Thresholder

For Perry’s money, the dwarves were the strangest of the seven intelligent species that inhabited the world of Markat. They had an extreme sexual dimorphism, with the men being short and stout but more or less human-looking, and the women being large and porcine, eight hundred pound sows that were apparently not capable of thought or feeling. It was, in Perry’s opinion, absolutely wild, and he couldn’t look at the dwarves the same way after learning about it. He’d been thinking that all these different fantasy varieties were just like Tolkien had drawn them up, pretty close to human but with some differences that you could call cultural if you really wanted to, but it went more than skin deep. That made it all the more surprising that they were able to integrate and get along so well, not even with too many distinct ethnic enclaves.

The elves could live for a few hundred years, but went through a chrysalis process every fifty years or so, coming out looking like a younger version of themselves. Every city with any sort of elven population had a safe and sturdy place that would house the chrysalises, with the elves going into their cocoons, turning into goop, and reconstituting just like when a caterpillar turned into a butterfly.

“I mean, they’re called elves and dwarves, that has to mean something,” said Mette after they were back to their room. They’d swung by the library and gotten a fairly thick stack of books and another library card. “Doesn’t it?”

“I don’t know what it could mean,” said Perry. “Seraphinus has elves too, though I only met one once, and I don’t think he was typical of his species. There were dwarves, and I knew a few of them, but they kept to their own kind, mostly coming through the kingdom to sell their wares and get some trinkets that were hard to come by where they were from.”

“It’s one thing to have languages match each other,” said Mette. “It’s another to have humans on many different worlds. But this is … I don’t know.”

“It suggests something, sure,” said Perry. It wasn’t new information, exactly, just a piece of the puzzle that he hadn’t had much cause to inspect closely. “I don’t know that it’s important in the grand scheme of things. They have recognizable dwarves here, recognizable elves, so maybe that’s … part of it?”

“Part of the fabric of worlds?” asked Mette.

“Maybe,” Perry said. She had her book open in front of her, but her attention was on him. “But not every world speaks English, or even a language that’s close to English. I think some amount of cross-pollination is one answer, but I don’t know.”

“Thresholders moving between worlds,” said Mette. “The word you had was … invasive species.”

“Or something else,” said Perry. “That’s one of the things we’re on the lookout for. There are hints of that. And if we find a pathway, we could go back to Esperide, or back to Earth 2.”

“Those are the places you’d want to go?” asked Mette. “Not the Earth you came from?”

“I don’t know,” said Perry. “It depends on the specifics. We need to get to reading. It might be a moot point.”

Mette was working through a book on the history of the lanterns, written twenty years prior, mostly to get some idea of where they were at and whether it would be easy or difficult for her to slip into a class. Any learning that she did would have to be rapidly accelerated, given that they almost certainly didn’t have four years to sit around going to classes, but she had proven herself proficient in magic, and Perry hoped that would give her a leg up.

Perry’s book was The Fall of Kings, which he’d selected because it had an addendum dated a year ago. He read the addendum first, hoping that it would give some hint as to what happened, and he was rewarded with a dry academic look at what was considered likely to be an assassination. Earlier revolutions had been bloody in some cases, but the way they preferred to do it was by having a groundswell of support and a peaceful transition of power.

The assassination wasn’t even remotely that. The support for ‘the culture’ was there, and a symboulion had been formed to take control from the monarchy, but the king had refused a peaceful transition of power. It had seemed as though loyalist forces were going to have a bloody clash against the symboulion’s guard. Instead, the king had been found dead in a public place some miles from his castle, something which the royal guard found out from the morning paper.

There were no hints as to how it was done, and the author of the book equivocated on whether or not this violent action had been necessary or desirable, whether it was a poor precedent to set — whether it was ‘the culture’ or not ‘the culture.’ There were theories of a rogue actor, and other theories that it was a secret revolt from within the palace, but it probably would have left a worse taste in everyone’s mouth if the other option hadn’t been conflict and war. Other revolutions had been won with blood, and in the end, this wasn’t considered to be much different.

Perry flipped back through the book to the table of contents, then ahead to the foreword, then to the first chapter and started reading.

The first chapter wasn’t actually about the fall of kings, it was deep history, the conditions that had led to the ‘supremacy of kings’ throughout the known world. There were elf kings, dwarf kings, human kings, orc kings, and it seemed as though the entire idea of a ruling monarch was one that had spread throughout the entire world, sometimes destroying or displacing other concepts that had been there before. They weren’t always strictly hereditary, but most were. It was the author’s conclusion that there were no good kings, including even those who had the best interests of their people at heart, and Perry felt as though that was probably such settled doctrine that he wouldn’t get disagreement from anyone on the street.

Much of what followed in the pages was familiar to Perry, not just from what he’d seen in the museum, but from a study of history and what he knew of his own world. Society was split into upper and lower classes, and the upper classes ground down the lower classes in various ways — poor working conditions, high taxes, war, and eventually, starvation. The age of ‘high magic’ had exacerbated everything, particularly with the effluent soaking into the major cities of the world. There were also oddities that had no analogs on Earth, like the king-of-all-dwarves having a monopoly on pigwives, or the elven nobility spending decadent years in their chrysalises while the lower classes were forced to reform quickly. All that might not even have been enough if the nations of the world had followed the bread and circuses model, but they hadn’t. People starved.

