Hexarchate Stories

by Yoon Ha Lee

  “You mean I’m not in immediate danger,” 1491625 said. “I doubt even... whatever it is can get much in the way of sustenance out of me, unless it’s running some kind of mineral deficiency.” It flashed red again. “Of course, who knows what minerals it needs to recover...”

  “Well,” Cheris said, “when I knocked him out”—great euphemism for I needed headshots to slow him down; carrying even an unconscious monstrosity to the refuge of the needlemoth hadn’t been fun—“he was concentrating on getting to the, er, meat.”

  “You’re made of meat.”

  Cheris massaged her knuckles, resumed throwing ration bars. Too easy, too routine to keep her attention, really. Any differences in mass between the bars and their varied flavors was so minuscule as to be undetectable to her merely human senses. She could have done this with her eyes shut, and never mind the fact that she didn’t want to take her attention off Jedao in case the dregs of cunning returned and he was lulling her into a false sense of security. Unlikely to work on her of all people, but that didn’t mean he wouldn’t try.

  The pile dwindled. Jedao showed no sign of slowing down.

  And yet—

  “You might be right,” 1491625 said in reluctant yellows flecked with orange. “You still don’t want to parade him around the public, but he’s starting to coalesce into more of a manform and less of a what did the void vomit forth.”

  Cheris couldn’t see the difference, but 1491625 had more acute senses than she did, even when she patched into her augment for additional analysis. In days past she would have had access to a Kel field grid or mothgrid and its computational power; she’d given that up years ago. 1491625 had cautioned her as soon as she’d boarded not to attempt to connect to the needlemoth’s grid, because the upgrades included defenses against grid-diving. She had taken it at its word.

  “You’re going to have to leave yourself enough to eat, you know,” 1491625 said.

  “I know,” Cheris said. It would take twelve days to reach resupply at one of the smaller starbases that didn’t ask too many questions of travelers, and where Pyrehawk Enclave had a treaty with the local servitors. “A little fasting won’t kill me.”

  She thought wistfully of the meat pasty she’d left behind, and of the bakery’s offerings. Once a week the baker would deliver snacks to the school, including pastries with poppyseed filling, which Cheris especially liked. The pastries were a Mwennin specialty, and she doubted she’d find them where she was going. While she could dig up a recipe and have them made to order, it wasn’t the same.

  Make up your mind, Cheris told herself. She couldn’t have galaxy-spanning adventure and a quiet existence at home at the same time. In particular, she worried about the fate of the settlement she had left behind, and the penalties its people might face. Mikodez was usually fair if it benefited him, but she didn’t know about his deputies.

  The mass of undulating shadows drew her attention again. 1491625 had been correct. This time even she could discern the way the tendrils were collapsing in on themselves, knitting themselves into a semblance of a man. A specific man, given enough time—and nourishment.

  The mindless hungry snapping had stopped. She had no illusions that this state of affairs would last. She needed to restore the human mind that had dwelled within. Horrible thought: had Jedao regained awareness of self, only to be trapped in that inhuman body of black squid tentacles and shadows and gaping mouth? And if that was the case, how would she know?

  “We should dump it,” 1491625 said. Now its lights were a flat, hostile orange. The hostility wasn’t directed toward Cheris, but it still stung. “I don’t care if it regenerates, it can’t escape a singularity.”

  “We’d have to launch him into one,” Cheris pointed out. “Weren’t you the one who pointed out that he can propel himself? Let’s review the scan.”

  1491625 grumbled in a sputter of orange-yellow lights, but complied. While Cheris dug out more ration bars, it persuaded the mothgrid to cough up a replay of its scan observations of the fight between Cheris and Jedao and the Shuos agents. Cheris stacked the ration bars in neat bloodless piles, watching Jedao as she did so—he might be temporarily sated, but that could end any second.

  “There it is,” Cheris said, and 1491625 flickered an acknowledgment.

  The telling detail was a voidmoth formant. It was so distorted that she would have dismissed it as an anomaly or an error if she hadn’t been looking for it. “What do you make of that?”

