“Fift!” Smistria thundered, in the breakfast room. “That’s enough!”
“Don’t yell at zir, Smi,” Frill said. “Ze just doesn’t understand. Look, Fift, that’s not what they’re asking for. They can’t risk making Shria into a hero, after what ve’s done.”
Fift kept climbing. Higher into the shaft than ze’d ever been before.
{It may become necessary to inform your parents of your location.} the context advisory agent sent.
{You never did that when I used to climb up here before.} Fift sent. {And you could have done it already. But you haven’t.}
{Such a decision is contingent on many factors.} the context advisory agent sent.
{Well, I don’t know what those factors are.} Fift sent. {I don’t know whose side you’re on. You’ve been in my head my whole life, and I don’t really know if you’re there to help me or to spy on me.}
{We are here to take care of you.} the social nuance agent sent.
{I don’t know what that means.} Fift sent. {Take care of what? Of my ratings? Of my comfort? Of what I . . . what I become? Does it matter what I want to become?}
The softness of Shria’s cheek against zirs. The weight of vir forehead, pressed into zir shoulder. The hard muscles under the skin of vir arms, enclosing Fift. Vir hair falling in copper tangles over vir shoulders.
Amid a myriad, one true witness . . .
“I’m not going to betray vem,” Fift said, in the breakfast room. “I’ll go to the Pole. I won’t make trouble. I’ll say whatever else they want me to say . . . but I’m not going to blame Shria in front of the whole world.”
“Fift!” Frill cried. “We are in no position to bargain.”
Miolasia leaned forward. “We are here, Fift, as a favor to your Mother Pip. And because we believe that you want to do the right thing. And so we are offering you a chance. One chance. To trust us and to do as we say.”
The steam flowed thickly past Fift as ze climbed. The light was getting brighter.
{You are insufficiently aware of the dangers of attracting further attention.} the context advisory agent sent. {Your instant-fame has swelled dramatically.}
“But I, Fift,” Miolasia said, “am not a marginal indexer from Tentative Scoop. You do not debate with me.”
{You didn’t answer my question.} Fift sent zir agents. {You never really do! You always just tell me what you think I should know. Answer what I asked. What are you taking care of?}
“Fift,” Father Nupolo said, in the breakfast room, “don’t you understand? They’re going to dissolve our cohort!”
{What do you want me to become?} Fift sent zir agents. {Do you want me to become someone who denounces their best friend on the feed to save their own cohort, without . . . without even sending a message to vem? Is that what you’re . . . taking care of?}
“Revered Expressive,” Nupolo said, “the matter’s decided! Fift’s parents have agreed. Ze’s our child. Please accept our apologies for zir childish questions. Ze will absolutely cooperate—”
{It is true}, the context advisory agent sent cautiously, {that restriction of send privileges is a relatively extreme measure.}
{One which is entirely appropriate for extreme situations.} the social nuance agent sent.
{As Fift noted}, the context advisory agent sent, {at issue here is zir right to control zir own mind—zir basic ability to communicate with others.}
{A right which cannot take precedence}, zir social nuance agent sent, {over Fift’s basic safety, and the integrity of the social flow . . .}
Fift crawled out of the shaft and into a bright translucent gazebo on the upper surface of Foo. In the walls all around zir, thousands of tiny slits puckered to exhale clouds of steam and mist. There was barely room for zir to lie in the loam of the gazebo’s floor beside the drop, zir arms and legs aching.
“That is very correct of you, Nupolo Imsmi Iraxis,” Umlum said. “But you will surely forgive a certain skepticism on our part regarding your ability to control your child.”
Miolasia’s vermillion eyes bored into Fift.
The back of Fift’s necks were cold. Zir hands were slick with sweat. Zir stomach roiled.
{There is some divergence}, the context advisory agent sent reluctantly, {among various agents tasked mutually with regulatory responsibilities for your feed infrastructure. Please allow for a short pause while we attempt to reconcile these factors. Your patience is appreciated.}
“I’ll do as you say,” Fift said, zir voice scratchy, “Except about Shria.”
“Well,” said Miolasia, straightening, “I think we’re done here. Thank you all for your time.”
Frill leaned over the breakfast room table. “Fift!” ve shouted. “What are you doing?”
