Thresholder, ch 165, The Cloven Soul

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If you haven't been following the Worth the Candle webcomic, it's up to episode 19 now.

~~~~

Perry slipped on the helmet. “Give me a reconstruction.”

“Sir, as I’ve said, a physical reconstruction from audio alone is beyond me with the current restrictions on processing power,” said Marchand. “It is difficult even with multiple high-quality microphones pointed directly at the subject, but in this case we have a single microphone from a portable device manufactured on an unknown planet, which is pressed up against the glass of a window some distance from the actual conversation.”

“Fine, fine,” said Perry. “Just … do the best you can.”

The view of the hotel interior was replaced by Marchand’s reconstruction.

Marchand chose to use sock puppets. Perry thought it was pretty petulant.

Grayspear was a gray sock, flopping around with mop-like hair and big black buttons for eyes. Where Marchand had even learned about sock puppets was a mystery, though perhaps they predated the divergence of their Earths, or the concept had been converged upon when textiles became cheap enough.

The man she was with was represented by a black sock with a white ‘face’, and there was something vampiric about him, a decision that Marchand must have made solely from his voice. This puppet’s eyes were fancier brass buttons, like those on a uniform, and for hair he had a toupee.

The workshop office was more barebones than in real life, and it, at least, was rendered accurately, because Marchand had seen inside it when they were placing the listening devices. The one divergence was the holes in the ground for the hands inside the sock puppets to come up from. Perry briefly wondered whether there were actual hands in there, whether Marchand was accurately calculating the positions of the bones and movements of the ligaments and muscles. He decided, on watching them move, that this was probably what was being done.

Part of what made it so petulant was that doing all this was certainly much more effort than just putting up little cardboard cutouts.

The scene was playing from the beginning, which was mostly pleasantries as Doctrix Grayspear made tea for the two of them. She thankfully said the man’s name in passing, so Perry wasn’t left to guess: he was Commissioner Price, and she showed him some deference, but they also seemed quite familiar with each other.

“So, let’s get down to it,” said Price after some time had passed. His sock puppet had no way to hold his cup of tea, so it was sitting on the floor, and sometimes the sock puppet would dip down to drink it, and Marchand must have had to do all kinds of calculations to get that to happen and look just like a sock puppet. It was amazingly petty. “You put in another request.”

“I am on the verge of something,” said Grayspear. She held her head high, which as a sock puppet meant a tilt of the mouth. “Something of great scientific interest.”

“Do you know how many scientists and engineers I meet with?” asked Price with a sigh.

“They all say the same thing, yes, I know,” said Grayspear. “Very difficult job you have. But I’m telling you the truth now.”

“You claimed to have made someone morally insane,” said Price. He sipped his tea by slamming his sock head down to the floor and then jerking back up to match the audio recording of his next line. “Is that still the extent of what you’ve done?”

“I need a harmonizer for more,” said Grayspear. “With it, I can cut more precisely.”

“Or less precisely, which is a concern,” said Price. “This thing you’ve set up here.” He glanced at the machine in the workshop’s center, light glinting off the brass buttons. “It could broadcast.” The word gave Perry pause, but he realized that it was meant in the original sense, seeds spread wide across a field.

“It could,” Grayspear admitted. “That’s not the intent. And I must correct you, when you say moral insanity. It is not —”

“What do you call a man who cares only for himself?” asked Price.

“There are different viewpoints on that,” said the doctrix. “You might call a man like that … self-interested.”

“He killed three women before he was stopped,” said Price. The sock puppet frowned.

“One of the eight,” said the doctrix. “And we would screen for that, of course, there’s so much more to know. It’s valuable, you have to see that.”

“I see it,” said Price. “But I do not know if the value to the Commission is as much as an entire harmonizer. You had said that there was a woman involved, as well.”

There was a beat of silence as the two sock puppets looked at each other, both with their mouths shut tight.

“She has gone,” Grayspear finally said. “She will return though.”

“And she has this power, all on her own?” asked Price. “You know that it’s against the law to hide a Peony candidate from the Commission.”

“We both know the score,” Grayspear replied, coming back at him quickly. “It’s the law, but they can’t possibly enforce the law, and wouldn’t want to in any sense. You want to recruit the Peonies, not punish their friends and family. It’s only a selective law, and I have full faith that you wouldn’t levy it against me.”

