Year’s Best SF 15 (9 page)

“I may not have seen that number,” Ephraim said. “But I'm sure it was a fine poem.”

 

I drove Percy to the doctor in Crib Lake. The doctor was an old man with pinch-nose glasses and dirty fingernails. I told him I had shot my servant accidentally, while hunting. The doctor said he did not usually work on colored men, but an extra ten dollars on top of his fee changed his mind.

He told me there was a good chance Percy would pull through, if the fever didn't worsen.

I thanked him, and went off to buy myself a drink.

Yoon Ha Lee
(pegasus.cityofveils.com)
lives in Pasadena, California. She has a degree in mathematics and writes about mathematics in her website. She has been publishing her carefully crafted stories in the genre for about ten years. Her fiction has appeared in
Fantasy & Science Fiction, Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet, Ideomancer,
and
Shadows of Saturn,
among others. When we first included her fiction in a Year's Best volume, she lived in Massachusetts with “a motley assortment of musical instruments, and a glass Klein bottle.” We hope she still has them.

“The Unstrung Zither” was published in
F & SF,
a leading magazine that went bi-monthly in 2009, but nevertheless continued to publish a lot of excellent fiction (including two more stories found in this volume). This is the second “math” story in this volume. Kathryn, who has a degree in math, says, “I appreciate the story for its mathematical/musical aesthetic logic. Getting to the ending is like reading a good proof.” David, whose doctorate is in literature, says, “the emotional logic is convincing, and the characterization deep and suggestive.”

“T
hey don't look very dangerous,” Xiao Ling Yun said to the aide. Ling Yun wished she understood what Phoenix Command wanted from her. Not that she minded the excuse to take a break from the composition for two flutes and hammered dulcimer that had been stymieing her for the past two weeks.

Through a one-way window in the observation chamber, Xiao Ling Yun saw five adolescents sitting cross-legged on the floor in a semicircle. Before them was a tablet and two brushes. No ink; these were not calligraphy brushes. One of the adolescents, a girl with short, dark hair, leaned over and drew two characters with quick strokes. All five studied the map that appeared on the tablet.

“Nevertheless,” the aide said. “They attempted to assassinate the Phoenix General. We are fortunate to have captured them.”

The aide wrote something on her own tablet, and a map appeared. She circled a region of the map. The tablet enlarged it until it filled the screen. “Circles represent gliders,” the aide said. “Triangles represent dragons.”

Ling Yun peered at the formations. “Who's winning?”

At the aide's instigation, the tablet replayed the last move. A squadron of dragons engaged a squadron of gliders. One dragon turned white—white for death—and vanished from the map. The aide smiled. “The assassins are starting to slip.”

Ling Yun had thought that the Phoenix General desired
the services of a musician to restore order to the fractious ashworlds. She was not the best person for such a purpose, nor the worst: a master musician, yes, but without a sage's philosophical bent of mind. Perhaps they had chosen her on account of her uncle's position as a logistician. She was pragmatic enough not to be offended by the possibility.

“I had not expected prisoners to be offered entertainment,” Ling Yun said, a little dubious. She was surprised that they hadn't been executed, in fact.

“It is not entertainment,” the aide said reprovingly. “Every citizen has a right to education.”

Of course. The government's stance was that the ashworlds already belonged to the empire, whatever the physical reality might be. “Including the classical arts, I presume,” she said. “But I am a musician, not a painter.” Did they want her to tutor the assassins? And if so, why?

“Music is the queen of the arts, is it not?” the aide said.

She had not expected to be discussing the philosophy of music with a soldier. “According to tradition, yes,” Ling Yun said carefully. Her career had been spent writing music that never strayed too much from the boundaries of tradition.

The most important music lesson she had had came not from her tutor, but from a servant in her parents' house. The servant, whose name Ling Yun had deliberately forgotten, liked to sing as he stirred the soup or pounded the day's bread. He didn't have a particularly notable voice. It wavered in the upper register and his vowels drifted when he wasn't paying attention. (She didn't tell him any of this. She didn't talk to him at all. Her parents would have disapproved.) But the servant had two small children who helped him with his tasks, and they chanted the songs, boisterously out of tune.

From watching that servant and his children, Ling Yun learned that the importance of music came not from its ability to move the five elements, but from its ability to affect the heart. She wanted to write music that anyone could hum, music that anyone could enjoy. It was the opposite of the haughty ideal that her tutor taught her to strive toward. Naturally, Ling Yun kept this thought to herself.

