by CJ Brightley
“Come here,” Xillon said. “One of those extra duties of a Keeper. Don’t worry, it sounds awful, but you’ll get used to it. There’s plenty to do, and it’s really hard to keep track of time without a body to make demands of you. I figured it was probably about time for another Keeper, but I wouldn’t have been surprised if it had been another generation, either. The years just sort of blur together.”
I’ll live longer than a lifetime without seeing anyone or having anyone to talk to. I felt ill. How could anyone think that was okay?
“Tell me more about my status system,” Xillon said eagerly, sitting cross-legged and wrapping his hands around his ankles. “I want to hear everything.”
I tried to answer patiently, remembering how awful it was to have questions with nobody willing to answer them. But as what felt like hours passed, the endless interrogation started to wear on me. Why did he even care that some vassals had more status than their landowners, or that all objects’ prices were fixed regardless of size or quality, or that children rarely wound up buying the land their parents had? It wasn’t like it would affect him any.
He seemed particularly fascinated that embezzlement was now a death crime, while stealing wasn’t. He kept coming back to it, as if it were some kind of strange mystery. I was starting to wish I’d never asked the Ruler’s husband what the word meant.
“But embezzling is stealing,” Xillon insisted, the third time he brought it up. “They’re basically the same thing. So why is the punishment so much more severe?”
I sighed. The man’s insufferable persistence was reminding me of Hurik when my brother decided something was unfair.
“Because it’s status, and they’re mathematicians,” I said. “They have to be incontrovertibly trustworthy.”
“But why?” Xillon demanded. “Why can’t people just calculate their own status and check it for themselves? It’s stupid not to.”
I was starting to get annoyed. “People can’t calculate it for themselves. They have status.”
“Exactly! The equation for calculating your own status is the easiest one! What do people think the third equation is for? Theory?”
“I don’t know the third status equation,” I said, exasperated. Was he stupid? “I’m not a mathematician. And neither is anyone else who has status.”
Xillon stared at me like I was speaking in a foreign accent. “Are you saying . . . mathematicians don’t have status?”
“Of course they don’t,” I said. “The oath of mathematics requires renouncing it.”
Xillon’s chest heaved and his arms shook. “And why . . . in the world . . . would anybody do that?”
“Because it’s the law,” I said. “If a vassal tries to learn mathematics without taking the oath, they’re forced to take the oath immediately. If a landowner tries, they get the death penalty.”
Xillon leapt up, seized his hammock, and hurled it the fire. It exploded, sending flares of light that didn’t sting my eyes and tongues of flame that didn’t burn my skin across the whole room. After a moment, the inferno vanished, and the room returned to how it had been before.
“Why did you do that?” I asked, my voice a high squeak.
“Venting,” Xillon growled. He whirled back over to the corner where his hammock had been, and another appeared. He flopped into it and glowered at me, folding his arms. “So. You’re saying that my perfect system has resulted in mathematics being taken away from all but a select secret society. That’s great. That’s just great. That’s so not what I intended. Any other disasters I should know about?”
I swallowed, glancing at the fireplace. Granted, he hadn’t actually damaged anything, but I still hadn’t liked that burst of rage. “Well, magic’s limited the same way,” I said tentatively. “An oath and death penalty —”
“I don’t care about enhancement,” Xillon said, waving his hand impatiently. “The system did that to itself. I assume the oath is still the one they used in my day, the enhancement-of-enhancement thing?”
“Uh,” I said. “I don’t know? Nobody can use magic without taking the oath. Except me,” I added gloomily. “Then magicians grow a little bit more every day.”
“Yeah, that’s the enhancement oath,” Xillon said, nodding. “It used to require renouncing agri, but the fanatics didn’t care. Are they renouncing status now to boost enhancement? That seems pretty stupid.”
“Well, they have to,” I said. “It’s the only way they can get magic at all.”
Xillon thought about that. Then he nodded. “Okay, that makes sense. With enough oath-takers around, drawing it in, there wouldn’t be enough power left over for anyone else.”
“Anyone else?” I blinked. “You mean . . . everyone else used to be able to use it?”
“’Course they did,” he said. “Systems don’t naturally stop people from using them.”
“Then . . . that law,” I said slowly. “The one forbidding landowners from using magic. I thought maybe it was targeting me. Or, well, a rising Keeper like me. It had an actual reason to exist?”
“Yeah, I imagine so,” Xillon shrugged. “Pretty good idea, actually, making people choose between the corrupt falling system and the virtuous rising one. Good way to hasten social change. I should have thought of it myself.”
“The death penalty for landowners was taking it a bit far, though,” I muttered.
“Eh, not really.” Xillon scratched his dubious insinuation of a beard. “Back in my day, landowners were the worst offenders. Thought manipulation was an ugly, ugly thing, and it got much worse when two landowners decided to wage war against each other and turn their vassals into armies. Before my system came along, it was possible for someone to be rich and powerful and malignant to the core. I wasn’t kidding when I said status improved things.”
I swallowed. I wasn’t sure what any of that meant, but it certainly sounded ominous.
