And the Burned Moths Remain Read online

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  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

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  Copyright

  When the envoy comes, Jingfei is fighting herself in a duel to the death.

  Jackknife paths and recoil slopes extend and retract, vector-walls forming and reforming to bring the combatants now tantalizing close, now infuriating apart. The arena moves with a predator’s intelligence, its heuristic array as much participant as battlefield.

  The ground stinks of sweat and hemorrhage; neither waveform ceiling nor parabolic tiles have ever been cleaned. The stains are mortality, the weapon fragments a reminder: nothing lasts, nothing is forever. Not even, perhaps, an eternal prison sentence.

  Jingfei, and Jingfei. Two shadows of equal height, equal might, similar mass. Their weapons too are twins: swords sculpted from the leavings of the fortress itself, shed shells from velocity shadows and sloughed nacre from iteration cycles. Over the lifetimes that have layered on top of another and condensed into an unbreakable edge—sediment to diamond—Jingfei of Moth River has acquired many skills, though she chooses to neither use nor craft firearms. They are too fast, finish disputes too soon.

  The duelists climb over warped bulkhead, in which reflections of knife edges dart and flash like schools of fish. In speed the two Jingfeis are equal. In skill, in experience, in their certainty of the other’s next movement—attack and defense, parry and riposte, the idiosyncrasies of tactic and style. Beneath the carapace of their armor, under the brocade of their robes, perhaps their hearts heave to the same beat.

  They have been engaged a long time, hours smearing, swarm-light rising and setting and rising again. One slows, slips, blunted by exhaustion. The other comes down upon her, momentum and desperation and need.

  She does not find her mark—Jingfei twists away, strikes back. Their blades meet and grip, one biting down on the other.

  A tensile threshold is met. One blade shatters, a burst of shrapnel like pearls and lightning.

  Jingfel kneels, slashes across with the light, consummate ease of habit. The throat opens, aorta protesting against loss. The sand-strewn floor absorbs spilled blood, but there are always blotches left behind, like careless calligraphy.

  Jingfei falls; Jingfei rises, victorious. An audience of Jingfei roars applause from a thousand throats.

  * * *

  When the envoy comes, Jingfei is being decanted elsewhere in the citadel. She spills from a tank onto pale morass, raw and loose-limbed, wet hair and gurgling throat: newborn sounds and newborn-frail, though her thought and perception have accrued through years uncounted, and her arteries pulse with the strength of lifetimes multiplied. Replicants straighten and clean her, dress her in the silks and hairpins of her native land. They always make sure her clothes are extravagant, robes trimmed in the riches of defeated constituents, jeweled in the unique resources of annexed worlds. Her skin is bruised by swarm-light, striped tigerish. Cranes of metal and silicon lap up the waters of her birth. She never speaks and her motor control never develops.

  The envoy is greeted by a boy of ten and an adolescent of no particular gender. The fortress seals behind the breach of her entry, tightening the vise of its shields.

  Though the envoy arrives dragging questions like anchors and chains, existence cannot be answered in binary: on or off, alive or not. There are more than two states, and more than one may be concurrently true. Outside the swarm-fortress, Jingfei of Moth River has never been born, her past corroded and her name consigned to forgetting. Inside it, within the bounds of thorn-suns and briar-stars casting sequential dusks, Jingfei has been born a hundred times, a thousand, a million: a multitude of allotropic selves with a mind inviolate as it is divided from shell to shell, a flame passed from one wick to light the next.

  She is called the seer, the oracle, the sibyl, though not for any ability of foresight or precognition—she has none, and the Hegemony does not admit superstition. She is kept here for the sake of yesterdays rather than tomorrows.

  When accuracy is prioritized over mythology, she is called the Record of Tiansong.

