Anthology of Speculative Fiction, Volume Two

by Short Story Anthology

  I had no weapon on me, nothing that had any chance of harming an entity of metal and shielded circuits. But I launched myself at Hauth anyway, then choked back a shriek as something slammed into me and knocked me aside: my mother’s tail.

  My side hurt and I couldn’t breathe. My mother stood between me and Hauth. She was crowned in blue fire, and she resembled nothing so much as a skeleton stitched together by sinew of shadows.

  “It won’t matter if you kill me,” Hauth said. “I am not an entity like you or your mother. My experience-sum is copied to alter-selves at regular intervals. The same mechanism suffices to distribute the chronicle.”

  It said something about Hauth that it expected an appeal of pure reason to sway me, and more about me that the appeal moved me not at all. The irony was that my mother and Hauth fundamentally agreed on the value of peace; but she would not impose it, while Hauth would. And Hauth now returned her hospitality with a threat. I could not forgive that.

  I did not know how to fight. I did not know how to use my fists or feet, or any of the guns or knives amenable to human hands. My teeth, as I had learned early in life, were practically useless. But Hauth’s remarks, and my mother’s hints, had given me to understand that I had one weapon after all: my mother.

  “You were waiting for me to grow up all that time,” I said to her. “To see if you had raised me true.”

  She gave a terrible cry. For all the defenses the fortress boasted, she was its greatest one. “If you kill it,” she said in a tattered voice, “then we have nothing more in common. But I will not fight you either, weapon though I am.”

  “Then what will you do?” I said. I didn’t recognize my own voice. I might have been crying.

  “I stopped fighting so many years ago the number has no meaning to you,” she said. “I am not going to start again now. It is always possible, of course, that my imperatives are stronger than my ability to resist them even after all my edits, and that I will do as you order anyway.”

  She did not say: I thought I had taught you better than this. We were beyond that now.

  My hatred for Hauth was passionate and sharp-edged and did not hurt nearly so much as the grief in my mother’s eyes. I whirled and fled as fast as I could, down the corridors I had grown up in. No one came after me.

  I could not go back to my mother after that. The fortress was closed to me now. I was given time to adjust to the idea that I was to leave. Only certain doors opened to me, for all that meals were provided, along with any other diversion I asked for.

  Eventually I came to a small ship, as beautiful as a flowerbud. When I finally brought myself to enter it, knowing that I must then depart for good, I found waiting for me a single cupcake decorated with azalea-pink frosting. I made myself eat it, and never managed to remember how it tasted.

  My exile was a centrifugal one. Any path was open to me except the one I wanted to take, curving back home. As you grow older, I will tell you of the times I almost died, and the lifetimes I spent in ancestral halls looking for mentions of my mother’s origins, however thready, not already discussed in Hauth’s chronicle. I took lovers who murmured poetry-of-absences into my dreams, and wept when I left them; I learned everything from surgery to cloud-gardening. One thing I never took up, however, was baking.

  I have told you all this as we travel, as you curl your cilia inquisitively within the birthing sac, listening even unborn. I can only hope to be as good a mother to you as my mother was to me. It would have been preferable to return you to your people, had any remained, but by the time I passed by their system, they had destroyed themselves in an ecological collapse that left entire worlds pitted with corrosive seas. I salvaged what I could, alone. We carry with us their songs and histories and genealogy-braids, the possibility of future generations of your kind, so that you may decide what to do with them when you are older.

  Long years have passed since I left the fortress behind, having broken the rules that my mother laid down. She had already forgiven me when I left; I needed all this time to forgive myself. In the meantime, I see the fortress’s welcome-banner streaming out toward us, luminous like an effusion of flowers, and I imagine that your grandmother will be pleased to meet you.

