Year’s Best SF 15 (11 page)

It's a toy
, she reminded herself. She could make another herself if she had to.

How much had these children lost, before coming here?

Periet's blue eyes met Ling Yun's gaze. The girl made a tiny nod.

“‘Even a toy can be a weapon,'” Mesketalioth said, without inflection. “There are many kinds of weapons.”

“Hey,” Ko said to Ling Yun. He sounded genuinely concerned. “We can fix it. They'll let us have some glue, won't they? Besides, your general likes you. He'd have our heads if we didn't.”

I've never even met the Phoenix General
, Ling Yun thought, chewing her lip before she caught herself. “How many people did
you
take down?” she asked, trying to remind herself that these children were assassins and killers.

Ko rebraided the ends of his hair. “I keep a tally in my head,” he said.

“He's killed sixteen gliders in the game,” Wen Zhi said contemptuously. “That's information that you should have gotten from studying the game.”

“You're still losing territory,” Ling Yun said, remembering the latest report. “How do you expect to win?”

Cheng Guo laughed from his corner. “As if we'd tell you? Please.”

General
, Ling Yun thought,
how in the empress's name is this a good idea
? She hoped she wasn't the only musician they had working on the problem. The whole conversation was giving her a jittery sense of urgency.

“Indeed,” she said. “Thank you.”

“Leave the glider,” Ko said. “We'll fix it. You'll see.”

“If you like,” Ling Yun said, wondering what her uncle would say if he knew. Well, she didn't have to tell him. “Perhaps I'll see you another time, if they permit it.”

Periet touched Ling Yun's hand lightly. Ling Yun half-turned. “Yes?”

Periet said, “There should be six, not five. But you've always known that, haven't you?”

The hairs on the back of Ling Yun's neck prickled.

Periet smiled again.

Ling Yun thought of the two butterflies in Periet's dragon-portrait, and wondered if dragons ate butterflies. Or musicians, for that matter. “It was pleasant meeting you all,” she said, because her parents had raised her to be polite.

Wu Wen Zhi and Li Cheng Guo ignored her, but the others murmured their good-byes.

Shaking her head, Ling Yun made the signal that the guards had taught her, and the door opened. None of the assassins made an attempt to escape. It scared her.

 

Ling Yun was in the midst of revising Mesketalioth's piece in tablature when the summons came. She knew it had to be the Phoenix General because the soldiers would not disrupt her concentration for anything else. But Ling Yun used to practice composing in adverse circumstances: sitting in a clattering train; at a street puppet theater while children shouted out their favorite characters' names; during tedious parties when she had had too much rice wine. She didn't compose courtly lays or ballads, but cheerful ditties that she could hum in the bath where no one else had to know. But the aides had certain ideas about how musicians worked, and it was hardly for her to overturn those ideas.

The aide asked, “Will you need your zither?”

“That depends,” Ling Yun said. “Will he want me to play what I have so far?”

“No,” the aide said, a little hesitantly. “He'll make arrangements when he wants to hear a performance, I'm sure.”

Surreptitiously, Ling Yun curled and uncurled her fingers to limber them up, just in case.

The aide escorted her to a briefing room painted with
Phoenix Command's flame-and-spear on the door. She slid the door open with a surprising lack of ceremony. “General,” she called out, “Musician Xiao is here.” She patted Ling Yun's shoulder. “Go on. You'll be fine.”

Ling Yun stepped through the minimum distance possible and knelt in full obeisance, catching a glimpse of the Phoenix General on the way down. He had gray-streaked hair and a strong-jawed profile.

“Enough,” the general said. “Let's not waste time on ceremony.”

Slowly, she rose, trying to interpret his expression.
He hasn't heard your work yet
, she reminded herself,
so he can't hate it already.

“Sir,” she said, dipping in a bow despite herself.

“You've been too well trained, I see,” the general said wryly. “I swear, it's true of every musician I meet. Sit down.”

