Hexarchate Stories

by Yoon Ha Lee

  What Mikodez knew: that Jedao, however much he appeared a manform, was not human. Jedao’s body regenerated even from death. Kujen, who had designed him, had intended for him to live forever.

  What Mikodez might not yet be aware of: Jedao could drag himself through the space-time weave as moths did. It was how he’d escaped the massacre of the Kel (my Kel, he couldn’t help thinking, with a stab of grief). It had also hurt so badly that Jedao didn’t care to repeat the experience.

  Beyond that, moths spoke to each other through minute fluctuations in space-time: gravity waves. Jedao heard the Citadel’s swarms of shadowmoths singing to each other every night, lullaby and torment in one.

  Jedao hadn’t attempted to contact the shadowmoths. While everyone knew that defense swarms orbited the Citadel, he wasn’t supposed to know their locations while they were stealthed. He wanted to join in the song, and talk to them, and be welcomed. But he remembered the utter silence with which the Kel warmoths had reacted to him, and he didn’t have any reason to believe that Shuos shadowmoths would feel differently. Besides, any anomaly in their behavior would be noticed by Mikodez’s staff, and Jedao couldn’t afford that.

  Instead, he’d practiced the speech-of-moths quietly, and learned to manipulate matter, with Hemiola standing guard. At first he’d been clumsy with it—he’d knocked all the riotous scented soaps into the tub that one time—and then he’d gained in finesse. In conjunction with his othersense, which allowed him to “see” distributions of mass with distracting precision, it gave him a chance to pull this off. Just this moment, for instance, in correlation with the master maps that he’d hacked into, he could tell that Mikodez’s primary office was empty.

  That was all the opening Jedao needed to reach into Mikodez’s office, enter the necessary verifications not by using the keyboard input but the terminal’s internal circuitry itself, and pipe access to Jedao’s own workstation.

  Kujen would have figured it out, assuming he hadn’t counted on it from the beginning. Whether he had informed Mikodez about this detail was what Jedao was about to find out.

  Hemiola’s lights sheened orange when the third subdisplay came up. It featured a background photo of a calico cat napping in a sink. Jedao recognized it as one of Zehun’s pets—specifically the one that, disconcertingly, was named after him.

  Jedao started to sweat. The marrow-deep pain was as he remembered it, if finer in scale. The fabric of his uniform—red-and-gold, how he hated the sight of it—clung damply to his back. He wiped his palms on his pants. Two years and he still hadn’t grown accustomed to going everywhere with naked hands, and this despite the fact that he’d never earned the half-gloves, either.

  I am a Shuos, he thought. Fourth time; lucky unlucky four. He thought of all the Kel deaths he was responsible for, in this life and in the one he couldn’t remember.

  He’d come this far. It would be a shame to let the opportunity slide past. So he set his fingers to the workstation and entered his first query. It would have been safer to do this using his ability to manipulate gravity, but he didn’t enjoy the pain. This would have to do.

  What the fuck became of you, Ruo? Jedao wondered as he dug through the filesystem. Did he really want to know what had become of his best friend? The boy he’d played pranks with? Whom he’d pined after but never asked out? (And why hadn’t he? Had there been a falling out?)

  Vestenya Ruo, Shuos cadet, tracked as Shuos infantry. Jedao had no idea why even a top-secret record clung to the old euphemism for assassin. He’d asked Mikodez about the term once. Mikodez had shrugged and said, “Habit”—another one of those maddening non-answers.

  Ruo had attended Shuos Academy Prime from 826 to—826. The end date hit Jedao like a blow to the stomach. Nausea washed through him as he wondered what had gone wrong.

  The first date was right. They’d been first-years together. As sieve-like as his memories were, Jedao knew that much.

  But less than a year in academy?

  The record didn’t end there. Ruo hadn’t been expelled, which would have been bad enough. Nor had he graduated in a single year, which would have been a miracle.

  No—Ruo had died. The record specified, in dry, bloodless detail, that Ruo had run afoul of a visiting Rahal magistrate while playing a heresy game. Ruo had committed suicide rather than be outprocessed and handed over to the Rahal.