The aide scribbled some more on the tablet. In response, an image of a mechanical dragon drew itself across the tablet. It had been painted white, with jagged red markings on its jointed wings.

“Is this a captured dragon?” Ling Yun asked.

“Unfortunately, no,” the aide said. “We caught glimpses of two of the assassins as they came down on dragons, but the dragons disappeared as though they'd been erased. We want to know where they're hiding, and how they're being hidden.”

Ling Yun stared at the dragon. Whoever had drawn it did not have an artist's fluency of line. But everything was precise and carefully proportioned. She could see where the wings connected to the body and the articulations that made motion possible, even, if she squinted, some of the controls by the pi lot's seat.

“Who produced this?”

The aide turned her head toward the window. “The dark-haired girl did. Her name is Wu Wen Zhi.”

It was a masculine name, but they probably did things differently in the ashworlds. Ling Yun felt a rebellious twinge of approval.

Ling Yun said, “Wen Zhi draws you a picture, and you expect it to yield the ashworlders' secrets. Surely she's not as incompetent an assassin as all that. Or did you torture this out of her?”

“No, it's part of the game they're playing with the general,” the aide said.

“I don't see the connection,” she said. And why was the general playing a game with them in the first place?
Wei qi
involved no such thing, nor had the tablet games she had played as a student.

The aide smiled as though she had heard the thought. “It personalizes the experience. When the game calculates the results of combat, it refers to the pilot's emblem to determine her strengths and weaknesses. Take Wen Zhi's dragon, for instance. First of all, the dragon's design indicates that it specializes in close combat, as opposed to Mesketalioth's—” she switched briefly to another dragon painting “—which
has repeating crossbows mounted on its shoulders.” She returned to Wen Zhi's white dragon. “However, notice the stiffness of the lines. The pilot is always alert, but in a way that makes her tense. This can be exploited.”

“The general has an emblem in the game, too, I presume,” Ling Yun said.

“Of course,” the aide said, but she didn't volunteer to show it to Ling Yun. “Let me tell you about our five assassins.

“Wu Wen Zhi comes from Colony One.” The empire's two original colonies had been given numbers rather than names. “Wen Zhi has tried to kill herself three times already. She doesn't sleep well at night, but she refuses to meditate, and she won't take medications.”

I wouldn't either
, Ling Yun thought.

“The young man with the long braid is Ko. He's lived on several of the ashworlds and speaks multiple languages, but his accent suggests that he comes from Arani. Interestingly enough, Ko alerted us to the third of Wen Zhi's suicide attempts. Wen Zhi didn't take this well.

“The scarred one sitting next to Ko is Mesketalioth. He's from Straken Okh. We suspect that he worked for Straken's intelligence division before he was recruited by the Dragon Corps.

“The girl with the light hair is Periet, although the others call her Perias. We haven't figured out why, and they look at us as though we're crazy when we ask them about it, although she'll answer to either name. Our linguists tell us that Perias is the masculine form of her name; our doctors confirm that she is indeed a girl. She comes from Kiris. Don't be fooled by her sweet manners. She's the one who destroyed Shang Yuan.”

Ling Yun opened her mouth, then found her voice. “
Her
?” Shang Yuan had been a city of several million people. It had been obliterated during the Festival of Lanterns, for which it had been famous. “I thought that the concussive storm was a natural disaster.”

The aide gave Ling Yun a singularly cynical look. “Natural disasters don't flatten every building in the city and cause all the lanterns to explode. It was an elemental attack.”

“I suppose this is classified information.”

“It is, technically, not that many people haven't guessed.”

“How much help did she have?”

The aide's mouth twisted. “Ashworld Kiris didn't authorize the attack. As near as we can determine, Periet did it all by herself.”

“All right,” Ling Yun said. She paced to the one-way window and watched Periet-Perias, trying to map the massacre onto the girl's open, cheerful expression. “Who's the fifth one now skulking in a corner?”

“That's Li Cheng Guo, from Colony Two,” the aide said. “He killed two of our guards on the first day. Actually, they all did their share of killing on the way in, although Periet takes the prize.”

“That's terrible,” Ling Yun said. But what she was thinking was,
The ashworlds must be terribly desperate, to send children
. The Phoenix General had had the ashworlds' leader assassinated two years ago; this must be their counterstroke. “So,” she said, “one assassin from each ashworld.” Colony One and Colony Two; Arani, Straken Okh, and Kiris. The latter three had been founded by nations that had since been conquered by the empire.

“Correct.” The aide rolled the brush around in her hand. “The Phoenix General wants you to discover the assassins' secret.”

