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Thresholder, ch 138, Waiting Games
🕑 Added 2024-07-18 06:33:44 +0000 UTCMy apologies again for the inconsistency of the chapters, I've been stressed out and depressed. I've been trying to write some side things to get the juices flowing, but I've had some life stuff that's been getting me down, and it's at least partly a mindset issue.
In other news, my webcomic Millennial Scarlet is now on Tapas, if you'd like to read it in a better format than going on its Patreon. I've really enjoyed writing it and seeing the drawings come to life.
I will also be posting some of the Book 1 stuff here in the next few days, partly to get some feedback and partly because I'm happy with them.
Also, my apologies if you received an email about this in error.
~~~~
“It’s actually really cool,” said Eggy. “They figured out a technique of mapping punches, not the one we use, where we’re depending on universal resonance, but a more — I guess I’d call it intrauniversal technique, one that works only within the universe. And they’re doing it by hand, which isn’t hard, I guess, but — oh heck, he’s figured out the calculator, this should be good.”
Eggy was watching her monitor with a view over Moss’ shoulder as he used the tablet Perry had left there. The bridge was a bit crowded, since the crew and a few of the hangers-on were there, but it was an informal meeting that Perry didn’t want to miss. Eggy was their science officer, or something like that, and she was extremely excited by what they’d found in the northern research city.
“Yeah, he’s going straight for calculus, that’s what I would have done,” said Eggy. “Going straight for the integrals — and now he’s trying to break it, which I also respect. Hell of a guy.”
“You were saying about the methods?” asked Perry. He had gotten out of his armor for the time being, and felt much more comfortable. “We can adapt them?”
“Well, yes and no,” said Eggy. She turned around in her chair, spinning to face Perry, but she’d shoved off from the table too hard and went right back around to her monitor and had to make another half rotation. “We can adapt the methods here, but they’re not shy about having different magic systems interface with each other, because obviously they don’t understand the fundamental nature of their reality as something cobbled together. So there’s basically not any chance at all that we would get it to work on some other world, which is one of the things we’re after. Although …”
“I’m hoping that’s a good ‘although’,” said Hella. The ship’s captain had her arms folded and was directing a stern look at her excitable scientist.
“Uh,” said Eggy, running her fingers through her hair. “In theory we could use it for discrimination if we had a giant dish, which isn’t as impractical as it might sound, because we could just go into space and unfold it — if the world we’re on has space, which … obviously would present an issue.”
“Focus, please,” said Hella. She relaxed slightly. “Do you need a stimulant?”
“Yeah,” said Eggy with a double nod. “Nose one?”
“Sure,” said Hella. She reached down into a nearby drawer at her station and pulled out a white nasal spray, which she handed over to Eggy, who took it and immediately squirted a puff of something up her nose.
“Uh,” said Mette.
“Nasal spray,” said Hella. “Cools down the brain.”
“What does it actually do?” asked Kes, who was standing with his arms crossed in a pose that mimicked Perry’s. Perry found this slightly annoying.
“It’s a nootropic,” said Hella. “Increases concentration for an hour, helps a lot when your mind is going too many places. We picked it up some worlds back. It’s not actually a stimulant in the conventional sense.” She read Perry’s face. “We take what we can get. It’s safe.”
Eggy handed the spray back and blinked, then looked at the computer. “Where were we?”
“You were jumping around from topic to topic too much,” said Hella.
“Right,” said Eggy. She placed her hands flat on the table on either side of the keyboard. “So to focus in on the relevant stuff here, we can adapt some of the techniques he’s using in the long term. For this world, we’ll have perfect clarity about the punches, maybe a little more than that. The mapping system they’re using is completely different, but I can adapt our models to theirs, and there’s a good chance that we can have some influence. Actually, give me a second.”
Eggy began rapidly typing into what Perry only vaguely understood to be some kind of interface for writing programs. He’d seen both Richter and Brigitta doing similar things with wildly different interfaces, but in all cases it was a manipulation of glyphs. He could use second sphere for interpretation, changing the way it appeared on the screen as though there was a filter on top of his eyes, but it didn’t become much more comprehensible.
