Unconquerable Sun

by Elliott, Kate

  “Your Highness!” He taps his right arm to his chest in salute. The hand and arm below the shoulder are a crude mechanical, stark metal, not even a basic cosmetic replacement. “Corporal Vontae Yáo Alaksu. Third Battalion, Scorpion Company, Republican Guard.”

  Sun nods regally. “Where did you lose the arm, Corporal?”

  “Lukka Prime, second day of the attack on the Esplanade in the Fourth Kanesh campaign.”

  “Surely as a citizen who served honorably and was disabled in the line of duty you are due something better than that basic attachment.”

  He glances toward Nanea. “Life’s a complicated set of choices, Your Highness. How may we help you?”

  “I need my guild key, Dad,” says Ti.

  He blows out air through pinched lips, looks at Ti, looks at Sun, then steps back. “I’ll get it.”

  Sun walks after him. “We’ll come with you and your daughter.”

  A small hand grasps my wrist. Staring hopefully up at me, Kaspar says, “I thought you were going to look at my drawings?”

  I catch Sun’s eye and gesture toward the boy. “I’ll stay here with Kas and his esteemed mother.”

  He tugs me to the long shelf with its boxes. His mother hurries to an oven to get out a batch of cupcakes, the smell so appetizing that I lick my lips involuntarily. She brings a cooled pastry over on a tin plate, and I can’t refuse it and don’t want to anyway. It’s flaky, moist, and delicious with an almond-and-sesame-seed paste.

  “Mmmm. This is so good.”

  She smiles. Her accent is a curious one; she’s not Chaonian, that’s for sure. “I was able to invest in this new kitchen with Tiana’s employment bonus. But I beg your pardon, Honored. I have a batch of batter needing to go in.”

  “Please, go on with your work. It would be a shame to waste such mouthwatering food.”

  Surreptitiously I examine the woman as she works. She wears a faded blue dress that falls to her ankles, cut close to her long body and narrow hips. She’s got a dead-on eye for pouring out batter into small molds without spilling a drop.

  Kas sets a box on the table and opens it. I wasn’t sure what to expect, but it isn’t this: actual physical pictures, on real paper, using physical pencils and brushes. All the images are landscapes and cityscapes, rendered in exceptional detail with a few tiny human figures here and there as if for scale.

  “Wow. How old are you?”

  “Thirteen.”

  “These are really good.”

  “Do you think so?”

  “I do. You must spend a lot of time on art. I guess you really love it.”

  He shrugs. “It gives me something to do. I don’t go to school.” He flashes a look toward his mother, as if hoping she will hear and be sorry for denying him this chance.

  “Why not?” I ask.

  His mother interrupts from the kitchen. “Kaspar has the asthma. Also he is displaying four of the precursor symptoms to developing pit lung. It is not safe for him to go outside.”

  “Not even with a mask?” I ask, thinking of how awful it must be to stay cooped up in a tent all day every day, and even worse for a curious, restless kid.

  Her look of alarm shames me. It’s not my business. I don’t live here, struggling to make ends meet, much less breathe, and to keep my child from developing a degenerative and fatal disease of the lungs that I can’t afford proper treatment for. So I turn my attention back to the art.

  The landscapes look strangely familiar, but I can’t pin a memory on where I’ve seen them: a monumental promenade lined with stone beasts sculpted in imitation of the mythical animals of the Celestial Empire; a white tower crowned with horns; a flat salt plain at twilight with three moons rising; a forest of fiercely green bamboo pierced by a walkway that branches into three paths, each mysterious and tempting; a gleaming three-cornered plaza elevated high above the ground on a cushion of air and illuminated by hovering lanterns in the shape of koi.

  The interior of a vast basilica with sixteen floridly decorated alcoves dedicated to the holy saints of the Celestial Empire, looking down the nave toward the main entry doors.

