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Thresholder, ch 110, Company Town
🕑 Added 2024-03-27 18:48:47 +0000 UTCSorry for the late chapter, we were hit by a major snowstorm, which has meant three snow days in a row and my son spending a lot more time at home. After a relatively snowless winter, it's been nice to have snow again, but it's also a bit of a pain that they've deemed this worth shutting down the schools.
~~~~
Once the airship landed, it was deflated, which was apparently quite unusual for airships. The machine inside was extracted under the cover of darkness, a rush job that Perry watched from a distance even though he wasn’t supposed to. It was put into a warehouse and then locked up, with no one so much as visiting it, and the Caster was reinflated the next day, to be used for shuttling materials back and forth across Berus.
“There’s nothing?” asked Perry. “No explanation of what it is? Nothing, over all that time?”
“I’m sorry, sir,” said Marchand. “I do believe that those who understand the machine’s true nature are avoiding the subject, perhaps for fear of eavesdropping. Do you suspect that it’s important?”
“I’ve gone through some of the flagged conversations,” said Perry. “I think it’s some bit of science or magic or both that sits at the frontier of what they know to be possible. Which would make it a very good thing for us to use.”
“I suppose, sir,” said Marchand. “It does seem quite large and heavy though.”
“True,” said Perry. “Not the kind of thing that we could steal, even if we wanted to.”
“Indeed, sir, we would never engage in theft,” said Marchand.
“Unless we had to,” said Perry. “Or the circumstances were right, or we were stealing from a real asshole.”
“Yes, sir,” said Marchand. “I apologize if it wasn’t communicated with the tone of my voice, but I was attempting to demonstrate a tacit understanding of the reality of the situation without calling us thieves. I do not doubt that you would steal the device if you deemed it necessary.”
The monitoring of conversations hadn’t been a total waste though. It had revealed bits and pieces, hints at what the thing was. Moss had said that they shouldn’t use it for fear that they would draw attention to themselves, which meant that it wasn’t something like a nuclear weapon. Perry also didn’t think that it was a teleporter or portal maker or anything like that, since they didn’t talk about it like that — they had talked about Dirk coming here in the context of the machine, but not about anyone else going, and not about escape plans. It was possible that it was just a receiver, but Perry didn’t think that was likely.
At any rate, it was sitting in a warehouse, being guarded and not used, and Perry didn’t think there was much to gain from going to see it in person. Instead, his attention was elsewhere. The golden dome was being planned, and not all was right in the world.
~~~~
Their accommodations were in a village situated right next to the factories, in lodgings that were used by the workers. This was a company town, which had previously been owned and operated by one of the nobles thanks to a charter from the king and a fair amount of capital investment. Now it was controlled by a temporary worker’s symboulion, but this far away from the city, the culture wasn’t all that well established. Perry got the sense that while most of these men and women had their grievances against the monarchy and in particular the now-dead duke, that wasn’t quite enough for them to throw in their lot with the new way of doing things. They hadn’t had the same agitation in the city and hadn’t been fed the same propaganda. The process of converting a country was complicated and many-pronged, and Perry didn’t fully understand all the moving parts involved, but whatever had made the people of Calamus receptive clearly hadn’t been done here, not nearly to the same extent.
On that first day, Perry was mostly in meetings, sitting in with Moss and doing the boring work of bodyguarding. It was essentially onboarding for most of the people who’d come from the city, and Perry thought that he could have done without it, aside from a shouting match that at least offered some flavor. The shouting had been about jobs and what everyone would be doing, along with when the lanterns would be turned back on and how the workers were going to get paid. The lanterns weren’t going back on unless it could at all be helped, and the workers weren’t going to get paid, which was a hard thing for some to understand.
That night, Perry had slipped out from the house they were in and strolled through the small town, taking it in, only to strike up a conversation with a man smoking a pipe outside.
“You’re the bodyguard, are you?” he asked.
“I am,” nodded Perry.
“Off for the day?” the guy asked. He kept the pipe to the left side of his mouth. “Or how’s it work now? They run you like a dog?”
“Clearly not,” said Perry with a shrug.
“Seems to me people won’t work,” he said. He looked Perry over while he sucked on his pipe. “Why do you work? You a ‘true believer’?”
“It’s work that needs doing,” said Perry. “That’s what I’m here for. So in a sense I’m not off work, because if a cry went up, I would be there to deal with it.”
