Hexarchate Stories

by Yoon Ha Lee

  Tonight’s story was about two lovers and the quest that one of them underwent to reunite himself with the other man, only for the two of them to be transformed into a flower-offering to the gods. For the flowers, a new set of curtains in green swished across the back of the stage, spangled with blossoms made of black sequins and dark crystal. Ledana was dazzled by the stage lights playing over them.

  On reflection, maybe she should have picked something with a happy ending if she hoped to get laid, except she loved the building so, and shadow plays in general.

  When the lights came back on and people began to file out of the auditorium, Shkan raised Ledana’s hand to his lips and pressed a kiss to it. “I didn’t realize you liked tragedies so much,” he said, grinning. “Should I take this as an omen? Or do you just like very flexible people?”

  Ledana didn’t bother hiding her delight at the overture. She only hoped he was as good in bed as he was handsome. “It’s the only shadow play running here for the next two months.” She slipped into the high language for “month.”

  His eyes crinkled.

  “Besides,” Ledana said as she followed Shkan back into the foyer, “I don’t believe in tragedies, or omens.” No sense beating around the bush. “How do you feel about siring a kid? Because I know a few contortions myself.”

  Shkan linked arms with her and smiled.

  Author’s Note

  I like Jedao’s mom Garach Ledana very much, but I only feel a little sorry for killing her off so ignominiously. I am afraid that when you slaughter as many characters as I do, you get inured to it.

  By the way, when I was a kid growing up in Texas, I was convinced jackalopes were real. The hexarchate may be full of cockamamie Asians in space, but since I’m a Texan, some of those cockamamie Asians are cockamamie Asian Texans in space. (I take a particular fiendish delight, when people ask me where I’m from, in saying, “Houston.”) As for cockamamie Asians who like guns, I am reminded of the time I took a semester of riflery at college. Despite being surrounded by great white hunter types, the best shot in the class was a five-foot nothing Asian woman who weighed maybe a hundred pounds soaking wet, who dimed the target every time. I took vicarious pleasure in her skill (I was the worst shot in the class).

  By the way, the deal with this family and their geese is that in the very first draft of Ninefox Gambit, Jedao was an out-and-out Hollywood-style psychopath (I have never claimed to have good taste in tropes) and one of the dreadful flashbacks involved him vivisecting a live goose as a boy. I had the good sense to cut that scene, but in its honor, my family has roast goose (humanely killed, we hope) for dinner at Thanksgiving.

  Honesty

  NIDANA WAS FOUR years old when she learned what her second-oldest brother’s name meant.

  Jedao was nine at the time, still skinny—certainly skinnier than Rodao, the oldest, who was fourteen and tall, and already broad at the shoulders and chest. Jedao and Ro both had to go to school. Nidana couldn’t wait until she was old enough to go to school with them. Ro said that she should enjoy not having to study while she could, but Nidana didn’t see that what Ro did with the slates was all that different from all the games she played on them. Plus he got to go out and play with his friends at school. Ro said that wasn’t what you did at school, which was very confusing.

  “‘Honesty’?” Nidana said, tugging at Jedao’s shirt while he was cleaning Mom’s glassware. Nidana knew she was supposed to be careful, so careful, in this room, even more careful when someone was working with the shiny glassware. But she was also curious, and she couldn’t wait. “Why did Mom name you ‘honesty’?”

  Jedao’s eyes softened as he put down the beaker so he could ruffle her hair. “Beats me,” he said. “I have always had the sneaking suspicion that she picked names out of one of those adventure novels she likes to read. I haven’t been able to find evidence, though.”

  They were speaking in Shparoi, their birth-tongue. Their mother was Shparoi. So was Rodao’s sire, and Jedao’s, although not Nidana’s. Most people realized that Nidana and Jedao were related, because they had inherited their mother’s tilted smile and her eyes. The three of them had learned the high language second, not first. Rodao spoke the high language flawlessly, although he refused to say why it was so important to him, putting Nidana off with, “You’ll find out someday.” But Jedao never would lose the local Shparoi dialect’s drawl.

