Conservation of Shadows (28 page)

“How many of me were there?”

“I lost count after a thousand or so,” the blue woman says. “Most of them were more like me. Some of them were more like you.”

A thousand Jenny Changs, a thousand blue women. More. Gone, one by one, like a scatterfall of rain. “Did all of them say yes?” Jenny asks.

The blue woman shakes her head.

“And none of the ones who said yes survived.”

“None of them.”

“If that’s the case,” Jenny says, “what makes you special?”

“I’m living on borrowed possibilities,” she says. “When the battle ends, I’ll be gone too, no matter which way it ends.”

Jenny looks around her, then squeezes her eyes shut, thinking.
Two significant figures,
she thinks inanely. “Who started the fight?” She’s appalled that she sounds like her mom.

“There’s always an armageddon around the corner,” the blue woman says. “This happens to be the one that
he
found.”

The dark-skinned man. Who was he, that he could persuade people to take a last stand like this? Maybe it’s not so difficult when a last stand is the only thing left. That solution displeases her, though.

Her heart is hammering. “I won’t do it,” Jenny says. “Take me home.”

The blue woman’s eyes narrow. “You are the last,” she says quietly. “I thought you would understand.”

Everything hinges on one thing: is the blue woman different enough from Jenny that Jenny can lie to her, and be believed?

“I’m sorry,” Jenny says.

“Very well,” the blue woman says.

Jenny strains to keep her eyes open at the crucial moment. When the blue woman reaches for her hand, Jenny sees the portal, a shimmer of blue light. She grabs the blue woman and shoves her through. The last thing Jenny hears from the blue woman is a muffled protest.

Whatever protection the blue woman’s touch afforded her is gone. The rain drenches her shirt and runs in cold rivulets through her hair, into her eyes, down her back. Jenny reaches again for the fallen man’s gun. It’s cold, but she has a moment’s warmth in her yet.

She might not be able to save the world, but she can at least save herself.

It’s the end of the school day and you’re waiting for Jenny’s mother to pick you up. A man walks up to you. He wears a coat as grey as rain, and his eyes are pale against dark skin. “You have to come with me,” he says, awkward and serious at once. You recognize him, of course. You remember when he first recruited you, in another timeline. You remember what he looked like fallen in the battle at the end of time, with a gun knocked out of his hand.

“I can’t,” you say, kindly, because it will take him time to understand that you’re not the blue woman anymore, that you won’t do the things the blue woman did.

“What?” he says. “Please. It’s urgent.” He knows better than to grab your arm. “There’s a battle—”

Once upon a time, you listened to his plea. Part of you is tempted to listen this time around, to abandon the life that Jenny left you and take up his banner. But you know how that story ends.

“I’m not in your story anymore,” you explain to him. “You’re in mine.”

The man doesn’t look like he belongs in a world of parking tickets and potted begonias and pencil sharpeners. But he can learn, the way you have.

General Shuos Jedao was spending his least favorite remembrance day with Captain-magistrate Rahal Korais. There was nothing wrong with Korais except that he was the fangmoth’s Doctrine officer, and even then he was reasonable for a Rahal. Nevertheless, Doctrine observed remembrances with the ranking officer, which meant that Jedao had to make sure he didn’t fall over.

Next time,
Jedao thought, wishing the painkillers worked better,
I have to get myself assassinated on a planet where they do the job right.

The assassin had been a Lanterner, and she had used a shattergun. She had caught him at a conference, of all places. The shattergun had almost sharded Jedao into a hundred hundred pieces of ghostwrack. Now, when Jedao looked at the icelight that served as a meditation focus, he saw anywhere from three to eight of them. The effect would have been charming if it hadn’t been accompanied by stabbing pains in his head.

Korais was speaking to him.

“Say again?” Jedao said. He kept from looking at his wristwatch.

“I’ll recite the next verses for you, sir, if that doesn’t offend you,” Korais said.

Korais was being diplomatic. Jedao couldn’t remember where in the litany they were. Under better circumstances he would have claimed that he was distracted by the fact that his force of eleven fangmoths was being pursued by the Lanterners who had mauled the rest of the swarm, but it came down to the injuries.

