Thresholder, ch 171, Trades

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I'm still recovering from being sick, back to about 90% capacity by my best estimation. My best guess is still that it was influenza, so I'm drinking lots of water and sleeping ten to twelve hours a day. I did have a moment driving my car yesterday when I realized that I didn't have the mental capacity to be doing that, not in the sense that I was going to cause an accident, but in the sense that I would not have been prepared for anything unexpected to happen.

~~~~

Perry slipped back into the shelf space. He had the piece of yarn with him, and worried at every moment what it might be capable of. The sooner he had a place to store it, the better, but that would take some doing, since there wasn’t a place in the city that Perry called home, not when he was still presumably a wanted man whether in the armor or out of it. He placed the yarn into an empty jar that was sitting on the shelf, then placed it close to the door, in the hopes that it wouldn’t be able to spy on him.

And did feeling paranoid about a piece of yarn feel faintly ridiculous? Yes. But such was life.

“How is this going?” asked Perry as he approached Grayspear. She’d been untied, though there were still marks around her wrists. Anaksi was next to her, tense, with a knife in hand.

“Fine,” said Anaksi.

“Progress?” asked Perry.

“I don’t have any tools and am working under duress with very little sleep,” said Grayspear. “It has got to be five in the morning, hasn’t it?”

“We were just keeping busy,” said Anaksi. She looked at Perry, then relaxed, slipping the knife back in her holster. “I’m going to sleep in the bunks.”

“I wanted to talk to you first,” said Perry.

“Can I sleep?” asked Grayspear. “There are ways you need to treat a prisoner, if you wish them to do intellectual labor for you. Food, water, a bathroom, some sense that they’re not moments away from capricious death. I don’t mean to criticize, as I’ve never held someone captive, but I’ve had cause to mull over the situation.”

“I’ll drag a bed over for you,” said Perry. “You should know that I don’t need to sleep, and could kill you without this armor on before you could bring a knife anywhere near my throat, if I did choose to sleep.”

“Do you think I don’t understand the depths of my situation?” asked Doctrix Grayspear.

“I am very aware that you don’t understand,” said Perry. “Because you’ve been exposed to only a tenth of what’s actually going on.”

“The sooner I can sleep, the better,” said Grayspear. She blinked slowly, and Perry believed that whatever adrenaline high she’d been riding since being accosted in the middle of the night and kidnapped was now fading away.

He got a bed for her, some water and soap to allow her to clean her hands, and set her off to bed before sitting with Anaksi on the other end of the shelf space.

“You can sleep too, if you need it,” said Perry. “I don’t want to impair your ability to function.”

“It’s fine,” said Anaksi. “I’m going to be here for a long time.”

“I just want to know how it’s been, both with Grayspear, and … you spoke with Marchand.”

“She’s servile, but looking for a way out,” said Anaksi. “I know the look. I’ve been there. Feeling trapped, wanting to make an escape, putting on the show I need to in order to get out from under someone’s thumb …” She was clearly tired, and Perry thought that having her stay up might be a mistake.

“She’s dangerous,” said Perry.

“Less dangerous in here than out there,” said Anaksi. “But yes, give her a knife and turn your back on her and she’ll try to cut you.”

“We won’t trust her then,” said Perry. “Won’t give her a proverbial knife, even if we do end up giving her a literal one.”

Anaksi nodded, and the slowness of the nod was probably just because of how late it was.

“You’d prefer to keep her alive,” said Anaksi.

“I think she’s probably too dangerous for that,” said Perry. “But yes, I’d prefer not to execute a prisoner. It’s the reason that you’re alive, you realize that, right?”

“I do,” said Anaksi. “Of course I do. But it’s different, isn’t it?”

“Because?” asked Perry.

“I am myself and she is the other,” said Anaksi. “I was fighting for my tribe, and for all the Yuuksen, and she’s trying to herald a different sort of human that doesn’t feel love.”

“Well, no,” said Perry. “That’s Queenie. She’s the one that wants that. Grayspear wants to know the truth about people, she wants to progress the ability to affect the world. That’s a difference, even if it’s not one that counts for much. She’s dangerous on the societal level, I agree, I just … it matters that she doesn’t think that using the device is the endgame.”

“Fine,” said Anaksi. There was no fight left in her.

“What did you talk about with Marchand?” asked Perry.

