by D. J. Butler
“So Wayland devotes Healing resources to one Urbane at the expense of another,” Deek said by way of example.
“You must consider the System and your relationship to it with every action you take,” the Magister said, which sounded like agreement. “And with every action you take, the System will be considering you.”
“The System’s not a person,” Deek added quickly. “It’s just a collection of interacting things. Institutions, individuals, devices.”
“Is it so obvious to you,” the Magister asked in return, her voice quiet and subdued, “that there is a difference?”
“Of course you have to consider the System,” Wayland said. “If you commit crimes against it, you get killed.”
Magister Zarah was quiet again for a while. “The System,” she said slowly, “kills to protect itself, and all the people who are its charges. Sometimes it has to kill criminals. Sometimes it has to kill the wicked, or the weak.”
“What do you mean, sometimes?” Cheela grinned like she was imagining herself as a Hangman, and enjoying it.
“Sometimes the System has to kill good people,” Dyan said, reaching the logical conclusion of Zarah’s line of thought. “And the strong.”
They rode in silence for a long time after that. Off to their right, they passed occasional crumbling walls of brick, and long stretches of shattered grayish pavement.
Buza System lay on the north side of the broad Treasure Valley, along a river and pressed against the lowest hills of the Jawtooth Mountains. To its south the land rose steadily, passing through a broad gate between a westward-jutting ridge of the Jawtooths and the easternmost of the Wahai Mountains. Beyond that gate lay a sea of grass and sage that was bright green for approximately one month of each spring, and otherwise lay yellow and gray under a hot sun, fit only for jackrabbits, coyotes and antelopes.
Out in this wilderness lay Ratsnay Station, the Creche-Leavers’ destination. Ratsnay Station wasn’t beyond the wilderness—as far as Dyan knew, nothing lay beyond the wilderness, and the entire world lay blighted, burnt and devastated—and there was no way to get through it that didn’t involve a hard ride. Outriders, Cheela repeatedly informed the others, made this ride in a single, casual day.
As the sun fell below the jagged shoulders of the Wahai, casting golden-red shadows through the dry grass, Magister Zarah called for a halt. “There’s a way station on that knob of earth,” she told them, indicating the bulbous end of a long ridge that rose above a loop of track a mile long.
“I’ll check it out,” Cheela volunteered. She straightened her back and raised her heels to race off, but Dyan noticed that she still looked at the Magister, as if for permission.
Zarah nodded. “Go with her,” she said, nodding to Shad.
Shad shrugged at Dyan and she smiled back, but he didn’t look terribly bothered.
“How did you do it?” Dyan whispered to Wayland as the Outriders-designate rode ahead.
“Do what?” His eyes sparkled.
“Get into the girls’ dormitories while we were sleeping.”
Deek snorted.
“I didn’t,” Wayland admitted.
He looked so sincere Dyan almost believed him. “Then who did?” she asked.
“I went in the night before, during dinner.”
Dyan considered. “That can’t be right. The rooms would have smelled like oat porridge all night.”
Deek grinned. “Not if you sealed the porridge in plastic bags that would slowly dissolve through the night.”
Dyan laughed out loud. “You imp! Where did you get dissolving plastic bags?”
Deek laughed too, and almost fell off his horse. “If only you were a Mechanical, I could tell you!”
The three of them rode slowly up a gravelly trail that wound around the hill to its top, pulling ahead of Magister Zarah as their chuckles dissolved into comfortable silence. They arrived long after Cheela and Shad, who had split up and climbed the slope at different points, converging on the top of the low peak at the same moment. The crown of the rise held a chest-high log stockade, just like every other way station of Buza System Dyan had ever seen, and she expected, cresting the knob, to see Shad and Cheela tethering their horses and preparing a fire.
Instead, when she pushed up onto the gold-grassy space beside the stockade, she saw Shad and Cheela standing their horses shoulder to shoulder, gazing across the plains at the setting sun.
Dyan felt profoundly unsettled. Distracted, she slackened her grip on her horse’s reins, and the animal skittered a few feet to one side. “Vixen,” she muttered.
