Юн Ли - Revenant Gun

The figure rapidly executed three meditations, orienting itself at precise angles with respect to the chamber’s walls. The local calendar shifted yet again.

The lock disengaged. The timer went dark. Hemiola chided itself for having doubted the hexarch, and never mind his unusual choice of body, or his gear.

“Well, we should see to his needs,” Hemiola said, unable to keep from tinting blue-green in relief.

Rhombus flashed rudely. “As if Kujen ever hesitated to summon us for whatever manual task he needed an extra pair of grippers for. You just want to gawk.”

Hemiola didn’t deign to respond. Instead, it hovered out of the control room at a decorous speed. Around it, the base came alive in response to the hexarch’s arrival. Human-breathable air circulated through the rest of the complex and lights turned on. Hemiola remembered the rock garden that it and Sieve had arranged during the last visit, when they’d surfaced to see to the hexarch’s voidmoth. It wondered, not a little wistfully, if the hexarch would take notice of the garden this time.

The hexarch had removed his suit by the time Hemiola arrived to greet him. He was indeed a womanform, his hair cropped short in a disconcertingly military style that framed a yellow-pale oval face with dark eyes. His clothes were of plain dark fabric. No lace, no scarves, no jewelry except a pendant tucked under his shirt. He’d already unzipped his jacket and folded it over a spare chair.

Hemiola was considerably surprised when the hexarch addressed him directly. “Hello there,” he said. “What would you like me to call you?”

Flustered, Hemiola went dark. How was it supposed to respond to that?

More importantly, why was the hexarch speaking not in his accustomed dialect, but in a drawl? It knew that drawl—

“Let me guess,” the hexarch said, his speech forms uncharacteristically informal. Not impolite, just informal. “There’s confusion about who I am.”

Deciding that it didn’t want to risk offending the hexarch, or whoever it was, Hemiola flashed a simple acknowledgment, then waited.

“The hexarch is busy with other matters,” said the not-hexarch. “I’m Shuos Jedao.”

Shuos Jedao. The Immolation Fox, and the hexarch’s sometime lover. Why was he here without the hexarch?

“You must have a lot of questions,” Jedao said, “but it’s been a long voyage. Could I trouble you for a glass of water?”

Hemiola emitted a mortified gleep. Surely it should be serving tea, or wine-of-roses, or whiskey.

Jedao smiled the tilted smile that Hemiola remembered so well, constant across every body he’d appeared in. “No, really, whatever you have.”

Over the servitors’ channel, Hemiola explained the situation. “Help?” Hemiola asked. Sieve acknowledged.

“Someone’s coming with a glass of water,” Hemiola told Jedao, unthinkingly using Machine Universal.

“Thank you, much appreciated,” Jedao said.

Hemiola colored pink in mortification when it realized what it had done.

“I can understand your language if it doesn’t go by too quickly,” Jedao said with a series of finger-taps in Simplified Machine Universal. “I didn’t mean to embarrass you.”

True, the absence of color and the geometrical placement of lights flattened the language’s nuances. But Hemiola was disinclined to quibble. It hadn’t expected to be addressed in its own language at all.

Just then, Sieve entered with a tray containing the requested glass of water and, even more mortifyingly, a ration bar . In the past, the hexarch had always brought his own food. He’d replenished the store of ration bars each visit—the bars were rated for up to 240 years under standard conditions, whatever that meant—in case of emergency. Nevertheless, Hemiola couldn’t help but feel responsible for the lack of decent edibles.

“Thank you,” Jedao said to Sieve. “If you don’t mind—?”

Sieve bobbed a nod.

“He asked what I wanted him to call me ,” Hemiola said privately to Sieve.

“What did you tell him?” Sieve said, with aggravating reasonableness.

“I haven’t answered yet.”

If the ration bar displeased Jedao, he gave no sign. At last he wiped the crumbs from his mouth and folded up the wrapper on a corner of the tray. Sieve whisked it away, leaving Hemiola alone with him. Thanks so much , Hemiola thought.

“How else can we serve you?” Hemiola said at last.

“I was hoping to look something up in the archives,” Jedao said. “You’re in charge of safekeeping the records, correct?”

“Yes,” Hemiola said. “I hope you know where to look, though, because we’ve never read through the records ourselves.”

“What if I made a copy to take with me?”

Hemiola hesitated just long enough to ask the others what to do.

“He’s the hexarch’s lover, doesn’t matter to me,” was Rhombus’s response.

“Use your judgment,” Sieve said, equally unhelpful.

Jedao lifted an eyebrow.

“We shouldn’t let the records out of our sight,” Hemiola said. “Metaphorically speaking.”

“I can’t stay long,” Jedao said. “That would limit the amount of research I could do. Unless—”

“Unless?”

“Unless one of you came with me to ensure that the records weren’t misused.”

Hemiola thought this over. The proposal was tempting—too tempting. But it couldn’t resist asking for more details. “How long would this journey be?”

“That I can’t say with any certainty,” Jedao said. “But if at any point you need to return home, I have friends who can arrange for transport.”

Hemiola flickered doubtfully.

“Well, you don’t have to decide right this moment,” Jedao said. “I saw a rock garden on my way in, by the way. Some evidence of micrometeorites over the past decades, but still, very nice. Your work?”

“Yes,” Hemiola said. “Mine and the other servitor you met just now.” It didn’t know how to react to Jedao’s casual interest. Resentment that he’d noticed, even though the hexarch never had? Gratitude? Embarrassment that such an inconsequential act of decoration had come to a human’s attention after all?

“There used to be a display case in the archives,” Jedao said. “Would it be all right if I looked at that, at least?”

Hemiola didn’t see why not. “Of course.”

“If you’d show me the way? It’s been a few years.”

It couldn’t think of a reason to say no to that, either. It led the way through the shining passages. Jedao followed. But—“I have a question.”

“Ask,” Jedao said.

“How did you get past the calendrical lock?”

“I made friends with a mathematician,” Jedao said, with a hint of irony that Hemiola didn’t understand. He drew out the pendant, which was engraved with a raven in flight, and fingered it. “There’s an algorithm for fast factorization. The trick is, it relies on exotic effects—and those effects require a nonstandard calendar. So I brought along a computer designed to take advantage of the exotics, shifted the local calendar long enough for it to do its work, then used the solution it generated to crack the lock. It’s a solution Kujen wouldn’t have considered because of his attachment to the high calendar.”

They arrived at the part of the base where the records were stored. It was not a large room. In fact, the bulk of it was taken up by luxurious couches and chaises. The records themselves could be accessed through a dedicated terminal.

The one anomaly in the room was a shrine. At least, Hemiola always thought of it as a shrine, although it did not, to its knowledge, serve a religious purpose. It contained a booklet of badly yellowed paper, preserved in a transparent casket. None of the servitors had dared to take it out and flip through the pages for fear of damaging it. The hexarch had never paid it any heed despite the care he’d gone to to preserve it.