“I thought death didn’t frighten you,” Damassis whispers, her words fluttering against Jingfei’s eyelashes.
“I contradict myself constantly, envoy, and my mouth wasn’t the precise one which uttered those exact words.” The duelist angles the blade sideways, as though she means to sheathe it in Hegemonic flesh. The weapon will soon fall apart, but for now it can still execute. “In my time, I honestly wasn’t any sort of fighter, but it’s surprising how much practice you get once you decide disputes should be settled by single combat.”
“I meant to present the gun as my third and last gift to you, to show you that I won’t hurt or humiliate you simply because I can. That I will not deprive you of your dignity. As my apology on behalf of—the others.”
Jingfei collects the weapon and laughs, a sound of moth wings in susurrus as they circle killing fire. “Not worried I’d shoot you with it?”
“I’ve told you before that I’m disposable. I am my duty.” Damassis touches her neck where the sword licked it, her skin still vibrating in echo to the blade. “I will say again that I’ve been sent to negotiate, not interrogate; we’re past that. What is it that you wish for?”
“What would anyone in my position wish for? The impossible. It’s pointless. I don’t have what you want. The secret of the altar-ghost isn’t mine to give.”
“Tiansong will be set free,” the envoy goes on as though Jingfei has said nothing. “That’s what you want, no? A second chance, to undo what you did. Your world is valuable, but we can afford the loss. Its history has been much buried, but you are the Record of Tiansong. What has been forgotten or eroded you alone recall. The languages, the festivals of seasons, the times of worship and contemplation—everything. All this you can return to them, their savior risen from the ashes. It’ll never be the same Tiansong you knew, but it’s the closest that can be had, under the circumstances.”
A shriek of shattering glass. Cracks radiate, on and on, from the far end of the cell. The duelist has been still, her arms at her sides, the gun clipped to her sash. In the reflections another Jingfei flits by, disappears. Shards of mirror fall, chiming.
The duelist turns to Damassis, offering no remark or explanation, though she listens for the receding noise of small bare feet. “Why do you want to understand the mainframe so desperately? It has its uses, originally meant to harden the empresses’ transfer and moot the need for taking over another’s body, but what would you begin to do with it? The Hegemony stands impregnable. At this point even if there exists a dominion equal to yours, the damage you’d inflict on one another would be past bearing for either side. For all intents and purposes you are unchallenged.”
“Your grasp of current affairs isn’t wrong.”
“The essential nature of power seldom changes, and I’m no stranger to it.”
“True upload of the self is something we haven’t been able to achieve, even to contain just one lifetime’s worth of data, let alone multiple.” Damassis glances at her reflections, at Jingfei’s. “Our best generals, slain in action, can be brought back. Our foremost negotiators and intelligence officers, lost to crossfire or assassins, can be returned to their functions. They wouldn’t have to be trained, tested, whetted. The best minds would always be available. If the Hegemony is formidable now, the altar-ghost would make us invincible.”
It takes Jingfei no effort to summon the taste of sweet lotus seed, the sight of gardens where sharks swim through canopies of petals and salted air. “That is not a future I can countenance.”
“We will leave you alone. No Hegemonic warship will ever approach Tiansong’s system. Your territories will be sacrosanct, inviolate, and we’ll guard them, too, should it come to that. What do you owe any other sovereignty we might trample?”
“My human compassion. My empathy.” But she sneers as she says this. “You can’t corroborate your offer. For all I know, Tiansong has been a heat smear for centuries. Nor do I have any guarantee that you’ll deliver.”
Damassis starts to crumple her sleeves in her fists. She loosens her fingers, staring down at them as though they moved independent of her volition or responded to someone else’s fury. Her expression is blank, creased only by distant puzzlement. “That’s sensible, of course. I will personally accompany one of you to your birthworld, so you may see for yourself that it stands strong and flourishing. Then we will withdraw our personnel and barracks from the planet, our outposts from the system, empty Tiansong’s skies of Hegemonic ships. You will find some of your descendants object to this, but we will instate you as First of Tiansong, grant you all the authority you need and enforce it as required. Once you’ve been well established, the rest is up to you. With the altar-ghost replenishing you, you have forever to correct your mistake.”
Jingfei leans forward, clasps her hands to either side of Damassis’ jaw. The envoy does not protest or pull away. “Who are you?”
“Shouldn’t the question be what I am?” Damassis blinks once, twice, lapsing into confusion. But she shakes her head as far as Jingfei’s grip allows, regaining herself. “And the answer to that I have already given, through what I have said and done.”
The duelist lets go.
“Please consider what I’ve proposed. I’m ready to leave at any time; a ship awaits with room for us both. It is,” the envoy murmurs as though her words emerge, dazed and unsteady, from another’s throat, “your future.”
* * *
The shape of treason is a trunk of thorns; the traitor climbs, knowing forgiveness waits at the zenith, at the world’s roof where earth joins heaven. At the conclusion of boughs that bite and leaves that lash, there will be a lotus whose nectar shall heal all wounds, whose petals are the shade of salvation.
An old image, part of an old teaching from an extinguished religion, but Jingfei thinks on it often. A tree that is all trunk: the punch line—the punishment—being that there is no end to it, no absolution or path to virtue. The traitor’s sentence is eternal.
Under the pavilion, she watches her kites falter under the relentless pursuit of briar-stars. A few of them will soon surrender to gravity and decay. Everything she makes, from weapons to clothes to kites, culminates in atrophy and rot. She outlasts them all, she and her tree of thorns and her memory that never quite settles into the ease of scars.
The weight of decision, again, a path forking before her when it should have smoothed into a single direction, a linear and infinite vector.
So she knows what will happen—could have choreographed it moment to moment—when other parts of her gather on the roof, on the periphery of radiant aegis, the precipice of the swarm. Beyond that wall there is a vacuum. Some of her have chosen that, on occasion, suicide being preferable to the fortress; that part, too, the mainframe ruthlessly accumulates, yielding not an inch to data loss and oblivion. Jingfei has muscle memory of the leap, the buoyancy of space, the instant before implosive death.
The duelist crouches behind the railing and draws the envoy’s gun.
Her first shot catches an older man with eyelids painted scarab-blue, lips burnished platinum. Her second drops a child starvation-thin. Another, another, and Jingfei dies. She doesn’t keep track; some of her instances she never gets to meet before they expire. They are her and she is they, but it is only a technicality.
Kites stretch and snap and shroud the fallen, but the kites are few and the bodies are many. The duelist works on, methodical and impersonal. She will not feel the impact of bullet in flesh, the crack of bones giving in to annihilating charge. The next one to decant will, and though all of them contain memories of dying it’s never been so rapid, murders lined up compressed and close. The mind defends itself by forgetting. But she has no such luxury, and the next crop of Jingfei, she thinks, will at last break.