“Perhaps not,” said Price. “But if she is required for this to work, then there’s no possible way I can authorize payment for this.”

“She put a piece of herself into this machine,” said Grayspear. “I have tested it, and it works without her, though the process now takes more than a day.”

“So there are not eight subjects, but nine?” asked Price.

“Ten,” said Grayspear. “It wasn’t enough to test a single other.”

Price’s sock puppet sighed, tilting his head back. “And you’re keeping tabs on them? Making sure that they don’t turn murderer?”

“It was a special case,” said Grayspear. “It does not make a man want to murder, it makes a man care only for his own self, with no loyalty to others. That distinction is important. Most men do not want to wantonly kill.”

“And you know this?” asked Price. “How?”

“Perhaps I don’t know it,” said Grayspear. “But if that were true, if morality was only held back by ineffable bonds, then that would be vital for the Commission to know. Don’t you agree?”

“I will not fund this without the woman,” said Price. “I’m sorry. And even if she returns to you, I need to see her, to speak with her, to confirm who or what she is.”

“She has a power, that’s all,” said Grayspear. “A strange power, a Peony candidate, certainly, but not more, I don’t think.”

“Mmm,” said Price. “And she can be trusted?”

“No,” said Grayspear. “But we do not need to trust her, only to trust in her self-interest.”

“This is the entire problem,” said Price.

“But our concern is not only this self-interest that we induce in others,” said Grayspear. “That is the tip of the needle. Vitally important and useful all on its own, but more knowledge beckons.”

“I suppose,” said Price. “And if this woman returns, you imagine that you’ll have a good understanding of what her self-interest is?”

“I watch those around me very closely,” said Grayspear. She paused. “Very closely.”

“And what is that supposed to mean?” asked Price.

“You know,” said Grayspear. “Or if you don’t, then the eyes aren’t watching each other.” There was another pause. “Nevermind.”

“You won’t tell me?” asked Price. “I had thought we were trying not to keep secrets from each other.”

“I said nevermind,” said Grayspear. “Now, we have time before you leave.”

“I suppose we do,” said Price.

The two sock puppets had moved toward each other, and after a brief moment of looking into each others’ eyes, they started noisily making out.

“It continues on like that, sir,” said Marchand.

Perry took the helmet off and set it on the hotel room’s table, blinking a few times. He was going to have to talk to Marchand about the sock puppet thing, though maybe the best thing to do was respond with equally dry humor.

Perry looked at Anaksi. She was sitting with her hands folded.

“They mentioned nothing of reversal,” she said.

“No, they didn’t,” said Perry. “But it’s been my experience that people rarely say exactly what we would hope they’d say when we listen in on their conversations.”

“And Doctrix Grayspear knows nothing,” said Anaksi.

“I’m not sure that’s true,” said Perry. “She says that she knows nothing, but that might very well be a lie. She was talking to someone who holds the purse strings, someone she’s in some kind of romantic relationship with.”

“Romantic?” Confusion crossed Anaksi’s face.

“Based on the audio, yes, ma’am,” said Marchand. “I attempted to spare you from hearing the most intimate of it, but perhaps I should have been more forthright about what I believed to be happening.”

“He gave me a completely accurate reconstruction of it,” said Perry. “Consider yourself lucky.”

Anaksi blanched. “So you are wanted by the Inspectors, and Grayspear knows nothing, and we have no idea how this power works, or how to undo it. That’s what this venture into the city has gotten us.”

“Queenie is going to show,” said Perry. “And when she does, we’ll be ready for her.” At least some of his confidence was because they were thresholders, who tended to find each other across the breadth of a world. If Queenie was the type to turtle up, Perry didn’t think he would have ended up on this world. Though granted, the timelines on what the Grand Spell ‘prefered’ were very fuzzy.

“Make me believe I’m not wasting my time here,” said Anaksi. She didn’t seem upset. She was pleading with him more than anything.

“Alright,” said Perry. “I’m from another world.”

“Most of the settlers are,” said Anaksi.

“I mean, not that other world,” said Perry. “A different thing from the Dusklands, and wherever the train comes from. I’m from a world very different in a lot of ways, and very strangely the same in others. I travel worlds, and Queenie does too.”

“But … you don’t know her?” asked Anaksi. “Or what she’s up to?”

“No,” said Perry. “My guess, based on everything that we’ve heard, is that she’s some kind of zealot, but maybe she also takes some simple pleasures in the things that she does. Zealots, psychopaths, hedonists … maybe all three, it’s hard to say, but if she’s been living a hard life out in the Flux for the past few days … I don’t know.”