  © Copyright 2014 Yoon Ha Lee

  The Knight of Chains, the Deuce of Stars, by Yoon Ha Lee

  (Beneath Ceaseless Skies #143, March 2014)

  The tower is a black spire upon a world whose only sun is a million starships wrecked into a mass grave. Light the color of fossils burns from the ships, and at certain hours, the sun casts shadows that mutter the names of vanquished cities and vanished civilizations. It is said that when the tower’s sun finally darkens, the universe’s clocks will stop.

  But the sun, however strange, is not why people make the labyrinthine journey to the tower. The tower guards the world’s hollow depths, in which may be found the universe’s games. Every game played among the universe’s peoples was once trapped in the world’s terrible underground passages, and every one was mined and bargained for by some traveler. It is for such a game that the exile Niristez comes here now, in a ship of ice and iron and armageddon engines.

  This is the hand Niristez played long ago: The Ten of Theorems; the Knight of Hounds; the Nine of Chains, the bad-luck symbol she uses as a calling card; and she kept two cards hidden, but lost the round anyway.

  Niristez carries the last two cards with her. They come from a deck made of coalescent paper, which will reveal the cards drawn when she chooses and not before. Today, the backs show the tower in abbreviated brushstrokes, like a needle of dark iron plunging into an eye. Coalescent cards are not known for their subtlety.

  She may have lost that match, but it’s not the only game she’s playing, and this time she means to win.

  ***

  The tower has a warden, or perhaps the warden has a tower. The warden’s name is Daechong. He is usually polite. It was one of the first lessons he learned.

  Most people don’t first notice the warden when they meet him, or the rooms crowded with agate-eyed figurines, flowers of glass, cryptochips sliced into mosaics. They first notice the warden’s gun. It is made of living bone and barbed wire and smoke-silver axioms. It would have a stock of mother-of-pearl, if pearls were born from gangrenous stars. It has a long, lustrous barrel forged in a bomb’s hellheart. And along the barrel is an inscription in whatever language your heart answers to: I never miss.

  When he is human-shaped, Daechong is modestly tall, with a narrow face and dark hair cut short. His hands move too quickly to be reassuring, even if he always keeps them in sight. He wears gray, although sometimes his definition of “gray” has more in common with the black static that you find on the other side of your eyelids.

  Daechong has been chained to the tower since the tower came into existence. He remembers his first visitors. It took him very little time to understand that he couldn’t leave, and so he murdered them. After that, for a long time, he was alone. When more visitors started to arrive, he was very careful with them, having learned that silence is wearisome company.

  Anyone who desires to descend into the world with its unmined games must persuade him to let them pass. Daechong is not recalcitrant, precisely, but he likes to challenge his visitors to games himself. It is possible, although not easy, to defeat him. Sometimes defeat carries a small penalty, sometimes a great one, according to his mood.

  It is inadvisable to threaten him, and especially inadvisable to attempt to separate him from his gun. The gun admits no bullets and speaks no words of fire or fission. It gives forth no smoke, no sparks, no suppurating oil.

  Yet the gun always hits what Daechong intends to shoot. Killing is one of the few pleasures available to him, and he indulges either as part of a wager or in self-defense. It doesn’t matter whether the target is in front of him, or behind him, or in another galaxy, behind the ash-shroud of stars that failed to be born. Sometimes, when he fires, a quantum sentience shudders apart into spin-states pinned to f
orever zeros. Sometimes a city inverts itself, plunging its arches and cobweb skyroads into the earth, leaving its citizens to suffocate. The story goes that the sun-of-starships was Daechong’s response to some reckless admiral bent on conquering the tower, although Daechong refuses to say anything definite on the matter.

  It has been a long time since Daechong feared anyone. When he learns that Niristez of the Nine of Chains has asked for an audience, fear is not what he feels. But after all this time, he is still capable of curiosity; he will not turn her away.

  ***

  There is an old story you already know, and a variant on it that you have already guessed.

  Take a chessboard, eight squares by eight squares, sixty-four in total. Play begins with the first square being paid for with a single death. On the second day, fill in the next square with two deaths. On the third day, four; on the fourth day, eight. The sequence continues in this manner. The question is when both parties will find the toll of deaths such that they can no longer stomach the price of play.

