Conservation of Shadows (40 page)

Come to my halls, sister, and there will be no more talk of light or dark or the permutations in between. We will sit side by side on our thrones, drinking young wine and old rather than the dark, dank water that trickles just beneath the world’s skin. We will bestow treasures upon those who please us, luminous cabochons and spiral emblems of gold, chains sometimes of silver and sometimes of bronze.

In the earth’s hidden hoards you can taste treasure as though it were a nectar beyond price. Underground, so deep that even fungi find no nourishment, the earth fruits metal and precious stones. It is of no concern to us that living creatures starve contemplating such fruit.

You unfasten your belt, such a short, blunt length to encircle your waist. Jewels of varying cuts are set in the leather, all polished to the brilliance of river water beneath a fecund moon. They fling colored sparks across the floor and walls. Did you ever spare a thought for the underground spirits that had to be disturbed by the digging for your treasures?

With the belt you whip the largest geode in the wall, already cracked half-open to reveal its jagged amethyst heart. The jewels fall out of your belt and scatter to the floor, uncracked yet dimmer, duller. You should be more patient, sister. After all, when you reach the final gate there will be no returning. Doesn’t the thought distress you even a little?

Heedless, you bunch up the belt in your fist, then thrust it into the gate that is growing from the crack in the geode. Is that how you regard the underworld’s gleaming treasures? Obstacles to be destroyed?

I suppose I haven’t learned anything that I didn’t already know. You are all the same, all of you.

The geode’s teeth scratch your skin as you enter, even through the stiff curves of your armor.

This deep in the earth, you can’t hear the seasons breathing even in your dreams. Tell me true: when you close your eyes, can you smell the earthy sweetness of rotting leaves, or taste the last fruits of fall? If I set before you a feast of the finest wines and hearty porridge and roast boar, would it taste like the dust that surrounds you?

Come to me before it’s too late, before you lose all ability to see color or to taste salt or sweet.

You tilt your head, listening to the laments of the dead. Their voices sound very like your own, don’t they? Maybe they always have. There is no use for fertility without death, you know.

All your faces are mine. You can verify that with a mirror when we meet, except that mirrors are liars when there is no light, claiming that everything is equal to everything. Perhaps that’s the sort of lie you like to tell yourself.

Here’s the thing about shadows. Even at their most distorted, shadows are mathematically precise. They show you what is given to them to show. If a shadow portrays you as larger as you are, it’s no fault of the shadow’s. It’s all a matter of light, of angles and intensity and color.

If I loom so large in your experience here, sister, you might consider what it is about you that has made me who I am.

Don’t worry about the candles here, or the supply of oxygen. The ventilation is quite adequate for our purposes.

Your shadows flicker and jump in perfect time to the candles’ flames, like dancers yearning after each other. Which one most truly represents your face? Or mine?

When you close your eyes, just before sleep bears you beneath the surface of the world, do you have a face at all? Can you differentiate yourself from the shadows at all?

Furiously, you pull open your jacket, unfasten your tunic. I know all the scars you bear, sister. The abrupt cuneiform shapes of scars embellish your skin. Scars from battle or love or all the jagged shapes in between, cicatrices and burn scars, round and pale and lightning-shaped.

Of course: no shadow living ever bore a scar.

You feed the shadows your scars, erasing all record of those past triumphs and defeats. As the scars smooth out, becoming invisible against the brown canvas of your body, the shadows gain in depth and form, braiding themselves together until they are a cold, tangible presence on the floor.

Unhesitating, you refasten your tunic and step through, falling without falling.

You’re shielding your eyes. Surprised at how bright it is? I thought you could use a reminder. The spectrum produced by each lamp imitates that of a sun you or one of your clone-sisters has visited. Sadly, no matter how faithful a lamp is, it can never rival the real thing.

Don’t look for their remnants here. Seasons in human time are one thing, but seasons in the lives of starfarers—what is a human winter to people like you or me? You’ve been breathing their dust, treading on their fossilized despair.

