Raven Stratagem

by Yoon Ha Lee

  Khiruev was shuffling a deck of jeng-zai cards, not because they were going to play (she hoped; Jedao was unnaturally good), but because it gave her hands something to do. One servitor, a scuffed lizardform, was making the usual doomed attempt to clear debris from under Khiruev’s workbench. Another, a deltaform, had accompanied them during the walk and into the sitting room. Perhaps it thought Jedao might call for refreshments.

  Jedao wasn’t looking directly at Khiruev when he said, “General, how do you feel about children?”

  Any question of Jedao’s was bound to have teeth hidden in it, but this one baffled Khiruev. “I haven’t got any, if that’s what you mean,” she said, setting the cards down and squaring them neatly. Surely Jedao could have looked that up?

  “Let me rephrase that,” Jedao said. “You don’t have any children in the Tieneved—excuse me, in the legal, high-language sense. But did you ever become a mother?”

  It took Khiruev a while to work out what Jedao was getting at. Jedao was Shparoi, from a culture that no longer existed in the hexarchate. Khiruev was accustomed to people entering marriage contracts for mutually agreeable periods of time to form a shared household or, if children would be involved, a lineage. Said contracts laid out whether those children would be natural-born or crèche-born. (Outdated terminology: most people were crèche-born, and had been for some time. The language had not caught up to contemporary practice.)

  Jedao was asking about being a non-custodial parent, a paradox in the high language. Children might be adopted, or might be formed from some combination of genetic material from the household’s parents, or from a donor or donors if that was desirable. But the marriage contract would spell out clearly who had birth-custody of the children, and only that person or persons were the parents. Apparently, Jedao was conflating being a genetic contributor and being a parent, even if the donor was not part of the contracted household.

  “Sir,” Khiruev said, wishing she hadn’t been put in the position of deciphering Jedao’s real question, “did you have genetic spawn?” Horrible circumlocution. The high language term she’d used referred to animals. It was offensive to use it to refer to humans. But in the absence of an adequate word, she had to get the idea across somehow. Khiruev did speak two low languages, but both came from the same language family as the high language and suffered the same deficiency of lexicon.

  To her relief, Jedao snorted. “No, that wouldn’t have happened,” he said. “I saw to that medically and I didn’t sleep with many womanforms to begin with. But I’ve always wondered if other”—he used a word Khiruev didn’t recognize, sibilants and an oddly pinched vowel. Shparoi, presumably. “If I had other siblings. Ones that survived.”

  Jedao’s hand dangled over the arm of the chair. He gazed at a world folded up into myth and mystery and footnotes no one read anymore but historians with high security clearances. “Once in a while, when Kel Command took me out of my pickle jar, I’d ask one of my anchors and they’d know about my mother, my sister, my brother and his family.” Assassinated; vanished; murder-suicide on Hellspin’s anniversary. “But no one had heard anything about any other siblings.

  “I had a father, in the Shparoi sense,” Jedao resumed after a long pause, “but not in the hexarchate one. He died before Hellspin, flitter accident. We’d met only twice years before that. He was a violist, very handsome. My mother was forever complaining that she’d gone to the trouble of picking a particularly nice one and I didn’t have the decency to inherit either his musicality or his looks.” The note of affection when Jedao mentioned his mother sounded disquietingly genuine. “Anyway, I never asked him if he’d sired others, in arrangements like the one he’d had with my mother. I didn’t investigate, either. It would have been extremely improper. Now he’s over four centuries dead and I’ll never know if anyone in my lineage survived.”

  “Would you feel better if you did?” Khiruev asked.

  “I doubt it, but I wonder all the same.”

  “I was never tempted to contract for children,” Khiruev said. “I don’t feel strongly about them one way or another. They’re loud and messy”—she’d never forget the expression on Mother Ekesra’s face that time she’d shorted out one of her pastry machines—”but if they weren’t like that there’d be something wrong with them.”

  She also remembered Mother Allu complaining once to Mother Ekesra, She’s so quiet, and Ekesra’s reply that at least she wasn’t getting into trouble.

