TRISTAN PALMGREN
Terminus
Social Robotics
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For those who,
in spite of it all,
remain kind.
You were like a traveler in the night, whose torch lights up for others the path where he himself has miserably fallen.
– Petrarch, Letter to Cicero
Part One
The Company of Mortality
1
There was no such thing as a restful day at sea. Not on this boat. Not for her. But some days were worse than others.
She had known this one was coming.
She’d filled the day with distractions. Her crew bickered just above the range of her hearing. Metal clanked against metal, thunked on wood as they wound the capstan. The sails scraped and ruffled, rhythmic as breath. The banks of oars trailed silently along the water, the wake of their passage the only evidence that the boat was moving.
She took no part in that work. Not today. Her crew bustled about it. They were willful. They had their own opinions about what was suited for their talents and when she’d get in the way. She'd made them that way. They’d all woken with the teal-gray predawn, slender lanterns dancing across the deck.
She sat at the edge of the deck, by the railing, her legs folded.
She had been released from active service on her other ship, her real one. She was to survey and scour these oceans, learning everything there was to learn. One of her crew dropped a survey probe. After a muted splash, there was a steady, whip-fast uncoiling of rope.
There was still little enough light in the sky. But more than there should have been.
A finch-tail comet brushstroked the southern horizon, shading the sky crimson. It moved like no comet should have. It traveled perpendicular to the path of the sun. It glowed brighter than any comet. This was the first night she had sailed far south enough to see it.
Had she breath, she would have held it.
Soon there would be cloudless nights when the whole sky turned pink. The comet’s glow would hide the stars. The horizon would be curtained red. Everything would become the backdrop of a theater.
Theater was the right word for it. It was all stagecraft. All of the sky was a performance.
The false comet cut a line across the far southern horizon, heading eastward and gradually northward, following the path of the winter sun. Seen at this steep angle, through so much intervening atmosphere, the exhaust plume appeared cherry-red, haloed in orange.
The intruder knew the effect that comets had on this world’s peoples. She tried to put herself in their place, see it how they saw it. She couldn’t. She thought of herself as an imaginative person. But she couldn’t forget everything she knew about the ship burning across the sky, about transplanar travel, about the amalgamates. Even with what she knew, it was at times too much.
No wonder that, the first few times it appeared, cities had burned.
That had been years ago. These days, watching and waiting and trembling, the natives tended to get on with their lives. Like most people the multiverse over, they had little choice and less control. They mattered only in the abstract. The comet persisted regardless.
She should have been up there. Not at sea, trapped in horizons. She’d been stranded on this plane with that ship: the living planarship Ways and Means. She’d been one of its thousands of crew.
She’d departed for her own safety. Now its crew wouldn’t even call her by name. They just called her the One Who Stopped Them. Even when they knew she was listening. It was as if she’d been erased.
She hadn’t actually stopped anyone. She had no say. Ways and Means reserved all final decisions for itself. They knew that. But, when she’d spoken up, their master had apparently picked her alone to listen to.
The rest of the crew couldn’t despise Ways and Means. It had wormed its way into them. They had needed another target.
She’d been right there, on offer. Ways and Means had made her visible.
She gripped the railing, dug in her fingers.
When she pulled her hand back, her index finger had left a long and shallow divot against the grain of the wood.
She stared. Her finger was slender, ink-black, and blunt at the tip. She had no nails. The railing had left no mark or splinter on her demiorganic flesh.
She hadn’t meant to do that. It was possible for her to lose control of her body. But it had not happened to her before.
The noises behind her had stilled. Her crew was watching her. They were perceptive.
She should not have sailed this way. Should not have looked up. Eventually, though, there was going to be nowhere on this world from which she could not see the comet.
She unfolded her legs and planted her feet against the deck. Her finger-length toes unfurled. She levered herself up.
Her cheeks were hot, and the corners of her eyes burned. These feelings were psychosomatic, a lizard-brain response. She didn’t have a real body. Hadn’t for centuries.
It didn't matter what today was. She shouldn't feel any different on another. She hadn't the day before. Or before that.
Of course her skin radiated heat. She’d been out in the sun too long.
She glared at her crew. All of them pretended to have been hard at work. Her engineer busied herself with the rear sail’s outhaul. Her divers pretended to be measuring the wind.
Osia opened her mouth. For the second time that morning, her body betrayed her. She had something to say, but not the strength to say it.
She was going to have to reprogram her crew not to be so nosy, so perceptive.
She turned back to the sea, and this time managed not to look upward. It didn’t matter. Her memory was perfect. She knew exactly what she would have seen.
Worse, she knew where it was going next.
2
Fia had seen death before, on a massive scale and without looking away, but she had not seen death like this.
Acid touched the back of her throat. But still there was something fascinating about it.
She crept closer, quiet and careful as a mouse.
The shed’s door hung half-open. It cast everything inside under sharp contrasts of light and dark. It etched a black halo around the man in the dirt. His twisted legs and slack mouth carved canyons of shadow.