  And the game had been designed by one Cadet Garach Jedao Shkan.

  That can’t be right, Jedao thought, and: I would never.

  Tears pricked his eyes. Angrily, he scrubbed them away with the back of his hand. Had he—had he maneuvered Ruo into suicide on purpose? And if so, why?

  But the record had no answers for him.

  I loved him, Jedao thought, and he’s gone. He’d looked sidelong at Ruo during the classes that they had together, admiring the fineness of his features, longing to run his fingers through the mane of hair that Ruo kept tied back in a ponytail. Imagined the weight of that solid body atop his.

  But he’d been convinced that he’d loved Dhanneth, too; and look how that had ended. Was his treatment of Dhanneth part of a pattern that he’d missed because of the amnesia? And if so, how could he make it up to the dead?

  I believe he died young, Kel Cheris had said to him. Sparing him the truth. There was no way she hadn’t known.

  Jedao didn’t feel spared. He couldn’t see why this information was so deeply classified. Especially when he knew that Mikodez, for all his quixotic moods, did everything for a reason when it came to security.

  “Are you all right?” Hemiola asked in worried yellow lights, then flushed pink. “Of course you’re not all right.” It had better vision than humans did, and in most regards, than Jedao himself. It already knew what the record said.

  “He would have been dead anyway,” Jedao said, but he wasn’t convincing even himself. He couldn’t bring himself to say Ruo’s name out loud, and not because he was worried about surveillance.

  “Is that all you wanted to find out?”

  “No,” Jedao said. “Just one more thing.”

  He had to dig around to locate what he was looking for. Mikodez named all his files sensible things, which only surprised Jedao a little: as much as Mikodez liked to play at high whimsy, his successor would someday depend on being able to locate important information. And Mikodez cared about his successors; cared that what he built should outlast him.

  Not my problem, Jedao told himself. It might even have been true. He opened the latest of the psychological evaluations that Mikodez had ordered his nephew and contact specialist, Andan Niath, to do on Jedao himself.

  The file was long and dreary. It took an effort not to skim. He knew already that he was unfit to leave the Citadel and rejoin mainstream society; possibly not fit even to interact with anyone but his carefully selected keepers, including the contact specialist. He didn’t need to be told that.

  The occasional odd detail leapt out at him. Displays no phobia of the dark, for instance. Surely such a common trigger would have disqualified him for military service? Granted that they had recovered him from deep space after the Battle of Terebeg two years ago, but a whole section followed on his responses to a test that they had given him, which had involved a series of lurid paintings.

  At last he came to Zehun’s summation, which was what interested him the most. Recommendation: subject is no closer to divulging the secret of why Hexarch Kujen’s command moth mutinied at Terebeg. Subject should be terminated.

  Jedao’s hand slipped; he almost accidentally deleted the file. Which wasn’t easy, what was he thinking, the system was logging all activity. Stupid of him, especially since he shouldn’t care. Zehun was civil to him, but there was no love lost between the two of them.

  “Hemiola,” Jedao said as he logged out and covered his tracks to the extent that they could be covered, which wasn’t very, “I’m going to need more of your help than I realized.”

  Hemiola blinked anxiously at him.

  “I
need passage off the Citadel to—a starport,” Jedao said. “Any starport. I can’t stow away inside a voidmoth here; they’ll catch me. But I might have a chance if I cling to the carapace.”

  Strictly speaking, he didn’t need to breathe. He’d tested this in his bathtub, which would have looked either silly or tragic if anyone had walked in on him. (Hemiola had disapproved strongly of this experiment, but he’d successfully argued that drowning was a temporary inconvenience.) All—”all“—he had to do was web himself to the exterior.

  Hemiola’s lights went through a veritable rainbow of misgivings. “I see a way,” it said at last. “Follow me.”

  SIX MINUTES BEFORE the end of class, and Ajewen Cheris, currently going by the name of Dzannis Paral, wondered who was looking forward to it more: herself, or her sixteen students.