  “They’re not right yet.” The boy leans on the table, examining the paintings with an artist’s skeptical eye. He points to the bamboo forest. “Like here. I’ll never be good at leaves until I see a real one. Wouldn’t it be nice to go there for real?”

  “Is that a real place?”

  “Yes.”

  “What’s it called?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Do you copy these from things you’ve seen on the net?”

  “We don’t have the net,” he whispers. “It’s too expensive.”

  His mother breaks in. “The net is not allowed except through a censored shunt. This shunt the authorities are always monitoring. And it is very high in cost, too much cost for what you are receiving.”

  In Chaonia basic net access is provided to all citizens. People could no more function without it than they could function without medical care, food, and shelter. I scan the shelves and spot actual physical books, rarely seen outside of archives and museums. But when I walk over to study the titles, none are travel books with pictures for a homebound child to copy. Seven are classical fashion books with antiquated titles like Dictionary of Design Innovation and Traditional Style in the History of the Celestial Empire. Two are old-fashioned reading primers, one for children and the other for Karnoite language users learning Common Yele, the language of scholars and traders and anyone with pretensions of being sophisticated and civilized. One is encased in a clear sleeve, its spine labeled in a script I don’t recognize and which the net can’t identify. I’m oddly reluctant to ask, although my fingers itch to slip the book off the shelf and page through it as through a mystery.

  “That’s my favorite,” says Kas, who has followed on my heels like I’m the most fascinating thing that’s ever happened to him, which possibly I am. “But I’m not allowed to touch it. Do you want to see?”

  Before I can answer he pulls the slender volume off the shelf and carries it back to the table. There he opens it with the tender care one gives to very old people. From the book’s inside pocket he unfolds a diagram.

  My heart stops, or it would, if desire twinned with shock could stall the atria. It’s a beacon map so old that discoloration has warped patterns into the print.

  “Where did you get this?” I ask hoarsely.

  The mother straightens up by the oven, where she just slid in a tray of unbaked cupcakes. Her voice sharpens. “Kaspar, what do you have there?”

  “Just showing the Honorable my drawings,” he lies.

  I can’t bear to betray him, and anyway I want to touch it, but I’m afraid that if I do the heat of my lust will scorch it to ash. I am staring at an artifact from a lost archive.

  For two thousand years after landfall, humans expanded out of the queendom of Mishirru into a rich, worlds-heavy region. Local systems were able to retain autonomy because although the vast distances of space were bridgeable by the knnu drive, the passage between systems took months or years. That all changed when the Apsaras Convergence invented, or discovered, the beacons.

  I like to think of the beacons as interstellar stations on an invisible rail system we no longer fully comprehend. Conceptually it works on the same basic principles. Stations link together to form lines that follow set routes to specific places. A beacon has to be gravitationally anchored to another object in a solar system, like a planet. And of course they are anchored within systems in sets of prime numbers, or one.

  Any line ends ultimately in a terminus, a single-beacon system; a ship can come in from and go back to the same place, but it can’t go farther, not by beacon drive.

  Janus systems have two beacons. They’re the backbones of the system, like local stations on the Chaonian rail lines. A long single-stage route of janus beacons runs like a river through ancient Mishirru from its glorious capital all the way to the isolated terminus system of Landfall where the Argo
sies that fled the Celestial Empire found a first planetary haven, long before the beacons were built.

  A cerberus system has three beacons, as Troia System does, for example. Now the route possibilities begin to branch out by creating complicated intersections, since a beacon might link you not to a nearby system but to one much farther away.

  Chaonia, Molossia, and Thesprotis are all scylla systems, each with five beacons. The Republic of Chaonia parlayed its liminal space between frontiers and its Tinker-Evers-Chance convergence into political and military might.

  Karnos System is a hydra, with seven beacons whose tendrils reach out into the resource-rich Hatti region and back into the heart of the Phene Empire. That’s why it’s so valuable.

