Conservation of Shadows (41 page)

Yi was famed for his loyalty, although the regime didn’t seem to deserve it much. I didn’t want to dump the war’s exact events into a future setting because I can’t improve on history, but I thought I’d explore the loyalty question by changing things around.

Probably the best single current English-language book on the Imjin War is Samuel Hawley’s
The Imjin War.
But you may find Stephen Turnbull’s
Samurai Invasion,
which focuses more on the Japanese perspective, easier to locate.

“Swanwatch”

I wanted to put more technical stuff about computer music in this story (at the time I was screwing around in Logic Pro), but one of my betas said she wasn’t interested in music theory, she wanted to know more about the characters. This is why I need betas. I am usually happy to spend pages describing things that no one cares about.

I have been fascinated by black holes since 4th grade, when an astronomy book terrified me by suggesting that black holes get bigger the more they (for lack of a better word) ingest, and the more they ingest the bigger they get. By the time I learned about Hawking radiation I was no longer worried, but black holes struck me as fermata-like, and the story grew from there.

By the way, in case anyone was wondering, the reason Tortoise never talks to anyone is that he’s dead. Although really, he owes something to Ghast Rhymi from Henry Kuttner’s
The Dark World.

I would also like to report that I was forced to go to some astronomy department’s very helpful, well-illustrated website overview of Black Holes 101 in order to check some details about the event horizon (I was right, it turned out) because my husband the
gravitational astrophysicist
was so busy playing
EVE: Online
that he wouldn’t answer my questions. I am never going to let him live this down and I take particular pleasure in recounting this in front of other gravitational astrophysicists. Admittedly, this is not a huge set of people!

“Effigy Nights”

This story came from two places. Maybe two and a half.

My father is a surgeon. I am not sure what most children get as playthings from their fathers. Mine provided an endless supply of pens that advertised medications whose purpose I still don’t know (I like pens, so this was congenial), occasionally tablets of paper, and those small curved scissors that they use for surgery, once they were no longer suitable for actual surgery. Surgeon hand-me-downs are the best. I spent a serious amount of time trying to cut straight lines in paper with those scissors and never had any success; if you know the trick, please tell me. (I never tried the scissors on, say, a cut of raw chicken. Although now that I think of it . . . ) In any case, the scene in which Seran cuts free the Saint of Guns was originally going to be the opening of a novel, but I got bored of the concept and decided to recycle it into another story, and since this one had paper dolls in it, it seemed suitable.

The second is my childhood love of paper dolls. My mother provided these colonial American dolls of a grandmother and her granddaughters, I think, probably from Dover Publications or the like. I soon grew bored of these and started producing paper dolls of unicorns, multicolored river snakes (Crayola was my friend), and dragons. I cut out gemstones from newspaper advertisements of rings and necklaces so the critters could have hoards. (Hoards are very important.) I eventually worked up to two swordswomen with swords and sheaths quasi-laminated using shiny Scotch tape, so that you could slide the swords in and out of the sheaths. I wish I knew what happened to that old folder full of paper dolls and settings and hoarded gems.

As for the last half? One of my earliest memories is of one of the (many) times I scared the hell out of my mother. I can’t have been more than four or five years old. I had watched with great interest as my mother cooked fish in pans on the stove, and thought it looked terrifically fun. So, with impeccable logic, I drew fish on a sheet of paper with crayons, cut them out with scissors, put them in a pan, and turned on the stove. The fish started burning so I was satisfied that I was doing it right, which was the point at which my mother noticed the smoke and freaked out. (I think she had been distracted talking to one of my uncles.) The moral of this story is that I should not be allowed near paper critters.

“Flower, Mercy, Needle, Chain”

I only write about vague magical guns because I have no handgun experience and I have reliably been informed that the two things you Do Not Get Wrong in writing are horses and guns. I mostly stopped putting horses in stories after that (although I took a semester of equitation in undergrad anyway, to be on the safe side), but I am loath to give up a weapon option.