  * * *

  The arena empties, the spectators’ seats vacated one by one. In the absence of living bodies, the vastness of the floor runs like a cold hand down Jingfei’s back. The scale was not meant for her, even so many of her; the fortress was created to accommodate millions, an experiment in sealed cities. But the Hegemony grew and conquered, and in time its prosperity made structures like her prison obsolete.

  Now there is only one inhabitant. One inmate.

  The duelist remains standing over her opponent, over the blots from her arteries, the unsightly discoloration where spilled guts have daubed the floor. There are runnels where her blood, old and new, has congealed and caked, nearly as solid as resin. Her foot nudges the fallen body, stirs the coils of dark hair that she always wears shoulder-length. She should be used to it—is used to it—but though experience transfers there is always an instinct underneath, a reflexive displacement to see herself lying down dead as she continues to breathe, even with the knowledge that she dealt the fatal blow.

  She wipes away the brittle sheen of her sweat, casts off gloves crusted in salt, peels away her outer robe stained in gore. They land, wet, on blood still hot as she lifts her head to the envoy.

  “Would it be tactless,” the visitor says, “to ask why you were fighting yourself?”

  “For sport, for thrill, for justice. You must’ve read my file. Do I strike you as someone who’d tolerate her own company well? It’s a wonder this doesn’t happen more often. What did you say your name was?”

  The boy and adolescent, Jingfei both, do not make the joke of answering their other self. The envoy puts her hand to her chest. “I am Damassis of Iron Gate, formerly Damassis Ingmir.”

  Three pairs of eyes train on Damassis, sniper-focused. She is the Hegemonic ideal brought to animation: avian-sharp skull and cheeks, a high narrow nose, a complexion with the undertone of pearl rather than Tiansong ivory. Her ancestry is unmistakable, each pump through her veins conqueror’s blood, each whipcrack of her heart the roar of warships. The boy says, “You would submit to bearing a Tianhua clan-name? You’ve taken a wrong turn, envoy; you didn’t invade us to assimilate into our culture. Allow me to map your path back to propriety—dye Iron Gate the colors of Ingmir, and make your children and theirs take your name. That’s the correct order of things.”

  “It’s no wound to my honor or personhood to wear this name. I keep it with pride.”

  “Did you come by it through adoption? Marriage?”

  “Love has made me naïve.” Damassis unwinds a chain from her throat, alloy dense as neutron stars, each link refraction-etched with verses from Tiansong plays. She pulls down from her hair moths and butterflies of living resin, with compound eyes of event-horizon windows and antennae of meteor frost. Each object is priceless. “I have brought gifts.”

  The boy takes the chain, though its weight challenges his. The adolescent affixes the moths and butterflies to eir hair, though their proboscises chill eir scalp. The duelist, ungifted, sheathes her steaming sword
. Its lease on being will run out soon, the stress of protracted battle having cracked its limits. “How is Tiansong?”

  “The planet of your nativity fares very well. Of all subjects in our administrative bounds it’s among the most favored. Its nationals keep their names, their traditions. This much we promised you, and we honor that pledge.”

  The boy lifts his eyebrows; the adolescent chuckles, low. “Not that, envoy. You married one of us. Iron Gate and Moth River were related of old, so in a way you’re my in-law many times removed. Tell me about your spouse, what Iron Gate is like now, what they served at your wedding feast, which clan is feuding against which. Honor your elder, envoy, and share a little gossip.”

  “Gossip isn’t my specialty.” Damassis glances at the empty seats, away from the three that are Jingfei. “Before I recalibrate your genesis algorithms, shall we perform an integrity check?”

  Jingfei smiles, each slightly differently. This part is ever the same. “Always.”

  The envoy folds her hands. Some of the cranes have emerged from the decanting chamber, nudging her with wet shining beaks. “What is your name and origin?”

  “Jingfei of Moth River, once a national of the planet Tiansong.”

  “What is your earliest memory?”

  “Standing beneath a sky churned by giants. The touch of embers on my cheeks as the dead fell down. That was my first vision, which midwifed me.” Jingfei waits for the envoy to ask whether this is apocryphal, as the rest of them have done, but Damassis lets it pass.