  “I can help,” Nidana said, brightening at the thought of helping one of her brothers with something. She was starting to be able to read without pictures, although pictures were better.

  “If you find it, let me know,” Jedao said. He frowned at the beaker. “There’s still a speck on this. You’d better go, Nidana, before Mom decides that you’re old enough to learn how to do this.”

  She went.

  The next day, she had not found evidence in any of the books she could reach. (She had also narrowly avoided pulling down a bookcase on herself, although she was oblivious to this fact.) But she decided that she could find something else to be helpful with, and set off after Jedao. Like everyone in the heptarchate, she had developed a keen sense of passing time from an early age. She might be able to meet him on the way home from school.

  They lived at the edge of town—not even properly a town, Ro had remarked once—and Ro and Jedao hiked to a stop where a flitter picked them up with some other local kids. Jedao had taught Nidana the route over the course of weekends, almost certainly without Mom knowing. Definitely without Ro knowing. Mom wouldn’t have cared—she let all of them explore the surroundings however they pleased—but Ro disapproved of an awful lot of things.

  Nidana had a good sense of direction, something else she shared with Jedao, and she knew to wear a jacket and bring water and something to eat. Jedao always made her lunch in the morning because Mom tended to forget. But that meant that she had a rucksack with snacks and meat pastries. (The rucksack also communicated its location to the household computer system at all times, something she wouldn’t learn until she was six. Mom might be terrible at feeding people on time, but she liked making sure no one got lost.)

  The day was overcast, but Nidana liked the way the wind nipped at her cheeks and blew strands of her hair free. The hills were so tall. She liked the way the grasses made them mysterious, the occasional startling break of sunlight flinging shadows across her feet. Birds shouted at each other. She wondered if birds told the truth, like her brother was supposed to.

  She had come up the hill, where the grasses had worn thin, and heard shouting, voices raised in taunts. The slight figure in a lavender jacket belonged to her brother. He was half-crouched, backing away from two older boys. She couldn’t remember if she was supposed to know their names.

  “Jedao!” she called out.

  He whirled, caught sight of her, and said the same words Mom had said that night the goose eggs exploded in the incubator. “Nidana, run!” he shouted, just in time for the taller boy to hit him on the back of the head. He staggered but did not go down.

  She ran toward Jedao. He said more words. The taller boy swung at him again, but Jedao was prepared this time and snatched up a rock. He didn’t throw it, which was what Nidana would have done (if she had been allowed to throw rocks). He kept it in his fist. His blows were staggeringly quick, even with the added mass. The taller boy managed to get in another blow, then shouted one more taunt before fleeing. His friend said something that Nidana couldn’t quite understand and scurried after him.

  “Why don’t they like you?” Nidana said. She was not afraid. Of course she wasn’t afraid of the boys.

  “It wasn’t anything they had against me,” Jedao said.

  “Then why did you fight them?”

  “They said things about Mom.”

  Nidana considered that. “Were they nice things?”

  Jedao seemed to consider this in his turn. “They were things you have to hit people for.”

  “Oh.” Then she saw it again, in a flash, her brother wit
h his quick fists. For the first time she looked at him, wide-eyed, and thought of all the times he had carried her through the house, or combed her hair, or played house with her; thought of what he could do with those hands. She shrank from him.

  Jedao set the rock down. Then he knelt and tipped her chin up with his callused fingers. “Listen,” he said. “Listen. I would never hurt anyone I love.”

  She would not wonder for many years why, in a sentence otherwise in the high language, he had used the Shparoi word for hurt, which meant moral damage but excluded the physical—“a hurt of the heart’s marrow, not the flesh,” as one of their famed philosophers had said—a distinction that the high language did not make.

  Author’s Note

  Jedao never did find out what became of Nidana, and I regret that I ran out of time to tell her story. I will say that his suspicions were right and she hightailed it out of the heptarchate after Hellspin.

  Incidentally, the Shparoi drawl is—you guessed it—a Texan drawl. I have the damndest time convincing folks that I’m from Texas because I don’t have it myself, aside from saying “y’all”; my parents moved often enough that it didn’t stick.