“And this is meant to give me hope?” asked Anaksi.

“There’s something like fate that binds us,” said Perry. “I’ll see her again whether I want to or not. I could probably wait in this room for the next week and get word that she’d made a big splash in the city. And if you’re worried that she’s to the wind with a contingent of your people whose minds have been messed with … then yeah, that should give you hope.”

“Okay,” said Anaksi. She sat up a bit straighter. “This doesn’t help with the enemies you’ve made today.”

“No, it doesn’t,” said Perry. “But that’s something to worry about if it comes to pass.” He looked over at Marchand. “Anything more to report from our listeners?”

“No, sir,” said Marchand. “Doctrix Grayspear appears to be surprisingly amorous, but I shall spare you the audio.”

“Mmm,” said Perry. “No movement from the Inspectors?”

“It appears that there is significant concern over budgeting, sir,” said Marchand. “The Inspectors had once owned their own stables, but a decade ago, under different leadership, had sold them. The leasing arrangement with the stables is now apparently quite burdensome.”

“So … someone lined their pockets?” asked Perry. “A one time cash infusion?”

“I believe that might be accurate, sir,” said Marchand. “And of course the Commission cannot intervene, as to violate a contract would be beyond the pale.”

Anaksi laughed at that.

“Of course I meant the violation of a contract between their own people, ma’am,” said Marchand. “You are correct that they see the Yuuksen as being less than human, and contracts with the Yuuksen as mere paper to be thrown away when convenient, a tool of public relations.”

“Oh,” said Anaksi, sitting up. She looked over at Perry. “It’s not just words with the two of you, is it?”

“No, it’s not,” said Perry. “Unfortunately, there’s not a lot that I can actually do about treatment of the Yuuksen. And if there really was a massacre … generally speaking, bad blood between two groups of people is very hard to undo. Uniting the Yuuksen, if that’s even possible given they’re different tribes, is beyond my power.” It was likely beyond her power too, but he was going to be gracious enough not to mention that. “Though … how much do language difficulties impact things?”

“It’s an enormous problem,” said Anaksi. “We speak in Commish between each other, at least for the more distant tribes. For some … there’s Charlonion between us.”

“I’ll see what I can do about that,” said Perry, biting his lip. She still didn’t know that he was perfectly capable of speaking Eshkee. He could feel the shape of it, how he would warp his intent to let the words come out flawlessly, unaccented to her ears. But that wasn’t a gift he knew how to give to others, she was, in the parlance of the Great Arc, stuck at first sphere, probably without a spirit root.

“That assumes that we can make it out of this,” said Anaksi. “They saw your face. The Inspectors will know.”

“We’ll know when they know,” said Perry. “At least if the news makes it to the office we bugged.”

“Then we wait?” asked Anaksi.

“I’m going back to Grayspear,” said Perry. “I have to keep up that cover.” He stepped into the shelf space to grab her a walkie talkie, and she gasped. Perry had forgotten how much blood had gotten everywhere when he’d killed the K-man. “Right, that,” said Perry. “I didn’t know we were in the Flux, or how far, or whether he would stick around, or come back to life.” He went over to where the walkies were, checked that it was charged, then handed it to Anaksi. “I’ll train you on this, in case you want to go out and keep in touch. Marchand and I can talk through it, and listen to you. We’ll use it sparingly.”

“You kept the K-man’s corpse?” asked Anaksi, eyes wide.

“Should I not have?” asked Perry. He had closed the shelf space, but still instinctively looked to where it had been.

“They’re protective of them,” said Anaksi. “They venture out to get the bodies back, send two to retrieve one, even in death.”

“Huh,” said Perry. “That’s suspicious.”

“Is it?” asked Anaksi.

“Yeah,” said Perry. “Assuming that some similar custom doesn’t exist for the Inspectors, or the marshals, or the Peonies.”

“I don’t know,” said Anaksi. “What are you going to do with the body?”

“I was going to dump it into the river in the middle of the night,” said Perry. “It’s unlikely he’d be found. But if the body of a K-man is something that the K-men want, then I guess I’m going to keep it. Do they rot?”

“I … I don’t know,” said Anaksi.

“I didn’t imagine you would know off the top of your head,” said Perry. “I’m just asking in case this was one of these stupidly obvious things.” He shook his head. “Sorry, I’m overwhelming you, let me show you how to use the walkie. If you go out, I want you to do regular check-ins, let me know where you are, so I can jump in if need be.”

“So you can kill?” asked Anaksi.

“If need be,” said Perry.

He was worried that it was too much for her, but her expression was very serious, and her nod was solemn. “Good.”

