Warrior Women

by Paula Guran

  The lines of her face become sharper, keener. “I know,” she says. “But I made my promise. This is the only way to keep it. I will attempt the gamble. I always keep my promises.”

  Niristez has been saying this for a long time, and people have been tactful when she does so for a long time. Daechong, too, is tactful. It does him no harm. “If you are certain,” he says, “then let us play.”

  At this point, it is worth describing the war that the High Fleet of the Knifebird has been fighting for so long, against an opponent that is everywhere distributed and which has no name but the name that particles mutter as they decay. The High Fleet has not yet raised the redshift banner that indicates defeat, but the fact that they have been fighting all this time without much in the way of lasting gains is hardly a point of pride.

  High Fleet doctrine says that they are finite warriors fighting an infinite war, and the stakes are nothing less than control of the universe’s laws. Each small war in the continuum is itself a gamepiece in the war of wars, placed or extinguished according to local conditions. The value of each piece is contextual both in time and in space. A duel between two spindleships at the edge of an obscure asteroid belt may, at times, weigh more heavily than a genocidal war between a dozen star empires.

  In the game of Go, it is possible for players to play such that alternating captures of single stones would cause repeating positions. In principle, these moves could be played forever, and the game would never end. However, the rule called ko prevents such repetition from happening immediately.

  There exists a type of ko situation, the ten thousand year ko, which is often left unresolved—sometimes until the game’s conclusion—because the player who enters the battle first does so at a disadvantage. The war of wars is widely held to have run afoul of something similar.

  You may speculate as to the application to the ex-strategist Niristez’s situation, although most people believe that she is not capable of such subtlety. Indeed, it’s not clear why she would be interested in prolonging the war of wars, unless she intended it as revenge for her loss of status. Even if she meant only to force the universe into an asymptotic cooldown rather than a condensed annihilation, this would hardly be an unambiguous victory for her or her former allies. But then, if she were skilled enough to carry out this gambit anyway, surely she wouldn’t have fallen in the first place.

  Daechong allows Niristez the choice of game, since she is the petitioner. The choice itself might tell him something about her, although he doubts it will be anything he couldn’t already have figured out. He is surprised, then thoughtful, when she requests a linguistic game played upon competing lattices. Its name means something like “the calculus of verses.” He would not have suspected her of a fondness for poetry, even the poetry of eradication. It is likely that the game has real-world manifestations, not that he has any way of checking.

  The game has a deployment phase, in which they breed pensive sememes and seed rival phonologies, braid the syntactical structures that they will be pitting against each other. “Do you have the opportunity to read much?” Niristez asks him, no doubt thinking of varieties of literature to wield against him.

  “On occasion people bring me books,” he says. Sometimes they are tattooed on wafers of silicon. Sometimes they come bound in metal beaten thin from the corpses of deprecated clocks. Occasionally they have pages of irradiated paper. He is especially fond of the neutron variety. “I don’t often read them, however.” He reads fastest by—surprise—burning up the books, and while he did that a few times by accident in the early days, he saves that now for special occasions.

  “Well,” Niristez says, “the universe is infested with words of all kinds. I can’t blame you for being choosy.” She does something exceedingly clever with the placement of a cultural singularity to urge her budding language to better readiness for the engagement.

  Daechong’s deployments are conservative. In his experience, people who focus too much on the setup phase of the game tangle themselves up during the match proper. “I am fluent in very many languages,” he says, which is an understatement. He has always assumed that the knack is a requirement, or perhaps a gift, of his position. “But I enjoy talking to people more.”

  “Yes,” she says, “I imagine you would.”

  They are quiet through the rest of the deployment phase, although Daechong pours Niristez another glass of the wine she brought him, since she appears to be thirsty. She sips at it little by little, without any sign of enjoyment. He considers having another glass himself, but the smoke is still pleasantly strong in the air; no need yet.

  When the game begins in earnest, the lattices light up in the colors of drifting constellations and burning sodium and firefly sonatas. Niristez’s first move gives her entire language an imperialistic focus. His response is to nurture a slang of resistance.

  “I am not familiar with the High Fleet’s customs,” Daechong says while she considers a typological imperative. “Will it be difficult to secure your reinstatement?”

  This is not, strictly speaking, a courteous thing to bring up; but they are playing now. She will expect him to try to unsettle her.

  Her laugh is so brief he wonders if he imagined it. “That’s an open question. Tell me, Warden, if you get free of this place, where will you go?”

  A predictable riposte. “I don’t know,” he says, although people have asked him before. His answer always changes. “The universe is a very large place. I expect that wherever I start, I can find something new to see. At the moment, I wouldn’t mind visiting a binary star system. Something simple and ordinary.”

  That’s not it at all. He likes the thought of stars that have companions, even though he knows better than to think that such things matter to stars.

  Niristez seeds the plebeian chants with prestige terms from her own language, denaturing his slang. “What if you find that you were happier here?”

  “There’s always that risk, yes.”

  “The possibility doesn’t bother you?”

  She’s asking questions she knows the answers to, which is also part of the game. “Of course it bothers me,” Daechong says, “but if I never leave, I will never find out.” He initiates a memetic protest. Unstable, although it has the advantage of propagating swiftly.

