Calling it an apartment is, perhaps, an exaggeration. A cube of nearly thirty meters’ volume, it held my bed (a blood blue cocoon purchased from a thrift store), a couple of changes of clothing suitable for different social contexts, a two-meter retina with a ripped corner that I’d rescued from a recycler and tacked to one wall for visualizations and entertainment, a ready-packed bag in case I had to leave in a hurry, and a crate where I kept my feed. I’d visited worse slums, but not often and never to live there by choice.
On the other hand, there was nothing here to attract the attention of my neighbors. Most of the other residents were laborers or fractional-reserve servants of one variety or another: poor but sufficiently respectable not to attract the attention of the secret police. (Not that the SPs cared about anything except direct threats of sedition or subversion that might impair their patrons’ ability to keep their salaries flowing. Accept capitalism into your heart, and you were almost certainly safe, except for the occasional unfortunate case of mistaken identity. Yet another reason not to dwell here too long . . .)
I flopped back onto my bed and waved at the retina. “Any mail?” I asked halfheartedly.
“Good evenshift, Krina! I’m sorry, there’s nothing new for you today.” I’d given it an avatar, the facial map and mannerisms of my sib Briony—but left the eyes empty, to remind me there was no person behind them. “A communiqué from your cousin Andrea”—a sib of another generation from mine—“is buffering now and will be complete within two thousand seconds. Price of release is thirty-two fast. Do you wish to accept?”
I swore under my breath—not at the retina, lest it misinterpret. But rent-seeking intermediaries with a monopoly on interstellar commerce would have been a good candidate for the bane of my life had they not also become the source of my income (by a cosmic irony that I no longer found even remotely humorous). In this case, the station’s official receiver had decided that Andrea’s incoming message was inconveniently large, or that the exchange rate since its transmission began (at least twelve years ago, assuming she was still back home) had fluctuated sufficiently to justify levying a supplementary fee. In any event, what was I going to do? I could pay the additional service fee or miss the message. Which might be something as banal as a we’re all missing you, come home safe and soon or as vitally important as word that my entire multiyear mission was pointless, that the long-lost property had been picked up by a rival syndicate.
“Accept and debit my account,” I said aloud. I paused to update my expenses sheet and stared gloomily at the dwindling cash float: Today was turning out to be very costly indeed. “Have there been any more responses to my primary search?” I asked the retina.
“No new responses!” I winced. I’d spent another chunk of fast money a week ago, buying a broadcast search—not merely of Taj Beacon’s public-information systems, but propagated systemwide—for news of Ana. Who had now been missing for over a hundred days, since shortly after I began to download into the arrival hall’s buffers—a suspicious coincidence, in my view, given that she had lived in the same floating city on Shin-Tethys for over twenty years. “Three archived responses. Do you wish to review them?”
“No.” I had them off by rote memory: One anxious inquiry from an out-of-touch friend of Ana’s (I think an ex-lover); a request for an interview from the local police (doubtless wondering why an out-system visitor was interested in a missing person); and a debt-collection agency wondering who was going to pay the rent on her pod. It was depressing to think how faint the mark she’d left behind must be, that so few people were interested in her disappearance. (Much like me, in fact. Loneliness is our only reliable companion when we fish the well of time for magic coins.) “Download and archive Andrea’s packet in my second slot as soon as it’s available.” A thought struck me. “Transaction with M. Hebert, travel agent: labor-exchange placement. When does it time out?”
“Your offer closes in four thousand four hundred seconds! Placement vessel preparing for departure!” My retina chirped.
What? The agent didn’t tell me it was leaving so soon! I looked around my cube in a momentary panic, then realized there was virtually nothing here that I couldn’t replace easily enough. I grabbed my go bag, already stuffed with a spare change of clothes and a palm-sized retina: “Dump Andrea’s packet into my number two soul chip as soon as you’ve got it, then erase yourself,” I told my sister’s hollow-eyed face on the wall: “I’m out of here for good.”
