Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 166

by Neil Clarke

  “Do come in,” Aramīn called out to her.

  When she didn’t move, he got up from his seat and walked toward her. “I thought we’d already established that I’m not one for eating people,” he said cautiously.

  She walked in, her legs stiff like wooden sticks.

  “Do sit.”

  She was frozen.

  “Here, I have a chair for you,” Aramīn said and stepped to the wall, picked up one of the chairs, and put it behind her. “You can sit now.” His voice was smooth and reassuring. She sat.

  He sat on top of his desk; it was mostly empty. He threaded his fingers together. “So you’ve come to see the Institute for yourself. I’m happy to show you around. A little good-natured propaganda is not beneath me,” he said with a small, sarcastic smile.

  She nodded, one of the vertebrae in her neck cracking. She could see he was trying to put her at ease.

  “I was just reviewing a new procedure proposed by one of our surgery teams. It’s probably not really up your alley. We can go and look around, I can show you the—”

  She broke in. “No, no, it’s all right—” She didn’t want to keep him from anything, especially not his work. Besides, everything he said was interesting.

  “Oh?” He raised an eyebrow. “Would you be interested?” He smiled again, a hungrier smile. Just for a moment. “Ah, is it that everything about me is equally fascinating to you?”

  She had a hard time believing he was not a māwalēni himself. Were her reactions to him so transparent? They probably were, she decided. Or maybe he had just a little grasp of the māwal but used that to all its worth.

  When no answer was forthcoming, he said, “Well then. I cannot promise this will hold your attention, but I’ll do my best to explain everything.” He leaned back and shared his mental workspace with her with a command.

  It was just a casual gesture for him, but for Oyārun it carried an intimacy beyond what would usually be attributed to it. Maybe because for her, there was no clear-cut division between input from her computer interface, input from her senses, and input via the māwal—it all blended together, and thus even when he simply shared something with her via purely technological means, it was as if he’d opened his mind to her, without hesitation.

  She was touched, even though she felt that was unreasonable. He didn’t seem to notice. She leaned forward as he began his explanation.

  “I should offer some context first—my apologies if we tread familiar terrain, in the beginning at least.”

  She nodded again to show it was all right. She appreciated his consideration.

  “All right. Eren is an extremely high-māwal zone and we need to spend a lot of effort on maintaining a habitable environment,” he said. It sounded like a quote from a lecture. He probably lectured often, she thought. “We need a large contingent of māwalēni whose primary task is to make sure no serious problems occur. This is why the Empire originally abandoned Eren, even though it was set to be a lucrative mining colony. It’s necessary—”

  He got up and began to circle her chair, talking all the while. The effect was mesmerizing.

  “It’s necessary to loosely bind together and harmonize the minds of everyone in general society and exert a stabilizing influence. In an environment that can be shaped by people’s expectations and fears, a single person’s panic can cause runaway reactions if precautions are not taken.”

  He stopped, directly behind her, the tone of his voice abruptly changing.

  “Did you know the first people to live here were devoured by monsters?”

  She offered a weak no.

  “It’s not hidden from those who choose to investigate, but it’s generally held that it’s for the best if people do not investigate.” He sighed and began his circle anew. “These days we can prevent such large-scale disasters without inhibiting māwal use. But it takes a lot of effort, and all too many of our māwalēni are busy with this constant struggle. We’re trying very, very hard to make sure that people who choose to join us can perform to the best of their ability, and possibly beyond. We are very short-staffed. It’s the only way. This is the System of Eren, not as you’d hear of it, but as it is. And if people had not already worked their hardest, I would not have had my moment of fame.”

  Oyārun thought back on the video. All the weapons in the crowd. The emotions running high. And yet, the quiet, the people turning to each other to help. She nodded.

  He looked at her and his gaze went to her marrow. “We only take volunteers. We are very firm about this. Believe me.” He looked away. “Still. I’m not proud of some of the things we do. We take people and squeeze them dry.” His gaze flickered around the room, as if searching for a window to stare out. There was no window, and outside—she knew—no nature to behold, only a desert of rocks and silt. No air above the thick roofs of the domes.

  He spoke with his back to her. “They die far too young. And they die all spent. Back on Emek, when the Imperial Seers were all spent satisfying the whims of the noble houses, my blood had boiled with righteous anger.”

  She couldn’t imagine him boiling with anything, but she could feel there was indeed an undercurrent of emotion beneath the surface; not particularly strong, but steady and never ceasing. He went on.

  “Now we do the same ourselves. Do you understand that?”

  Silence.

  “There’s no place for us to go,” she said after she could overcome her hesitation. “This is our planet now . . . this is the price of independence.” She wished she could believe that herself.

  “But this is too high a price. I do not want to see them die. I made an oath I would dedicate all my efforts to this. I cannot—” He didn’t finish the sentence.

  Suddenly, a flash of insight struck Oyārun—Aramīn could not stand to feel useless. He wanted to be in control. Was all this about him and his mastery of his surroundings, by proxy? Even if it was, his efforts were still for a worthy cause, Oyārun decided.

