Conservation of Shadows

by Yoon Ha Lee

  When each codex has accomplished its task, it loses all vitality and drifts inertly wherever it ends up. The Iothal are very long-lived, but even they do not always survive to this fate.

  Distant civilizations are well-accustomed to the phenomenon of drifting Iothal vessels, but so far none of them have deciphered the trail of knowledge that the Iothal have been at such pains to lay down.

  The Dancers

  To most of their near neighbors, they are known as the dancers. It is not the case that their societies are more interested in dance than the norm. True, they have their dances of metal harvest, and dances of dream descending, and dances of efflorescent death. They have their high rituals and their low chants, their festivals where water-of-suffusement flows freely for all who would drink, where bells with spangled clappers toll the hours by antique calendars. But then, these customs differ from their neighbors’ in detail rather than in essential nature.

  Rather, their historians like to tell the story of how, not so long ago, they went to war with aliens from a distant cluster. No one can agree on the nature of the offense that precipitated the whole affair, and it seems likely that it was a mundane squabble over excavation rights at a particular rumor-pit.

  The aliens were young when it came to interstellar war, and they struggled greatly with the conventions expected of them. In order to understand their enemy better, they charged their masters of etiquette with the task of interpreting the dancers’ behavior. For it was the case that the dancers began each of their battles in the starry deeps with the same maneuvers, and often retreated from battle—those times they had cause to retreat—with other maneuvers, carried out with great precision. The etiquette masters became fascinated by the pirouettes and helices and rolls, and speculated that the dancers’ society was constricted by strict rules of engagement. Their fabulists wrote witty and extravagant tales about the dancers’ dinner parties, the dancers’ sacrificial exchanges, the dancers’ effervescent arrangements of glass splinters and their varied meanings.

  It was not until late in the war that the aliens realized that the stylized maneuvers of the dancers’ ships had nothing to do with courtesy. Rather, they were an effect of the stardrive’s ordinary functioning, without which the ships could not move. The aliens could have exploited this knowledge and pushed for a total victory, but by then their culture was so enchanted by their self-dreamed vision of the dancers that the two came instead to a fruitful truce.

  These days, the dancers themselves often speak admiringly of the tales that the aliens wrote about them. Among the younger generation in particular, there are those who emulate the elegant and mannered society depicted in the aliens’ fables. As time goes on, it is likely that this fantasy will displace the dancers’ native culture.

  The Profit Motive

  Although the Kiatti have their share of sculptors, engineers, and mercenaries, they are perhaps best known as traders. Kiatti vessels are welcome in many places, for they bring delightfully disruptive theories of government, fossilized musical instruments, and fine surgical tools; they bring cold-eyed guns that whisper of sleep impending and sugared atrocities. If you can describe it, so they say, there is a Kiatti who is willing to sell it to you.

  In the ordinary course of things, the Kiatti accept barter for payment. They claim that it is a language that even the universe understands. Their sages devote a great deal of time attempting to justify the profit motive in view of conservation laws. Most of them converge comfortably on the position that profit is the civilized response to entropy. The traders themselves vary, as you might expect, in the rapacity of their bargains. But then, as they often say, value is contextual.

  The Kiatti do have a currency of sorts. It is their stardrives, and all aliens’ stardrives are rated in comparison with their own. The Kiatti produce a number of them, which encompass a logarithmic scale of utility.

  When the Kiatti determine that it is necessary to pay or be paid in this currency, they will spend months—sometimes years—refitting their vessels as necessary. Thus every trader is also an engineer. The drives’ designers made some attempt to make the drives modular, but this was a haphazard enterprise at best.

  One Kiatti visionary wrote of commerce between universes, which would require the greatest stardrive of all. The Kiatti do not see any reason why they can’t bargain with the universe itself, and are slowly accumulating their wealth towards the time when they can trade their smaller coins for one that will take them to this new goal. They rarely speak of this with outsiders, but most of them are confident that no one else will be able to outbid them.

  The Inescapable Experiment

  One small civilization claims to have invented a stardrive that kills everyone who uses it. One moment the ship is here, with everyone alive and well, or as well as they ever were; the next moment, it is there, and carries only corpses. The records, transmitted over great expanses against the microwave hiss, are persuasive. Observers in differently-equipped ships have sometimes accompanied these suicide vessels, and they corroborate the reports.

  Most of their neighbors are mystified by their fixation with this mordant discovery. It would be one thing, they say, if these people were set upon finding a way to fix this terrible flaw, but that does not appear to be the case. A small but reliable number of them volunteers to test each new iteration of the deathdrive, and they are rarely under any illusions about their fate. For that matter, some of the neighbors, out of pity or curiosity, have offered this people some of their own old but reliable technology, asking only a token sum to allow them to preserve their pride, but they always decline politely. After all, they possess safe stardrive technology of their own; the barrier is not knowledge.

  Occasionally, volunteers from other peoples come to test it themselves, on the premise that there has to exist some species that won’t be affected by the stardrive’s peculiar radiance. (The drive’s murderousness does not appear to have any lasting effect on the ship’s structure.) So far, the claim has stood. One imagines it will stand as long as there are people to test it.