“Stop shouting,” Squell whispered. “Stop shouting at zir.”
“Why should they have the right?” Fift said, flinching away from Frill. “Why should they have the right to dissolve us if we want to stay together? Why would you listen to the Midwives and the bookies and the adjudicators and the ratings? Why would you let them supplant you? Why would you let them take me away?”
{Just let me send.} Fift sent zir agents. Ze rolled onto zir hands and knees, the soaking shift clinging to zir skin. Ze pushed zirself up. {Let me send to vem. If you want to protect me, if you want to protect Iraxis cohort, if you want me to cave in and do what they say . . . just let me send first, let me tell vem why!}
Miolasia stood, almost leaping up from the table, not meeting anyone’s eyes and brushing off vir hands as if something disgusting was stuck to them. Umlum rose more slowly.
“Please, Revered Expressive,” Arevio said. Arevio, Nupolo, Frill, and Smistria were on their feet.
“Fift, you’re sixteen,” Frill said, in the breakfast room. “You don’t understand! We can’t ignore reality! We live in the world, not in some void-spurned hidden island on a surface sea! We depend on interconnections, relationships, with everyone in the world!
Squell swayed on vir feet, eyes closed.
“Listen, Fift,” Frill said desperately. “Maybe a cohort should be able to supplant the whole world! But you can’t just pretend the world is not as it is!”
“You ungrateful, muddled child!” Smistria said. “This is dissolution!”
Still seated at the meeting room table, Pip laced zir fingers together and turned to Fift. “Are you certain of this decision, Fift?” ze asked mildly. “To throw away this cohort, which has raised you with love, to lose us, to have us lose each other . . . for this gesture? To impress a vailchild who you may never see again? Who perhaps has fond memories of you as a child . . . but with whom, in fact, you have little in common?”
Across the table, Squell was rigid, glassy-eyed. In the breakfast room, ve made a high, hard, strangled sound and began to shake. The cobalt blue spikes set into vir pink scalp quivered.
“It’s the end,” Frill said, “we’re going to lose everything—everything! Don’t you understand?”
The gazebo’s outer membrane was filmy, translucent, slick with condensation. Fift could see the murky outlines of passersby outside. Ze stepped forward, put zir hand on the wall, felt the gaps puckering beneath zir fingers, the steam racing through.
In the meeting room, Fift stood. “Revered Eminences,” ze said, “this isn’t my parents’ fault. There’s no reason to dissolve their cohort. I—”
Miolasia smirked.
“Kumru’s frostbitten cock!” Frill shouted in the breakfast room. Squell, still making that rough, strangled sound, whirled on vem.
“I declare my majority,” Fift said. “I rejected my parents’ counsel—”
“Oh no, you certainly do not!” Arevio cried.
Squell’s hand moved fast, fingers tense and curled to a point, whipping loose-armed to strike at Frill’s temple: a blow that would have knocked vem to the ground, except that Grobbard, who had come slowly around the table, was there, zir hand closing gently over Squell’s at the top of its arc.
; Through the puckered gaps in the gazebo’s flesh, Fift saw a couple of courting Staids, arm in arm and holding parasols, heading for the eastern grove beyond the docking-spires.
In the breakfast room, Frill leaped back from Squell, stumbling over a seating harness. “What in—Squelly!”
“Esteemed guests,” Pip said, still seated, “my friends . . . Might we take a bit more time to resolve this matter?”
“From my perspective, the matter is quite resolved,” Miolasia said. “I would wish Iraxis cohort luck, were that not foolishly optimistic given the dismal failure of its project.”
In the breakfast room, Grobbard enfolded Squell in zir embrace. Squell shrank, wrapping vemself in vir own arms, vir own tight, quivering inner hug within Grobbard’s outer one. Ve turned vir head into Grobbard’s neck and squeezed vir eyes shut.
“As for you, Fift,” Miolasia went on, “while it is very kind of you to offer to shoulder the burden of raising yourself alone, that is in neither your own best interest, nor in ours.”
“Oh, Kumru,” Frill said, turning away from Squell moaning in Grobbard’s arms; turning away from Fift, vir eyes filling with tears. “Oh, Kumru. It’s over . . .”
