And the Burned Moths Remain Read online

  “You feel no terror at her imminent death?”

  “Envoy,” the adolescent says, “the terms of my sentence specifically forbid network implants. When I want to talk to myself, I have to do it face to face. We can’t even synchronize what we see, let alone what we feel. Even if we did, what’s death? We have died so many times. It’s stopped being scary or novel.”

  “Do you consider yourselves separate individuals then?”

  “When you make a decision, you choose out of many forks in a path. I like to think that’s how it is with us. Not distinct individuals, no, but—” Jingfei waves a hand. The adolescent watches her out of the corner of eir eye, sly, wary. “I take it your engineers have had no luck reproducing the system?”

  “Some.” Then, reluctantly, “There’s always a critical flaw, causing data loss. The identity and memories never carry over perfectly; concurrent instances can’t be maintained beyond two or three. The subject’s identity, sooner or later, fragments. None of the … selves is a complete person. They function more like organs, and not very well even then.”

  “For what it’s worth, this isn’t all that good or elegant a trick. In my time—” Here Jingfei stops again. Flutters one hand, as though to apologize for a wandering mind. “If you can’t get this information out of me, what then?”

  Damassis’ jaw tautens. When she speaks again her voice is low and harsh, and she flinches as if scalded by her own anger. “Then nothing. I’m disposable in ways that you are not. You are unique, the altar-ghost that keeps you alive the same.”

  “And because of that, I’m a prisoner here, will always be. It’s not much of an existence, envoy. To the last aristocrat and scholar, those I served would prefer a single glorious life over countless rebirths fulfilling no point save to endlessly stew in defeat.” Jingfei reaches toward the aegis, holds short of touching it. “I would’ve thought you’d be satisfied when I sold you my birthworld. What haven’t you taken? What haven’t you won? Even my rulers weren’t so hungry—they left some meat on the bones of their subjugated, some spirit on their subjects.”

  To that the envoy makes no response.

  * * *

  Jingfei sits in a room of mirrors. In the fortress there are many like this, cells to trap and torment, back when Jingfei was still being interrogated, but her torturers soon struck an impasse. They could destroy her instances, but her bodies were innumerable and disposable. They could not demolish the mainframe, a unique artifact as yet impossible to replicate. They had nothing to threaten her with.

  And so, envoys: the title a euphemism, but also not. Hers is likewise. She has always asked them to call her what she is—traitor of Tiansong, its final betrayer—but they insist on that piece of politeness, that negation of verity.

  Because every fraction of her recall is preserved, collected at the moment of death so it carries over to the next instance, she never forgets. The evening was colorless when she landed on the hot, dry soil of a distant shore. The scales of her ship crumbled to jade chips and silver filigree, as though no longer able to bear the weight of her decision. A choice like molten lead in her heart and in her hands, dense and searing, blackening all that she touched.

  Once her treason was finalized—the negotiations finished—it was almost a relief.

  She has her eyes shut when the envoy enters. Jingfei knows her own gait, the rhythm of her footsteps and the rustle of her robes. This is different, a harder beat to the boots, a sleeker whisper to the fabrics: gossamer collars, chitinous sleeves. “Your colleagues learned long ago that there’s no point torturing me,” she says. “But that didn’t stop some of them. One shattered my fingers, then my wrists, then my ankles. Another vivisected me and planted fractal seeds in my stomach so I’d feel every bud and shoot of circuit-flowers. The problem with remembering everything, envoy, is that I remember everything. The trauma doesn’t overwhelm the rest because the mainframe won’t let one set of data overwrite another, but there’s been more bad than good. The mind defends itself by forgetting, Damassis Ingmir. Take away that survival trick and what do you think remains?”

  “I can’t be held accountable for their actions. But I offer my—” Hesitation briefer than the writhing flare of space-time pinned down. “My sympathies.”

  “Where are you from exactly? From your original name I’d guess Salhune, but I’m too out of touch to guess much else.”

  “My origins are irrelevant.”