  One Final Constant

  Then there are the civilizations that invent keener and more nimble stardrives solely to further their wars, but that’s an old story and you already know how it ends.

  The Unstrung Zither

  “They don’t look very dangerous,” Xiao Ling Yun said to the aide. Ling Yun wished she understood what Phoenix Command wanted from her. Not that she minded the excuse to take a break from the composition for two flutes and hammered dulcimer that had been stymying her for the past two weeks.

  Through a one-way window in the observation chamber, Xiao Ling Yun saw five adolescents sitting cross-legged on the floor in a semicircle. Before them was a tablet and two brushes. No ink; these were not calligraphy brushes. One of the adolescents, a girl with short, dark hair, leaned over and drew two characters with quick strokes. All five studied the map that appeared on the tablet.

  “Nevertheless,” the aide said. “They attempted to assassinate the Phoenix General. We are fortunate to have captured them.”

  The aide wrote something on her own tablet, and a map appeared. She circled a region of the map. The tablet enlarged it until it filled the screen. “Circles represent gliders,” the aide said. “Triangles represent dragons.”

  Ling Yun peered at the formations. “Who’s winning?”

  At the aide’s instigation, the tablet replayed the last move. A squadron of dragons engaged a squadron of gliders. One dragon turned white—white for death—and vanished from the map. The aide smiled. “The assassins are starting to slip.”

  Ling Yun had thought that the Phoenix General desired the services of a musician to restore order to the fractious ashworlds. She was not the best person for such a purpose, nor the worst: a master musician, yes, but without a sage’s philosophical bent of mind. Perhaps they had chosen her on account of her uncle’s position as a logistician. She was pragmatic enough not to be offended by the possibility.


  “I had not expected prisoners to be offered entertainment,” Ling Yun said, a little dubious. She was surprised that they hadn’t been executed, in fact.

  “It is not entertainment,” the aide said reprovingly. “Every citizen has a right to education.”

  Of course. The government’s stance was that the ashworlds already belonged to the empire, whatever the physical reality might be. “Including the classical arts, I presume,” she said. “But I am a musician, not a painter.” Did they want her to tutor the assassins? And if so, why?

  “Music is the queen of the arts, is it not?” the aide said.

  She had not expected to be discussing the philosophy of music with a soldier. “According to tradition, yes,” Ling Yun said carefully. Her career had been spent writing music that never strayed too much from the boundaries of tradition.

  The most important music lesson she had had came not from her tutor, but from a servant in her parents’ house. The servant, whose name Ling Yun had deliberately forgotten, liked to sing as he stirred the soup or pounded the day’s bread. He didn’t have a particularly notable voice. It wavered in the upper register and his vowels drifted when he wasn’t paying attention. (She didn’t tell him any of this. She didn’t talk to him at all. Her parents would have disapproved.) But the servant had two small children who helped him with his tasks, and they chanted the songs, boisterously out of tune.

  From watching that servant and his children, Ling Yun learned that the importance of music came not from its ability to move the five elements, but from its ability to affect the heart. She wanted to write music that anyone could hum, music that anyone could enjoy. It was the opposite of the haughty ideal that her tutor taught her to strive toward. Naturally, Ling Yun kept this thought to herself.

  The aide scribbled some more on the tablet. In response, an image of a mechanical dragon drew itself across the tablet. It had been painted white, with jagged red markings on its jointed wings.

  “Is this a captured dragon?” Ling Yun asked.

  “Unfortunately, no,” the aide said. “We caught glimpses of two of the assassins as they came down on dragons, but the dragons disappeared as though they’d been erased. We want to know where they’re hiding, and how they’re being hidden.”

  Ling Yun stared at the dragon. Whoever had drawn it did not have an artist’s fluency of line. But everything was precise and carefully proportioned. She could see where the wings connected to the body and the articulations that made motion possible, even, if she squinted, some of the controls by the pilot’s seat.

  “Who produced this?”

  The aide turned her head toward the window. “The dark-haired girl did. Her name is Wu Wen Zhi.”

  It was a masculine name, but they probably did things differently in the ashworlds. Ling Yun felt a rebellious twinge of approval.

  Ling Yun said, “Wen Zhi draws you a picture, and you expect it to yield the ashworlders’ secrets. Surely she’s not as incompetent an assassin as all that. Or did you torture this out of her?”

  “No, it’s part of the game they’re playing with the general,” the aide said.

  “I don’t see the connection,” she said. And why was the general playing a game with them in the first place? Wei qi involved no such thing, nor had the tablet games she had played as a student.

  The aide smiled as though she had heard the thought. “It personalizes the experience. When the game calculates the results of combat, it refers to the pilot’s emblem to determine her strengths and weaknesses. Take Wen Zhi’s dragon, for instance. First of all, the dragon’s design indicates that it specializes in close combat, as opposed to Mesketalioth’s”—she switched briefly to another dragon painting—“which has repeating crossbows mounted on its shoulders.” She returned to Wen Zhi’s white dragon. “However, notice the stiffness of the lines. The pilot is always alert, but in a way that makes her tense. This can be exploited.”

  “The general has an emblem in the game, too, I presume,” Ling Yun said.