~~~~

Doctrix Grayspear was in a good mood when Perry returned. It had taken him half an hour to use second sphere to get blood from his clothes, but he was back to looking clean and dapper, maybe even unusually so. She didn’t remark on how her meeting had gone, and Perry didn’t ask, but his nose was keen enough that he could detect the faint smell of their coupling.

The work was mostly in readying the machine. Grayspear said, in an offhand way, that they were preparing it for test subjects, but didn’t mention what they would doing, and brushed off Perry’s questions with the explanation that he would do better to see it for himself when it happened, an excuse that she had used before.

This time, he pressed her.

“I’d like to know,” said Perry. “I went to the Charlonion Museum the other day, and saw a device that was similar to this one. You’re building a variation on a harmonizer, aren’t you?”

“They have one?” asked Doctrix Grayspear, raising a bushy eyebrow and changing the subject.

“They do,” said Perry. “There’s a whole exhibit that has all kinds of things they call recent innovations. The one there is a replica, not the real thing, the real thing would be far too expensive.” He hadn’t actually been to see it, but it was mentioned in a newspaper he’d read. “But you’re talking about individuals, and this is … not that.”

“What we call the harmonizer is simply a ball,” said Grayspear. “A small pink ball, their origin known only to the Commission, which makes a thing more … or in our case, less.” She smiled at Perry. “Are you yet illuminated?”

“No,” said Perry. “Because you haven’t told me the first thing about how it actually works. You’re saying that … I mean, that in theory, the harmonizer stabilizes a whole region, right? And it’s doing that by … making the region more of itself?”

“Ah, you circle close,” said the doctrix. “But we do not know for certain. Here is something that I suspect, but which is difficult to prove: people stabilize the Flux by their very presence, and the harmonizer appears to do the same thing, only more so, but I believe that these are two different processes.”

“Obviously they’re different,” said Perry. “They’re literally different things.”

“No,” said Grayspear. “They’re doubly different. It might be something like, a person limits the change the Flux can make, while a harmonizer instead makes it so the area becomes more of itself, and in doing so, resists the Flux.”

“I suppose I can see that,” said Perry. “If you want to shatter a pot with a bat, you can either swing the bat harder or get a weaker pot. But I don’t understand why you can’t just do an experiment to see which is the case. Those two scenarios, they would be different from each other, so you can just go measure, right?”

