Shi Jin gripped her stylus and tried to concentrate on her lesson rather than her grumbling stomach. She had enough trouble understanding why she had to learn Earthlang in the first place—nobody on Garamond spoke it—and now, hungry as she was, concentration was next to impossible.
She looked up at the timer on the wall: still two dozen minutes left to her study session. The timer was the only decoration in her room, a wooden cell about four paces square which contained her bed, some drawers inset in the wall and the work terminal.
The inactivity warning flashed—two flashes and her time would be extended—and she put her hand on the controller, closing Earthlang and opening Calligraphy. Holding the stylus carefully, thumb and forefinger gently stroking the thickness sensors, she started to write the character p’u. ‘The uncarved block’ was what it really meant: the fundamental nature of a thing, the part that stayed unchanged whatever was done to it. She preferred the more complicated characters, enjoyed the tiny twists and curls required to get them just right. Her father had told her that when she was older she would miss the simplicity of the ‘child’s two hundred,’ but so far as she was concerned her life was more than simple enough.
After a while Jin released the stylus and let the program judge her work. She had broadened a line in the component character that meant “monkey in a thicket”—she wanted it to look more like the monkeys she’d seen in vids, all dark and hairy—but the program took points off for exceeding standard line width. She couldn’t help doing more than the program wanted, even though she knew her changes wouldn’t be accepted.
She remembered what her father had said when she told him about it. “Do you think you’re the first person to say that?” he had asked, smiling gently. “People have been writing this way for five thousand years. But who knows? Study hard, learn how we do things now, and maybe someday you’ll be put on the Board of Regulations. Then you could tell the computer, and All-the-Stars, how thick a brushstroke should be.”
That was her father’s answer to everything: study hard, and someday you’ll be one of the people who make the rules. She supposed he must be right: he had studied hard when he was Jin’s age and now he was Colonial Magistrate. His characters were all perfect to the fingertip—he relearned them every time the Board of Regulations issued a change—and he could speak Earthlang just as well as the pilots who came on the food ships.
The food ships . . . that thought made her stomach speak up again, an acid rumbling that made her gag. She had only had a pressed rice cake with a thin layer of protein jelly so far today, and was having trouble keeping her thoughts off her next meal. She had never known the food ships to be so late, though some of the miners spoke darkly of a time twelve years ago when an entire shipment was lost, the ship destroyed by rebels or pirates depending on who you asked, and nearly a quarter of the people in the camp had died.
The timer flashed green, releasing her from her bondage, and the program closed. The computer’s screen resolved to one of the Eight Instructional Poems, in pixel-perfect calligraphy:
Do your duty to your parents.
Honour your elders.
Be at peace with your neighbours.
Instruct sons and grandsons.
Be content in your occupation.
Do not commit offences.
She got up, unsteady, then opened one of the drawers in the wall and pulled out her grey cotton indoor pants and her dark red pleather Technical jacket. She put them on over her basic duty coverall and then closed the drawer, smoothed her short, straight black hair with her hand and walked out the door. She did not really know where to go. She wasn’t sure what time it was: her lessons were metred out in golden hours, the Magistracy’s clock, so she was always out of synch with the planet’s blue hours. On her schedule it was time for the evening meal, but she had already used up her food ration for the day. She wandered down the hall to the small dining room to see if her father was there anyway; he was the only other person on Garamond who lived on golden time like she did.
Her heart jumped for a moment when she saw him sitting at the table, chewing thoughtfully at something—could the ship possibly have come without her knowing it?—but when he saw her and passed his plate she saw immediately that whatever was on it was not food.
“Sealant gum,” he said after carefully spitting what he was chewing into a cup. “It is not toxic, and it makes the hunger less.”
Jin gave him a quick low bow, sat down. On the plate in front of her was a disk about two fingers thick of clear silicone, cut into wedges. Picking up her sticks she seized one of the wedges, put it in her mouth, then chewed quietly for a few minutes as her father did the same. Finally, when she thought the taste was about to make her vomit up what little actual food she had had that day, she picked up her cup and spat the gum into it.
She woke sometime in the night, the memory of the noise that had awakened her already fading. Some kind of bang, and an anxious voice down the hall . . . She rubbed her eyes and reached out to key the lights. Nothing happened. She lay very still, calmed her breathing, heard nothing—not even, she realized, the sound of the mine far below. She could not remember it ever having gone silent before.
She rose carefully, made her way out into the dark hallway. Now she could hear her father’s voice, low, coming from the control room. She paused outside, straining to hear.
“—all systems, we have to shut down now. Contact me when everything’s green.” She peered inside to see him hit the CLOSE CHANNEL key and then methodically turn off every system in the camp. One by one, sounds she had never known could go away—the water pump, the oxygen circulation system—went silent. She thought of the red-faced men who maintained them, wondered if they would be worried or glad for the rest.