There was another book sitting in the pile they had gathered, this one called Cultural Metamorphosis, and it was mentioned by name in The Fall of Kings. Perry thought it was probably going to be important for him to read it, but also thought that since it was so old, it might not be the best way of getting any idea what ‘the culture’ actually was. It had been written by the elf whose statue Perry had looked unfavorably at, and was also a playbook for revolution, but most of it seemed to be meditations on how culture shapes society and its function.

“Is this normally how you do it?” asked Mette after an hour of reading.

“No,” said Perry. “Normally I would find someone who would tell me everything relevant, someone I could ask questions of. But I don’t want to be scooped up by the powers that be, which seems like what should happen. In Teaguewater I tried to stay undercover and was scooped up, which worked out in the end, but could easily have gone very wrong for me. These people are heavily armed, as much as you might not think it from walking down these streets.”

“Mmm,” said Mette. Her finger had stopped at her place in the book. Either she was a fast reader or she was skimming. “I am learning.”

“I might switch over to talking with Marchand,” said Perry. “He’s combing through the books faster than we can, synthesizing them as best as possible. Right?”

“Yes, sir,” said Marchand. The armor was out of the shelf, laying on the ground next to their bed. “I believe the most difficult aspect of this work will be untangling superstition from hard science. There are many claims which appear spurious, particularly those with regards to historical legends. Additionally, it will be difficult to understand the bias that the authors show, given how little of the ground truth is available to us. As you may know, I wasn’t constructed with this sort of analysis in mind. Certain things were taken to be a given.”

“Do you have enough to give some advice on passing as locals?” asked Perry. He had a habit of looking at the armor when he spoke, which he knew really wasn’t necessary. “Because I do want to go out, and it would be very helpful to do that while not worrying about a stray word getting us caught by one of the giant metal guards.”

“From what I have seen, heard, and read, it appears there are few things that are truly taboo,” said Marchand. “However, there is much discussion and importance placed on ‘the culture’, and social censure appears to be one of the primary mechanisms of enforcement. You might consider them to be light taboos. The guard are called only in exceptional circumstances. It would be far more likely that you would have a mediator or arbitrator called.”

“What’s the difference?” asked Perry.

“The mediators are more common, and cannot decide disputes,” said Marchand. “They’re neutral third parties. Arbitrators give judgments which are binding. They’re used more often in cases where there has been some injury or damage.”

“And if someone doesn’t accept the binding judgment?” asked Perry.

“There are a variety of censures,” said Marchand. “I don’t know the full extent of it, but at the highest level, a form of involuntary therapy with confinement is used. In certain cases where rehabilitation is deemed impossible, segregated living is enforced.”

Perry didn’t like the sound of that, but it felt like there were plenty of chances for him to run and bail out before it would come to that. He had always figured that a lot of thresholders would end up in a mental clinic they weren’t allowed to check out of. “And do you have any leads on how we could get our hands on one of those giant suits of armor?” asked Perry. “How they’re controlled, piloted, that sort of thing?”

“No, sir,” said Marchand. “This society’s relationship to technology appears complicated, if I’m reading these conversations and books correctly. They are skeptical of technology and its impacts.”

“Their whole society was created from whole cloth in the wake of being poisoned,” said Mette. She gave a thoughtful look out the window. “That makes sense to me. Though I have to wonder how many doors they’re closing behind them …”

“Would they be suspicious of you?” Perry asked March.

“I don’t believe that suspicion is the right word,” said Marchand. “For a one-off invention, I don’t believe there would be any cause for alarm. However, before manufacture of a second, or widespread use, they would convene a special symboulion which would look closely at the technology and its anticipated costs and impacts.”

“If someone invents something they have to … sit on it?” asked Mette. She turned to look down at the armor, just like Perry did, like that was Marchand’s body and he was just laying on the ground.

“That would appear to be the case, from what I have gleaned from conversations,” said Marchand. “There was a woman downstairs whose application was denied for a third time. She seemed quite upset about the matter.”

Perry nodded. “So there’s technology they have but don’t use?”

“That does appear to be the case,” said Marchand. “There is a conclave responsible for technological progress and the use of assistive aid in manufacturing and social relations. Filekeeping is woeful, and the bureaucracy is not robust, but if you’re thinking what I think you are, you might find information there.”

“Alright,” said Perry with a nod. They were a little like the Amish then, who would allow rollerskating but not electric lighting. He could work with that, so long as they had left their schematics for electric lights around somewhere. “Last question for now, what’s our legal status here? Do you know?”

“I don’t, sir,” said Marchand. “Technically you are a stateless person. However, if you’re posing as former citizens of the Berus Kingdom, there is an expectation that you would have some documentation of your travel. The borders of the world are porous, and efforts have been made to create a homogenous culture where there is no need for border protection, but the Kingdom of Berus is one of the few exceptions, at least for the time being.”

