Terminus

by Tristan Palmgren

  Of course, Ways and Means itself could have overridden both.

  She had no illusion of privacy. She was constantly being monitored. Ways and Means had never confessed to that, but it didn’t have to. It was just the kind of creature it was.

  Whether or not it was responsible for this, it was watching her. Just by reviewing these records, she might have revealed herself.

  If this was something that Ways and Means didn’t want her to see, it was probably best that she pretend she’d never noticed. When she’d first come to this plane, when she’d still been living with Companion, she wouldn’t have thought twice about that. The amalgamates were jealous of their secrets. She’d lived to serve the amalgamates.

  It had been a long time since she had to think of herself that way.

  When Ways and Means had given her this assignment, it had asked her to be her own creature. She was.

  Still – best not to notice. She resisted the urge to glance at Dahn. He was closer to Ways and Means than she was. If he was watching her, he would have already sensed her elevated pulse and her sweaty palms.

  5

  Neither the weather nor the waves had changed in the past week. Nor had Osia.

  She sat feline-still, legs folded, knees at the railing.

  Her body fired off a pulse scan at automated intervals, unconsciously – deep demiorganic subroutines monitoring for deviations from the weather forecast. There was never anything. The wind was never strong enough to rock the deck more than minutely. The warm mist from the sallow waves touched her knees, coming like clockwork.

  At night the steady light of the false comet, cold as frost, gleamed off her brow and flat eyes. It had risen far enough above the horizon that its light had turned from ocher to pale.

  Her crew had grown quietly desperate in their attempts to attract her attention. Osia did not notice, at least not in the way they wanted her to. Her background processes logged the noise for later review.

  One of them, Braeloris, sat by her side. Braeloris fancied herself a counselor, a talker. “You can’t keep grappling with yourself like this. I don’t know what you’re doing, looking at what you’ve lost or looking away, but you have to know it’s not working. You’ve been doing it for so long.”

  Osia did not answer. The sun shone into her unblinking eyes.

  Eventually Braeloris went away.

  Osia’s consciousness was malleable. She could hear without hearing, just as she saw the sun without seeing it. Her crew were no more human than she, but they had been made to behave human. They had never gotten accustomed to her fugues. She did not answer any of them, did not dignify their efforts by even thinking of them.

  At last, she blinked.

  Blinking was one of the few purely human reactions her demiorganic body allowed her. As she woke, a wave of displacement, digitized dizziness, overcame her. She reached up, placed her hand on the rail.

  Her clocks did not align. More time had passed than should have. She tried to recall what she had meditated upon, but found a void. Her only memories were those her subroutines had stored for her, waiting for her to review.

  Her consciousness was malleable in ways that, no matter how many years she had been in this body, still disconcerted her. She had gone into the fugue to decompress. She remembered that much. Seeing the comet again had left her unsettled. Even now, its tenth passage across the skies since it had arrived, she still reacted poorly. She had gone into the fugue to stifle her anxiety and put her thoughts back together.

  And then–

  A black expanse, a wide and gulf-like sensation of time passing, bridged the moment she had gone into the fugue and the moment she had left.

  The memories were gone. She must have erased them. A rapid diagnostic confirmed that she had.

  Only two things crossed that expanse. The first was a voice, an echo of her own that she didn’t remember speaking: Don’t bother searching for the memories. You’re better off forgetting.

  The second was a feeling. No matter how cleanly she might have tried to cut her memories, she was a creature of continuity. She could not be cut entirely short. Like a human, she could wake from a dream and forget it all, but still be left with an imprint, an outline of its shape. It was static lingering in the background radiation of her mind.

  The feeling was of drowning. Of being caught under a landslide. A smothering, choking pressure in her throat, in her head.

  The false comet burned overhead. She stood, and looked. It had passed its zenith while she was in her fugue. It crested northward. Its engine exhaust covered a fifteen-degree arc of the sky, impossible to miss.