“Jin?” he said. “Are you out there?” She was unable to answer. “Come on. Let’s go outside.”
She nodded, her father’s casual inflections disconcerting her as much as anything else. “What’s going on?” she asked. “Why did you—”
“Later,” he said. He led her out of the building, to the big open area around the landing pad. “Look up,” he said. “It should hit in a few seconds.” She watched the sky intently, seeing nothing, then put her hands to her ears as a huge roar crashed through the air. Her father grabbed her shoulder and pointed to the sky. There, outside the plasteel dome that was the camp’s protection from the harsh air outside, a fireball had appeared, shooting across the dark sky. When it reached the horizon it disappeared but the rumble continued, making the dome tremble. She looked at her father.
“Keep watching,” he shouted over the noise. Other people, off-duty miners and their children, were starting to come out of their homes and look to Jin’s father for explanation. Many of them she had not seen in weeks, and she was shocked by how thin they had become.
Her father pointed at the sky again and she saw the fireball reappear, bigger and slower, and once again cross to the other horizon. The rumble became quieter as the fireball disappeared again.
“One more pass ought to do it,” he said, to himself more than anyone else. He stood still, looking up, as a crowd gathered around. Noticing them, he raised his voice. “It’s all right. It should be all right.” He sounded so certain Jin could not help but be reassured, but she wondered if he would have said the same thing to her if they had been alone. The volume of the rumble increased and they all looked up again. The fireball reappeared once more, this time slow and close enough that they could see it was a ship, glowing red hot.
“Is it the food ship?” she asked. It did not look like it. Nor did it look like the old, cobbled-together ships the Travellers used when they came on their once-a-year visits: it looked like one of the ships from the adventure vids. Like a warship.
Her father shook his head. “No,” he said. The ship arced across the sky, almost lazily compared to its previous speed, and once it was out of sight he took the portable comm from his tool belt. The incoming signal light was flashing. “Shi here. What’s your status?”
“We’re fine, zi Shi,” the tinny voice on the other end said. “Just got hit with a pulse that would’ve fried us if we hadn’t shut down. As it is, it’ll take us ten blue hours to be up and running again. Should we send a message rocket?”
“No, I don’t think we’re going to get any more visitors. Let me know your status in five blue. Shi out.”
Jin followed her father as he made his way back to the central building. He took a slightly roundabout route, passing by as many people as possible and reassuring them that everything would be all right but not giving them any details about what was happening. It wasn’t until they were back in her father’s study, and her father had restarted all of the computer systems and sent the orders to start the mines going again, that Jin felt able to speak.
“Who were you talking to?”
“Li Pang, part of the Colonial Administration. He runs the surveillance satellite.” Her father keyed in a number of sequences and paused. After a few seconds Jin could feel the low hum of the mine equipment far below starting up again. “I hope this doesn’t drop productivity too much,” her father said. “I’m not sure if I could explain it.”
“Who’s on that ship?” she asked.
He shrugged. “I don’t know. I’ll have to take the Rescue ship out to investigate, but the satellite’s going to be blind for a few hours—we won’t have any guidance ’til then.” He drummed his fingers on his desk. “Did you complete your lessons for today?”
Jin nodded.
“And did you find them illuminating?”
She frowned, unsure why he was asking about this now. Yesterday she had asked her father why the Equitable Marketing System did not allow them to grow food, or even store more than five years’ worth at a time, and he had told her to read the “Salt and Iron Dialogue” in the Book of Shang. Now that she had, she wondered whether admitting she had not understood how it related to her question would be an admission of failure or a proper showing of humility. “I am not sure I did,” she said, keeping her inflection as formal as possible. “It did not seem to bear on our situation.”
“It was written a very long time ago. But zi Shang thought highly enough of it to include it in his Book, so perhaps it has some worth anyway, hm?” It was not a question but an order, a challenge to think more deeply. “Summarize the debate, then you may see how it relates.”
She took a breath. “Well, it’s—it is between two wise men, a minister and a scholar. They are debating whether or not the Emperor was right to restrict the sale of salt and iron to the government . . . the scholar says it’s wrong, because the people need those things, but the minister says that it will keep the people from being preyed on by speculators.”
“And which one is right?”
“I don’t know,” she said. Most of the dialogues she had read had a clear teacher and student, but this one did not: both the scholar and the minister made arguments she found difficult to find fault with.
Her father glanced at his datapad, tapped his desk again. “Which one did you think was right?”
Jin took a breath. “I think the scholar was right, because he said the people should have what they need. I mean, I’m sure the minister was right too, but maybe there are other ways to keep the people from being cheated. I don’t know why salt and iron would be so important though.”
