Conservation of Shadows

by Yoon Ha Lee

  More time passed. There was something wrong about the high calendar when it ticked off seconds cleanly and precisely and didn’t account for the way time crawled when you were waiting for battle. Among the many things wrong with the high calendar, but that one he could own to without getting called out as a heretic.

  “The far terrain is going to shift in our favor in five hours, sir,” Korais said.

  “Thank you, good to know,” Jedao said.

  To distract himself from the pain, he was thinking about the bridgelights and their resemblance to falling petals when Scan alerted him that the Lanterners had shown up. “Thirty-some moths in the van,” the officer said in a commendably steady voice. “Readings suggest more are behind them. They’re moving rapidly, vector suggests they’re headed down the Yellow Passage toward the choke locus, and they’re using a blast wave to clear mines.”

  As if he’d had the time to plant mines down a hostile corridor. Good of them to think of it, though.

  Menowen’s breath hissed between her teeth. “Our banner—”

  His emblem. The Kel transmitted their general’s emblem before battle. “No,” Jedao said. “We’re not bannering. The Lanterners are going to be receiving the Deuce of Gears from over there,” where the Rahal were.

  “But the protocol, sir. The Rahal aren’t part of your force,” Menowen said, “they don’t fight—”

  That got his attention. “Fledge,” Jedao said sharply, which brought her up short, “what the hell do you mean they’re not fighting? Just because they’re not sitting on a mass of things that go boom? They’re fighting what’s in the enemy’s head.”

  He studied the enemy dispositions. The Yellow Passage narrowed as it approached the null, and the first group consisted of eight hellmoths, smaller than fangmoths, but well-armed if they were in terrain friendly to their own calendar, which was not going to be the case at the passage’s mouth. The rest of the groups would probably consist of eight to twelve hellmoths each. Taken piecemeal, entirely doable.

  “They fell for it,” Menowen breathed, then wisely shut up.

  “General Shuos Jedao to all moths,” Jedao said. “Coordinated strike on incoming units with missiles and railguns.” Hellmoths didn’t have good side weapons, so he wasn’t as concerned about return fire. “After the first hits, move into the Yellow Passage to engage. Repeat, move into the Yellow Passage.”

  The fangmoths’ backs would be to that damned null, no good way to retreat, but that would only motivate them to fight harder.

  If the Lanterners wanted a chance at the choke, they’d have to choose between shooting their way through when the geometry didn’t permit them to bring their numbers to bear in the passage, or else leaving the passage and taking their chances with terrain that shaded toward the high calendar. If they chose the latter, they risked being hit by Kel formation effects, anything from force lances to scatterbursts, on top of the fangmoths’ exotic weapons.

  The display was soon a mess of red lights and gold, damage reports. The computer kept making the dry, metallic click that indicated hits made by the Kel. Say what you liked about the Kel, they did fine with weapons.

  Two hellmoths tried to break through the Kel fangmoths, presumably under the impression that the Rahal were the real enemy. One hellmoth took a direct engine hit from a spinal railgun, while the other shuddered apart under a barrage of missiles that overwhelmed the anti-missile defenses.

  “You poor fools,” Jedao said, perusing the summaries despite the horrible throbbing in his left eye. “You found a general who was incandescently talented at calendrical warfare, so you spent all your money on the exotic toys and ran out of funding for the boring invariant stuff.”

  Menowen paused in coordinating damage control—they’d taken a burst from an exploding scout, of all things—and remarked, “I should think you’d be grateful, sir.”

  “It’s war, Commander, and someone always dies,” Jedao said, aware of Korais listening in; aware that even this might be revealing too much. “That doesn’t mean I’m eager to dance on their ashes.”

  “Of course,” Menowen said, but her voice revealed nothing of her feelings.