“You can’t just ask him?” asked Anaksi.

“I can,” said Perry. “And I might. But I want to hear it from you, not just the questions that you asked and answers that you got, but what you thought about it all.”

“My soul burned,” said Anaksi. “It was a history of my people as they might have been in another world, and the deaths they found there from people very much like the Commission.”

Perry didn’t fully agree. You could map the societies, yes, that much was obvious, but the differences were huge. There was no universal constant that indigenous peoples had to lose to foreigners, and besides that, there were many ways in which the city of Charlonion wasn’t only barely a colonizer to begin with — it had been sitting there for long enough that it represented a foreign nation more than an outside context problem. He wouldn’t necessarily have made that argument to anyone, but it did occur to him.

“It’s a sad thing,” said Perry.

“And you feel … pity?” asked Anaksi. He hadn’t taken the helmet off, but felt like she was looking through him all the same.

“Pity, remorse, a sense of loss,” said Perry. “I mean … of course I do. I’d rather that people and cultures didn’t annihilate each other. I’d rather there weren’t pain, suffering, and war.”

Anaksi nodded and laid back. She was ready for sleep, so perhaps she’d have taken anything he said as soothing. “Then you’re on our side.”

“I am,” Perry answered, though it might have been better for him to simply let her believe that without him saying anything.

“You’re a good man,” said Anaksi. “I wouldn’t have thought it, but you are. And I need my sleep. If there’s more … we can speak in the morning?”

“Of course,” said Perry.

She wasted very little time in getting herself ready for rest, though Perry noticed she made one last hostile look in the direction of Grayspear.

Perry could have told her about the deal that he’d struck with Queenie, but he didn’t want to get her hopes up, not when there was still nothing that she could do and every chance that Queenie would renege on him.

There were also the reservations that Perry had. Anaksi didn’t believe in peace. She would stab at the throat of the Commission if that was necessary, and it seemed like it was necessary. She would destroy them utterly, he was pretty sure. He was on her side, but not sure that he was that much on her side. The good ending, for him, gave some hope for unified Yuuksen to stand against the Commission, to mingle and trade and then not destroy each other, to the extent that the Commission was capable of that.

Perry walked to the entrance of the shelf space and picked up the jar that held the yarn. He looked it over. It was inert, at least visibly, which meant nothing.

He opened the shelf space a crack, and tried his best to send a message down the line. The response was immediate.

<You’re back!> came Queenie’s voice, full of eagerness.

Perry tested again, making sure that he could block her out if he needed to, that the texture of this communication was something that second sphere could interact with. He would have used it as an attack vector, in her position, though of course he’d have waited until a breakdown in communications had happened. Maybe she would do the same, though he couldn’t say that he knew for certain. Maybe talking with her would prove her nature one way or another.

<The nature of this link means that I might disappear from time to time,> said Perry.

<Some kind of fancy trick you’re hiding?> asked Queenie.

<Something like that,> said Perry.

<Well then, let’s get on with it chubbo,> said Queenie. <Tell me about the world you’re from first.>

<Hold on, business first,> said Perry. <I need the location of the Yuuksen. We need a way to make this work, some kind of trust, or something that acts in the place of trust.>

<Bah,> said Queenie. <They’re at a place called Miller’s Crossing, where a river and a road usually meet, ten or a hundred miles outside Charlonion, living off a caravan I shot up. Does that do it for you?>

<That — yes,> said Perry. He was surprised by how readily she’d given the information. <But what stops me from just shutting this down now, burning the yarn?>

<Well that wouldn’t be a nice thing to do now, would it, chubbo?> asked Queenie. <And besides, if you want the real reason, it’s that you don’t want to burn a line to your enemy, and there might be a time when we have to trust each other, going forward. You burn your bridges after you cross them for the last time, not when you might need a way back, isn’t that right?>

<Fair enough,> said Perry. <I wasn’t thinking about dropping the line, I just wanted to make sure we were on the same page.>

<So, first world, tell me,> said Queenie. <The one you come from.>

Perry hesitated, then tried something he’d been meaning to try, and pushed an image with the Inspector’s power down the link between them. He hadn’t been sure whether that would work, but he heard a yelp of surprise inside his head.