* * *
An hour later, I arrived at a docking node in an old part of the station. It was all grubby metal and delaminating anticorrosion treatments, the lights flickering, ventilation ducts howling mournfully behind rattling panels. Fat umbilical trunks snaked between nodes and across exposed walls, floors, and ceilings, their papery shrouds rippling in the breeze: Odd gelatinous globules hang quivering from leaky pipes, their surfaces fogged and filthy with trapped dust and fluff. There was a marked lack of life in this place, a sense that here the bones of the world were showing through the skin.
I found myself afloat in the middle of a desolate six-way crossroads. It took a few seconds for me to compose myself before the next step. At times like this, I have always been susceptible to a weary, familiar dread. I was on my own here; if Ana was dead (as seemed likely), I was the only one of my kind in this entire star system, and my generation in my lineage is not one that is comfortable with solitary working. I’m a creature of habit and a team player—by design. I’d been up and alive on Taj Beacon for around a million seconds: time enough to develop a routine, even as a near down-and-out in an unfriendly and highly competitive realm. And routines are comforting. It would be easy to stop moving and stay here. I was achingly, numbingly tired of constant motion. Sometimes it felt as if I’d been traveling and studying and covertly searching forever, as if I’d been built to run down darkening corridors in beacon stations across the whole of inhabited space, driven by hallucinations and night terrors from the wrong side of the balance sheet. The darkness behind me was gaining, filled with the terrible fear that I and my closest sibs had been set up to be the targets of a killing joke of monstrous dimensions. Or perhaps just a killing. There was, quite clearly, no turning back—but I was deathly tired of going forward.
I made a conscious effort of will to get moving again, drawing deep on the reserves of determination held by the bank of Krina. I had long since anthropomorphized my regular doubts into familiars (for the only friends I had to talk things over with were imaginary). No Payoff At The End Of The Tunnel shuffled behind me and stared at my back with starvation-dulled eyes. In Too Deep rode on my shoulder, hunched and squinting suspiciously at every anomaly. Moral Hazard flew ahead of me on wings the color of bonemetal, occasionally turning its head to mock me over its shoulder. I did my best to ignore them: They were along for the voyage, but I was determined to chart our course without reference to insecurities. So I forced myself to kick off, diving headfirst into the shadowy recess of the air lock connected to the docking node above me, imagining them trailing behind.
The air lock was a dingy cylinder with no obvious exit: just a hand wheel protruding from one wall, some grab rails, and a sign on the dead end opposite the entrance that said YOU ARE NOW LEAVING THE PRESSURIZED ZONE. I braced myself and turned the wheel. The entrance to the air lock narrowed as the cylinder rotated around me. As the solid, curved wall drifted across the entrance to the air lock, a mournful whistling began: A mesh of holes slid into view, venting into a cold trap to reclaim the valuable gases. When I felt the pressure drop in my vestibular machinery I stopped cranking and waited for silence. Then I turned the wheel again and kept turning until the air lock finally rotated far enough to show me the other doorway—the one that opened onto the unwinking starry darkness of deep space.
Space walking is dangerous, but the mooring crew had made adequate provisions: They’d fused no less than three brightly colored ribbons to the outer grab rail beyond the air lo
ck, glowing merrily in the floodlit glare of a portal embedded in the chapel’s belowground service structures, some twenty meters away. There was a harness and pulley attached to the nearest tape. I blinked to shatter the film of ice that had crusted over my eyeballs, then grabbed the harness and fastened it around my body, looping it through the strap of my bag. A minute later I fell headfirst through the violet-glaring hoop of the chapel’s air lock. The light was cast by ultraviolet sterilizers. I knew what that meant: On the other side of this air lock, there was meat. Living meat.
The Church of the Fragile
My name is Krina Alizond-114, and my species is metahuman.