  Bunny

  JEDAO WOULD RATHER have been doing anything but cleaning the bathroom, but his older brother Rodao had skipped out on the chore in favor of a night out with his boyfriend. Their mother was working late tonight, as usual, so she wouldn’t know or care who did the job as long as it got done. Besides, Jedao considered it useful to have additional blackmail material on Ro. He couldn’t decide whether it was hilarious or annoying that Ro had suddenly become interested in dating. At eleven, Jedao couldn’t see what the fuss was about.

  In the meantime, he still couldn’t figure out how those weird purple stains had gotten onto the bathtub. Had his mother been pouring her experiments into the tub instead of disposing of them properly? Except she was always so conscientious about that. Or did it have something to do with her attempts to brew up new and exciting shampoos?

  “Jay,” said a soft, snuffling voice from the doorway.

  Jedao set down the sponge and sat back on his haunches. His six-year-old sister Nidana was scrubbing her eyes. “What’s the matter?” he asked.

  Nidana burst into tears.

  Jedao stripped off his rubber gloves, quickly washed his hands, and put his arms around her. “Hey, there,” he said. “I didn’t think the book I gave you to read was that scary.” The book in question featured a bold girl space adventurer who punctured space monsters with her space rapier. Ordinarily Nidana loved that sort of thing.

  After the snuffling and wailing had dwindled, Nidana said, “I went outside to look at the tree with the really big icicles.”

  “All right,” he said, “did you hurt yourself?” He’d had icicles fall on him before. The big ones were no joke. She didn’t look injured, despite the hair straggling out of her braid, but maybe she’d had a scare.

  “Jay,” she said, “I can’t find the cat. I think she got out.”

  “I see,” Jedao said, suppressing his alarm. The cat, which Nidana had named Bunny when she was five, had a talent for getting herself stuck up trees. (At five, Nidana’s vocabulary for animals had left something to be desired. The family also had a dog named Bunny, two finches named Bunny, and a snake named Bunny.) Bunny-the-cat tried to escape the house at every opportunity, and while Jedao wouldn’t have worried about her during warmer weather, he didn’t like the thought of her trapped outside in the cold. “Bundle up. Let’s go look for her.”

  Jedao helped Nidana with her sweater, coat, mittens, hat, scarf, and boots, then pulled on his own winter clothes. He left a note tacked to the small corkboard next to the door, just in case. “Come on,” he said. “We’ll find Bunny.”

  Nidana snuffled some more. “I didn’t mean to, Jay.”

  “I know.” It was too bad that Bunny-the-cat hated Bunny-the-dog. The latter was reasonably good at tracking, but his habit of trying to nip at Bunny-the-cat’s tail whenever he could catch her wouldn’t do them any favors here.

  The cold air stung Jedao’s eyes and nostrils as they traipsed out onto the path that Jedao and his brother had shoveled that morning. The wind had blown more snow onto the path in feathered drifts, but it was still walkable. Unfortunately, it also meant that any tracks the cat might have left were obscured.

  “Show me where you went,” Jedao said.

  Nidana led him to the sycamore with its mantle of glistening icicles. He broke one off from a lower branch so that she could suck on it. If nothing else, it would distract her.

  “Bunny!” Nidana called in between licking her icicle. But there was no sign of the cat.

  Jedao and Nidana checked all the buildings they were allowed into, and some that they weren’t. The cat remained elusive. The sun sank lower and lower in the sky, and Nidana was starting to shiver. Jedao made sure not to walk too quickly for her to keep up, despite his increasing concern for Bunny.

  At last, discouraged, they returned to the front door of their home. Bunny-the-dog bounded up and almost bowled Nidana over when they came in, tail wagging frenetically. “Stop that,” Jedao said, and made the dog sit. He and Nidana shed their winter clothes, and Jedao hung them up in the hallway closet. “Nidana,” he said, “entertain the dog. I’ll check around the house.”