“When these debates were written salt was used to preserve food,” her father said. “If you wanted to store food for lean times, you needed salt. But salt had to be mined, so it was very precious—a person could become very rich by selling salt to people who feared a famine.”
“So salt means food? And then iron means—ships?”
“Yes. That is why the Travellers are permitted to move freely and to buy and sell whatever they please, but there are two things only the Magistracy may trade in—food and ships.” He closed his eyes, began quoting. “‘For such reasons the sages built boats and bridges across rivers; they tamed cattle and horses to travel across the country. In this way they were able to feed all the people.’ There have been a half-dozen rebellions since the Corp Wars, Jin, and each has failed—because people know that without the Borderless Empire there will be no more food ships, ever.”
“But if people were allowed to grow just a little food, or buy some from Travellers, it wouldn’t be so bad when the ships were late,” Jin said.
“If the ships are late, it is because something more important has delayed them. But they will come.” He turned away slightly, so that he was not quite looking her in the eyes. He tapped his desk one more time, let out a breath and then stood up. “Come on,” he said, heading towards the door.
“Where?”
“To see the ship.”
She stood up quickly and stumbled after him. “But the satellite—”
“I believe I still remember how to pilot by sight. Unless you’d rather wait?”
Jin had never been allowed to ride in the Rescue ship before. She didn’t know if the Rescue ship had ever been flown before. It had been part of the colony’s original equipment; other than the dome itself, it was the only thing on Garamond not built by someone who lived there, and it did not bear a maker’s mark. It was spotless, and in perfect condition—she ought to know; she had been responsible for maintaining it since she turned twelve—but it had a kind of lonely, unused feeling to it. It didn’t smell like people, the way everything else in the camp did. Instead it had the sharp smell she associated with ore fresh from the mines. She wondered if the ship they were going to find smelled that way.
“There it is,” her father said as they passed over a ridge.
Jin looked out the viewport to where her father was pointing. The new ship was resting unevenly on the rocky terrain. It didn’t look much like the ships from the vids now that she was close to it. Or rather, it looked like they did at the end, after they’d been ambushed and surrounded by raiders and rebels and nearly destroyed before they enacted their secret plan and turned the tables. Maybe that was what had happened. That would explain everything.
Her father piloted their small ship alongside the larger one, lowered it to the ground. He pressed the comm button several times. Finally he rose, opened the cabin closet and pulled out an oxygen mask. “Stay in here,” he said.
Jin stood up. “Father—”
“No. Leave the channel open—it’s time for your language lesson.”
He stepped out of the cabin, into the corridor that led to the airlock. It wasn’t until the ‘lock had sealed that Jin realized he was afraid.
She watched through the viewport as her father walked to the front of the Rescue ship, listened to him breathing. There was no air on Garamond, but there was plenty of atmosphere, all of it poisonous. The good side to that was that you didn’t need a suit to go outside the dome, just a mask.
“I can hear you, father,” she said into the comm.
“Good. Don’t speak again until I tell you, please.”
She willed herself to breathe quietly as he walked over to the airlock on the other ship that was closest to the ground. He pressed a key on the side of the ‘lock then rapped on it, drew his hand back—the ship must still be hot, two golden hours after landing.
After a minute the airlock opened and a man stepped out. He was tall, taller than anyone in the camp, and had sandy blond hair. He was wearing the black and silver pants and jacket of a Fleet officer and a small airmask that only covered his mouth and nose.
She heard her father say something in a language she didn’t recognize. No, wait, she did—it was Earthlang, spoken by a human rather than a computer. He had said, “Welcome to Garamond.” She listened closely and tried to keep her breathing quiet.
The man looked around, turned back to her father. “I’m Lieutenant Claus Wiesen. I’m—”
“You are a Pilot in the TSARINA Fleet,” her father said calmly. “Your ship is a Quantum Dynamics Light Fighter, or a similar model, and has a standard crew compartment of two. Where is your co-pilot?”
“You know your ships,” the man said. “Are you in charge around here?”
“I am the Colonial Magistrate of the Garamond mining colony. My name is Shi Po. Your ship has weapons damage. Why are you here?”
“Was it raiders?” Jin asked. The stranger jumped. Her father turned to look at the Rescue ship’s cockpit, sighed.
“That was my—assistant, on board our ship,” he explained. “I apologize for not telling you, but regulations require that communications with unauthorized visitors be monitored.”
“Sure—sure, I understand. Listen, could I come onto your ship? Something out here’s burning my eyes.”
Her father nodded. “That would be the atmosphere. There is an eyewash kit in the Rescue ship.”
“Great.” The pilot began to step forward, but Jin’s father didn’t move out of his way. Instead he leaned forward and said something to the pilot, too quietly for Jin to hear; a moment later the pilot passed something to her father, but the way they were standing she couldn’t see what it was.