  The fangmoths curved into a concave bowl as they advanced up the Yellow Passage. The wrecked Lanterner hellmoths in the van were getting in the way of the Lanterners’ attempts to bring fire to bear. Jedao had planned for a slaughter, but he hadn’t expected it to work this well. They seemed to think his force was a detachment to delay them from reaching the false Kel swarm while the far terrain was hostile to the high calendar, and that if they could get past him before the terrain changed, they would prevail. It wasn’t until the fourth group of Lanterners had been written into rubble and smoke that their swarm discipline wavered. Some of the hellmoths and their auxiliaries started peeling out of the passage just to have somewhere else to go. Others turned around, exposing their sides to further punishment, so they could accelerate back up the passage where the Kel wouldn’t be able to catch them.

  One of Jedao’s fangmoths had taken engine damage serious enough that he had ordered it to pull back, but that left him ten to work with. “Formation Sparrow’s Spear,” he said, and gave the first set of targets.

  The fangmoths narrowed into formation as they plunged out of the Yellow Passage and toward five hellmoths and a transport moving with the speed and grace of a flipped turtle. As they entered friendlier terrain, white-gold fire blazed up from the formation’s primary pivot and raked through two hellmoths, the transport, and a piece of crystalline battledrift.

  They swung around for a second strike, shifting into a shield formation to slough off the incoming fire.

  This is too easy, Jedao thought coldly, and then.

  “Incoming message from Lanterner hellmoth 5,” Communications said. Scan had tagged it as the probable command moth. “Hellmoth 5 has disengaged.” It wasn’t the only one. The list showed up on Jedao’s display.

  “Hold fire on anything that isn’t shooting at us,” Jedao said. “They want to talk? I’ll talk.”

  There was still a core of fourteen hellmoths whose morale hadn’t broken. A few of the stragglers were taking potshots at the Kel, but the fourteen had stopped firing.

  “This is Lieutenant Colonel Akkion Dhaved,” said a man’s voice. “I assume I’m addressing a Kel general.”

  “In a manner of speaking,” Jedao said. “This is General Shuos Jedao. Are you the ranking officer?” Damn. He would have liked to know the Lanterner general’s name.

  “Sir,” Menowen mouthed, “it’s a trick, stop talking to them.”

  He wasn’t sure he disagreed, but he wasn’t going to get more information by closing the channel.

  “That’s complicated, General.” Dhaved’s voice was sardonic. “I have an offer to make you.”

  “I’m sorry,” Jedao said, “but are you the ranking officer? Are you authorized to have this conversation?” He wasn’t the only one who didn’t like the direction of the conversation. The weight of collective Kel disapproval was almost crushing.

  “I’m offering you a trade, General. You’ve been facing General Bremis kae Meghuet of the Lantern.”

  The name sounded familiar—

  “She’s the cousin of Bremis kae Erisphon, one of our leaders. Hostage value, if you care. You’re welcome to her if you let the rest of us go. She’s intact. Whether you want to leave her that way is your affair.”

  Jedao didn’t realize how chilly his voice was until he saw Menowen straighten in approval. “Are you telling me you mutinied against your commanding officer?”

  “She lost the battle,” Dhaved said, “and it’s either death or capture. We all know what the heptarchate does to heretics, don’t we?”

  Korais spoke with quiet urgency. “General. Find out if Bremis kae Meghuet really is alive.”

  Jedao met the man’s eyes. It took him a moment to understand the expression in them: regret.

  “There’s a nine-hour window,” Korais said. “The Day of Broken Fee
t isn’t over.”

  Jedao gestured for Communications to mute the channel, which he should have done earlier. “The battle’s basically won and we’ll see the cascade effects soon,” he said. “What do you have in mind?”

  “It’s not ideal,” Korais said, “but a heretic general is a sufficient symbol.” Just as Jedao himself might have been, if the assassin had succeeded. “If we torture kae Meghuet ourselves, it would cement the victory in the calendar.”

  Jedao hauled himself to his feet to glare at Korais, which was a mistake. He almost lost his balance when the pain drove through his head like nails.

  Still, Jedao had to give Korais credit for avoiding the usual euphemism, processed.

  Filaments in the feet. It was said that that particular group of heretics had taken weeks to die.