<That works?> asked Queenie. <Might have to rethink giving you that, give me a moment.>

Perry waited. He could see the image he was projecting for her, but he couldn’t see her, not that he’d thought he would. He had the bright idea to project blackness and see if he could find her at range, but that did nothing, probably because she was too far away from him.

<Alright,> said Queenie. <You start sending me things when I’m not ready for them, we’re goin’ to have problems.> She gave no indication of what she’d been doing on her end.

<Got it,> said Perry. <But if it works at a distance, then this gives you a better picture, doesn’t it? And it’s something you can trust.>

<Fair enough,> said Queenie. <So this is Earth?>

The image he’d sent her was of a particular street corner in Tacoma, not far from where he’d lived, with a five-over-one sitting next to a parking lot, with a few places to eat next to it. There were power lines and cars going by, nothing particularly special about it, and that was why Perry had chosen it: it was fairly representative, honest.

<You can’t know a world from seeing a single slice of it,> said Perry. <But yes, this is Earth.>

<Some worlds you can,> said Queenie. <Some worlds you see all you need to see right from the get-go, day one.>

<Well, not Earth,> said Perry. <But this was it, the place that I grew up.>

He switched the view to a residential street, the one he’d grown up on, standing not far from the house he had last visited at Christmas, not knowing that it would be the last time.

<Bog standard childhood, very normal,> said Perry. <Not terribly rich or poor, maybe a little better education between my parents than others. This is just one country, the United States, the global superpower, but it’s where I spent most of my time. Mid-tier technology, computers and firearms. You know computers?>

<I used one once,> said Queenie. <Didn’t see the fuss.>

<Well, they were a big deal,> said Perry.

On a whim he switched the view to show a vision of him sitting on his laptop at his desk in the small apartment he’d briefly had in his senior year. It was cramped, but it was all his, and the computer had felt like the important thing. It hadn’t been a great place to bring a girl back to, but it was a great place to watch things on Netflix while eating takeout.

<And this was you, before the portal?> asked Queenie. <Just a nothing person?>

<I wouldn’t put it like that,> said Perry. <But yeah, a nothing person.>

He watched himself for a moment.

<See, but here’s the question, chubbo — why?> asked Queenie.

<What do you mean, why?> asked Perry.

<Why were you a nothing person?> she asked.

<I was just a drop in the ocean,> said Perry. <A face in the crowds.> He changed the scene to one of himself sitting in a crowded theater, before one of his mother’s performances. He’d been alone that time, for whatever reason, and had felt particularly anonymous. <Nothing made me stand out, and standing out except in specific ways was considered pretty bad, the kind of thing that people knock you down for.>

<And you hated it?> asked Queenie.

<Do you actually care?> asked Perry.

<’Course, chubbo,> said Queenie.

<I don’t think I rose to the level of hating it,> said Perry. <I felt like I was wound up a little bit, under this stress of a system of being that was larger than I was, inevitable, all-consuming. I was checked out, but still plugged in. Mostly I thought about other things, like movies and books and being right about things. But that was all to try to fill this hole that couldn’t be filled, I guess. This hole of … agency, of purpose.>

<And then the portal,> said Queenie. <Show me.>

Perry hesitated, then pushed it through. It was simple and plain, nothing identifiable, just a portal like every other one, sitting in an unassuming position on a trail through a park. Anyone could have been the one to come across it, but from everything Perry knew, it had chosen him. That was something, at least. Of all the people on Earth, it had been him.

Him and Maya.

Him, and Maya, and whoever else had been plucked from Earth as a participant, disappearing without a trace. It could have been hundreds over the years, maybe thousands, though at a certain point someone paying attention would have seen it in the demographic data.

<I’ve never seen someone else’s portal,> said Queenie into Perry’s head. <Looks pretty normal.>

<What’s your record?> asked Perry.

<What do you mean?> asked Queenie.

<I’ve been to seven worlds now, eight if you include the one I started on,> said Perry. <Every thresholder I’ve fought, I’ve won. How many worlds for you, how many victories?>

<Depends on how you count,> said Queenie. <Eight, I guess. Maybe seven. One of them, he killed himself, not sure if you think that’s fair to say it was me or not.>

<And you haven’t talked to the other thresholders, so you don’t know their record?> asked Perry. <You don’t know who they were, what their deal was?>

<A few words, here and there,> said Queenie. <But no, it’s been mostly fighting. I offered a thread to the last guy, and he near-as spat in my face. Say, is that common? Two people with a similar record?>

<It’s a constant,> said Perry. <One of the only things you can depend on when you come through the portal.>

<Is it now?> asked Queenie. <Well, life has plenty of lessons in store for us.>

<Unless you have a team up,> said Perry.

