Ebullient pink-and-yellow lights lit up the entire cockpit of the needlemoth as 1491625 expressed its opinion of that statement. “You mean he was good in bed.”
“Well, even after ‘only’ a few centuries, he knew a lot of... but never mind.”
Hemiola had the mortifying and possibly heretical thought of the hexarch starring as a courtesan in a drama. Certainly he was always pretty enough to be one, even in a world dominated by pretty people. Even more mortifyingly, it had enough videos of him to... I am not going to make a music video of the hexarch dancing.
“If you were allies once,” Hemiola said after it had tamped down that terrible idea, “what changed your mind?”
Instead of lying again, Cheris propped her chin in her hands and sighed. “He knows I don’t need him anymore, which makes me a liability of the first order. I’ve already defied him by creating the Compact. He wouldn’t destroy me for spite, but he doesn’t tolerate threats to his power, either. And right now I’m the single person best equipped to stop him.” She contemplated some snarl of stratagems invisible to anyone but herself. “I’m sorry you were dragged into this.”
Hemiola didn’t trust itself to answer. It decided that reinventorying the cargo hold was in order. Just in case some random vermin had scuttled aboard at Ayong Primary and were eating their way through the beloved ration bars.
Either Cheris’s favorite flavor was roasted dried squid, because that was the one disappearing at the fastest rate, or she hated it and was trying to get rid of it so she could get to something tastier. She cleaned up after herself conscientiously enough; the needlemoth’s systems recycled the wrappers tidily. But each wrapper came with a scannable code identifying its flavor, expiration date, and manufacturing facility of origin, presumably for quality control purposes. Servitors’ work, which they could do without even opening up crates to look at the redundant human-readable labels.
Hemiola returned to browsing through the hexarch’s notes. They finally revealed why assassinating the hexarch was impossible. It didn’t recognize the revelation for what it was. It came in the form of a map, although it wasn’t to scale, which bothered it more than it cared to admit. The hexarch had inked it in several different colors. After searching its own databases, updated with information from Ayong Primary, Hemiola concluded that the colors denoted different calendrical zones of influence. Yellow represented the hexarchate. Other pastel colors represented the Taurag Republic, the Hafn, Hausse, the Gwa Reality, and more.
The Gwa-an keep to themselves, the hexarch had written—in shorthand, but by now this posed no challenge. The Hafn and Taurags are the most likely to be problematic in the next decades.
And: This is the first time in 237 years that our borders have been under serious threat of collapse, even if only along the Entangled and Crescendo Marches. I can feel the pressure of the encroaching calendrical rot like a disease under my skin.
There followed a long sequence of equations and feverish side notes under the heading black cradle. Hemiola had to study them intensely for several days, disguising its interest with judicious applications of bad dramas. Even the incompetently choreographed dance sequences no longer mattered. The stakes were too high for it to spare much thought for its former hobbies.
The hexarch and Jedao could switch bodies. Jedao did so only with the hexarch’s assistance, which perhaps explained some of his ambivalent attitude toward the hexarch.
On the other hand, the hexarch could jump at will. This explained how he had survived the past 900-odd years. Jedao hadn’t murdered the hexarch in bed (or while dancing, or at dinner) because it wouldn’t have done any good. The hexarch would simply have jumped into another body. So Cheris had told the truth about that.
Here, at last, came the explanation for the hexarch’s interest in his nation’s borders, and how intimately his welfare was bound up with them, beyond the obvious. His immortality—his ability to inhabit other bodies—was an exotic effect. It only worked within the high calendar’s sphere of influence.
With ruthless paranoia, the hexarch had teased out the existence of other exotic effects that could destroy him. He’d even prototyped a couple of weapons, presumably for use against Jedao. This struck Hemiola as singularly dangerous, but then again, Jedao hadn’t managed to obtain those weapons while he had the hexarch in his sights.
Some Kel formation effects could also sever the hexarch from his host body and annihilate him. But the Kel would never disobey their commanders, and Hemiola couldn’t imagine that the hexarch would allow those commanders enough freedom to act against him.
The current fragmentation of the hexarchate must worry the hexarch. After all, if the nation fell, so did he. Even worse, the Protectorate and Compact had joined forces and were transitioning away from the high calendar.
Determined to make further sense of this, Hemiola skimmed rapidly through Kujen’s earlier notes. If it had been human, it was sure it would have developed a headache. But it found the answer it had sought in the research on moths it had earlier thought insignificant. Not the material on dwarf moths, but even earlier, at the very beginning of the mothdrive research program.
The moths are alive, the hexarch had written. The evidence can’t be ignored: they are almost certainly sentient. If we proceed with this line of research we will be enslaving aliens who have done as no harm.
On the other hand, the heptarchate is losing its battles. I watch the news daily. Despite the propaganda I can tell. Whole worlds eaten by the invaders at our borders. A faster stardrive would make all the difference.
Two days later: I wish it didn’t hurt to think about the moths. About dying children. About starving populations. Every time I think about it, I remember my own childhood. I wish I could stop caring.
And the day after that, scrawled in the margin in jagged, shaky letters almost entirely unlike his usual handwriting: I know how to do that.
The hexarch meant psych surgery. It was almost always a bad idea, according to everything Hemiola had ever heard, to undertake psych surgery on yourself. Hemiola wished it could travel back in time and talk the hexarch out of this. It was too late by centuries.
Hemiola vibrated nervously, wondering what to do. It was still stuck on the needlemoth. But who did it owe its loyalty to? Even if the hexarch had ripped out his own conscience and warped the nation around his own thirst for life eternal, that didn’t automatically make Cheris trustworthy.
CHERIS HAD WEDGED herself into the last remaining free space in the hold and was regarding Hemiola gravely. “You look like you want to talk about something,” she said.
“Want” was a strong word. “I have information you need,” it said.
“Need?” Cheris said.
“You said you want to kill the hexarch.”
“So you know how.”
“Now I do.”
“Why tell me?” Cheris said reasonably. “Have you changed your mind about the kind of man he was?”
“You’ve been a general across many realms, many stars,” it said.