  Instead the envoy chooses to correct her language: “Which doctored your birth. Decanting assistants are hardly uniformly female anywhere.”

  “Hegemonic pedantry! That’s how we would have said it too, in some of our slaughtered languages where little is gendered. Oh, we were as enlightened as you; annexation didn’t bring us anything new.” The duelist cants her head. “But this Tianhua is what my descendants speak, so I’ve been led to believe, the sole language you left us with after you culled other tongues and dialects. Or have I been misinformed? Does my home continue to thrive with more than a hundred nations, each with its own wealth of peculiarities and languages?”

  Damassis does not confirm or deny: it is not her role, and the question of whether a homogenized world is easier to control answers itself. “This is what is known. Tiansong, the Lake of Bridges, was ruled by two hundred war-empresses who sent out their commanders to terraform and conquer. At the apex of its might, Tiansong held seven worlds in its imperial grip. They sent tributes of soldiers and riches, secret knowledge and power, so that on Tiansong all court scholars might clothe themselves in the dreams of a continent and each lowly menial might dine on the wealth of a nation.

  “For centuries they were ascendant, growing in strength and reach, searching ever further outward for new territories and strange rarities, delicacies with which to hone their palate. Not an infant born among them was permitted to taste deprivation; grace and opulence were the right of all. The war-empresses, in turn, harnessed their altar-ghosts to achieve life everlasting. As the monarch’s flesh failed, she would select a body of her line and claim it for her own. But this was a price willingly paid, so it is recorded.”

  Jingfei has heard this before, the frozen history of her native shore thawing from an envoy’s mouth. It is always the same, with minor variations to suit the political temperament of the outside universe. Even that temperament itself rarely shifts. Her instances lean against a marble pagoda, pace in widening circles, paying no particular attention.

  “This went on,” Damassis says, mouthpiece for a ritual generations old, “until one of the tyrants felt her body falter: her limbs, once puissant, grew leaden. Her sight, once precise as the measure of her territories, grew faint. She considered her lineage, the hundreds of children and grandchildren, and their by-blows in turn. One was especially high in her favor, a linguist who specialized in the languages of incense and burnt offerings, of moths and radial cremations.”

  “For an account of the way things were, yours is stuffed with apocrypha. Pick one—fact or fable, it can’t be both.”

  “I welcome corrections.” The envoy inclines her head, a few degrees short of a bow.

  The boy has wandered away, the chain heavy around his neck and shoulder and hips, the gleam of it disappearing with him.

  “Why would I be a spoilsport?” the adolescent says, draping eir arms around the pagoda, flesh embracing stone. “Let me fill in the rest. The linguist, wise to her sovereign’s intention, fled on a ship of horn and lamellar. She sought a then-nascent alliance of worlds as yet too far from the empresses’ conquering gaze. Perhaps she imparted to them a crucial weakness of Tiansong, perhaps she gave them the secret of incense and moths. In any case, the empresses were overthrown. So ended their ruthless appetite.”

  “So it ended,” the envoy agrees. “But you remain, Jingfei of Moth River, who speaks the words of eternity and gave us Tiansong. The mainframe which holds your memory and maintains your instances is your final secret, and I’m here to bargain for it.”

  Jingfei straightens to her full height: she is shorter than the envoy, but her build carries perhaps more heft, though she does not think it’ll ever come to a physical contest. “Your colleagues have asked before and you ask it again, but recall that I was a linguist, not an engineer. I’ve always ‘failed’ this check, but my memory isn’t in error. I can’t hand over what I never had.”

  Damassis pauses her recording; her subroutines, charting little maps on her face, dim and extinguish. Fortress dusk falls, shrouding them in a fall of phantom soot and combusting antennae. She does not look at Jingfei as she says, “If you insist on that, then you admit you’re no longer of use. That the Record of Tiansong has outlasted its purpose and must be concluded.”

