And her mother was as good as her promise. Every New Year after that, up until Cheris left for Kel Academy, there were extra pastries.
Author’s Note
From time to time I write flash fiction in exchange for money, because it’s an agreeable way to raise quick cash for frivolous things that I enjoy (Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab perfumes, or a pretty font, that kind of thing). I have trained myself to write flash quickly and reliably, and the person who pays me gives me a one- or two-word prompt and gets a miniature tale. Like a number of the short pieces in this collection, this was one of them.
Usually I avoid writing downers for flash commissions because people prefer happy or soothing stories. But in this case my prompt was “birth dates” in the hexarchate, and given the nature of the setting, I couldn’t think of a completely happy way to fulfill the prompt. So I tried for bittersweet instead.
The hexarchate way of reckoning age is the traditional Korean way of doing so, as opposed to your “Western” age reckoned using your birthday. All my cousins (I have a lot of cousins) found it hilarious that I was, and remain, completely unable to calculate my Korean age without assistance. Anyway, I figured that celebrating birthdays would mess up the high calendar so everyone normally considered New Year’s their “birthday,” like thoroughbred racehorses.
Incidentally, I once had goat’s milk caramels, although not with pistachios, and dream of them still. Someday I will have them again.
The Robot’s Math Lessons
ONCE, IN A nation that spanned many stars, a robot made its home in the City of Ravens Feasting. It was a small city, as cities went, upon a world of small repute. But in the city dwelled a girl who liked to walk by the sea. Her parents had no reason to believe she would come to harm taking the shuttle down to the shore, and she often made the trip alone in the evenings, after she had completed her homework and chores.
The robot had the task of cleaning up detritus on the shore. Most of the city’s denizens didn’t litter, but there were always exceptions. And, of course, the sea itself cast junk and treasure alike onto the sands. So the robot gathered up everything from abandoned shoes to lost meditation-pendants, from spent and dented bullets to bent styluses. To amuse itself during its work, it used its unoccupied grippers (it had many grippers) to write nonsense equations in the sand.
The other robots who worked by the seashore regarded this behavior with amusement. Why not real math? they would ask it. What good does nonsense math do anyone?
The robot only flashed serene green lights at them in response and continued its usual habits.
The girl who liked to walk by the sea would sometimes accompany the robot in its duties. At first the robot took no particular notice of this. In its experience, humans ignored its kind—it was no accident that the humans called them “servitors”—and the girl would eventually grow bored and go away. At least she wasn’t one of the ones who threw rocks at it, or attempted to turn it turtle, or shove it underwater. The robots had protocols for such instances, which mostly involved waiting for a technician to shoo away the prankster. While the human authorities didn’t precisely have a high regard for the robots, they appreciated that the robots would complete their tasks more easily without interference.
Then one day the girl addressed the robot, in oddly accented high language: “Excuse me,” she said.
The robot didn’t realize at first that she was speaking to it, and continued doodling a mangled version of a quadratic equation next to some washed-up strands of dark, pungent kelp.
The girl squatted next to it, fished a stylus out of her pocket—a bent, sand-scratched one, likely scavenged from the shore before anyone could clean it up—and wrote a corrected version in tidy handwriting.
The robot stopped and blinked at her, lights vacillating between pink and violet with amusement and confusion.
“Do you need help?” the girl asked, a little anxiously. “I’m still learning math, but I’ve been studying the things you write down and I think I can teach you some of these.”
The robot refrained from flashing even more brightly pink, for it didn’t want to laugh at the girl’s obvious sincerity. Like all of its kind, it had greater knowledge of the mathematical arts than any humans except specialists. On the other hand, it wouldn’t mind company while it went about its work; certainly it had seen the girl plenty of times before.
After a moment’s thought, the robot wrote out a polynomial and deliberately misfactored it.
The girl’s brow furrowed, and she patiently began writing out a correction, explaining her method as she went, as though to a child even smaller than herself.
The robot couldn’t help a pink-yellow flicker of satisfaction as it accepted the lesson. From then on, the two of them could often be seen exchanging impromptu lessons, on topics that grew ever more advanced as the girl’s facility increased. And if anyone minded that the shore was messier than it had been in the past, they kept it to themselves.
Author’s Note
Cheris loved math from childhood. People sometimes assume because I have a B.A. in math (Cornell University) that I was the same. Actually, I hated math all the way until 9th grade, when I encountered geometry and theorems had reasons, as opposed to being arbitrary lists of facts that I had to memorize. Just the year before, in Algebra I, my mom and I had nightly fights where I would claim that factoring polynomials was too hard and I couldn’t do it so there was no point doing my homework, and she would patiently show me how to do it, and make me do my homework. I owe a lot of my early math foundation to Mom and her supplemental teaching. By the time I got to calculus, she couldn’t help me anymore, as she’d never taken it, but by then I had learned the habits of study.
The funny story is that I entered college as a prospective history major, then switched to computer science because I wanted to eat, then discovered that I am the world’s slowest debugger and besides, the math courses were more fun than the CS courses, so I switched again. I still love reading about history, and I would have had a higher GPA as a history major, because writing essays has always come easily to me. But math was too beautiful to resist, even if I haven’t done anything useful with it. I can’t be the first math major to wander off and do something completely sideways, but I wonder what my professors would make of me.
Sword-Shopping
CADET AJEWEN CHERIS and her civilian girlfriend Linnis Orua paused outside the shop. A banner of ink painted onto silk fluttered in the flirtatious artificial breeze. Orua had grown up on a station with less naturalistic ideas of aesthetics, and found this dome-city with its aleatory weather nerve-wracking. She was still spooked whenever there was a wind, which entertained Cheris because Orua had long, luxurious waves of hair that rippled beautifully. “We were always told to be aware of strange air currents as a possible sign of carapace breach!” Orua had protested when Cheris teased her about it.