  We use chess—with its pieces intimating knights and kings and castles, sword-crash wars of old—for convenience, although it could be anything else. And we restrict ourselves to powers of two for convenience as well, although the mathematics of escalation knows no such boundary.

  ***

  Daechong waits for Niristez in one of the highest rooms of the tower. He doesn’t know what she looks like, and he declines to watch her enter by the door that will admit her but which will not allow him to leave. Besides, he can hear her footsteps wherever she is in the tower, or on the world. She has a militant reputation: he can tell that by the percussion of her boots.

  This room contains musical instruments. He doesn’t know how to play any of them, but he can tune and maintain them. His current favorite is a flute made of pipe scavenged from some extinguished city’s scrap heap. There’s a great curving harp, a lithophone, two bells. On occasion, one of his visitors breaks an instrument, and then he burns up the fragments; that’s all.

  The footsteps slow. She’s reached the room. The lights in the tower will have told her where to go. On occasion, some visitor strays, and then he has to fetch them out of the confusion of hallways and shadows. It is sometimes tempting to let them wander, but by now the habits of courtesy are strong.

  Niristez knocks once, twice. Waits.

  “The door is unlocked,” Daechong says.

  He regards her thoughtfully as she enters the room. She is taller than he is, and her hair is like a banner. In the intolerable aeons of her exile, she has gone by many names, but Niristez is the one she prefers. It means I promise. The name is a lie, although most people know better than to mention it to her face. Once she had a reputation for always keeping her promises. Once she swore to win an unwinnable war. Then she fled her people, and the war has not, to this day, been won.

  Her most notable feature, aside from her reputation, is not her height, or the gloves made from skinned fractals, or even the sword-of-treatises knotted at her side. It is her eyes, whose color cannot be discerned in any light but corpselight. In her eyes you can see a map forever drawing and redrawing itself, a map that knows where your flaws may be found, a map that knows how your desires may be drowned. Long ago, she was a strategist for the High Fleet of the Knifebird, and while no one now refers to her by her old rank, people remember what her eyes mean. Daechong isn’t concerned by them, terrible though they are. She will already have charted his greatest weakness, and she doesn’t need her unique form of vision to do so.

  Niristez isn’t looking at his gun, which is easily within his reach. That isn’t saying much. No matter where it lies, the gun is always within his reach. But its presence is like a splinter of black dreaming, inescapable.

  Niristez is, however, bearing a bottle of amber-green glass, with a cork whose eye stares unblinking at Daechong. “I thought,” she says dryly, “it would be ungracious if I didn’t bring a gift, considering that I am here to bargain for a favor.”

  “It’s very considerate of you,” Daechong says. “Shall I open it here?”

  Niristez shrugs. “It’s yours now, so you may as well suit yourself.”

  He keeps glasses in a red-stained cabinet. She’s not the first person to bring him liquor. He picks out two spiraling flutes, with gold wire patterns reminiscent of inside-out automata and melting gears. It’s tempting to shoot the bottle open, but that would be showing off, so he picks the cork out with his fingers. He’s killed people by digging out their eyes; this isn’t so different.

  The liquor effervesces and leaves querulous sparks in the air, spelling out hectic inequalities and the occasional exclamatory couplet. Daechong looks at it longingly. “Would you be offended if I burn it up?” he says. Anything for a taste of the world outside. “I can’t actually drink.”

  “I can’t claim to be difficult to offend,” Niristez says, “but as I said, it’s yours now.” She takes a sip herself. The inequalities flare up and die down into first-order contradictions as they pass her lips.

  Daechong taps the rim of the glass. For a moment, nothing happens. Then the entire glassful goes up in smoke the color of lamentations, sweet and thick, and he inhales deeply. “You must find my tastes predictable,” he says.

  Niristez smiles, and shadows deepen in her eyes. “Let’s say it’s something we have in common.”

