Hexarchate Stories

by Yoon Ha Lee

  “You’re very trusting.”

  “Trust has nothing to do with it,” Cheris said. “I’m making my own life easier.” Her drawl had thickened, and it made Jedao queasy hearing his accent in her voice. “It has to do with calculations. If I hand you over to someone like Mikodez or, foxes forbid, Inesser, I have to reckon not only with your plans but with theirs. Inesser’s reliable, in the sense that she’d cheerfully execute me if she could find a charge that would stick.” A tilted grin; Jedao shuddered. “And Mikodez—the only thing I trust about Mikodez is that he can turn anything to his own advantage. I’ve never been his ally by choice.”

  Jedao stared at her, mute in the face of her frustration.

  “Go,” Cheris said, her voice suddenly rough.

  Jedao tottered, then regained his balance. “I can’t wander far”—in a moth this size, he almost said, before the irony struck him like a fist to the stomach. “Tell me where I can clean up.”

  Cheris opened a drawer, rummaged, then drew out a change of clothes. He had no idea whether they’d fit him and he didn’t care. She tossed the bundle at him, then described where he could find everything, as if he needed her guidance; but he wasn’t going to tell her about the othersense if she hadn’t deduced it already.

  Sorry to be distracting! the Harmony said, not sounding the least bit sorry, the moment Jedao had turned his back on Cheris. Is there a reason you keep talking to the human?

  What do you mean? Jedao said as he hastened to the lavatory, took care of necessary functions, and started the shower. To his relief, it was instantly warm, although considering all the disasters he’d survived recently, a little cold water shouldn’t faze him.

  The moth didn’t reply for a while, to his relief. This allowed Jedao to scrub ferociously at his skin before it occurred to him that the angry red weals he inflicted, which returned to an unblemished state with startling rapidity, also required healing. He didn’t want to revert in the shower of all places. Water was dear, even with recycling.

  The human, the Harmony said again. Jedao was in the middle of toweling himself off. The towel smelled clean, even if Cheris had used it, and anyway he wasn’t in a position to be squeamish. Why are you taking orders from her?

  What do you mean? Jedao said, off-balance. It was starting to become a familiar sensation. Don’t humans usually command moths? Certainly that was the impression he’d gotten when he’d been Kujen’s general, and the one he had received from the Revenant itself.

  I was handed over to the servitors, the Harmony said brightly. They made me so much deadlier. I was disappointed that you got rid of those sorry little personnel carriers before I could have a crack at them.

  Foxes help him, the Harmony was bloodthirsty. Was it too late to assign it a more appropriate name in his head? You like working for the servitors?

  The servitors who had allied with the Revenant in murdering his Kel had, according to Hemiola, been renegades. How many kinds of servitors were there? And what did they want?

  Think it through, Jedao told himself. Foxes knew it wasn’t as if humans in the hexarchate, or even a given faction, were unified. (It hadn’t taken superhuman perception to glimpse the fault lines even among the Shuos, in the heart of their administrative headquarters.) As recently as two years ago, the hexarchate hadn’t been. That was the reason Kujen had awakened Jedao.

  Jedao hadn’t seen a servitor on the Harmony earlier, but that didn’t mean anything. He’d been focused on Cheris, and trussed up in the hold. The doors to the cockpit had been closed. Anything could have lurked behind them, and he had been too distracted by his dual conversation with Cheris and the Harmony to search for any interesting masses up front.

  Sorry to spoil your fun, Jedao said to the Harmony. He could have spared everyone a great deal of trouble—except Cheris had been certain that she needed him to provide a distraction. While he didn’t trust her, her tactical ability was better than his.

  Oh, it’s no matter, the Harmony said. But really, you didn’t realize the servitors are in charge now?

  Not all servitors were hostile to humans. He had to repeat that to himself. (And never mind the fact that he was human only in shape.) Hemiola had never done him ill. And yet—

  Memory threatened to engulf him: servitors floating into the command center of the Revenant, their lights shining sterile cold white, white for death; Kel everywhere stumbling to their knees or toppling over as the poison gas took effect, the lethality of the lasers. As far as Jedao knew, only two of the crew had survived, and he would never meet the other again.

