Conservation of Shadows

by Yoon Ha Lee

  CONSERVATION OF SHADOWS

  YOON HA LEE

  Copyright © 2013 by Yoon Ha Lee.

  Cover art and design by Sherin Nicole.

  Contributing imagery by Akşam Güneşi, ~ArrsistableStock, ~JennyAnyStock, and Kimberly Crick.

  Ebook design by Neil Clarke.

  ISBN: 978-1-60701-398-3 (ebook)

  ISBN: 978-1-60701-387-7 (trade paperback)

  PRIME BOOKS

  www.prime-books.com

  Publisher’s Note: No portion of this book may be reproduced by any means, mechanical, electronic, or otherwise, without first obtaining the permission of the copyright holder.

  For more information, contact Prime Books at prime@prime-books.com.

  Contents

  Introduction

  Ghostweight

  The Shadow Postulates

  The Bones of Giants

  Between Two Dragons

  Swanwatch

  Effigy Nights

  Flower, Mercy, Needle, Chain

  Iseul’s Lexicon

  Counting the Shapes

  Blue Ink

  The Battle of Candle Arc

  A Vector Alphabet of Interstellar Travel

  The Unstrung Zither

  The Black Abacus

  The Book of Locked Doors

  Conservation of Shadows

  Story Notes

  Publication History

  About the Author

  Introduction

  In my other life, I am a computer engineer; and I do a lot of mathematics. Mathematics, like most sciences, presents laws and models that are meant to hold true in reality—but, like most sciences, maths is constantly evolving and adapting itself to new observations that do not fit its models.

  One thing I find amazing about Yoon Ha Lee’s fiction is to see it so steeped in that same logic, and to find across her stories the same fascination about models. Models can dictate the behaviour of the universe, and yet at the same time fail to describe its complexity. Lee’s stories present, over and over, this fundamental tension between image and truth; between myth and reality; between actual behaviour and model. This is nowhere more evident than in “The Book of Locked Doors,” where the eponymous book draws magic from memories of dead people, forever frozen in misleading, one-purpose images: the dead are recorded only through their ability to practise magic, and this magic is the only thing that the book provides to its users.

  Yoon Ha Lee has been one of those fairly discreet authors: her first story was published in 1999, long before I entered the science fiction and fantasy writing scene. She has since then been reprinted in various “year’s best” anthologies, but to the best of my knowledge, seldom shortlisted for major awards, and Lee herself has remained relatively discreet. To my mind, this is a shame, as her talent for intricate world-building as well as writing multi-layered, subtle fiction has mostly gone unrecognised. Stories like “Ghostweight” or “Flower, Mercy, Needle, Chain,” with their Asian-inspired Galactic empires, their original take on branching multiple universes, their idiosyncratic approach to ancestor worship and the preservation of the dead, are among the best and most memorable short fiction I have read.

  Lee’s flavourful and original settings range from competing starfaring empires in the far future to re-imagined histories, whether medieval or otherwise. Her characters are researchers and magicians, often forced into figuring out the rules of the world; but also generals and war-heroes, soldiers who do not necessarily have a taste for battle but do what they do for love of their people—and do it terribly well, with devastating consequences.

  One thing Lee does not shy from is portraying the harrowing cost of war, genocide, and occupation, whether it is for the occupying forces or for those fighting for peace or independence. It is something I particularly appreciate in her fiction: far from glorifying war, Lee provides a thoughtful, nuanced examination of the cost of violence; of how war can be dehumanising but at the same time utterly necessary; of how a national identity builds and maintains itself in times of strife. That Lee is Korean-American, from a country that was devastated and separated several times by war, certainly informs and nourishes those narrations. As a Franco-Vietnamese, with roots in another country that has had its share of divisive and painful conflicts, I find this counterpoint to other more jingoistic narrations (sadly all too present in genre) both appreciable and much-needed. Stories like “Between Two Dragons” or “Blue Ink” are all the more striking because of this thematic undercurrent.