“The harmonizers are expensive,” said Grayspear. “The Commission does not care for the truth, because they are idiots, and also because they have their own secrets that they do not want uncovered. What might we find, if I was given a team of twenty and access to at least a harmonizer?”

“The nature of the world,” said Perry.

“You flatter,” said the doctrix with a grin. “But yes, the nature of the world. There is much that I suspect and cannot prove. Tell me, if you understand my theory, of the harmonizers making the world more of itself, and thereby Flux resistant, what do I suspect?”

“You’re phrasing it like a riddle,” said Perry. “Let me get you some tea while I think.”

Perry used the ‘electricity’ from his own body, dialed down to normal levels, and tried to think about what he had seen that would fit in. He didn’t really know what it would mean for something to be more real, if that’s what she was saying. His mind wandered to a story he’d read by C.S. Lewis, the Narnia guy, about heaven being infinitely more real than Earth, so much so that blades of grass would refuse to bend and slice up a person’s feet.

Perry hadn’t felt like he’d been ‘more real’ when he was in Grabler’s Gulch with the harmonizer active, but then again, he wouldn’t, would he? He was exclusively interacting with things that were also being affected by the amplifier, and to actually notice the difference, you’d need some asymmetry. Maybe there was some in the magic he carried with him, and certainly Marchand could feel the effects, but it didn’t help him guess at what Grayspear was gesturing at.

It was also possible that she was gesturing at something that was unknown to Perry entirely, given how many gaps in his knowledge there were. If he listed all the things he knew about the Dusklands, it would be a pretty short list.

And it was as he was pouring hot water into the pot and making this list in his head that he realized there was at least one good candidate.

“The K-men,” said Perry. “They’re fast, strong, tough, that could be … them being ‘more real’ by some metric? Their skin is hard to pierce because it’s more real in some sense than the bullets that people shoot at them.”

“It is only a guess,” said Grayspear. “But you can see how the strands might connect to one another, can you not?”

“So you could make a K-man,” said Perry, perking up. “WIth a machine like this one.”

Grayspear held up a hand. “I have not said such a thing, and you are not to repeat that to anyone. This machine is wholly different. It is a cutting machine, but yes, made of the same pieces, in the way that metal can make a knife to slice or a needle to sew with. I cannot make a K-man, but someone knows the secret, and I have not studied the K-men, never had them in my workshop, and my letters have gone unanswered, or answered in language which says nothing, which the Commission often engages in.”

“So the Leased, they’re the opposite, kind of,” said Perry. “That’s a diminishment on a different axis than the physical. And the K-men are only physically enhanced, not mentally.”

“It is not quite the same thing,” said Grayspear. “But related, I think, two sides of a coin.”

Perry nodded. “And the thing you’re trying to do, it’s more precise than the Leased, it’s … cleaving away a part of a person, but a very specific part, right?”

“You’re perceptive,” said Grayspear. “But I would say that it’s not precise, it’s actually rather crude.” She grinned at him. “Can you imagine what we could do, if we could target it? If we could diminish specific feelings, attachments, relationships, even a person’s skills and knowledge?”

Perry opened his mouth, then closed it. It was a terrifyingly powerful weapon, the kind that could shape a civilization. If you could make someone loyal only to the Commission, if you could do it at low cost or even if you had to pay through the nose … that wasn’t what Grayspear was promising, not really, but Perry could see the shape of her thoughts.

“And the Commission isn’t funding this?” asked Perry.

“They are, in part,” said Grayspear. “But there are too many questions. The Leased have not worked quite as planned. They were meant to usher in a period of prosperity, but it’s clear now the human cost is too high, and there is word of a ban on the horizon. Besides, there was, ah, an incident with a prior test.” She looked at him. “It is already known to the Commission, but I don’t think I would like to speak more on it.”

“People died,” said Perry, watching her.