  The Phene and Yele, who each control an eleven-beacon system, can send out multiple tendrils of influence that have allowed them to become the most powerful of confederations.

  Every main hub and branch line of the current beacon system is burned into my mind. I know the map by heart. What makes this map amazing is that it shows the beacon network before the collapse.

  The collapse came suddenly. Whole route sections vanished into what we now call the Gap. Of course Argosy fleets powered by knnu drive still ply their slow roads through what is not really a gap but just normal space, guided by the ancient art of celestial navigation, a skill the Argosy guilds guard jealously and never teach to outsiders. When Solomon’s family lost their little fleet, they lost their sails.

  But even more incredibly, this map must date from the point of collapse because on this map the Apsaras home world, She Who Bore Them All, is marked with thirteen beacons. It was originally built with eleven. Many have speculated that the construction of twelfth and thirteenth beacons in a single system is what overloaded and crashed the network.

  Scholars have reconstructed most of the lost routes. Even though no one can use them, it’s the kind of thing people want to know. And here are the old beacon lines as they were at the peak of the Convergence, overlaid on a faded star chart that marks the main routes taken by Argosy trading fleets in their glory days, when their ships were the lifeline that linked worlds. A person who possesses this chart might be able to use it to find She Who Bore Them All.

  “Where did you get this?” I ask again.

  The vent into the repair shop rips open. Sun charges through in the lead with Isis and Hetty and Alika behind her. Kas snatches the map out of my hand, slides it back into the book, and shoves the book onto the shelf.

  “Can’t I even take an image?” I whisper, angry that I didn’t think to record it.

  He shakes his head. I’m about to try to wheedle him when Sun strides up to us.

  “Time to go,” she says, and then her gaze jolts to a halt as she takes in the paintings. “Who did these?” she demands.

  Kas manages a nervous smile. His lips don’t move, but I’m sure I hear a strange whisper of sound. His mother drops a pan, a clatter that whips Isis around.

  Sun splays both hands on the table and studies the illustrations. “These are all views of famous landmarks in the Phene Empire. That’s the processional way on Anchor Prime. That’s the famous horned lighthouse on Sogdia Limit. That’s the plain of triple-headed Cyclops, in Auger System. And that is the floating concourse on Axiom Prime. It’s off-limits to anyone except high-ranking Phene military and administrative officers and members of the Rider Council.”

  “How do you know what it looks like?” I ask. “You’re none of those things.”

  “That’s right, you didn’t grow up at court. For three years a high-ranking Phene official took refuge at court with their son, Bartholomew. Bar and I became friends.”

  “What happened?”

  “The official got tired of me asking questions about the empire. And they really weren’t pleased when they found out Bar was showing me interdicted images of places no outsider is meant to see. So they separated us. Not long after they got recalled when the political enemy who’d had them exiled died abruptly. You know how that goes.”

  “I don’t, really. I was at CeDCA for five years, remember? So I wouldn’t have to know how it goes.”

  “Don’t kid yourself, Perse,” says Sun with the measuring tilt of her head. Am I being found wanting? “We of the Core Houses don’t just walk out of that life and those connections. They make us what we are.”

  “Yeah, yeah, I already had this lecture from Tiana. I don’t want it from you.”

  We both glance toward the back of the tent.

  Ti stands at the open vent, embracing first her mother and then her father. Kas slouches over to them, looking as sullen as only a thirteen-year-old can. Sun examines his gait and chubby torso through narrowed eyes, then shakes herself and steps away from the table. She slips a court token out of her sleeve and sets it on the gleaming kitchen counter.

  “If you need anything, this token will get you access to me personally.”

  I look longingly at the shelf and the slender book, but there is no possible way to get an image now. I don’t want to get Kaspar into trouble. The poor, isolated boy couldn’t resist showing off. But now I know it exists and where it is, and because Ti is my cee-cee I’ll have an excuse to come back here.

