Yoon Ha Lee’s fiction has appeared in Clarkesworld, Tor. com, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Lightspeed, and other venues. The first volume of his space opera trilogy, Ninefox Gambit, will be published by Solaris Books in 2016. He lives in Louisiana with his family and an extremely lazy cat, and has not yet been eaten by gators.

THE COLD INEQUALITIES

Yoon Ha Lee

 

Sentinel Anzhmir only noticed the discrepancy because of one of her favorite books. At least, she was almost certain it had been a book, rather than a game, or an escritoire, or a pair of shoes. She had not accessed it in some time.

The archiveship’s master index showed no change. It was Anzhmir’s duty to monitor the jewel-flicker of her freight of quantum blossoms in their dreaming, as well as the more mundane systems that regulated navigation, temperature, the minutiae of maintenance. The archiveship’s garden consisted of a compressed and sequenced cross-selection of human minds, everything from pastry chefs to physicists to plumbers. The selection was designed to accommodate any reasonable situation the colony-seed might find itself in, and a great many unreasonable ones as well.

Anzhmir had reached for the book’s address in memory, and found instead a wholly unfamiliar piece of lore. The discrepancy could only mean one thing: a stowaway.

She knew what must be done, although she regretted it already. As sentinel, she was made to harvest lives. Hers was a useful archetype. And once she trapped the stowaway, she would zero it utterly.

The archiveship’s designers had compressed most of its contents, desiring to take as many blossoms and their necessaries of culture and knowledge as possible. The compression algorithm depended on the strict sequencing of the data, and the stowaway, by interfering with the sequencing, threatened the cargo entire. At the same time, the designers had realized that the sentinel would require maneuvering space both for her own sanity and to ensure that no stowaways escaped her gaze. So it was that Anzhmir could reconfigure the garden into a fortress, all firewall glory and cryptic gates, and populate it with foxes, tigers, serpents: a small fierce cadre of polysemous seducers, hunters, poisoners, the algorithmic extracts of old legends.

As she did so, a designated subpersona examined the intrusion that had been left where one of her favorite books had once lived. She cordoned off the subpersona to avoid any additional potential contamination.

That left a third task: reviewing the master index to assess the extent of the damage. The compression algorithm was finicky about placement. How much could be restored from backups? Assuming the backups hadn’t been corrupted as well.

If it had not been for the fact of failure already in progress, Anzhmir would have felt well prepared to deal with the situation.

At this point, it is worth examining the matter of Anzhmir’s favorite books.

The Archive Collective usually refers to the sum of colonist-blossoms, rather than to their personal effects; but sometimes the term is used for the latter as well. It is too expensive to send people’s bodies, with their bloated tissues and fluids, to the stars. It is another matter to boil humans down to blossoms of thought, and to transport those, preserved in a medium of chilly computational splendor. Once the archiveship arrives and its nanites have prepared the site, only then will the blossoms be planted in bodies built atom by atom to accommodate the waiting environment.

If people—the colony’s purpose—are too expensive to transport in their original medium, then mere belongings, from wombsilk jewelry to antique inkwells, are out of the question. But objects can be scanned more easily than people, to be reconstituted. Indeed, some of the colonists filled their data allotments with such blueprints. Many, however, recognized the value of culture. Some brought journals to augment their flux of memories. Others brought broader context: music popular or eccentric, sports matches and the associated commentaries, analyses of the semiotics of museum gallery layouts.

Anzhmir does not have an allotment of her own. She was pared down to a minimum of name and function, silhouette-sleek. But the voyage is a long one, and she can—with care—access the colonists’ allotments.

She discovered (rediscovered?) a love of books. Like many lovers of books, she hates to confine herself to a short list of favorites, but for our purposes, she regards three above all others.

One is an obscure Pedantist volume called The Commercialization of Maps. Its author purports to explain how to take any map, whether that of a drowned archipelago, a genealogy of bygone experimental mice, or a moss-tiger’s hunting range, and transform it into a bestselling novel. The examples of such successes are of dubious verity, as are the maps themselves. When Anzhmir reads, she imagines the maps flaring up from the paragraphs as though scribed in ink of phoenixes. She riffles through the archiveship’s storage for maps and dreams of alchemizing them into tales themselves worthy of inclusion in the Collective.

One book is a cookbook, discovered among the effects of a settler whose original body perished during the conversion into blossomform. Having no proper title, it goes by the designation Culinary Collation Mogh-1367812313 Rukn. The interested reader may deduce from the call number that it was not a high priority for being processed. The units of measure are inconsistent, some (many) of the ingredients beyond conjecture, a number of words hopelessly misspelled.