  “The hardest thing Kel Command ever made me do was shoot children.” Jedao’s voice was soft.

  Khiruev hadn’t known about this, but then, her interest in historical generals had been confined to their strategies and tactics rather than biographies. “Secondary casualties are always difficult,” she said neutrally.

  “I’m not a linguist, but do you ever think there’s something wrong with the things we do and don’t have words for?”

  So this was what Jedao had been leading up to. “Sir,” Khiruev said, with a hint of a bite, “they didn’t have formation instinct in your day.” Jedao’s mouth twisted as though that had brought something to mind, but if so, he kept it to himself. “And you’re a Shuos, anyway. Why didn’t you do something?”

  “You know what?” Jedao said. “The Kel called me the fox general, although there was a Shuos brigadier general who overlapped my service, a staffer posted somewhere obscure. But the Shuos called me a hawk.”

  Khiruev waited for an answer, or some moral, some further revelation. Instead, Jedao called up a digest of news reports and a regional map hazed with annotations. “Sometimes it amazes me how big we’ve gotten,” Jedao said, and smiled with predatory benevolence. “Tell me, what do you know about that system?” He struggled with the map before getting it to focus on Weraio 5.

  “It’s one of a thousand conflagrations,” Khiruev said wryly. She had paid it more attention than most not because it was noteworthy in itself—sporadic outbursts of calendrical warfare and student demonstrations on the subtropical archipelago, yes, but many planets suffered similar incidents—but because she’d visited it twice. If you avoided the hotspot archipelago, it could be a perfectly reasonable vacation. She hated warm weather, which reminded her of home, and had instead gone for a tour of the city of Miifau, famed, if you followed that sort of thing, for its orchestra. Every time the Weraio system came up in the digests, she’d scanned them for any mention that Miifau’s orchestra had gotten bombed. It was a stupid thing to care about, especially when so many people died everywhere, in every passing moment. Yet the fractal nature of the hexarchate’s fight against heresy made it impossible to care about those blotted numbers.

  Khiruev doubted Jedao cared particularly about Weraio 5, other than having zeroed in on Khiruev’s own interest in it, even if it was theoretically possible that he had caught word of a nasty development from that direction. But Weraio wasn’t located anywhere strategic and was yet some distance from the Hafn incursions. Instead, Khiruev said, “Sir, we”—I—“will be of more use to you if we have some indication of the next objective.”

  So far Jedao had maneuvered them past the Fortress of Spinshot Coins and toward the Hafn while keeping them from engaging any Kel, either by luck, an intelligence system he had yet to reveal to Khiruev, or intimidating Kel Command from a distance. Khiruev didn’t expect Jedao to level with her about his grand strategy. At the same time, Jedao couldn’t expect anyone to take his motives at face value, either.

  “What, thrashing the Hafn isn’t good enough for you?” Jedao said.

  Khiruev suppressed a shiver. She had long practice hiding her reactions, dubious benefit of growing up in a household with a mother who terrified her. Still, taken literally, a question was a question.

  “If all you cared about was the defeat of the Hafn,” Khiruev said, “you could have left that to the Kel after whatever happened at Scattered Needles. Flitting around the hexarchate with a renegade swarm merely advertises our weakness to the enemy, especially since they’ve alr
eady engaged us.”

  “All right, then,” Jedao said, “what is it you think I do care about? And why bring it up now, General, and not earlier?”

  “Does every card player you encounter give away everything after the first hand?” Khiruev said. Brezan, for instance, had a terminal inability to bluff. Not coincidentally, he stayed out of high-stakes jeng-zai.

  Jedao’s smile flickered at her like a candle flame. Khiruev caught herself wishing it had lasted longer. Nevertheless, for all that the argument was transparently designed to appeal to a gambler, Jedao didn’t draw it out. “Fair enough,” Jedao said. He fell silent, and Khiruev was reminded that Jedao hadn’t answered the first question.

