Clarkesworld: Year Four

by Kij Johnson

  “Sezhi-kan,” the commandant replied, addressing the other man by his Yamachin title, “it was too late when your chancellor-general set his eye upon Feng-Huang.” And when our government, faction-torn, failed to heed the diplomats’ warning of Tsehan’s ambitions; but he would not say that to a Yamachin. “It was too late when you opened fire on the station. I will not stand down.”

  “Commandant,” said Sezhi even as his guards trained their rifles on Sang, “please. Heaven’s Gate is lost.” His voice dropped to a murmur. “Sang, it’s over. At least save yourself and the people who are still alive.”

  Small courtesies have power. In the records that made it out of Heaven’s Gate, we see the temptation that sweeps over the commandant’s face as he holds Sezhi’s gaze. We see the moment when he decides that he won’t break eye contact to look around at his haggard soldiers, and the moment when temptation breaks its grasp.

  Oh, yes: the cameras were transmitting to all the relays, with no thought as to who might be eavesdropping.

  “I will surrender the white gun,” Sang said, “when you take it from me. Dying is easier than letting you pass.”

  Sezhi’s face held no more expression than night inside a nexus. “Then take it I shall. Gentlemen.”

  The commandant drew the white gun from its holster, keeping it at all times aimed at the floor. He was right-handed.

  The first shot took off Sang’s right arm.

  His face was white as the blood spurted. He knelt—or collapsed—to pick up the white gun with his left hand, but had no strength left to stand.

  The second shot, from one of the soldiers behind Sezhi, took off his left arm.

  It’s hard to tell whether shock finally caused Sang to slump as the soldiers’ next twelve bullets slammed into him. A few patriots believe that Sang was going to pick up the white gun with his teeth before he died, but never had the opportunity. But the blood is indisputable.

  Sezhi Tomo, pale but dry-eyed, bowed over the commandant’s fallen body, lifting his hand from heart to lips: a Chosar salute, never a Yamachin one. Sezhi paid for that among his own troops.

  And Yen—Admiral, through no fault of your own, you received the news too late to save the commandant. Heaven’s Gate, to our shame, fell in days.

  There is no need to recount our losses to Yamat’s soldiers. Once their warsails had entered Cho’s local space, they showed what a generation of civil war does for one’s martial abilities. Our world-bound populations fell before them like summer leaves before winter winds. One general wrote, in a memorandum to the government, that “death walks the only road left to us.” The only hope was to stop them before they made planetfall, and we failed at that.

  We asked Feng-Huang for aid, but Feng-Huang was suspicious of our failure to inform them earlier of Yamat’s imperial designs. So their warsail fleets and soldiers arrived too late to prevent the worst of the damage.

  It must pain you to look at the starsail battles lost, which you could have won so readily. It is easy to scorn Admiral Wan Kun for not being the tactician you are, less adept at using the nexuses’ spacetime terrain to advantage. But what truly diminishes the man is the fact that he allowed rivalry to cloud his judgment. Instead of using his connections at court to disparage your victories and accuse you of treason, he could have helped unify the fractious factions in coming up with a strategy to defeat Yamat. Alas, he held a grudge against you for invading his jurisdiction at Heaven’s Gate without securing prior permission.

  He never forgave you for eclipsing him. Even as he died in defeat, commanding the Chosar fleet that you had led so effectively, he must have been bitter. But they say this last battle at Yellow Splendor will decide everything. Forget his pettiness, Yen. He is gone, and it is no longer important.

  “I have your file,” the man said to Yen Shenar. His dark blue uniform did not show any rank insignia, but there was a white gun in his holster. “I would appeal to your loyalty, but the programmer assigned to you noted that this was unlikely to succeed.”

  “Then why are you here?” Yen said. They were in a room with high windows and paintings of carp. The guards had given him plain clothing, also in dark blue, a small improvement on the gray that all prisoners wore.