Smistria stumbled from the seating harness and went to vem. Nupolo, alone at the breakfast room table, was blank, immobile, like a lapine transfixed on a spear.
{Okay.} Fift sent zir agents. {Last chance.}
“Despite the immense demands currently laid upon us,” Miolasia said, “our order never shirks its duties. Your parenting is now in our hands, and we have ample resources to correct your previous parents’ mistakes. We must be on our way now”—ve tucked a stray mirror behind vir ear and looked over at Umlum, who nodded that ze was ready—“but I will see you soon, at the Pole.”
“As it would be unwise, for a number of reasons, for you to journey alone,” Umlum said, “we have summoned the nearest pod of Peaceables to escort you there. They should arrive within the hour.” Ze looked somberly at the faces of Pip, Arevio, and Grobbard, each in turn. “Your squatright over these apartments . . . should hold until then.”
Fift ripped open the gazebo’s membrane and pushed into the gap, staining zir white robe with its yellow blood. Ze struggled through, out onto the surface of Foo.
And ze ran.
19
The moment Fift emerged from the gazebo, zir audience surged from zero into the tens of thousands—the first wave of the agent-notified.
Fift ran past the pavilions, the bundle-gardens, over a small bridge, zir feet slapping on the grownbone walk. The diners at a nearby veranda looked up in surprise.
But zir parents hadn’t noticed yet. They must have attention screens up for the meeting. Nothing from the outside was getting in. Not yet.
Umlum nodded to Grobbard, avoided Pip’s eyes, glanced briefly at the rest of the Fathers, and followed Miolasia from the meeting room.
“Well,” Nupolo said in the breakfast room. “Well.”
“What a Kumru-spurned fucking fiasco,” Frill said.
“Well, we’ll appeal it,” Smistria said. “Obviously! We’re not going to just . . . roll over like that.”
“Our chances . . .” Nupolo shook vir head. “No. No immediate appeal. But . . . if we split up for a while . . . tried to maintain at least dyads or triads, just . . . for the meantime . . .”
“Oh, Fift Brulio,” Arevio said, vir eyes filling with tears.
Diners at the snack-veranda were standing, pointing. Fift’s hearts pounded. 8,934,190 active viewers and climbing. Ze ran.
Miolasia and Umlum were in the anteroom by the front door. Miolasia ran vir sharp, jeweled claws through vir crimson hair. And then they were through the door, and gone.
“Rev—your garden—” Nupolo said, in the meeting room, turning to Arevio. Ve stood, brushing vir hands awkwardly over stiff blue fabric. “If there’s anything you want to take . . . I’ll . . . how about if I help?”
“I just want to look at Fift Brulio,” Arevio said. “While I still can.” Tears dripped from vir chin.
Fift shivered. Ze tried to meet Arevio’s searching, stunned gaze, but ze couldn’t. In the breakfast room and the meeting room, ze looked down, squeezed zir eyes shut. Ze couldn’t think of what to say, and zir throat was too tight to speak.
Ze concentrated on running.
In the breakfast room, Squell began to shriek in Grobbard’s arms, a scratchy, desperate, keening sound.
“Here’s what I say: we had a good bout,” Frill said. Ve stood up abruptly from the meeting room table, crossed to the door, and hovered there, half turning back. “We made it sixteen years, and whatever they say, whatever anyone thinks, I say we didn’t do such a bad job of it.” Ve looked at Smistria, at Nupolo. “We were only nine, and only two Staids! And Fift . . . Fift is a wonderful kid, even if in the end”—ve put vir face in vir hands—“even if we couldn’t really handle . . . couldn’t really give zir what ze needed . . .”
“Fift,” Grobbard murmured, “I wish I had words of more comfort for you. All I can tell you is that life is long. Your . . . zeal . . . once it is tempered, with time . . . will be a virtue. In your . . .” Ze looked at the table. “In your new life.”
Frill sobbed.
Smistria pulled Frill against vir chest with one hand, tugged on vir beard with another. “Kumru’s blood, Pip, I would have thought . . . I mean, you know these Midwives . . . I was expecting you to . . .”