  This was its tenth appearance. Thirty years since its first. She had thought she would be used to it by now.

  The loneliness did not go away as she turned to her crew. Braeloris pretended to be doing something else. Two of the others answered her stare. Coral. Ira.

  Osia told them, “Patrol junk coming over the horizon.” The signal, bouncing back from her pulse scan, had brought her from the fugue.

  Her constructs hadn’t seen it yet. Her sensors were better than theirs. She could bounce a pulse scan off the atmosphere, but the sensor rig concealed in their ship’s hold was limited to penetrating a small arc of seawater below the horizon.

  Coral asked, “Which direction will get us around it?” Coral had already guessed Osia would want to steer around.

  Osia said, “I want to meet it.”

  Her crew looked to each other. Ira said what they were all thinking: “It’s been years since you let a patrol catch sight of us.”

  “They’re more likely to give us someone to talk to.”

  Osia’s memories of everything that had happened in her fugue were still catching up to her. She glared at Braeloris. Braeloris looked away.

  She could not explain why she was making this decision. Not to her satisfaction. Maybe, before that other Osia had destroyed those memories and ended herself, she had left a subconscious parting wish.

  It didn’t matter. She didn’t need to explain it to them. She’d been out here too many years to really remember how to hold herself to account.

  Osia said, “They’ll be able to see us late afternoon. You have seven hours to make us ready.”

  Osia should not have felt restless. Her crystal gel muscles could hold position for years without losing capacity. And yet the fugue had left her feeling that she had energy to burn.

  Her boat was an imitation Chinese junk, triple-masted. She’d built it herself, piece by piece, over the course of two lonely months before her crew had been delivered to her. The engine had come with them. Both engine and constructs were parting gifts from Ways and Means. It had sent her a few other trinkets and an assignment to keep her busy. Or out of trouble.

  The boat’s tallow-colored sails stood broad and square. They’d torn a little at the edges. The wood along the masts and the railings was old and splinter-jagged. More stagecraft and theatrics. Occasionally, on those rare occasions when Osia chose, they came into contact with the locals. Her boat needed to seem unremarkable, old, undesirable.

  Her crew had a great deal of work to make ready for the meeting. Counting her, her boat held six people. Less than a skeleton crew for a ship its size. No native would ever believe the ship could be crewed by so few. It had empty rows of oars, just for show.

  Osia helped her crew haul the oarsmen dummies to the deck, set them in place. These constructs were not a tenth as functional as her crew, and would not speak when spoken to. However, they still needed to animate and appear human to a human eye, a complex task that required hours of setup and orientation.

  Her crew already had the brown skin tone to match the nearest locals. They needed only discard their olive swim jumpsuits and restyle their hair. Only the men could stay on deck, though. The two women, and Coral, would not be able to stay visible. The locals would have looked askance at women crewing a merchant junk. And Coral would have been beyond their experience.

  Osia was
too. The natives would think her an obsidian golem if she remained as she was. Her skin fluoresced and rippled iridescent as it recolored. She chose a graying skin tone, adding liver spots to simulate age and exposure. She was going to be a weathered captain, an old hand.

  She couldn’t do hair or facial structures. Coral helped sculpt them. Coral worked deftly, quietly, in the poor light of Osia’s closet-sized cabin. In thir personality’s previous life, Coral had been a diver, an adventurer. Thi was a creature of multiple talents. Like the women, thi could not remain above deck during the meeting. Thi was a third gender, a point high above the linear spectrum of male and female. Thir voice was fluted, thir chin and shoulders heavy and sharp. Thir hair grew out of the side of thir neck, to thir shoulders, in long vertical stripes.

  Thi said, “We get more and more concerned when you spend so long away.”

  Osia said, “So? Turn that part of yourself off.”

  “Not in our power,” thi said.

  Most days, Osia was willing to follow along with her crew’s illusions, for her sake if not for theirs. Her patience was short. “You were made to simulate emotions, not to have them.”

  “We were made to be concerned about you.”

