THERE’S A SHUOS joke that isn’t shared often, although most people have heard it.
What’s the difference between a Shuos and a bullet to the back of the head?
You might survive the bullet.
It’s not especially funny (as opposed to Kel jokes, which everyone but the Kel agree are hilarious). But then, depending on how you measure these things, the deadliest general in Kel history was a Shuos.
YOU WAKE WITH a memory of shadows cutting across the door, of your jacket’s unexpected injection, of toppling sideways and the taste of blood in your mouth. You’re hooked up to a medical unit that someone has decorated with knitted lace. The sight is so unexpected (and the russet lace so hideous) that it keeps you from doing the obvious thing and accosting the instructor, who is standing subtly out of reach, with a dancer’s awareness of space.
You’re pretty sure that if not for whatever they drugged you with, you’d be in a lot of pain right now. As it stands, your thoughts feel as clear as ice in spite of the weird disconnected feeling that your mind is only attached to your body by a few silk strands.
“The ‘Taurag attack’ was still part of the game, wasn’t it?” you ask in a scratched-up voice. “Some of those people actually died.” You weren’t in a simulator for the second half. The smells, the hot, sticky blood, the staring eye.
“The performers were volunteers,” the instructor says, which only makes you want to shoot him more, if only you had a gun. “I had to apply to Mikodez for special permission to recruit them, because if there’s anything Mikodez hates, it’s inefficiency. But the exercise had to be real because that was the only way to make it feel real.”
“You had me kill people for a test. You killed people for a test.”
“You’re not the first person to call me a monster.” The instructor smiles; his eyes are very dark. “I didn’t lie about the destructive potential of the weapon that we’re concerned with. It can devastate planetary populations, and they say I was known for overkill. But it isn’t a Taurag weapon. It’s our weapon. We’re building new battlemoths to make use of it even as we speak. I hear they’ll be ready by year’s end.
“The next step will be to take the fight to the Taurag Republic. There’s a lot of potential for the war to go genocidal, for us to get locked into back-and-forth invasions until one or both of us is obliterated. We have to look beyond that. We can’t escape the fact of war—there’s too much history of distrust for that—but we can lay the foundation for whatever accord we reach afterwards, because no war, however terrible, lasts forever.”
You’re not liking the fact that you agree with this one point, because it means you’re agreeing with him.
“I refuse to let this weapon fall into the hands of people who can use it without blinking at the deaths it will cause, or who think only of revenge,” the instructor says. “I would rather spend a few deaths now, to identify people who understand restraint—who care about the lives of civilians—than find out during the invasion proper by reading about the inevitable massacres.”
“Tell me,” you say sarcastically. “If I’d decided to blow the Citadel up, would you have let that go through, too?”
“No, you were only playing with a dummy system by that point,” he says, “even if you had to believe it was real. If you’d hit the button, we’d still be here, only I’d be debriefing you on why you’d failed.”
He rubs the back of one hand, as if in memory of scars, although you see none there. “You did well,” he adds, as if that could make up for the people you killed, that he put into harm’s way. “You passed. I hope you continue to pass. Because this is one test you don’t stop taking.”
“You wouldn’t have passed,” you say, because someone has to.
“No,” he says. For a moment you glimpse the shadows he lives with, all of them self-inflicted. “I’ve always been an excellent killer. It’s not too late for you to do more with your career than I did with mine. You’ll make an excellent officer. I’m recommending you for the invasion swarm.”
You inhale sharply, and regret it when pain stabs through your side in spite of the painkillers. “I’m not sure you should”—more candor than is safe, but you’re beyond caring. “Because after we deal with the Taurags, I’m coming for you.”
The instructor salutes you Kel-style, with just a touch of irony. You don’t return the gesture. “I look forward to it,” he says.
Author’s Note
Second person is frequently controversial. I am perhaps fonder of it than I have any right to be, because my first story sale (“The Hundredth Question,” The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, February 1999) was written in second person. A lifetime of reading Choose Your Own Adventure books and gamebooks probably exacerbated the tendency.
Mikodez’s lace knitting comes from my brief flirtation with lace knitting. Unfortunately, I am both prone to dropping stitches and unable to read my own knitting, a combination that led to me acrimoniously divorcing knitting a few years back. Maybe I should go back to cross-stitch (a hobby I assigned to Inesser) or tatting?
Glass Cannon
I AM A Shuos.
Jedao didn’t remember most of Shuos Academy, let alone graduating from it. He couldn’t help thinking of himself as a cadet, only nineteen years old, despite the fact that his body was middle-aged in appearance. While Hexarch Shuos Mikodez had assured him that the courses he was taking at the Citadel of Eyes were equivalent to the education he would have gotten at the modern academy, Jedao didn’t believe him. Jedao had spent the past two years and change as a “guest” of the hexarch, or, more accurately, a prisoner. The hexarch might have unbent enough to allow him to catch up with best practices in social engineering and how to wrangle the state of the art bath facilities. That didn’t mean he was likely to allow Jedao to extract classified information from the grid.
Naturally, that was precisely what Jedao intended to do.
I am a Shuos.
Jedao had hoped that repeating the phrase in his head, like a mantra, would magically grant him access to the memories of his older, other self. Useful memories, like how do I hack into the Shuos hexarch’s private files? Never mind that he had no idea whether Jedao One (as he’d labeled the other man, who was and wasn’t dead) would have been able to manage the feat.
At the moment, Jedao was sitting in his suite of rooms watching a poetry recital livestream. The hexarch had invited him to the performance, put on by a Shuos agent whose job it was to pretend to be an Andan. Jedao had declined, claiming that crowds made him jittery. No one had challenged the lie.
The truth was other. Jedao had not redecorated the suite since he had moved into it. The wallpaper remained tranquil green. Furniture in wood—real wood, to which he responded with unwanted atavistic delight. He shifted the chairs around from time to time, just to prove he could, and also because he wondered if it bothered his watchers. (He had no delusions of privacy in the heart of Shuos headquarters.) He watered the potted green onion plant, the same one he’d been given two years ago, with great diligence. The hexarch asked after it every time they met, although Jedao hadn’t figured out why Mikodez cared so much about container gardening. None of this did anything to ameliorate the vast emptiness in his heart, the fact that he had no human friends here, and never would.