Jewel Box by E. Lily Yu

Author:E. Lily Yu [Yu, E. Lily]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: short stories collections, literary fiction, on fragile waves, ken liu, ursula le guin, ted chiang, kelly link, collection, scifi, fantasy, speculative fiction, science fiction, short stories
Publisher: Erewhon Books
Published: 2023-10-24T00:00:00+00:00

In its latter days, the two blessed suns of the planet of Ys grew twice as large and dully red. There was no true day or night on Ys, but a long thin dusk when both suns burned, followed by a dim and feverish evening when one or the other had set.

While laughter was still heard on Ys, people placed bets on which sun would swallow the other before flaring outward to consume their doubled necklace of planets, and they joked about the difficulties of collecting.

Then the crops did not grow in the low and ugly light, and laughter ceased.

The temples of jasper and chrysocolla were torn down. Ancient thrones were toppled, and governments dissolved in speechless confusion.

One man who had amassed several towers of gold, which in that eternal evening looked indistinguishable from iron, announced that he would build a starship to save a select few. From his towers of gold he paid engineers and physicists to labor day and night. And many praised him.

Another man who had amassed a mountain of gold, which gleamed in the red light with an oily green tinge, declared that salvation was to be found underground. He would bore thousands of miles of tunnels, for use by a fortunate handful. And he paid excavators and builders to burrow in the earth. His name was breathed with reverence.

A third man sat on a wreck of gold, which shone enough that one might overlook the deaths that had purchased it, and proclaimed that cooling the body to stillness, to make statues of the living until danger had passed, was the answer. And he paid biologists and chemists to perfect this enchantment. Many prayers and blessings were said for him.

All the while, those who did not have towers of gold, nor black-clad guards with rifles of light, scratched and scrounged and ate furtively in corners, that their food might not be taken from them. Death and plague ran through the streets. One barely opened one’s gates to family, fear flowed so free.

Where the long dragging point of one tower’s shadow fell in the darkest part of dusk, in an unremarkable neighborhood, there was a mud-walled compound. And in that compound, in the latter days of Ys, as people fought and snatched and hoarded, a woman passed the evenings cooking, sweeping, and putting things to rights.

She sowed seed, though the plants never grew high in that weak light, and gathered the small greens to eat by the bowlful. She clambered down into the drying well and scraped at the muddy bottom with a broken cup to collect the mouthfuls of water that remained. And she tended to two girls who had collapsed, one after the other, weeping and bleeding, before her gate.

When her neighbors first heard the rattle of the chain on her gates, they had hissed at her from behind their own walls.

“What are you doing?”

“You’re mad!”

“Don’t let her in!”

“Open the gates, and the men will fall on you.”

The woman shouldered one of the gates open, though not far, in case what that last neighbor said was true.

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