PIZLO was moody. To be fair, if anyone on all of Barsk had a right to stew in his own juices or rail against the injustice of daily life it was Pizlo. But the boy wasn’t cranky for his own sake. Never having known fairness, he rarely noticed its absence. Rather, he felt bad for the Archetype of Man, whose nefshons he had just dismissed after the machine had filled his head to bursting. For years, Pizlo had been listening to its stories, thousands upon thousands of them ranging from anecdotes to epics. Most of the stories involved men and women, young and old, but hints here and there throughout the tales had made it clear that those words meant something different to whomever had first told those stories. And some of the stories included beings who were clearly not men and women, but animals that weren’t animals because they were smart and could speak. Sapient. Animals that were sapient, but still weren’t men and so weren’t like him. Pizlo had grappled with that for a long while because he couldn’t wrap his thoughts around it. People were sapient, not animals. But the heroes in the machine’s stories were mostly just one kind of people. Even the Fant had two kinds of people, Eleph and Lox. But not the people in the stories. Maybe that’s why they were all gone. Maybe that’s why they hadn’t recognized what they had made when creating their Archetype of Man.
That the Archetype had produced nefshons was the only proof Pizlo needed to see two points as incontrovertible: first that it had been both alive and sapient. Maybe not from the moment of its awakening, but certainly during most of the long span of its inorganic machine life. It had spent the majority of that span with its systems powered down to a dormancy that by comparison made the paralysis of mortal sleep like running fast enough to walk on wind. So that was one thing. The other was that it possessed wisdom. Its knowledge outstripped even Jorl, who often seemed like he’d read and understood everything. The Archetype didn’t simply know all its lore, it was the embodiment of it. A miracle storyteller and teacher.
It amazed Pizlo that people had created it, and he wondered if they’d really understood what they’d done, what a miracle to have built sapience into a machine. And yet, despite that miracle, its creators had cheated it as well.
The Archetype lacked agency. It had never once initiated any action. Always it waited upon inquiry. According to Jorl its last words before being physically destroyed had delineated its pedigree and qualifications, its tone imploring the Patrolers who had stumbled upon it to use it. Instead, they’d denied it without knowing what they’d extinguished. But even that pointless, willful act of annihilation didn’t upset the boy. Rather it was the cruelty that the Archetype of Man’s long vanished makers chose to imbue it with so much insight while denying it even a hint of free will.
If knowledge was power—as Jorl had taught Pizlo with endless examples—how could such power exist without will? How could will exist without accountability? Accountability without integrity? And so, back again to the fundamental question, how might a person—ancient hero from Before or Fant abomination such as himself—how could any of them even conceive of integrity without agency? More simply, how could the Archetype’s makers be capable of such majestic creation and so stupid at the same time?
As often happened when he used koph, Pizlo felt both frantically alert and yawnishly sleepy. In just such a state he’d wandered along the hidden pathways that were his private routes, pausing at a concealed spot above a favored park where he could watch people come and go without being noticed himself. The drug he’d ingested to speak with the Archetype still buzzed in him. The people in the park each shone with their own golden wrapping of particles. This section of the park held one of Keslo’s public mazes, a shadow-laced space constructed of winding walkways cunningly separated by translucent screens. Fant making their way through adjacent portions of the maze saw their fellows only as questing shadows on the screens, the sound of their laughter and conversation seeming to come from ever-changing distances. The maze offered little challenge except to the youngest of children, and among its many twists and turns were alcoves with comfortable cushions, pairs of chairs and gaming tables, and the occasional bit of artwork appropriate for a span of contemplation. Pizlo’s perch had sufficient elevation that he could see down into the maze. Seniors strolled in unhurried steps, young lovers slipped through for a moment’s private caress, and some wandered at ease in a needed break from the demands of the day. He liked to watch people meander along the paths, much as he had always studied the progress of insects about their day, seeking larger patterns of purpose in the actions of individuals. People weren’t so different. Sometimes he would guess at the identity of the person beneath a particular nefshon cocoon and banish that individual’s particles from his perception to see if he was right.
Muzzy with sleep, moments passed before he recognized one of the gleaming figures in the maze, not just as a resident of Keslo that he’d passively watched for years. Some familiar movement beneath the glowing gold identified her as Dabni. Pizlo dismissed his awareness of the active nefshons blanketing everyone around him, now seeing the men and women in the maze with normal eyes. Was Dabni taking a break from work? But why? Why would anyone want a break from working in a bookstore. That seemed as alien as growing tired of the taste of air or wistful for the ability to fan someone else’s ears.
Almost he left his spot, knowing that while Rina’s mother didn’t like him much, she had been working hard at it for years now. At her daughter’s urging, she and Rina had prepared treats for him, and more substantial meals besides, leaving them on the sill of an open window of his own mother’s house. Dabni would even chat with him now, albeit grudgingly, and almost always about books he’d read. She sometimes set aside books for him where he might snatch them up when no one was looking. He always took care of them, handling them more delicately than the volumes from Jorl’s collection—which were meant to show that they’d been read—and returned them within a tenday, nearly pristine and fit to be sold in her shop without anyone knowing they’d been touched, let alone read, by the island’s abomination.