“This is just absolutely painful to watch,” said Mette in a low voice. She had moved closer to Perry, and said it in a low voice.
“Heard that,” said Eggy. She turned in her chair. “I would suggest you do better if you think you can, but you don’t even know what we’re trying to do here.”
“Up,” said Mette. “Let me do it.”
“You don’t know this keyboard, interface, or programming language,” said Eggy. “Come on.” She got up though. Perry’s opinion, it was mostly to see what happened.
Mette slid into the chair, stared at the keyboard for a moment, then looked over at Eggy. “Alright, let me handle this, tell me what we’re doing. I can put it in about a billion times faster than you can.”
“So,” said Eggy. “Basically, we have the punch map, which is a relational map, it shows — yeah, that one, how did you get that?”
The punch map had come up on the screen, showing the arcs of the thresholders through their worlds. Perry’s started on Earth and was a simple line going through all the worlds he’d visited.
“I was watching you, and I can use a search function, as I am not a moron,” said Mette, eyes still on the screen and hands still at the ready.
“Right, so the map that the Markat team made is different, because in higher dimensional space it actually does point to where things are,” said Eggy. “So the script should map these two things against each other, which will point out where we are in high-D, along with a vector showing some directions. That will at least get us in the direction of — okay, so you’re fast.”
A crude visualization showed a sphere in the center of the screen with a bunch of spikes sticking out of it. It didn’t mean much to Perry.
“We can use this somehow?” asked Perry.
“So … in theory, yeah,” said Eggy. She sniffed. Her hands were smoothing down her dress, which she didn’t seem to be aware of. “They have tools which theoretically could nudge the exit punch in a specific direction. There’s a little delay, sometimes a long delay. In theory, we could direct the punch. I think.”
“How long?” asked Kes before Perry had a chance to.
“A month, let’s say,” replied Eggy.
“From experience, you need to make that two months,” said Hella.
“That’s a pretty long time,” said Perry. “A very long time, if we’re leaving Third Fervor alive. I can’t capture her, and once she’s down, the portal opens. And if Fenilor gets to her, if he ends her …”
“We monitor and hope for the best,” said Hella. “That’s all we can do. We’ll work on the other problems as much as we can. We build weapons, a way to track Fenilor, a way to obliterate him if he refuses to go quietly.” Weapons would be easier than tracking, even if they had that tablet.
“We’re going to need help,” said Perry. “I don’t fully trust the culture, but they have hundreds of people who’ve worked in spheres adjacent to the ones we need.”
“First we need to see how far Fenilor has penetrated them,” said Hella. “But in the meantime, I’m going to be using that machine of yours. We’re going to expand the Farfinder as much as we can.” She looked around at her crew and got some nods.
“Will you be able to take them all on the ship?” asked Perry. “The clones?”
“No,” said Hella. “Some of them will be stranded here. If I thought it was viable, I would suggest we build a few more of this ship, but the ship has been through a lot, and it’s poorly documented. It’ll mean some of the crew will stay on this planet.”
“It wouldn’t be too hard to make another ship,” said Mette. She hesitated. “Not if there were more of me.” It wasn’t something that Perry had talked about with her, but Mette came from a culture where expanding the population was taken as a social imperative. She’d had children, and she would have clones.
“We’ll discuss it,” said Hella with a curt nod. “Obviously it’s Perry’s machine, and we can’t do anything without his blessing, nor would we, but I think this is the plan. With five of Eggy working together, there are projects that we couldn’t otherwise get done.”
“I’m great like that,” said Eggy with a smile that Perry only returned by half.
“That would drop the timeline to what?” asked Perry.
“The two month timeline would assume that we had more science and engineering people,” said Hella.
“Do it then,” said Perry. “We’ll get it set up. As many as you want.”
~~~~
Days passed.
Perry stepped into Nima’s room, not wearing the power armor. She had mostly been by herself, with only Mette to stop in every now and then. She had a computer, which she was surprisingly adept with, and limited access to a subset of the knowledge and media library of the Farfinder, with their copy of a copy of Marchand looking over her shoulder.