  Fuck dignity. Jedao hung on to the arm of the chair and said, as distinctly as he could, “It’s a trick. I’m not dealing with Dhaved. Tell the Lanterners we’ll resume the engagement in seven minutes.” His vision was going white around the edges, but he had to say this. Seven minutes wouldn’t give the Lanterners enough time to run or evade, but it mattered. It mattered. “Annihilate anything that can’t run fast enough.”

  Best not to leave Doctrine any prisoners to torture.

  Jedao was falling over sideways. Someone caught his arm. Commander Menowen. “You ought to let us take care of the mopping up, sir,” she said. “You’re not well.”

  She could relieve him of duty. Reverse his orders. Given that the world was one vast blur, he couldn’t argue that he was in any fit shape to assess the situation. He tried to speak again, but the pain hit again, and he couldn’t remember how to form words.

  “I don’t like to press at a time like this,” Korais was saying to Menowen, “but the Lanterner general—”

  “General Jedao has spoken,” Menowen said crisply. “Find another way, Captain.” She called for a junior officer to escort Jedao out of the command center.

  Words were said around him, a lot of them. They didn’t take him to his quarters. They took him to the medical center. All the while he thought about lights and shrapnel and petals falling endlessly in the dark.

  Commander Menowen came to talk to him after he was returned to his quarters. The mopping up was still going on. Menowen was carrying a small wooden box. He hoped it didn’t contain more medications.

  “Sir,” Menowen said, “I used to think heretics were just heretics, and death was just death. Why does it matter to you how they die?”

  Menowen had backed him against Doctrine, and she hadn’t had to. That meant a lot.

  She hadn’t said that she didn’t have her own reasons. She had asked for his. Fair enough.

  Jedao had served with Kel who would have understood why he had balked. A few of them would have shot him if he had turned over an enemy officer, even a heretic, for torture. But as he advanced in rank, he found fewer and fewer such Kel. One of the consequences of living in a police state.

  “Because war is about people,” Jedao said. “Even when you’re killing them.”

  “I don’t imagine that makes you popular with Doctrine,” Menowen said.

  “The Rahal can’t get rid of me because the Kel like me. I just have to make sure it stays that way.”

  She looked at him steadily. “Then you have one more Kel ally, sir. We have the final tally. We engaged ninety-one hellmoths and destroyed forty-nine of them. Captain-magistrate Korais is obliged to report your actions, but given the numbers, you are going to get a lot of leniency.”

  There would have been around four hundred crew on each of the hellmoths. He had already seen the casualty figures for his own fangmoths and the three Rahal vessels that had gotten involved, fourteen dead and fifty-one injured.

  “Leniency wasn’t what I was looking for,” Jedao said.

  Menowen nodded slowly.

  “Is there anything exciting about our journey to Twin Axes, or can I go back to being an invalid?”

  “One thing,” she said. “Doctrine has provisionally declared a remembrance of your victory to replace the Day of Broken Feet. He says it is likely to be approved by the high magistrates. Since we didn’t provide a heretic focus for torture, we’re burning effigy candles.” She hesitated. “He said he thought you might prefer this alternative remembrance. You don’t want to be caught shirking this.” She put the box down on the nearest table.

  “I will observe the remembrance,” Jedao said, “although it’s ridiculous to remember something that just happened.”

  Menowen’s mouth quirked. “One less day for publicly torturing criminals,” she said, and he couldn’t argue. “That’s all, sir.”

  After she had gone, Jedao opened the box. It contained red candles in the shape of hellmoths, except the wax was additionally carved with writhing bullet-ridden figures.

  Jedao set the candles out and lit them with the provided lighter, then stared at the melting figures. I don’t think you understand what I’m taking away from these remembrance days, he thought. The next time he won some remarkable victory, it wasn’t going to be against some unfortunate heretics. It was going to be against the high calendar itself. Every observance would be a reminder of what he had to do next—and while everyone lost a battle eventually, he had one more Kel officer in his corner, and he didn’t plan on losing now.

  A Vector Alphabet of Interstellar Travel

  The Conflagration

  Among the universe’s civilizations, some conceive of the journey between stars as the sailing of bright ships, and others as tunneling through the crevices of night. Some look upon their far-voyaging as a migratory imperative, and name their vessels after birds or butterflies.