“No one has asked us for any papers,” said Perry. “We’ve had free food, clothing, housing, all that.”

“These are considered to be basic rights, sir,” said Marchand. “The thought among this culture is that management is something to be eschewed whenever and wherever possible. Logbooks are kept only for the purposes of social censure and a basic understanding of supply and demand. The idea that a man should starve because he didn’t have the proper paperwork would be something that they would find abhorrent — it would not ‘be the culture.’”

“For what it’s worth, that’s how it was on the Natrix too,” said Mette. “We never denied people food, even if some people took more than their fair share before the takeover. When I read about what was happening on Earth, it was stomach-churning.”

“It was,” said Perry. “I guess I got used to it, or to not thinking about it for my own sanity. I never had enough power to make any meaningful change.”

“But you do now,” said Mette. She folded her book shut and set it beside her. “Knowing what things are like here, and what things are like under the kings — under the last remaining king in Thirlwell, I guess — do you still think it’s the other thresholder?”

“I don’t know,” said Perry. “Probably.”

“But they’re making the world a better place, aren’t they?” asked Mette. “Maybe not through the right methods, but deposing tyrants has got to be considered a general good.”

“You did a coup of your own,” said Perry. “So you would say that.”

“Would you not?” asked Mette. She cocked her head to the side.

“I would worry that the leaders aren’t the leaders,” said Perry. “I would worry that it’s a matter of entrenched interests, or pressures that aren’t going to go away with a change of leadership, and I would worry about the new leaders inevitably being power-hungry, and maybe more power-hungry than whomever they’re replacing. So far as we’ve seen, the systems and ideologies here are working, but we only have this singular example, and I’m sure there are problems and seedy underbellies. I mean, even the best places have their tensions and conflicts.” He wasn’t sure whether he believed that enough to accept it as an axiom, but it felt right, like human nature, even for people who weren’t human.

“But it’s not something to fight over, is it?” asked Mette. “Your kingkiller theory, it’s that the enemy thresholder is on a mission to kill the kings, and right now, there’s only one king left. Are you going to try to stop him?”

“I’m thinking that it would be good to go to Berus and see if we can use our superior abilities and knowledge to pick up a trail,” said Perry. “Then I think it would be good to find this person and figure out what their deal is. Someone who came to this world and immediately started trying to solve geopolitical problems through murder seems, to me, like someone who might not stay content with a handful of dead kings.”

“So it wouldn’t be the dead kings, that wouldn’t be the driver of conflict,” said Mette. She was looking into his eyes. “You might be in favor of the dead kings.”

“We’ve been here less than a day, and I’ve read less than half of a book,” said Perry. “I don’t know enough to stake my flag on any particular hill. I think generally speaking, violence can work on the side of justice. But if it’s warranted here, or maybe just acceptable, is something that I can’t answer without knowing a hell of a lot that I currently don’t know. The primary reason that we would get on the next ship to Berus would be that we might be the only people capable of stopping the other thresholder.”

“You,” said Mette. “Not me.” She looked defiant, but also somehow small. The conflict on Esperide must have looked very different from her eyes, as much as he’d done to shield her people from it.

“You’re a part of this,” said Perry. “You don’t have to be, if you don’t want to, but if you travel by my side as I go through the multiverse, then I was hoping that you would help out as much as you can.”

“This is all something I should have figured out before I left,” said Mette. She put a hand to her head.

“You have time now,” said Perry. “Though I am going to be looking into when the ships leave for Berus.”

“We would be with people who would want to know our story,” said Mette. “They would have questions we couldn’t answer.”

“Couldn’t answer yet,” said Perry. “A week from now, we’ll have heard conversations, read books, read back issues of newspapers, and talked to people. That would be enough.”

“To pursue someone you don’t even disagree with?” asked Mette.

“Sure,” said Perry. “Look, the portals are predictive, they place us somewhere for a reason. Whoever the other thresholder is, I’m set up for conflict with them. We have to take that as a given. Now, I’m not going to strike first, but I am going to make my own investigations, make sure I know where I should be keeping my eye, and figure out what’s going on. Who knows, it could be an ally, another team up situation.”

“Like with Maya?” asked Mette. “Could it … be Maya?”

“It’s remotely possible, I guess,” said Perry. “Killing monarchs seems like it would be her kind of schtick. I wouldn’t think that it would work like that, but ‘possible’ is as high as I would rate it.” He rose from his seat and paced back and forth in the room, though it didn’t feel quite large enough for a proper pacing. “You’re against moving.”

“Yes,” said Mette. “I came here to learn, to see things, not to get on a ship with hundreds of other people and do all this … stuff.” She glanced at the power armor.

“Spy shit,” said Perry.

“Yeah,” said Mette, looking back at him. “I want to eat weird foods and poke weird aliens. You don’t want to do that?”