  The man smiled. “Necessity,” he said. “Your military acumen is needed.”

  “Perhaps the government should have considered that before they put me here,” Yen said.

  “You speak as though the government were a unified entity.”

  As if he could forget. The court’s inability to face in the same direction at the same time was legendary.

  “You were not without allies, even then,” the man said.

  Yen tipped his head up: he was not a short man, but the other was taller. “The government has a flawed understanding of ‘military acumen,’ you know.”

  The man raised an eyebrow.

  “It’s not just winning at baduk or other strategy games, or the ability to put starsails in pretty arrangements,” Yen said. “It is leadership; it is inspiring people, and knowing who is worth inspiring; it is honoring your ancestors with your service. And,” he added dryly, “it is knowing enough about court politics to avoid being put in the Garden, where your abilities do you no good.”

  “People are the sum of their loyalties,” the man said. “You told me that once.”

  “I’m expected to recognize you?”

  “No,” the man said frankly. “I told them so. We all know how reprogramming works. There’s no hope of restoring what you were.” There was no particular emotion in his voice. “But they insisted that I try.”

  “Tell me who you are.”

  “You have no way of verifying the information,” the man said.

  Yen laughed shortly. “I’m curious anyway.”

  “I’m your nephew,” the man said. “My name wouldn’t mean anything to you.” At Yen’s scrutiny, he said, “You used to remark on how I take after my mother.”

  “I’m surprised the government didn’t send me back to the Ministry of Virtuous Thought to ensure my cooperation anyway,” Yen said.

  “They were afraid it would damage you beyond repair,” he said.

  “Did the programmer tell them so?”

  “I’ve only spoken to her once,” the man said.

  This was the important part, and this supposed nephew of his didn’t even realize it. “Did she have anything else to say?”

  The man studied him for a long moment, then nodded. “She said you are not the sum of your loyalties, you are the sum of your choices.”

  “I did not choose to be here,” Yen said, because it would be expected of him, although it was not true. Presumably, given that he had known what the king’s decree was to be, he could have committed suicide or defected. He was a strategist now and had been a strategist then. This course of action had to have been chosen for a reason.

  He realized now that the Yen Shenar of yesteryear might not have been a man willing to intrigue against his enemies, even where it would have saved him his command. But he had been ready to become one who would, even for the sake of a government that had been willing to discard his service.

  The man was frowning. “Will you accept your reinstatement into the military?”

  “Yes,” Yen said. “Yes.” He was the weapon that he had made of himself, in a life he remembered only through shadows and fissures. It was time to test his forging, to ensure that the government would never be in a position to trap him in the Garden again.

  This is the story the way they are telling it now. I do not know how much of it to believe. Surely it is impossible that you outmatched the Yamachin fleet when it was five times the size of your own; surely it is impossible that over half the Yamachin starsails were destroyed or captured. But the royal historians say it is so.

  There has been rejoicing in the temporary capital: red banners in every street, fragrant blossoms scattered at every doorway. Children play with starsails of folded paper, pretending to vanquish the Yamachin
foe, and even the thralls have memorized the famous poem commemorating your victory at Yellow Splendor.

  They say you will come home soon. I hope that is true.

  But all I can think of is how, the one time I met you, you did not wear the white gun. I wonder if you wear it now.

  for my parents, with additional thanks to Prof. Barry S. Strauss

  About the Author

  Yoon Ha Lee is an award-nominated Korean-American sf/f writer (mostly short stories) who majored in math and finds it a source of continual delight that math can be mined for sf/f story ideas. Her fiction has appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Clarkesworld, Tor.com and Beneath Ceaseless Skies. Her collection Conservation of Shadows will be published in 2013.

  The Cull

  Robert Reed

  Smiles mean nothing here. Inside the station, everybody smiles. Optimism is the natural state of mind. But this particular smile is larger and brighter than usual, and it happens to be honest. The man grins at me while taking a slow and very deep breath, trying to infect me with his prurient joy. He has news, important enormous delightful news, and he relishes the chance to tell me what I can’t possibly know yet.

