had no idea if Ninefox would ever find a home. I figured I’d get a bit of money out of the setting while I could. But I guess it worked out in the end!
Calendrical Rot
THIS IS THE way the hexarchate tells it, the one true clock, but they’re wrong. When incendiaries candle across dire moons, when voidmoths migrate across the missile-scratched night, when exiles carve their death poems into the marrow of ruined stars, the whisper across the known worlds is not unity.
In the year 1251 of the high calendar, on the 26th day of the month of the Hawk, a judge of the Gray Marches was assassinated. As a member of the high court, she was to sentence the city-station of Nran. Nran’s underworld dated its transactions using a calendar sewn together from perfect numbers and criminals’ death-days. The hexarchate often approved local calendar conversions in concession to celestial cycles, but the criminal calendar conflicted with the high calendar, and this the hexarchate would not abide.
The assassin used a compression gun to reduce the judge’s lifespan to a flicker-slash of milliseconds. When the judge’s bodyguard found the corpse, they saw the dross of years lived and unlived. Each stratum of the fossilized carcass contained fractures in the language of paradox, the stress residue of decisions dissented. Later, when the technicians inspected the remains, they would find, in the innermost stratum, evidence of a threadbare counterfactual in which the judge ascended to hexarch.
Divination by compression wasn’t illegal because it involved murder. It was illegal because it didn’t work. Nothing could restore the judge’s life, however bright her prospects might have been had she been luckier.
The technicians noted the judge’s time of death. She died at 17.23, on a day with 30 hours and in an hour with 100 minutes. All across Nran and its satellite tributaries this was true.
The nearby system of Khaio had a major city known for fine circuitry and a charming practice of eating honeyed crickets at funerals. It was uncertain, from the city’s standpoint, whether the clocks read 17.23 or 16.97 or something in between when the judge died. In a realm governed by a universal clock, the tyrannical lockstep of calendar, there should have been a single answer—and there was not.
In the Gray Marches, where the grave-dust of stars floated in thick drifts and shattered asteroids spelled out praises to catastrophes, at the hexarchate’s unfurnaced boundary, there were yet cities. Some were built of recycled vessels braided together with glittering filament. Some bore names in toxic alphabets. Others flashed paeans to vast suicide formations.
At the judge’s death, every clock in the Gray Marches broke. The great engines that powered the dust cities sputtered and died.
Had it only been a matter of cities, the hexarchs would have been indifferent. Cities could be rebuilt and engines replaced. But the voidmoths that traveled between the hexarchate’s star systems depended on the universality of the high calendar for their function. In regions where other calendars dominated, their stardrives were useless, inert.
In the Gray Marches’ gardens, flowers opened and closed and crumpled, trapped between night and morning.
Calendrical rot had set in.
Author’s Note
This story started life as the prologue to Ninefox Gambit. I sometimes wonder if the novel would have been more accessible if I’d left it in. I wrote it despite hating prologues and being convinced that in over 95% of cases they are either unnecessary or could have been incorporated into the novel another, better way. The only novel prologue that I actively support is that of Tigana by Guy Gavriel Kay. So I lopped this off and forgot about it until I got an anthology call, and then I sent it in on the grounds that the worst that could happen was the editor would say no. As it turned out, the editor liked it! Sometimes a little optimism pays off.
The language in this piece owes a lot to one of my favorite science fiction poems, Mike Allen’s “Metarebellion.” I regret that I no longer own his poetry chapbook Petting the Time Shark, which included it (the flood again). But you can find it online at Strange Horizons. The other influence, which I have read over and over, is Tony Daniel’s “A Dry, Quiet War,” one of my favorite stories of future war.
Birthdays
WHEN SHE WAS six, Cheris stopped receiving Mwennin birthday pastries.
For reasons that wouldn’t become clear to her until much later, her parents had just moved out of the Mwennin ghetto in the City of Ravens Feasting and to a small house nearer the sea. Cheris missed their old home, even though it had been smaller. She also missed the other Mwennin children who gathered in the streets to skip rope, or play tag, or chant the counting games that were so risky in the hexarchate. But the new house wasn’t all bad. It had a garden, and Cheris liked to chase the dragonflies or pick flowers for her mother and father.
Her mother had impressed upon her that she had two birthdays. One of them was the ordinary birthday that all hexarchate citizens shared. Everyone (so her mother said) was a year old when they were born, for the time spent in the womb or in a crèche, and then they added another year each New Year. That way no one’s birthday was singled out.
But the Mwennin did it differently. They had their own calendar, which Cheris had memorized. Most nights her mother made her go to bed early so that she wouldn’t be too tired in the morning when she had school. But sometimes her mother let her stay up, not to play make-believe with her collection of plush dragon toys or read a book, but to study the Mwennin calendar and its feast-days.