Her room was of her own design, spun from the material dreams. Perry had always associated elves with silver ornamentation and ostentatious curls, white wood that had been lovingly worked and looked like it was meant to last forever, an idea he’d probably gotten from Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings movies or through cultural osmosis. Nima’s room was minimalist modernism, though with less in the way of straight lines. Every hinge, fastener, or screw was completely hidden, but the furniture was made of two or three large pieces of polished wood or stone, and in a few places metal gleamed. The bends to lines were mathematical, seeming like there had to be some function that easily defined them, some kind of notation you could write out using three variables and some brackets. A large window showed a city that had been built to the same aesthetic with nothing in the way of ornamentation or elaboration, just houses and gardens that had clean curves. Beyond that, there was a steep drop off, and it seemed as though the city sat above clouds.
“You know, there are moments when I can believe that I’m back home,” said Nima. She was seated at her desk, using a keyboard and mouse, neither of which fit in with the elegant desk. She turned to him and looked him up and down. “And then you come here. Not even giving me the dignity of wearing your armor.”
“You’re not violent,” said Perry with a shrug.
“And I’m very out-classed,” said Nima. She sighed and reached over to turn off her computer monitor. It had been on a page about American sports. “What do you need from me?”
“Nothing,” said Perry. “I’m just seeing how you’re doing.”
“You can spy on me at any time,” said Nima. “It’s a better prison than the one I was in before, but through my whole time on this planet I’m not sure I’ve ever been in a place of my own choosing.”
Perry watched her. “You know, I was talking to Hella. She said that this is one of the more common failure modes for thresholders who aren’t immediately aggressive. They come together, feel each other out, and then distrust and a small amount of misalignment throws them into a real conflict with each other.”
Nima watched him with a blank face.
“Or sometimes they do come at each other with aggression, because that’s what a world or two of thresholding has trained them to do,” said Perry. “They might not even know that they were aligned on a lot of things. I had an ally nearly kill me, actually.”
“We’re not aligned,” said Nima. “If I had the power, I would fix this world. You think it doesn’t need fixing.”
“It’s a functional world,” said Perry. “That’s better than I can say for most of them. I mean, I’ve only been to civilized worlds, but even by the standards of civilization, this one is working well, at least in the near term. No famine, no disease, no collapse.”
Nima looked away. “For now.”
“For now,” said Perry. He was happy giving her that much. “I think if they believed that it would hold forever without any work, it wouldn’t actually function. They fight, they strive, they have every member of their society putting their back into it. There’s something beautiful in that, though I don’t know how you get there — and I’ve been studying their teachings, their cultural works.”
Nima was silent for a moment. “We had that,” she said softly.
“Did you?” asked Perry. “You never said.”
“We understood our place,” said Nima. She looked out over the false image of the city. “We understood the importance of our work. We believed in doing good and battling evil in all its forms.” She looked back at Perry. “From everything you’ve said, you came from a place that believed in nothing.”
Perry considered that. “It was a place that believed in a lot of things, just … some of them weren’t good things. There was an understanding that people would take advantage if you let them, that people would do what was best for themselves at the expense of others. We believed in freedom, I guess, but … I don’t know. Sometimes it felt like that freedom was just an excuse to be shitty to each other.”
“It sounds awful,” said Nima.
“The whole world wasn’t like that,” said Perry. “Even the country I lived in wasn’t really like that, it was just … the internet. The computers.” He wasn’t sure he believed that. He looked over at her desk. “You’re getting along well with it?”
“We had computers in my world,” said Nima. “Everything is different, but it’s not that different. I’m getting along.”
Perry nodded.
“Thank you,” said Nima. She pursed her lips. “For not using force on me, after the whole hostage thing. For trying to make this imprisonment pleasant.”
Perry nodded. “I try not to be a bad guy.”
“Interesting phrasing,” Nima replied. “You try, but you might actually be a bad guy?”
“I’ve eaten people, Nima,” said Perry. “I’ve killed … I don’t even know how many people. And I haven’t felt bad about it, even though I think in principle murder is wrong.” He paused. “Some of them I felt bad about. The ones that weren’t under my control. The senseless ones. But most deaths are senseless, in the end.”
