Year’s Best SF 15 by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer

logic. Getting to the ending is like reading a good proof.” David, whose doctorate is in literature, says, “the emotional logic is convincing, and the characterization deep and suggestive.”

 
    â€œT hey don’t look very dangerous,” Xiao Ling Yun said to the aide. Ling Yun wished she understood what Phoenix Command wanted from her. Not that she minded the excuse to take a break from the composition for two flutes and hammered dulcimer that had been stymieing her for the past two weeks.
    Through a one-way window in the observation chamber, Xiao Ling Yun saw five adolescents sitting cross-legged on the floor in a semicircle. Before them was a tablet and two brushes. No ink; these were not calligraphy brushes. One of the adolescents, a girl with short, dark hair, leaned over and drew two characters with quick strokes. All five studied the map that appeared on the tablet.
    â€œNevertheless,” the aide said. “They attempted to assassinate the Phoenix General. We are fortunate to have captured them.”
    The aide wrote something on her own tablet, and a map appeared. She circled a region of the map. The tablet enlarged it until it filled the screen. “Circles represent gliders,” the aide said. “Triangles represent dragons.”
    Ling Yun peered at the formations. “Who’s winning?”
    At the aide’s instigation, the tablet replayed the last move. A squadron of dragons engaged a squadron of gliders. One dragon turned white—white for death—and vanished from the map. The aide smiled. “The assassins are starting to slip.”
    Ling Yun had thought that the Phoenix General desiredthe services of a musician to restore order to the fractious ashworlds. She was not the best person for such a purpose, nor the worst: a master musician, yes, but without a sage’s philosophical bent of mind. Perhaps they had chosen her on account of her uncle’s position as a logistician. She was pragmatic enough not to be offended by the possibility.
    â€œI had not expected prisoners to be offered entertainment,” Ling Yun said, a little dubious. She was surprised that they hadn’t been executed, in fact.
    â€œIt is not entertainment,” the aide said reprovingly. “Every citizen has a right to education.”
    Of course. The government’s stance was that the ashworlds already belonged to the empire, whatever the physical reality might be. “Including the classical arts, I presume,” she said. “But I am a musician, not a painter.” Did they want her to tutor the assassins? And if so, why?
    â€œMusic is the queen of the arts, is it not?” the aide said.
    She had not expected to be discussing the philosophy of music with a soldier. “According to tradition, yes,” Ling Yun said carefully. Her career had been spent writing music that never strayed too much from the boundaries of tradition.
    The most important music lesson she had had came not from her tutor, but from a servant in her parents’ house. The servant, whose name Ling Yun had deliberately forgotten, liked to sing as he stirred the soup or pounded the day’s bread. He didn’t have a particularly notable voice. It wavered in the upper register and his vowels drifted when he wasn’t paying attention. (She didn’t tell him any of this. She didn’t talk to him at all. Her parents would have disapproved.) But the servant had two small children who helped him with his tasks, and they chanted the songs, boisterously out of tune.
    From watching that servant and his children, Ling Yun learned that the importance of music came not from its ability to move the five elements, but from its ability to affect the heart. She wanted to write music that anyone could hum, music that anyone could enjoy. It was the opposite of the haughty ideal that her tutor taught her to strive toward. Naturally, Ling Yun kept this thought to herself.
    The aide