Lightspeed: Year One

In no hurry, the woman draws the Flower and points it at the man. She is aiming it not at his absent heart, but at his left eye. If she pulled the trigger, she would pierce him through the false pupil.

The musician continues plucking plangent notes from the instrument. The others, seeing the gun, gawk for only a moment before hastening out of the bar. As if that would save them.

“Yes,” the man says, outwardly unshaken, “you could damage my lineage badly. I could name programmers all the way back to the first people who scratched a tally of birds or rocks.”

The gun’s muzzle moves precisely, horizontally: now the right eye. The woman says, “You’ve convinced me that you know. You haven’t convinced me not to kill you.” It’s half a bluff: she wouldn’t use the Flower, not for this. But she knows many ways to kill.

“There’s another one,” he says. “I don’t want to speak of it here, but will you hear me out?”

She nods once, curtly.

Covered by her palm, engraved silver-bright in a language nobody else reads or writes, is the word ancestor.

Once upon a universe, an empress’s favored duelist received a pistol from the empress’s own hand. The pistol had a stock of silver-gilt and niello, an efflorescence of vines framing the maker’s mark. The gun had survived four dynasties, with all their rebellions and coups. It had accompanied the imperial arsenal from homeworld to homeworld.

Of the ancestral pistol, the empire’s archives said two things: Do not use this weapon, for it is nothing but peril and This weapon does not function.

In a reasonable universe, both statements would not be true.

The man follows the woman to her suite, which is on one of Blackwheel’s tidier levels. The sitting room, comfortable but not luxurious by Blackwheeler standards, accommodates a couch sized to human proportions, a metal table shined to blurry reflectivity, a vase in the corner.

There are also two paintings, on silk rather than some less ancient substrate. One is of a mountain by night, serenely anonymous amid its stylized clouds. The other, in a completely different style, consists of a cavalcade of shadows. Only after several moments’ study do the shadows assemble themselves into a face. Neither painting is signed.

“Sit,” the woman says.

The man does. “Do you require a name?” he asks.

“Yours, or the target’s?”

“I have a name for occasions like this,” he says. “It is Zheu Kerang.”

“You haven’t asked me my name,” she remarks.

“I’m not sure that’s a meaningful question,” Kerang says. “If I’m not mistaken, you don’t exist.”

Wearily, she says, “I exist in all the ways that matter. I have volume and mass and volition. I drink water that tastes the same every day, as water should. I kill when it moves me to do so. I’ve unwritten death into the history of the universe.”

His mouth tilts up at unwritten. “Nevertheless,” he says. “Your species never evolved. You speak a language that is not even dead. It never existed.”

“Many languages are extinct.”

“To become extinct, something has to exist first.”

The woman folds herself into the couch next to him, not close but not far. “It’s an old story,” she says. “What is yours?”

“Four of Arighan’s guns are still in existence,” Kerang says.

The woman’s eyes narrow. “I had thought it was three.” Arighan’s Flower is the last, the gunsmith’s final work. The others she knows of are Arighan’s Mercy, which always kills the person shot, and Arighan’s Needle, which removes the target’s memories of the wielder.

“One more has surfaced,” Kerang says. “The character in the maker’s mark resembles a sword in chains. They are already calling it Arighan’s Chain.”

“What does it do?” she says, because he will tell her anyway.

“This one kills the commander of whoever is shot,” Kerang says, “if that’s anyone at all. Admirals, ministers, monks. Schoolteachers. It’s a peculiar sort of loyalty test.”

Now she knows. “You want me to destroy the Chain.”

Once upon a universe, a duelist named Shiron took up the gun that an empress with empiricist tendencies had given her. “I don’t understand how a gun that doesn’t work could possibly be perilous,” the empress said. She nodded at a sweating man bound in monofilament so that he would dismember himself if he tried to flee. “This man will be executed anyway, his name struck from the roster of honored ancestors. See if the gun works on him.”

Shiron fired the gun . . . and woke in a city she didn’t recognize, whose inhabitants spoke a dialect she had never heard before, whose technology she mostly recognized from historical dramas. The calendar they used, at least, was familiar. It told her that she was 857 years too early. No amount of research changed the figure.