“See, that’s how they get you,” he nodded. “It’s how the duke always was.”
“The duke lived in the city, didn’t he?” asked Perry.
“You know what I mean,” the man said, waving his pipe. “The higher ups, the men that the duke had put in charge. They were always trying to get us to do work without pay too, saying that we had to get things done today and damn the timesheets. Saying that they had to round off the hours. Saying, when we put in a lot of effort, that it was about the time, and saying, when we put in a lot of time, that it was about the effort.”
“The culture demands that you care about what you produce,” said Perry. “I think that’s about it. If you care, you’ll put in the time and effort. I’m just the muscle though.”
“They taught us not to care too much about anything besides the eyes of the man watching us,” said the worker as he took a puff from his pipe. He let out a beautiful smoke ring. Perry was suitably impressed.
“Why would they teach that?” asked Perry. “What’s the benefit to them?”
“Oh, not on purpose,” the man laughed. He coughed once at whatever he found so humorous. “They teach poor practices without thinking about it too much. The shit flows from the top, the duke demanding more output because that’s what makes him his money, the managers pushing us harder and cutting corners to get the work done, and then us, down at the bottom, only having an eye to what brings down the manager’s stick on us. You get yelled at for taking too long, but most of these fucks don’t know how long a thing should take, so you always tell them that it will take longer than it needs.” He coughed again and spat on the ground. “You learn to make yourself scarce when the managers come around, and you learn how to act like there’s nothing you could possibly have done to make it go any faster or take any less resources.”
“And of course there’s all the stuff that takes place under the table,” said Perry. “You skim off the top where you can.”
“Well, of course you do,” said the man. “Because you have to. Because they don’t pay enough. And they don’t want to pay enough for guards or watchmen to make sure that we don’t skim, or they do pay for a watchman and then we cut the watchman in. But I suppose that’s supposed to be done with?”
“It’s supposed to be,” said Perry. “I guess we’ll see how it goes.” On impulse, he stuck his hand out. “I’m Perry.”
“Ginger,” the man replied, shaking his hand. There were rough calluses on his hand, and Perry knew that his own had felt like it had been dipped in liquid silk. “You’re a tough guy?”
“I know I don’t seem like it,” said Perry.
“They’re saying that you killed a bunch of loyalists,” Ginger said. “But now you’re here? Looking to kill some more?” There was no challenge in his voice.
“I’m looking to deal with anyone who’s looking to do violence,” said Perry.
“Seems sort of whatsit, doesn’t it?” asked Ginger. “Para something.”
“Paradoxical,” said Perry. “And … no, not really. But if you know anyone who’s thinking of trying something, let me know, because they’re going to lose. If you think a public demonstration would help, I’m all for that, but I don’t think it’s the culture.”
“Showing off isn’t the culture?” asked Ginger.
“Telling people they better behave or I’ll punch them in the face isn’t the culture,” said Perry. “That’s not what I’m saying, but it might be how it would come off if I dominated your best five fighters.”
‘Five?” laughed Ginger. “Not sure I would believe that, but I’ll talk you up.”
“If I told you how many men I could actually take on at once, you definitely wouldn’t believe me,” said Perry with a smile. “But like I said, my job right now is mostly to sit around and make sure that if anything goes down, I’m there to make sure it doesn’t get out of hand. Or if it does get out of hand, the right people end up injured.”
“I’ll know not to cross you,” said Ginger. “Not that I’m the crossing type.”
~~~~
It was good to have a friend among the workers, though Moss was putting in as many hours as anyone and trying his hardest to be an example of the culture. Moss was a worker, just not a worker like they were. Privately, he explained that this was one of his roles there. They had taken to having drinks together in the room that had been set aside for Moss, in lieu of going down to the town tavern.
The room wasn’t built for a dwarf, it was built for a human. Nothing was the right height, including the table and chairs, but Moss was a craftsman and engineer, and had taken his tools to the problem. The chair effectively had a booster seat on it, putting them at about the same height, but when Moss had to get in it, it was a bit of an ordeal. Perry felt a little bit bad about that, because he definitely wouldn’t have considered that dwarves need extra help. He felt worse when he realized that the only reason Moss hadn’t just cut down the legs on the table and chairs was so he’d be more comfortable.