“I’d be much obliged, Captain,” Jedao said.

This remembrance was called the Feast of Drownings. The Rahal heptarch, whose faction maintained the high calendar and who set Doctrine, had declared it three years back, in response to a heresy in one of the heptarchate’s larger marches. Jedao would have called the heresy a benign one. People who wanted the freedom to build shrines to their ancestors, for pity’s sake. But the Rahal had claimed that this would upset the high calendar’s master equations, and so the heretics had had to be put down.

There were worse ways to die than by having your lungs slowly filled with caustic fluid. That still didn’t make it a good way to die.

Korais had begun his recital. Jedao looked at the icelight on the table in front of them. It had translucent lobes and bronchi and alveoli, and light trickled downward through them like fluid, pale and blue and inexorable.

The heptarchate’s exotic technologies depended on the high calendar’s configurations: the numerical concordances, the feasts and remembrances, the associated system of belief. The mothdrive that permitted fast travel between star systems was an exotic technology. Few people advocated a switch in calendars. Too much would have to be given up, and invariant technologies, which worked under any calendar, never seemed to keep up. Besides, any new calendar would be subject to the same problem of lock-in; any new calendar would be regulated by the Rahal, or by people like the Rahal, as rigorously as the current one.

It was a facile argument, and one that Jedao had always disliked.

“Sir,” Korais said, breaking off at the end of a phrase, “you should sit.”

“I’m supposed to be standing for this,” Jedao said dryly.

“I don’t think your meditations during the next nineteen minutes are going to help if you fall unconscious.”

He must look awful if Doctrine was telling him how long until the ordeal was over. Not that he was going to rest afterward. He had to figure out what to do about the Lanterners.

It wasn’t that Jedao minded being recalled from medical leave to fight a battle. It wasn’t even that he minded being handed this sad force of eleven fangmoths, whose morale was shredded after General Kel Najhera had gotten herself killed. It was that the heptarchate had kept the Lanterners as clients for as long as he remembered. Now the Lanterners were demanding regional representation, and they were at war with the heptarchate.

The Lanterner assassin had targeted Jedao during the Feast of Falcon’s Eye. If she had succeeded, the event would have spiked the high calendar in the Lanterners’ favor. Then they would have declared a remembrance in their own, competing calendar. The irony was that Jedao wasn’t sure he disagreed with the Lanterners’ grievances against the heptarchate, which they had broadcast everywhere after their victory over Najhera.

Korais was still looking at him. Jedao went to sit down, which was difficult because walking in a straight line took all of his concentration. Sitting down also took concentration. It wasn’t worth pretending that he heard the last remembrance verses.

“It’s over, sir,” Korais said. “I’ll leave you to your duties.” He saluted and let himself out.

Jedao looked at his watch after the door hissed shut. Everything on it was too tiny to read the way his vision was. He made his computer enlarge its time display. Korais had left at least seven minutes early, an astonishing concession considering his job.

Jedao waited until the latest wave of pain receded, then brought up a visual of Candle Arc, a battledrift site nine days out from their present position and eleven days out from the Lanterners’ last reported position. The battle had taken place 177 years ago, between two powers that had since been conquered. The heptarchate called the battle Candle Arc because of the bridge of lights that wheeled through the scatter-hell of what had once been a fortress built from desiccated suns, and the remnants of warmoths. The two powers probably had called their battle something else, and their moths wouldn’t have been called moths either, and their calendars were dead except in records held locked by the Rahal.

Some genius had done up the image in shades of Kel gold, even though a notation gave the spectrum shift for anyone who cared. Jedao was fond of the Kel, who were the heptarchate’s military faction. For nearly twenty years he had been seconded to their service, and they had many virtues, but their taste in ornamentation was gaudy. Their faction emblem was the ashhawk, the bird that burned in its own glory, all fire and ferocity. The Shuos emblem was the ninefox, shapeshifter and trickster. The Kel called him the fox general, but they weren’t always being complimentary.

The bridgelights swam in and out of focus. Damnation. This was going to take forever. After pulling up maps of the calendrical terrain, he got the computer algebra system to tell him what the estimated shifts looked like in pictures. Then he sent a summons to the moth commander.