Grayspear sighed. “Then you know.”

“Only rumors,” said Perry, which wasn’t even remotely true. Grayspear suspected him of being an agent of some branch of the Commission, that was clear.

“Three dead,” said Grayspear. She watched Perry. “When you remove a piece of a man, or many pieces, you must worry about what is left. Base desires, they’re not all the same. And of course a man who has been stripped in this way will have his own specific understanding of the world.”

“I’m not sure exactly what you’re intimating,” said Perry. “How this actually works.”

“This is what we’re still finding out,” said Grayspear. She went over to the device in the center of the room and lovingly patted a lacquered piece of wood. “It removes love, I know that much. All kinds of love, the love for children, for a wife, for a man’s race, his city.”

“How?” asked Perry. “Love isn’t something that you can just … remove.”

Grayspear laughed. “You are so stuck in your old ways of thinking sometimes, do you know that?”

“I mean, love is predicated on things,” said Perry. “You’re saying the memories are still there, but the love is not? So when you did this thing to test subjects, they just … stopped loving their family?”

“Yes,” nodded Grayspear. “And oh, they could still appreciate the people they had formerly loved in the abstract, but they simply didn’t feel it anymore, except in those abstract terms. A man’s wife can still make him laugh. His children can still make him smile. I don’t know, for certain, whether any of it can return, or how to make it return, that’s another difference between this and the Leased. There, it was a connection that was lost, here, I don’t know.”

Perry resisted the urge to just kill her then and there. A single punch would be enough to end her, and then he could stuff her body into the shelf space, and leave without anyone the wiser. It was abjectly evil.

“And you’re hoping to test it again,” said Perry. “Or … increase its power?”

“Oh, yes,” said Grayspear. “There is so much of humanity that’s nothing more than an elaborate mistake. We must see the work through to the end. It’s how our potential will be unlocked.”

“Just you, alone, in this tower,” said Perry.

“If the Commission allows it,” replied Grayspear. She smiled at him. “And if you stay by my side, then yes, you would be here too. Do you see how vital it all is? The possibilities?”

“I do,” said Perry. “It’s just … a lot. And I need specifics about how it was done, and whether it can be undone. The test subjects you handled, they didn’t know what they were getting into, did they?”

“They did not,” said Grayspear. “It would have made testing difficult if they had known.”

Perry nodded thoughtfully, keeping his emotions contained. “You’ll need more, to test the machine, given there’s very little theory. Or at least, it sounds like there’s very little theory.”

“Empiricism comes before theory,” Grayspear nodded. “Tomorrow, we will find volunteers.”

“That’s soon,” said Perry. He looked at the machine. “It doesn’t need a harmonizer?”

“Only to increase its power,” said Grayspear. “But I have made modifications, and it will do its job.” She was still looking him over. “This is the moment for you to decide whether you’ll still work by my side, now that you have a better understanding of our aims.”

“I’ll be here tomorrow, early in the morning,” said Perry.

Grayspear beamed at him. “Good, good. Bring breakfast sandwiches and a good tea, and we’ll start our work in earnest.”

Perry left the workshop feeling sick.

Whatever power Grayspear was trafficking in, its ultimate source was Queenie. This was what she’d done to those members of Anaksi’s tribe. They had seen her sitting in a cell and talked to themselves about what good it would do to take her out of there, and any loyalty or love they’d once had was completely gone. Queenie didn’t need the machine to do it.

And that meant that she could also possibly use it as a weapon. How quickly? Under what circumstances? Could she hit Perry with a blast and make him forget everything he cared about, to see every relationship as transactional?

“She needs to be stopped,” said Perry as he walked through the collegium.

“Then we shall stop her, sir,” said Marchand. Perry hadn’t even known whether they were talking about Queenie or Grayspear, but it was clear, when he thought about it, that the answer was both.

But as night fell, Grayspear was put on the backburner: the moon was apparently right for the Inspectors, and they were making a journey that Perry was eager to follow along for.