  Tiana leads us out of the camp by a different route. She’s silent, brooding, as we reach a large nerve center filled with market stalls, enclosed shops, wash facilities for those who can afford the exorbitant water cost for clean clothes and clean bodies, and endless lines leading into various administrative centers where refugees can purchase temporary ration cards, travel and work permits, and urgent medical care.

  There’s a line to get into the line for the security gate to Repose District.

  Ti leads us past hundreds of resigned, exhausted people whose faces are wrapped in gauze or wheezing filter masks running down their last charge. She heads for an establishment advertising itself with an elaborate neon lotus flower whose petals open and close. There’s a main door carved with various symbols: an ichthus, a butterfly unfolding out of a cocoon, womb boats and phallic towers, a caduceus with intertwined snakes, and a pair of hands. But Ti leads us around a corner and down a shadowed alley. She uses her key to unlock a nondescript door.

  We enter a service hallway. Voices speak in the distance: laughter, sobbing, whispered intimacies, cheerful chatter clattering from a kitchen. I’m hungry, and I can’t stop thinking about the pastry. Twice people approach us down the long corridor. Ti gestures with a sign, and they sign back and ignore us.

  The corridor ends in a square, featureless room with an airlock and a lock pad. Ti unlocks the entry and we cycle through, emerging into a room so exactly like the one we just left that for an instant I think we have simply walked a full 360 through the gate and come out where we started.

  Sun pauses, checking in with James, then turns to the rest of us.

  “Hetty, you go with Alika…” She trails off as Hetty gives her a look that would singe a lesser luminary. “Isis, Solomon, Hetty, with me. We only get one shot at this.”

  “We’re taking out the Rider and the remaining Phene special forces, Your Highness?” Isis asks. “The four of us?”

  “Zizou is our secret weapon.”

  “You’re sure he’ll obey you, and not the Phene? He works for them, after all.”

  “Among the banners, an oath to a Royal overrides all other orders. The Phene haven’t figured that out yet. If the banners have anything to say about it, they never will. Perse, you go with Alika.”

  “What are Alika and I doing?” I ask, trying to sound perky instead of dismayed.

  “You two are the flanking maneuver.”

  Alika looks at me, gives a skeptical sigh, and says, “You need to work on your visual presence, but for now set your stinger on stun and act like my backup.”

  “My favorite assignment,” I say in my most sardonic drawl.

  He adds, “If you can’t smile then that sullen look will work almost as well for the wasps.”

  Ouch.


  I’d exchange a meaningful eye roll with Ti, but she and the others are already out the door. We follow into a dim corridor. I pull my filter mask up off my face and suck in deep breaths of air so rich it makes me a bit heady. The corridor ends in two doors, side by side. One opens into an alley and the other into a tiny campaspe shrine. The Campaspe Guild is a labor union, not a religion, but some people bring offerings and so a clamshell grotto sits in Repose District for those who may find it needful. Sun and the others hustle away down the alley, but Alika leads me into the back of the grotto. Tucked into the hinge of the grotto’s clamshell architecture rests a couch heaped with pillows embroidered with images of acrobatic sexual postures, many of which I’ve tried and an intriguing few that are new to me. Beside the couch stands an altar table made of rose quartz and laden with flowers, bites of food, and drams of arrack, soju, and golden rum. Alika pauses to examine the space.

  I say, “You’re not thinking of recording yourself singing here, are you? Doesn’t that seem a little…”

  “It’s a fantastic venue, intimate and suggestive.”

  “Disrespectful?” I don’t like being on the receiving end of the Handsome Alika’s scowl. It makes me want to touch my face to make sure there’s no unsightly snot or drool to disgust the world.

  “You seem to be under a misapprehension, Persephone Lee. We’re at war with the Phene. Don’t be precious.”

  “Your call, since you’re in charge of this flanking maneuver.” I slip out my tonfa and twist them together into stinger configuration. “I just take orders.”