“You … weren’t in control?” asked Nima.
“I can turn into a wolf creature,” said Perry. “It gives me extra strength at the cost of a loss of control and a hunger for flesh. I do have it under control now, but there was a time when I … didn’t.”
Nima paled. “I suppose it’s no wonder I couldn’t beat you even with your armor off.”
“Yeah,” said Perry. He couldn’t tell her about Kes for practical reasons of not handing the enemy intel. It would also be a humiliation if he let her know just how much stronger than her he was. Kes had just been a normal human.
“You’re becoming less human over time,” said Nima. “That’s a path thresholders walk.”
Perry nodded. “At the point I’m at now, I don’t think I’ve become less human in a bad way.”
“I don’t want to be less of an elf,” said Nima.
“Then you’re in luck, because your very nature will mean that you’re not often tempted,” said Perry. “The good thing about the portals, at least as far as we understand them, is that they don’t have a sense of irony or drama. They value close fights, and that’s it.”
“I’m done,” said Nima. “They — Hella and the others — think there’s a way out. All I would need to do is stay on this ship.”
“Oh,” said Perry. “I was planning to offer to let you through a portal. To continue on.”
“So I could do what?” asked Nima. “Fight for the rest of my life? Struggle against people like Fenilor? Like you?”
“I don’t know,” said Perry. “It’s just … we wouldn’t be able to bring you home, and I don’t think you want to spend the rest of your life as a prisoner here, so you’d just settle down on the next world that looks good enough?”
“Something like that,” said Nima. She watched him. “You would never.”
“No,” said Perry. “Or … I don’t know.”
They sat together for a bit while Perry tried to process some feelings.
There were many things he didn’t like about thresholding. He’d been pierced through his stomach by a sword a week ago, for fuck’s sake. He’d been trapped underground with bugs crawling all over him. He’d been betrayed, humiliated, and brutalized at various points. It was often boring, with nothing to do but wait, which seemed like it was how the next month or two was going to go. But there was also something very straightforward about it, a measure of personal power and inner drive that had been completely lacking for almost his entire life. What was best in life? To crush your enemies, naturally. But in any other context besides thresholding, enemies weren’t really something that people had. Problems were nuanced, conflict was a thing to be avoided, you couldn’t just chop off a man’s head because you didn’t like his politics.
The best fight — the most satisfying — had been against Xiyan. She was irredeemable, and he’d known her well enough to completely write her off as a person. Where else would he ever get that satisfaction? Maybe it was pathological to think that way. Maybe it was something he could go to therapy for. But deep down, the thought of joining up with the Farfinder and becoming their neutered muscle made him recoil. He’d had enough of being a bodyguard when he’d been doing it for Moss.
“Thank you for visiting,” said Nima. “I know you had good intentions, but I don’t need you to do it again.”
“Sure,” said Perry. He stood awkwardly. “If you want to talk, let me know.”
“I doubt that I ever would,” said Nima. Her lips were tight. “But thank you. It was kind.”
~~~~
Third Fervor and her queen were, unfortunately, making moves. The first and most bold of these moves was to announce that the queen was to be wed. The monarchy was under threat, you’d have to be an idiot not to see that, and a marriage was both a distraction for the people and a way of gaining some small amount of power and control.
It would also give Third Fervor the king she clearly wanted.
The options for who would be king were not plentiful. For one thing, Thirlwell was not actually all that large of an island, and while it had once been a colonial power and was still living off their pillaging of other places, the population was relatively small. There were plenty of nobles, including some kings-in-exile for kingdoms that had no hope to ever be restored, but most of them were useless, and the number of eligible bachelors was actually quite small. Besides that, marrying one of them and allowing him to become king would immediately put a target on his back, and there was the question of optics.