“Jin, please unseal the outer airlock door,” her father said.
She keyed the ‘lock open and watched her father lead the stranger in by the hand. Wiesen was covering his eyes with his hand, rubbing them. She heard the two men climb into the ship and the airlock hiss closed.
Her father’s voice came from the corridor outside. “You should rest in here, Lieutenant Wiesen. I will return soon with the eyewash.”
Jin looked up as her father stepped into the cockpit, hoping that everything would be explained to her. Instead he simply nodded and retrieved the First Aid kit from the closet. He then turned to her and held out a shiny black object. “Take this and keep it safe,” he said.
“What is this?” she asked. It was smaller than a datapad, and surprisingly heavy in her hand.
“It is a pistol, Lieutenant Wiesen’s. No weapons are permitted within the dome, Fleet Pilots not excepted.” Jin put the pistol in the kitbox under her console. Her father returned to the corridor. “Please monitor the instruments,” he said as he left. “I will be occupied tending to Lieutenant Wiesen.”
She knew she ought to stay at her console, but she couldn’t resist tiptoeing out to the corridor to try to listen to him talking to the Fleet Pilot. The door was closed, and with her imperfect mastery of Earthlang Jin couldn’t make out what they were saying. Increasingly long periods of silence followed each of her father’s questions. After while their voices became quieter, so that she could not hear them at all, and she went back to sit in the cockpit. It was just as well. This way, there was no chance of her father catching her listening. She’d made enough mistakes already.
On impulse, she opened up the kitbox and drew out the pistol, which was smaller and somehow less dangerous-looking than the ones in the vids, more like a tool than a weapon. It was really a dull, dark grey, not black, and the stock had a hammered finish that made it cling to her fingers. On the power cell cover were stamped the characters wu shen, Wiesen’s name in Earthlang Formal; it was his maker’s mark, to show that he had made it himself. She had just put it back in the kitbox when her father returned, leading Lieutenant Wiesen into the cockpit.
“Lieutenant Wiesen, this is my daughter, Shi Jin. She is studying Earthlang to prepare for her duties as Junior Magistrate.”
Close up, Jin could see that Wiesen’s blond hair was thinning and his beefy face flushed. His eyes were red—probably from exposure to the atmosphere, she thought. His black and silver uniform failed to hide the paunch around his middle.
“Pleased to meet you,” Wiesen said, very slowly. He gave her the quarter-bow reserved for children.
Jin gave him the full bow of a subordinate to a superior, rather than a child’s bow to an adult. “I understand Earthlang,” she said.
“Jin,” her father said warningly, but Wiesen seemed not to take offense.
“Well, good—that’ll make my job a lot easier.”
“Lieutenant Wiesen will be teaching you Earthlang while he’s here,” her father said. “This will take the place of your regular lessons for the time being.”
“How long will he be here?” Jin asked.
“Ask Lieutenant Wiesen your question, Shi Jin,” her father said. “In Earthlang.”
“How long will you be staying with us, zi Wiesen?” Jin asked the man, slowly and carefully.
“That depends—a few months, at least. But we’ll have fun, eh?”
“Isn’t someone coming to rescue you?” she asked.
“No—the Fleet is very busy right now, and they don’t have time to rescue people who aren’t in danger. You people rescued me, and that’ll have to do.”
“We get Travellers, once a year,” Jin said. “They bring vid chips and things. They could probably get you back to the Fleet.”
“Fleet Pilots are not permitted to use unauthorized transport,” her father said. He turned to the other man. “This make of ship is normally stocked with a store of high-density food supplies. I do not believe the Fleet will object if you share them with our community.”
“Of course,” Wiesen said. “You’re welcome to everything I have.”
“I thought you were supposed to be teaching me Earthlang.” Jin said as she watched Wiesen lay out the makeshift pieces on the board of alternating black and white squares.
“Are you talking to me?”
“Yes.”
“Then you’re learning Earthlang. Now, you’re black, so you go first.”
She looked the board over sceptically. “Which piece should I start with?”
“That’s up to you.”
Jin thought for a second and then took one of the bottom-rank pieces—pawns, they were called—and pushed it forward. “Was that right?” she asked.
“We’ll have to see.”
“I thought you knew how to play this game.”
“I do. And part of the game is that the right thing to do changes as the game goes on.” Wiesen pushed one of his own pawns forward, two spaces.
“I thought they only moved one space at a time.”
“Except for the first time they move, when they can go two spaces—I told you that. You have to know the pieces at your command, what they can do.”
“So now what do I do?”
“Move another piece.”
Jin narrowed her eyes, tried to believe that these bolts, washers and other bits of scrap that had been painted white and black were a game. She knew what a game was: it was like a vid where you controlled what happened—but there was always a right and a wrong choice, one that would lead you to the reward at the end and one that would get you killed. “Why are you teaching me this?” she asked.