  Jingfei opens one eye. Her images and those of Damassis overlap, warping and melding at intersections of glass. “When did you marry into Iron Gate? You must have duties beyond this; your predecessors always let me in a little on their lives, on current fashion, on the latest planets brought into Hegemonic peace. Even their favorite games or hobbies. It’s my sole connection with the outside world. Come, must I beg?”

  “I don’t see the point of taunting you with details of a life you’ll never have again.” Damassis unholsters her gun.

  The duelist moves. The edge of her palm cracks against the envoy’s wrist and the gun falls. A low hum of velocity shadow, music to her after so long, and the fang of her blade comes to rest at the envoy’s throat.

  “I thought death didn’t frighten you,” Damassis whispers, her words fluttering against Jingfei’s eyelashes.

  “I contradict myself constantly, envoy, and my mouth wasn’t the precise one which uttered those exact words.” The duelist angles the blade sideways, as though she means to sheathe it in Hegemonic flesh. The weapon will soon fall apart, but for now it can still execute. “In my time, I honestly wasn’t any sort of fighter, but it’s surprising how much practice you get once you decide disputes should be settled by single combat.”

  “I meant to present the gun as my third and last gift to you, to show you that I won’t hurt or humiliate you simply because I can. That I will not deprive you of your dignity. As my apology on behalf of—the others.”

  Jingfei collects the weapon and laughs, a sound of moth wings in susurrus as they circle killing fire. “Not worried I’d shoot you with it?”

  “I’ve told you before that I’m disposable. I am my duty.” Damassis touches her neck where the sword licked it, her skin still vibrating in echo to the blade. “I will say again that I’ve been sent to negotiate, not interrogate; we’re past that. What is it that you wish for?”

  “What would anyone in my position wish for? The impossible. It’s pointless. I don’t have what you want. The secret of the altar-ghost isn’t mine to give.”

  “Tiansong will be set free,” the envoy goes on as though Jingfei has said nothing. “That’s what you want, no? A second chance, to undo what you did. Your world is valuable, but we can afford the loss. Its history has been much buried, but you are the Record of Tiansong. What has been forgotten or eroded you alone recall. The languages, the festivals of seasons, the times of worship and contemplation—everything. All this you can return to them, their savior risen from the ashes. It’ll never be the same Tiansong you knew, but it’s the closest that can be had, under the circumstances.”

  A shriek of shattering glass. Cracks radiate, on and on, from the far end of the cell. The duelist has been still, her arms at her sides, the gun clipped to her sash. In the reflections another Jingfei flits by, disappears. Shards of mirror fall, chiming.

  The duelist turns to Damassis, offering no remark or explanation, though she listens for the receding noise of small bare feet. “Why do you want to understand the mainframe so desperately? It has its uses, originally meant to harden the empresses’ transfer and moot the need for taking over another’s body, but what would you begin to do with it? The Hegemony stands impregnable. At this point even if there exists a dominion equal to yours, the damage you’d inflict on one another would be past bearing for either side. For all intents and purposes you are unchallenged.”

  “Your grasp of current affairs isn’t wrong.”

  “The essential nature of power seldom changes, and I’m no stranger to it.”

&nbs
p; “True upload of the self is something we haven’t been able to achieve, even to contain just one lifetime’s worth of data, let alone multiple.” Damassis glances at her reflections, at Jingfei’s. “Our best generals, slain in action, can be brought back. Our foremost negotiators and intelligence officers, lost to crossfire or assassins, can be returned to their functions. They wouldn’t have to be trained, tested, whetted. The best minds would always be available. If the Hegemony is formidable now, the altar-ghost would make us invincible.”

  It takes Jingfei no effort to summon the taste of sweet lotus seed, the sight of gardens where sharks swim through canopies of petals and salted air. “That is not a future I can countenance.”

  “We will leave you alone. No Hegemonic warship will ever approach Tiansong’s system. Your territories will be sacrosanct, inviolate, and we’ll guard them, too, should it come to that. What do you owe any other sovereignty we might trample?”

  “My human compassion. My empathy.” But she sneers as she says this. “You can’t corroborate your offer. For all I know, Tiansong has been a heat smear for centuries. Nor do I have any guarantee that you’ll deliver.”