  Khiruev, no longer young, had not dueled except casually in years. But she had a counter ready. “Why is it,” she said, “that you’re so determined to teach me how to think autonomously? What would that give you that simple obedience wouldn’t?”

  Jedao leaned back, began to put his feet up on the table between them, caught himself. The whole sequence looked so natural. Khiruev wasn’t fooled. “Simple obedience won’t suffice for what I have in mind,” Jedao said. “Never mind that for now. Tell me what I’m really up to, since I’ve apparently lost my ability to bluff.”

  Highly unlikely. But then, Jedao’s arched eyebrow suggested that he hadn’t meant the remark seriously. At any rate, Khiruev was stuck in the role of pupil. She didn’t care to dispute Jedao’s superior experience anyway.

  “I can only assume that you’re at war with the hexarchs,” Khiruev said, “and that the Hafn are only useful insofar as you can use them against the hexarchs, or to gain influence with the mass of citizens.” Anyone could have come to the same conclusion. But Khiruev had the nagging sense that she shouldn’t have approved of this goal as much as she did, considering how long she had served the Kel loyally.

  “The great difficulty of a Kel army,” Jedao said with surprising bitterness, “is that there’s no one to tell me when I’m wrong.”

  “You can’t possibly hope to prevail.”

  Jedao’s grin had just a glint of teeth. “Funny, that’s what Commander Chau said going into Candle Arc.”

  The only reason Jedao wasn’t best-remembered for Candle Arc—a space battle in which he’d been outnumbered eight to one and still smashed the enemy—was the massacre. “You said yourself that the hexarchate is a big place,” Khiruev said. “Eight to one is nothing compared to what you face now. ‘Outnumbered’ doesn’t begin to describe it.”

  “That’s what everyone says. And so the hexarchs keep their stranglehold on the populace.”

  The stirring of hope that rose in Khiruev was ridiculous. How could Jedao hope to coordinate a rebellion across the entire hexarchate? As the heretics proved, over and over, rebelling was easy. The coalescence of a viable successor government was another matter. And yet, she wanted to warm herself by that hope: proof that she was a suicide hawk.

  Jedao rose all at once, not graceful so much as efficient, and stood before Khiruev. No wonder he’d been a fabled duelist in his first life, that flawless balanced poise. He looked down at Khiruev, intent, unsmiling. “Tell me what you want me to do,” he said, as if he hadn’t lined up all the advantages on his side of the conversation.

  Khiruev’s heart contracted. “Sir,” she said, as steadily as ever, “I wouldn’t presume.”

  “Don’t tell me you never tire of the endless wheel of failed heresies.” His words spoke of one thing. His eyes, as sweet and merciless as ashes, spoke of another. He reached out, hand pausing just short of Khiruev’s jaw.

  Khiruev knew where this was leading. Her disappointment in Jedao was almost as great as her desire. Even so, Jedao’s phrasing was sufficiently ambiguous that Khiruev could construe it as a simple remark. And so she had the defense permitted even a fledge-null. She stared mutely at Jedao and waited to see if he would force the issue.

  Over her lifetime, Khiruev had failed at all her relationships. She hadn’t dated until she was in her thirties; had only managed a single short-lived, dismal marriage. Or maybe it had started earlier, with the mawkish tone poem she had composed for an alt when she was fourteen, only to think better of ever playing it for anyone. (She still remembered every note.)

  Upon reflection, the marriage had been a disaster from the beginning. She had been thirty-seven, awestruck by the beautiful, elegant singer, Dosveissen Moressa, and her ability to come up with double entendres for engineering jargon, to say nothing of her dazzling smile when she brought her gifts. Moressa’s favorite had been the music box Khiruev had restored for her, exquisite decoupage tigers on the outside and, once opened, an endless hunt of clockwork figures.

  Moressa and Khiruev had contracted for a year after dating for several months. A year was a pitiable length of time for a marriage contract. The relationship cooled off after five months. Khiruev had been so convinced at the outset that they were being rational about building something lasting. Who would have guessed that a conservative approach to romance would end so badly? But the fact that they had rarely discussed long-term plans, even after they’d known each other intimately, should have warned her that they would founder on fundamental points.