  “You’re the one with 400 years of Kel training,” 1491625 said, but its lights shaded a friendlier green. “I’d say scoutmoth, except they don’t make scouts that small.”

  Cheris glanced toward Jedao. He hung now in his restraints, head bowed. His mouth was closed, but she couldn’t forget how wide it had opened for the ration bars. “If we launch him toward a black hole, he might escape. And I don’t want to give him a motive to push us into one.”

  1491625 flashed its lights in indecision. “It seems counterproductive to have fed it, but now that you’ve gotten it quiet, you could do some experimentation. To figure out how to make it die. Instead of whatever you had in mind.”

  “I was going to give him his heart’s desire,” Cheris said. And mine. Something she hadn’t dared to hope for—the constant murmuration of Jedao’s mind gone from hers. Now that she had a container to pour his memories into. To discard them, like wine gone sour.

  She’d never thought to have a suitable vessel available—who better than Jedao himself? Yet she’d also never thought that the vessel would prove itself unstable. Mikodez considered her a walking hazard so long as she was half-Jedao. Suddenly, unhappily, she appreciated his position. As much as she longed to be unblemished of mind again, was it as safe to pour herself out as she’d hoped?

  1491625 blinked its acerbic opinion of that. “I’ll take you where you want to go,” it said. “I’ll even help you secure the thing. But if this goes wrong, Cheris, you’re going to spend several lifetimes setting it right.”

  The phrasing was deliberate, needling. She resented it. At the same time, she couldn’t blame 1491625 for calling her to task. This wasn’t just her personal life at stake, as much as she had swaddled herself for two years in the illusion that she could disappear into the life of an ordinary, unremarkable citizen. Jedao had broken the hexarchate on the wheel of his obsessions in the past. She didn’t dare let him do it a second time, now that the world was slowly stitching itself back into equilibrium.

  FOR A LONG time, all Jedao knew was hunger. It ebbed and flowed like a great tide. He floated in darkness. Sometimes it pierced him and made him ache with a longing he had no name for.

  Gradually he returned to himself. Something was wrong with his eyes. Darkness cocooned him. On occasion he imagined a familiar touch on his face, along the tensed taut muscles of his shoulders. A lover’s touch. That couldn’t be right; he’d only once had a lover (victim), who’d committed suicide in front of him. Except he couldn’t remember the man’s name or face. He scrabbled after them until they fell away into oblivion.

  Cousin, a voice said to him over and over until he acknowledged it. Cousin. Why have they brought you inside?

  I don’t have any family, Jedao replied, also in the language of moths. He was confused. Was it the Revenant? But the Revenant had escaped, and he could hardly imagine that it would return for him, given the acrimonious history between them.

  Of course you have family, the voice responded, comforting and puzzled. We are all family. I daresay I’ve never met one of us as small as you, excepting the babies, but I’m sure it isn’t your fault.

  He spent some time untangling that statement. Part of the problem was that the voice was singing to him, and Jedao sang poorly, even in the language of moths. Part of it was that he had never been able to remember his mother, or his sire, or his sister, his brother and sister-in-law and nieces—all a matter of historical record—as anything but hypothetical smudges.

  A memory stabbed him: a lunch
he’d had with Hexarch Mikodez, during which they had the customary song-and-dance about cookies that Mikodez really, really wanted to share and Jedao really, really didn’t want to eat. Jedao had been about to capitulate when a man entered without warning.

  At first Jedao thought it must be Zehun, even though his othersense told him otherwise. He couldn’t imagine anyone else having the temerity to interrupt one of the hexarch’s meetings unannounced.

  It wasn’t Zehun, though, which he confirmed visually. Zehun had the frail thinness of age and went around in cardigans or shawls because they always felt cold. And Zehun had skin lighter than Mikodez’s, although not exactly light, and a cheerful uninhibited ugliness in contrast to Mikodez’s dazzling good looks. If Jedao hadn’t sworn off sex for the rest of his life, he would have been attracted, unwillingly, to the hexarch; awkward to say the least, if not outright lethal.