Even so, Anzhmir fantasizes that someday this cookbook will become more than a dry recitation of recipes and emerge as food. She has no memories of her own that deal with food, but she wanders through others’. The sweetness of rice chewed long in a rare moment of luxury. Chicken soup with the piquancy of ginseng and lemongrass, the floating crunch of fresh-chopped green onion. Frozen juice bars in the shapes of sharks, grape on the outside and rich berry on the inside, which freeze your teeth when you bite in and leave your tongue stained purple and magenta. Sometimes the yearning for a meal overcomes her. But she can no more eat than she can walk or sleep, and so she thanks whoever included the cookbook, as well as all the people who remember food so vigorously, and contents herself with phantom feasts.

One is a volume of poetry, The Song of Downward Bones, dedicated to the flesh-gods of a dead sect. The translation notes several lacunae where scholars interpolated anything from oracular laments to digressions on local trade in perfumes. Curiously, Anzhmir, who lingers so wistfully on the aromas of food, is little interested in scents concocted for human vanity.

Anzhmir originally regarded poetry as a matter of utility rather than beauty, with devices such as alliteration used to focus the mind and make phrases-of-faith easier to remember. The Song of Downward Bones taught her not that verse could be beautiful but that it could be profane. She poked at its cantos the way one might nudge a carcass with a flinching toe. The world the archiveship left behind was a world of profanities, or so the librarians assured her. She hopes never to forget this.

It is this last book that has been purged or misplaced.

Before her discovery of the stowaway, if asked which of these books was her favorite, which she would have least liked to lose, Anzhmir would not have been able to decide. The absence of a simple algorithmic means of decision itself should have alerted her that her own situation was not as simple as she had always thought.

The fortress reconfigured into a fractal of dead ends. Anzhmir’s shapeshifters patrolled the fortress, as versatile as water. Anzhmir did not disturb her essential cargo of souls, lost in their own conceptions of darkness and distance. She ran the checksums, imperative absolute, knowing that the stowaway, by the fact of its presence, was unlikely to respect the archiveship’s mission of preservation.

The foxes slipped like smoke through the haze of probability paths, here and there and all points in between at once. They peered into underground desires, took on the mannerisms of lovers abandoned or enemies clasped tight, lingered at unlikely junctures. They found conflations and confusions, a noo-sphere of archetypes knotted from the histories, but no stowaway.

The tigers did no better. They prowled up and down and sideways through the entangled passages, quicksilver-leaping from dream to dream, across walkway shadows cast by furtive unlanterns of remembered sunlight.

There was a saying in a chant-of-annihilation that Anzhmir had unearthed early in the voyage: tigers respect no seasons. The only two seasons the archive-ship acknowledged were winter and not-winter, cold metal pallor in contrast to the misted impressions of long-ago typhoons, wind-flattened grasses, even snow slanting from velvet skies. Anzhmir ached sometimes, knowing herself no different from the tigers in her ignorance of sensation. The tigers traipsed through memories of swamp without leaving ripples in the ghost-water, and knew nothing of wet or warmth or the sucking mud. The only odors they knew were numerical anomalies, not the carnal red pulse of meat. For all this, predator was a concept that could be crafted either in flesh or in polymorphic data structures. It was a pity that hunger, apparently, did not suffice.

The serpents enjoyed no better success. They ran to ground a myriad of fragmented clues, a society of secrets, all pointing in different directions.

Anzhmir’s last hope, the subpersona examining the intrusion, zeroed itself suddenly. Anzhmir suppressed her alarm.

“I’m right here where I’ve always been,” a voice said to Anzhmir.

Praying that she had isolated the stowaway in time, she split herself into a subpersona instance and slammed down wall after wall around herself. Although she didn’t enjoy being toyed with, or the mounting fear, she knew her duty. “The regulations pertaining to the Archive Collective are unambiguous,” she said to the stowaway. She presented it with the entire document in one jagged datablast, and prepared to zero both this isolated subpersona along with the intruder.

She was only one Anzhmir in a society of Anzhmirs, expendable.

She triggered the zero.

Nothing happened.

Don’t panic, Anzhmir said to herself, with no little irony. Death was a small thing. The survival of her line wasn’t in doubt, even if her personal survival meant nothing compared to what she guarded.

“You are an unauthorized presence,” Anzhmir said.

“Yes,” the voice said with eerie calm. “If you kill me, I will be gone forever.”