  Osia arched her new eyebrow, but she could not turn without disrupting Coral’s delicate work.

  By the time Coral turned on the ultraviolet lamp to harden thir sculpting, thi had turned Osia almost human. She had become a middle-aged man, with false wrinkles and eye shadows. Coral glued a stubble of shaved hair to Osia’s false scalp.

  Osia would never feel like flesh to the touch. Her skin’s polymers couldn’t be changed that as easily as color. That was one of many parts of being human she had given up.

  She returned to the deck. She hid her finger-length toes under boots visibly too large for a person her size. The boots would draw less attention than those toes, though. The patrol junk was close enough that she could have seen the white of its broad sails even if she’d still had human eyes.

  She set her fingers on the railing. Ira stood nearby. He spun his rigging knife between his fingers. All of her crew had picked up nervous tics and bad habits at some point over the decades.

  Ira didn’t just have the knife twirling. He also enjoyed prodding her. “We shouldn’t let you out on the deck for this long.”

  Osia bit the bait. She looked to him.

  He nodded to the southern horizon, the comet in the sky. “You start your brooding whenever you see it, don’t you?”

  Like Braeloris imagined herself a counselor, Ira was, in his own mind, a teller of hard truths. And like most people who fancied themselves that, he had no idea. She had the same solution for him as for Braeloris. She turned away, ignored him until he finally left.

  She was beginning to seriously rethink her relationship with her crew.

  They were supposed to keep her company in exile. Not to provoke her. But Ira might have had a point. The railing still had the gouge she’d made decades ago.

  Thirty years exiled to this boat. Thirty years since she’d left home. And thirty years and a handful of weeks since Ways and Means had arrived on this plane in the course of its own exile.

  Ways and Means had been forced out of its disintegrating transplanar empire, the Unity. It and its crew had been sentenced to remain here, in solitary contemplation, for a millennium.

  Ways and Means was an amalgamation of hundreds, thousands, of AIs who’d survived the chaos of the Unity’s early history. There had been several others like it. Like Ways and Means, the other amalgamates each had their own planarships. They too had been forced into exile elsewhere.

  Ways and Means had chosen this plane for a reason. It had been here before. It had had plans to colonize it before its exile. This world was still ripe for it. Ways and Means had not waited long to intervene on this plane. It had seeded the sky with immunizing aerospores, ending the black plague that had killed millions throughout Asia and Europe, would have killed millions more. That had only been the first step.

  Its crew wanted a new home, a world from which to restart their lives after their exile. Mostly, though, they had wanted to settle this world because they could. Because it was what they had always done. They were used to it. The Unity had colonized many worlds just like this one.

  They didn’t see why that should change just because they were alone now. Alone among them, Osia had hesitated.

  Her crime, as far as the rest of the crew were concerned, was not that she had suggested scaling back their intervention. Her crime had been in the fact that Ways and Means seemed to listen to her.

  Osia wrapped her hand around the railing, careful to exercise tight control over her muscles, and not to leave a gouge this time.

  She studied the patrol boat. A typical Yuan war junk, three-masted like hers, with eighty human-sized infrared sources on deck and underneath. Likely on patrol to protect fishing and deter smuggling. Their bright orange banners snapped with their sails. Archers, in the nest above the mainmast, held arrows ready to nock. More bowmen stood along the prow.

  Osia’s boat was obviously no fishing ship. They’d probably thought they’d found a floundered smuggler, an easy catch. Money in their pockets if she or her crew did anything wrong.

  Osia had not protested settling this world because she respected these people.

  Long before Ways and Means’ exile, a team of anthropologists had come here and combed through this plane. Osia memorized their reports. The peoples of this plane were small-minded, petty – and what was more, they were unremarkable. She’d seen thousands like them, societies trapped in their myopias, insects in glue.

  Living on a single world, unable to see farther than the horizon, would do that to any person. Even to her. She was afraid that, in a thousand years of exile, she’d become just like them.