“Ahem,” Wayland cleared his throat from behind Dyan. “I think we are still not allowed Love-Matches. And if we are, fellow Crechelings, I should tell you that I’ve had my eyes on Shad for some time.”
Deek gained the summit, followed a few moments later by Magister Zarah.
“What about it, Magister?” Wayland asked. “Do Cheela and Shad get a Love-Match as a reward for their scouting work?”
“As a reward for their scouting work,” Zarah said, her eyes shadowed pits in the twilight, “Cheela and Shad get to sleep sheltered from the wind. As, hopefully, do I.”
The word on the Magister’s lips made Dyan realize that she was right; at this height, the wind cut across the hilltop cruelly. With the sun down, the desert would soon be cold. She shivered and pulled her riding coat closed across her chest.
“Actually,” Cheela said, “as an Outrider, I would suggest—”
“Outrider-designate.” Zarah was calm, but her voice held authority.
Cheela looked down, abashed. “Outrider-designate,” she agreed. “As an Outrider-designate, I would like to suggest that we camp further along the ridge.”
“Oh?” Zarah arched an eyebrow at Dyan’s Crechemate.
“We should light a fire in the stockade,” Cheela continued, “and camp without one ourselves. That way, if any outlaws or renegades or runaways approach us in the night, they’ll be drawn to the fire and not our real position.”
“Should we be worried about outlaws, renegades, and runaways so close to Buza Station?” the Magister challenged her.
“We should beware of outlaws, renegades, and runaways everywhere, Magister,” Cheela said. She had a childish, submissive, respectful expression on her face that made Dyan irrationally, for just a moment, think how satisfying it would be to kick the other girl’s teeth in. “Being close to Buza System, or even in the Treasure Valley, is no guarantee of safety.”
Zarah nodded. “I’m pleased to see you’ve paid attention to at least some of your lessons,” she said. “Lead on.”
Cheela led the way eagerly, and Shad turned his horse to follow her.
Dyan snapped her reins to urge her own mount forward, and when she thought she was out of earshot of the others she leaned in close to him and whispered. “You told her to say that. You’re the one with the wilderness skills. All she’s good at is killing things.”
Shad shrugged. “She wants to impress the Magister so much.” He didn’t look sorry in the slightest.
“You could impress Magister Zarah instead,” she suggested.
“Does it matter?” he asked, and spurred his horse onward.
“I thought …” Dyan floundered.
She couldn’t find the words, but of course it mattered. It mattered a lot. Yes, Shad was leaving the Creche, and Magister Zarah would no longer be his Magister. Still, she was a Magister, and he should want her good opinion.
Also, Dyan thought bitterly, why Cheela? If he wanted to help someone impress the Magister, why not her? Why not help Dyan look good? Had she been mistaken about Shad and his feelings for her?
She wanted to shout at him, but she knew it would be the act of a child, and she didn’t want to be a child anymore. So instead she sat on her horse and watched his back as he rode up the ridge after Cheela, looking for a campsite that would be out of the wind and in sight of the hilltop stockade.
***
Chapter Three
“They are all celebrating the harvest,” Magister Zarah said.
The party of Creche-Leavers rode down a long crackling slope of autumnal grass towards a stockaded settlement that must be Ratsnay Station. It squatted, bristling with the sharpened tips of pine logs, on the dam-end of a reservoir that shimmered silver in the late afternoon sun. All around the water, smoke began to trickle upward from large piles of wood.
Dyan hadn’t said a word to Shad the night before, and only such words as were necessary during the day’s ride that had brought them here. She felt saddlesore from the ride, cheated by Shad’s sudden willingness to care so much about Cheela, and terrified by a mounting sense that to be an adult was to be very, very lonely. The other settlements they’d passed, all tiny, distant from the road and huddling behind protective walls, had only added to the sensation. The ruins dotting the wilderness made her feel even worse.
“Many of them are also celebrating the Selection.”
“What is that, like picking the best of the crop?” Deek wanted to know. So did Dyan. They’d all known they were to participate in the Selection after the Hanging, but no one had ever explained what the Selection was.
“Yes,” the Magister said, “if you mean the crop of new adults.”
“It must be like the Creche-Leaving, then,” Dyan intuited, happy for anything to clutch at that wasn’t her own feelings.