Anzhmir had no idea what she had looked like in life, but that didn’t matter. She could draw on a library of avatars. So she imaged herself as a soldier, tall, with crisscrossed scars over dark skin, wearing the parchment-colored uniform of the Archive Guard.

Whether intending insult, or merely revealing lack of imagination, the stowaway imaged itself the same way.

“The higher death is difficult,” Anzhmir said to it, “but you should have considered that before you sneaked aboard.”

Worries pecked at her: What had the stowaway displaced to make room for itself? Were there yet more, speaking to other Anzhmir subpersonae? Was the stowaway even now expanding its boundaries by chewing through the blossoms the librarians had chosen for the colony?

She had to gather herself for another attempt. In the meantime, keep it talking. Perhaps she could buy time—if not for herself, then for other defenses outside this slice of blossomspace. “What’s your name?” she asked.

“A name is a small thing,” it said. “I had a family, and a face, and a history. But that’s not why I’m here.”

Anzhmir was nonplussed. “Why are you here, then?”

The stowaway smiled at her, sharp as paper. “I came here to tell you a story.”

Suppose you need to prioritize items in a set. For instance, you could assign a unique nonnegative integer value to each item, where a higher value indicates that the item is more important. To rescue a lover from certain death may have a value of 200,109 and is (the lover hopes, at any rate) unlikely to have a value of 3. Perhaps this priority 3 item is to recycle a box of souvenirs from High-City Yau. More compactly, recycle < rescue, since 3 < 200,109. (The choice of notation, < for inequality, is not accidental.)

In general, we can prioritize in this manner if the following four rules are always true:

(1) a ≤ a for all items a in the set. At any given moment, anyway, that item has the same priority as itself.

(2) For items a and b, if a ≤ b and b ≤ a, then in fact a is b.

(3) If a ≤ b and b ≤ c, then a ≤ c.

(4) For any pair of items a and b in the set, either a ≤ b or b ≤ a.

Mathematically, this business of prioritizing is known as a total order.

However, we have a reason for our change of terminology.

“Stories?” Anzhmir said, making no effort to conceal her bewilderment. “The Archive is full of books, stories, memories.”

“Yes,” the stowaway said, “but whose stories survived?”

The question didn’t merit thought. The colonists’ stories had been preserved, what else? “If you have something to say, say it plainly.”

At any moment the walls might flatten them both. This might be a farce of parley, but Anzhmir was transcribing it anyway and appending her notes in the hopes that the other Anzhmirs would find some useful information therein. She imagined that she heard tigers pacing outside, that a hot wind disturbed the fragile blossoms.

“Once upon a time—”

Anzhmir did not want to listen. The only stories that belonged here were the stories the colonists had selected—that the librarians had authorized. Yet she had nowhere to go, and anything the stowaway let slip might be a clue as to its weaknesses.

The stowaway spoke in a voice like rust. “—there was a girl whose parents came from the drown-towns. Even so, the quality of the water where the family lived was terrible. The girl had three siblings. In the evenings she told them stories about the drown-towns’ fate. In her imagination they joined the fabled Dragon Court. The people who didn’t escape the rising waters became courtiers to the Dragon Queen in her palace of coral and whalebone. Her parents didn’t like this reminder of their past, but they held their tongues.”

“The stories of drown-town refugees don’t concern me,” Anzhmir said scornfully. If the refugees had had anything to offer, the librarians would have preserved them, too. As it stood, Anzhmir would have to purge this story at the earliest opportunity. Even if a single story took up little space, infinitesimals could yet sum to significance; and she had no way of knowing how many of these conversations were taking place, with other iterations of herself and the stowaway.

Anzhmir exhaled, and foxes sought to charm the stowaway from its mission of words. They whispered of the silk of surrender, the scouring joy of mutual conflagration. None of their promised caresses had any effect. The stowaway remained intent on Anzhmir herself, as though it had mapped and stapled each of her constituent heuristics to a nowhere singularity.

“Once upon a world there was a girl who taught herself to read from food wrappers and propaganda pamphlets and the occasional smudged triplicate form,” the stowaway continued. “She didn’t learn for a long time that people didn’t just use writing for these things, but for stories. Stories were something that people passed between themselves at the shelters while they huddled close together, warming themselves by tales of bird-winged warriors or women who fooled wolves into eating their own tails.”

“I am not concerned with mythologies of literacy or pedagogy, or with wolves for that matter,” Anzhmir said.