The queen had made the search public, which was a savvy PR move in Perry’s opinion, because it distracted the public with a spectacle and at least gave the sense that the monarchy would rebuild itself stronger and better than before. Few knew of Third Fervor’s injury, which was being kept very quiet, so from the outside, the queen was simply steeling herself and doing what needed to be done — it was noble, in a way, sacrificing herself to a man. People liked it, for whatever reason. There was drama in a search for a husband, and some promise that there would be a savior, however that was going to be managed.
Perry got to watch it all from the inside, which he sometimes did with Kes and Mette. The remote monitoring tools the Farfinder had didn’t have sound, but Marchand could extract sound from high-fidelity audio by watching micro-vibrations, and could also read lips with a relatively high degree of accuracy, especially once Perry had the idea of clipping their magic ‘camera’ inside a speaker’s mouth to watch the movement of their tongue and lips.
The clone of Dirk Gibbons serving as spymaster produced a suspect for the poisoning of the prince. The patsy was a man who had died of delirium tremens and then had his head bashed in after the fact by the secret police. They’d tried to take him quietly, Dirk had explained, had wanted to get answers, but alas. That was a good enough answer for the queen, apparently, especially as the suspect had left behind a brief manifesto which was making its way through what was left of the Thirlwell resistance. In reality, the manifesto had been Dirk’s work too — not a manifesto in favor of the culture, but against the monarchy and all its ills, something that painted them in a bad light while saying nothing at all about the opposition. It had mostly been done for plausibility, Perry was pretty sure.
Dirk saved his own skin, and his reward was being put in charge of the search for the king, one of the many, many duties he had as spymaster on top of all the duties he had as being a spy for the culture.
There was something hilarious to Perry about spying on the spymaster. He was hopeful that at some point he’d be able to say to Dirk “oh yeah, I had a camera installed in your mouth”, but that would mean explaining what a camera was, and maybe that would take the fun out of it.
“I would make a good king,” said Perry as he sat on the couch in the break room. Mette and Kes were with him, watching a large screen that showed them a digest of what had happened and might happen. They were together on a love seat that just barely fit both of them, casually close in a way he somewhat envied.
“Wow,” said Mette. She was, technically, Mette Prime, since there were now four clones of her. She was the only one of them who was a werewolf, and the only one who was a thresholder. Collectively, Perry called them ‘the Mets’, but he spent almost all his time with the singular Mette Prime.
“Yeah, that was something we always thought,” said Kes. He shrugged. “We would make a good king.”
“It’s arrogant though,” said Mette.
“Weren’t you basically a queen?” asked Kes. “I mean, not in terms of structure, and you had a coregency, but —”
“Totally different,” said Mette. “Sometimes you have to step up, but monarchy is different from being an elected leader.”
“I don’t remember many elections,” said Kes.
“We were going to have them,” said Mette. “Nothing like you’ve described, those grueling year-long contests, but it is important for there to be a release valve when people are upset. I can see some value in having a leader for life, if there’s a good succession plan and good heirs, but most monarchies don’t have that, and if the people have a bad monarch, what’s the backup plan?”
“Shoot them in the face,” said Marchand, who was hooked into the ship’s systems. He only rarely offered his commentary when they were just watching, though his own view of what was happening on the planet was much better than theirs. Between watching the past, present, and future, there was a lot to keep an eye on.
“I mean, yeah,” said Perry. “Violence is one of the only ways to get a dictator out of power, whether they end up dead or in exile, and a king is basically a dictator. But the very first thing a king should do is secure their position of power and make that kind of violence against him impossible, which in practice, historically, meant brokering some binding deals that vastly limited power-in-practice.”
Kes laughed. “Took the words out of my mouth,” he said.
“You too are insufferable,” said Mette with an exaggerated huff. She leaned forward and looked at the screen. “March, do we have prognostics here?”
“Yes, ma’am,” said Marchand. “What would you like to see?”
“I want to understand what Dirk is doing here,” said Mette. “I think in the scheme of the fight, it’s probably not important, but he’s making moves without any knowledge of who or what we are.”
“You think he might gum up the works?” asked Perry.
“Possible,” said Mette. “March, find me where they’re discussing this, if you can.”