<And what’s that?> asked Queenie.

<You two-on-one against someone with a record that matches yours,> said Perry. <You have eight wins, they have four apiece.>

<Seems like you’ve been learnin’ more than me, chubbo,> said Queenie. <Might be when I get to my turn tellin’ tales you’ll be bored by it all.> She chuckled. <But say, how do you know we’re not meant to team up then?>

<You’re trying to destroy this civilization,> said Perry. <There’s that, for a start.>

<You’ve never come across a civilization you wanted to destroy, chubbo?> asked Queenie.

<No,> said Perry. <I’ve come across civilizations that I’ve wanted to change, but even that … civilizations are complicated things, you can’t just alter them by force of will, not without making people miserable in the process, not without knock-on effects. And what you’re doing is just destruction, it’s murder.>

<But we’ll see what rises from the ashes, won’t we chubbo?> asked Queenie. She seemed to genuinely not care about what he was saying. There was no rebuttal from her, no promise that these people would ultimately thank her for what was done, just an apathy to suffering.

<No, we need to talk about this,> said Perry.

<We really don’t,> said Queenie. <You’re one of those chubbos thinks he can talk me around with enough words? I’ve known a few of those in my time, the talkers. Always the downside of a talker.>

<Yeah, I’m that kind of guy,> said Perry. <Look, if you want to free people from the bonds of socialization, that’s — I’m not going to say that it’s good, but especially in a society like this one, I think that I can see the impetus. Too much of these morons thinking that they have it all figured out, too many people trapped by the circumstances of their birth. But the way to do it isn’t to strip things out of their heads. And that’s not even going to help!>

<I think I just got done sayin’ that I don’t like someone tryin’ to talk me around, chubbo,> said Queenie, with a note of disdain in her voice.

<Do you think that men are going to stop subjugating women because they’ve had a piece of their socialization stripped out?> asked Perry. <No, of course they’re not, they’re going to see that they’re physically stronger and don’t have to suffer pregnancy or breastfeeding, and they’re going to organize on the basis of gender. This is just a single pillar that you’re blowing out.>

<Women don’t even have suffrage here,> said Queenie. <You think it’s goin’ to get worse? Hardly seems likely to me. I’ve seen the looks I’ve gotten, if we’re talkin’ about how women are treated, and I don’t know why you’re talkin’ about it, chubbo. Come on, just tell me about your least favorite world, how about that.>

<Hard to pick,> said Perry. <There was a place called the Great Arc, it — here.> He put up a vision of it, the ribbon of world looping overhead in all its grandeur, bamboo forests and tall mountains in the distance.

<She’s a beaut,> said Queenie. <So what’s the matter with it.>

<Too many people above me,> said Perry. <Too many times I was clearly outclassed and was expected to bow and grovel. And the whole world was like that, with the bulk of the people on the bottom being slaves or worse.>

<Worse than slaves?> asked Queenie.

<Mind control, or something like it,> said Perry. <Used as fuel. An instrument for someone else.>

<Ah, well,> said Queenie. <And you think they didn’t deserve to be destroyed?>

<I think that they existed like that because those were the incentives structures, those were the elements demanded by material reality,> said Perry.

<Talker!> yelled Queenie, right into his ear, a joyful accusation.

<I’m saying that I couldn’t have changed anything with your machine,> said Perry. <If anything, it would have gotten worse. They would see the serfs as even more disposable, they wouldn’t even have honor to back them up.> In reality, the cultivators depended on balances of karma, which maybe would have translated back into something pro-social, but he would have to explain that later, and think about what he was saying.

<Did the people there see themselves like that?> asked Queenie. <As disposable? Show me them.>

Perry did as requested, showing a village he’d been through briefly. He hadn’t had all that much interaction with the first sphere people aside from those who’d been training at the temple. There was a difference between someone who had ambitions and someone who had resigned themselves to their place.