  No one had called her “Cheris” since she had moved to the world of Esrala to live as a Mwennin among Mwennin, least of all the children, ranging from ages eight to fourteen, in her class. Cheris’s mother might be dead, and the Mwennin, her mother’s people, scattered and much diminished—Cheris’s own fault, a guilt that ran deep—but here, now, a few survived. Most days she was glad of it, and of the fact that there were children at all.

  Cheris had tutored math as a cadet in Kel Academy, but that had been, as Mikodez would have said, a completely different kettle of foxes. Not only had the topics been more advanced—applied and abstract algebra, plus the formation notation specific to the Kel—she’d been tutoring peers, fellow cadets. Cadets did not chew on styluses, stick wads of homemade candy under the tables, pull each other’s hair, or (admittedly one of the nicer surprises) bring in a pet snake to show her.

  Her students were, varyingly, bright, sleepy, curious, fidgety, and more difficult to predict than Kel. It wasn’t true that Kel were all alike, as though they were woodblock prints. But the Kel did select for a certain spirit of conformity. Mwennin parents, on the other hand, didn’t “select” at all. The children they had were the children they had.

  Cheris taught in one of the rooms of the community building, which the settlers considered a luxury. People in the hexarchate proper had neighborhood halls where they could gather and gossip and, inevitably, listen to the Doctrine briefings by the local Vidona-approved delegate. Here, the Mwennin had to adhere to the revised calendar—her calendar, although she tried not to think of it that way, not least because she couldn’t afford for the Mwennin to deduce her identity—but they didn’t hide many of the old traditions. Frequently the children themselves told Cheris about folklore and foods that she only stumblingly remembered from her own youth.

  A girl and an alt started squabbling over who had the prettier stylus. When they ignored the first and second warnings, Cheris escalated: “Heads down, please.” The children grumbled but obeyed, mumbling the meditation-chant that she had taught them to help them quiet down. She had to coax the girl to a seat farther away so she wouldn’t continue the quarrel.

  At least she didn’t want for classroom supplies. The settlement had basic manufacturing capabilities and some aging matter printers, for which Mikodez had privately apologized to Cheris. “You wouldn’t believe my budget problems,” he had said. “My people did what they could.” For once, Cheris believed him. She didn’t have to worry that her students would lack slates or desks or learning games. If anything, thanks to the involvement of the Shuos, they had more games, in all formats, than she was entirely comfortable with.

  And yet, for all the challenges that working as a teacher had brought her, from the time her students climbed up on the roof on a lark to the incident with the thankfully edible modeling clay, Cheris had discovered, to her horror, that she was getting bored.

  “Gwan,” Cheris said, wondering how it was that wrangling an energetic nine-year-old girl who constantly chewed on things was, in its way, more harrowing than being shot at. “Take that out of your mouth, please.” Weren’t kids supposed to grow out of that? By age four at least?

  (She thought about having kids of her own someday, if she met the right women or alts. The settlement had the necessary medical labs, even some crèches for those Mwennin who wanted to use them. Then she looked at her students, as much as she adored them, and had second thoughts.)

  Gwan took the mutilated stylus out of her mouth. “Sorry, Teacher!” she said. She was always sorry. As far as Cheris could tell, Gwan was sincere, she just had a wandering attention span and a need to fidget. Cheris had tried giving her candies instead, but Gwan kept passing them to the other kids, which defeated the purpose.

  The minutes ticked by. Cheris was diligent about making the kids stay for every last second of class—an important lesson to learn in a world where the calendar was so vital—but she let them out the moment the augment told her it was time. Most of the younger ones skipped or ran, almost colliding with each other in their enthusiasm.

  As Cheris tidied up the tables and chairs, she was aware of the weight of her handgun against her right hip, inside her pants; she was right-handed. Fortunately, Mwennin children were too respectful of adults to touch her or she would have worried about one of them discovering it by accident. The same went for the spare magazine she kept in her pocket. To keep from revealing it inadvertently, she kept most of her belongings—slate and stylus, snacks, keycard, that sort of thing—in a handbag.