  “What is it?” I ask.

  “Orlando,” he says.

  I don’t respond.

  “That boy,” he says. “The brat—”

  “What has Orlando done?”

  “This time, he’s hurt a child.”

  Surprise fills my face. My enduring smile is replaced with a concerned, suspicious grin. “Which child?”

  “His sister.”

  Compassion twists my features. “How badly?” I ask.

  “She’s bleeding.”

  I start to pick up my doctor’s case.

  “Just a bad bloody nose. She’s going to be fine.” He doesn’t want me rushing off. The girl isn’t half as important as Orlando.

  “When did this happen?”

  “A few minutes ago.”

  “He struck her?”

  “Punched her with his fist.”

  “You saw this?”

  “No.”

  “Who were the witnesses?” I start to ask.

  But he interrupts, explaining, “They were together in their quarters. Nobody else. Then there was a scream, and she was bleeding and crying. Several people saw her running into the hallway, holding her nose.”

  I pick up the case anyway.

  “She says he hit her. She says her brother is mean.”

  Orlando has a well-earned reputation. But stealing and lying are lesser crimes compared to physical violence, particularly violence towards a small and very pretty three-year-old girl.

  “What do the parents say?” I ask.

  “Not very much. You can imagine.” In the small, intense politics of the station, this is an important man. But he looks at me warily, wondering if I will do what is obvious to him.

  “I will talk to them,” I say.

  “Of course.”

  My clinic is a large room with three interior walls and a tall ceiling. The walls are padded, cutting the roar of blowing fans and aging machinery and the endless music of voices engaged in happy conversation. But when I step through the door, a strange, almost unheard-of quiet takes hold. Dozens of faces watch me, and nobody speaks. The black case rides in my most human hand, and I walk quickly, passing one old lady who turns to a grandchild, saying the word that everyone wants to hear.

  “Cull,” she says.

  I stop and look back at her.

  My expression makes her flinch. But she attempts to straighten her back—impossible with her collapsing bones—and with that fearless certainty of creatures not long for this world, she says, “Oh, but you’ll have to cull the brat now. That’s the law. You haven’t any choice.”

  A four-year-old stole the playmate’s favorite toy, and everybody assumed a case of boys being boys. No need for alarm, no need to forgive. And when he was seven and tricked that little girl out of her morning rations, it was easy to believe that one stern lecture from his otherwise sterling parents would do enough good. But lectures never helped, except to teach the troublemaker that he didn’t need the approval of others, and even when children avoided him, nothing changed. He was a loner, an outcast in the making. And more disturbing was how the adults would speak in front of him, talking openly about eradicating what was wrong with the world, and Orlando’s only response was to erupt into wild, mocking laughter.

  His parents worried but for somewhat different reasons.

  The mother was quick to blame herself. If she was the problem, then she could be the solution too. “I love Orlando,” she would say, trying to convince herself of her motherly adorations. “I just need to show my love more. Then I’ll make him understand. I will. He can’t keep acting this way. He can’t steal and lie. This won’t end well, if he doesn’t change.”

  The father embraced several myths. Other children were the problem, gullible and silly, and they might even deserve what they got. Or his boy was testing boundaries, mastering his environment. But was either story good enough? If they didn’t convince, there was one final, best hope: He looked at me, adding winks to his smile. “Orlando’s a genius,” he claimed. “That’s the heart of our problem. Look at his test scores. Look what the teachers write. Humans and machines say the same thing: He’s practically exploding with promise.”

  But there was more than test scores to consider. Observations and gut feelings from his teachers belied every exceptional mark. Orlando’s real genius was for making trouble. And it wasn’t just the larceny and mendacity. That boy could pick the best possible moment to say the worst possible words—flat alarming and awful statements crafted to test everybody’s happiness.