“They could build a dome from instructions, if they had to,” said Moss. “But it’s harder to build a culture from instructions, as much as we might try. You need people to provide examples, to show how it’s done, to reinforce the things that need reinforcement.”
“Seems like that works less well with you being a dwarf,” said Perry. “What with all the racism.”
“This is true,” said Moss. “It can also be exhausting to offer calm explanations, to push the culture, and to do all the necessary work at the same time.” He let out a sigh. “I do miss my wife, in times like this.” She had stayed back in the city, where she was helping to divy up the wealth of the nobles into a proper commons, rather than having people play ‘looters keepers’. The library system they’d tried to set up on their own wasn’t working well, and Velli knew all the failure modes of transition along with how to avoid them.
“And there are the risks from the effluence,” said Perry.
“That I’m used to,” said Moss. “The wild magic is easy to ignore most of the time. You build so your structures are less affected by it, then hope that you don’t wake up sick one day.”
“I’m not clear on the odds, exactly,” said Perry. “We’re safe here?”
“You ask this now?” asked Moss with a laugh. He shook his head. “If you want numbers, it’s always been a point of contention, and it depends heavily on the rains, the winds, how hot the lanterns are run, how pure the fuel is … and we just don’t know. This place, where we are now, the death date was one in four hundred per year. There were perhaps twice the number of maimings. Not all from effluence though.”
“I woke up this morning and coughed up a feather,” said Perry. “Effluence?”
“Almost certainly,” said Moss. “I believe that was considered good luck, for a time. There were books that cataloged the influence of effluence, and said which signs were good omens. All propaganda, of course, a way of making peace with this horrible thing. And there are boons, to be sure, and beyond the boons, unknowable things ascribed to the effluence.”
“Someone wakes up and a scar is gone,” said Perry. “Or you’re walking down the street one day and there’s a little pop from your knee, and the limp you’ve had is corrected. There’s a lump of gold that just appears on the table, that kind of thing.” Some of this he knew, but it wasn’t something that they talked about much in Kerry Coast, because they had virtually eliminated effluence.
“But of course, most of the time it’s neutral or unpleasant,” said Moss with a sigh. He tipped his glass to the side and watched the liquid inside move around. “Perry, where are you from?”
“You know I’m not going to give you the real answer,” said Perry. He suddenly became tense, and elected not to show it on his face.
“I’m happy that you’ve grown comfortable enough with me to ask questions,” said Moss. “I’m happy to answer those questions. But I think it would be unfair to you to keep all my questions to myself. If you were from a country that had been beset by effluence — there were a few that you could have grown up in — then you would know these customs and ways of thinking backward and forward. But there are other questions you ask that I can’t imagine someone from Kerry Coast or elsewhere asking. You’re ignorant of kings, of effluence, but also of the culture … So where are you from? It’s the question that burns at the back of my mind with every conversation we have.”
Perry had eavesdropped on a few conversations about himself. He knew that the questions were there, and he hadn’t been particularly interested in ‘passing’ as any one thing or another. He was pretty sure that his initial plan of simply blending in would have worked, but with the attention of important people, and with the fights he’d engaged in, all of that had been blown apart. But to tell them that he was a thresholder seemed like it would invite attention — and more worryingly, action — that he wasn’t keen on. That had always been the argument against revealing anything. The problem was, he trusted Moss. Moss was a straightforward, uncomplicated dwarf.
“It’s hard to explain,” said Perry. “There’s the place I’m from, and then there are the places I’ve been. The place I’m from? It resembles the kingdoms more than the culture, but it didn’t have kings. And the places I’ve been? They’ve been wild, divergent, like nothing you have in this world.”
Moss considered this. “And you or your people are the ones who have been killing the kings?”
“That’s the other burning question?” asked Perry. “The one that’s been rolling around in your head but that you’ve been too polite to ask?”
“It’s not a matter of politeness,” said Moss. “It’s a matter of strategy. You seemed like you were unlikely to answer, or if you did answer, you seemed likely to lie. But it wasn’t just my head the question was rolling around in, it’s been a topic of discussion among various agencies and symboulions who are aware of your existence.”
“The identity of the assassin is an open question to me too,” said Perry. “But if you guys don’t know who’s responsible, then I think that raises the chance that it’s one of the people who are … like me.”
“And Nima and Mette are too?” asked Moss.
“In a sense,” said Perry. “Nima is far weaker, and Mette is just a baseline human.” Or close enough, anyway.
