Conservation of Shadows - By Yoon Ha Lee Page 0,12

admirable nonchalance, and smiled again. Neither of them glanced toward the scroll with its absent manual.

After that, Kaela returned to studying for the week’s exam in judicial theory. She had neglected to do so earlier because she was puzzling over the problem of the shadow postulates, which she had brashly submitted as her research topic, and later because she had decided that, after months of dead-end possibilities, she would rather learn sword-dancing. She was paying for it now.

Tonight, she would rather have hidden in her room and studied. The Black College was hosting a trio of visiting scholars, however, and since the dinner talk was on mathematics, her specialty, she could not absent herself. Teris had disappeared after their practice session, heading for a festhall sword-dance with her lover, a college technician who shared her enthusiasm for the physical disciplines. Kaela envied them their revelry, even though she shied away from that bright, barbaric atmosphere.

Trapped at dinner, Kaela toyed with her chopsticks and reviewed canonical decisions while a senior magistrate introduced the scholars. When her seatmates started giving her irritated looks, she switched to teasing apart a tassel on her floor-cushion to keep herself awake.

Three scholars, the ever-present convention of rhetorical balance, in contrast to the undiluted pairing of the sword-dance, relic of earlier, more warlike traditions. The second scholar, at least, had an animated face and voice in contrast to the pedantry of the first. Even so, she felt her attention drifting. Maybe she should buy a new floor-cushion for her room, one with many silk tassels for the unraveling. On second thought, maybe not. Teris was sensitive to small nervous motions, but was too polite to protest. Kaela tried to return the courtesy by stilling herself. The sword-dancing did help reduce her jitteriness.

When the scholar went into a digression on mirror dynamics, Kaela sat straighter, the tassel forgotten. This intersected her research topic, after all.

“—what the mirror-war revealed,” said the scholar by way of conclusion, “is that the relationship between source and image is mediated by these dynamics. An invisible third presence, if you like, satisfying the rule of three for Vorief’s framework.”

Kaela shivered at the name. Anje Vorief’s studies in entelechy had resulted in near-instant communications and the ready production of silhouettes, which displaced scribes and the necessity of large-scale printing. They had also led to the continent’s only mirror-war, which started with the assassination of several public figures by paring away their reflections hour by hour until they wandered lost in iterations of shattered identity and died.

Nevertheless, now that safeguards existed against those abuses, Vorief’s treatise, When Shadows Walk into the World, was required reading at the Black College. Magistrates had a long history of primitive applications of entelechy theory, as the college’s procession of shades showed. All magistrate-aspirants were warned that the shades, which belonged to past magistrates, paid them especial scrutiny. The shades’ demands for inhuman honesty had driven careless aspirants into safer academic pursuits.

The third scholar had finished speaking. Kaela’s body begged for sleep. She stayed just long enough to show courtesy to the visitors before fleeing to her empty room. Tassels and their shadows, forming unbreakable knots on the walls, twined in her dreams.

“I’m hungry,” Kaela said after her roomsister prodded her awake.

Teris gave her an exasperated look. “I bet you didn’t remember to eat anything at dinner. I saved you a pastry from breakfast, but your tea’s no longer hot.”

“You’re too splendid for words, Teris.” Kaela didn’t mind lukewarm tea.

Teris sniffed, but the crook of her mouth suggested she was not unflattered. “How was the talk?”

“The parts of it I was awake for? There were some interesting things about how mathematical applications affect the propagation of legal norms, models for ethical calculus, that sort of thing.”

Teris had started stretching, palms to feet, and she straightened herself before saying, “Nothing controversial, then. I wish they would inflict these itinerant scholars on us less often. Let them ponder philosophy and leave applications to us.”

“I’m sure they think their work is important. At least we’re exposed to judicial research from all over the continent. Unless you think we should be sheltered from different paradigms until we have more experience?”

“See what happens when I give you a pastry? It’s restday and here you are starting a policy discussion without a third participant.”

Kaela changed the subject, despite her roomsister’s teasing tone. “How was the festhall?”

“Ever so refreshing after poring over documents.” She resumed her stretches, recounting the pleasure of her lover’s surety of form, the consuming