Perry frowned at her. “I’ve fought five of these fuckers so far,” said Perry. “Six, I guess, because Marjut and Jeff were a twofer. It’s been a parade of psychopaths. Cosme was the only exception to that. It’s been face-stealers and sadists. So I’m going knives out, which in this case means spy shit. I don’t know how compromised the government is, but we stay on the down-low, we don’t announce ourselves. We’re figuring this out as we go. I’m open to your thoughts, but I’ve been attacked enough, and attacked recently enough that I’m going to know where my gun is pointed.”

“You might feel differently in another few days,” said Mette. “Leticia always said that after a big thing happens, you should sit back and think for a bit, let it meld, let it settle.”

“Would that we had that luxury,” said Perry.

“Make your plans,” said Mette. “But don’t commit. Don’t make it so we have to be on a ship a week from now. Because I’m going to magic school, Perry, and I’m going to blow everyone out of the water.”

~~~~

Perry walked through the city the next day with mixed feelings. He was alone, aside from Marchand in his ear. He was feeling confident about not getting caught, and had left the armor in the room. The primary argument for doing that was that it allowed Marchand to stay connected to the nanite network so he could direct them and record what they said. The main argument against was the real risk that Marchand would be stolen.

The city was vibrant, and Perry was left wondering how it worked. The golden domes were factories of a sort, but they didn’t seem any better at making things than a modern factory anywhere on Earth. They still needed lots of people to work them, and the society was pretty far from being post-scarcity. It was difficult to compare their world to the Earth he’d come from, but he actually thought that in terms of production capacity they might be fairly significantly behind with more hours worked to get the same result.

The answer that they gave to how it worked was ‘the culture.’ He wasn’t sure that answered the question though. Culture was a notoriously difficult thing to change.

A part of him was trying to find the catch, the thing that would turn him against it. There were bumps and wrinkles, obvious ones that showed up in the papers, but they weren’t anything that he’d balk at. The dwarven pigwives were contentious, with some (mostly not dwarves) arguing that they should be treated like people, and others (mostly dwarves) arguing that the pigwives were basically only at the level of cattle, and of course there should be some protection for cattle, but let’s not go overboard here. To Perry, that argument wasn’t something he blinked twice at. He could feel the itch to investigate more so that he could fight people in the comments section, which here would be done by writing a letter to the editor or having a debate in a community center. He ignored that urge.

Mette wasn’t looking for the catch. She had come from a place where everyone worked, even the small children, where no one went hungry and the clothes were made in bulk for everyone, at least so long as they followed the plans. She hadn’t known ethnic or racial tensions. To her, there was nothing miraculous in what this society had done, and so she was only interested in having fun and exploring, and possibly gaining access to awesome powers.

Perry had thought that having a companion would be different. If he was being hard on himself, then he would have said that he hadn’t considered that his companion might have her own thoughts and feelings. Really, it was that it was Mette, who he’d known for two years and considered a fairly close friend. For as long as he had known her, she’d been driven and focused, and even the flirtation felt like it was with purpose.

Now she had slipped out from under the yoke of command, and she seemed to have lost her drive. Maybe she was right, and everything would shake out in a day or two. They would know more, have direct goals, and the battle-ready stance he was taking would fade away as he understood what he was up against — both from the world, and from his opponent.

He was fitting in, at least. A few people looked at him, but there wasn’t much in the way of attention, and certainly not of the ‘what is this guy doing here’ variety. In his opinion, his haircut was the one thing that didn’t fit very well. It had been done with a buzzer aboard the Natrix and was too cleanly cut for this place, reinforced by the second sphere making it look very exact. No one had seemed to notice though.

Aside from the elves, dwarves, humans, and orcs, there were three others, less of the standard fantasy mold. The blue-skinned kintee had four arms and were almost always bundled up, as the city was uncomfortably cold to them: as a result, they had a lower population. The pennic had heads like shrimp, beady black eyes and articulated mouth-parts, but they could speak English, and though they had hive mind clusters of around twelve, they spoke just like humans did. The last were the melekee, a small, fidgeting race that liked to scurry, for whom there were holds on many exterior walls to allow them access to the roofs.

The shrimp people reminded Perry too much of the bugs he’d been fighting, and the melekee’s fast movements triggered some animal instinct toward wariness in him, but he was surprised how quickly he’d adjusted to all that. In another day or two, he might not even notice any of it. It had been two years since he’d changed worlds, but he was still in his heart a thresholder, still with the skill of slipping between cultures and societies, picking up what they were putting down. It was a valuable skill to have, in his opinion.