Moss let out a long, slow breath. “I’m going to have to bring Dirk in. This is more than I can handle. It’s more than a single person should handle, but I fear for putting you under the authority of any committee.”
“Why?” asked Perry.
“I fear you would run away and never be seen nor heard again, except for events of worldwide importance that we learn about days or weeks after they happen,” said Moss. “I know better than most how the symboulions work, and I know that dealing with rare individuals is not one of their strong suits.”
“Thank you,” said Perry with a nod. “If it’s fine with you, I’ll continue with my paper-thin story about being a returning citizen of Berus acting as a guard out of an obligation toward duty.”
“And the kingkiller?” asked Moss. “That’s something you’re pursuing?”
“No,” said Perry. “I wish I had some kind of lead. I think it’s a bad way of going about things. Better to have the transfer of power be more peaceful, even if it requires force. If you can slip into the king’s room and abduct him, I don’t see why you wouldn’t take him somewhere and make him declare that the monarchy was over. Have him speak publicly about the errors of him and his people, the faults of their system.”
Moss tapped his thick fingers against the table. “But you think that it was one of your people?”
“They’re not really my people,” said Perry. “Wrong words, I guess. The thing we have in common is mostly that we fight each other.”
“If I do bring in Dirk, you’ll talk to him? Tell him what he needs to know?” asked Moss.
“He’s slippery,” said Perry. “But I sort of like him in spite of that. I suppose you’re going to use that huge machine in the warehouse, but the story will be that he came along in a wagon?”
“You’ve seen much,” said Moss with a nod. “But yes, that will be how it’s done.”
“And the city is going to be fine without him?” asked Perry. “Seems like we’re piling a lot of resources into this very out of the way place.”
The dwarf’s face caught slightly, and Perry couldn’t read what it meant. Perry had revealed some ignorance, or confirmed some suspicion, and he had no idea what it could possibly have been. “No, they’ll be fine,” said Moss. “I agreed not to tell you about it, but what you’ve said here today … it does change things.” He shook his head. “Another world.”
“Other worlds,” said Perry. “Plural. More than a million, supposedly.”
Moss winced. “And in how many of them has monarchy been defeated?”
“Few,” said Perry. “And sometimes the thing that defeats monarchy isn’t all that much better, if monarchy has been invented in the first place.”
“How much do we need to be worried about this secret war?” asked Moss.
Perry smiled at him. “It’s like effluence, I guess. Sometimes you cough up a feather, other times your head swells to the size of a melon and pops. But generally speaking, it’s safe. I’ll try to make it safe, to keep the casualties low.”
“You know what this will mean, if it gets out?” asked Moss.
“Not really, no,” said Perry. “You understand from my questions that I don’t understand your world all that well.” He took a sip of his ale.
“There are plans on the horizon, when the Last King falls,” said Moss. “There are different factions in play, different ideologies, all hinging on an end to the fight against monarchy. You’ve seen the shipments coming in with parts for the dome? The movements of resources to Berus to prop it up while we get everything into position? We want Berus to do well, to become like us, but part of why we engage in these efforts is because we don’t want to feel compelled to throw time, money, and effort into fighting the monarchies. You were there at the bombings in Kerry Coast. To defend against something like that is a drain on resources.”
“And you’re worried that it’s a drain that will never be removed if there’s some worry about monarchs from beyond the stars,” said Perry.
“I am,” said Moss.
“I wouldn’t worry,” said Perry. “I wouldn’t worry about it anymore than I would worry about dying from a random pop of effluence.”
“Mmm,” said Moss. “That’s something that I’ve worked my whole life to stop.”
“Well, yes,” said Perry. “Bad analogy.”
Moss grunted. Maybe he didn’t think the analogy was all that bad.
~~~~
Perry liked to take walks at night, in part because he was only sleeping four hours a night and didn’t have all that much else to do. He had a small workshop he could use, where he was working on his first mask, but the first mask was always the worst one, and wouldn’t do him much good. The fields of flowers that were planted around the town were less pretty up close. In the air, they had been a riot of colors, but down on the ground Perry could see where they’d taken the hits of effluence. Sometimes it was a glow, other times it was a glint of metal, but mostly it was a series of dead spots and overgrowths. The effluence happened in bursts, usually fairly small, but they could change and transform, as well as kill. Perry had yet to see one happen, but most of them weren’t observed, only discovered in their aftereffects.
