Юн Ли - Revenant Gun

Jedao didn’t waste time on swearing. Instead, he reached for something on his belt.

Hemiola didn’t stick around to find out what he was going to pull. Instead, it sprinted for the opening through which they had entered. Behind it, it heard Jedao saying, in a remarkably mild voice, “You could have let me—” before his voice became inaudible.

It analyzed the labyrinthine passages and made the split-second decision to flee more deeply into the station, rather than back to the needlemoth. It could only assume that 1491625 shared Cheris’s goals. Ayong Primary might not be safe, but better that than to continue traveling with someone who meant the hexarch ill.

The station swallowed it. Hemiola had never before had cause to dash so quickly, but its control systems, inherited from earlier servitors, guided it well. It received a kaleidoscope impression of lovingly polished walls, hand- and footholds for humans, lights; periodic closets marked EMERGENCY SUITS; the occasional stray nook containing sculptures or flower arrangements for passers-by to contemplate. A number of humans spotted it and flattened themselves against the walls as it zoomed by.

Hemiola finally came to a stop in a closet unoccupied by humans or servitors. This area of the station was less well maintained than the others, with stray graffiti scratched into the floor. The scratches depicted cartoon animals armed with gardening tools. Under other circumstances, Hemiola would have puzzled over their meaning.

It surveyed its surroundings. What it had taken for a closet must in fact be someone’s... home? To one side rested a thick quilted blanket, rolled up with a pillow atop it. There was a knee-level table to the other side, adorned only with a small meditation focus in the shape of a kneeling wolf. A chest of clothes in the corner. That was all.

Assured that it was safe for the moment, Hemiola tucked itself into an empty corner and brooded. How could it have been so naive? It should have suspected something was wrong the moment Jedao—Cheris—asked for a copy of the archives. By now they could have copied the data and broadcast it everywhere.

There was something worse than being betrayed by Cheris or Jedao or whoever they were. Face it, “Immolation Fox” didn’t imply great things about their reliability no matter what guise they wore. No: it was the existence of not one but multiple servitors—a whole enclave, and a powerful one—that planned to destroy a hexarch.

Either something had gone badly rotten with servitor society, or something had gone even worse with the hexarch. But which?

Hexarchs (and heptarchs, back in the day) were by no means infallible. This much it understood. A Rose in Three Revolutions even featured a decadent, meddling, obstructionist heptarch (Shuos, of course). On the other hand, Hemiola had always believed that the servitors’ role was to carry out background tasks, not to interfere with government. Had it been wrong all this time?

At least it had a copy of the hexarch’s archives. It had rearranged its memory storage to make room for it, not difficult. Perhaps perusing them now would reveal something that would make the world make sense.

So deeply entangled was Hemiola in its reflections that the entrance of a human took it by surprise. More accurately, a gangly, tan-skinned girl barely into adolescence, her head shaved and her mauve robes frayed at the hem.

“Who are you ?” the girl said in a distinctly hostile voice. “If you’re also here to tell me that I’m overdue on my assignment, I already know that.”

Hemiola levitated in the direction of the door, since its presence was clearly unwanted. Whoever she was.

“No, wait, stay,” she said. “Tell me who you are. Which enclave are you from?”

She knew about enclaves? Hemiola couldn’t tell whether this was good news or bad news. But it stopped. “Tefos Enclave,” it said, using Machine Universal by reflex. “It’s a Nirai enclave.”

“Huh,” she said, “never heard of it. Is it far away? I guess this is space, everything’s far away.”

She was fluent in Machine Universal. Upon reflection, if Cheris was, others could be too.

The girl set down her bag and kicked the wall, which reverberated dully. “It’s been such a terrible day. I guess it’s only universal justice that I’m sent an objective stranger to witness my failings, or something. I hate this paper and if I don’t turn it in tonight , I’m out of the running for sure.”

“Should I leave you to your paper?” Hemiola asked cautiously. Because if it didn’t need to pay attention to this, it could be reviewing the hexarch’s notes. On the one hand, it would be rude to ignore its host, especially considering it was an intruder. On the other, it wasn’t sure that its host cared what it did so long as it provided a passive audience.

“Yeah, you didn’t come all the way from Tefos”—she echoed the high language pronunciation with the hand sign for the name in Simplified Machine Universal—“just to help me procrastinate on this. But since you’re here anyway, what do you think I should do? We have very few Nirai servitors on Ayong Primary, and my instructors are always going on about how objective truth can withstand assault from all directions and so on and so forth. Which is not the way Rahal tribunals work in real life, but it makes for pretty speeches, doesn’t it?”

Hemiola blinked inquiringly at her. It didn’t know much about the Rahal except by reputation. By now, however, it had figured out that she was studying to take the entrance examinations for Rahal Academy. It hoped she didn’t expect it to help her with her paper. Among other things, Hemiola didn’t have the faintest idea how rhetoric worked.

The girl stared at it, then sighed. “You’re no help.” Then she stomped over to another corner of the room, slumped against the wall, and slid down to sit sprawled against it, hugging her knees. “This is what I get for arguing with the magistrate-errant’s judgment in class last week.”

“What ruling?” Hemiola asked, perhaps unwisely.

“Ayong Primary’s head magistrate originally ruled that one of the local observances was lawful,” she said. “It caught the authorities’ attention because a small group of people were practicing it shortly after one of the scheduled remembrances. It should have ended there, but we’re cursed with an unusually tight-assed magistrate-errant, and when he reviewed the past year’s cases, he picked that one to overturn. Now a bunch of perfectly ordinary people are in danger of being declared heretics.” She kicked the wall again. “I should have kept my mouth shut about the whole thing, except it’s so stupid . My grandparents are going to kill me. Assuming they don’t send the Vidona after me when my essay proves less than acceptable.”

Hemiola’s bafflement turned to alarm when it detected the approach of another servitor. Where could it go, though? And how could it leave when this human girl had told it to stay?

Miserably, it held its position. The girl was scrubbing at her face. Oh, no, she was crying . Crying was something it had only seen humans do in dramas, and in dramas they did it much more prettily, at dramatic moments, with swelling music in the background. Instead, the girl was getting mucus on her sleeve, and Hemiola didn’t understand the context, and it doubted she would appreciate it providing swelling music on her behalf.

Why didn’t you tell me what to do? Hemiola thought, resenting not the girl—who, after all deserved the courtesy due a new-met stranger—but the hexarch and Jedao. It had never witnessed either of them doing anything as sentimental as crying. There was no way it could leave her in this state.