Photo by LericDax
PART TWO
Now:
“So it’s true, then, that the Fae had no homeworld? They lived on Servitor ships?” The Gertan girl – she seemed so young! – looks at Clare quizzically. “Or… I guess that means they lived in Servitors? Since the ships are Servitors?”
“Not all of them. Well, some of them – like Bram – believe that they came originally from the magical world of Tír na nÓg. Where magic worked and they could fly using their vestigial wings.”
“That just sounds like religion? I mean, we had legends of Tír na nÓg back on Kuru.”
Clere chuckles. “So did we, on Earth. I bet you had legends of faeries too.”
The Gertan aide looks thoughtful, rummages in her box, and starts taking notes. Then she stops. “Then where did they come from?”
Clere shrugs.
Then:
“There, suture it good and tight.” The old crone pointed her bony finger at one edge of the cut on her leg. Blood oozed past the stitches, and her skirt was flung immodestly up her thigh, but she didn’t seem to care.
Shae grit her teeth and pushed the needle through the crepey skin. It tore when she pulled the thread tighter. The old woman winced.
Shae flung the sewing kit down. “This is ridiculous. There has to be a better way.”
Rosmerta stared at her. “What better way? We’re out of ointments, child.”
“It’s going to get infected, you know that.”
Rosmerta tsk’ed. “And if it does, I’ll catch the blood fever, and I’ll set out some offering to the spirits of the ever night, and I’ll sing my way through the veil.”
Shae sat back on her heels. “And if it does, I’ll be cleaning up your piss and wiping your arse and then dragging your stinky body to the nearest disposal chute.”
“Ah, don’t do so poorly by me, Shae! Drop me in a recycling vat, please, let me return to the cycle of nature.”
Shae sighed exasperatedly. “What nature? We live inside a giant robot that doesn’t care we’re alive.”
Rosmerta’s eyes narrowed. “Oh, they care. It is part of the Bargain.”
Shae kept her face impassive. “Of course, the great Bargain struck with the Old Ones.”
“Yes!” Rosmerta said, drawing herself up. For a moment she looked like the witch from the House of Magic that she once was, before dwindling away to frailty. “The Servitors keep us all alive, because that was the Bargain struck with their masters.”
“And what we did we give those masters, in this bargain, eh? Because if I’m to believe these bedtime stories, we must have struck a deal. We are bound by bargains, aren’t we? Isn’t that another part of all these old stories?”
Rosmerta looked at her, then came to a decision. “Here, help me up.” Shae got under the old Fae’s arm, and Rosmerta grabbed her walking stick. It was a prized possession, made of actual wood and worn smooth with handling. “Let’s go.”
“Where?”
“It’s time you understood some of the House of Magic.”
The paths through the Servitor ship were dark, because they did not need light to follow their programming. Rosmerta led Shae on an unerring journey, up levels, past huge empty spaces where drones floated in endless zipping rows on endless inscrutable journeys. She led her past cathedrals of circuitry that glowed in colors Shae could not name. They stepped over a river of liquid that folded their souls as they passed over it, like fingers running along the inside of their spines.
The whole way, the stitches came loose, and the leg bled more, and Rosmerta limped more and moved more slowly.
“We should go back,” Shae said. “I’ll never find my way home if you can’t guide me.”
Rosmerta cackled. “Just follow the trail of blood, my dear! But worry not, we are here. This is our chamber of mysteries on this ship.”
And there past the doorway, was the dazzle.
Shae hadn’t seen it since she was a child and was orphaned – and never like this. The glittering black velvet and spray of gemstone stars. The diffuse tendrils of heated gases billowing in cosmic winds. The room was a semi-circle, with vast windows onto space.
Standing around the room were Servitor types she had never seen before. Some were shiny and clean, and some were rusty. They had blades for feet and vicious corkscrews for fingers; antennae like insects and energy pulse cannons as forearms. Some hovered folded into balls, and others loomed, frozen mid-gesture.
“The House of Magic tries to keep the memory of our magicks from Tír na nÓg alive. But none of it works here.”