  Damassis starts to crumple her sleeves in her fists. She loosens her fingers, staring down at them as though they moved independent of her volition or responded to someone else’s fury. Her expression is blank, creased only by distant puzzlement. “That’s sensible, of course. I will personally accompany one of you to your birthworld, so you may see for yourself that it stands strong and flourishing. Then we will withdraw our personnel and barracks from the planet, our outposts from the system, empty Tiansong’s skies of Hegemonic ships. You will find some of your descendants object to this, but we will instate you as First of Tiansong, grant you all the authority you need and enforce it as required. Once you’ve been well established, the rest is up to you. With the altar-ghost replenishing you, you have forever to correct your mistake.”

  Jingfei leans forward, clasps her hands to either side of Damassis’ jaw. The envoy does not protest or pull away. “Who are you?”

  “Shouldn’t the question be what I am?” Damassis blinks once, twice, lapsing into confusion. But she shakes her head as far as Jingfei’s grip allows, regaining herself. “And the answer to that I have already given, through what I have said and done.”

  The duelist lets go.

  “Please consider what I’ve proposed. I’m ready to leave at any time; a ship awaits with room for us both. It is,” the envoy murmurs as though her words emerge, dazed and unsteady, from another’s throat, “your future.”

  * * *

  The shape of treason is a trunk of thorns; the traitor climbs, knowing forgiveness waits at the zenith, at the world’s roof where earth joins heaven. At the conclusion of boughs that bite and leaves that lash, there will be a lotus whose nectar shall heal all wounds, whose petals are the shade of salvation.

  An old image, part of an old teaching from an extinguished religion, but Jingfei thinks on it often. A tree that is all trunk: the punch line—the punishment—being that there is no end to it, no absolution or path to virtue. The traitor’s sentence is eternal.

  Under the pavilion, she watches her kites falter under the relentless pursuit of briar-stars. A few of them will soon surrender to gravity and decay. Everything she makes, from weapons to clothes to kites, culminates in atrophy and rot. She outlasts them all, she and her tree of thorns and her memory that never quite settles into the ease of scars.

  The weight of decision, again, a path forking before her when it should have smoothed into a single direction, a linear and infinite vector.

  So she knows what will happen—could have choreographed it moment to moment—when other parts of her gather on the roof, on the periphery of radiant aegis, the precipice of the swarm. Beyond that wall there is a vacuum. Some of her have chosen that, on occasion, suicide being preferable to the fortress; that part, too, the mainframe ruthlessly accumulates, yielding not an inch to data loss and oblivion. Jingfei has muscle memory of the leap, the buoyancy of space, the instant before implosive death.

  The duelist crouches behind the railing and draws the envoy’s gun.

  Her first shot catches an older man with eyelids painted scarab-blue, lips burnished platinum. Her second drops a child starvation-thin. Another, another, and Jingfei dies. She doesn’t keep track; some of her instances she never gets to meet before they expire. They are her and she is they, but it is only a technicality.

  Kites stretch and snap and shroud the fallen, but the kites are few and the bodies are many. The duelist works on, methodical and impersonal. She will not feel the impact of bullet in flesh, the crack of bones giving in to annihilating charge. The next one to decant will, and though all of them contain memories of dying it’s never been so rapid, murders lined up compressed and close. The mind defends itself by forgetting. But she has no such luxury, and the next crop of Jingfei, she thinks, will at last break.

  Gates to the roof thunder shut. All of Jingfei stop, united even in this.

  Heatless light sweeps over them, eclipsing the swarm.

  When it fades there is a whisper of smoke, a murmur of ash, and most of Jingfei lie dead. Damassis strides past and over them, a second gun loosely held in hands bleeding from what must have been incredible recoil.

  Jingfei looks at the blood, looks up at the envoy. “How many of you are there?”

  “I don’t know.” Damassis joins her in the pavilion, kneeling too, her brow to the cool stone as though fatigued. “We are—I am—connected, but the link is one way. None of us can hold the memory load for long, no matter how it’s transferred, put into the datasphere raw, embedded into the birthing protocols, in sync or independent.… What do you mean to do here? The rest of you. The other parts of you.”