“Your father asked me to.”
“Why?”
“So you’d learn how to play games.”
“Everyone knows how to play games.”
“You don’t know how to play this one.”
Sighing, Jin moved her pawn another space. She tried to guess what her opponent would do next, like she’d been told to. She guessed right: Wiesen moved another pawn.
“This is boring,” Jin said, pushing her pawn forward.
“What would you rather do?”
Jin looked up from the board. “Tell me about being a Fleet Pilot. What kind of battle were you in? Why did you come in so fast? Why did my father have to turn off all the computers before you got here?”
“I’ll tell you what—let’s keep playing the game, to make your dad happy, and every time you take one of my pieces I’ll answer one question. Okay?”
Jin considered it. “Okay,” she said. That was her favourite new word, a bit of Earthlang the computer hadn’t taught her—it was from the Informal mode, what people in the Core Worlds actually spoke. With an incentive, she found it easier to imagine different possible moves the way Wiesen had said she should. Even still, she had lost four pieces before she managed to take one of his pawns.
“Can I ask a question now?”
“Go ahead.”
“What kind of battle were you in?”
“A space battle.” Wiesen paused, watching the look of betrayal that spread across her face. “I’ll give you that one for free. Next time, remember: if you don’t aim, you won’t hit anything.”
Jin threw him an annoyed look. “You sound like my father.”
“I hope so. To answer the question you should have asked, it was a battle with rebels—probably the last one, for awhile. I’m pretty sure that’s why your food ship’s been late. The rebellion started at Jericho—that’s a Fleet base, not too far from here—and this area’s been pretty hot since then.”
“I didn’t hear anything about that.”
“The Fleet doesn’t like to talk about rebellions until they’re over. Anyway, the Magistracy poured just about everything it had—Nospace fleet, Reserve fleet, even orbital defence ships—into blowing the rebels out of All-the-Stars. In the end they pretty much succeeded.”
“Then why did you come here?”
“That’ll cost another piece.”
Two more of her own pieces gone and she was able to take one of Wiesen’s knights. “Why did you have to come here—so quickly?” she asked.
“Better question. More precise.” Wiesen sat back in his chair, paused. “I was being chased, by a much bigger ship. A fighter can go to Nospace more quickly than a larger ship—less mass—but since larger ships have more fuel, they’d have caught up with me while I was slowing down. So I didn’t—I decelerated just enough to get back into real space, then shot for your planet and hoped its gravity and atmosphere would slow me down before my ship burned up.” He stopped, reliving a memory, then smiled slightly and went on. “And since that was such a good question, I’ll answer your next one for free: your father turned off the computers because he guessed what I was doing, and knew it would create a magnetic shock that would damage them.”
“Is that the procedure, for when someone does that? My father would have looked it up in the Regulations Guide.” And he wouldn’t think much of this game, where right and wrong keep changing, Jin thought.
“There is no Regulations Guide for what I did. So far as I know, nobody’s ever done it before. And with good reason; it was a stupid thing to do—”
“But it was the right thing to do?”
“Right. Or it looks that way, at this stage of the game. Speaking of which—” he shifted one of his bishops along its diagonal path “—that’s check, mate in two moves.”
Jin looked over the board. She hadn’t noticed her king was in danger at all. “What do you mean? We haven’t played those moves yet.”
“No, but there’s only a few ways for them to go, and they all end with your king being trapped. I can play them out for you if you like.”
He slid the pieces around the board, playing both black and white, to show how it would go: each time she said she wouldn’t have made the move he said she would he showed her how she had trapped herself, cutting off her options with the choices she had made.
“How did you do that?”
“I distracted you. So long as you wanted to take pieces so I’d answer questions, I knew you wouldn’t pay much attention to protecting your king. It doesn’t matter how many pieces you take, if you’re playing for the wrong goal. Want to play another game?”
“But you’re better than me at it,” she said, furious at being tricked.
“I’m also bigger than you. Are you going to let that get in your way?”
“What can I do about it?”
“You’ve already learned the principles. The rest is just a matter of improving your technique.” Wiesen cleared the board, starting putting the pieces back in their original positions. “Again?”
Jin trained sealant spray along the bottom of the Rescue ship, shielding her eyes with her free hand, and then blew along the line to keep it from stippling as it dried. It had taken her all day to do her regular maintenance, instead of the few golden hours it usually did: her father had done a check after they had returned from retrieving Wiesen but had left it to her to return the ship to its formerly pristine condition. It was a good thing he had allowed her to skip her Earthlang and Calligraphy lessons while Wiesen was there, or there wouldn’t have been enough blue hours in a day.