He was mapping the city as he walked, paying attention to where everything was and getting some intuitive sense of the relation of one thing to another. Most of the city was made up of shorter buildings, four stories tall at the most with commercial spaces (or libraries) on the first floor and homes up above, but there were also a number of grand buildings, most of which dated back to an earlier time. Perry passed by one of the golden domes, their version of factories, which were larger than they’d seemed from the air. They thrummed with energy even from outside, but there was only one obvious entrance, and that had people standing in front of it that might have been guards, the first that Perry had seen.

The paper map he had gotten from one of the libraries had places of interest to a wanderer, and the one that had caught his eye was the Magical Advancement Institute. It had its own campus in the city, and his books said that it far predated the revolution — predated even what was now called the Effluence Revolution, when harnessing magic had led to enormous might and pollution in equal measure.

The campus buildings were mostly red brick, which was unusual in a city where almost everything was made of thick stone. The campus had once been walled off from the surrounding city, with no windows at the ground level where it met the outside, and a number of thick doors positioned to span the streets that fed into it. Those were gone now, leaving the whole thing open to the public, and Perry wandered in, looking around.

The institute hadn’t been the birthplace of the Effluence Revolution, but it had been a major part of it, and whatever magitech progress had been done after that, over the last sixty years, this had been one of the places that it had been done.

Perry stood there for a moment in what felt like a college quad. There were lots of the distinctive brick buildings, and most of the foot traffic was young people, along with the steady stream of bikes that seemed to be everywhere, though here the footpaths weren’t as nicely paved. Perry wandered around for a bit before finding himself in front of a large building whose name was carved in stone above the large entrance, ‘College of Nous.’ Mette was talking about being a student, which he thought was probably because he’d made being a student sound good. Perry was mostly thinking about finding some specialist libraries and getting the nanites to scan in everything that they could so that Perry could do searchable cross-referenced study with Marchand’s assistance. It wasn’t clear to him what this particular college did, but the sooner he had the nanites working, the better off he’d be. He dropped a tiny black ball from inside his pocket.

“Can I help you?” asked a woman who’d come to stand beside him. He hadn’t looked at her, but he’d sensed her presence. She was an elf, pointed ears sticking out from messy dark hair, glasses with rectangular lenses perched on a small, upturned nose. She was wearing a short blue skirt and a thick collection of necklaces rather than a top. He wondered how it was affixed to her to prevent a wardrobe malfunction, but when she moved, he saw that they were just loose, and he could occasionally see a bit of nipple.

“Sorry if I’m not supposed to be here,” said Perry. “I can be on my way.”

“You’re new here?” asked the elf. She looked him up and down, taking in the sculpted body and the hairiness. She seemed to approve.

“Yeah,” said Perry. “I’m from overseas, and have only been in the city for a day or so.”

“Well, hopefully I’m the first person to tell you this, but that’s not the culture,” the elf said with a smile. “Tell people that they don’t belong somewhere, trying to get them to leave a commons, we don’t do it like that here.”

“Noted,” said Perry. He looked around. “This is another commons?”

She nodded. “A commons held by the Institute, open to all. But obviously the environment is for study, and there are some restrictions on using the commons, so … don’t throw a party here without asking, I guess.”

“I’m Perry,” he said, extending a hand.

She shook it. “Nima. You’re from Berus?”

“I am,” said Perry. “I’ll probably be returning home, given the news, which means that my time here will get cut short.” He didn’t like to lie, but he didn’t think he could play it vague. “Though … when you asked if you could help me, you really thought that I might need help and you were willing to give it?”

“That’s the culture,” said Nima with a smile. “There are probably limits on what I could help with, but I could steer you in the right direction for most things that I can’t help with. Like where to get the best food, for example.”

“Any chance that you could give me a little tour of the institute?” asked Perry. “I was told that anyone can join up, if they want to.”

“Sure, let me show you around, I’m waiting on an experiment to finish anyway,” said Nima.

She guided him around, and he followed behind her. He was trying not to stare. While elves were definitely more scantily dressed than the other species and the weather would dictate, she was taking it to another level. Given that she was just wearing necklaces, her entire back was exposed, showing smooth, pale skin.

“The brick comes from a lantern process,” said Nima. “It’s actually something that was invented here, hundreds of years ago, long before the effluence. It was a labor-intensive way to get the materials to build, but they made the apprentices do it. They still make the apprentices do it, for what it’s worth.”

“I would need to apprentice?” asked Perry.

“Unless you have experience and can interview your way out of that,” said Nima. She passed by a large tree that had been molded into one of the brick walls, the angle of every branch a perfect ninety degrees.

“Maybe,” said Perry. “But assuming that I can’t?”

“Apprenticeship is the way then,” said Nima. She reached out and ran her fingers along the red bricks of a building they passed. “There are more candidates than spots for them. Apprenticeship is a bit of friction, a way of making sure that the people who want to be in the business of magic really want to be here.”

Perry was pretty sure that unpaid labor was a constant throughout the multiverse. The Great Arc had a similar scheme. At least here, the laborers had their homes and food fully paid for with no penalty for deciding to do something else with their life, and it was probably the case that they were actually learning something in the process. ‘Use a lantern to make some bricks’ seemed like it was worthwhile, anyway, at least for a week or two.