  The people of a certain red star no longer speak its name in any of their hundreds of languages, although they paint alien skies with its whorled light and scorch its spectral lines into the sides of their vessels.

  Their most common cult, although by no means a universal one, is that of many-cornered Mrithaya, Mother of the Conflagration. Mrithaya is commonly conceived of as the god of catastrophe and disease, impartial in the injuries she deals out. Any gifts she bestows are incidental, and usually come with sharp edges. The stardrive was invented by one of her worshipers.

  Her priests believe that she is completely indifferent to worship, existing in the serenity of her own disinterest. A philosopher once said that you leave offerings of bitter ash and aleatory wine at her dank altars not because she will heed them, but because it is important to acknowledge the truth of the universe’s workings. Naturally, this does not stop some of her petitioners from trying, and it is through their largesse that the priests are able to thrive as they do.

  Mrithaya is depicted as an eyeless woman of her people, small of stature, but with a shadow scarring the world. (Her people’s iconography has never been subtle.) She leans upon a crooked staff with words of poison scratched into it. In poetry, she is signified by smoke-wind and nausea, the sudden fall sideways into loss.

  Mrithaya’s people, perhaps not surprisingly, think of their travels as the outbreak of a terrible disease, a conflagration that they have limited power to contain; that the civilizations they visit will learn how to build Mrithaya’s stardrive, and be infected by its workings. A not insignificant faction holds that they should hide on their candled worlds so as to prevent Mrithaya’s terrible eyeless gaze from afflicting other civilizations, that all interstellar travel should be interdicted. And yet the pilgrims—Mrithaya’s get, they are called—always find a way.

  Certain poets write in terror of the day that all extant civilizations will be touched by this terrible technological conflagration, and become subject to Mrithaya’s whims.

  Alphabets

  In linear algebra, the basis of a vector space is an alphabet in which all vectors can be expressed uniquely. The thing to remember is that there are many such alphabets.

  In the peregrinations of civilizations grand and subtle, each mode of transport is an alphabet expressing t
heir understandings of the universe’s one-way knell. One assumes that the underlying universe is the same in each case.

  Codices

  The Iothal are a people who treasure chronicles of all kinds. From early on in their history, they bound forest chronicles by pressing leaves together and listening to their secrets of turning worm and wheeling sun; they read hymns to the transient things of the world in chronicles of footprints upon rocky soil, of foam upon restive sea. They wrote their alphabets forwards and backwards and upside down into reflected cloudlight, and divined the poetry of time receding in the earth’s cracked strata.

  As a corollary, the Iothal compile vast libraries. On the worlds they inhabit, even the motes of air are subject to having indices written on them in stuttering quantum ink. Some of their visionaries speak of a surfeit of knowledge, when it will be impossible to move or breathe without imbibing some unexpected fact, from the number of neutrons in a certain meadow to the habits of aestivating snails. Surely the end product will be a society of enlightened beings, each crowned with some unique mixture of facts and heady fictions.

  The underside of this obsession is the society’s driving terror. One day all their cities will be unordered dust, one day all their books will be scattered like leaves, one day no one will know the things they knew. One day the rotting remains of their libraries will disintegrate so completely that they will be indistinguishable from the world’s wrack of stray eddies and meaningless scribbles, the untide of heat death.

  The Iothal do not call their starships ships, but rather codices. They have devoted untold ages to this ongoing work of archival. Although they had developed earlier stardrives—indeed, with their predilection for knowledge, it was impossible not to—their scientists refused to rest until they devised one that drank in information and, as its ordinary mode of operation, tattooed it upon the universe’s subtle skin.

  Each time the Iothal build a codex, they furnish it with a carefully selected compilation of their chronicles, written in a format that the stardrive will find nourishing. Then its crew takes it out into the universe to carry out the act of inscription. Iothal codices have very little care for destination, as it is merely the fact of travel that matters, although they make a point of avoiding potentially hostile aliens.