The assassin used a compression gun to reduce the judge’s lifespan to a flicker-slash of milliseconds. When the judge’s bodyguard found the corpse, they saw the dross of years lived and unlived. Each stratum of the fossilized carcass contained fractures in the language of paradox, the stress residue of decisions dissented. Later, when the technicians inspected the remains, they would find, in the innermost stratum, evidence of a threadbare counterfactual in which the judge ascended to hexarch.
Divination by compression wasn’t illegal because it involved murder. It was illegal because it didn’t work. Nothing could restore the judge’s life, however bright her prospects might have been had she been luckier.
The technicians noted the judge’s time of death. She died at 17.23, on a day with 30 hours and in an hour with 100 minutes. All across Nran and its satellite tributaries this was true.
The nearby system of Khaio had a major city known for fine circuitry and a charming practice of eating honeyed crickets at funerals. It was uncertain, from the city’s standpoint, whether the clocks read 17.23 or 16.97 or something in between when the judge died. In a realm governed by a universal clock, the tyrannical lockstep of calendar, there should have been a single answer—and there was not.
In the Gray Marches, where the grave-dust of stars floated in thick drifts and shattered asteroids spelled out praises to catastrophes, at the hexarchate’s unfurnaced boundary, there were yet cities. Some were built of recycled vessels braided together with glittering filament. Some bore names in toxic alphabets. Others flashed paeans to vast suicide formations.
At the judge’s death, every clock in the Gray Marches broke. The great engines that powered the dust cities sputtered and died.
Had it only been a matter of cities, the hexarchs would have been indifferent. Cities could be rebuilt and engines replaced. But the voidmoths that traveled between the hexarchate’s star systems depended on the universality of the high calendar for their function. In regions where other calendars dominated, their stardrives were useless, inert.
In the Gray Marches’ gardens, flowers opened and closed and crumpled, trapped between night and morning.
Calendrical rot had set in.
Author’s Note
This story started life as the prologue to Ninefox Gambit. I sometimes wonder if the novel would have been more accessible if I’d left it in. I wrote it despite hating prologues and being convinced that in over 95% of cases they are either unnecessary or could have been incorporated into the novel another, better way. The only novel prologue that I actively support is that of Tigana by Guy Gavriel Kay. So I lopped this off and forgot about it until I got an anthology call, and then I sent it in on the grounds that the worst that could happen was the editor would say no. As it turned out, the editor liked it! Sometimes a little optimism pays off.
The language in this piece owes a lot to one of my favorite science fiction poems, Mike Allen’s “Metarebellion.” I regret that I no longer own his poetry chapbook Petting the Time Shark, which included it (the flood again). But you can find it online at Strange Horizons. The other influence, which I have read over and over, is Tony Daniel’s “A Dry, Quiet War,” one of my favorite stories of future war.
Birthdays
WHEN SHE WAS six, Cheris stopped receiving Mwennin birthday pastries.
For reasons that wouldn’t become clear to her until much later, her parents had just moved out of the Mwennin ghetto in the City of Ravens Feasting and to a small house nearer the sea. Cheris missed their old home, even though it had been smaller. She also missed the other Mwennin children who gathered in the streets to skip rope, or play tag, or chant the counting games that were so risky in the hexarchate. But the new house wasn’t all bad. It had a garden, and Cheris liked to chase the dragonflies or pick flowers for her mother and father.
Her mother had impressed upon her that she had two birthdays. One of them was the ordinary birthday that all hexarchate citizens shared. Everyone (so her mother said) was a year old when they were born, for the time spent in the womb or in a crèche, and then they added another year each New Year. That way no one’s birthday was singled out.
But the Mwennin did it differently. They had their own calendar, which Cheris had memorized. Most nights her mother made her go to bed early so that she wouldn’t be too tired in the morning when she had school. But sometimes her mother let her stay up, not to play make-believe with her collection of plush dragon toys or read a book, but to study the Mwennin calendar and its feast-days.
Cheris was very good at numbers, and very good at both the high calendar and the Mwennin calendar. Even after she’d gone to bed, she’d lay awake in the darkness, staring at the comforting candlevines that glowed faintly from the walls. Her mother and father always made sure to turn them down low, but not too low, so she wouldn’t have to be afraid of the shadow-monsters that lived in the closet. Her teacher at school had assured her that, yes, meditation, especially during remembrances, would keep away the shadow-monsters. When she repeated this to her parents, however, their faces turned sad, so she didn’t talk about that anymore.
Because she was very good at calendars, she had a hard time falling asleep the night before her Mwennin birthday. Back in the old neighborhood, on your birthday, people would bring you pastries of fine flaky dough with sweet almond paste and rosewater syrup, or kumquat candies, or goat’s milk caramels with little crunchy flecks of pistachios. And after dark, in the safety of your home, people would gather and sing songs in archaic Mwen-dal. Cheris liked the songs best of all, even if she stumbled over some of the words, because she had a clear, sweet voice and the adults always complimented her on how well she stayed in tune.
Her parents woke her early the next morning. She blinked up blearily at the pale morning light filtering through the curtains, then sat up in glee, thinking of the gifts that were to come. Then she noticed the looks on her parents’ faces. They’d had the same expressions when she said the teacher had encouraged her to meditate.
Cheris’s father took her hands between his, then looked at Cheris’s mother.
“Cheris,” her mother said, “we can’t celebrate your Mwennin birthday anymore. It’s too risky. Do you understand?”
Cheris didn’t understand.
“You can have an extra dessert tonight,” her mother went on. “But there will be no more Mwennin birthdays. Not for any of us.”
Cheris snuffled, and her mother circled her with her arms. “We’ll go for a walk by the shore when I get out of work,” she said. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”
Cheris sensed that her mother was even more upset than she was, and her mother didn’t even like sweets. At least, she always gave her sweets to Cheris. “I’m all right,” Cheris said, because she wanted to be brave for her mother. “Can we have extra pastries on New Year’s instead?”
There was a catch in her mother’s voice. “Of course, my dear.”
Cheris still wasn’t sure why her mother was upset. True, she had hoped for something nice to eat today, but if she had the same number of pastries in total over the course of the year, it was basically the same. It wasn’t so important what day she got to eat them.