More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Yoon Ha Lee
Read between
September 5 - September 5, 2020
immortality was like sex: it made idiots of otherwise rational people.
Kujen had sent Mikodez his projections of possible heretical calendars. “I’ve sorted them by likelihood,” Kujen said. “That first one is bad news, especially if they’re fixated on seven as their central integer. And here I thought nobody paid attention to the past anymore.” He was one of two people who still remembered what life had been like under seven factions, not six.
– of a time when the hexarchate was a heptarchate – did concern him. The Liozh had been the philosophers and ethicists of the heptarchate, and some evidence suggested that they had been destroyed when they attempted to do away with the remembrances, which Kujen was fond of.
if the Liozh had failed with their heresy the first time around, why would any sane heretic pick them to emulate?
“Anyway, all those calendars are compatible with the Fortress’s shields. I have advised Kel Command that they might as well just say how to take the shields out since it’s not like it’ll stay a secret, but they are proving resistant.”
If the shields went down, the Fortress was dangerously vulnerable.
Kujen was unlikely to damage anyone who had a chance of entertaining him in matters related to number theory.
Kel Cheris was sane, although the odds were that she wouldn’t stay that way. Still, Mikodez had to trade her welfare for the hexarchate’s. Someday someone might come up with a better government, one in which brainwashing and the remembrances’ ritual torture weren’t an unremarkable fact of life.
“Welcome back, Captain,” the executive officer said, eying her with a faint spark of curiosity. This alarmed her – it never paid to stand out too much among the Kel – but no response seemed to be expected.
All her muscles ached, but she dug out a small box of personal items and pulled out the raven luckstone her mother had given her on her twenty-third birthday. It was a polished stone, drab gray, and the raven’s silhouette was a welcome reminder of the home she visited so seldom.
The birdform flashed a series of ironic golds and reds. Cheris had learned to read Simplified Machine Universal, and nodded her agreement. It added that it had been having trouble with one of its grippers, if she had a moment to adjust it? “Of course,” Cheris said. She wasn’t a technician, but some repair jobs were better handled by human hands, and she had learned the basics.
The servitors had designations for human convenience, but she was certain that they had names of their own. She made a point of not asking.
the Shuos ninefox with its waving tails, each with a lidless eye, and the Kel ashhawk in flames; the Andan kniferose and the Vidona stingray; the Rahal scrywolf and the Nirai voidmoth scattered with stars.
The terminal showed her signifier, which was to say that it drew red-gold flames around an ashhawk’s silhouette. Unlike the emblem on her uniform, the signifier’s ashhawk was in the Sheathed Wings configuration.
She was beginning to wonder if she should leave her apologies and try again later when the terminal’s signifier shattered and showed her her own face: the same neat dark hair, the same dark eyes. But the smile was not her own, and the stranger wore a high general’s flared wings and flame where Cheris had a captain’s talon with its pricked bead of blood. “Captain,” the stranger said. It even had her voice. “This is Composite Subcommand Two of Kel Command. Acknowledge.”
the designation Two indicated that at least one of the highest generals was in the composite. A bad sign.
Subcommand Two said, “Most of your soldiers will have to be processed by Doctrine, true. But it would be a waste of your improvisational abilities to send you with them.”
“Calendrical rot has taken hold not only in Dredge but in several central marches of the hexarchate. It cannot be allowed to persist.”
The Rahal concerned themselves with Doctrine and justice, but they rarely dealt with full-fledged uprisings; the Vidona cleaned up the aftermath, although no one trusted them to put heresies down at the outset. The Shuos and the Kel were collectively regarded as the hexarchate’s sword, but the Kel specialized in kinetic operations and short-term goals while the Shuos pursued information operations and long-term plans.
Kel Command wouldn’t consent to intimate Shuos oversight for anything less than a crisis.
“We have six officers competing to deal with the heresy in the Fortress of Scattered Needles and its surrounds,” the composite said. “The Shuos have requested to be represented by a seventh as their web piece.” Cheris’s face smiled at her with a momentary glint of teeth. “You.”
And why did the Shuos want her, of all people, as a web piece?
Players were divided up into several marches, and each march competed separately. Certain actions conferred great advantage, but also incremented a heresy clock. As the clock went up, the game’s rules changed. The web piece interacted with the heresy clock and represented the weapon that saved you even as it poisoned your principles.
As long as it was possible to be played as a web piece and survive, she meant to try.
The two ways to win at gambling were to read the situation and know the odds. Cheris had calculated her situation already. She had only a single life to offer, and she was aware of the ugly deaths that awaited her should she fail, but at some point you had to trust yourself.
She had a bowl of rice, and the communal platters had familiar fare: fish fried in rice flour and egg and leaves of sage, pickled plums, quail eggs with sesame salt.
They were staring at her, even Verab, who should have guessed. “Doctrine,” he said. His voice cracked. Verab was fifth-generation Kel. His family would take it hard. “You may be able to serve again, some of you,” Cheris said, aware of the inadequacy of her words, “but that depends on the magistrates’ assessments. I’m sorry. I don’t have details.”