  After she finished, Cheris headed out. Not for the first time, she felt ridiculous for carrying a gun. Crime wasn’t unknown in the settlement, but she couldn’t recall any instances of violent crime since her arrival. Granted, as former infantry, she wasn’t concerned about petty fights. It was illegal for her to own the gun, let alone carry it to school. As a Kel, she’d been armed as a matter of course. As a civilian, she was supposed to rely on the authorities.

  Tomorrow I’ll leave it at home, Cheris thought as she strolled down the road leading to her favorite bakery. (This wasn’t saying much; the settlement only had two.) Even so, she knew she was lying to herself. The part of her that was Kel might have been persuaded to leave security to the authorities. The part of her that was Jedao—that was another matter entirely.

  Jedao might be a whisper of unruly memories crammed into her head, but he was real and present in ways that she hadn’t entirely untangled even after the eleven years since his death. And Jedao didn’t believe in safety, or trusting other people. During the centuries planning a one-man revolution against the hexarchate entire, with his only ally the man who had designed the high calendar in the first place, with its social strictures and ritual torture, he couldn’t afford to.

  She reached the bakery and picked up her usual order of two meat pasties, which was ready for her. Several people sat at the tables outside. One of them was pretending to work out pattern-stone puzzles on their tablet. She’d identified the curly-haired alt as a Shuos agent not long after her arrival. She always saw them here, even on the days that she changed her schedule. They weren’t trying to hide from her, anyway, just from the other settlers, and she didn’t have a reason to expose them.

  Cheris resisted the urge to wave at the agent as she walked by them on the way home. The winding road that led to her neighborhood was lined with an exuberance of flowers. Most of the forsythias, with their four-petaled yellow blooms, had died off in favor of splendid green leaves, but there were still azaleas in pink, white, magenta. The violets were harder to spot, both the white ones with purple streaks at their hearts and the more ordinary ones that looked like their name.

  The flowers’ mingling fragrances relaxed her, and the smell of the pasties was making her hungry. She was looking forward to a quiet evening doing some grading, despite the tickling sense that she wouldn’t mind a more active existence. There was that one boy who had creative ideas about how the distributive property worked. And afterwards she could sit down in the common room and watch dueling matches.

  “Anyone home?” Cheris called out as she approached the front door of the residence she shared with two women and an alt. No one
responded; no surprise. Two of her housemates had jobs that kept them out until later in the day, and the third was a social butterfly and was frequently visiting friends.

  Cheris entered and checked, reflexively, for signs of intruders. The hard part wasn’t the paranoia. She’d gotten used to that. The hard part was trying to fit in; pretending that she was just another Mwennin refugee.

  She had a lovely home where she could catch up on dramas and dueling matches at her leisure. She taught adorable children, even if the adorable children liked to stick things in their mouths. Nobody shot at her anymore. Why wasn’t she happy?

  She headed into the kitchen to put one of the meat pasties into the refrigerator, then returned to the common area and sank gratefully onto a floor cushion to eat the other. She asked the grid to image her the local news. Maybe that would ground her in reality and keep her from worrying about the state of the galaxy, which wasn’t her concern anymore.

  Still, her mind wandered as the news talked about the discovery of a new primitive sea-creature. She thought of Jedao, inevitably. Sometimes I don’t understand you at all, she told the fragments of him that remained. Someone who still mourned the death of a childhood friend, to the extent that he existed to do the mourning at all, yet had been capable of murdering his command staff, people he’d known and relied upon for years.

  If Cheris was honest with herself—something she had just enough psychic distance for—Jedao’s feelings for Kel Gized, his chief of staff and the first person he’d murdered, had not been entirely platonic. But Jedao wouldn’t have acted on his subterranean desires, and in any case Gized had never shown any sign of having any interest in romance. She’d been a Kel of the very old school, from the days when the Kel were an autonomous people and some of them took the sword-vow: married to her profession as a soldier, and nothing else.