  “Of course,” the aide said, but she didn’t volunteer to show it to Ling Yun. “Let me tell you about our five assassins.

  “Wu Wen Zhi comes from Colony One.” The empire’s two original colonies had been given numbers rather than names. “Wen Zhi has tried to kill herself three times already. She doesn’t sleep well at night, but she refuses to meditate, and she won’t take medications.”

  I wouldn’t either, Ling Yun thought.

  “The young man with the long braid is Ko. He’s lived on several of the ashworlds and speaks multiple languages, but his accent suggests that he comes from Arani. Interestingly enough, Ko alerted us to the third of Wen Zhi’s suicide attempts. Wen Zhi didn’t take this well.

  “The scarred one sitting next to Ko is Mesketalioth. He’s from Straken Okh. We suspect that he worked for Straken’s intelligence division before he was recruited by the Dragon Corps.

  “The girl with the light hair is Periet, although the others call her Perias. We haven’t figured out why, and they look at us as though we’re crazy when we ask them about it, although she’ll answer to either name. Our linguists tell us that Perias is the masculine form of her name; our doctors confirm that she is indeed a girl. She comes from Kiris. Don’t be fooled by her sweet manners. She’s the one who destroyed Shang Yuan.”

  Ling Yun opened her mouth, then found her voice. “Her?” Shang Yuan had been a city of several million people. It had been obliterated during the Festival of Lanterns, for which it had been famous. “I thought that the concussive storm was a natural disaster.”

  The aide gave Ling Yun a singularly cynical look. “Natural disasters don’t flatten every building in the city and cause all the lanterns to explode. It was an elemental attack.”

  “I suppose this is classified information.”

  “It is, technically, not that many people haven’t guessed.”

  “How much help did she have?”

  The aide’s mouth twisted. “Ashworld Kiris didn’t authorize the attack. As near as we can determine, Periet did it all by herself.”

  “All right,” Ling Yun said. She paced to the one-way window and watched Periet-Perias, trying to map the massacre onto the girl’s open, cheerful expression. “Who’s the fifth one now skulking in a corner?”

  “That’s Li Cheng Guo, from Colony Two,” the aide said. “He killed two of our guards on the first day. Actually, they all did their share of killing on the way in, although Periet takes the prize.”

  “That’s terrible,” Ling Yun said. But what she was thinking was, The ashworlds must be terribly desperate, to send children. The Phoenix General had had the ashworlds’ leader assassinated two years ago; this must be their counterstroke. “So,” she said, “one assassin from each ashworld.” Colony One and Colony Two; Arani, Straken Okh, and Kiris. The latter three had been founded by nations that had since been conquered by the empire.

  “Correct.” The aide rolled the brush around in her hand. “The Phoenix General wants you to discover the assassins’ secret.”

  Oh no, Ling Yun thought. For all the honors that the empress had lavished on the Phoenix General, he was still known as the Mad General. He had started out as a glider pilot, and everyone knew that glider pilots were crazy. Their extreme affinity for fire and wood unbalanced their minds.

  On the other hand, Ling Yun had a lifetime’s practice of bowing before those of greater standing, however much it chafed, and the man had produced undeniable results. She could respect that.

  “I’m no soldier,” Ling Yun said, “and no interrogator. What would you like me to do?”

  The aide smiled. “Each assassin has an emblem in the game.”

  Ling Yun had a sudden memory of a self-portrait she had drawn when she was a child. It was still in the hallway of her parents’ house, to her embarrassment: lopsided face with tiny eyes and a dot for a nose, scribbly hair, arms spread wide. “Why did they agree to this game?” she asked.

  “They are playing because it was
that or die. But they have some hidden purpose of their own, and time may be running out. You must study the game—we’ll provide analyses for you, as we hardly expect you to become a tactician—and study the dragons. Compose a suite of five pieces, one for each dragon—for each pilot.”

  “Pilot?”

  “They’re pilots in their minds, although we’re only certain that Periet and Mesketalioth have the training. Maybe the secret is just that they found blockade runners to drop them off.” The aide didn’t sound convinced.

  “One piece for each dragon. You think that by translating their self-representations into music, the supreme art, you will learn their secret, and how to defeat them.”

  “Precisely.”

  “I will do what I can,” Xiao Ling Yun said.

  “I’m sure you will,” the aide said.

  Xiao Ling Yun’s ancestors had worshipped dragons. At the harvest festival, they poured libations of rice wine to the twin dragons of the greatmoon and the smallmoon. When the empire’s skies were afire with the summer’s meteor showers, people would burn incense for the souls of the falling stars.

  You could still see fire in the sky, most nights, festive and beautiful, but no one brought out incense. The light came from battles high in the atmosphere, battles between the ashworlders’ metal dragons and the empire’s Phoenix Corps.

  When she was a child, Ling Yun’s uncle had made her a toy glider, a flimsy-looking thing of bamboo and paper, with tiny slivers to represent the wing-mounted flamethrowers. He had painted the red-and-gold emblem of the Phoenix Corps on each wing. “Uncle,” she asked, “why do we fight with fire when the gliders are made of wood? Isn’t it dangerous?”