“Look, if you want to study on past systems — and I suggest you do — the data’s in that pile there.” Xillon nodded at the stack of books in the corner. “You can see what every other system’s been like at its start, peak, and end. You can use that to decide what kind of system you’d like to make yourself.”
I hopped to my feet and moved over to the stack. “If you care so much about status, why didn’t you watch it from here, then?”
“Can’t,” Xillon said, making a face. “The data on a system only appears after it dies. Enhancement should be there now, though. It will have appeared when you did.”
Carefully, I pulled the top book off the stack. I opened the cover, and images flooded into my head. Shocked at some of the things I’d glimpsed, I slammed it shut.
“Yeah, you’re going to learn about a few unpleasant things,” Xillon said. “Like war. Try not to make a system that’ll encourage stuff like that to happen again.”
I opened book after book, the information flooding into my head like somebody else’s memories. There were so many different systems, it was dizzying.
There were some I didn’t care one way or another about. The agri system, with its ability to modify plants, didn’t really call to me. Mother would have loved it, so it was a shame she wasn’t here to see it with me. The taming system was bizarre, a really old one that had to do with wild animals being dangerous or something. Even with all of the images, I had no frame of reference to understand it. The word “domestication” kept coming back, but the concept didn’t really make sense to me. Apparently it was a good thing?
There were some I really liked. The sunstream system was amazing, with the way people harvested sunlight as if it were some kind of crop. They used it to run machines, which performed spectacular and wondrous things. My heart squeezed when I saw it end, when all of the machines stopped working. I wished I could have seen some of them personally.
Magma was fascinating. It was like a cross between the geo system, a recent one, and plasma, a really ancient one. I’d had no idea that there was anything like heated rocks underneath the dirt. I
t seemed that when the geo system had reshaped all of the land to create the Rulership, it had smoothed out not only the surface, but whatever was underneath that determined whether a piece of land was dangerous or stable.
I hated the blood system. It had been intended for use on animals, but the creator hadn’t built in enough limitations, so almost from the beginning, humans had used it on each other. The wars, murders, and exterminations made me want to scream and weep. Before that system, there had been humans in the world with purple skin and three arms. There were no longer.
The one that was the oddest to see was enhancement, because I had grown up with it in its nearly-diminished state. It wasn’t quite as bad near its peak as Xillon had made it out to be, but I still felt unsettled watching it. Thought manipulation and memory erasure hadn’t been common, but I still didn’t feel comfortable bringing back the possibility of such things again.
“Any ideas?” Xillon asked, waving at me from his hammock.
I shook my head to clear it. I felt overloaded, like I had been studying for weeks. Perhaps I had been. I was fairly certain it had been days, at least.
“I’ve learned that every system seems to have unintended consequences,” I said slowly. “Sunstream’s was that when it died, most of the world’s technology died with it. Geo’s was that it extincted almost every wild animal species when a Keeper decided to reshape all of the land into, you know . . .” I waved my hands in a round motion. “. . . the Rulership. Agri’s was . . . I’m not sure how to describe it . . .”
“Soil depletion,” Xillon said. “It also contributed to most domesticated animal species dying off, because people stopped breeding them. Plant-based foods were easier and more efficient, but the plants that replaced animal-based foods required a lot more nutrients than the soil could naturally provide. Geo was enriching the soil regularly, so the problem didn’t become obvious until agri was declining, and by then it was too late to do anything about it.”
I nodded. “So I need to build a system that can resolve our food supply.”
“Ehhh,” Xillon said, looking unenthusiastic. “Societies always have more than one problem. You might find something else you want to focus on more.”
What could be more important than food? I thought. Maybe you’ve never lived through a cold season when food supplies were running low and everyone you knew was hungry and the snows just kept on coming, but I have.
“I think I’ll focus on that,” I said.
Xillon shrugged. “Suit yourself. I’d find it boring.”
I went back to my studying, determined to find something valuable that spoke to me.
But, unfortunately, Xillon was right. Any of the older systems that had focused around food production, or at least would have been useful for it, were boring to me. It was intensely frustrating, because every time I tried to study the mechanics of one of them, my eyes glazed over and I just couldn’t concentrate.
“I don’t get it!” I complained. “Why can’t I do this?”
Xillon looked up from the illusion he was painting in the air with his fingers. He had swapped the hammock for a large couch some time ago; I wasn’t sure when. “Do what?” he asked.
“Concentrate!” I cried. “I have nothing to distract me! Why can’t I learn what I need to?”
“It doesn’t work that way,” Xillon said, shaking his head. “You’re not supposed to be able to learn things here that you aren’t interested in. You’re here to create a system, and you won’t be able to unless you’re passionate about it. Try focusing on details you find fascinating. You’ll find it’s easier to learn them than it would be normally.”
“But I have to solve the problem!” I cried. “I have a duty!”
Xillon rubbed a knuckle under his sparsely-wisped chin. “Is duty something you find riveting?”
I swallowed.
No. No, it wasn’t. Duty would be like Jontan: boring, safe, predictable, and guilt-free. Making something interesting would be like Derrim: wild, exciting, dangerous, and selfish beyond belief. Neither of those seemed like a good alternative to me.