“How goes it?” Perry asked Ginger the next night when his stroll brought him by.
“Liked it better when it was just meetings,” said Ginger. “Now they’re asking us to work.”
“I saw some guys jumped ship, hitched a ride into the city,” said Perry. “I was a little surprised to find that you weren’t one of them.”
“Ah, well, that’s not the culture, now is it?” asked Ginger. “And it doesn’t seem like the monarchists are coming back, so I guess we have to make this work. So I’m building a dome, and once the dome is built, I’ll know enough to help work it. And there’s apparently going to be some scrip in it for me.”
“Seeking scrip isn’t the culture,” said Perry.
“You’re not getting scrip for guard duty?” asked Ginger. “I guess that makes sense, given you haven’t had to do much so far.”
“I’m hoping that my time won’t come,” said Perry. “But what do I need scrip for? There’s food, clothing, everything I need right now, isn’t there?”
“I’ve heard that the food won’t last,” said Ginger. He was nursing the pipe again, which seemed to be a nightly habit. “Some dust up between the symboulions.”
“Oh?” asked Perry. He had enough ears on the ground to have heard about it, but he was curious what Ginger’s perspective was.
“The farmers made their own symboulion, maybe for defense as much as anything else,” said Ginger. “They wanted some pay for their crops, and the city symboulions countered with well-stocked libraries and regular shipments of all the things the cities would be making. The farmers offered some complicated deal about getting scrip and labor from the cities during harvest season, and the city symboulions want them to stop using the tractors, or to retrofit them, and it’s hard to say whether it’s too many hard-headed people together, or just too many moving parts.”
“And you’re worried that the supply of food is going to run dry?” asked Perry.
“People are talking about it, so I’m worried, sure,” said Ginger. “They say that nothing is really going to change except the rich bastards aren’t going to be getting richer and milking us for all we’re worth, but then they also say that we need to stop poisoning the land and making so much stuff. This lantern has been shut down for a month now, and that’s going to mean shortages, but most of what we were making wasn’t food. People can go without their textiles, at least for a time. If food goes?” He shook his head. “You don’t think food will go, do you?”
“Are you really worried about that?” asked Perry. “We have lanterns, if it comes down to it.”
“There’s no way they’re ever turning the big one back on,” said Ginger, pointing his thumb at the largest building. “And the heart is coming out of that thing in another few days, which means that we couldn’t turn it back on if we wanted to. Once we do that, there’s no coming back. And they’re rushing it, because that’s what they want.”
Ginger smoked on his pipe. He was watching Perry.
“We have to hope that it all works out,” said Perry. “You know more about effluence than I do, how dangerous it is, how much risk there was with the lanterns. It’s still around here, seeped into everything, and it’ll take some time to recover, but … surely the domes have got to be better?”
“Meh,” said Ginger. He looked up at the smokestacks. “Not giving off effluence is just about the only way they beat a lantern. From what I’ve heard, even from your people? They’re finicky, need lots of constant adjustments, and won’t hit the same output levels. And it’s not like the lanterns, where you can run more shifts if you really have to, you’re limited by the sun.”
The domes were essentially solar power, though nothing like solar panels. Rather than burning fuel, they accumulated sunlight and moonlight, which was then fed through different ‘fences’ that allowed for some control of what was produced because the fuel couldn’t be varied. It was under the same umbrella, and there was cross-applicability between the two, which was fortunate since it meant that all the guys working in this place wouldn’t be left without jobs — something that could have easily created some problems for people worried about what would happen to them when they didn’t have a trade.
Ginger was repeating a bunch of talking points that Moss had warned Perry about. The debate about lanterns versus domes was old, more than a hundred years old, and ‘finnicky’ in particular was a word that often got thrown around. Perry had probably heard ten times more about the trade-offs than he needed to, but he tried to empathize with Moss. Dwarves lived for a long time, and Moss had been young when the debates were going on. The lanterns had been well-established, and there were kinks to work out with the domes, and more than that, the lanterns had entrenched interests by that point, people who had every reason to fight tooth and nail to keep the existing lanterns spewing their filth into the air. All the drawbacks were downplayed, all the externalities discounted, and every time something went wrong with a dome — a breakdown, an accident, a problem with the purity or quality of some shipment — it was taken as proof of their obvious inferiority.