Oh no
, Ling Yun thought. For all the honors that the empress had lavished on the Phoenix General, he was still known as the Mad General. He had started out as a glider pilot, and everyone knew that glider pilots were crazy. Their extreme affinity for fire and wood unbalanced their minds.

On the other hand, Ling Yun had a lifetime's practice of bowing before those of greater standing, however much it chafed, and the man had produced undeniable results. She could respect that.

“I'm no soldier,” Ling Yun said, “and no interrogator. What would you like me to do?”

The aide smiled. “Each assassin has an emblem in the game.”

Ling Yun had a sudden memory of a self-portrait she had
drawn when she was a child. It was still in the hallway of her parents' house, to her embarrassment: lopsided face with tiny eyes and a dot for a nose, scribbly hair, arms spread wide. “Why did they agree to this game?” she asked.

“They are playing because it was that or die. But they have some hidden purpose of their own, and time may be running out. You must study the game—we'll provide analyses for you, as we hardly expect you to become a tactician—and study the dragons. Compose a suite of five pieces, one for each dragon—for each pilot.”

“Pilot?”

“They're pilots in their minds, although we're only certain that Periet and Mesketalioth have the training. Maybe the secret is just that they found blockade runners to drop them off.” The aide didn't sound convinced.

“One piece for each dragon. You think that by translating their self-representations into music, the supreme art, you will learn their secret, and how to defeat them.”

“Precisely.”

“I will do what I can,” Xiao Ling Yun said.

“I'm sure you will,” the aide said.

 

Xiao Ling Yun's ancestors had worshipped dragons. At the harvest festival, they poured libations of rice wine to the twin dragons of the greatmoon and the smallmoon. When the empire's skies were afire with the summer's meteor showers, people would burn incense for the souls of the falling stars.

You could still see fire in the sky, most nights, festive and beautiful, but no one brought out incense. The light came from battles high in the atmosphere, battles between the ashworlders' metal dragons and the empire's Phoenix Corps.

When she was a child, Ling Yun's uncle had made her a toy glider, a flimsy-looking thing of bamboo and paper, with tiny slivers to represent the wing-mounted flame-throwers. He had painted the red-and-gold emblem of the Phoenix Corps on each wing. “Uncle,” she asked, “why do we fight with fire when the gliders are made of wood? Isn't it dangerous?”

Her uncle patted her hand and smiled. “Remember the cycle of elements, little one.”

She thought about it: metal cut wood, wood split earth, earth drank water, water doused fire, and—“Fire melts metal,” she said.

“Indeed,” he said. “The ashworlds abound in metal, mined from the asteroid belts. Therefore their dragons are built of metal. We must use fire to defeat metal.”

“But wood
burns
,” Ling Yun said, wondering, despite all her lessons and the habits of obedience, if her uncle were right in the head. She turned the glider around in her hands, testing the paper wings. They flexed under her touch.

“So does the phoenix,” her uncle said.

Ling Yun squinted, trying to reconcile fire-defeats-metal with fire-burns-wood and fire-goes-down-in-flames.

Taking pity on her, her uncle added, “The phoenix is a symbol that came to us by conquest, from the southern spicelands.” He laughed at her wide eyes. “Oh, yes—do you think that for thousands and thousands of years, the empire has never been conquered? You'll find all the old, ugly stories in the history books, of the Boar Banner and the Tiger Banner, the woman who brought down the wall, the Outsider Dynasty with its great fleets….”

Ling Yun took note of the things that he had mentioned so she could look them up later.

“Come, Ling Yun,” her uncle said. “Why don't we go outside and test the glider?”

She sensed that he was preventing her from asking further questions. But if he didn't want her to know, why had he told her about the phoenix in the first place?

Still, she loved the way the glider felt in her hand, and her uncle didn't visit very often. “All right,” she said.

They went into the courtyard with its broad flagstones and pond, and spoke no more of the elements.

 

Ling Yun started composing the suite on the
wuxian qin
, the five-stringed zither. She had brought her favorite one with her. The military was accustomed to transporting fragile
instruments, thanks to the Phoenix Corps, whose gliders had to be attuned to the elements.

For suicidal, dark-haired Wu Wen Zhi, Ling Yun wrote a disjunct melody with tense articulations, reflecting the mixed power and turmoil she saw in the girl's white dragon. White and red, bone and blood, death and fortune. The aide said Wen Zhi had killed six people since landing in the empire. The dragon had nine markings. Ling Yun trusted the dragon. Wen Zhi did not strike her as the subtle type. The aide's response to this observation was a pained laugh.