But what else was I supposed to do? I was creating a system for other people to use. If I prioritized my self-fulfillment, I’d be ignoring what the world needed. If I prioritized what the world needed . . .
Ugh. I put my head in my hands. The thought of dealing with a system of dirt or fertilizer or plants for the rest of my life made me feel like screaming.
“I’m the wrong person to be here,” I mumbled. “Mother would have recreated agri.”
“Perhaps that makes you the right person to be here,” Xillon said, dipping his fingers in a pool of orange light that floated right next to him. “Do you think a system wants to take the same form every time? Because I don’t.”
“You . . . think systems can think?” I asked dubiously.
Xillon spread his fingers and swished an arc of orange in front of him. He poked his fingers back in the pool of light, which was now blue-purple. “Let’s just say I doubt it’s a coincidence that a new Keeper always has experience with both systems, and they’re usually much fonder of the one they’re not replacing.”
“You think systems have a death wish?” I asked skeptically.
Xillon poked some purple dots in the air beside him. “No, I suspect new Keepers are chosen based on the system wanting to see what their tastes will remake it to be.”
“So . . . if I’d taken the oath of magic . . .” I said slowly.
“If you were the sort of person who would swear your life to the enhancement system, I doubt you would have been chosen as a Keeper in the first place.”
That made me irrationally angry. “That’s so totally unfair! This has ruined my life! I didn’t want this — any of this!”
“I don’t think the systems are interested in fairness. I think they’re interested in changing.”
I glared at the illusion he was flicking with blue specks.
“Well, regardless of the reason,” Xillon said, smearing dark green all over the top of the blue specks and the orange streaks, “you’ve been chosen, so make something that you love. Trying to make something you don’t care about because you think other people need it is doomed to failure.”
“You did,” I said. It sounded more accusatory than I’d intended. “How did you manage it?”
Xillon burst out laughing. “You think that’s what I did? I was an economist, Raneh. The thought of designing my own currency was like the ultimate candy. What I wanted came first. Then I figured out how to make it serve society.”
Great, I thought, frustrated. And we’re back to me not knowing what I want in the first place.
“Go study the systems you liked best out of history,” Xillon said, waving his hands at the pile of books I’d left strewn around carelessly. “See what they did to improve society. See if it sparks some ideas.”
I stared at the fire crackling in the hearth. The warmth felt real from here, and the heat made me homesick. It reminded me of watching the fire for hours during cold season, bundled up and talking with family. If I never built a system, I would never get out of here, never see them again.
Finally, I reached over slowly and pulled the volumes that represented magma and sunstream onto my lap.
When the idea finally came to me, it was like a strike of lightning. I sat bolt upright, and the book that had been on my stomach tumbled onto the floor. Since it couldn’t actually get damaged, I paid it no heed, and made my armrest into a smooth writing surface. I snatched a piece of paper and a writing utensil from midair and started writing feverishly.
At one point, Xillon tried to interrupt me, but when he noticed I was concentrating, he shut his mouth and walked away. Relieved because even noticing he’d cleared his throat had been an unwelcome distraction, I dove back into the ideas I was outlining.
Many times, I went back over previous books, looking at details of other systems’ rules and what they had done — or failed to prepare for — in certain circum
stances. A few times, I got lost in the details of an interesting one, experiencing it for awhile until I finally surfaced to notice Xillon had changed activities.
All this time, he didn’t interrupt me. I was grateful for it. Part of me wondered if I ought to be more polite and pay attention to him, but he didn’t seem to be complaining, and having so much unbroken concentration was a luxury. I didn’t have to worry that my neck would get stiff. I didn’t have to worry that my hand would cramp up. I didn’t even have to worry about sleeping or eating or breathing. It was pure luxury.
Every so often I resurfaced, feeling a little dazed, and looked around the room and wondered how long it had been. But then I’d stare at the fire, just staring, not thinking, until inspiration hit again, and I’d go right back to research or scribbling.
Finally, at long last, I put my writing utensil down, feeling numb. I thought that was it. I thought I had finished it. Now only one thing was remaining.
“Xillon?” I croaked nervously. I looked around and found him burying himself up to the neck in sand way off in the distance. “Could you look at this?”
Despite the seeming remoteness, he leapt out of the ground and onto his feet. The sand vanished from around him, and he reached my chair in two strides.
“Are you done?” he asked, holding out his hand. “Let me see.”
Swallowing, I handed it over. He took it and sat in midair, not even seeming to notice he had forgotten to make a chair appear.
He flipped through page after page, reading slowly, and I got more and more jittery. Now that I’d finished it, it seemed an awful idea. What had I been thinking? I hadn’t solved the problem of food at all, and even with all the precautions I’d made, it still might be extremely dangerous.
He stopped and raised an eyebrow, looking up at me. “You’re going to integrate the flower into the actual system?”
“Is that okay?” I asked anxiously.
“I don’t see why not,” he said, tapping his finger on the page. “Nobody’s tried it before, but then, the flowers have only been around for four systems.”