“Because magic isn’t real,” Shae said sourly. All this mysticism talk was ruining her amazement at the view. She gingerly walked past all the immobile Servitors. They were powered down, and she had learned early in her life to recognize when the robots were blind to her passage. When she reached the windows, she laid her palms and the tip of her nose against the window and stared into the abyss.
“None of it works here,” Rosmerta said. “But any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
And with that she took her cane and rapped it smartly across the head of one of the Servitors.
Shae turned in horror. “What are you doing?!?” She ran towards Rosmerta, but the old woman waved her off. It was too late anyway, as light flickered on under the joints and in the oddly shaped face of the Servitor. Limbs reconfigured with sine wave slides and servo smoothness, and the vast head turned.
“Organic,” the Servitor said. His voice was metallic, and Shae shivered. They talk?
Rosmerta inclined her head. “Servitor. I invoke the Bargain.”
“There is no justification. Statistical models show that a sustainable population of your species exists on many worlds.”
Rosmerta calmly said, “Our local communal knowledge store is at risk of criticality threshold loss. Information transmission must be permitted to preserve cultural identity, per the Bargain.”
The Servitor paused. “Localized knowledge of historical data is not critical to maintaining species level knowledge.”
“Our social structure requires one node to maintain privileged data for each established population center.”
The Servitor nodded. “This is in our data store. Clarify the risk.”
Rosmerta hiked up her skirt, and extended her leg. “This node is at risk of neural collapse, in the event of contamination by foreign organisms causing systemic collapse.”
The Servitor extended one of its impossibly jointed arms, then extended a projector digit from its forearm and played a beam over Rosmerta’s leg. “Organic entity is correct that invasive species have begun colonization.”
Rosmerta said again, “I invoke the Bargain. I must have time to transmit knowledge to a new node according to our traditions.”
“Oral transmission is inefficient. If this younger organic is the destination node, we could simply copy your neural net and overwrite.”
Shae shrank back. She couldn’t quite follow the conversation, but that didn’t sound good.
Rosmerta shook her head. “Not acceptable within our cultural norms.”
“Very well. We offer a solution.” The servitor extended his arm towards Rosmerta’s head. Once extended, the forearm unfolded into a fan of six hyperprojectile cannons, and they began to spin around his arm. As they sped up, they charged up with an eerie glow.
And as Shae screamed, the Servitor vaporized Rosmerta’s head. Then he vaporized the rest of her.
As he did it, Shae kept screaming, eyes shut, weeping, curled into a ball on the floor. She braced herself for the heat of a beam, for the sensation of molecular disassembly. She screamed until a hand came down on her shoulder. “Hush, girl.”
It was Rosmerta’s voice.
Shae opened her eyes. The Servitor was quiescent once more. There was a carbonized shadow on the floor. And outside the windows, peaceful endless space floated as it always had.
“What… how…?”
Rosmerta grinned. “The House of Magic never has figured out how to make our spells work here. But we have learned something of the magic of the Old Ones, and how to make the Bargain work for us. This, we call ReLifing.” She looked better than before, less drawn, less ill. She tugged up her skirt and showed up her unblemished leg. “See?”
Shae looked at the grinning old woman, and was suddenly furious. “You mean, you have had healing here this whole time? You have had the ability to bring back the dead? Like those children’s mother?”
The grin faded from Rosmerta’s face.
“You mean you could have saved my parents?” Shae was weeping now, pounding her fists against the old woman’s chest.
“Hold, child,” Rosmerta said, and took her in an embrace. “It is time that you heard some difficult truths. This is not truly power. We exist by sufferance, and by the will of vanished gods. We can rules-lawyer at the edges of the Bargain, but not much more. And this, I will teach you.”
And with that, Rosmerta and Shae talked into the night, and Shae learned what was traded by the Fae, how to bargain with the Servitors, what became of the Old Ones, and, some say, she learned the location of lost Tír na nÓg.
She also called Rosmerta a fucking asshole at least five times.