Nevertheless, you crouch, heedless of the gray grit that clings to your clothes, and draw figures on the cave’s floor. If you think your calculus will save you, you are sorely mistaken. In your formulae the infinitesimals come to a positive sum. Here, the sum of iterated emptiness will only be more emptiness.

Let me tell you a story to distract you from the useless fable you are telling yourself. Long ago, the people of a great and fertile land resolved to explore worlds that circled the god-stars that they had watched and worshipped since their people first set brick upon brick to build cities. But for all their ambitions, they were loyal, and did not forget their gods. They knew they would need their gods to guard them from the dangers that lie deep in space.

So they made sure that their gods would follow them into that shining darkness, a pantheon of gods for each world. They made you, all of you, and they made me.

If you must console yourself over your journey here, tell yourself that those who made you achieved their purpose, and that you are perfectly recapitulating that old story so that your world will pass into its winter rest. You will not live to see your world’s renewal, but another of you will.

Don’t bother scratching out a message to her. She won’t read the same languages you do, won’t take the same twisting path. I will tell her the same things that I have told you. You may be sure of it.

You’ve removed the shadow-gun from its holster and are cradling it in your hands. You knew it would come to this. We both did.

It’s a beautiful weapon. It has the same coiled intensity that you do when you are intent on war, sister. And it has killed people in your hands. You are not the kind to beg forgiveness; you were made for bloodshed. I don’t understand why you regard the gun with such loathing, then.

Steadily, you raise the shadow-gun and squeeze the trigger. The room explodes into utter darkness, the kind of darkness that swallows sound and stifles thought. Even the spangled otherspace behind your eyelids is brighter than this.

A moment later, your fingers close around empty air as the gun dissolves. It has served its purpose. All but one of your inventory slots is empty as well.

The entire room is a gate now. It remains only for you to take a step. It speaks well of you that you listen for a long, careful moment before moving in the direction leading downward, toward me.

Your heart thuds one-two, one-two, one-two like a march without an army. There is only you, alone before the last gate. What did you hope to accomplish when you set out, sister? Did you have some brave notion of unseating me from my dark throne, or tearing asunder all the underworld gates so the dead would roam free and outnumber the living?

I have always admired your purity of purpose, mistaken as it is. We are not so different, you and I. We play the roles that are given to us. Yours is to die, and mine is to kill you. Don’t spoil the symmetry of the story.

The only reason you can see anything here, where the darkness is thicker than honey, is that you still have a heart. It shines red-bright in the final inventory slot, last remaining illumination. If I cared to, I could grow you a new, more compliant heart. But that is not my duty. Would you deny Number Seventy-Six her chance at this journey?

There is a small, angular object in your hand like a dead star. Your inventory system needs to be debugged. Why was I not informed?

You kneel again. I can hear the painful harshness of your breathing. More important is what you are scratching into the dust on the floor with your pointed fingernail. This time it is in a language I understand:

I have always known I am not the only one. You are not the only one of your kind, either. My clone-sisters and I have planned for this moment, a coordinated strike. It is the only way we can be free. I am s—

How can it be that I feel the touch of rain so deep beneath the earth, blotting out the last word you would have written?

You timed it to your traitor heart. And now that I know to look, I see it: a mass inside your heart, tangled inextricably into it.

In the end you give up your heart after all, but I am the one who loses everything, in a springtime effusion of light.

“Ghostweight”

This was the second-hardest story I have ever written, not because of the subject material (I find it funny to slaughter fictional characters, that bit’s easy) but because it took me the better part of six months to nail the opening. The thing about the story is that in the first paragraph you are setting up the story’s axioms, and this affects your ability to hammer in the QED at the end. It is like writing a proof. You have to know what your premises are so you know what you’re arguing from.