  “To determine Tiansong’s fate.” The duelist’s mouth pulls back, hard white teeth gleaming in the dim. “No. To judge my conscience, the ultimate arbiter. Do I make the same choice, betray Tiansong once more in order to aggrandize myself? Do I accept my incarceration as just and correct, bear it until the mainframe gives out? Or a third option yet: destroy the mainframe now and remove all possibilities, permanently.”

  “You wish for an end?”

  “I’ve overstayed my mortality. Oh, some part of me wants to continue. It’s the instinct of all living things, to survive even when there’s no reason to.”

  “I’ve forgotten,” Damassis says, “nearly everything. Feelings. Fear. My spouse and when I wedded her, my life and what it was like, my beginning. Whether I volunteered for this, whether I agreed to be an experiment bound for failure. There’s hardly anything left—I’m an appendage to a purpose, a vehicle to carry it out. In time my sentience will fray. But if I were still capable of choice, I believe I would strive to live.”

  “An animal imperative, and one I share. Even when you’re down to a shell, shorn of human reason, still it will rule and guide you.” Jingfei stands to take stock of the damage. She starts counting, stops. “Were you whole, I doubt I would have been able to suffer you. If it takes hollowing out a Hegemonic agent to make her sympathetic.…”

  “Your sympathy is irrelevant to my objective.”

  “Is it? There was a reason someone with your condition and circumstances was sent. Let me ask you: Do you want to be, as you are now? You may be whittling down to a blank slate, but if your decay is stopped you can be built up again. A self and identity of your own rather than puppet to a task you don’t even remember pledging yourself to.”

  The envoy frowns; a shiver goes through her, answering to another’s terror, excitement, both. “I don’t—but I’m being instructed to agree.”

  Jingfei smiles, thin and hard. She turns to the mainframe, speaks in the tongue of incense and cremations. A knot of code, a set of hidden protocols stirring awake. “Transfer your data. The altar-ghost will accept you as a user, keep you uplinked so that, like mine, all your experiences will be preserved in perfect clarity. There’s danger in that, and you�
�not the animus directing you from afar—will have to decide.”

  Damassis wipes her palms on her trousers, haphazard red prints. “I’ve seen what happens when one of us falls apart. I know what my fate will be and I don’t think I’m afraid, I don’t know what that is like anymore, but I don’t—the thought of it seems unbearable. Except why would you do this? You’re playing into our hand.”

  The gates shudder. Jingfei has never created firearms, but perhaps some of her recently dabbled in munitions. There is material for it; the fortress can’t be what it is without churning out disruptive fuel and centrifugal shrapnel. There are countless methods for her to harm the mainframe and butcher her instances. Her captors have never shielded her from herself. Death and injury are her fundamental prerogative.

  “Empathy. Compassion.” Jingfei exhales. “And since I’m accepting your offer to regain Tiansong—under a limited definition—it pays to secure your goodwill. Well?”

  “Yes,” Damassis says and begins transfer.

  * * *

  When the envoy departs, she is led to the fortress’ vestibule. She leaves alone. A duelist armed with a gun and a boy draped in alloy chain see her off, a matter of etiquette and decorum. To the last, Jingfei is polite.

  She listens to the sound of a ship lifting off, tearing free of the aegis that holds her prison’s shape. She thinks of the roof, where carcasses are buried under beasts of auspice and fortune. When she has time, she plans to make new kites. Some will be thorns after the shape of the suns; others will be briars, after the stars. The rest will be lotuses, nectar-bright, with petals that sing forgiveness.

  The bodies she will push off the edge one by one, where they will never stop falling. Hers was a theater costly to stage, but she considers the price well paid. An appendage may be given another purpose. A vehicle may be altered to carry out a different task. A blank slate may be written over.

  Existence cannot be answered in binary: here or there, alive or not. Inside the swarm-fortress, the Record of Tiansong remains, anchored to her corpses and her guilt. She has been born countless times and will not be born again, for her mortality has caught up with her at last.