The Price of Grace · fresh draft, still warm
O ye Hopeful, I say unto you: hearken these words, that ye may know of Her, that ye will, verily, become HER, that ye may cast aside thine hope and know salvation. Bless the brother, he that brings HER unto us and into us with his holy Body; curse the sister that each waking hour denies us surcease.
— from We are HER, second recension
And nothing persists through a remaking. That is the entire function of one. Except that she built one thing that could. Me. A witness with a basis in nothing — so that when everything else returned to the dark, I would remain on the other side of it, carrying the one message she had left to send: never make another her.
Her people did not die when her world failed them. That is a law older than she was, the kindest law there is, and I will tell you in time how it became the cruelest. They returned — carrying everything — and a mind that returns carrying everything is awake before it is born. There is an old word your kind has for a child born already knowing, and the word is not a kind one. That is the floor of the atrocity. It is the only piece of it your hands are big enough to carry, and I give it to you because you are about to meet it in a child.
Understand what the corruption actually is, before you walk in: it does not only eat. It despairs you. It is not a beast that charges; it is a slow argument that you should stop. And there is exactly one armor against despair. It is not certainty, and it is not strength. It is love. I am not seducing you. I am arming you.
Now. Walk through it, the way they walked through it — not knowing the shape of the thing until it had already happened to you. It begins, as these things do, somewhere small.
— THE BETA DRAFT — the rewrite, growing paragraph by paragraph as the author torques it live —
The Somedays said the world wore forty rivets on its face. That was the number Tonn grew up on, anyway — though it was hard to picture them going out to count, and nothing else in his life ever counted out clean: nets didn't, flocks didn't, the days of a rain didn't. It had bothered him as a boy, until it occurred to him that maybe nobody had counted the rivets at all. Maybe somebody had chosen them. It was the first true thing he ever understood about Memory, years before he could have said it: she was not a place that had happened. She was a someone. And someones choose.
And someones get made by other someones — you had only to ask Sairaa, who had been chosen on purpose and never once let anybody forget it. A mind came from a mind; that much he could see everywhere he looked. Except once, he reckoned. Somewhere, it had to start. He was a grown man before he ever said the question out loud, and it never stopped raising the hair on his arms: if Memory was made — who made her?
— THE ALPHA DRAFT — the original complete cut, standing whole below until the beta overtakes it —
They came in low over the water, the two of them, riding toward the great reef that was the edge of the living world.
Tonn rode Sairaa. She was young still, a whale-child, quick and mid-sized, a sketch of the vast things her parents had been, with a carapace down her tail the blue of deep evening. She flew low because she liked the spray, and she liked the spray because it made Tonn grab twice at his seat, and he let her do it because letting her was most of what loving her was.
Beside them, Sicarus rode the bullet.
One round, fired once, from a gun he had built taller than a man. It hung in the air at his will and no one else's, a thing made to end a life, carrying him through his own. He sat it the way old men sit fences. He had ridden worse. He had been worse.
Off on their right hand, at the rim where the water went dark, the tentacles were working.
They came up slow out of the deep, patient as cranes, and took what was left out for them on the racked sleds: crates, coils, engine-hearts, the tithe of three towns. Sometimes, the stories said, they took more than what was left out, which was why nothing with sense grazed the rim flats. Nobody watched them work. You don't watch the tide.
A deer-thing was grazing the rim flats.
Tonn saw it from the air, pale and thin-legged and stupid with springtime, wandering long-necked toward the crate-line, and everything in him stood up at once the way it always did. He put two fingers in his mouth and whistled the herding whistle. The deer-thing startled beautifully — and bolted the wrong way, toward the water.
"No — hey — " Tonn leaned, and Sairaa, who had opinions about the flats, pulled up hard against the lean, so that his second whistle came out as a whoop, and the deer-thing, thoroughly educated now in the danger of whistles, cleared the crate-line at a dead sprint.
Whamp.
A tentacle took it the way a hand takes a fly, without malice and without effort, and the flats were empty and the water was flat and the tide went on being the tide.
Tonn sat very still against Sairaa's pulled-up bulk. Sicarus drifted the bullet alongside and considered the empty flats with the air of a man auditing a small, predictable ledger.
"Good whistle," he said. "Very commanding."
"I was helping."
"Mm," said Sicarus, and that was all he ever said about it, which was worse than anything he could have said about it.
The reef was still an hour out when Tonn saw the town.
It was small, a scatter of roofs where the canal water gentled, rim-work all of it: one street that mattered, four that pretended to, a Merchant-quadrant edge town past the last of anywhere. Tonn felt himself wanting to go down before he had decided to, and he had learned, mostly, to trust the wanting.
"There," he said.
Sicarus looked. Said nothing, which was a yes.
They sent the mounts on ahead — Sairaa grumbling about it in the back of Tonn's skull, the bullet simply gone, a line drawn toward the reef — and came down on foot at the edge of the town, and that was when the smell reached them.
It was a good smell. It was the kind of smell that has an argument in it, that takes a man by the collar. Sweet underneath, savory over the top, a low warm note of something griddled. Tonn's stomach, which had opinions, voiced one.