It was certainly true that her Earthlang was improving—she knew almost all the Formal words now, a lot of Informal, and they were starting to work on her accent—though she couldn’t say the same for her calligraphy. What she had seen of Wiesen’s was laughably bad, though out of politeness she refrained from pointing it out. She was also under orders from her father not to say anything about his table manners; Fleet Pilots didn’t use sticks because they didn’t work well in zero-gee. It was strange, because he was fanatically tidy in everything else—another Fleet habit, born of the need to keep a close eye on your possessions without gravity to hold them down.
Still, it was his game that fascinated her. She’d won her first game with him a week and a half after they’d started. When she did, he told her he was glad he didn’t have to handicap himself anymore, and she hadn’t won again since.
The game occupied most of her mind these days. It was a good thing: even rationed carefully, Lieutenant Wiesen’s supplies were already starting to run out. Like her, the miners who had seen Wiesen’s ship arriving had hoped it would be the food ship, and her father’s refusal to tell anyone what it had been was not reducing the tension in the camp.
Clearing her mind, she closed her toolbox and gave the Rescue ship a final once-over. The Travellers had made orbit two nights before, and she wondered if she would have time to watch any of the new vid chips they had brought. She ran a finger along the seal and then began to crab-walk out from under the ship.
She paused at the sound of footsteps in the hall. From her vantage point she could only see the feet of the person coming into the room, but the unweathered black boots told her immediately who it was.
“Hello, Lieutenant Wiesen,” she said, coming out from under the ship in a crouch. She straightened up, brushed her hair back from her face and gave the appropriate bow.
He gave a small head nod, then returned her bow a moment later. “Yes. Hello.” He turned slightly, looking around the room and behind him. Other than his boots, he was not wearing his uniform but rather plain coveralls. “Were you working on the ship?”
She nodded.
“Everything fine?”
“No problems.” She frowned, glanced over at the ship. “Are you here to review my work?”
“No. Just passing by.” He turned to face her. “Do you want a game?”
She nodded, followed him back to his room.
He sat at the table and began to lay out the pieces on the board. “What shall we play for?”
“Tell me more about the Travellers,” she said.
“Oh, I see,” Wiesen said, taking on a dramatic tone. “Do you want to know why it is that they can never make planetfall? Why they’re condemned to wander the stars forever?”
Jin shook her head; every child in All-the-Stars knew that story. She ran a finger along the tops of her pawns before sliding one two spaces ahead. “Every year they bring vids and other things like that, but all they ever take from us is old parts and machines we don’t need any more—even stuff that’s broken. What good does it do them?”
“Travellers don’t have a word for broken,” Wiesen said. “I mean, I’m sure they do, but they don’t ever use it. Only using something for what it was designed for would be admitting that the person who made it is smarter than they are, and so far as they’re concerned no landsider is smarter than a Traveller. I’ve actually learned a few Traveller tricks over the years: most Pilots have—ways to use parts from your secondary systems to keep your ship going when it’s damaged, things like that.”
“So why don’t they have to follow the rules? Nobody else just gets to go wherever they want—or grow their own food.”
“If you ever tasted Traveller food, you wouldn’t envy them too much: it’s mostly just nutrient algae.” He moved his queen’s knight out ahead of his pawns, daring her to go after it. “But to answer your question, they don’t follow the rules because the Magistracy doesn’t make them. They’re like a safety valve: the vids and trinkets they sell distract people. Plus the Magistracy makes most of the vids anyway, and letting Travellers sell them is the best way of spreading their propaganda.”
She slid another pawn forward, pointedly ignoring his provocation. “But why can’t they sell food?” she asked. “Even if it was just a little, it would help out when the ships were late.”
“Which is exactly why they can’t. So far as the Magistracy is concerned, it’s actually better if the ships are late now and then—it reminds everyone how dependent they are on everything running smoothly.” He moved his knight again, to a space near the middle of the board.
Jin frowned, held her hand over her pieces for a moment and then slowly moved another pawn forward. She was trying to understand what it was that Wiesen was trying to get her to do, but so far she couldn’t see it. “But the Travellers, if they sold food when the ships were late they could get anything they wanted for it.”
“Sure they could—once. But if the Magistracy found out it wouldn’t be just the one ship that paid, it would be all Travellers, forever.” He pushed his queen’s pawn one space ahead. “I don’t think you could offer them anything that’d be worth taking that risk.”
They played for another dozen moves, but she still couldn’t figure out his gambit: he seemed to be making moves almost at random, exposing several of his most valuable pieces. She began to feel excited at the possibility that she might win a game for the first time since he had started playing in earnest, but a suspicion gnawed at her that he was only laying a trap.
Finally Wiesen stood up. “Listen, Shi Jin. . . .”
“Yes?”
Wiesen was silent for a moment. “Nothing.” He gave a small shrug, then bowed to her. “I’ll see you in the morning.”