Ling Yun had no idea what to say to this, so she sat cross-legged at the table and settled for looking helpful.

“What dreams do you dream?” the general asked. His fingers tapped the wall. Indeed, he seemed unable to stop them.

“My last dream was about the fish I had for dinner,” Ling Yun said, taken aback. “It swam up out of my mouth and chastised me for using too much salt. When I woke up, I was facing the butterfly dragon.”

“Ah, yes,” the general said. “Periet, destroyer of Shang Yuan. I lost an entire glider squadron when she flew in. Dragon pilots are unstable too, as you might guess, so we thought she was a rogue. We'd seen her take down a couple of her own comrades on the way in. Then her dragon roared, and the concussive storm shattered everything in its path, and the City of Lanterns exploded in fire.”

“You were there, General?”

He didn't answer her. “How is the dragon suite progressing?”

“I have revisions to make based on this morning's results in the game, sir,” Ling Yun said.

“Do you play
wei qi
, Musician?” he asked.

“Only poorly,” Ling Yun said. “My mother taught me the rules, but it's been years. It concerns territory and influence
and patterns, doesn't it? It's strange—musical patterns are so easy for me to perceive, but the visual ones are more difficult.”

The general sat across from her. “If musicians were automatically as skilled at
wei qi
as they were at music,” he said, “they would be unbeatable.”

A tablet rested on the table. He picked up the larger of two brushes and wrote
game
, then several other characters. There were no triangles—no dragons—to be seen anywhere. “I didn't know they could do that,” the general mused. “This is what happens when you allow the game to modify its own rules.” He met Ling Yun's inquisitive gaze. “Somehow I don't think they've conceded.”

“So the dragons haven't been captured,” she said, slipping back into the terminology of
wei qi
. “What else mediates this game, General?”

“It's tuned the way a glider might be tuned by a musician, the way a tablet is calibrated by a calligrapher. It's tuned by developments in the living war.”

“I had understood,” Ling Yun said, “that the suite was to reflect the pilots, not to influence them. I must confess that so far I haven't seen anything that would explain the vanishing dragons.”

The general said, “In music, the ideal is a silent song upon an unstrung zither. Is this not so?”

Ling Yun drew the characters in her mind:
wuxian
meant “five,”
qin
meant “zither.” But the
wu
of “five,” in the third tone, brought to mind the
wu
of “nothing” or “emptiness,” which was in the first tone. The unstrung zither, favored instrument of the sages. The ancients had preferred subtlety and restraint in all things; the unstrung zither took this to the natural conclusion. Ling Yun had applied herself to her lessons with the same patient dedication that she did all things musical, but the unstrung zither had vexed her. “That was the view of the traditional theorists,” she said neutrally, “although modern musicians don't necessarily agree.”

The Phoenix General's smile only widened, as though he saw right through her temporizing. “Music is the highest expression of the world's patterns. The sages have told us so,
time and again. The music in the empress's court provides order to her subjects. We must apply the same principles in war.”

She already knew what he was going to say.

“Thus, in war, the ideal must be a bloodless engagement upon an empty battlefield.”

“Are you sure it is wise to keep the ashworlder children alive, then?” Ling Yun said. It made her uneasy to ask, for she didn't want to change the general's mind. Perhaps the thought was traitorous.

“They'll die when they're no longer useful,” the general said frankly.

Traitorous or not, there was something wrong with a war that involved killing children. Even deadly children. Even Periet, with her eyes that hid such lethality.

Wei qi
was a game of territory, of colonialism. Ling Yun thought of all the things she owed to her parents, who had made sure she had the best tutors; to her uncle, who had brought her the glider and other treats over the years. But she no longer lived in her parents' house. And three of the colonies, Arani and Straken Okh and Kiris, had not been founded by the empire at all. What did they owe the Phoenix Banner?

In her history lessons, she had learned that the phoenix and dragon were wedding symbols, and that this was a sign that the ashworlds, with their dragons, needed to be joined to the empire. But surely there were ways to cooperate—in trade, say—without conquering the ashworlds outright.