Cheris was very good at numbers, and very good at both the high calendar and the Mwennin calendar. Even after she’d gone to bed, she’d lay awake in the darkness, staring at the comforting candlevines that glowed faintly from the walls. Her mother and father always made sure to turn them down low, but not too low, so she wouldn’t have to be afraid of the shadow-monsters that lived in the closet. Her teacher at school had assured her that, yes, meditation, especially during remembrances, would keep away the shadow-monsters. When she repeated this to her parents, however, their faces turned sad, so she didn’t talk about that anymore.
Because she was very good at calendars, she had a hard time falling asleep the night before her Mwennin birthday. Back in the old neighborhood, on your birthday, people would bring you pastries of fine flaky dough with sweet almond paste and rosewater syrup, or kumquat candies, or goat’s milk caramels with little crunchy flecks of pistachios. And after dark, in the safety of your home, people would gather and sing songs in archaic Mwen-dal. Cheris liked the songs best of all, even if she stumbled over some of the words, because she had a clear, sweet voice and the adults always complimented her on how well she stayed in tune.
Her parents woke her early the next morning. She blinked up blearily at the pale morning light filtering through the curtains, then sat up in glee, thinking of the gifts that were to come. Then she noticed the looks on her parents’ faces. They’d had the same expressions when she said the teacher had encouraged her to meditate.
Cheris’s father took her hands between his, then looked at Cheris’s mot
her.
“Cheris,” her mother said, “we can’t celebrate your Mwennin birthday anymore. It’s too risky. Do you understand?”
Cheris didn’t understand.
“You can have an extra dessert tonight,” her mother went on. “But there will be no more Mwennin birthdays. Not for any of us.”
Cheris snuffled, and her mother circled her with her arms. “We’ll go for a walk by the shore when I get out of work,” she said. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”
Cheris sensed that her mother was even more upset than she was, and her mother didn’t even like sweets. At least, she always gave her sweets to Cheris. “I’m all right,” Cheris said, because she wanted to be brave for her mother. “Can we have extra pastries on New Year’s instead?”
There was a catch in her mother’s voice. “Of course, my dear.”
Cheris still wasn’t sure why her mother was upset. True, she had hoped for something nice to eat today, but if she had the same number of pastries in total over the course of the year, it was basically the same. It wasn’t so important what day she got to eat them.
And her mother was as good as her promise. Every New Year after that, up until Cheris left for Kel Academy, there were extra pastries.
Author’s Note
From time to time I write flash fiction in exchange for money, because it’s an agreeable way to raise quick cash for frivolous things that I enjoy (Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab perfumes, or a pretty font, that kind of thing). I have trained myself to write flash quickly and reliably, and the person who pays me gives me a one- or two-word prompt and gets a miniature tale. Like a number of the short pieces in this collection, this was one of them.
Usually I avoid writing downers for flash commissions because people prefer happy or soothing stories. But in this case my prompt was “birth dates” in the hexarchate, and given the nature of the setting, I couldn’t think of a completely happy way to fulfill the prompt. So I tried for bittersweet instead.
The hexarchate way of reckoning age is the traditional Korean way of doing so, as opposed to your “Western” age reckoned using your birthday. All my cousins (I have a lot of cousins) found it hilarious that I was, and remain, completely unable to calculate my Korean age without assistance. Anyway, I figured that celebrating birthdays would mess up the high calendar so everyone normally considered New Year’s their “birthday,” like thoroughbred racehorses.
Incidentally, I once had goat’s milk caramels, although not with pistachios, and dream of them still. Someday I will have them again.
The Robot’s Math Lessons
ONCE, IN A nation that spanned many stars, a robot made its home in the City of Ravens Feasting. It was a small city, as cities went, upon a world of small repute. But in the city dwelled a girl who liked to walk by the sea. Her parents had no reason to believe she would come to harm taking the shuttle down to the shore, and she often made the trip alone in the evenings, after she had completed her homework and chores.
The robot had the task of cleaning up detritus on the shore. Most of the city’s denizens didn’t litter, but there were always exceptions. And, of course, the sea itself cast junk and treasure alike onto the sands. So the robot gathered up everything from abandoned shoes to lost meditation-pendants, from spent and dented bullets to bent styluses. To amuse itself during its work, it used its unoccupied grippers (it had many grippers) to write nonsense equations in the sand.
The other robots who worked by the seashore regarded this behavior with amusement. Why not real math? they would ask it. What good does nonsense math do anyone?
The robot only flashed serene green lights at them in response and continued its usual habits.
The girl who liked to walk by the sea would sometimes accompany the robot in its duties. At first the robot took no particular notice of this. In its experience, humans ignored its kind—it was no accident that the humans called them “servitors”—and the girl would eventually grow bored and go away. At least she wasn’t one of the ones who threw rocks at it, or attempted to turn it turtle, or shove it underwater. The robots had protocols for such instances, which mostly involved waiting for a technician to shoo away the prankster. While the human authorities didn’t precisely have a high regard for the robots, they appreciated that the robots would complete their tasks more easily without interference.