Jin returned the bow and then watched him go. She studied the board for a few moments, then stood up and headed for the dining room. She peeled open the ration pack that lay on the table—one meal for one person, in theory, though this one had been open for two days now—took out a sheet of pressed soymeat and began chewing at it.
“Shi Jin?”
Her father’s voice made her jump, and she held her hand over her mouth: she had long since given up trying to eat Wiesen’s rations with sticks, but up ‘til now had managed to keep her father from seeing her eating with her hands. “I’m sorry,” she mumbled, sitting down.
“Are you well?” he asked, giving her a head-bow and apparently choosing to ignore what he had just seen.
She stood up again to return the bow. “Yes, I’m fine.”
“Sit,” he said. When she sat down he joined her at the table, delicately seized a sheet of soymeat with his sticks and nibbled at one end. “I am concerned that you may be falling behind in your study of the Book of Shang,” he said after a few moments. “Even the keenest knife grows dull without use.”
“I could add readings to my schedule. . . .”
He shook his head. “Let us first test your edge, to see if that is necessary. Tell me, what are the duties of a gentleman?”
“To obey his superiors,” Shi Jin began. She knew this as well as her own name, but that brought little reassurance. “To bring honour to his ancestors. To serve the Borderless Empire. To inspire others by his example.”
Her father nodded. “And are they different from one another, these duties?”
“What do you mean?”
“If he obeys his superiors, will he not always serve the Empire?”
Jin took a breath. She had always felt nervous when they discussed her readings, afraid of making a mistake, but now found she was looking forward to it: it felt more like Wiesen’s game than a lesson, trying to find the perfect quote to counter what her father had said. “‘The wise man creates laws while the dullard is controlled by them,’” she said, quoting the Master and Student Dialogue. “‘Gentlemen alter the rites while the rabble are held fast by them.’”
“What good are orders, then, if the gentleman is not bound to follow them?”
The answer came to her immediately—a quotation from the Sun zi that Lieutenant Wiesen was particularly fond of: “‘The general in the field is not bound by the orders of his sovereign.’ An order may be wise in the court but foolish on the battlefield.”
“But the general, with his view of the whole battlefield, may know things his officers do not. ‘A baby will always cry when his boils are lanced, even if his mother holds him, for he cannot see that today’s pain will heal him tomorrow.’ Should a gentleman not have faith in the wisdom of his superiors?”
Jin frowned. This was more than just a discussion of her readings, she realized; he was asking her opinion, using the debate to help him make a decision. “‘A wise emperor is like a carpenter who chooses straight timber to make shafts and curved timber to make wheels,’” she said. “‘As a good carpenter does not discard any timber, so a wise emperor does not discard any gentleman.’”
Her father shook his head slowly. “Don’t make the error of putting too much value on any one man. ‘If only straight shafts were made into arrows, and round ones into wheels, only one man in a hundred could ride and shoot.’”
She crossed her arms. “But isn’t it wrong to waste the ones that are straight or round, by using them for the wrong things? Or not using them at all?” Jin bit her lip, trying to think of a quote that would support her point, but nothing came to her. “It’s like the game Lieutenant Wiesen taught me. Each piece is different, so you have to understand the nature of each one and use it accordingly.”
“I see. And supposing we may discuss this game as we do the Book of Shang, does each piece act according to its own benefit?”
“A knight cannot ride straight and a bishop’s path cannot turn, but each will give his life for the king. Just so will a gentleman violate an order to better serve the Empire, then stand and pay the price.” She took a breath. “Wouldn’t Lieutenant Wiesen do more good if he rejoined the Fleet, instead of staying here?”
For a long moment her father was silent. “Is that what we’ve been talking about?”
Jin looked down at the table, wondering if she had crossed a line by addressing the subject directly. She hadn’t been able to help herself: she had been able to feel her father wavering, knew that this was the moment to press her attack. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Should I schedule more time studying the Book of Shang?”
Her father shook his head. “No,” she said. “I have no doubts about the keenness of your edge.” He stood, gave her a brief head-bow and left the room. She sat at the table for a long time, wondering just what it was she had won or lost.
That night Jin awoke to the sound of thunder; when she sat up, though, she heard no other signs of a storm—no keening winds or patter of rain on the dome—and went back to sleep. When she awoke in the morning she found that she had overslept, past the time of her usual Earthlang lesson. She went to the dining room, wondering if her father or Lieutenant Wiesen might be there, but it was empty except for an unopened ration packet. A strong smell of fermentation filled the air as she opened the lid, revealing a mass of stringy green curds in a thick brown goo.