  “I have seen a great deal of the world outside,” Niristez remarks. For a moment, he can almost see what color her eyes are. “There are people who wall themselves away deliberately, you know. Ascetics and philosophers and solitude artists. Some of them would give a great deal to take your place.”

  “As far as anyone knows,” Daechong says, “I have been here since the first stars winked open. My time here has hardly been infinite, but it’s still a long time, as finite numbers go. I have no reason to believe any successor of mine would spend less time here.”

  She studies his move’s ramifications with a slight frown, then glances around as though seeing the instruments for the first time. Nevertheless, it doesn’t escape his attention that she singles out the flute for scrutiny. “Your imprisonment has given you unprecedented access to the games of the universe,” she says. “Or do you take no pleasure in the things you guard?”

  He considers his answer while she puts together a propaganda campaign. Blunt, but perhaps that’s to be expected of someone with a military background. Still, he can’t let down his guard. She may be covering for a more devious ploy. “I can’t claim that the position hasn’t been without its privileges,” he says mildly.

  Daechong has played games on involute boards, games of sacrifice and skullduggery and smiling assurances, games where you keep score with burning worlds. He has played games with rules that mutate turn by turn, and games where you bet with the currency of senescent ambition, and games that handicap the stronger player with cognitive manacles. Most of the time, he wins, and he never throws a match, even when he’s tempted to just to see what would happen.

  After a few moments, he counters the propaganda campaign wi
th a furtive renaissance of the musical forms that he put in place during deployment. It’s early to do this, but he’d rather respond now than give Niristez’s tactic a chance to play out fully. People are sometimes startled by his comfort with music, for all that he plays no instrument. Music has its own associations with games and sports: battle hymns, marches, aggressive rhythms beaten upon the space-time membrane.

  They test each other with more such exchanges. Niristez’s fingers tap the side of the table before she manages to still them. Daechong doesn’t take that lapse at face value, either. “In the old days, it was held that my vision meant I could not be defeated,” she says abruptly, “although that has never been the case. Seeing a no-win situation opening its jaws in your direction isn’t necessarily helpful.”

  “Have there been many of those in your career?”

  “You only need one,” she says, not without humor. “And even then, I’ve orchestrated my share of dreadful battles. Gravitational tides and neutron cannons and the slaughters you get when you use a thermodynamic vise on someone’s sputtering sun. Doomships that intone stagnancy-curses into the ecosystems of entire planets. Civilizations’ worth of skeletons knit together with ligatures-of-damnation and made to fight unsheathed in the crackling cold void. Dead people everywhere, no matter how you count the cost.”

  She’s either trying to warn him or distract him. They might be the same thing. “You wouldn’t have been at personal risk?” he asks. Although he’s spoken with soldiers of all sorts, the staggering variety of military conventions means that he is cautious about making assumptions. In any case, he’s met very few Knifebird officers.

  “Not as such,” she says, “although there’s always the risk of an assassination attempt. A few have tried.” She doesn’t bother telling him what happened to them. In this matter, anyway, they are similar.

  Niristez’s attacks are starting to give way before Daechong’s tradition of stories handed down mouth to mouth, myths to succor insurrection. A myth doesn’t have to roar like dragons or fight like tigers. A myth can murmur possibilities with fox words. A myth can be subtle.

  He doesn’t point this out, but he doesn’t have to. The rueful cast of her mouth tells him she is thinking it.

  Niristez redoubles her efforts, but her early-game deployment has locked her into rigid, not to say tyrannical, stratagems. Unless she comes up with something extraordinary, they are nearing the point where the game is effectively over, even if a few of the lattices’ regions can still be contested.

  At last Niristez picks up a hollowed-out demagogue node and tips it over: surrender. “There’s no sense in dragging this out any further,” she says.

  Daechong is starting to become alarmed: Niristez should be afraid, or resigned, or angry; anything but this calculating alertness. It does occur to him that, by choosing her strategy so early, she dictated his. But that was only part of the game, and in the meantime, they have their agreement.

  He doesn’t reach for the gun—not yet.

  “It doesn’t matter anyway,” Niristez says. The side of her mouth tips up, and there are fissures like needles in her irises. “We both win.”

  He doesn’t understand.

  “I never needed to go into the passages,” she says, and her voice is very steady. “I’m looking at what I seek already. Because the game the tower plays is you, Warden.”

  A myth can be subtle, and some regard Daechong as one himself; but he isn’t the only myth in the room.

  “Explain yourself,” Daechong says, quiet and cutting.

  “Everyone has been mining the planet for its games,” Niristez says, “but no one has been looking at what’s been right in front of them all this time. In a way, you are a game, are you not? You are a challenge to be met. You have rules, give rewards, incur penalties.

  “I don’t know who mined you out of the dark depths. It was probably long ago. You must have been one of the first games after the universe’s very machinery of equations. And when they realized just what they had let loose into the world, when they realized your name, they locked you up in the tower. Of course, it was too late.”

  Niristez doesn’t tell him what his name has to be. He is figuring that out for himself. The gun’s presence presses against his awareness like an attar of carnage.

