And the Burned Moths Remain (3 page)

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

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

“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.

Outside the swarm-fortress, the Record of Tiansong pilots a small ship meant to accommodate two. She carries the weight of slaughtered dialects and extinct tongues, the payload of secrets and legacy. A choice that needs no revision or second thought, for it burns in her heart and in her hands, blazing a path before her and purifying all she touches. Out here, she will never die.

She will write her name down again on the vertebrae of history, and this time it will not be rubbed out.

 

 

Copyright © 2014 by Benjanun Sriduangkaew

Art copyright © 2014 by Jeffrey Alan Love