  There are sixteen stories in this collection. In them you will find a war-kite pilot carrying the ghost of a compatriot in her head, a civilisation which kills others by taking and twisting their language, ships of soldiers passing through a black hole to reach a battle at the end of time, a dozen dizzying ways to travel through space, and many more such wonders, which I hope you find as breathtaking and as haunting as I did.

  —Aliette de Bodard

  Ghostweight

  It is not true that the dead cannot be folded. Square becomes kite becomes swan; history becomes rumor becomes song. Even the act of remembrance creases the truth.

  What the paper-folding diagrams fail to mention is that each fold enacts itself upon the secret marrow of your ethics, the axioms of your thoughts.

  Whether this is the most important thing the diagrams fail to mention is a matter of opinion.

  “There’s time for one more hand,” Lisse’s ghost said. It was composed of cinders of color, a cipher of blurred features, and it had a voice like entropy and smoke and sudden death. Quite possibly it was the last ghost on all of ruined Rhaion, conquered Rhaion, Rhaion with its devastated, shadowless cities and dead moons and dimming sun. Sometimes Lisse wondered if the ghost had a scar to match her own, a long, livid line down her arm. But she felt it was impolite to ask.

  Around them, in a command spindle sized for fifty, the walls of the war-kite were hung with tatters of black and faded green, even now in the process of reknitting themselves into tapestry displays. Tangled reeds changed into ravens. One perched on a lightning-cloven tree. Another, taking shape amid twisted threads, peered out from a skull’s eye socket.

  Lisse didn’t need any deep familiarity with mercenary symbology to understand the warning. Lisse’s people had adopted a saying from the Imperium’s mercenaries: In raven arithmetic, no death is enough.

  Lisse had expected pursuit. She had deserted from Base 87 soon after hearing that scouts had found a mercenary war-kite in the ruins of a sacred maze, six years after all the mercenaries vanished: suspicious timing on her part, but she would have no better opportunity for revenge. The ghost had not tried too hard to dissuade her. It had always understood her ambitions.

  For a hundred years, despite being frequently outnumbered, the mercenaries in their starfaring kites had cindered cities, destroyed flights of rebel starflyers, shattered stations in the void’s hungry depths. What better weapon than one of their own kites?

  What troubled her was how lightly the war-kite had been defended. It had made a strange, thorny silhouette against the lavender sky even from a long way off, like briars gone wild, and with the ghost as scout she had slipped past the few mechanized sentries. The kite’s shadow had been human. She was not sure what to make of that.

  The kite had opened to her like a flower. The card game had been the ghost’s idea, a way to reassure the kite that she was its ally: Scorch had been invented by the mercenaries.

  Lisse leaned forward and started to scoop the nearest column, the Candle Column, from the black-and-green gameplay rug. The ghost forestalled her with a hand that felt like the dregs of autumn, decay from the inside out. In spite of herself, she flinched from the ghostweight, which had troubled her all her life. H
er hand jerked sideways; her fingers spasmed.

  “Look,” the ghost said.

  Few cadets had played Scorch with Lisse even in the barracks. The ghost left its combinatorial fingerprints in the cards. People drew the unlucky Fallen General’s Hand over and over again, or doubled on nothing but negative values, or inverted the Crown Flower at odds of thousands to one. So Lisse had learned to play the solitaire variant, with jerengjen as counters. You must learn your enemy’s weapons, the ghost had told her, and so, even as a child in the reeducation facility, she had saved her chits for paper to practice folding into cranes, lilies, leaf-shaped boats.

  Next to the Candle Column she had folded stormbird, greatfrog, lantern, drake. Where the ghost had interrupted her attempt to clear the pieces, they had landed amid the Sojourner and Mirror Columns, forming a skewed late-game configuration: a minor variant of the Needle Stratagem, missing only its pivot.

  “Consider it an omen,” the ghost said. “Even the smallest sliver can kill, as they say.”

  There were six ravens on the tapestries now. The latest one had outspread wings, as though it planned to blot out the shrouded sun. She wondered what it said about the mercenaries, that they couched their warnings in pictures rather than drums or gongs.