  “You promised me my freedom,” Daechong says after a long, brittle silence. “Or is that a trick, too?”

  “Only if you think of it as one,” she says. “You could have left at any time if you’d only known, Warden. You’re only trapped here so long as you are a prisoner of your own nature. As the warden, you alone can determine this. If you choose to be a game no longer, you can walk out at any time.”

  Now she looks at the gun. At the dull bone, at the spiky wires, at the inscription: I never miss. “Destroy the gun,” she says, “and walk free. It’s up to you.”

  “If you had won,” Daechong says, “you would have demanded that I come with you.”

  He rises. She tilts her head back to meet his gaze, unflinching. Of all things, her eyes are—not kind, precisely, but sympathetic. “Yes,” she said. “But this way you have a choice.”

  “You’re implying that, when I leave, all the wars end. That the game of war ceases to exist.”

  “Yes,” she says.

  All wars over. Everywhere. All at once.

  “I can only assume that at this point in time, such a suspension of hostilities would leave the High Fleet of the Knifebird in a winning position,” Daechong says.

  Her eyes darken in color. “Warden,” she says, “if I have learned one thing in my years of exile, it is that there are victors in war, but no one wins.”

  “I could wait for a position unfavorable to your cause,” he says. “Thwart you.” They’re playing for higher stakes now.

  “You could try,” she says, “but I know what passes outside this tower, and you don’t.” The map in her eyes is fractal-deep, and encompasses the universe’s many conflagrations.

  “You played well,” Daechong says. He isn’t merely being polite, and he doesn’t say this to many people. “I should have been better prepared.”

  “The difference between us is this,” she says. “You are a tactician, and you fought the battle; but I am a strategist, and I fought the war. I keep my promises.”

  “I don’t concern myself with ethics,” Daechong says, “but I am surprised that you would think of something as far-reaching and devastating as war to be nothing more than a game.”

  “It’s all in how you define the set,” she murmurs.

  The gun is in his hand. He points it at the wall, not at Niristez, and not at himself. (This is habit. In reality, this doesn’t make Niristez any safer.) It is beautiful in the way of annihilated stars, beautiful in the way of violated postulates. And she is telling him that he would have to extinguish it forever.

  “It comes down to this,” Niristez says. The smile is gone from her mouth, but it kindles in her eyes. “Is thwarting my promise in the war of wars more important to you than the freedom you have desired for so long?”

  In the game of Go, groups of stones are said to be alive or dead depending on whether or not the opponent can kill them. But sometimes the opponents have two groups that live together: Neither can attack the other without killing itself. This situation is called seki, or mutual life.

  The tower is a black spire upon a world whose only sun is a million starships wrecked into a mass grave. There is no light in the starships, and as time goes by, fewer and fewer people remember when the sun-of-starships gave forth any radiance at all. The shadows still mutter the names of vanquished cities and vanished civilizations, but of course the world is nothing but shadow now, and the few inhabitants remaining find it impossible to hear anything else.

  Now and again people make the labyrinthine journey to the tower, which plunges into the world’s hollow depths. But the tower no longer has any doors or any windows, or a warden to greet visitors, and the games that might have been dug ou
t of the dark passages are trapped there.

  Two cards of coalescent paper can, however, be found before the tower. Even the wind dares not move them from where they rest. One of them displays the Knight of Chains reversed: shattered fetters, unsmiling eyes, an ornate border that speaks to a preference for courtesy. The other card is the Deuce of Stars. It is the only source of light on the planet.

  Even with the two cards revealed, Niristez would have lost the round; but that wasn’t the game she was playing anyway. In the meantime, she likes to think of the former warden looking up at a chilly sky filled with enough stars to sate the longest nights alone, his hands forever empty.

  — Part Four —

  Space Aria

  Virtue Kana is a warrior to the extent that she defends those for whom she feels responsible—her partner, Dayva, and her former partner, General—and what is hers: Artace, her hover boat. But Jessica Reisman reveals Virtue has a secret: someone intended her to be something other than a salvager, and that something would have led to frequent combat.

  Boy Twelve

  Jessica Reisman

  The twelfth clone of Virtue Kana’s dead lover came to call one day while Virtue and her partner prepped for a salvage run. The light-drenched tranquility of Jumka Docks, on the Coreyal Sea of Samjadsit Space Station, had, until that moment, seemed as remote from Virtue’s home world of Piranesi as the Coreyal from the fabled seas of Earth.

  Spreading dark and sinuous to the white-sugar crust of glow along the upcurve of station horizon, the Coreyal’s waters were luminous. The glow came through station wellcore from Samjadsit system’s young sun, to which the vast space station was oriented, axis-wise, like a gaudy bead on a festival stick.

  On the deck of the Artace, Virtue readied equipment for a run to the Fortunate Isles for dust while her partner Dayva fed numbers into the nav comp.

  “Seems to me I recall hearing someone say that the day she agreed to salvage dust would be the day they could pack her in—let me see,” Dayva held up one hand, “what was it?—‘pack her in the Artace’s carapactic hull and spit her off station into the solar winds.’ ”