“Do people make money with this stuff?” asked Perry.

Nima laughed. “That’s not the culture. You put scrip-making right out of your head if you want to fit in here. Nevermind that scrip is what you need if you have any interest at all in getting significant projects done. ‘Chasing scrip’, that’s an insult.”

“I don’t think I really understand scrip,” said Perry. “I haven’t had to use any yet. I don’t have any, though I have things I can trade for it, I think.”

“Well, I’m fine being a guide, but I don’t want to throw you into the cultural morass, and I don’t think I’m equipped to guide you through,” said Nima. “Nor do I think it would be all that good for me to tell you all my private thoughts, not when we’ve just met.”

“But you have private thoughts,” said Perry. She turned back and flashed him a grin before heading onward. “These aren’t things that you just don’t think about.”

“Thinking about the culture is part of the culture,” said Nima. “But perhaps saying certain things that go contrary to the ideas that others hold isn’t always a part of the culture. Not that I’m an anticulturalist, nothing like that.”

“You never said what you do,” said Perry. “You have experiments going. You’re a researcher?”

“I do my best,” said Nima. “I have a novel lantern structure that got rejected by a technological committee two days ago. Right now I’m trying to get everything ready for the resubmission, but the tech committee moves slowly by design, at least for things like this.”

“What does the lantern do?” asked Perry.

“It’s complicated,” said Nima. “How much of the basics do you understand?”

“Absolutely none,” said Perry.

“Hrm,” replied Nima. “Well then … lanterns use fuel, and depending on their configuration, emit an effect. The most basic fuel is oil, and the most basic effect is light, but there are, ah, other effects that — you know nothing?”

“Nothing,” Perry confirmed, hoping that it wouldn’t immediately mark him as a moron or ignoramus. He was hoping that wasn’t the culture. It would still probably be better to be either of those than to be a combatant from another world.

“The lantern I made is basically an identifier,” said Nima. “I mean, it’s more complicated than that, you need a mask too, but just a basic one, the minimal mask.”

“Minimal mask,” said Perry. “That doesn’t mean anything to me.”

“The masks — oh gods this is so hard — the magic of the masks is deep, but the basic mask, which you can do with ten minutes if someone sets everything up for you, is a mask that layers your own perception over the world.” Nima shook her head and stopped next to a tall tree that rose up above the tallest of the brickwork buildings. “Sorry, it’s really not what they start with, they start with things that are conceptually easier, like movement or blurring. What this project does is to shine a lantern light through the basic mask and get a coded impression of a person’s perceptions. It’s a unique identifier.”

“Er,” said Perry. “So … I would have a mask that I would keep on me at all times, and if someone wanted to confirm who I was, they would place that mask beneath a lantern and match it up against a pattern?”

“Yes!” said Nima. Her eyes were bright. “Though you’re probably thinking that it’s a mask like you’d put on your face, which it’s not. The minimal mask is more like — actually, I have one here.” She reached into a small pocket in the short skirt and pulled out a thin piece of polished wood with a hole the size of a quarter in it. She held it up to her eye and looked at Perry. “Mask, see?”

“Kind of a mask,” said Perry. “You said that people can make these on their own? I’d never heard of that before.”

“No reason you should have,” said Nima. “The minimal mask isn’t really good for anything. In fact, this discovery was made because I was trying to figure out a use for it. So the dream is that there will be these tiny lanterns with cheap oils and low effluence that are in all the libraries, government buildings, or anywhere that there needs to be some control of the comings and goings of people, of identity. I’m hoping to have it set up so that when you slot a minimask into a standardized lantern and then it’ll just go straight into a book, readable by a person, to compare against whatever is on file.”

“That’s … certainly a dream,” said Perry.

“You can say it’s boring,” said Nima with a laugh. “It is boring, but it’s the kind of boring that I think we need more of, except a lot of people don’t think that it’s the culture.”

“Tracking people,” said Perry.

“Well, we already track people,” said Nima. “But — have you read Cultural Metamorphosis?”

“No,” said Perry. “It’s on my reading list.”

“Hardly anyone actually reads it,” said Nima. “But there’s this whole large section that says, essentially, that there are inherent contradictions and problems, and that this is okay and expected. What’s important is the culture.”

“Okay,” said Perry slowly. “And you think that this is a contradiction, tracking people?”

“There are better examples,” said Nima. “But yes, tracking people and what they do, making sure that there aren’t problems somewhere in the system, that’s something that’s necessary. Everyone wants to be local and communal, to know their neighbors and all that, and if you check things out from a library you check them back in again at some point without needing penalties or to be harangued about it, and you don’t take more than you need, and you put in vital work for the community without being motivated by scrip. Culture is important because it’s what does the heavy lifting. But …”

“There are issues with it,” said Perry. “There are people who will take advantage.”

