Variations on an Apple (3 page)

Authors: Yoon Ha Lee

“I don't trust it,” Paris said to Ilion as he stared over the pattern-maps and their mystifying gaps. He almost knocked over a tall glass of wine.

Ilion deftly caught the glass. “You need to quit pruning your need for sleep,” she said. “If it's regenerating this fast, you need the rest more than we need you awake obsessing over the invaders' whimsies.”

“You're taking this too lightly.”

Ilion fixed him with an interested stare. “Excuse me,” she said, “
somebody
is forgetting who's responsible for coordinating all the systems around here. Even when I'm busy feeding you grapes because you've forgotten to show up for dinner again.”

Paris gave it up. He didn't like the fact that none of their intelligence had anticipated this development. They had spent long hours tracing through what they knew of the invaders' councilsâdepressingly little, in spite of their studies of signal traffic, and repeated attempts to crack the encryptionâin an attempt to decipher its significance. So far they had a lot of speculation and little evidence to back up any of the going hypotheses.

“Stop that,” Ilion said.

Paris realized he had been tapping his foot in a querulous one-two, one-two-three, one-two rhythm. “Sorry,” he said, mostly sincerely.

“Look,” Ilion said, leaning over him. She was tall now, even allowing for the fact that he was slouched in his chair. “If there's a pattern in there, any shred of meaning or menace, I'll find it. The young are so”âshe smoothed his hair back and kissed the side of his browâ“impatient. We will prevail.”

“Other than the kiss,” Paris said, unimpressed, “you're starting to sound like my brother. You're more succinct, though.”

Ilion laughed. “He does like his rallying speeches, doesn't he? It's a harmless foible, as these things go.” Her hands trailed lower, began massaging the knots in Paris's neck. The calluses on her fingers were oddly soothing.

“I would feel so much better if you showed any sign of concern,” Paris said.

“No, you wouldn't,” she returned, and he couldn't refute her. But she smiled at him, dangerously. In the light-dark of her eyes he saw the enormous edifices of calculation, systems and subsystems dedicated to analyzing the anomaly in the enemy's behavior.

As it turned out, he shouldn't have been reassured after allânot because she wasn't devoted to the problem, but because she was.

*Â Â Â *Â Â Â *

Everyone in Ilion with a shred of understanding of strategic analysis dedicated a certain amount of their cognitive allocation to the problem of the vanished ships and whether they had, say, gone for reinforcements, or were skulking around doing something even worse, whatever that might be. (The sole exception was Cassandra; even Ilion gave up on coaxing her into joining the effort.) As a result, the enemy general's mimetic attack, inscribed in the notation of negative space, penetrated the city-fort's every level, from Ilion's highest heuristics to the sub-sentient routines that ran the simplest defense grids. And at the appointed time, all of Ilion's gates flowered open at once.

Even Paris, with his interest in matters mathematical, had been acculturated by the long siege to think of
attack
in terms of triremes and trebuchets, mass drivers and missiles. When he woke (having fallen asleep, without meaning to, while looking up a theorem concerning network topology), it took him a muddled hour to figure out what was going on.

By then it was too late.

*Â Â Â *Â Â Â *

Paris didn't recognize the conquering general until she deigned to visit him. He was the last, although he would never know that. She dispensed of the rest of the royal family by fire and sword and bullet, by her annihilating brilliance.

“So you're the cause of all this trouble,” the general said. She was made of articulated metal, shining in the gray light of the prison. Each time she moved, she made a metal-scrape whisper of bells.

Her voice was familiar and unfamiliar. Nevertheless, he was certain he had never heard it before. His bonds of gravity-weave at least permitted him to raise his head enough to look her in the eye.

The face, nowâhe knew that face. Once, through a scatter-veil of possibilities, he had seen it, golden-fair and blessed by goddesses three, beautiful in the way of bone and bullets and polished coins.

“I am Helen,” the general said, “and you've wasted ten years of everyone's lives by sparking off a general war. Congratulations.”

Paris laughed painfully, contemplating her. “Damn,” he said. “The fairest isn't a goddess after all, or a city, even. It's a general with a slide rule for a heart. That's a compliment, by the way.”

“You idiot,” Helen said. “You know as well as I do that the gods eavesdrop on everything. I can't spare you now.”

“Sometimes it's worth it just to say the truth as you see it,” Paris said.

“It's over,” she said. “Your city will be dismantled into its constituent quarks, and no more people will have to die for its sake. Until the next fruit's sprouting, anyway; there's always some gardener of human dissent. But that's a problem for the next general.”

“I should have chosen you,” Paris said. In that moment he fell in love the way you fell into a singularity, a moment spun into forever lingering.

Helen's masked face held no expression except Paris's own, faintly reflected. “Still an idiot,” she said, and this time there was real pity in her voice. “I know your story. Do you think you were the only one offered a choice?”

He had no answer for her. Even so, when she brought the gun up to his head, he did not close his eyes. His last thought was that Ilion had never had a chance.

About the Author

Yoon Ha Lee
is an American science fiction writer born on January 26, 1979 in Houston, Texas. His first published story, "The Hundredth Question," appeared in
Fantasy & Science Fiction
in 1999; since then, over two dozen further stories have appeared. He lives in Pasadena, California. You can sign up for email updates
here
.

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