It would be easy to scramble to another branch, use a bit of rope to swing into position and drop into her path within the maze. It would surprise her, but there had always been that about Dabni that caused her to recover quickly. If he encountered her in the maze she’d probably make some clever remark or joke about it. That was when he liked her most. He stretched and grinned, shrugging off sleepiness to do this thing when he followed the thought to its end and stopped himself. As fine as it might be to startle Dabni, once in the maze he’d have to run its course to reach an exit. From his vantage point he knew it would require him to startle several other Fant, and in their panic they could well tear through a panel, injuring the maze and possibly themselves. And where was the integrity in that? Right. Instead, he watched Dabni, much as he had been watching the other people enjoying the maze this day, each in their own way, whether or not it all served some larger purpose.
He tracked her progress, around the grand arc that defined the outermost edge to the left of where she’d entered. He watched as she passed four separate chances to slip through openings in the screens and delve deeper into the maze. Instead she stayed her course, completing the arc to where it branched off in three directions, two of which branched again twice more to wend further into the maze. She ignored both of these and instead took the third route. It progressed in an ever narrowing spiral that culminated in a quiet alcove outfitted with a broad cushion. At the precise center of the spiral the maze’s designer had placed a simple glass art installation that invited contemplation. It was the nature of the spiral’s end that one could see the shadowy forms of other travelers in the maze coming their way through several layers of screens well before they reached them.
The scene caused Pizlo’s thoughts to turn again to the Archetype of Man and the shadow shapes that existed beneath its own translucent panes, vague and indistinct, as if the men and women of its stories constantly rose and fell inside its cubical body. Comparing the two images in his mind, he wondered what role mazes played in the hero’s journey. There’d been the one about the man with the ball of string that the Archetype had told him years ago. He’d liked that one because the hero had traveled from island to island, like a Fant on Barsk might. The other details, especially the ending, escaped him though.
He had sufficient koph left in his system that he toyed with the idea of summoning his dead tutor again just to rehear the tale’s end. That notion fled his mind in an instant as a very different thought caught his attention.
Dabni had settled herself on the waiting cushion. She held one hand up in front of her face, brought the tip of her trunk a short distance from it, and all at once held aloft a span of golden thread. It ran from her grasp through the walls of the maze some distance to connect with a young Eleph, one of a pair girls, both clad in the fashion of another island. They looked little older than him, teenage sweethearts stealing kisses from one another as they strolled hand in hand.
But though he’d set aside his awareness of either Eleph’s nefshon swaddling, there could be no doubt about the thread that ran straight as a trumpet cry from the one Eleph girl to Dabni, piercing the intervening maze panels without effect. The thread was all of nefshons! He could see it.
But … how could Dabni do that? Isolate a thread, from a living person? And did that mean she was a Speaker like he was? Like Jorl? He’d never mentioned it, not once. And why would she work in a bookstore if she could summon the dead? Except … that wasn’t what she was doing, or he’d have seen her conversant, just as anyone receptive to the effects of koph could see the working of another Speaker. And if she wasn’t Speaking, then … what was she doing?
While he watched, Dabni raised her other hand and a glittering spherical lattice of gold appeared. Pizlo gasped at the sight of it. He knew it didn’t exist in the real world because the brightness of it didn’t hurt his eyes. The thing—like a gleaming fractal puzzle ball—was made of nefshons, and yet even from this distance he could tell its pieces didn’t belong together, not like the summoned bits of a conversant’s construct all were of a kind. Every piece of this thing felt different from every other. As he watched, Dabni added the thread she’d drawn from one of those girls, somehow both breaking it off from its source and tying it into the structure she held. The thread winked out of existence. It happened so fast that almost, almost Pizlo believed it a trick of the light. Nefshon threads? Constructs made from many different people’s particles? Such things couldn’t be. But then another thread winked into existence. Again Dabni held one end in her hand, the other stretching through the maze to the other of the pair of girls. Moments later, this too vanished while the construct in her hand gained a minute bit of complexity. Dabni’s trunk kept moving, the tip dancing near the hand that had held the threads. And that quickly, she held a third one, this time the other end connected to an elderly Lox a bit further in the maze who sat by a gaming table, pieces arrayed in a complex game that he seemed to be playing both sides of. Then that thread vanished and in the next instant another appeared, running from Dabni to yet another person. And each time she added something of the thread to the object in her hand.
It didn’t make any sense, not to be able to do that to nefshons, nor to tie herself, however briefly, to living Fant, nor to do so without their knowledge, and least of all to build something from the collection of them. But judging by the construct, she’d been doing it for a long time. Too long. It hurt to think of it, but whatever she held contained particles from millions and millions of different people, many times the population of the entire planet. Whatever any of it meant, Pizlo knew of no other Speaker on Keslo who did such things. Nor in all of Jorl’s books had he read about anyone anywhere else on Barsk that could. And how long had she been able to do it?
It didn’t appear to have any effect on the Fant on the other end of the threads. Pizlo rolled his confusion around in his head a while. This wasn’t like a new piece of learning that he’d not quite mastered yet, but rather the realization that someone he believed to be solid and constant in his life was not the person he thought he knew. Dabni, who shared his mother’s house, who had married his mentor and birthed the first person in the world who had never thought “abomination” when seeing him, that woman had transformed into someone else. As he watched, she dropped her hands and smiled. The fractal ball vanished, like it had never been.
But it had, all of it was real, and that changed everything, didn’t it?