It had all become part of some long-ago culture war, except the war was still being fought in Berus, and Moss had probably fought it many different times in many different former kingdoms. But it wasn’t as though the culture was totally immune from propaganda or motivated thinking, far from it, and Perry was wary of discounting the whole thing as completely one-sided. Because the lanterns were the tools of entrenched powers, of course replacing them had some element of revolutionary flavor to it. And effluence-as-poison was another tool in the arsenal of the culture, one that they used heavily, not just an indictment of the lanterns, but of the royalty itself.
“You’re in a good position to be on the ground floor,” said Perry. “There are going to be more domes, this is just one of the first, slotted into place where the old lanterns were, heavy output, a lot of it for the farms. There are going to be more built in the cities, closer to where the people are, and they’ll need people to man them. And it is scrip work, or was in Kerry Coast.”
“Rising up the ladder doesn’t hold much appeal if you’re not getting anything from it,” said Ginger. “Call me crazy, but more responsibility isn’t my thing. And I don’t feel the tug to do ‘the right thing’, not in the way they want. They don’t have their hooks in me.”
Perry nodded. “Do you feel like they will, in time?”
Ginger looked thoughtful. “It would be better in the city,” said Ginger. “Here, it’s all people who will be working the same problem, and most of what we do? It just goes right back to the city, unseen people who can’t even really thank us.”
“They could have a parade here every month,” Perry suggested with a laugh. “A bunch of people from the city making the trek out and expressing their gratitude for being fed and clothed.”
“It’s a real problem though,” said Ginger. “I read through some of the books they brought.” That surprised Perry. “Skimmed them, anyway. They don’t like doing things like we do them, faraway production feeding the cities. It means that you have different groups, and they end up fighting each other, each looking out for their own.”
“Like the farmers and the cityfolk,” said Perry with a nod. “I guess I never saw how they did it in Kerry Coast.”
“Oh, I can tell you that,” said Ginger. “Lots of farms, people shipped out for short periods when there’s a harvest or a planting, tractors replaced — we’re near the farms, if you wanted to take a day trip. I know a few farmers, and a few farmers’ daughters. They hate me, but I know them.”
“I’d ask what you did to make them hate you, but I don’t think I want to know,” said Perry.
“Bah,” said Ginger. “I’m a gentleman, unless saying so is going to get me executed. With the nobility gone I suppose we need a new word. But it’s not because of the daughters and what they’ve deigned to do with me, it’s because I’m a lantern man. Every time a pea plant in the fields turns to stone and gums up a bit of the tractor, we get the blame, nevermind that the tractors tend to be spewing out the effluence too.”
“But not anymore,” said Perry. “There’s a new wave coming.”
“We’ll see,” shrugged Ginger. “You’ll put in a good word for me with the higher ups? Moss seems like a good man — or not a man, you know, a whatever you’d call him.”
“I think ‘man’ is fine,” said Perry. “But I will.”
Ginger had been putting in a good word for Perry with the other workers, which was a bit surprising. He was a talkative man, and Perry had ears all over the small town, which he was using to listen in on various meetings and conversations, mostly in the hopes of finding the counter revolutionaries before they came with their knives out. He was talkative, which was how they’d met in the first place, but there was value in having a talkative guy talking about transition, especially since he was coming from the position of someone who was skeptical. Perry was pretty sure that he was going to get fully on board in his own way.
Perry was hoping that the resentments wouldn’t amount to much. Moss was trying to train up people, to make sure that they would all have jobs when the dome was up and running, but the resentment meant that some of them were simply not putting in the time to learn and change — whether that meant a change in skills and technology or a change in culture.
~~~~
Perry’s listeners let him know when Moss was on the move. It was late at night, and in theory Perry was perpetually on call, but Moss hadn’t knocked on his door, and had picked up two men who’d made the trip over from Kerry Coast on the Caster instead. They weren’t in the know, Perry didn’t think, but they could be relied on in a way that Perry couldn’t, at least when it came to secrets.
Perry had enough time to slip on the armor. It was dark out, with no big flood lights to light up the sky, and only the luminescence of some clouds in the moonlight. High enough up in the air with his sword sheathed, Perry would be invisible, mistaken for a bird if he was spotted at all. The armor wasn’t strictly necessary for the spying work, but it would help, and if he was caught, there was at least a little bit of plausible deniability.
As he suspected, Moss was going to the warehouse.