Marchand brought them a change in view, which came from the ship’s prognostic engines. They were running virtually all the time, fed by a power source that only worked under certain physics which were currently ripe — though the next world they went to wouldn’t necessarily allow it.
The screen showed a meeting between Dirk, the queen, and Third Fervor. Because the magics for past, present, and future were all different, different tools needed to be used, but Marchand was fairly seamlessly using every audio-visual processing trick at his disposal to make it seem like it was just a feed from a camera.
“There’s the possibility of a commoner,” said Dirk.
“A commoner?” asked Third Fervor. She was looking at Dirk with a significant amount of skepticism. She was in her armor, with the face of it peeled back. She removed it only to sleep, and sometimes not even then. The injury to her jaw had not fully mended, which meant she spoke slowly and infrequently.
“I would like to hear the rationale,” said the queen. “Surely there’s someone from the noble class more suitable. Sir Miche?”
“Caught with a prostitute three days ago,” said Dirk. “The rumors were swirling even before that though.”
“Sir Terren then?” asked the queen. Her hands were folded in her lap.
Dirk shook his head sadly. She apparently understood the implication, though Perry did not.
“I’m starting to regret making a spectacle of this,” said the queen. “Someone from outside the noble class wouldn’t be wholly unprecedented, but I fear it would send the wrong message.”
“I’ll look closely at candidates,” said Dirk. “There are significant advantages though. A husband from outside the nobility would be a sign that the gap between classes is not so large as it might be feared. If you think in terms of the delusions that the enemy trades in, one of the most important is that no one has a master — and if people believe that they might become a master some day, by the grace of the nobility, I think that’s more attractive than equality.”
“They’re not equal,” said Third Fervor.
“It’s true,” said the queen. “The symboulions rule, and the Command Authorities put themselves above everyone else. Equality is a myth.” She said this with some concern, and watched Dirk as he answered.
“They’re hypocrites,” said Dirk. “If only pointing out those things deterred them. It’s one of their foundational beliefs that contradictions must exist, that you cannot stand firm on the axioms. That’s one of their advantages — they feel no need to be coherent, to stick to firm principles.”
“We’ll be introducing a contradiction of our own, if I were to marry a commoner,” said the queen. She placed a finger against her chin. “Draw up a list. Only those who are loyal, who have means, who would serve the kingdom, not their own interests.”
“I’ll do my best,” said Dirk with a nod.
“Oh my god,” said Kes from the couch. “He’s going to pull a Dick Cheney.”
“He’s going to shoot someone in the face?” asked Perry.
“Who is Dick Cheney?” asked Mette with a frown, looking between them. “He’s a man who shot someone in the face?”
“He was Vice President of the United States for a while,” said Perry.
“More importantly, he headed up the presidential candidate’s search for a vice president,” said Kes. “When that search was concluded, who should become vice president but the man who was doing the search?”
“Wow,” said Perry.
“Sorry,” said Mette, holding up a hand. “He shot someone in the face?”
“Hunting accident,” said Perry and Kes at the same time.
“Not actually relevant,” said Perry. “It’s just where my mind went, given … you know.”
“It was a national punchline for a bit,” said Kes. “We were young.”
“If we ever get to your Earth, I’m going to have some very specific and useless knowledge,” said Mette. “I don’t know how to drive a car, but I do know about a hunting accident that happened twenty years ago.”
“So Dirk goes searching for a marriage candidate, finds the nobles unacceptable, looks among the commoners, finds himself,” said Kes. “What’s the endgame there?”
“He becomes king,” said Perry.
“Yeah,” said Kes. “But he doesn’t want to be king.”
“Being a king means having enormous power,” said Perry. “More than he already has. He can use that power for a soft revolution or a hard one. Committing a coup when you’re married to the queen seems … almost ideal, right, especially given some sexist commoners who don’t trust a woman in the first place?”
“Fair point,” said Kes. “But with Berus still in rocky condition, I doubt that a coup is on his mind.”
“He’s completely on his own,” said Perry. “We don’t know what’s on his mind.”
Kes shook his head sadly. “Being alone, that’s not the culture.”