I was instantiated—born, in natalist terminology, if you are one of those who adhere to the conventions of the Fragile—aboard the migratory habitat New California, in the 912th Year of Our Voyage. I was one of a round hex of newly forked children spawned from and raised by order of our ancient and incalculably wealthy lineage mater, Sondra Alizond-1. She had grown staid and overly ’prisoned by habit and convention as the centuries passed, and was acutely aware of it: She was desirous of regaining some of the youthful drive and energy that had fueled her rise to wealth and power. So every few centuries, she forked a brood of youngsters (in my case, sixteen): callow and edited copies of her younger self, bound to servitude in the cloistered basement of her countinghouse until we could repay the debt of our creation.
Child slavery was the custom in New California at the time of our birth, but I wouldn’t want to mislead you into thinking that we were harshly exploited. Sondra indentured us entirely legally and with the loftiest of moral reasons: For by so doing, she enabled us to repay the not-insubstantial debt of our creation as soon as possible, without falling victim to the full misery of compound interest. Indeed, our lack of legal personhood gave us the full protection of our mater’s not-inconsequential status at an age when most newborn citizens would be struggling. We were born to wear platinum fetters, as she never tired of reminding us.
(Fuck you too, Mother.)
Although for our first years we were confined to our narrow stone cells in the basement of her chateau by the coast of the Bay of Tears on the Girdle Sea of level six—and, on the rare occasions when we were granted a ticket of leave to enjoy the fleshpots of Saint Cruise, we could transact our affairs only as extensions of her legal person—we were not badly mistreated by the standards of the ship of our birth.
Child slavery as an institution has one mitigating feature: Once you reach the age of majority, you are no longer alive only on your owner-creator’s sufferance—you became a legal person, albeit one still burdened by the debt of your creation. If you manage to keep your nose clean, keep working, save money, and pay off the mortgage on your body, then in no time at all—a billion seconds, thirty years if you count time planetary-style—you can escape. (Even if you’re not so energetic, you may escape servitude in the event that a Jubilee is declared.) It takes a certain cold patience and cunning—and a determination not to provoke the mater into aborting you before you came of age—but nine out of hexteen of us made it through childhood alive, and seven of us eventually earned out.
From the first morning when I awakened innocent and confused, wondering where I was, Sondra shaped me to fit a plan that she had laid in place decades (if not centuries) before. She shaped all of my hex: The mater bent Zoe toward actuarial statistics, twisted Lemiske in the direction of derivatives, and turned Briony (for no reason I ever understood) to the study of classical biology and a niche in the priesthood. And when her servitors led me from my birthing cell to Quality Assurance, then to my tutorial station (where I would be introduced to the fearsome Proctor Das), they did so to assess my suitability for the career she had chosen for me: For I, alone of my generation, was to become a scholar of the historiography of accountancy practices.
Which, by way of numerous diversions, is why I am in this predicament: floating in the air lock of a church, about to take a working passage to a water world in a star system far from the place of my birth, there to establish what happened to my sib-of-an-earlier-spawning Ana and thereby recover a lost treasure trove and the goodwill of my sisters. Who have probably forgotten I ever existed by now, for I have been gone on this errand for almost thirty years already, with no end in sight.
* * *
Ioriented myself in the chapel’s air lock, twisting until my feet pointed in the same direction as the floorward arrows. There was a wheel, decorative rather than purely functional—nine spokes shaped like Fragile arm bones, a rim in the shape of ossified hands wired fingertip to wrist (eighteen in all)—I rotated it slowly, soaking in the strangeness of the architecture. The vestibule behind the air lock was decorated in ancient Gothic style: stone arches resting on skeletal Fragile caryatids, separated by engravings (illustrating afterlife myths from the distant past) etched onto the wall panels. A handrail of foamed metal textured like rope led past fistula-like openings in the tunnel wall. There was a traditional flat floor, but the side tunnels appeared to be designed for a life of intermittent microgravity. Eleven hollow tubular candles burned erratically in sconces mounted over air ducts, thriving in the forced draft. I blinked at this latter detail—naked flames aboard a spacegoing construct?—but as I looked closer, I noticed the flame-suppression hoods folded nearby. It might belong to a religious order, but it was at least one that took a sensible approach to safety: I approved.