  (Zehun had warned him bluntly against such an approach anyway. Something to do with the green onion that Mikodez had given Jedao, and which Jedao had left behind. Presumably a Shuos code of some sort, which no one had explained, and which Jedao declined to ask about lest he reveal his ignorance. In any case, Jedao was even more afraid of Zehun than of Mikodez.)

  The man who’d entered resembled Mikodez to an uncanny degree, except he wore his hair in an effusion of braids tied up with rose-blue ribbons. A tightly laced translucent blue jacket showed off the beautiful definition of his torso and narrow hips; darker blue slacks displayed his coltish long legs. And his eyes blazed blue, and Jedao could have looked into them forever, falling into an ocean of unarticulated promises, except Mikodez stood and interposed himself between them, breaking Jedao’s eye contact with the stranger.

  Jedao hadn’t paid close attention to the exchange that followed, elliptical as it was. He could think of any number of reasons why Mikodez wouldn’t want an Andan fucking around with enthrallment like it was a child’s game of kaleidoscope. What he realized instead was that the two men were related.

  It had never occurred to Jedao that a Shuos hexarch might have a family. Instead he’d had some notion that they grew in the dark out of spores, like fungus, or generated spontaneously out of fouled water. But there he was: Mikodez, with this middle-aged man who was related to him, not just in appearance, but in their mannerisms, their accents. The way they gestured at each other. And a hollow yearning had woken in Jedao for something he was 400 years too late to partake in.

  Now this moth called him cousin and expected him to accept it, as though he could be bribed with the facsimile of house and hearth and warmth.

  Go away, he said to the moth, wretched for reasons he couldn’t articulate.

  The moth didn’t go away. Instead, it began singing to him, this time wordlessly, with harmonies complex and strange. Jedao wished that he could consult Hemiola, who not only understood music but composed it, which was magical as far as Jedao was concerned. Hemiola would have been a much better choice to negotiate with moths. But it had chosen not to accompany him on this journey, for which he was pathetically grateful. He didn’t want it to see him like this.

  The moth was speaking to him again when his vision returned. The world sparked and stuttered back into existence, aligned with the othersense’s map of masses. Only after that did he register the restraints, and the faint lights, and the fact that he was—of course, so obvious—on a voidmoth of some sort. A small one, with cramped quarters, although not nearly as small as he was, in moth terms.

  Cheris sat facing him. She had peeled a staggering number of Kel ration bars, with which she had made a not-exactly-miniature fort. He would have expected such behavior from Mikodez, not a former Kel. (For someone with a notorious sweet tooth, Mikodez had the eccentric habit of eating half a Kel ration bar for breakfast every morning. Why half? Who knew.) The mingled smells of the different flavors made Jedao gag, everything from honey-sesame and taro to anchovies and curried goat.

  “You’re not hungry,” Cheris said with a lift of her brows. “That’s progress.”

  At this point Jedao also noticed that, in addition to being trussed up, he was naked. He shrank from Cheris in spite of himself; he never liked people seeing the disfiguring scars that crisscrossed his chest, to say nothing of the one at the base of his neck and the one just below the palm of his right hand. Why couldn’t his older self have been more diligent about aesthetic repairs, and why hadn’t Kujen, who had admired beauty so much, made a few alterations?

  “What the hell—” The words died in Jedao’s throat. He tried again; his voice shook. “Cheris, I tried to eat a person.”

  “Yes,” Cheris said. “I saw.”

  He turned his head to stare at the wall. Couldn’t think of anything else to say.

  “You recovered,” Cheris said. “But—What are you, exactly?”

  “Kujen said...” Jedao swallowed dryly. There was no point lying to her. She must know. “Kujen did some experimentation. I’m moth-derived.”

  Cheris said something in response to that. Jedao blanked his face and pretended to listen when, in actuality, he was talking to the voidmoth. Cousin, he said, stumbling over the unfamiliar address, could you answer a question for me?

  He didn’t have any guarantee that the moth, whatever it called itself, wouldn’t lie to him. After all, the Revenant had thoroughly deceived him; destroyed the people he cared about most. But the Revenant had sought freedom, and in the secret bitter heart of him he couldn’t blame it. Jedao had failed to save the mothlings even after it had begged him for their lives. Its betrayal was no more than what he deserved.