“Shocker,” said Mette with a roll of her eyes. “They use cultural enforcement, which means that people who are disconnected from the culture — either intentionally or otherwise — are free to do whatever they want. So they want to keep people from being on their own, independent. That’s built into the system.”
“She’s been doing political reading,” said Kes.
“As you’ve pointed out, I was god-emperor of the Natrix,” said Mette. “We had to worry about social cohesion, group dynamics, and it was very different, but it wasn’t that different. When we deposed the old people who’d been prioritizing their geriatric comforts, we put them in with everyone else. There were reasons for that, and we didn’t have the Gratbook to draw on, but I do think even with hindsight and the knowledge of worlds that it was the right move. I have more experience with engineering social conditions than either of you.”
“You’re saying you have a good track record,” said Kes. “And that … the culture should let people be loners more than it does?”
“I have no idea,” said Mette with a huff. “But I guess I can talk about it, because I know that neither of you really have any idea either. We’re all ignorant, so we can just be ignorant.” She reached forward to the small table that held her drink, a fizzy cola. She’d had it for the first time a few days ago and was enamored with them. “I think if you make a society, it has to be a society that’s good for everyone. And if it’s not good for everyone, then you need a way for people to escape and go somewhere else. There were people escaping to go to the kingdoms. But now the kingdoms are dying out, and there’s nowhere left to go. And the internal places to go, like working for the Command Authorities, are also going to be shut down. A guy like Dirk doesn’t seem like he would function well within the culture, but the culture thankfully has a use for him, because he has these skills, right?”
“And absent an opposition, you think a guy like that is dangerous?” asked Perry.
“I don’t know,” said Mette. “I don’t think he’s unique. I think he enjoys the games he’s playing, and he thinks they’re necessary. There are probably thousands more like him, they just deal with it, or don’t deal with it and let it fester. On the Natrix we understood individuality and that drive to push yourself. We accommodated in a way this place doesn’t.”
“Thankfully the plan is for there to be more worlds for these people,” said Perry. “Or they might be able to figure it out even without that.”
“We delivered the plans to the snow-town Moss this morning,” said Mette. “So short of trying to contain that information after the fact, they know how to build something like the Farfinder, in principle if not in practice. The engine plan works across all universes, it’s built from basal physics.”
The Farfinder had a long history, and the tools in use now weren’t the ones that the ship had started out with, back when it had its original crew. There were talks about building another, maybe two, which would be possible only with the new clones that had been made in the days following Perry joining the team. The clone-making machine had actually broken down after two uses, but then was fixed by Mette and Eggy working together. They didn’t have the capacity to make another machine, not yet, but the one they had was nearly constantly running, expanding the technical capacity of the Farfinder with every passing day. In another month there would be significant specialization among the clones.
They’d hit some of the limits of the machine. Nitta, their primary engineer, could not actually be cloned — her species had multiple skins that could be slipping into and shed at will, but the clones had come out with none of them, and had died in spite of their best efforts after twenty minutes of intense pain. Hella had been cloned, but the clone had none of her superpowers. Cark’s blood was a milky white since it used perfluorocarbons rather than hemoglobin, and hadn’t worked at all.
It was a brave new world, that had such people in it. While Perry was mostly watching and waiting, they were working on what came next.
~~~~
Berus and Thirlwell were both simmering. The symboulions of Berus had squashed the counter-revolution and looted the nobility, and the first of the domes had finished construction. They were in the process of starting to churn out as much spare food and clothing as they could. The queen had not entirely squashed the revolutionary elements in Thirlwell, especially because the man who was most responsible for doing that was working with them, but the fears of the end of the monarchy were settling down, and people were going along with the new order of the kingdom.
Perry was restless, and it somehow seemed like he was the only one. Third Fervor had mostly mended, though she had terrible scarring on her face and winced when she spoke, which sometimes happened with a lisp. She was missing teeth, he knew. It remained to be seen whether she would be weaker in a fight, but prognostics suggested that she would be. The damage he’d done to her stomach had healed on the surface, but he could see the pain on her face when she stood up from a chair.