To Jin’s relief it tasted marginally better than it smelled; she ate half and then returned to her room. The timer was still dark, so she started up her computer and selected the entertainment channel. As she’d hoped, the vids the Travellers had brought had been uploaded, and she began to scroll through the list of new titles. Then she paused, and the curdled algae she had eaten began to rise in her throat as she read two characters, wu shen, that she had only seen together once before. She swallowed hard and held her teeth together as she cued the vid to start.
When she got to her father’s office he was seated at his desk, and he gave her a head-bow as she came in. “Good morning.”
She opened her mouth, but found she had no voice. After a few moments she finally said “I had an Earthlang lesson scheduled this for morning. Have you seen Lieutenant Wiesen?”
“Lieutenant Wiesen is gone,” her father said. “I do not expect you will see him again. For the remainder of your time here you will study only Calligraphy, Rites and Music, and especially the Book of Shang.”
“I saw a vid,” she said, unable to keep the words in. “He was in it—not him, but someone who looked like him—”
Her father pushed his stool back from his desk and stood up. “An actor,” he said, in a voice that was not a whisper but was quiet in a way that commanded her to keep the same volume. “Genuine criminals will rarely follow a script, rebels in particular.”
“You knew?” she said. “How could you—you made him my teacher.”
“We have too few resources to hold a prisoner who contributes nothing to the colony, and I judged this the best use of his talents. ‘A wise emperor is like a carpenter who chooses straight timber to make shafts and curved timber to make wheels.’”
“But there’s been no Fleet ship. He must have gone. . . .” Jin felt oddly light, as though she were already in orbit.
“Father—the new ration packs—”
“Nutrient algae—not as palatable as soymeat, but it should last until the food ship arrives.” He sighed. “There is a path ahead of you that leads to being a colonial administrator, Shi Jin, and another that leads to being a Fleet Magistrate. Perhaps you will yet change how characters are written. Perhaps you will change many things. But I could not set you on the second path, and Lieutenant Wiesen could—and so I will stand and pay the price.”
“What do you mean? Are you—”
He shook his head. “I found a wrecked ship, salvaged the food rations, incinerated the body of the pilot and sold the remainder for scrap. There will be an investigation—a formality, but it would delay your entry to the Academy. That is why you must pass the examination before the next ship comes, and go with it when it leaves, so that you will already be on Hanzi when the investigation begins.”
She was silent for a moment and then bowed, giving him the child’s low bow to a parent. After he returned the bow she smoothed her hair with her hand and walked out the door. She did not really know where to go: without thinking she went to Wiesen’s room, or at least the room that had been his. None of his things were there except for the game board and pieces.
She looked over the board and began to play out their unfinished game, imagining how it might have gone. She drew in a sharp breath, and suddenly it was as though she saw the fundamental nature of the pieces, laid plain in white and black like salt and iron. The rooks were the food ships, able to cross the board in one turn but always blocked by other pieces; the bishops, swooping down when you didn’t expect them, were like Fleet ships coming out of Nospace; the queens were the Magistracy, with both Fleet and food ships at their command, but still bound to move in straight lines; only Travellers, the knights, were allowed to break the rules, moving in skips and hops. And of course there were the pawns—but even a pawn could become something greater if it followed the right path, to the deepest part of the enemy’s board. Anything but a king.
Now Jin could see a half-dozen moves ahead of where they had left the game and smiled without meaning to. She could win this game, she saw, as the moves and countermoves played out in her mind. She picked up Wiesen’s king—it was the one piece he had put much work into repurposing, a plastic ball joint he had carved until it vaguely resembled a head and crown—and her smile fell as her fingers brushed over his maker’s mark, the two characters she knew she could never speak again.
Six months later she was on Hanzi, unpacking her meagre belongings in her room at the Academy. It was very small, almost a relief after the number of times she’d had to change her idea of what big was since leaving Garamond. When the ship had docked she had been awed by what she had seen: more people than she had ever known standing in a single room that was full of light and colour, stores and vidscreens. Corridors stretched outward in every direction, promising more wonders. She had turned to her seatmate, a sophisticate from Xerxes, told him she had not imagined even Hanzi could be this big.
“This is just the docking satellite,” he had told her, not bothering to hide his contempt. “We’re going to board a wayship from here to take us down to the city. It’s big.”
After that she had not even bothered trying to gauge the size of what she saw, and the hundreds of buildings they had passed on their way to the dorms—each one at least fifty times larger than the central building back home—had barely registered as real, just a pattern of light and shade. Now that she was in her room, though, in a space she could get her mind around—it was a little under four paces square, actually a bit smaller than her old room—she could finally start to make herself at home.
She put her bag on the bed and opened it, pulling out one-by-one the pieces she and Lieutenant Wiesen had made. She took the board out last, put it on the desk and put the pieces on it, recreating the game that had been left unfinished when he left. Then she lay down on the bed, curled her hand around the carved plastic piece in her pocket and let herself sleep.