He knew how long it took to get from the moth’s command center to his quarters. The door chimed at him with commendable promptness.

“Come in,” Jedao said.

The door opened. “You wished to see me, sir,” said Kel Menowen, commander of the
Fortune Travels in Fours.
She was a stocky woman with swan-black hair and unsmiling eyes. Like all Kel, she wore black gloves; Jedao himself wore fingerless gloves. Her salute was so correct that he wanted to find an imperfection in her fist, or the angle of her arm.

Jedao had chosen the
Fortune
as his command moth not because it was the least damaged after Najhera’s death, which it wasn’t, but because Menowen had a grudge against the Shuos. She was going to be the hardest commander to win over, so he wanted to do it in person.

The tired joke about the Kel was that they were strong, loyal, and stupid, although they weren’t any more prone to stupidity than the other factions.

The tired joke about the Shuos, who specialized in information operations, was that they had backstabbing quotas. Most of the other factions had reasonable succession policies for their heptarchs. The Rahal heptarch appointed a successor from one of the senior magistrates. With the Kel, it was rank and seniority. The Shuos policy was that if you could keep the heptarch’s seat, it was yours. The other tired joke was that the infighting was the only reason the Shuos weren’t running the heptarchate.

One of Menowen’s aunts had died in a Shuos scheme, an assassin getting careless with secondary casualties. Jedao had already been in Kel service at the time, but it was in his public record that he had once been Shuos infantry, where “Shuos infantry” was a euphemism for “probably an assassin.” In his case, he had been a very good assassin.

Menowen was still standing there. Jedao approximated a return salute. “At ease,” he said. “I’d stand, but ‘up’ and ‘down’ are difficult concepts, which is distressing when you have to think in three dimensions.”

Menowen’s version of at ease looked stiff. “What do you require, sir?”

They had exchanged few words since he boarded her moth because he had barely been functional. She wasn’t stupid. She knew he was on her moth to make sure she behaved, and he had no doubt her behavior would be exemplary. She also probably wanted to know what the plan was.

“What do you think I require?” Jedao asked. Sometimes it helped to be direct.

Menowen’s posture became more stiff. “It hasn’t escaped my notice that you only gave move orders as far as the Haussen system,” she said. “But that won’t take us near any useful support, and I thought our orders were to retreat.” She was overenunciating on top of telling him things he knew, which meant that at some point she was going to tell him he wasn’t fit for duty. Some Kel knew how to do subtlety. Menowen had an excellent service record, but she didn’t strike him as a subtle Kel.

“You’re reading the sane, sensible thing into our orders,” Jedao said. “Kel Command was explicit. They didn’t use the word ‘retreat’ anywhere.” An interesting oversight on their part. The orders had directed him to ensure that the border shell guarding the Glover Marches was secured by any means possible.

“Retreat is the only logical response,” Menowen said. “Catch repairs if possible, link up with Twin Axes.” The Twin Axes swarm was on patrol along the Taurag border, and was the nearest Kel force of any size. “Then we’d have a chance against the heretics.”

“You’re discounting some alternatives,” Jedao said.

Menowen lifted her chin and glared at him, or possibly at his insignia, or at the ink painting over his shoulder. “Sir,” she said, “if you’re contemplating fighting them with our present resources—” She stopped, tried again. The second try was blunter. “Your injuries have impaired your judgment and you ought to—”

“—let the senior moth commander make the sane, sensible decision to run for help?” Jedao flexed his hands. He had a clear memory of an earlier conversation with Commander Kel Chau, specifically the pinched look around Chau’s eyes. Chau probably thought running was an excellent idea. “I had considered it. But it’s not necessary. I’ve looked at the calendrical terrain. We can win this.”

Menowen was having a Kel moment. She wanted to tell him off, but it wasn’t just that he outranked her, it was that Kel Command had pulled him off medical leave to put him in charge, instead of evacuating him from the front. “Sir,” she said, “I was
there.
The Lanterners have a swarm of at least sixty moths. They will have reinforcements. I shouldn’t have to tell you any of this.”