The Farfinder was running prognostics almost constantly, trying to see what the future held, but the further into the future it tried to predict, the less accurate those predictions got, and they couldn’t account for Perry unless he was deliberately waiting outside of the ship with some kind of plan in place for when he would act.
After three weeks, for no particular reason that they could see, the prognostics began to predict that Third Fervor would attack Berus.
When they had dug into it, they had found Fenilor’s fingerprints — or rather, a lack of fingerprints. None of the magic they were using to see the past, present, or future could see Fenilor, and when they finally found the gap he left, it was already in the past, nineteen minutes where Third Fervor was under the umbra of protection against their scrying.
The prognostics said that if left unchecked, Third Fervor was going to move against the symboulions of Berus, using her portals to kill a number of prominent members. Because she couldn’t easily move indoors unless a door or window was opening, she would attack an open air rally that was to be held outside the castle. They had seen it three times in prognostication, which meant that it was almost certain to happen for real if no steps were taken to stop it.
The different visions of the future showed her dropping down and sweeping her spear through unarmed men and women, killing the masked men who went against her, murdering guards, causing mayhem. It was different in each vision, but not all that different. He wouldn’t have thought that she would do that. It seemed too violent for her to do, and too callous for the queen to order, but the proof was in the prognostics. Third Fervor’s sense of loyalty was ironclad, and if she had been commanded to kill, that was what she would do.
Perry had frowned at the videos for a long time. The obvious question was what had happened when Fenilor had met with her, and what Fenilor’s goals might possibly be. A trap of some kind seemed likely, but Fenilor seemed to be laying in wait just the same as Perry was. It seemed out of character for Fenilor too, if he had deliberately provoked Third Fervor into attacking the culture that Fenilor had worked so hard to build.
“Are you going to stop the attack?” asked Hella during another impromptu meeting on the bridge.
“Are you?” asked Perry, eyeing her.
“No,” said Hella. “We stay out of these battles, as much as it turns my stomach sometimes. We could potentially warn our contacts, but —”
“I’ll stop her,” said Perry. “It plays into her hands, as well as Fenilor’s, but if it prevents the deaths of hundreds, then I’m all for it.” He wasn’t a wildlife photographer or a Star Trek captain. There was nothing but pragmatism that compelled him to stand by.
Hella frowned. “We were hoping for more time.”
“Fenilor has been out there doing something,” said Perry. “This is proof of that. If it’s not a trap, then it’s a diversion. I’m not sure how much he knows about our capabilities, but he knows that I had some way to find his black sites, and he certainly knows that I can move across distances faster than my sword or his spear would actually allow. He’s been looking for me, probing.”
“We’ll monitor,” said Hella. “We’ll keep doors open for you, so long as you’re outside of Third Fervor’s sphere.”
“I’ll aim to lead her away from civilization,” said Perry. “I’ll go after her before she can even get close to implementing whatever this mayhem is. She needs to sleep, I’ll descend tonight while she’s out of her armor and try to finish her cleanly. And if Fenilor is there to take the portal out, then I’ll guard against him — and you’ll need to too.” It didn’t fully make sense though, because if Fenilor wanted to kill Third Fervor, then it seemed as though he had the opporunity.
“We have a day,” said Hella. “That’s enough to run another round of prognostics and see how the fight will go. Enough to give advanced warning. But the problem isn’t that she’s hitting this specific event, it’s that she’s decided to act. We can monitor her, and the queen, see if they give us some intel on why, but the answer is obviously Fenilor.”
“He might have told her about us,” said Perry. “Depending on what he knows, or suspects.”
“Very possible,” said Hella.
“Set up monitoring,” said Perry. “Something that will tell us if he’s near her again, some kind of alarm that goes off if monitoring craps out. We should have had it before now.”
“Already done,” said Eggy.
“You’ll support me, if I decide that now is the time to strike?” asked Perry. “If I don’t want the deaths of the leadership of Berus on my head?”
“We will,” said Hella. “Of course we will.”
“Good,” said Perry. “Then I’m going to prepare for war.”
Comments
iridium248
Fenilor is going to kill all these redshirts, isn't he?
