“Just for an hour or two,” Jedao said coaxingly. “My mom and my siblings wanted me to send home some vacation photos. And I promised my nieces that I would bring them some souvenirs. Maybe the zoo’s shop will have some mounted skeletons or the like.”
“You spoil those kids rotten,” Garit said with a snort.
“What are uncles for?” Jedao said. One of the great regrets of his life was that his job kept him away from his family for long periods of time. The girls grew so fast. “Besides, the folks down at the shop might have some tips for hunters.”
Garit shook his head, amused. “You’re transparent, but all right.”
The zoo was not particularly busy. The two of them were off-duty, and the young woman who told them about the zoo regulations either didn’t recognize them or didn’t care, which Jedao found congenial. Jedao then persuaded Garit to come with him into the zoo proper so Jedao could snap some photos.
Jedao fiddled with the manual exposure, trying to get the black panther to show up in its cave. The camera had been a gift from his brother, and was practically an antique. Jedao was not especially gifted at taking pictures that pleased his family (“These look like reconnaissance photos,” his sister had once complained, “who cares about all this kill zone stuff when you’re snapping pics of an engagement party?”) so he had resolved to do better.
“That’s the oddest damned fox I’ve ever seen,” Garit said, pointing.
Jedao gave up on the exposure and settled for a muddled silhouette in the shadows. “Beg pardon?” he asked.
They strolled closer to the enclosure Garit had indicated to take a look. A reddish, bushy-tailed creature was taking a nap in the branches of a tree. Bamboo shoots sprouted not far away. Some of them looked like they’d been gnawed on.
“That’s not a fox,” Jedao said, reading the enclosure’s label. “Red panda. Apparently they eat bamboo. And sometimes birds and things.”
“It’s kind of cute,” Garit said grudgingly. “Doesn’t look like much of a challenge, though.”
Jedao thought that coddled zoo creatures were unlikely to be much challenge in general, but he didn’t say anything that would give Garit the idea of adding another kind of animal to his wishlist for this trip. “My nieces will like it,” he said, and raised his camera.
“We should catch you one to take home to them,” Garit said.
Jedao made a face. “Have you ever looked at the customs forms for importing wildlife? I’m pretty sure those critters don’t exist on my homeworld.”
“Well, I’ll look into expediting it as a favor to you if you can help me with my tiger problem,” Garit said.
“That’s very kind of you,” Jedao said, as diplomatically as he could, “but my nieces are notoriously good at killing goldfish. Let’s leave the red pandas alone and hit up the shop so I can buy bat skeletons or fox-eared hats or something, and we can head to the hunting grounds.”
Author’s Note
In most regards, Jedao and I are complete opposites (I am rock stone stupid at tactics and games and he’s supposed to be good at tactics, I have perfect pitch and compose orchestral music for fun while he sucks at music, etc.), but he and I are both hapless at cameras. One of my uncles was a photographer at one point, and my dad used to be a pretty good amateur up until the point someone stole his analog SLR, but I regret to report that it’s not genetic. I stick to cat pics because my cat is innately photogenic and leave it at that.
The bat skeleton is a nod to the bat skeleton from Paxton Gate in San Francisco, which sells ethically sourced taxidermy, that my sister bought for my daughter for one of her birthdays. It was one of the treasures that survived the 2016 flood and she still has it today.
The Battle of Candle Arc
GENERAL SHUOS JEDAO was spending his least favorite remembrance day with Captain-magistrate Rahal Korais. There was nothing wrong with Korais except that he was the fangmoth’s Doctrine officer, and even then he was reasonable for a Rahal. Nevertheless, Doctrine observed remembrances with the ranking officer, which meant that Jedao had to make sure he didn’t fall over.
Next time, Jedao thought, wishing the painkillers worked better, I have to get myself assassinated on a planet where they do the job right.
The assassin had been a Lanterner, and she had used a shattergun. She had caught him at a conference, of all places. The shattergun had almost sharded Jedao into a hundred hundred pieces of ghostwrack. Now, as Jedao looked at the icelight that served as a meditation focus, he saw anywhere from three to eight of them. The effect would have been charming if it hadn’t been accompanied by stabbing pains in his head.
Korais was speaking to him.
“Say again?” Jedao said. He kept from looking at his wristwatch.
“I’ll recite the next verses for you, sir, if that doesn’t offend you,” Korais said.
Korais was being diplomatic. Jedao couldn’t remember where in the litany they were. Under better circumstances he would have claimed that he was distracted by the fact that his force of eleven fangmoths was being pursued by the Lanterners who had mauled the rest of the swarm, but it came down to the injuries.
“I’d be much obliged, Captain,” Jedao said.
This remembrance was called the Feast of Drownings. The Rahal heptarch, whose faction maintained the high calendar and who set Doctrine, had declared it three years back, in response to a heresy in one of the heptarchate’s larger marches. Jedao would have called the heresy a benign one: people who wanted the freedom to build shrines to their ancestors, for pity’s sake. But the Rahal had claimed that this would upset the high calendar’s master equations, and so the heretics had had to be put down.
There were worse ways to die than by having your lungs slowly filled with caustic fluid. That still didn’t make it a good way to die.
Korais had begun his recital. Jedao looked at the icelight on the table in front of them. It had translucent lobes and bronchi and alveoli, and light trickled downward through them like fluid, pale and blue and inexorable.
The heptarchate’s exotic technologies depended on the high calendar’s configurations: the numerical concordances, the feasts and remembrances, the associated system of belief. The mothdrive that permitted fast travel between star systems was an exotic technology. Few people advocated a switch in calendars. Too much would have to be given up, and invariant technologies, which worked under any calendar, never seemed to keep up. Besides, any new calendar would be subject to the same problems of lock-in; any new calendar would be regulated by the Rahal, or by people like the Rahal, as rigorously as the current one.
It was a facile argument, and one that Jedao had always disliked.
“Sir,” Korais said, breaking off at the end of a phrase, “you should sit.”
“I’m supposed to be standing for this,” Jedao said dryly.
“I don’t think your meditations during the next nineteen minutes are going to help if you fall unconscious.”