  “Let’s get back to the diagrams,” Aramīn said and turned around. His face was inscrutable. “These are quite drastic procedures.” Did he have trouble speaking?

  “To amplify the māwal?” she offered.

  “No, no,” he shook his head. “On this planet, we have all the amplification we need, and then some more. And with the people we recruit, lack of power is simply not an issue. This is all for regulation.”

  She didn’t really get the idea. They hadn’t gotten to anything similar yet in her classes.

  “Many māwalēni can raise a large amount of māwal, here on Eren. Training or no training, implants or no implants. But that’s just a burst, or some kind of runaway reaction, a positive feedback loop that runs until some limiting factor is hit. What we need is constant, steady high throughput.”

  She had heard of positive feedback loops, but not too much—she knew “positive” didn’t mean the loop was desirable, only that it was amplificatory. Still, she got the gist of what he was saying. She nodded, her neck no longer clicking and creaking.

  “This necessitates constant control and considerable effort. Especially since ideally, there should be a division between power raising and power direction.”

  “Um?”

  “Power raising and power direction, at their most focused, are hard if not impossible to do concurrently for a single mind. It is much more fruitful to split the functions, assign them to separate people.”

  He breathed out. She breathed out too, then blinked; had their breaths unconsciously synchronized? Was that a good sign, or the exact opposite?

  “This helped us to persist here,” he said, suddenly aloof. He held up one hand, looked at it. Showed it to her. “You know, my hands are bloody.”

  She sat in silence. She knew that—everyone knew—everyone knew everything. Back then, politics, now, history. She didn’t know how to react. Independence had been hard-won.

  He looked upward, toward a nonexistent sky. “And yet you still come to me.” Then he shook his head an
d cleared his throat. He didn’t speak for a long time.

  Her mind spun. Was this a prescheduled confession? Or was it more spontaneous? She could not tell. His sadness, however, was genuine. Not strong, and mixed with a kind of self-reflective amusement—“am I really feeling this?”—but genuine nonetheless.

  “Enough,” he said. “We have a task at hand.”

  3.

  Oyārun sat, looking at the little fountain—the only one of its kind. She felt empty, and at the same time, weighed down, as if something were steadily pressing on her shoulders, pushing her chest cavity inward . . .

  Aramīn had shown her the schematics, explained everything in detail. But when it was time for her tour of the building, he demonstrated a curious reluctance.

  She was turning her mental impressions around in her head; it was all surprisingly difficult. Eventually, she concluded Aramīn had assumed she would be discomforted. That she would disapprove. But why would that bother him?

  A thought—

  She was an outsider. She was not one of his charges and was not slated to become one.

  Maybe he was afraid of—

  She could not pursue this train of thought any further.

  She clutched her arms around her chest, hugged herself tightly. She didn’t, she didn’t want to think of it—she knew, knew for once that he would not want her to think of it—she squeezed her eyes shut.

  Then she blinked. How had she gained so much insight into one person? Certainly, via the māwal . . . but the Ereni cognotype did not lend itself to such approaches. She could perceive the māwal, and that probably helped, but still . . .

  “It’s the sheer effort I put into it,” she said out loud. “Into understanding him.” No one was there to hear her. Her voice sounded too low and deep for her ears. “It’s the sheer effort,” she repeated.

  This took her mind away from the rest.

  Oyārun tried to wrangle Aramīn into an internship placement—she was surprised by her own audacity. It was all just text messages sent back and forth, and not very long ones at that, but this was not something she would’ve imagined herself capable of doing.

  It’s the fear, she thought, without pausing to examine the source of her fear.

  Life sped up and she moved through it in a daze, staggering from one day to another. Her conversations with the people she’d met through paper folding lessened, then ceased. Her meetings with her teacher were shorter and shorter. She wasn’t sure when she’d last talked to her parents.

  She would start her internship at the end of the short cycle. Just a few more days.

  She felt a craving, and yet she did not know what it was that she craved.

  They were not, strictly speaking, visions; they only had a tactile component. Oyārun felt herself strapped to some kind of—machine? frame?—then she felt the straps tighten. A warm, dry hand smoothed over her brow. Then she was lying in bed, a soft, firm bed, and all around there was white—that emptiness was the only thing she saw.

  She wondered if she should seek help. Ask for a counseling appointment—but what would she say? That something was swimming below the surface, waiting to break out, and she had glimpsed the shadow of its body, rising from the depths to lurk just below the edges of her consciousness, a sea monster determined to ascend? How would she say that? And was that even a problem in itself, or was it something she simply needed to come to terms with, something perfectly natural and right, if somewhat unusual?

  The māwal would give her visions. Surely this was expected, especially on this planet, and especially given that she was sensitive to it.

  Then why the sense of urgency?

  Her time frame shortened. She counted every hour until the day she would set foot in the Institute again. She kept on feeling, then rejecting the feeling, that her life would be over.

  This was to be a simple junior internship in medical engineering, nothing more.

  She tried to tell herself that.