They weren’t looking forward to the future. Most of them would lose Kel tradition and formation instinct. They might remember the mottoes and formations, but the mottoes would give them no more comfort, and the formations would no longer have any potency for them.
It was a foxform rather than the moth’s more usual spiderforms and birdforms. It had eyes of faceted glass, and they lit up yellow. A Shuos servitor. Of course. The servitor didn’t answer. Kel servitors never spoke human languages and Shuos servitors rarely did, although Andan and Vidona servitors usually could if they cared to. The foxform skittered in, moving in furtive zigzags. Then it stepped up into the air until it was level with the surface of Cheris’s desk.
The most notable thing about the gamecloth was that it was more of a record than a playing surface. Pieces had been embroidered at the intersections of lines, capturing the positions of an incomplete match. Cheris’s eyes went immediately to the web piece in the corner, and she smiled crookedly.
eidetic
eidetic /īˈdedik/ I. adjective [Psychology] relating to or denoting mental images having unusual vividness and detail, as if actually visible. II. noun a person able to form or recall eidetic images. III. derivatives eidetically adverb – origin 1920s: coined in German from Greek eidētikos, from eidos ‘form.’
She picked up the gamecloth again, inspecting both sides and wondering what she had missed. There it was: worked into the back of an empty square was a flexible filament in the shape of a gear. The servitor tilted its head at her encouragingly. Cheris hesitated, then pulled the filament out. She felt a painful pulse of heat in her forearm. There had to be a message in the filament. Her gloves felt briefly warm, then cold. A map distended in her mind. She could feel it as though she could walk her fingers over the tangled strands of voidmoth routes and feel the heat of far-scattered stars. The
...more
The hexarchate lagged in invariant technology, which could be used under any calendrical regime. In particular, too close to the rot the voidmoths’ primary stardrives would fail. Without the voidmoths to connect the hexarchate’s worlds, the realm would unravel. If the heretics converted the Fortress to their own calendrical system, the problem became critical. The hexarchate would have to contend with a rival power at the heart of its richest systems.
Two, the Rahal, was a Doctrine officer. The idea of giving a Rahal direct control over a mission worried Cheris. The Rahal were the high faction who led the hexarchate: they set Doctrine and maintained the high calendar.
Five worried her the most: a Shuos agent. The Shuos were typically closemouthed about records. If they already had one of their own involved, what were they trying to do by rescuing a Kel from outprocessing? She owed no loyalty to the Shuos beyond what she owed to the hexarchate entire.
It was one thing to know that the might of the Kel was theoretically available to you. It was another thing to devise a plan that had a chance of being accepted. The Kel had six cindermoths, their most powerful warmoths, which could also project calendrical stability.
Kel Command would be looking for the fastest, most economical solution. This meant the use of weapons ordinarily forbidden. And that meant the Kel Arsenal. Catastrophe guns, abrogation sieves, small shining boxes that held the deaths of worlds.
If the Fortress of Scattered Needles had fallen, she would need a way to crack its legendary defenses, its shields of invariant ice. The shields functioned under any calendrical regime, which meant the heretics could use them against the hexarchate. Cheris didn’t know how the shields worked – classified information – much less how to overcome them.
Three hundred ninety-nine years ago, General Shuos Jedao was in the service of the Kel. Because he had a reputation for winning unwinnable fights, they assigned him to deal with the Lanterner rebellion.
So Kel Command put Jedao into the black cradle, making him their immortal prisoner.
One through Six wouldn’t be present in person. She wondered if she would see their faces or if they would be represented by signifiers.
Rahal lensmoth.
The Rahal guarded their dedicated moths jealously. Just sending one to a system was usually enough to get it to back down from whatever heresy it was nurturing. However, the lensmoths’ reliance on exotic technologies made them useless in sufficiently advanced cases of calendrical heresy. In a way, it gave heretics an incentive to go radical as quickly as possible.
One wanted the Fortress depopulated, which meant the Kel would have to rely on the Vidona to supply enough loyal citizens afterward to reestablish the appropriate consensus mechanics.
Despite their power, the Rahal’s combination of rigid honesty, abstract mindset, and asceticism meant that they were one of the poorer factions.
Five made Cheris sit a little straighter. The Shuos wanted to requisition a weapon from the Andan Archives. “We can’t assume access to Andan resources,” Subcommand Two said, the first time it had interrupted any of the proposals. The Andan were the third high faction, along with the Rahal and the Shuos, and they generally stayed out of military matters. They were known for their love, not to say control, of high culture, and their wealth. Significantly, they didn’t get along with the Shuos or the Kel.
“The Andan have a version of the Shuos shouter that works over a wider range of calendrical values,” Five said. “Evidence suggests that the survivors can be encouraged, with proper Vidona methods, to resume productive lives. In the interests of full disclosure, I note that the survival rate is around forty percent, and the rest are no longer able to function as sentients.”
But the Nirai existed to be researchers and engineers, not to die.
General Jedao had been in Kel custody for 397 years.
Cheris realized how they had manipulated her with the gamecloth. What she still didn’t understand was why Kel Command hadn’t made the decision straight out.