But ve didn’t look at Pip while ve said it. No one—Fift could see over the house feed, even with zir eyes squeezed shut—no one was looking at Pip. Pip was colder than a glacier now; ze was like one of the lost vessels from the Ages Before the Ages, of which Omolo speaks in the fifth work of the third cycle: abandoned so deep in emptiness that worlds were only a rumor; burst open, void-scoured, the breath of life become a crust of frost clinging to their pitted spars.
“Who’s that outside? The Peaceables are coming already?” Smistria said, blinking.
“It’s Ellix,” Nupolo whispered. “Ze rushed over.”
“For the love of Kumru, Squell,” Frill said in the breakfast room, holding vir head, “would you stop screaming?”
Fifteen million viewers. Fift tried sending. Still nothing. Zir agents wouldn’t answer. It was absurd to imagine that ze could make it to the docks, never mind to Stiffwaddle Somatic Fashions. Something was wrong with zir feed-navigation agent, too. Ze looked for Shria, for Dobroc, but the feed was a vast jumble, impossible to sort through.
It was like ze was hidden away in a silent bubble of time. Drenched with steam and sweat in the wintergreen light of second morning; throat dry, feet sore from pounding on rushfelt, zir shift sticking to zir legs, the docks ahead.
Twenty million viewers, and ze could feel zir incoming queue swelling with invisible messages, an opaque mass veiled by zir agents’ stubborn will. Fift came to the stairs above the docks and paused.
“They’ve published it,” Nupolo said, sagging. Vir military posture dissolved like sugar in the rain; ve hunched, like an old Vail without prospects. “It’s official. Fift is theirs.”
There was something different about the docks. The people there—the orphans, the bankrupt and cohort-sundered, would-be travelers hoping for some ratings fluctuation or act of pity to grant them passage—they weren’t just milling. There was a febrile activity on the docks, like a disrupted anthill: intense clusters of people shoving their way from one group to another through a buzz of raised voices. One group was opening a giant banner, four bodylengths high, currently blank, into the air.
On the steps just below Fift, two Staids and a Vail turned and saw zir, and one of the Staids gasped.
Frill’s head shot up from Smistria’s shoulder. “All-sucking void!”
Smistria gaped. “Fift—what are you doing out there?”
“Will this never end?” Nupolo said in the meeting room.
“It’s like a joke,” Smistria said. “A joke without a punchline.”
“Fift Brulio,”
Arevio said, face bright with tears, “just wait there at the top of the stairs. I understand how you must feel, but don’t make it worse by running.”
“Tell my agents to let me send,” Fift said. “I just have to send.”
Arevio squeezed vir eyes shut, violently, as if Fift had struck vem, as if Squell’s blow had landed on vir temple.
“Fift,” Grobbard said, gently, “why would your agents listen to us now? We are not . . .” zir voice faded, and ze licked zir lips.
Pip stood, slowly, and walked from the room.
Fift’s skin was like ice. Zir stomach was a hard ball of acid. “I’m—I’m sorry that—”
“Don’t,” Frill said, vir voice thick with tears. “Just don’t.”
“It’s zir,” one of the Staids on the steps said. “It’s really zir.”
“How did ze even get down there?” Nupolo said.
“Oh, run all you like, Fift!” Smistria threw up vir hands. “Let’s just make a gigantic chase tableau in the middle of Foo, shall we, where the Peaceables run you down like a lapine in the hedges.”
“If I may be so bold as to introduce myself,” said the Vail on the stairs—according to lookup, ve was Bojum Holkitz of name registry Buttercup Void 5, 110 years old—“I am the Practices and Principles liaison for the Manifesto Working Group of [Embracing Fift and Shria]. It’s a great, great honor . . .”
Arevio came cautiously around the table and put vir arms around Fift. Ve lay vir head, with its fuzzy, silken, gray mane of hair, on Fift’s shoulder.
It was like being scalded or stabbed.
“And, um, I’m the Theory liaison!” one of the Staids said—Morinti Bob of name registry Selfish Turkey 12, 125 years old. Ze gestured to the other Staid. “And this here is Emim. Ze’s not a liaison.”
“I take the minutes,” said Emim Potching of name registry Unfortunate Plank 2, 75 years old. Ze looked a little overawed, a plump, shy Staid, bald, in an ill-fitting cream shift.
The Unraveling Page 26