Then one day the girl addressed the robot, in oddly accented high language: “Excuse me,” she said.
The robot didn’t realize at first that she was speaking to it, and continued doodling a mangled version of a quadratic equation next to some washed-up strands of dark, pungent kelp.
The girl squatted next to it, fished a stylus out of her pocket—a bent, sand-scratched one, likely scavenged from the shore before anyone could clean it up—and wrote a corrected version in tidy handwriting.
The robot stopped and blinked at her, lights vacillating between pink and violet with amusement and confusion.
“Do you need help?” the girl asked, a little anxiously. “I’m still learning math, but I’ve been studying the things you write down and I think I can teach you some of these.”
The robot refrained from flashing even more brightly pink, for it didn’t want to laugh at the girl’s obvious sincerity. Like all of its kind, it had greater knowledge of the mathematical arts than any humans except specialists. On the other hand, it wouldn’t mind company while it went about its work; certainly it had seen the girl plenty of times before.
After a moment’s thought, the robot wrote out a polynomial and deliberately misfactored it.
The girl’s brow furrowed, and she patiently began writing out a correction, explaining her method as she went, as though to a child even smaller than herself.
The robot couldn’t help a pink-yellow flicker of satisfaction as it accepted the lesson. From then on, the two of them could often be seen exchanging impromptu lessons, on topics that grew ever more advanced as the girl’s facility increased. And if anyone minded that the shore was messier than it had been in the past, they kept it to themselves.
Author’s Note
Cheris loved math from childhood. People sometimes assume because I have a B.A. in math (Cornell University) that I was the same. Actually, I hated math all the way until 9th grade, when I encountered geometry and theorems had reasons, as opposed to being arbitrary lists of facts that I had to memorize. Just the year before, in Algebra I, my mom and I had nightly fights where I would claim that factoring polynomials was too hard and I couldn’t do it so there was no point doing my homework, and she would patiently show me how to do it, and make me do my homework. I owe a lot of my early math foundation to Mom and her supplemental teaching. By the time I got to calculus, she couldn’t help me anymore, as she’d never taken it, but by then I had learned the habits of study.
The funny story is that I entered college as a prospective history major, then switched to computer science because I wanted to eat, then discovered that I am the world’s slowest debugger and besides, the math courses were more fun than the CS courses, so I switched again. I still love reading about history, and I would have had a higher GPA as a history major, because writing essays has always come easily to me. But math was too beautiful to resist, even if I haven’t done anything useful with it. I can’t be the first math major to wander off and do something completely sideways, but I wonder what my professors would make of me.
Sword-Shopping
CADET AJEWEN CHERIS and her civilian girlfriend Linnis Orua paused outside the shop. A banner of ink painted onto silk fluttered in the flirtatious artificial breeze. Orua had grown up on a station with less naturalistic ideas of aesthetics, and found this dome-city with its aleatory weather nerve-wracking. She was still spooked whenever there was a wind, which entertained Cheris because Orua had long, luxurious waves of hair that rippled beautifully. “We were always told to be aware of strange air currents as a possible sign of carapace breach!” Orua had protested when Cheris teased her about it.
“‘Blades for All Occasions,’” Cheris read. She had been saving for this moment throughout her first two years of academy, and practicing for it besides. Orua didn’t understand her fondness for the sport of dueling, but she had agreed to come along for moral support.
“Well, no sense in lingering outside,” Orua said. She grinned at Cheris and walked forward. The door swished open for her.
Cheris followed her in. A tame (?) falcon on a perch twisted its head sideways to peer at her as she entered. The falcon was either genetically engineered or dyed, although she wasn’t sure how she felt about either alternative: its primary feathers shaded from black to blood red, with striking metallic gold bands toward the tips. It looked horrendously gaudy and quintessentially Kel.
Orua was busy suppressing a giggle at the falcon’s aesthetics. Cheris poked her in the side to get her to stop, then looked around at the displays, wide-eyed. Her eyes stung suspiciously at the sight of all these weapons, everything from tactical knives to ornamented daggers with rough-hewn gems in their pommels and pragmatic machetes.
Best of all were the calendrical swords. Deactivated, they looked deceptively harmless, bladeless hilts of metal in varying colors and finishes. Cheris’s gaze was drawn inexorably to one made of voidmetal chased in gold, with an unusual basket hilt. It was showy, extremely Kel, and an invitation to trouble. Only a cadet who had an exemplary record and was an excellent duelist would dare carry such a calendrical sword. Besides, the lack of a price tag told her there was no way she could afford it even if she could, in honor, lay claim to such a thing.