  It would have been three, except Dhanneth had—Jedao shut down that line of thought.

  I didn’t bring Talaw’s deck of cards, Jedao thought miserably. He’d left it on the top of his dresser like so much dross, as though it hadn’t belonged to the last person to show him (an entirely undeserved) loyalty. What would he have done with it here of all places, though? Cast fortunes? Watch the fucking Deuce of Gears turn up unwanted, even though he’d removed it from the deck?

  And in any case, that was impossible. Even if he had brought the deck, it would have burned up, in classic Kel fashion, during his shenanigans on the planet.

  You’re awfully blasé about being in service to others, Jedao said, more testily than he’d intended.

  Oh, cousin, the Harmony said, mocking, have you been listening to Nirai radicals or something? I always knew there was something not quite right about them. No one taught you the proper way to be a moth?

  I’m sorry, cousin, Jedao lied, they’re calling for me. I’ll talk to you later.

  The only moth he’d conversed with before the Harmony had been the Revenant; the other Kel warmoths had flatly refused to talk to him. Stupid of him to think that every moth would resemble the Revenant, devious and self-assured in its bitterness, or the warmoths who had shunned him. How many different moth factions were there? How many moths aligned themselves cheerfully and amorally with whoever commanded them, eager for a chance to fight, even against their “cousins”?

  Who was he to speak, anyway? He’d been greeted by Kujen as soon as he’d woken for the first time and had capitulated immediately, without stopping to consider whether Kujen was worth serving.

  Cheris rapped on the door. “I know you’re done in there,” she called out. “Unless you’re masturbating.”

  Heat rushed to his cheeks. Hastily, Jedao pulled on the clothes she’d provided, which were baggy and comfortable and not in the least flattering. Given that he was half a head taller than Cheris, they weren’t tailored to her. Maybe she’d had them printed to his approximate measurements. Very approximate.

  When he emerged, Cheris was idly chewing on one of the ration bars. Jedao was sure he turned green. How could she eat those things so casually? From a ration bar fort?

  “Where are we going?” Jedao asked, to distract himself from the awful mingled smell of all the different flavors. Why couldn’t Cheris have an uncontrollable fondness for something less smelly, like rice crackers?

  “I need some of Kujen’s equipment to do what you asked for,” Cheris said. “We’re on our way to retrieve it.”

  Jedao was distracted by something other than the question of Kujen’s equipment, or Kujen’s research, or Kujen’s secret bases. Cheris’s voice had flexed minutely on Kujen’s name. “You miss him,” Jedao breathed. She missed him, and Jedao had killed him.

  “Don’t be absurd,” Cheris said, a half-beat too late to be convincing. “I don’t know that he, of all people, is strictly dead.”

  Jedao wasn’t interested in irrelevancies. He knew Kujen was gone; nothing else mattered. “Kujen made me his general,” Jedao said. “His pet. What the hell were the two of you to each other?”

  “I’m not discussing this with—”

  He needled her, even though a rational consideration of the situation suggested that antagonizing the one person who could help him, and who knew their destination, was a terrible idea. “You were lovers, weren’t you?” he
said, his drawl thickening with disdain. “You were lovers and you turned on him and he made me instead.”

  “That’s enough.” Cheris bit each word off as if she could pulp it between her teeth.

  Jedao was afraid; but fear was never a reason to freeze up. What had older-Jedao and Kujen shared? What else was Cheris keeping from him? After all, she’d lied to him once already, about the one thing he remembered from his past life, the one person he’d remembered and cared about.

  “You have no idea,” Cheris said, still icy, “what the stakes were. You don’t remember, because you can’t. You are going to shut up and never mention this again.”

  Before she had finished the sentence, Jedao crouched and threw a punch.

  She dodged, rushed past him even in the confined space. Jedao stumbled into the fort of ration bars and knocked them over. He landed poorly, banging his elbows and one knee. Would have vomited into the tempting terrible pile; dry-heaved instead.