The shed and the body belonged to Bandino, one of the shepherds from the other side of this rocky valley. He had served in Treviso's militia, and sometimes still stood watch for the Convent of Saint Augusta of Treviso. He knew how to handle a spear and dagger. He had never been other than unstintingly rude to Fia, but he served without being asked.
His face was blackened. His distended tongue burst through his lips. Red welts blossomed around his neck.
He had been strangled. This wasn’t just death. It was murder.
She bent, reached inside his tunic and touched bare skin. Still warm, not hot. She was enough of a familiar of death to judge the age of a body. It was a fair day out, sunny but not stifling. Cadavers took a fair amount of time to cool.
She had touched her father after his death. He’d still been feverish-hot though she’d known, from testing with a feather in front of his lips, that he’d stopped breathing more than an hour before.
Bandino’s dagger was missing from its sheath. He never traveled without it. He often sat on stones along the road to Saint Augusta's, whetting it. The earthen floor of the shed was scuffed. Someone had dragged him here.
His boots were missing. With a shiver, she saw the seams of his leggings were split. Someone had stripped him. They’d had a cool head. They'd searched a
ll the places where a man might have hidden money.
The shed’s cob walls slumped. It wasn’t much good for anything but keeping brush during the winter, or broken tools to trade for seed. She’d come over because the open door had been a telltale mark of intrusion, a burglar with the mistaken impression that there was something valuable inside. Or a drifter looking for shelter. She’d chased more than one off Saint Augusta’s property. There’d been plenty of those the past few years. And more this summer. All because of the trouble in the east.
This was no break-in. This was a body stash. Professionally done, too. They’d searched him in quick strokes. They’d neglected to close the door, but maybe they hadn’t cared that much.
She stifled her breathing and crept back outside. The wind, an intermittent visitor on her walk back from town, had stilled. The heat made her itch. There was no sign of trouble other than what she’d left behind.
She shouldn’t have been here. Shouldn’t have come alone. She’d been away from Saint Augusta’s for three days. She, two of the mothers, and three of the other girls had gone to Treviso to buy thread and linen. She and the other girls weren’t ordinarily allowed to go, but the mothers needed someone to haul, and couldn’t spare Saint Augusta’s few animals.
Fia hadn’t had much to carry back. The mothers’ money hadn’t gone very far. The advent of the eastern mercenaries had driven up prices. So she’d raced ahead when the mothers weren’t looking. She would pay a sharp price later. None of the orphanage’s girls were ever supposed to travel alone.
Funny thing was, she still wasn’t sorry she’d gone ahead. The mothers, let alone the other girls, would be useless here. She could have counted on them to do little more than panic or pray.
She crouched, using the grass to conceal herself. She should have melted back the way she’d come. Back away from the road, into the tangled forest. Found a place to hide.
Her blood burned. Her stomach was molten iron. Her fingers trembled.
Like a lot of people around Saint Augusta’s, Bandino had been an idiot. He drank himself sick. He stared at the orphanage’s girls when they thought he wasn’t watching. He was rude for rudeness’s sake. Fia had no patience for idiots. But he hadn’t deserved this.
She was not, had never been, the kind of girl to run and hide.
She recognized she’d made the decision only in retrospect. She had to see if the girls back home were safe too. Staying low, she kept going in the direction she’d started: toward home.
She loped along the creek that S-tailed along the border of the convent’s land. Saint Augusta’s was ahead. Its cousin orphanage, Saint Niccoluccio’s monastery, stood upon the ridge farther ahead. Their shared parcel of land was small, originally purchased to support the convent alone. The convent had not been intended to serve as an orphanage. After the great pestilence, necessity had turned it into Fia’s new home, and Saint Niccoluccio’s had been hastily constructed on the far corner of the property.
Try as the keepers of each orphanage might, there’d been no way to keep the boys and girls from contact. These hills were replete with hidden places. Fia had never gone to meet one of the boys, but she knew those spots well enough to keep concealed.
By unthinking childhood habit, she trailed her hand in the wheat. Abruptly, she remembered herself. It made extra noise, extra motion. Whisper-thin and nigh invisible, but still. She had to think and act like a soldier. She had ideas what that was like.
One of the orphanage’s regular summer merchants was a Venetian named Pandolfo. He was a living repository of war stories. He looked like a soldier. He had an uncivilized tumult of a beard and a hitch in his gait he claimed he owed to a Florentine bolt. He’d indulged Fia with stories of sieges and betrayals and public executions, but always reminded her that it was a very peculiar thing for a girl to ask about. Fia had answered that she was a very peculiar girl.
Pandolfo hadn’t shown up yet this year. There was some talk that he must have gone away. Independent merchants couldn’t survive all the trouble in the east, especially the fighting and pillaging around Venice.
She crouched, sniffing for smoke. Nothing. She couldn’t believe Pandolfo was gone. He and other men of his age had survived worse. So had she.
A decade and forever ago, a great and mortiferous pestilence had gutted Italy. It had been intangible as a brush of wind, a star falling from the sky. One morning, Fia’s world started to end. Her father had died in the space of an afternoon.