There was some interest in what had been stored there, but it was guarded around the clock by more men and women who had taken the trip from Kerry Coast. There had been an argument about whether the town symboulion was to be made aware of what was being stored in their warehouse, but Moss had succeeded in shutting them down, citing the attack on Kerry Coast and the attempted attack on the public execution. They didn’t know what was in the warehouse, but it wasn’t a place that they were using given that the lantern wasn’t working. It was a lot more secrecy than the culture was supposed to have.
Perry landed gently on the roof as Moss went in. There was only a single man with him, Mardoc, another engineer, and the two of them worked with the machine wordlessly. It was a combination of technologies, heavy and metal, as most lanterns were. Lanterns had a hard time affecting metal, which had been used to the advantage of engineers.
Perry found a window that had no sightlines to it and lowered his hand off the edge of the roof to get one of the weaker cameras aligned to look through it. It was a high up window, meant for sunlight and air but not for people to see in.
“What do you suppose we’ll see?” asked Marchand.
“Teleportation,” said Perry. “They’ll be summoning Dirk. What else there is to it, I don’t know, but I’m hoping we find out.” Mette’s theory was that they were suppressing teleportation technology both to get a strategic advantage and because that level of global interconnection would go against their principles of local governance, requiring global and extremely centralized solutions to far too many things.
Once all the work had been done on the machine, Moss and Mardoc waited together, sitting in chairs while the fuel burned in the lantern and something happened inside. Perry was pretty sure that Dirk Gibbons was going to come crawling out of that machine in a few short minutes, but it took more than a half hour, during which time the two engineers talked. A large towel and a pile of clothes sat neatly folded beside them.
“How are the recruits getting along?” asked Mardoc.
“We don’t need to talk shop,” said Moss. “I get enough of that in my day to day.”
Mardoc shrugged. “Not sure what else there is. How’s the wife? I had expected to see her here.”
“She has work in the city,” said Moss. “Important work. We’ll be back soon enough.”
“Work in the city, sure,” said Mardoc. “But,” he glanced at the machine. “She could be here.”
“It’s not something to use frivolously,” said Moss. “And people might notice.”
“We’re going to have to make it public at some point,” said Mardoc. “You’re here.”
Moss sighed. “There will be a reckoning. Better to comport ourselves well. Some day we’ll stand before various symboulions and answer for what we’ve done. Right now it’s sub-councils, small groups without the weight of the global community, if you can even say there’s such a thing.”
“All for the good of the world,” said Mardoc with a shrug.
“I worry about the world, and what’s to come,” said Moss. “Holding back what’s available from technology was always one of the weakest tenets. That technology should only be used when we can be sure that it’s to the benefit of all … it’s noble, but there’s such pressure to exploit, to push.”
“You think that this can’t be held back?” asked Mardoc, rapping his knuckles against the still-running machine.
“This, and whatever the Last King has made,” said Moss. “We don’t know what’s at the far edges of possibility. Lately I’ve had cause to have a longer view of our future history.”
“Your man?” asked Mardoc.
Moss nodded. “Best not to say much about him.”
“You think he’s listening?” asked Mardoc. “That technology —”
Moss waved a hand. “Probably not. But it’s still best not to say much. Speak only when necessary, commit it to paper if you have to. I’m fearful of the Last King.”
“Seems to me like he’s not long for this world,” said Mardoc. “Whether we wanted him to stick around or not. So I’m not sure I see the trouble.”
Moss shrugged and widened his legs in the short chair he sat in.
That was the end of the conversations that Perry cared about, and after that, the subject drifted to Mardoc’s love life, which Moss didn’t seem too interested in or approving of. Mardoc was a tall, pale man that the women of Berus seemed to find exotic, and it seemed as though he was bringing his own sexual mores to the countryside, which perhaps wasn’t the best idea from a pragmatic viewpoint. When that topic had been exhausted, which took a surprising amount of time, they moved on to questions of what Berus had to offer in the way of culture — the books, plays, and music. But Berus was a kingdom that had been tightly controlled by the nobility, and most of what had been produced were works venerating those same nobles or teaching moral lessons to the masses. Anything subversive got stamped down, but was also just never funded.
Eventually, a valve on the machine popped up, and Moss seemed glad to be done with the conversation.