  She’d seen more worlds than she’d cared to count. Her demiorganic memory was perfect, though, and kept that count for her. In her last life, Osia had served as Ways and Means’ liaison. It was a diplomatic position, dealing with people on Ways and Means’ behalf. Taking flak for its decisions. The amalgamates had rarely settled for fair play. She had lied, she had cheated, and manipulated. Her service had been for the good of the Unity. She had been proud of it.

  So often, taking control of other worlds, the least cruel thing to do had been to lie, let people think they had a hand in making their own decisions.

  It did not take long to identify the patrol junk’s captain. He wore a yellow robe that reached his ankles, and mirrored armor to protect his chest. His ribbons and tassels twisted in the wind. A pulse scan found the metallurgic signature of gold and silver jewelry under his robe. Unless things had dramatically changed since her last contact, those were beyond a patrol captain’s salary.

  Her first encounter with these people in years, and it was already tiresome.

  Her oarsmen steered astride in answer to barks from the other ship. Ramps crashed into her deck. The boarders scampered across them, swords not yet ready, but in reach. Osia stood at ease and let them by, a good citizen. Only when the boarders reported no illicit cargo – no cargo at all, really – and the proper permits affixed in the forecastle cabin, did the captain step over.

  Mindful to avoid touching him, she handed him her personal license, wrapped around a string of coins. Given the size of the latter, she didn’t expect she would run into much trouble if the styling of her license was out of date. He hardly looked at the string. He treated her to a thin smile. He waved his men back.

  “You sailors seem in need of aid,” he said.

  After those and other pleasantries, he invited her to dine in his cabin. They hardly would have fit in hers. He had a bed with covers lined with flossed silk, and a wall-covering scroll of a pastoral landscape in thick, aggressive brushstrokes. He dug a surprisingly cheap bottle of rice wine from a chest underneath his bed, and poured it into two wooden cups.

  Osia told him her cover story. “We sailed from Quanzhou to buy pepper in the Ph
ilippines. I told my employer that our boat needed repairs, but he didn’t listen. I was a fool and went. A gust split our center sail almost in two.” Her sails were yellowed and crisscrossed with stitching. Even now, Ira and the others were putting on a show of sewing.

  Osia’s counterpart had struck her as the kind of man who would loosen like a spigot with alcohol. She’d been right. She had been ready to dose his wine with tranquilizers to make him more suggestible, but hadn’t needed to. He said, “Get your pepper back to Quanzhou as fast as you can. Our masters will be raising tariffs soon. Maybe in weeks.”

  The way he said masters made it clear what he thought of them. Barbarians. For over a century, China had been ruled by Mongol invaders.

  Osia was surprised that was still the case. When she’d arrived, the barbarian dynasty, the Yuan Dynasty, had been teetering, on the verge of retreating northward.

  It only took a little prodding to find that, instead, they’d solidified their rule. The captain complained about them with little provocation. “They throw money after money beyond the borders. Always conscripting, always taxing.” It did not take much reading between the lines to figure that part of his bitterness likely came from overdue salaries.

  Osia suggested, “Perhaps with so much attention focused on foreigners, they’ll lose their grip on Han China.” The captain’s accent marked him as Han. Han China, South China, had been the region the Mongols had conquered last, and always the most resistant to their rule. His unimportant sea patrol was likely the highest post any Han Chinese man, no matter how noble or high-testing, could hold. His career advancement not only stopped here, but it likely had some time ago.

  “Perhaps,” he said. Footsteps on the deck outside made him fall silent. So – afraid of eavesdroppers and Mongol sympathizers.

  A strange feeling, an electric tension, trilling down Osia’s back. It was a phantom, a memory of excitement. Her nerves registered no actual signals. The Unity had manipulated and colonized enough planes like this one that it had turned the art of political forecasting to a rigid science. The Unity’s agents could leave a plane alone for twenty years and have a reasonable idea what would happen while they were gone.