  “So it will end,” Jingfei agrees. “And nothing will remain.”

  * * *

  Above the fortress’ roof, suns and stars chase one another, their brute velocity leaving trails of shadows that fill the mouth with a taste of acid honey, that incise redshift after-images on the retina. Jingfei flies solid-state kites here, plated dragon-fish spilling mandarins from their whiskers, scaled horses with burning tails, and cloud-spirits the shade of opals. By tradition they are symbols of auspice and fortune, but Jingfei has given them blank faces and gaping mouths, gray tongues twitching like earthworms in dry soil.

  She lets the envoy lead. Watches Damassis and her calm, unfailing even under this light, this sky. Previous envoys have shown unease, throats twitching and stomachs heaving, as she would expect of those unaccustomed to this environment. Perhaps Damassis has been trained, made familiar with the conditions of swarm-fortresses.

  They walk—march—across the mirror sheen of the roof, to the pavilion shaped like a scorpion’s pedipalp: red-black and downward, poised to snap shut. Within its septic glow the mainframe stands cold and absolute, shielded by a lesser cousin of the aegis that holds the swarm’s shape and sutures shut its interstices. Damassis dissolves this protection with a whisper of decryption, a bracelet of code. She does this without fanfare, without throwing Jingfei a knowing glance over her shoulder. In this way Jingfei knows the envoy is confident in her authority, requiring no great show to make a point of what mastery she holds over Jingfei, over the fortress itself.

  Despite this, or perhaps because of it, Jingfei again reaches to test the limits of the envoy’s tolerance. “How long do people live, now, out there?”

  “A citizen can see three hundred, with good augmens and cellular therapy.” Damassis’ eyes acquire the distant glaze of data immersion as she interfaces with the mainframe. “The average is roughly two hundred and twenty; I don’t have census data to hand.”

  Peculiar, the duelist thinks. Someone like Damassis should be connected at all times, with access to most information no matter its classification. “Two hundred and twenty! In my days, we could barely teach telomeres to hold on for longer than a hundred and eighty-five. Their Majesties aside, of co
urse, may their mighty souls have found heaven’s light.”

  “When Tiansong fell, much was lost; if its reconstructive advances and altar-ghost system were still intact people could live to half an eon, perhaps more, preserve themselves truly in virtuality and reincarnate as needed. Even the clan-altars on Tiansong today are a sad mockery of what they once were.”

  “Envoy,” the duelist says with a shocked little laugh, “are you berating a world for not allowing its conqueror to appropriate its advancements? Are you berating me for not having stolen the tech when I gave you Tiansong?”

  “Your monarchs and magistrates scorched the earth to spite us. They didn’t think what that would do to their descendants. Or yours. What history does Tiansong have left?” Damassis looks up from the mainframe, the irises of her eyes playing lamp-glass to the light of optical overlays. “If they had their way there would be nothing of the world but a handful of stellar dust.”

  “That isn’t wrong—their pride shone like the sun, blinded more than their warships ever did—but why tell me? I was never involved in those decisions.” Jingfei cants eir head at the duelist; they exchange a glance. “You plugged me into this because I was the only compatible, willing body at the time. It’d have served you better to capture an imperial engineer or an empress, but you were a little scared of them, weren’t you? Back then the Hegemony was little and weak. Each of our rulers seemed to you a god or a demon, full of teeth and nightmares. You could have no rest until all of them were exterminated.”

  The mainframe’s surface trembles, liquid, a sigh of ancient code knitting shut over the laceration of a glitch. The envoy draws away, disconnecting. “I’ve finished the calibrations. Your next bodies should have a normal span, two hundred years or more.”

  “My thanks. It was getting distressing, having new bodies that barely live past ten years. I’m fortunate—fifty, eighty years to go.” Jingfei wrinkles her nose. “The one just decanted will see, what, six months? So tragic.”