Perry watched through the helmet as the wet and wriggling body of Dirk Gibbons was pulled from the machine. He coughed up a thick pink fluid of the same kind he was coated in and slowly climbed to his feet, blinking. He was nude, and grabbed the towel to wipe himself off.
“Ugh,” he said. “There’s a terrible taste in the mouth.”
“You’re fine?” asked Moss.
“Where am I?” asked Dirk. He looked around, and didn’t seem to think much of the warehouse.
“You’re in the town of Marefield, as planned,” said Moss. “It’s been three days, as planned.”
“I’m not going to rely on plans to go through without a hitch, am I?” asked Dirk. He coughed again, then bent over and vomited in a very matter-of-fact way.
“You’re cleaning that up,” said Moss.
“Ugh,” said Dirk. “This’ll be fixed in the second generation, won’t it?”
“Probably not, no,” said Moss. He folded his arms. “We need to talk.”
Dirk held out a hand. “Give me a minute. Let me get dressed at least, for gods’ sake.”
Moss folded his arms and waited while Mardoc handed Dirk the clothes. Once he was toweled off, he got dressed in the plain clothes that they’d given him and sat down on the chair that Mardoc had been in.
“Alright,” said Dirk. “I’ve been out three days, give me the status, what do I need to know?”
“Perry revealed to me that he’s from another world,” said Moss. “From what I could tell, he’s one of a few. I didn’t want to push too hard, but the kingkiller is probably one of theirs, as are Nima, Mette, and the one he fought in the square. I didn’t push hard, but it’s something that you’re going to have to bring back to ICGCA.”
Dirk rubbed his face. “I was hoping to hear more about the dome construction, the local players, whether you think there’s going to be trouble. I was hoping to get the lay of the land out in the country, who we can press on, what kind of structures you’re building. Not … that.”
“Sorry,” said Moss. “We’ve been doing this for a long time, but this is something different.”
“You think it’s the Last King? Something pulled from the bag of tricks?” asked Dirk. “I haven’t liked the look of anything that’s been coming out of the kingdom. The deeper I look, the less I like.”
“I don’t know,” said Moss. “This is your field, not mine.”
“I’m worried that it’s no one’s field,” said Dirk. He burped and looked like he was about to throw up again, but he held it down. “I’ll have to talk to him. He hasn’t asked for anything? No support, nothing like that?”
“Only to know what this machine was,” said Moss. “And I didn’t tell him, but he’s on the wrong track. He thinks that it’s some kind of people mover.”
“Half right,” said Dirk. He shook his head. “You have a backstory for me? How I got here? What we say if anyone realizes that I’m in two places at once?”
“You were supposed to make your own backstory,” said Moss.
“Yes,” said Dirk, speaking slowly. “But what have you said? What do you know?”
“News from the city is slow,” said Moss. “It’s not likely that anyone will hear about you.”
“Then I came in at night, hitched a ride on a tractor and walked my way in,” said Dirk. “Doesn’t hold up to scrutiny, but there’s no reason for people to be asking questions. No need for anyone to realize that I’m in two places at once.”
That was it, they had finally said it outright. It wasn’t a teleporter, it was a cloner, memories and all, the specifics to be discovered at a later date, but a complete game changer. Perry could understand why they would want to keep it secret, but he couldn’t quite fathom why they’d taken the risk of bringing it to Berus. They hadn’t used it in the city, not that Perry had seen.
“You’ll have to watch out for Perry,” said Moss. “He’s canny. And I do think we should tell him.”
“We should tell our secrets to the warrior from another world?” asked Dirk. “Explain that one to me.”
“War is coming,” said Moss. “It’s not going to be like the old wars, it’s not going to be fought with the same weapons. And if we want to win, we’re going to need him on our side.”
Comments
SaltBoxScotch
Whoa the Culture is what Doris Finch needed to not be an exclusion
patreonizing
Huh. Suppress tech -> limit transportation and communication -> greatly increase plausible deniability for clones running around -> clone key Cultural players -> hereditary monarchies fall to Potemkin symboulions that are suspiciously well-coordinated...I can see why instilling The Culture is so important for the endgame, with such tech available. Not possible to sustain a world of clonable people if they aren't aggressively communitarian/altruistic/whatever to begin with. I do wonder if this'd make it possible to "embody" Marchand somehow. Even with emerging sentience, the armour itself is just not physically capable of much independent operation. But a fully-synced pilot body...
Deegles
my prediction: clone perry with marchand's brain