“No,” said Nima, accompanied by a violent shake of her head. “Or, yes, but no one will take you seriously if that’s your argument, because the standard counterargument to that is ‘so what.’ With the solar factories, we don’t need everyone to work, we just need everyone to be a good citizen. We don’t have to care all that much if someone checks out twenty outfits from the libraries, or eats a lot at every meal. We want people to have what they want, and that trumps the risk that they won’t pull their weight. Of course, pulling more than your weight is the culture, but you have to imagine all the time and effort that goes into tracking who has what and whether they’ve done enough. It would be a waste, and that kind of coercion isn’t the culture.”

“Which is why they don’t like your identifiers?” asked Perry.

“It’s hard to say,” said Nima. “It rubs them the wrong way.” She shrugged. “I think even the idea of more bureaucracy is something that people shrink back from. I’m running the tests now, which will let me know if this is something that I should push for, but I think the whole project might be dead in the water. Can I show you my lab? Or have you reached the peak of your boredom?”

“Show me,” said Perry with a nod.

They walked further through the campus. Perry’s eyes kept going to her bare back, in spite of himself. He wondered what the prevailing opinions on interspecies romance were, but this was mostly an idle thought. She had dimples on her back just above the line of her skirt, in spite of being a slender woman.

Her laboratory was surprisingly large, with tall ceilings and windows that were up high on the walls. He was fairly sure that this was one of the buildings that abutted a road that went past outside the campus. Many of the tools were familiar to him, and there was a whole blacksmithing setup with a carpentry station. The lathe drew his interest, because it was apparently powered by a lantern.

“It’s just you here?” asked Perry.

“Most days,” said Nima. “It’s technically a communal space, but this is small scale experimental work, and no one is really pushing in that direction right now. Most of the focus is on improving the efficiency of the domes, and there’s nothing you could do for them in a workshop like this.”

Perry looked over to the bench she was standing by, which had a row of six small lanterns, all with apertures pointed down at papers. Colorful patterns were displayed on each of the papers, all the same.

“This is my imprint,” said Nima. “The test here is mostly to see whether there’s any variation in the imprint, which there isn’t, even though there are different minimal masks. It’s not very exciting, but it’s one of the things that I got dinged for with the committee. It’s not their primary objection, obviously, but every little bit helps if I resubmit.”

“Can I try?” asked Perry.

“Try what?” asked Nima.

“The minimal mask?” asked Perry. “You said it was a simple five minute process.”

“No,” said Nima. “I mean, you can try, but no, it’ll take longer, the goal is to get it down to five minutes, to have the whole thing be as smooth and painless as possible. Here, I think this would be helpful, I haven’t actually tried to instruct anyone, in the long term I’m going to have to have this be repeatable from instructions alone — which is another thing they don’t like, because it’s not local and custom to the symboulion.”

“Show me how it’s done,” said Perry. “I’ve wanted a mask like this since I first saw one.”

The process took about half an hour, and started with Nima grabbing one of the ‘blanks.’ It was really more of a monocle with an awkward handle than anything else, but he made the cuts where she told him to, a simple design around the eyehole, with his energy focused into it.

“What happens if my perception changes?” asked Perry.

“What do you mean?” asked Nima.

“I mean, this identifier is a pattern of colors that shows how I see things, right?” asked Perry. “So what happens if how I see things changes?”

“Difficult to say,” replied Nima. “I’m not sure what it would mean. There’s not a lot of research that’s been done in this area. Most of what I’ve built here is mine alone. Before I started this two months ago, the idea of using the minimal mask for anything wasn’t even considered, at least so far as I could find.”

“Just curious,” said Perry.

He wasn’t trying to put any of himself into the ‘minimal’ mask, but there was a moment — a specific cut in the wood with a curved blade — when he could feel it catch, tugging at the currents of power inside of him.

When he’d finished, Nima got a fresh sheet of chemically treated paper and slipped it under one of the downward-facing lanterns, pushed his ‘mask’ between the aperture and the paper, then fueled the lantern from a small canister.

The paper almost immediately lit on fire. Nima panicked, but Perry pulled the paper from the table and set it into a metal bucket.

“What was that?” she asked, eyes on the bucket. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“Some kind of error?” asked Perry. He was pretty sure that he was the culprit, the energy within him translated into the mask somehow. He was going to have to slip away and hope that she didn’t report this to anyone.

“Let me look at this,” said Nima, taking the mask from the machine. She looked it over, then grabbed another mask from a hook on the wall, which was thin, wooden, and molded perfectly onto her face. He could no longer see her mouth, but he could see the muscles tense on the side of her face. “What is this?” She looked over at him, and he could see her go stiff.

“What does that mask do?” asked Perry.

“It’s a diagnostic mask,” said Nima. She was standing very still. “Look, I don’t want any trouble. I’m just a researcher here, trying to make what changes I can, I’m working within the culture, all that stuff I had said, if any of it was anticultural —” She swallowed to avoid choking on her words. Perry could smell the fear on her.

“I don’t know who you think I am,” said Perry. “But I’m just here out of idle curiosity. I really was just wandering around. You were the one who came up to talk to me, remember? Set the mask down, and we can talk about it.”

She set the mask on the table with trembling fingers. Her face was ashen.