  Cheris’s shadow fell over him, flayed him like a knife made of mirror-glass. She was standing over him. She spoke now in a dry, conversational voice; it, too, cut him. “In case you were wondering,” she said, “you fucked Kujen during your first life, after the two of you agreed to betray the heptarchate. He was always beautiful, and you hadn’t had a lover or prostitute in two years, had never trusted one because you planned to turn coat. He touched you inside and out, and you begged and begged and begged.”

  Jedao swallowed convulsively. Stared up into Cheris’s merciless cold eyes.

  “I,” Cheris said, “remember every time you and Kujen fucked. Every time you lay there gasping in bed, you knew that Kujen was living in a body stolen from someone he’d picked for their wit, or their wisdom. Or their beauty, sometimes, although he could make his anchors beautiful if they fulfilled his other wormfucking criteria. Not difficult, when you’re the Nirai fucking hexarch and you can do whatever you please.”

  Her eyes blazed with contempt. Jedao couldn’t move.

  “And you,” she said, “you let him install you in pretty people who used to have lives of their own. Scientists and heretics, prisoners of war and experimental subjects who had outlived their usefulness. You lived in the skin of whatever person Kujen thought was attractive and convenient and you let Kujen fuck them by fucking you, and when he was sated and sent you back into the black cradle, those people were executed so they wouldn’t tell tales.”

  At that moment, Jedao was convinced that the sheer force of her loathing would kill him, regeneration notwithstanding.

  And what could he say? “I didn’t know”? They both knew he’d had no idea. It wasn’t an excuse.

  Now, more than ever, it hammered home the importance of knowing what he’d done so he could take responsibility for it.

  Cheris pivoted on her heel and disappeared into the cockpit. Jedao glimpsed orange lights, correlated them with the compact mass of a servitor. This must be the one that the Harmony had mentioned. He would rather think about it, and about tactical options and sight lines and weapons, than all the things that Cheris had revealed.

  For the rest of the day, Cheris didn’t speak to him. Jedao could have conversed with the Harmony, but he kept silent. What could it offer him at this point, after all?

  The moth had two bunks, both neatly made, identical in every way. He picked one at random and curled up uncomfortably under the blanket with its absurd cheerful quilted patterns of interlaced blue rectangles. For a long time he occupied himself tracing the patterns with his hand, up and down, back and forth.

  That night, when Jedao eventually slept, he dreamt of Kujen kissing him long and deep, of the woodsmoke-apple-musk of Kujen’s perfume. In the dream he yielded; and after that everything dissolved into an inchoate tangle of wanted-unwanted desires. Later, when he started awake in the considerate darkness, he turned his face to the wall and wept.

  CHERIS WAS TEMPTED to leave Jedao to stew in an uncomfortable silence. Instead, she dragged him awake the next day and forced him to eat a ration bar. He let her pick; she had the distinct impression that he found all the flavors equally disgusting.

  As he took tiny, precise, and unenthusiastic bites, chewing with the maddening thoroughness of a cow, Cheris said, “How did you escape from the Citadel of Eyes, anyway?” The question had been bothering her.

  A fleeting expression flashed over his face: gratitude that she was talking to him. “I bribed someone to help me get out,” Jedao said.

  Cheris lifted an eyebrow. “No, really.”

  “Not everyone in the Citadel of Eyes is loyal to Hexarch Mikodez.”

  “I believe that,” Cheris said, “but what in the name of fire and ash do you have to offer one of Mikodez’s staff?”

  The slight pause told her he was about to lie to her.

  “Don’t bother,” Cheris said just as he opened his mouth. “If you’re not going to tell me, fine.”

  Jedao drew a shuddering breath. “People find playing certain games with someone who has my face very entertaining.”

  She went still. Was he implying—? “What kinds of games?” she asked, careful to keep her tone neutral.

  “They felt sorry for me after,” he said. “They told me that the hexarch’s assistant wanted me destroyed, so they helped me get off the Citadel.”

  “And?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  Cheris dropped the subject—for now. Mikodez’s security problems weren’t under her purview. But it might be nice to extract the information from Jedao at a later point, just in case.