(Okay, I took a semester of riflery, too. But not handguns.)

The philosophical conceit for this story came from a book that I still haven’t finished reading, Daniel Dennett’s
Freedom Evolves.
It has something to do with how inevitability and free will are not actually mutually exclusive. Someday I will start over, read the whole book, and figure out how this works.

The story tap-dances around the question of how ancestry is defined, and the answer is that ancestry is at least sometimes defined socially (“the line of Zot was founded by Zot the Brusque”) rather than an all-the-way-back-to-the-primordial-ooze line. Naturally, I forgot to include any such thing in the story proper, but maybe tap-dancing was the better move anyway.

This has the interesting distinction of being one of the few stories I have written that my husband liked. (We are friends, promise, just different tastes in fiction.) Of course, I know exactly what I do that makes him dislike the other ones, I’m just not willing to stop.

“Iseul’s Lexicon”

I used to say that “Ghostweight” was the hardest story I had ever written, but “Iseul’s Lexicon” beats it, mostly because while I was trying to hash the thing out, I was sick for over three months. It took me eight drafts, which is mildly appalling. My rough drafts are normally much cleaner, but not when I am bedridden half the day with pain.

I had been wanting to write a tactical linguistics story for years, although damned if I knew what on earth tactical linguistics meant. Then I thought up the Genial Ones’ penchant for lexicography and tossed in some genocide, and there it was.

Chindalla and Yeged are very loosely based on Korea and Japan, although it’s mashed up between the Imjin War and the Japanese occupation from 1910 to 1945. I don’t know a whole lot about my family’s experiences of the Japanese occupation. For one thing, the language barrier made it difficult to ask questions. For another, the questions were bound to lead to some messy answers. My spoken Korean is so-so and works best on common domestic conversational topics like food or jump rope, and my ability to read Korean is pretty lousy. But I think about it anyway.

This story originally had a lot more cryptology in it, but my sister persuaded me that going into the combinatorics of how to encrypt syllable blocks in a featural code would bore the reader (I was thinking of working up to a nice Vigenère), so I gave up on that. The petal script is a stand-in for Hangeul. The story goes that when King Sejong introduced the alphabet as a vastly simpler alternative to the method of using Chinese to write Korean, the recalcitrant yangban (literati) remarked derisively that it was so easy that even a woman could learn it. So I decided to have the inventor of my fictional version be a woman.

Many thanks to my husband for helping me think through the plot. Physicists can be excellent plot doctors.

“Counting the Shapes”

Originally this story, which I started in high school, was about wine of immortality. I woke up and realized I had nothing to say about immortality, so I ditched that.

It’s clear to me now that this story owes a lot to one of my favorite fantasy novels, Simon R. Green’s
Blue Moon Rising.
I have read
Blue Moon Rising
many times and there is no particular math in it (except the bit about teleportation coordinates), but it has demons and last stands and magical swords.

As for math, I fell in love with it sideways, without realizing it. I hated math passionately until 9th grade. 9th grade was geometry and they introduced proofs, and suddenly math wasn’t about a bunch of arbitrary facts and procedures, math
came from somewhere.
I despise not knowing the reasons for things, so this was attractive. I read popular math books because it never occurred to me that this isn’t something people do for fun. I read about topology and chaos theory and Gödel’s incompleteness theorems and catastrophe theory. I thought people should be writing stories about this stuff. It was more fantastic than the usual D&D fireball varieties of magic.

In my defense, I know about Greg Egan and Rudy Rucker now, but the only libraries I had access to were my school’s libraries in Korea and the selection was fun but necessarily limited. Ditto English-language books I could get at Gyobo Bookstore. My sister and I once got to order books (Zelazny’s Chronicles of Amber) from Amazon.com by badgering our dad, as they would ship to Korea. I don’t remember what the shipping cost, which is just as well. It was glorious; but it was only the one time.