  “You mentioned that you wished to bargain,” he says. “Might I ask what you’re looking for?” Ordinarily he would not be so direct, but Niristez has a reputation for impatience.

  “I want what everyone wants who comes here,” Niristez says. “I want a game. But it’s not just a game.” It never is. “You know my reputation, I trust.”

  “It would be hard to escape it, even living where I do,” Daechong says.

  “On this world is the stratagem that will enable me to keep my promise.” Niristez’s eyes are very dark now, and her smile darker still. “I wish to buy the game that contains it from you. I’ve spent a great deal of time determining that this game must exist. It will win me the war of wars; it will let me redeem my name.”

  Daechong taps the glass again. This time it chimes softly, like a bell of bullets. Some of the musical instruments reverberate in response. “I’m afraid that you are already losing my interest,” he says. “Games that admit an obvious dominant strategy tend not to be very interesting from the players’ point of view.” It’s difficult to be a warden of games and not feel responsible for the quality of the ones that he permits to escape into the outside world. “I could let you root around for it, but I assume you’re after a certain amount of guidance.”

  Although he is not infallible, Daechong has an instinct for the passages. He knows where the richest strata are, where the games sought are likeliest to be found. When people bargain with him, it’s not simply access that they seek. Anyone can wander through the twisty passages, growing intoxicated by the combinatoric vapors. It’s another matter to have a decent chance of finding what they want.

  “That’s correct,” Niristez says. “I have spent long enough gnawing at the universe’s laws and spitting out dead ends. I don’t intend to waste any more time now that I know what I’m after.” She leans forward. “I am sure that you will hear me out. Because what I offer you is your freedom.”

  Daechong tilts his head. “It’s not the first time someone has made that claim, so forgive me for being skeptical.”

  He cannot remember ever setting foot outside the tower; it has a number of windows almost beyond reckoning, which open and close at his desire, and which reveal visions terrible and troubling. Poetry-of-malice written into the accretion disks of black holes. Moons covered with sculptures of violet-green fungus grown in the hollowed-out bodies of prisoners of war. Planets with their seas boiled dry and the fossils bleached upon alkaline shores. These and other things he can see just by turning his head and wishing it so.

  Yet he thinks, sometimes, of what it would be like to walk up stairs that lead to a plaza
ringed by pillars of rough-hewn stone, or perhaps gnarled trees, and not the tower’s highest floor with its indiscriminate collection of paintings, tapestries, and curious statuettes that croak untrue prophecies. (More gifts. He wouldn’t dream of getting rid of them.) What it would be like to travel to a gas giant with its dustweave rings, or to a fortress of neutronium whispers, or to a spot far between stars that is empty except for the froth of quantum bubbling and the microwave hiss. What it would be like to walk outside and look up at the sky, any sky. There isn’t a sky in the universe whose winds would scour him, whose rains would poison him, whose stars would pierce his eyes. But his immunity does him no good here.

  “Call my bluff, then,” she says, her smile growing knife-sweet. “You like a challenge, don’t you? You won’t see me here again if you turn me down. If nothing else, it’s a moment’s diversion. Let’s play a game, you and I. If I win, you will tell me where to find my stratagem. If I lose, I will tell you how you can unshackle yourself from this tower—and you can set me whatever penalty you see fit.”

  “I don’t remember the very beginning of my existence,” Daechong says softly. “But I was made of pittances of mercy and atrocities sweeter than honey. I was made of carrion calculations and unpolished negations. They say your shadow is shaped like massacres, Niristez. You haven’t killed a fraction of the people that I have. Are you sure you want to offer this? I am not accustomed to losing, especially when the stakes matter to me.”

  He doesn’t speak of the penalties he extracts when people lie to him. For all the dreadful things he’s done, he has always respected honesty.

  “I am sure,” she says.

  “The High Fleet of the Knifebird is still fighting the war you promised to win. It would not be difficult for me to shoot the key players into cinders.”

  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.”