  The dog’s tail was thumping loudly against the floor, and the dog herself was busy slobbering all over Nidana. Nidana didn’t seem to mind this. At least the dog kept her from bursting into tears again thinking of the cat.

  For his part, Jedao systematically searched every room of the house but one. He knew most of the cat’s hiding places. At last he came to his brother’s room and hesitated. Ro had threatened him on pain of being fed to the geese not to barge in, but Jedao had checked everywhere else he could think of.

  “The hell with this,” Jedao said, since Nidana wasn’t around to overhear him, and pushed the door open. The first thing he noticed was that one of the dresser drawers was slightly ajar. He pulled it out further: aha. Bunny-the-cat was curled up in a nest of Rodao’s socks, underwear, and... magazines? Jedao eased one of the magazines out from beneath the cat, ignoring her hiss, and flipped it open to a full-color picture of two entwined naked men. Fascinated, Jedao started paging through.

  Bunny-the-cat suddenly meowed. Jedao heard Bunny-the-dog woofing as she bounded toward them, and turned around to see Nidana padding after the dog. Hastily, he shoved the magazine back into the drawer. “The cat’s fine, Nidana,” he said. “She was taking a nap.”

  “Can I see what you were reading?” Nidana said.

  “No,” Jedao said. He scooped the cat up despite her liberal application of claws to his arm and hastened out of his older brother’s room, doing his best (which wasn’t very) to herd Nidana and the dog at the same time. “The cat’s safe, that’s all that matters.”

  Author’s Note

  I have only been owned by a cat in adulthood, when we settled in Louisiana and I convinced my husband that a cat would be a great addition to the family. Ours is named Cloud and she’s not an outdoors cat; I take her outside for walks but only on a leash and harness so she can’t get away, because despite being affectionate and friendly, she’s not terribly bright. Nevertheless, she longs to show the world that she’s a mighty huntress, and so, yes, I too have known the terror of a cat parent whose cat has gone missing. Fortunately it was only for a couple hours and, after putting LOST CAT posters in my neighbors’ mailboxes and knocking on doors, I returned home, exhausted and afraid, to find her waiting at the door for me to let her back in. At that point I may have said some cuss words before hugging her tight.

  Black Squirrels

  JEDAO AND RUO had set up shop at the edge of one of the campus gardens, the one with the carp pond and the carefully maintained trees. Rumor had it that some of the carp were, in addition to being over a hundred years old, outfitted with surveillance gear. Like most Shuos cadets, Jedao and Ruo would, if questioned, laugh off the rumo
rs while secretly believing them wholeheartedly—at least the bit about surveillance gear. Jedao had argued that the best place to hide what they were doing was in plain sight. After all, who would be so daft as to run a prank right next to surveillance?

  “Lovely day, isn’t it?” Ruo said brightly.

  Jedao winced. “Not so loud,” he said. His head was still pounding after last night’s excesses, and the sunlight, unfiltered by any cloud cover, wasn’t helping. Why did he keep letting Ruo talk him into things? It wasn’t just that Ruo was really good in bed. He had this way of making incredibly risky things sound fun. Going out drinking? In itself, not that bad. Playing a drinking game with unlabeled bottles of possibly-alcohol-possibly-something-else stolen from Security’s hoard of contraband? Risky. Some of those hallucinations had been to die for, though, especially when he started seeing giant robots in the shape of geese.

  Fortunately, this latest idea wasn’t that risky. Probably. Besides, of the many things that other cadets had accused Jedao of, low risk tolerance wasn’t one of them.

  “Not my fault you can’t hold your drink,” Ruo said, even more brightly.

  “I’m going to get you one of these days,” Jedao muttered.

  Ruo’s grin flashed in his dark brown face. “More like you’ll lose the latest bet, and—” He started describing what he’d do to Jedao in ear-burning detail.

  At last one of the other first-years, puzzled by what Jedao and Ruo were doing by the carp pond with a pair of fishing poles, approached. Jedao recognized them: Meurran, who was good at fixing guns despite their terrible aim, and who had a glorious head of wildly curling hair.