“Now,” said Perry. “Who do you think I am?”

“I don’t know,” said Nima. “I thought … secret police?” She raised both eyebrows.

“Does this city have such a thing?” asked Perry.

“They’d be secret,” said Nima. She was still looking him over, and her eyes flickered to the door. “That’s the point.”

“There are the big metal ones, the ones that come down when people make a symbol on their chest,” said Perry. “I saw one in a museum, but I haven’t seen one in real life, not yet. If there are secret police, I would think they would want to be known, just so they could be a deterrent, but if they’re real, you’d tell me, right?”

“You really are from across the sea?” asked Nima.

“I’m not from the city,” said Perry, which he hoped was enough to let her know that his lie about having come from overseas was just that. “I just need you to tell me what you saw with the mask.”

“Power,” said Nima. “Like … you’re a lantern, burning something inside of you. It’s possible in theory. There are lines of study that are forbidden, things we’re not supposed to delve into even beyond just what the committees deem not good for the culture or the society.”

Perry nodded. “One of those contradictions, I’d guess.”

Nima swallowed. “This is just a chance meeting? You’re not some foreign agent from Berus? Or from Thirlwell?”

“Thirlwell, that’s where the last remaining king is?” asked Perry. “He’s doing everything he can to hold onto power, I’ve heard, but no, even if I were from there I can’t imagine that this is something he’d have any reason to try.”

Nima nodded. “And I know that I worked on some things that were proscribed, but you’re not here about that?”

Perry hesitated. “You worked on forbidden things?” he asked.

“I’m not supposed to talk about it,” said Nima. “They were roads I didn’t know I wasn’t supposed to go down, not until I was told. I’m really trying not to stir up trouble.” She took a deep breath. “If you have secrets, I can stay silent about them. I’m trying my best to fit in. Whether you’re from the city symboulion, from Berus, Thirlwell, or wherever else, I just want to do the work. That’s the culture, right?”

Perry let out a breath. “That mask, it lets you see the energy flowing out of me?”

“It does,” said Nima. “Is that energy always flowing out of you?”

“Not always,” said Perry. “Look, I’m just a guy, okay? I don’t want anyone to come looking for me, so if I go away, you would stay quiet about it, right? Not tell anyone that you saw someone glowing when you put on your diagnostic mask?”

She nodded too quickly. “I would be as quiet as a drowned mouse.”

“But,” said Perry. “The reason I came to the Institute was to learn. If there’s something different about me, something special, then I want to know what it is, how it can be used, harnessed. That paper lit on fire from the mask I made here. There have to be ways that we can exploit that, some type of science we can do to understand it. And it would need to be kept quiet, in confidence, until we were ready to bring it to the committee.”

Nima stared at him. The color had come back into her cheeks with a vengeance, and she was looking flushed. “You want to do covert science. Dark science.”

“That’s not how I would phrase it,” said Perry. He didn’t offer some other method of phrasing it though. “There’s also a woman I want to bring in the loop on this, someone I know and trust.”

Nima nodded slowly. “And if I were to tell someone?” she asked.

“I would know,” said Perry. “And then I would vanish, never to be seen nor heard from again. But if that’s what you want to happen, you can just tell me, and this is the last you’ll see of me.”

“I want to,” said Nima. “Whatever it is you have, whatever secrets you hold, I want to see them. I won’t go against the culture, not directly, but skirting the edges,” she took a breath. “I could maybe skirt the edges. Wait to tell people until there’s something concrete. If your body is like a lantern, that’s something that I need to know, to understand.”

Perry nodded. “You don’t need to decide right now. It’s better if you think it over. I’ll be back here in a day, same time, to see what you’ve decided.”

“Unless I tell someone,” said Nima.

“Unless you tell someone,” nodded Perry.

“And then you vanish into the winds like the Terinmar of old,” said Nima.

Perry nodded again. He wasn’t sure that he was playing this right, but he thought it was probably best to strike while the iron was near a forge. Besides, it would be easy enough to relocate to another city if that was necessary. He was less and less fearful of their ability to hunt him with every passing day, and if the culture was the same the world over, or with only minor differences, then they would be welcoming enough.

Nima was staring at him. She had some inkling now that he was something special, and also that he wasn’t exactly what he’d pretended to be. He’d set the bait for her, and it remained to be seen how hard she would bite down on it.

“Tomorrow then,” said Perry. “I’ll be here, if that works for you.”

“It does,” said Nima.

Perry moved to the table and took the small mask that he’d made. He gave it a look, then slipped it into his pants pocket, palming a small black bead of nanites in the process.

“You didn’t want to leave evidence,” said Nima. “Something that could uniquely identify you.”

“Not for now,” said Perry. He left her behind, lightly touching the table as he left, leaving a black dot that would quickly hide away and fade to nothing if Marchand was worth his salt. The place would be bugged for the foreseeable future, and he could keep an eye on her from a distance to see whether she was going to narc on him. She was in the midst of getting shut down by the powers that be though, and she had a hunger to her that he had seen before.

“March, keep an eye on her,” said Perry once he was outside. “See what we can see and make sure that it’s safe to come back. If she goes to anyone, make sure that you find out who they are. You left spiders?”

“I did, sir,” said Marchand. “I will make tracking this woman a priority.”