  Lisse rose from her couch. “So they’re coming for us. Where are they?”

  She had spoken in the Imperium’s administrative tongue, not one of the mercenaries’ own languages. Nevertheless, a raven flew from one tapestry to join its fellows in the next. The vacant tapestry grayed, then displayed a new scene: a squad of six tanks caparisoned in Imperial blue and bronze, paced by two personnel carriers sheathed in metal mined from withered stars. They advanced upslope, pebbles skittering in their wake.

  In the old days, the ghost had told her, no one would have advanced through a sacred maze by straight lines. But the ancient walls, curved and interlocking, were gone now. The ghost had drawn the old designs on her palm with its insubstantial fingers, and she had learned not to shudder at the untouch, had learned to thread the maze in her mind’s eye: one more map to the things she must not forget.

  “I’d rather avoid fighting them,” Lisse said. She was looking at the command spindle’s controls. Standard Imperial layout, all of them—it did not occur to her to wonder why the kite had configured itself thus—but she found nothing for the weapons.

  “People don’t bring tanks when they want to negotiate,” the ghost said dryly. “And they’ll have alerted their flyers for intercept. You have something they want badly.”

  “Then why didn’t they guard it better?” she demanded.

  Despite the tanks’ approach, the ghost fell silent. After a while, it said, “Perhaps they didn’t think anyone but a mercenary could fly a kite.”

  “They might be right,” Lisse said darkly. She strapped herself into the commander’s seat, then pressed three fingers against the controls and traced the commands she had been taught as a cadet. The kite shuddered, as though caught in a hell-wind from the sky’s fissures. But it did not unfurl itself to fly.

  She tried the command gestures again, forcing herself to slow down. A cold keening vibrated through the walls. The kite remained stubbornly landfast.

  The squad rounded the bend in the road. All the ravens had gathered in a single tapestry, decorating a half-leafed tree like dire jewels. The rest of the tapestries displayed the squad from different angles: two aerial views and four from the ground.

  Lisse studied one of the aerial views and caught sight of two scuttling figures, lean angles and glittering eyes and a balancing tail in black metal. She stiffened. They had the shadows of hounds, all graceful hunting curves. Two jerengjen, true ones, unlike the lifeless shapes that she folded out of paper. The kite must have deployed them when it sensed the tanks’ approach.

  Sweating now, despite the autumn temperature inside, she methodically tried every command she had ever learned. The kite remained obdurate. The tapestries’ green threads faded until the ravens and their tree were bleak black splashes against a background of wintry gray.

  It was a message. Perhaps a demand. But she did not understand.

  The first two tanks slowed into view. Roses, blue with bronze hearts, were engraved to either side of the main guns. The lead tank’s roses flared briefly.

  The kite whispered to itself in a language that Lisse did not recognize. Then the largest tapestry cleared of trees and swirling leaves and rubble, and presented her with a commander’s emblem, a pale blue rose pierced by three claws. A man’s voice issued from the tapestry: “Cadet Fai Guen.” This was her registry name. They had not reckoned that she would keep her true name alive in her heart like an ember. “You are in violation of Imperial interdict. Surrender the kite at once.”

  He did not offer mercy. The Imperium never did.

  Lisse resisted the urge to pound her fists against the interface. She had not survived this long by being impatient. “That’s it, then,” she said to the ghost in defeat.

  “Cadet Fai Guen,” the voice said again, after another burst of light, “you have one minute to surrender the kite before we open fire.”

  “Lisse,” the ghost said, “the kite’s awake.”

  She bit back a retort and looked down. Where the control panel had once been featureless gray, it was now crisp white interrupted by five glyphs, perfectly spaced for her outspread fingers. She resisted the urge to snatch her hand away. “Very well,” she said. “If we can’t fly, at least we can fight.”