Charibdys’s prompt was “origami and consequences in space.” I believe I delivered. Ordinarily, when I’m writing to a prompt for individuals, I don’t write downers because people don’t seem to like downers. I had strong reason to believe that Charibdys would be okay with a story about genocide and treachery, so I went with it.

Once I had the opening, the rest was easy. The hinge is getting the reader to accept the ghost as a given and not question who the ghost really is, which is made easier by the fact that Lisse never thinks to question this. I could be mistaken; maybe a lot of people guessed that in advance. Let me know.

As an aside, this is set in the same world (far in the future) as “The Shadow Postulates,” but you’d only know it if you happen to be one of a small set of people who saw some version of the defunct source novel.

“The Shadow Postulates”

The shadow postulates came from a hazy conjunction of two things in math: Fermat’s last theorem and Euclid’s fifth postulate. Fermat’s last theorem is the famous one where he wrote in the margin that he had a great proof that wouldn’t fit. It is likely that he had a great
wrong
proof. I have not attempted to read popular math accounts on Andrew Wiley’s actual proof of the theorem because just reading popular math accounts of the
prerequisites
to understand the actual proof have scared me off. I love math, but a B.A. doesn’t get you very far.

Euclid’s fifth postulate is the one about how if there’s a line and a point outside the line, you get only one parallel line to the first one through that outside point. (That’s a restatement of the postulate called Playfair’s Axiom, but it’s the same idea.) Non-Euclidean geometry came about when people realized you could construct alternate consistent geometries by monkeying around with that postulate, which had been driving mathematicians nuts for ages because something about it felt weird and it seemed like they ought to be able to derive it from the other postulates.

By the way, if it’s any consolation, any time I get near the word “entelechy” I have to look it up in the dictionary. The definition refuses to stay in my head. But then, that’s what dictionaries are for.

“The Bones of Giants”

I had been watching anime about mecha and it occurred to me that fantasy would be great for mecha if you just dug up some big skeletons and applied necromancy. I may have been influenced by
Neon Genesis Evangelion,
although I’m not sure
what
you classify the Evas as except Bad News.

The necromancy system came from the fact that I had been reading up on traditional 2D animation for a few years. I am not an animator; I have only animated three things in my life (one in Flash, two in LivingCels), and I don’t draw well enough to try it, but reading about how it works fascinates me because it’s something I can’t do.

Also, you ever notice how you stick someone in a mecha and half the time they magically sprout a bunch of completely impractical but acrobatic moves? Possibly after a few false starts, but still. That struck me as ridiculous, so I made my characters work for their battle moves.

Sakera’s hand tremor came from a hand tremor I developed as a side-effect of a medication I was on. It’s very slight now, but when I sketch I long for beautiful, smooth, controlled lines and those are forever beyond me. Oh well.

“Between Two Dragons”

This story is about the Imjin War. The first two wars I grew up knowing about weren’t World War I and World War II; they were the Imjin War and the Korean War.

The Imjin War was a Japanese invasion of Korea from 1592 to 1598, and it gave Korea one of its two great national heroes, Admiral Yi Sun-Shin. (The other is King Sejong, who, among other things, invented the Korean alphabet according to phonetic principles.) To give you some idea, at the Battle of Myeongnyang Yi defeated the Japanese with 13 warships against 133.

The Japanese were very good at land warfare (and the Koreans were unbelievably bad at it at that time), but naval warfare was another matter. The Japanese idea of fighting with ships was to sail their ships right up to yours, board you, and hack or shoot up your people. The Korean idea of fighting with ships was to shoot your ships up with cannons. One of these paradigms works better than the other.

(As an aside, the turtle boat, or geobukseon, was almost certainly not an ironclad.)

Admiral Yi went undefeated, but due to intrigue he was removed from command after the Japanese went home for a breather. Then he was tortured, stripped of rank, and almost executed by the Korean king. After the Japanese came back and defeated the Koreans in a battle at sea, the king reinstated him.