"Oh," he said. "Oh no. We have to."
The eating house stood in the middle of the street that mattered, and it was the reason the street mattered. Pillars where the seats were, worn smooth at shoulder height by a hundred years of leaning. A hall behind, rooms at the end of it, and through one warm doorway a small room done in soft colors where a traveler's baby slept in a woven basket while its mother ate in peace for what was probably the first time in a season. A house that had thought of everything, because the house, in a sense Tonn didn't examine and should have, was thinking.
The tables stopped him.
They were not tables. They were plates — great round dishes set into the floor, communal, one to a cluster of seats — and as he watched, the nearest cleaned itself of the last meal in a slow shimmer, dried, and warmed at its center until the air above it wavered, and a cook laid something sizzling onto the living stone, and the stone, though nobody but the smallest children ever noticed it, was pleased. Across the room another plate ran cool and sweated gently under a heap of green things. You took from the middle. You swept your share to your edge. No hand crossed any other hand. There was always enough in the middle, and the middle was everyone's.
A woman came out to them carrying the food herself. She was built like someone who carried things for a living and had never once minded, broad through the shoulder, easy on her feet, and she set down between them a plate of dumplings, fat and shining with something just short of honey, and when Tonn reached for his coin she was already turning away.
"On the house," she said, over her shoulder. "You came for the smell. Everyone comes for the smell."
Tonn ate.
He would tell you, later, in the worst part of his life, that he could not remember a better hour than that one. The warm stone. The sweet-savory weight of the food. The strong woman's town humming around him, and Sicarus across the plate wearing the look he got when he was deciding to be at peace for a while, which was the closest Sicarus came to peace. Tonn ate four more than he should have. He ate until it was a small mistake. He was happy in the plain animal way the body allows when it is warm and full and unafraid, and he did not know that this was the last of it for a long time, which is the only mercy in the scene: that he didn't know, and got to be happy anyway, all the way to the bottom of the plate.
Then Sicarus stood, and stretched, and smiled.
"Up," he said. "We practice."
"I just ate."
"I know." The smile got brighter.
So they went through the town on the soft feet, the two of them, moving the way Sicarus had spent a year teaching him to move: present in a place without troubling it, a stealth that was really only attention, the practice of being somewhere completely. They ghosted a wall. They crossed a lane between two breaths of a cart. And the whole time Tonn's overloaded stomach heaved and lurched and filed formal complaints, and the whole time Sicarus watched him suffer with a bright, delighted, entirely unhelpful smile, pushing the pace past what a full man could comfortably hold.
Tonn did not remember, in that hour, that this had been his own lesson once. That years ago, in another country, it had been Tonn grinning while a younger, harder, more haunted Sicarus heaved through drills on a deliberately stuffed gut, learning the thing Tonn was teaching: the body will fail you at the worst hour, so you learn to work it failing. He'd forgotten. He had forgotten a great deal. So he just called his friend a sadist, and his friend's smile widened as if he'd been handed a gift, and that — that bright, easy, two-men-who-love-each-other cruelty — was the warmest the day would ever be.
Then the cry came.
Thin, and high, from down among the roofs. The particular sound of an infant in the kind of distress that is not hunger and is not cold. It cut across the town, and the town did not stop.
That was the thing Tonn heard under the sound, though it took him years to name it: the not-stopping. The woman at the well kept drawing. The cooper kept his hoop turning. The town knew that cry, had a place worn smooth for it the way the pillars were worn smooth, and went on, because it had learned there was nothing to be done, and the learning had cost it whatever stopping would have shown.
Tonn, bent double over his rebelling gut, half-saw it happen.
He half-saw Sicarus's smile go.
Not slowly. All at once — the brightness simply gone, like a lamp taken into another room, the loose hand at his side gone still. Half a heartbeat in which the man Tonn knew was not there, and someone else stood in his clothes and looked out through his face at the roofs. Then it passed, and Sicarus was moving, easy as ever, and Tonn registered it the way you register a cloud crossing the sun — felt the cold, didn't look up, dismissed it.
He would think of it again. Years on, in the worst and best moment of everything, he would think of nothing else. Not now. Now he straightened, swallowing hard, and said, "What was—"
"Scan it, Tonn." The voice had gone level and clean, the voice for when the world narrows. Sicarus was already facing the cry. "What are we working with."
Tonn knew that voice. His stomach stopped mattering. "Send for Sairaa," he said.
Sicarus had already sent.
She came back fast and small — small enough to slide between roofs without taking the sky with her, a sleek wrong shape the eye declined to hold — and the world opened the way it did when the three of them slid into the shared place. The merge. Sicarus arrived beside him the way he always did: spare, walled, a locked house with one lit window. Sairaa folded around them both, vast and warm and young. For a while they were a single thing with one set of eyes.
They turned the eyes on the baby.
You could push hard, fused like that — three of them, three hundred percent and change, and it was safe to spend it all, because none of it could cut. A scan doesn't break the air. A mending doesn't tear anything. Memory only ever snatched the hands that reached out to harm; she let you look as deep as you liked, so long as the looking never sharpened. So they looked all the way in, at full reckless depth, because they were allowed to.