Something rustled and clattered behind me, a dry, rattling sound. I spun round, missed my grip on the handrail, and kept spinning, catching only a brief impression of something or someone lifelike but not, scuttling hand over withered hand toward me. My left leg twitched, bouncing me headfirst into the ceiling with a flash of sudden pain. The thing-person came closer, revealing itself to be a rattling rack of baroque calcified sticks. After a few seconds I recognized it to be a deceased Fragile structural core returned to implausible life. The skeleton wore a flaccid space suit, glove, boot, and helmetless: the ritual devotional vestments of the Church.
I emitted an involuntary squeak as it grabbed the handrail and jolted to a crunchy stop, turning its bony face toward me.
“Greetings, visitor.”
Details came into focus: the small camera beads glinting blackly from within the shadowed eye sockets, the buzzing speaker wedged between its yellowing fangs, the glint of wires and actuators in the gaps between the long bones, holding it together with a semblance of animating life.
“H-Hello?” I asked.
“Be at peace. You are Krina Alizond-114, I believe? I am Deacon Dennett. Please follow my remote.”
The skeleton turned away from me and clattered off into the darkness, clawing hand over hand along the knotted rope guideway. After a moment of nervous indecision, I followed it. A job interview was a job interview after all, even one administered by a specter in the depths of a spacegoing charnel house.
After ten and a half meters, the skeleton paused for me to catch up, then kicked off sideways into a tunnel that resembled a giant stone Fragile’s trachea. It was of oval cross section, and clearly designed around a “down” and “up” axis, but the verticality did little to dispel the gloom. The walls were punctuated every meter and a half with niches, and within each niche another mummified Fragile husk floated in final repose, restrained by a network of fine wires. They wore space suits, the open visors of which framed their sunken eye sockets and silently screaming jaws. The bones of their hands clutched at devotional models of the Holy Starship, the rosary of their faith. Desiccation shrank the skin around their bones, drawing their limbs into prayerful curves and curling their spines. It was disturbingly like being surrounded by the corpses of real people—only the minor differences testified that these were not in fact actual persons but our Fragile human forerunners. It was a (I had to think for a few seconds before the word popped to the surface of my memory) catacomb; hardly what I was expecting!
After we passed the twenty-second skeleton,
my guide brought me to another tunnel. This one was short and narrow (lined with stacked leg and arm bones, baled neatly with copper wire), and at the bottom of it we popped up into a perfectly ordinary metal-walled node, such as one might find aboard any other spacegoing vehicle. “Nearly there,” the deacon’s voice assured me as his motorized skeleton opened a hatch. “Ah, there you are! Do come in.” This time the voice from the other side of the opening was clearly live and human.
The skeletal guide stood aside as I floated through the entrance. I half expected to find even more gloom, but instead I found myself in the interior of a fabric-padded sphere graced with functional, if minimal, furniture appropriate to a life of contemplation (sleeping cocoon, desk, a feedstock urn) all extruded in cheerful primary colors. The sole exception was the person behind the desk, who had chosen to cocoon himself in the black, cowled robe of a prehistoric representation of Death incarnate.
My host pushed his hood back. “I am Deacon Dennett. I hope the journey here did not disturb you?” His smile was fey and somewhat insincere.
“This is a church.” I shrugged. “I confess, however, I was not expecting quite so many . . .” I hesitated to say corpses.
The deacon appeared to be a fully gendered male, possibly to the extent of being equipped with the coupling peripherals required by a follower of the holy pleasure. (His robe, thankfully, concealed any such distasteful details from view.) What I could see of him suggested that his body was nearly as thin as his silent charges—he was almost skeletal. But while they were clearly Fragile and dead, give or take a few wires and motors, he was clearly Post and alive. His skin was midnight black, his eyes a solid sapphire blue that matched his close-cropped hair—and large, befitting a body tailored for life in the abyssal depths of space. He showed few other obvious signs of phenotypic modification away from the archaic Fragile human baseline. “The skeleton—may I ask what you’re using it for?” I asked.
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