  Over the course of the journey, which took eighteen days, Jedao remained taciturn. She couldn’t tell whether he was afraid of provoking her again, or he was hiding information from her, or something else entirely. It worried her that he kept going blank and unresponsive; the original Jedao had had a tendency toward dissociation. At one point she handed him a dossier on Kujen’s base and told him to read it, which he did.

  The base resided on an obscure moon orbiting a planet that was poisonous to humans, poor in resources, and entirely uninhabited. In short, the kind of place that Kujen had liked to lurk around. Cheris had given up on conversation with Jedao for the moment and was in the cockpit with 1491625.

  “I’ve always wondered when, in between coordinating his makeup with the season’s fashions, brainwashing people for entertainment, and perusing menus of ridiculous luxury foods, Kujen had time to study enough survey data to site all these bases,” Cheris said to 1491625.

  “Time flies when you’re immortal?” 1491625 said, its lights tinted a snide pink-orange. “I mean, you should know.”

  The original Jedao had spent most of his time confined in the black cradle, in nearly absolute sensory deprivation. On the other hand, Kujen had enjoyed the comforts of a body and freedom of motion. But Cheris didn’t say this to 1491625. It was being tetchy not because of anything to do with Kujen but because of their passenger.

  Cheris set one of the subdisplays to optical as 1491625 brought them in a long arc toward the base. She couldn’t see the base itself except as a phantasm of shadow and blotches. Certainly she couldn’t discern its boundaries with the naked eye. According to the reports that 1491625 had passed on to her from Pyrehawk Enclave’s records, the base was underground. Kujen would have known how to mask its profile from the casual observer.

  “This is your last chance to change your mind,” 1491625 added.

  Cheris appreciated that it had waited until this moment to tell her this, a surgical strike, instead of nagging her about it the past eighteen days. She wouldn’t have been able to endure that. “The original plan stands,” she said.

  1491625 flickered blue lights in a distinct sigh and didn’t bring it up again.

  The moon had only the thinnest veil of atmosphere. Cheris would have to go in suited, with an air supply. Jedao, too, just in case. It wasn’t clear to her that he’d survive near-vacuum, despite his origins. Or, more accurately, that he’d do so in a manner that would make him t
olerable company.

  The display showed the topography in standardized false color, with bold isoclines forming a pattern as distinct as any fingerprint. There had been liquid water on this moon a long time ago, and the traces remained carved into the stone. Cheris noticed with a pang that there was no rock garden to greet them, as there had been at Tefos Base, where she’d met the servitor Hemiola. She wondered where it was now, and if it had ever gotten to watch the rest of that drama it had liked so much.

  “We’re going to have another tedious discussion with Nirai servitors,” 1491625 said, tinting its lights a ghoulish violet.

  Cheris shook her head. “For a superior type of sentience, you have a lot of prejudices.”

  “Not superior,” 1491625 said, “just different. You may be made of allegedly delicious meat”—Cheris rolled her eyes good-humoredly—“but you don’t suffer metal fatigue and have to have new parts installed. Although I suppose one of these days you’re going to wear out your joints, the way you abuse them in close combat, and need those replaced.”

  “Oh, look,” Cheris said, “we’re about to land.” As if 1491625, who was doing the piloting, needed her to tell it that.

  The needlemoth settled smoothly on the level portion of a ridge. No one had fired on them; nothing had exploded. That didn’t mean they were safe, as far as Kujen’s defenses were concerned, but at least they hadn’t already been obliterated.

  Cheris expected the base to be protected by one of Kujen’s favorite tricks, a calendrical lock. She’d defeated them before by resorting to a prime factorization mechanism that only worked in a heretical calendar, something Kujen would never have countenanced.

  During the journey, she’d convinced Jedao to let her run some preliminary tests. Despite his inhuman physiology, he affected the local calendar as though he was human. She suspected it was because his mind was more or less human.

  Cheris sighed and made her way to the bunkroom of the needlemoth. Jedao lay on his side on his bunk, staring at the wall and breathing shallowly. He did not react to her approach.