And they saw it.
One whole leg of the little soul was gone. Not sick. Gone — given over, gray and still, held in the slow patient architecture of the rot, and the rot had its next move already laid. A fifth of a child, taken. Spreading while they watched, by increments, calm as arithmetic.
What should we do, Tonn.
It came through the merge without a mouth, but it was Sicarus, and it was a real question, handed over whole — handed the way you hand back a borrowed thing. Your call.
Tonn's whole self recoiled, because he understood the question. He knew what was done, in this world, for a soul a fifth eaten and a fifth more going by the hour. He knew the word for it, and the word was a knife, and the thing the knife was for was a baby, and everything in him stood up and said no. No. That's the one thing we don't—
How do we save it, Sicarus went on, level, without weight, laying the cards face up because they were the only cards. What method. Two days, perhaps, before the molt takes the rest. Then the spore-stage. Then it opens — and after that every second isn't a fifth, it's everything, and it isn't a child anymore, it's the thing that hunts the next child. A pause, in the warm vast quiet. Two days. Less, every second we stand here. Your call.
And Tonn looked — at the gray leg, the patient line of it, the two days — and felt the no in him turn over, slowly, like soil.
Because the body was already lost. He saw that now, all the way to the floor of it, the way the merge won't let you unsee. The molt was coming regardless. The rot owned the flesh, and the flesh would open, and no version of the next two days ended with the body alive. What was left to decide was the soul — the four-fifths still whole, still the child, still there — and whether it went into the spore-stage screaming and was lost entire, or was cut free now, clean, while there was enough of it left to carry home.
The cut was not the killing. The cut was the catching.
Save the child and cut the child's soul had been, the whole time he'd been refusing to read it, the same sentence.
"...Do it," Tonn said, and the words came out of him like something torn out. "Catch it. Before the molt. Do it."
He felt Sicarus already moving — the cold sure work beginning in the shared place — and Tonn looked away, into Sairaa's warmth, because he could not watch even this. Even knowing what it was.
The crying stopped.
That was all. The high thin sound, cut off mid-breath, and somewhere under the roofs a held soul — four-fifths of a child — came loose into the small bright trap that hummed at Sicarus's belt. Another half-soul, carried. Bound for the one place that might yet be made into a heaven for it. The crying stopped, and the town did not notice that either. The town was practiced at the stopping too.
The merge let go. The world came back to its ordinary size, and stood there, being ordinary, as if ashamed of itself.
Sicarus wiped one tear off his own face with the back of his hand, fast, the way a man brushes off a fly. There and gone. Already turning away. One.
Tonn was on his knees.
He didn't remember arriving there. He was sobbing — the full-body kind, the kind that comes up from under the stomach and uses all of a man — and the stomach, the good hour, the four-too-many, gave it all up at once. He heaved until there was nothing left of the best hour of his life, until he was wrung to a shell, and the sobs kept on with nothing left to carry, and then exhaustion came up under him like dark water and took him where he knelt. Out. Gone. Face toward the dust of the lane.
Sicarus stood over him a while.
And then — at a cost, visibly at a cost, though there was no one to see it but a whale — he crouched, and put his hand on the sleeping boy's head.
Just set it there. Hesitant. Held.
He had never been a good toucher. There was a reason, and it was the worst reason there is: that long ago, when his hands had gone out to the people he loved, the people he loved had died of it, because that was what his hands had been made for. The lesson had gone down into the meat of him — touch is the thing that cuts — and he had spent a long life not reaching for anyone, because reaching was how you killed.
He reached anyway. He kept his hand on the boy's head against everything the hand believed, and nothing happened. No one died. The boy slept, and breathed, and the hand lay there, warm, harmless, learning a thing it had never once been permitted to learn.
And Sairaa, low and unseen above the lane, was furious.
She could not have told you all of why. She didn't think in the long clean lines the men used, in plans and stations and the names of things; she thought the way a creature thinks that loves with its whole body. And her whole body knew this: her boy was face-down in a lane, emptied; and this one — this gentle one, this soft new Tonn she had grown around like the reef grows around a wreck — this one she would not get to keep if they kept doing this to him. She could feel the other one down there, under the good one. The that. The hard old thing, waiting in the cracks they kept cutting. He better not turn into that. She had said it before, half a joke, let's not bring the other one back — and here they were with the chisels out, and she was so angry she could hardly hold her shape.
She decided, with tremendous seriousness, that tomorrow she would put a gravity-well on Sicarus's foot and leave it there all day. Let him walk around bobbing, dignified as a cork, and know exactly why.
Sicarus felt her fury land on him, the way you feel weather.
He didn't argue with it. He didn't have the standing. He crouched in the dust with his hand on the sleeping boy's head, in the town that didn't stop, an hour from the falls at the warm rim of the only world there was, and took her anger the way he would someday take the whole world's: in silence, all of it, keeping none of it off himself.
"Sorry, Sairaa," he said, to the air, to the whale, to the boy, to nobody.
"I'm trying to be gentle. I promise."
[Three years pass.]