  The funny thing was, years later, Khiruev couldn’t remember the topic of the quarrel that had finally driven a spike into the relationship, in part because the topic was sideways to the emotional undercurrents. Moressa had spoken in a voice that was never anything but calm, yet at the end her face twisted with frustration. Even when you laugh you never smile, she’d finally burst out.

  I have no idea what you’re talking about, Khiruev said, just as calmly. The lie knifed between them. Moressa stalked out of the apartment after an icy pause rather than continue looking at her. Khiruev stared at the sudden meaningless detritus of figurines and jewelry scattered around the apartment for the rest of the night. Moressa never returned. Indeed, they communicated only once for the rest of the marriage (the rest of their lives), to negotiate over some fine point of mutual finance that neither of them cared about. Even then they didn’t meet in person.

  Khiruev hadn’t told either of her mothers about the whole debacle, which had taken a great deal of finessing. They would have been unbearably understanding or, worse, inclined to blame Moressa. In fact, Moressa’s only transgression had been telling the truth.

  After that, Khiruev made a point of consciously sabotaging all her relationships by choosing unsuitable partners on the grounds that this beat doing it unconsciously. Khiruev was most ashamed of the time she’d picked out a man who’d been a refugee and who begged her over and over to leave the Kel and do something safe. Khiruev had never contemplated abandoning her career, least of all for a lover who grated on her almost from the beginning. It wasn’t anything the man did so much as the constant reminder that Khiruev was in the business of creating refugees when she wasn’t creating orphans and corpses.

  She had thought she had her heart under control, by which she meant that she had memorized the usual trajectories and had well-established protocols for dealing with the inevitable recriminations and breakups. It served her right to be confronted by a man who could demand her devotion in more than the usual sense, who had a dark history with the Kel, and who had no reason to fear the execution that would ordinarily await a soldier who slept with a soldier; who might well miss even the cold facsimile of companionship.

  Jedao’s hand shook visibly. “It would be so easy,” he said to himself. His thumb grazed Khiruev’s chin. Khiruev froze. It was as though her heart had crystallized inside her.

  Then Jedao sighed and stepped backwards, and sank back down into the chair. “There are things I will do and things I will not do,” he said simply. “But I don’t blame you for believing the worst.” He didn’t look all that convinced himself.

  Khiruev knew better than to pretend that she had been thinking about something else. “It doesn’t matter one way or another.”

  “But it does,” Jedao said, hot and cold and sharp at
once. “This is exactly what matters. The difference between what should and should not be done. This is what the fight’s about.”

  “Someday I will understand you, sir,” Khiruev said, meaning it.

  “I hope so,” Jedao said. This time the smile lasted longer.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  EVERY MORNING, MIKODEZ had a Kel infantry ration bar for breakfast. According to the Kel, consuming them voluntarily suggested interesting things about your mental health. Mikodez ate them in the hopes that they would immunize him to any poisons, and because they seemed to make his medications more effective. He knew poisons didn’t work that way, and that the latter effect was illusory, but it was a nice thought. Besides, he had to do something to atone for all the candy he put in his system.

  He’d opted to get to the conference room forty-eight minutes early and eat there, on the grounds that he was getting bored of the decor in his offices. All his offices. There was more than one of them, for reasons that were not entirely clear. The architects who had designed the Citadel had included Shuos, with Shuos habits of thought. His favorite hadn’t originally been an office, but had been converted to one as a test of variable layout, which Mikodez considered very brave of that long-vanished heptarch. (Said heptarch had died shortly after, not because of variable layout, or the Citadel’s security. She’d attended a meeting on some distant planet and caught what might or might not have been a bioengineered disease.)

  “You have the stupidest eating habits of anyone in the entire Citadel,” Istradez said. “If anyone else did that, they’d get dinged on all the medical evaluations.” He had already finished his own breakfast, consisting of seaweed soup, rice, a modest scallion pancake, and Kel pickles.