<Ah, see?> asked Queenie. <This is it, the thing that I hate most, you can see it on their face. They think they deserve to be there, down at the bottom.> He couldn’t see her, so couldn’t tell what she was looking at, but he guessed that it was a woman with a broom that Perry must have glanced at only briefly. <And why shouldn’t they think that, if that’s what they’ve grown up bein’ taught? If from the moment they’re born they think that this is the way, for them to have a boot on their neck, to have their life be worth less?>

<I see what you’re saying, and in that sense, sure, the machine would change them, maybe,> said Perry. <But that wouldn’t actually change their material condition?>

<Do you know how the people on top keep their position?> asked Queenie.

<I do,> said Perry. <But go on, say what you have to say.>

<They keep their position because they convince people that there’s no use in fightin’, in rebellion,> said Queenie. <The king stays a king because he’s got force of arms, sure, but a lot of his work is in havin’ people believe certain things, in thinkin’ that it’s their place to serve him, that this is the glory of the kingdom, that they’re worms diggin’ through the soil. A king tells people that him bein’ in charge is proper, and they believe it, because it’s all they’ve known, and because the king kills anyone who says otherwise. You might think that you’d only need the sword, but you need both, the sword and the speeches, and people believin’ that they have hold to decorum and good manners.>

<And that’s the thing you’re killing,> said Perry. <Or that you think you’re killing. The thing that holds societies together.>

<See, and to my way of thinkin’ — at the risk of becomin’ a talker like you — a society that holds itself together in that way, teachin’ people that it’s wrong to talk back, that their place is in the dirt, that they’ve got to respect their elders? That’s a society that we should be happy to destroy.> She seemed satisfied with herself, like she’d scored a point against him. That rubbed Perry the wrong way, not least because he didn’t think she was employing good logic.

<If we accept that human lives have value, and I think you must accept that if you’re willing to go through all this trouble, then surely you can see how this is going to end with people dead?> asked Perry.

<Might be that it does, might be that it doesn’t,> said Queenie. <Tell you what, if you let me try it on the whole city of Charlonion, maybe we can sit back and do a little test, how about that?>

<No,> said Perry. <And the deaths aren’t going to be among the richest, they’re going to be among the poorest, the people who have the least capacity to take care of themselves. It’s going to be children and the elderly that suffer, it’s going to be people who need others to take care of them.>

<And you think that’s not how it should be?> asked Queenie. <That’s all well and good for you, chubbo, if that’s what you think, but a child is a parasite, and if they can’t justify their own existence, fuck ‘em.>

Perry paused for a long time after that, trying to wrap his head around it. She was willing to bite the bullet on the whole ‘abandoned children’ issue, and he was certain that extended to the elderly too.

<How do you expect society to work?> he asked.

<Eh, they’ll figure it out, won’t they chubbo?> asked Queenie. <See, I don’t think I’m a genius, unless you’re talkin’ about my skills with a gun. But I figure if there are a few thousand people workin’ on the problem themselves, they’ll figure it out. And if you think you’ve got it all figured out, what will happen, well, that says somethin’ about how smart you think you are, and how smart you actually are.>

<You just don’t care about people at all,> said Perry.

<Maybe it’ll make sense when we swap stories,> said Queenie. <Maybe I’ll tell you what it was like for me to grow up, bein’ a princess and all that, and you’ll say ‘oh, now I understand her, how she thinks, the way she is’.>

<Maybe,> said Perry. <If we’re not going to come to some compromise here, then you’re right that we should at least swap stories. But I do want to circle back to your ideas here, to the empiricism of it, the question of what we expect is going to happen, and how we might test it, and whether we can do that without actually putting hundreds or thousands of lives in danger.>

<You’re a talker through a through,> said Queenie. <Let’s hope your stories are more entertaining than your arguments.>

<You wanted more about Earth?> asked Perry. <It was a large place, and I knew it well, but it doesn’t fit into a story too neatly. I can show you more of what my time was like, but … do you need to sleep?>

<Nah, you?> asked Queenie.

<Nope,> said Perry, which wasn’t quite true, but he could put it off for far longer than a baseline human. The sky was just starting to lighten, not dawn, but the edge of twilight that preceded it. <We’ll trade then. Starting from when I went through the portal, I think it makes a much better sort of sense, if that’s what you’re after. But you owe me some more discussion about what you’re doing and why, and whether we can find some better solution.>

<I owe you nothing, chubbo,> said Queenie. <Now, tell me what it was like when you stepped through that first portal.>