“Blue Ink”

In fiction I am wholeheartedly in favor of a good apocalypse and the associated mayhem, but I wanted to go somewhere different for this story. I wish I could tell you that I wrote this story in blue ink. Instead I wrote it at the computer. It occurs to me that I could have changed the font color, but that would have been obnoxious.

I sometimes drew comics in high school, but sadly they were never as interesting as the things Jenny came up with. Both this story and Jenny owe something to the three years of physics I took then, though. The physics textbook came with a lot of interesting sidebars. My favorite was the not-quite-a-joke about the three laws of thermodynamics (You can’t win/ You can’t break even/ You can’t get out of the game). I’ve always liked the idea of a battle at the end of time, when everything is winding down, and while this is not a new idea (my favorite instantiation is Tony Daniel’s “A Dry, Quiet War”), I couldn’t resist giving it a try.

“The Battle of Candle Arc”

This story came from an unpublished novel, which at this time I am still revising; you may or may not ever see it. But Shuos Jedao is one of the characters, and as part of the backstory, I mentioned in passing that he once decisively won a battle in space while outnumbered eight to one. I figured that since Candle Arc received all of two lines, I need never explain how he managed this feat, and I was safe from the reader.

(I should mention at this point that I live in terror that militarily savvy readers will tell me how much I fail to understand tactics, but on the other hand it would be good for me to be schooled, so I will accept my medicine. Just saying.)

Well, I was safe from the reader, but I wasn’t safe from myself. I became desperate to figure out how the hell he had done it. I complained to one of my betas, Daedala, that I wished I could crib from history, and she said well why not? Being Korean, I went straight for one of Admiral Yi’s battles, possibly his most famous one, the Battle of Myeongnyang. Yi did better than Jedao (outnumbered ten to one, killed more of the enemy, and lost no ships) but I figured I shouldn’t push the reader’s suspension of disbelief.

The hardest part was working out how to translate a naval battle taking advantage of a particular channel and its currents into three-dimensional terms, but fortunately I was saved by the fact that technology in this setting is keyed to competing calendars. Once you can artificially create “terrain” in space using the calendars, you can then arrange it to induce the necessary tactics. I swore a lot when I was trying to work this out. It took me embarrassingly long to remember that the simplest way to figure out what is going on is to draw a diagram, a lesson I learned from a couple West Point Military History textbooks; said textbooks are filled with loving maps and diagrams and it’s so much easier to follow what’s going on when there’s a picture instead of just words.

What’s really funny about Candle Arc is that Jedao is not actually deadliest on the battlefield. He’s deadliest when you let him talk to you. But that’s another story, and I couldn’t get into it here.

“A Vector Alphabet of Interstellar Travel”

I wrote this for Sam Kabo Ashwell because he was the one who encouraged me to read Italo Calvino’s
Invisible Cities.
I am wary of most people’s book recommendations because my tastes are weird and unpredictable. No one else is responsible when I hate a widely well-regarded book, but life is short and I want to avoid being stuck with books I hate. Anyway, but this is Sam, and after some resistance I bought a used copy I saw in a bookstore and he was right. I loved it.

What fascinates me about Italo Calvino is that this book, his prose, it’s unbelievable
in translation.
What the hell is the original Italian like? Does it sublimate off the page with its own incandescence? One of the things I regret is that I am not fluent enough in any language but English to have a chance at reading things. I had six years of French and I can make my way through texts sometimes (with a dictionary, unless it’s a monograph on group theory and then all the important vocabulary looks the same as in English), but that’s my strongest foreign language and getting nuances out of prose is a lost cause even so.

So, really, this is an Italo Calvino pastiche set in space, and the vector alphabet bit comes from the idea of basis vectors in linear algebra. I have a friend who derided linear algebra because it was so easy, and okay, it
was
easy, but it had clean lines and I liked the way it danced for me. I am aware there is an egregious amount of arrogance involved in the idea of pastiching Calvino, but I wanted to give something back to Sam and I figured it wouldn’t tear a hole in the universe for me to have a go.