Юн Ли - Revenant Gun

“Feeding a hungry girl?” Hemiola said, wondering what was so difficult about interpreting the passage.

“Yes, but why?”

It couldn’t see the point of the question. “Because she was hungry and he had food?”

Jedao massaged his temples. “I need to think about this. I wonder what else is in here. According to the index, we have a whole library’s worth of notes here. You read faster than I do, so we have a chance. Especially considering how much time we’re going to be spending in transit anyway.”

Hemiola caught itself admiring the doodle. “I wonder what that is,” it said. “I didn’t know the hexarch liked to draw.”

“The old Nirai emblem, before they replaced it with the modern voidmoth. He told me once he learned draughtsmanship the old-fashioned way, before all this grid assistance business. Showed me a collection of T-squares and compasses and ellipse templates. Although by the time I knew him, he could draw circles damn near perfect freehand. It must have been required in the Nirai curriculum once.” His mouth pulled up on one side. “He scared me once by telling me the Shuos used to require their cadets to speak in code for an entire semester. Or maybe that was the Andan, back before the Shuos split off from them, I can never remember.”

Jedao shook his head. “Some of this material is bound to get technical. I can handle mathematics if necessary”—again that note of irony—“but I’m no engineer.”

“Neither am I,” Hemiola said. “I don’t suppose—?”

“I’m hardly a gate mechanics specialist,” 1491625 said from the pilot’s seat, “although we have some textbooks and what Jedao says is a truly terrible interactive tutorial.”

“Well, we’ll have to make the most of it,” Jedao said.

“How fast do you read?” Hemiola said.

“I can read 200 words per minute of this kind of text. Assuming there aren’t secret codes hidden in the recipes. Which is a possibility with someone like Kujen.”

“All right,” Hemiola said, “would you rather read from the beginning, or take the more modern material?”

“More modern material,” Jedao said after a pause. “On the grounds that I need to know where he is now, not what he was up to almost a millennium ago.”

It calculated the dividing line. “Start with that file, then,” it suggested.

Jedao called up the relevant file. “Works for me. If anything interesting comes up, flag it for my attention. For whatever values of ‘interesting’ seem useful to you.” He settled in to read.

Hemiola did likewise. It was prying. It knew it was prying. Yet it couldn’t help warming to the hexarch. Whatever Jedao found disturbing about the incident recounted in that first entry, surely taking care of a hungry child was laudable?

“Do people still go hungry in the hexarchate?” it asked as it turned to the next entry.

“They probably do now,” 1491625 said with a cynical greenish flicker. “In the past, less so, unless you lived right up against some battle. Which describes a lot of places these days.”

Hemiola invited elaboration.

“Civil unrest,” Jedao said, “as the result of some necessary reform.”

“If that’s what you want to call it,” 1491625 said.

Hemiola blinked inquisitively.

“Old argument,” Jedao said, his eyes troubled.

Hemiola kept reading until it found another mention of the hungry girl. This one was embedded in notes on neuropsychology. The notes themselves were brief to the point of being telegraphic. Not surprising; it couldn’t imagine that the material had posed a challenge to the hexarch even as a cadet. If it had been skimming any faster, it would have missed the paragraph entirely.

Spotted her again , the hexarch said in what looked like quickly dashed-off handwriting. And, in the margin of the next page: My sister was about her age when she died .

“Jedao?” Hemiola said.

Jedao didn’t look up. “Mmm?”

“Who was the hexarch’s sister?”

“The hexarch’s what ?”

Hemiola pointed out the marginal note.

“I never heard of any siblings,” Jedao said, “much less that he cared—” He checked himself from whatever he’d been about to say. “I don’t suppose we have any idea how old Kujen was when he wrote this.”

“If we can figure out which course he was taking notes on,” 1491625 said after it glanced over the page, “we can compare it to the standard Nirai curriculum.”

“He was admitted at the age of fourteen,” Jedao said. “He mentioned that to me once. Thought it was amusing how many people thought he needed ‘protection.’ And he graduated early, too, in four years instead of the usual five. He said it could have been three if he hadn’t studied multiple specialties. I don’t think he was being boastful.”

Hemiola tried to imagine the hexarch as a fourteen-year-old cadet experimenting with flatbread recipes and failed. “I wonder why he didn’t report the girl, whoever she was, to the authorities,” it said. “Surely someone would have taken her in.”

While 1491625 and Jedao puzzled over Nirai Academy’s curricula, Hemiola kept reading. It found the answer to its question not long afterward. This one was tucked away next to a cryptic table of data—this one dated. (The hexarch had also showed his work on a number of computations, in what Hemiola would have called a sarcastic manner. It was certain that the hexarch could have done all of that in his head.)

One of my classmates asked me why I don’t just call the Vidona , the hexarch said. As if I don’t remember what life was like in a Vidona orphanage. I’m not sure the girl would thank me .

And, tucked in next to a scatter plot: I learned her name today, in exchange for more flatbread and candies. It’s Meveri. She’s probably lying about that. I used to do that too. Six years old and she already knows.

Hemiola was about to point this out to Jedao, too, in case he was interested. But 1491625 spoke first. “Advanced course of study,” it said. “The kind of thing senior Nirai come back to the academy to research if they’re good enough to be invited back. He was doing that as a cadet.”

“It wouldn’t have been a surprise to anyone that he was going to end up a heptarch,” Jedao said. “Still, it would probably have been toward the end of his stay at academy.”

“I found a date on this entry,” Hemiola said. “The year was 359.” It also pointed out the orphanage comment.

Jedao looked grim. “I suppose he had his reasons, but did he honestly think that passing scraps of food to a street child that young, rather than getting her to the authorities, was doing her any favors?”

“We don’t know what the authorities were like back then,” 1491625 said. “Maybe someone else was looking out for this Meveri.”

“If only your people had existed in those days,” Jedao said. “We might have some chance of tracking down additional records of her.”

“We have our own archivists,” 1491625 said, “but the heptarchate was a big place.”

Hemiola tuned them out. It wanted to know what had become of Meveri. While the hexarch and Jedao had never brought children with them to Tefos Base, the heroine of A Rose in Three Revolutions had an eight-year-old niece. It supposed six-year-old children behaved differently from eight-year-olds. And how was a six-year-old surviving on only the occasional gift of flatbreads, anyway?

The next swathe of pages made no mention of Meveri whatsoever. Hemiola suffered through confidence intervals, strange attractors, and cryptic chains of biochemical reactions before finding her again. This time the hexarch devoted an entire page to her, along with several scratched-out sketches. While the hexarch might have been a competent draughtsman, his portraits left something to be desired. He eventually settled for a verbal description.