  When he was eleven, Orlando leaped onto the cafeteria table, begging to be noticed. Most of the time he ignored other people, but on that day he drank in the nervous energies, waving arms while launching into a brief, polished speech about how there wasn’t enough food in the station. Starvation was everyone’s destiny. Except for the children whose parents were going to slit their throats and drink their thin blood and then fry up their scrawny little bodies. Those babies were the lucky ones, spared by the coming nightmares.

  Dhaka is the mother. Nearly as pretty as her son, she held her baby daughter in her lap, shaking her head sadly. “I have no idea why he would say that. Where would that come from?”

  The father tried to laugh. “It was a stupid joke. That’s all. We aren’t starving, not to death certainly, and the boy knows it. He’s just rattling cages.”

  Dhaka dipped her head and sighed.

  Houston is the father, and he can be tenacious when it comes to denying the obvious. “The boy is bored. That’s all.”

  “How can Orlando be bored?” Dhaka asked. “The station was designed with children in mind. We’ve got the playground and an exercise yard. Every book ever written is waiting to be read, and he can play any game, and his AI teachers are always awake and ready to work with him. Or they could just talk to him. Even if he never plays with another child, he can keep very, very busy.”

  The playground was shabby, and the exercise yard smelled of puke. And to keep people from dwelling too much on negative influences, a large portion of the digital library was misfiled, leaving it unavailable to ordinary citizens.

  But Houston wanted to echo the praise. “No, the station is great. It is.” He straightened his back, giving his best effort at conviction. “Hell, this is the perfect life. For kids and for adults too.”

  The station was a shit hole, but I tried keeping the focus on one difficult boy. “Believe what you wish,” I told them. “But Orlando is a disruption. And worse, he can be an agent of despair.”

  “This is crap,” declared Houston.

  With a doctor’s smooth, sorry voice, I said, “Chronic self-centeredness. If you want to give his affliction a name, that’s it.”

  Dhaka sobbed and held her baby until the poor girl squirmed, and looking up asked the clin
ic’s ceiling, “What else can I do? Tell me, and I’ll help him. Whatever it takes.”

  I pretended to think, but my ideas were uniformly grim.

  Once again, Houston denied the problem. But he wasn’t quite as determined, and it was easy to see him achieving a truce with the possibilities. He wouldn’t agree to any diagnosis, but it was important to ask, “What about medicine?”

  “Which medicines would you suggest?”

  Dhaka felt at ease with the topic. “Tranquilizers,” she blurted.

  A sedated boy couldn’t cheat or make people’s faces red. But he couldn’t be a productive citizen, not within this tiny, tightly orchestrated community.

  “How about harder stuff?” Houston asked.

  I leaned forward, staring at his eyes. “You must believe me. Sir. There are no drugs to treat this affliction or shots to make the brain immune to these impulses. And even if there were chemical tricks, the molecules would be complicated and I’d have to pull one of my synthesizers off its critical jobs, which as I’m sure you understand would be an enormous burden on every other patient.”

  The parents sat back, blinking nervously. “If only this, if only that,” they were thinking to themselves.

  It was Houston who finally spoke. “What are we talking about? If Orlando doesn’t improve, I mean.”

  Two smart, scared adults watched me. I could offer a variety of appealing lies, but they wouldn’t help anybody. The station was ruled by happiness, so deeply engrained that only the doctor sees its pernicious effects. If I wasn’t blunt—if I diluted my words or my tone—these clever, joyous people were going to invent some ridiculous excuse not to believe me.

  “This is your official warning,” I began.

  Terror spoiled those beaming, optimistic faces. They didn’t want the word “cull.” Even the happiest soul would be crushed to hear that term linked to his oldest child. But then the baby decided she was famished, shattering the drama with her own self-possessed wailing. I decided not to say the word. Not yet. Dhaka held her daughter to her breast, and the two-time father smiled gamely, shaking his head while proudly admiring this perfect little angel that was his.