  She didn’t know the kite’s specific control codes. Triggering the wrong sequence might activate the kite’s internal defenses. But taking tank fire at point-blank range would get her killed, too. She couldn’t imagine that the kite’s armor had improved in the years of its neglect.

  On the other hand, it had jerengjen scouts, and the jerengjen looked perfectly functional.

  She pressed her thumb to the first glyph. A shadow unfurled briefly but was gone before she could identify it. The second attempt revealed a two-headed dragon’s twisting coils. Long-range missiles, then: thunder in the sky. Working quickly, she ran through the options. It would be ironic if she got the weapons systems to work only to incinerate herself.

  “You have ten seconds, Cadet Fai Guen,” said the voice with no particular emotion.

  “Lisse,” the ghost said, betraying impatience.

  One of the glyphs had shown a wolf running. She remembered that at one point the wolf had been the mercenaries’ emblem. Nevertheless, she felt a dangerous affinity to it. As she hesitated over it, the kite said, in a parched voice, “Soul strike.”

  She tapped the glyph, then pressed her palm flat to activate the weapon. The panel felt briefly hot, then cold.

  For a second she thought that nothing had happened, that the kite had malfunctioned. The kite was eerily still.

  The tanks and personnel carriers were still visible as gray outlines against darker gray, as were the nearby trees and their stifled fruits. She wasn’t sure whether that was an effect of the unnamed weapons or a problem with the tapestries. Had ten seconds passed yet? She couldn’t tell, and the clock of her pulse was unreliable.

  Desperate to escape before the tanks spat forth the killing rounds, Lisse raked her hand sideways to dismiss the glyphs. They dispersed in unsettling fragmented shapes resembling half-chewed leaves and corroded handprints. She repeated the gesture for fly.

  Lisse choked back a cry as the kite lofted. The tapestry views changed to sky on all sides except the ravens on their tree—birds no longer, but skeletons, price paid in coin of bone.

  Only once they had gained some altitude did she instruct the kite to show her what had befallen her hunters. It responded by continuing to accelerate.

  The problem was not the tapestries. Rather, the kite’s wolf-strike had ripped all the shadows free of their owners, killing them. Below, across a great swathe of the continent once called Ishuel’s Bridge, was a devastation of light, a hard, glittering splash against the surrounding snow-capp
ed mountains and forests and winding rivers.

  Lisse had been an excellent student, not out of academic conscientiousness but because it gave her an opportunity to study her enemy. One of her best subjects had been geography. She and the ghost had spent hours drawing maps in the air or shaping topographies in her blankets; paper would betray them, it had said. As she memorized the streets of the City of Fountains, it had sung her the ballads of its founding. It had told her about the feuding poets and philosophers that the thoroughfares of the City of Prisms had been named after. She knew which mines supplied which bases and how the roads spidered across Ishuel’s Bridge. While the population figures of the bases and settlement camps weren’t exactly announced to cadets, especially those recruited from the reeducation facilities, it didn’t take much to make an educated guess.

  The Imperium had built 114 bases on Ishuel’s Bridge. Base complements averaged twenty thousand people. Even allowing for the imprecision of her eye, the wolf-strike had taken out—

  She shivered as she listed the affected bases, approximately sixty of them.

  The settlement camps’ populations were more difficult. The Imperium did not like to release those figures. Imperfectly, she based her estimate on the zone around Base 87, remembering the rows of identical shelters. The only reason they did not outnumber the bases’ personnel was that the mercenaries had been coldly efficient on Jerengjen Day.

  Needle Stratagem, Lisse thought blankly. The smallest sliver. She hadn’t expected its manifestation to be quite so literal.

  The ghost was looking at her, its dark eyes unusually distinct. “There’s nothing to be done for it now,” it said at last. “Tell the kite where to go before it decides for itself.”

  “Ashway 514,” Lisse said, as they had decided before she fled base: scenario after scenario whispered to each other like bedtime stories. She was shaking. The straps did nothing to steady her.

  She had one last glimpse of the dead region before they curved into the void: her handprint upon her own birthworld. She had only meant to destroy her hunters.