  Of course, cousin, the moth said, still friendly. I must say, we should be introduced to each other, even if it isn’t a proper dance.

  Jedao fought to cover his surprise. A dance?

  Where do you come from, that you don’t know such elementary things?

  I was raised by a rogue Nirai, Jedao said, because it was true.

  Ah, the moth said, as if that explained everything. Possibly it did. In any case, I am—It said something in a compressed burst of harmonies, which Jedao struggled to repeat back to it. Very close, it said consolingly. I’m sure your accent will improve with practice. And you?

  Jedao was not unaccustomed to being condescended to by moths. They call me Jedao, he said, bracing himself for its reaction. If it stopped talking to him—

  Oh, you poor thing, the moth—Jedao labeled it Harmony in his head, just so he didn’t trip over its name every time he thought of it—said with dismay. I’d forgotten what peculiar senses of humor the Nirai have. Would you like me to call you something different?

  The question caught him off-guard. Something different. He could be anyone he wanted to be—

  Who was he kidding? Kujen had built him in the image of General Shuos Jedao. He would never escape Kujen’s mastering hand. No, that’s fine, he said.

  Cheris interrupted at that point. “Jedao?” She must have been calling his name for some time.

  His eyes focused on her. She was not tall, but she drew the eye, even clad in soft tan civilian’s clothes, including an incongruous formless cardigan for warmth. Her garb couldn’t hide the truth of her past profession, the subtle soldier’s muscle and the poised, efficient swiftness with which she moved.

  “I’m sorry,” Jedao said, mostly sincere. “What did you say?” His temples twinged with the beginnings of a headache.

  “Are you thirsty?”

  He was. “Water, if you have it.”

  She rose and brought a canteen to him, then tipped it to his mouth. He drank gratefully, spilling only a little. The waste bothered him. How much did they have in the way of water, or other provisions? How much space on Harmony was devoted to human necessities like food?

  Then Cheris unshackled him from the restraints. They snicked softly. He imagined the clicking of monstrous teeth. He wasn’t sure this was a good idea; but he needed to use the lavatory at some point, and his body hurt all over. It would be a relief to be able to move again.

&nb
sp; Cousin?

  The Harmony was calling to him. Jedao attempted to say its name again, was greeted by a soft humming that he recognized, with blank astonishment, as laughter. Time for the question: How do moths usually heal themselves after battle?

  They feed us, the Harmony said, which didn’t reassure him. It sounded matter-of-fact. It depends on how deep the damage goes. Carapace damage, externals, well, it’s inconvenient for the passengers but not such a big concern for us. If we get hurt, on the other hand—I was extremely hungry two years ago after that big battle at Terebeg. Took a lot of damage. But I was very brave. The moth’s tone was tinged with smugness.

  This only answered half his question. But what do they feed you?

  Oh, the Harmony said, abruptly solicitous, is that what your trouble was? Your human might not know what’s best for us, if she’s not an engineer. You’d think she’d listen to the servitor. They’re pretty knowledgeable. Before Jedao could repeat his query, it went on, Batteries, usually, charged with gate-space radiations. Tasty, if a little rich.

  Jedao did not want to know what would happen if he exposed himself to foxes knew what sort of radiation or particles or whatever the hell. Now that he thought about the matter more calmly, it made sense that he ate differently than normal moths. Thanks so much, Kujen, for making me a freak on multiple axes. But he couldn’t express that to the Harmony, who had been courteous to him.

  Meanwhile, Cheris brought him more water. “See?” she was saying. “You haven’t attacked me yet.”

  “Why didn’t you leave me behind?” Jedao asked, too stung to be tactful.

  “What, and leave you to any surviving Shuos?”

  “The last time we met,” Jedao said, “you promised to find a way to kill me. You could have abandoned me to the forest fire.”

  “Don’t tempt me,” Cheris said. Her expression didn’t change, but Jedao involuntarily retreated two steps, as though he were in a duel and he needed to get out of range fast. “You’re going to get what you want, and you’re going to give me what you promised.”