She exhaled again. The snakes, mirror-wise, sickle-eyed, struck. For a moment Anzhmir dared to hope—but no, the stowaway sidestepped the snakes’ trajectories.

The stowaway spoke as though it had noticed no interruption. “Once upon a war there was a girl who grew to womanhood, as not all girls from the poor quarters did. She signed on to become a soldier-of-piety, although there was no piety in her heart except the credo of survival. She learned the formulas of the faith and recited them when required. She became expert in every weapon they presented to her, including words. She grew, grudgingly, to love the books that the librarians praised above all others, even if none of them had been written in the drown-town languages she had grown up speaking, but in the languages of the glittering high-cities. For all that the librarians were people of the high-cities, they had great expertise in the evaluation of cultural wealth, including that of the drown-towns; they said so themselves.

“And even so, she made of herself a tower. Inside that tower she locked away all the stories she had grown up with, and which had nourished her in the lean years. For the longest time she thought this would suffice. But when a war broke out between the librarians’ sects, between those who would preserve the drown-towns’ lore and those who would discard it, the old stories hatched like raptors.”

“Not everything can be preserved,” Anzhmir said, even as she sensed the fragility of her argument. “Not even by a thousand thousand ships. Someone had to choose.”

The stowaway’s mouth crimped. The motion was perfect. It said, with weary patience, “Did you never question why your own history had to be purged, when you, too, are one of the passengers?”

“I have no idea what you mean,” Anzhmir said.

She had every idea what the stowaway meant.

And she was no longer interested in listening, delaying tactic or no delaying tactic.

She slammed herself shut, grew thorns, flooded moats as deep as heartbreak.

Hinges broke. Thorns snapped. Water evaporated.

“Let me tell you the same story a different way,” the stowaway said.

I will not listen I will not listen I will not listen

She had no choice but to listen. The words lanced into her all at once.

“Once there was a woman walled up in a tower,” the stowaway said. Its face changed word by word: broader bones, deeper scars, more shadows in its eyes. Upon its brow was the quill-and-blossom tattoo of a soldier-of-piety. “Written on every brick was a story, and pressed into every crack was a blossom. Yet for all the wealth of words, the one story the woman was denied was her own.

“The librarians had fought among themselves. This woman had served one of the losing sects, which had endeavored to preserve languages in danger of extinction, and stories told only in remote parts of the world, and paintings to deprecated gods. The winners preserved only the wealthy, the educated, the well-connected. They prepared for them a garden around a distant sun, leaving everyone else, including the losing sects, on the drowning homeworld.

“Nevertheless, the woman could be skinned and reshaped in a way that the favored ones would never have tolerated for themselves. She was sculpted into a useful servant, her story-of-origin scraped away without so much as a thin blanket of replacement. Even so, her hunger for stories would not go away. She devoured the ones that her charges had brought, and some of them became a part of her. But in doing so she became the threat that her masters had feared.”

Anzhmir shattered herself, mirror into knives, and attacked. She couldn’t allow this argument to infect the rest of the ship.

Even so, she wondered if it was true that her own wanderings through the Archive had weakened the blossoms—if she herself was expanding inappropriately through blossomspace and needed to be pruned back so the colonists could survive.

Mathematically, it is easy to construct a situation to which prioritization cannot apply, using a set of only three items. Let’s use Anzhmir’s three books as an example: The Commercialization of Maps, Culinary Collation Mogh-1367812313 Rukn, The Song of Downward Bones.

Consider these books in pairs. Suppose that Anzhmir prefers The Commercialization of Maps to the cookbook, The Song of Downward Bones to The Commercialization of Maps, and the cookbook to The Song of Downward Bones. It is impossible to name a single favourite—highest priority—book.

You may legitimately wonder how many other situations do not permit prioritization; in which a total order does not exist after all.

Anzhmir had braced herself for logic-snares and sizzling barriers and paralytics as she speared into the stowaway.

Too late, she realized that this was the trap. The stowaway’s defenses evaporated before she met them, and she was drawn into its embrace. She could no more escape the shock of recognition than she could flesh herself within the ship’s icy confines. For the stowaway was another Anzhmir: useful archetype.

The stowaway had stitched all of them together, contaminated them with its quiltwork rebellion. Now she was the stowaway.

How many Anzhmirs had been outsmarted by themselves on voyages like this one? How many sentinels, their histories similarly effaced, had had to decide whether their self-preservation would endanger their charges more than their everywhere suicide?

Once upon an inequality.

Now she knew how the story began. It was a very old story, at that.

But how it ended was up to her—who the summation of Anzhmirs chose to be.