She had been told, later, that he lasted two days. She remembered no night. Black buboes rose under his arm. They had gurgled, and then racked him with spasms of pain. The hair on his chest turned oily from vomit. Sweat pooled between the tendons of his neck. She’d never thought that anyone so large could be brought down so quickly except by a blade.
Her family had had warning, but the warning had not helped. They had nowhere to flee. In weeks, her neighbors’ fields had become wilderness, their homes unmarked sepulchers. The carcasses of their mules and oxen dried to bone and shoe leather under the low winter sun.
In rapid succession, as notes in an ivory-fluted melody, the rest of Fia’s family, her mother and four siblings, had been struck down. Worst of all, Fia’s twin sister had died. When she realized she was getting sick and Fia was not, she had looked at Fia accusingly.
Alone among them, Fia had survived.
The irony of the orphanages was that the pestilence preferred taking children over men and women. Children piled over the lips of Treviso’s unmarked graves. But wicked probability saw some children survive their parents, and without extended family to adopt them. Those who could be caught were carted off lest they become a burden on Treviso’s streets.
Fia would have stayed at home had she been able, but hunger had driven her to Treviso. She’d been too young to escape capture. The whip at her back had been no less sharp than for the mules.
So she’d had nowhere but Saint Augusta’s convent to make her home. And she had – sometimes by the skin of her fists.
This land was no good for farming. It was too rocky, the soil too poor. The land puckered around short, steep hills that made for exasperating plowing. Every night of the spring and summer harvests, Fia’s legs and back felt shredded. One night, she’d lain on the dormitory’s cold earth floor to numb the fire in her shoulders. She was the first to risk the mothers’ wrath by trying that, but soon the other girls joined her. Fia often led their way.
She and the other girls might not have cared for each other, but they shared their misery. Their parents’ property had been stolen away, then seized in war. No one had cared to protect their flimsy inheritances. They would have no dowries. Their only value to the husbands the church would find for them was as servants, laborers.
Fia choked to think about marriage. She wanted nothing less. She still thought of herself and the others as kids. But they hadn’t been children for a while. Fia was pretty sure she was fifteen. She’d always been bigger than the others, which made it hard to tell.
All she had heard of the outside world were stories of war that outsiders like Pandolfo had brought to them. Even that turmoil had started to seem an escape.
The boys and girls of Saint Niccoluccio’s and Saint Augusta’s were given turns tilling the land so that they wouldn’t come into contact with each other. While the boys were out, the girls would be baking bread or learning crafts. But they couldn’t always be kept from each other. During spring and late summer harvests, the nuns and the monks couldn’t watch everything.
Where they failed, Fia had stepped up. She had to keep them in line. She’d used her fists where she had to.
Mother Emilia had lamented – in that timid, tight way of nuns who wanted to curse but couldn’t – that Fia hadn’t been born a boy. Then Fia could have been exiled to Saint Niccoluccio’s, whose rowdy, violent boys could handle her.
Mother Emilia been wrong. Fia clouted plenty of boys too. She’d knocked one of the fathers down too, when he’d grabbed her
arm after she’d struck a boy. So severe was the stricture against any of the fathers coming into contact with Saint Augusta’s girls that she’d never heard another word about that one.
As she’d grown older, she’d paid more attention to her peers than the nuns. And her peers had taught her a lot. They’d taught her how to hit. Then how to hit in such a way that left no marks. They’d taught her how to lead. She’d spent part of each of her shifts walking the field, being their foreman, their bully.
Even the most indolent and sullen among them knew what she wanted. Adult politics were not always so clear.
It was only midmorning, but the sun bore heat upon heat upon her. It baked the soil. Dust plastered to the sweat on her forehead. It was exactly the kind of day she’d imagined war would be fought under, a remorseless day. Weather for burning.
The soldiers menacing Venice, the condottieri, were supposed to spread fire whenever their devil winds carried them in. They burned, destroyed, ransomed, and tormented to provoke a reaction.
They were not supposed to be so close to Treviso. But their strange eastern horsemen, the stradiots, could move faster than anyone believed.
If anyone had suspected they could be here, the convent of Saint Augusta might have packed up its girls and sent them elsewhere so that they could “sleep honestly.” Fia curled her nose at that thought. As if women were guilty of anything more than being sport.
The only soldiers near were supposed to be Treviso’s allies. Mercenaries, more condottieri, passing through to purchase wheat and fodder and bolts. They weren’t supposed to be within thirty miles.
She crouched in the lee of the next hillock. Saint Niccoluccio’s was hidden behind a ridge with gravestone walls. She squinted. There was no sign of smoke. Not even chimney smoke. There should have been. If the boys were out, then the girls would be baking, or vice versa.
She edged around the hill. Her vision, stinging from sweat and dust, hazed. Something large and black, eight-legged, stirred in front of the chapterhouse. It took her too long to realize it was the convent’s two oxen, blurred together. She let her breath out.
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