  That was before she came face-to-face with Aramīn and found herself making that unspeakable request.

  4.

  Aramīn suddenly went pale, all the blood draining from his cheeks. Yet he kept his composure. “Sorry, would you please say that again?” he said with such forced evenness in his voice that a chill ran along Oyārun’s spine.

  “I want to join the System,” she said.

  There. She had done it. Even that morning when she woke, she had told herself she wouldn’t. It was impossible that she would even entertain such a thought.

  But she wanted to, she craved it so much it was impossible to describe—

  “You only say that because you are obsessed with me,” he said with cruelty sharp like a knife. He wanted to push her away.

  “No, I—” How was she supposed to respond to that? To such a slur? Yes, she was indeed obsessed if that was the word he wanted to use, instead of something like special interest that was more neutral, or abuwen, actually positive; but—“I am, I am, I admit that, but that has nothing to do with this—”

  “No?” He leaned forward. Eyes narrowing. “The way I see it is, you grew up, acquired enough of a grasp on the māwal to be able to function, and you never felt attracted to it. You knew what it was, but it was not your path.” Longer and longer pauses between words. Not. Your. Path. “And then all of a sudden,” his words hissed, “you become obsessed with me, and you realize this is what you need to keep me close. Suddenly, you want to join the System.”

  He stood, right in front of her. He was taller than her, and she had to arc her neck uncomfortably upward.

  “Let me tell you something,” he said. “We fought so that you would not have to do this. We fought so that no one would be forced to do this. We fought for your right of choice, many of us died for your right of choice, we fought, and we won. I will not—I will not allow you to throw that away.”

  She took a step back, and her feet tangled in the chair behind her, sitting there unused. She lost her balance and fell—

  He grabbed her arms and steadied her. Then he dropped his arms and looked away.

  “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have acted in a threatening way. But I can only say this much, and I can only say it thus. For you this is history, but for me it was my entire life.”

  “I’m sorry—” she began, then stopped, not knowing how to continue.

  “We fought so that the Imperial Seers would not have to live their lives in servitude to the Court. We fought so that the Undesirables would not be eradicated. You are both, and yet you would throw this freedom away.” End of the sentence. End of the line. He paused. “I will not allow it.”

  She braced herself. Then she stepped around him, in his line of sight, and stared him in the face. “This is what I want to do.” She saw something there, and she added, on impulse—“This is what you want to do.”

  He looked as if slapped.

  She went on, just as merciless as he had been.

  “This is what you want to do.” She imagined her eyes piercing his, she put force behind her gaze, willed it to be so. “You are flattered.” She started to walk around him, in a tight semicircle just like he had done, but a little too close for comfort. She kept up eye contact all the while, in a mechanistic but still all too effective manner. “I know how you see me. I’m young. I’m ideally suited to this. You are permanently, desperately short-staffed. I’m here to give you just what you want, and if my reasons are less than pure, so are yours. You might want to save the settlement, but that’s not what drives you. What drives you is my obedience, the obedience of people like me, and now you are torn—turn me away and enjoy my obedience for a moment, or keep me close and enjoy it for as long as I live.”

  He looked—taken aback?

  “That . . . ” He cleared his throat. “That might not be long.”

  She would not take her gaze off him, she would not let up for an instant—and he, he could not look away.

  “I am here for you to do as you please. I know the risks. I know
what’s involved.” She took a deep breath. “Let me help.”

  “You don’t know,” he said, looking away for a moment. Reminiscing? “You think you do, but you don’t. You might understand the process, but you’ve never experienced the pain.”

  Despite his words, she could feel that inside him, something had given way; yet she was too caught up in her own fervor to rejoice.

  He looked at her again. He had apparently used that moment to regain his composure, for he was just as forceful as before, and probably twice as forceful as she had just been.

  “I can take you. You are right; I am flattered, and you are well-suited to this line of work. But that’s not why I’m taking you.” His eyes bore into hers. Was he miming her? “I’m taking you because we, the collective we, do not have the luxury of turning any suitable person away. I have slapped you in the face and you have slapped me in the face; we are even.”

  His tone was abrasive, but she felt it was only an act. Inside, deep down inside, he was relieved. He was looking forward to this. He was—may the One Most High help them both—hungry.

  II.

  1.

  “We’ll also need an endorsement from your closest relatives,” the brown-skinned young man with Worowan features said and scratched his hairless scalp under his cap. Oyārun was surprised to see the gesture in someone so young-looking—he must’ve been born off-Eren, he must’ve had ample time to get used to the feeling of hair covering his head to feel the lack so acutely.

  Oyārun transferred the documents. Her father had approved everything; on the call, he had looked even more tired than Emien. She felt the planetoid was eating everyone alive.

  The man nodded to himself as he examined the documents. She looked at his profile—his name was Isinaiyu, and he had indeed been born elsewhere. He was also older than she’d guessed at first.

  “Everything looks all right,” he finally said. “I assume you haven’t changed your mind . . . ?”

  She sighed. “It has been two weeks. I haven’t changed my mind in two weeks, I’m not going to change it now.”