The general closed his eyes for a second and sighed. “If we could win the war without expending lives, it would be a marvel indeed. Imagine gliders that fly themselves, set against the ashworlds' dragons.”

“The ashworlders are hardly stupid, sir,” Ling Yun said. “They'll send pilotless dragons of their own.”
Or
, she thought suddenly,
dragonless pilots
.

Maybe the ashworlds were ahead of the Phoenix General. From Ling Yun's vantage point, it was impossible to tell.

“Then there's no point sending army against army, is there?” the general said, amused. “But people are people. I
doubt anyone would be so foolish as to disarm entirely, and commit a war solely on paper, as a game.”

Ling Yun bowed, even knowing it would annoy him, to give herself time to think.

“Enough,” the general said. “It is through music we will win the game, and through the game we will win the war. I commend your work, Musician. Take the time you need, but no longer.”

“As you will, sir,” Ling Yun said.

 

The population of the empire on the planet proper, at the last census, was 110 million people.

The population of the five ashworlds was estimated at 70 million people, although this number was much less certain, due to the transients who lived in the asteroid belts.

The number of gliders in the Phoenix Corps was classified. The number of dragons in the Dragon Corps was likewise classified.

Ling Yun stayed up late into the night reviewing the game's statistics. Visual patterns were not her forte, but she remembered the general's words. She had heard the eagerness in his voice, the way she heard echoes of the massacre of Shang Yuan in Periet's. Even now, there had to be pilotless gliders speeding toward the colonies.

Many of the reports compared the pilots' strategy in the game to actual engagements. Ling Yun had skimmed these earlier, because of all the unfamiliar names and places—the Serpent's Corridor, the Siege of Uln Okh, the Greater Vortex—but now she added up the ashworlders' estimated casualties and felt ill. They had lost their own Shang Yuans. She doubted that the general would stop until they lost many more.

Ling Yun had been right. The ashworlders were desperate, to send children.

Something else that interested her was the rate of replenishment. In the game, you could build new units to replace the ones you had lost. The five pilots kept losing dragons. Over the course of the game, the rate at which the game
permitted them to build new dragons dropped slowly but significantly. Based on the general's remarks, Ling Yun was willing to bet that this was based on actual intelligence about the Dragon Corps' attrition rate.

It was too bad she couldn't ask her uncle, who had probably helped plan the general's grand attack. Her uncle once told her that, so far, the ashworlds had held their own because they had a relatively large number of dragon pilots. Metal was not nearly as unstable an element as fire; people who worked almost exclusively with metal did not self-destruct quite as regularly.

It was no coincidence that each colony sent an assassin, and also no coincidence that the Phoenix General had kept all of them captive. Five was an important number, one that Ling Yun had taken for granted until Periet told her that the key was
six
.

The empire, with its emphasis on tradition, had accepted the sages' cycle of five elements since antiquity, even after it founded Colony One and Colony Two in the vast reaches of space. But what of space itself?

Numbers were Ling Yun's domain as much as they were any musician's. Now she knew what to do.

 

Ling Yun's head hurt, and even the tea wasn't going to keep her awake much longer. Still, she felt a quiet glow of triumph. She had finished the suite, including the sixth piece. The sixth piece wasn't for the
wuxian qin
at all. It was meant to be hummed, or whistled, like a folk melody or a child's song, like the music she had wanted to write all her life.

There was no place in the empire for such music, but she didn't have to accept that anymore.

If the toy glider had a song, it would be this one, even if the glider was broken. It was whole in her mind. That was what mattered.

Five strings braided together were coiled in her jacket sleeve, an uncomfortable reminder of what she was about to do.

Ling Yun wrote a letter on the tablet and marked it ur
gent, for the general's eyes only:
I must speak to you concerning the five assassins.
Her hand shook and her calligraphy looked unsteady. Let the general interpret that however he pleased.