“Much like it,” Zarah agreed.
“Is there a Hanging?” Cheela asked.
“You’ll see.” The Magister spurred her horse forward, moving ahead of the Creche-Leavers for the first time. “You’ll do more than see.”
Two men rose from the grass. They were quick; one moment they hadn’t been there, and the next, they were, springing up off their bellies. Dyan shrank back, startled at the suddenness of their approach and at their appearance. They wore leather shirts, stitched with row upon row of short animal bones, to make a sort of breastplate. Similar thick pads of leather covered the front of their legs and their arms, and their faces were painted with streaks of brown and ochre. Even without the paint and the leather, the men were deeply browned by the sun, much deeper than the people Dyan was used to seeing in the System.
They pointed long spears at the Magister, who brought her horse to a halt.
“Name yourself!” the taller man hissed through yellowed teeth.
“That armor wouldn’t even slow down a bola,” Cheela sneered.
“True,” Shad said, “but it might help against a rock or a knife.”
“What kind of idiot would attack them with a rock?”
“Or an animal’s claws,” Shad continued. “I don’t think they’re trying to protect themselves against us. I think they’re armored against robbers and runaways. Remember, they aren’t allowed bows, and they don’t have whips or bolas. They make do with what they can get.”
Dyan tried to imagine that Shad was sticking up for her against Cheela, but failed, and felt worse for having tried.
Magister Zarah held up her medallion with casual, deliberate speed. “We are here for the Selection,” she said.
The men looked the Creche-Leavers up and down, grunted, and then stepped aside. “Magister,” one of them said, tucking his chin to his chest in a little bow.
Zarah led them towards the water, and the people milling about the bonfires. As they drew closer, Dyan saw food and drink in abundance, makeshift tables created by laying boards on trestles, and musicians sitting on sawn logs and putting instruments in their laps. She saw dogs in abundance, playing among the celebrating people, and cats holding themselves aloof on rooftops and in the centers of tables.
A young man stood near the stockade gate wearing a black Magister’s cloak.
“Children,” Magister Zarah said. “Join the festivities. Stay close to the fires, and be careful what you drink—the Landsmen favor intoxicating beverages.”
“Ew.” Deek made a sour face.
“They work hard,” Zarah said, “and live lives to be pitied. Beer is a small mercy.”
“Yes, Magister,” Dyan said along with the others, bobbing her head and turning to go.
“Dyan,” Zarah said, and trapped her eyes with her own steely gaze. “Come with me.”
Dyan followed Zarah and the other Magister inside the walls of Ratsnay Station. She kept a respectful silence, but the new Magister noticed her and introduced himself.
“Magister Stanton,” he said. He was taller than Shad and thinner than Deek and he walked stooped over, as if he was inspecting the ground at every step over the five-armed medallion bouncing off his narrow chest. His face was very, very serious.
“Crecheling Dyan,” she returned.
“Magister-designate Dyan,” he contradicted her.
Her heart skipped a beat. “How do you know?” she asked. “Do you … does everyone know?”
He laughed, the serious lines exploding into a tangle of mirth. “Nothing so terrifying as all that, Magister-designate. But my colleague has invited you into the conversation with us, which she would not do unless you were Magister-designate.” He squinted at her fiercely, like an owl examining a mouse in its burrow. “Or perhaps a Cogitant-designate, though that would be a rare thing indeed.”
“Magister,” she squeaked, and then Magister Stanton brushed aside a hanging leather flap and led Zarah and Dyan inside a long one-story building.
It must be the schoolhouse. Crude benches and simple writing tables dominated the space in rows, and a great writing slate hung from the front wall, chalked with columns of numbers and model sentences. At the back of the room stood a carved wooden statue of a robed woman, her hands clasped together in front of her.
“Pay attention,” Zarah told her. “You may be wiping snot from Crechelings’ noses next week, it’s true. On the other hand, you may be in a settlement like this one, wiping snot from the noses of Landsmen children.”
From a table at the front of the room, Stanton picked up a small stack of cards and handed them to Zarah.
She leafed through them, scrutinizing each closely but not showing them to Dyan. “It is impressive,” she murmured, “that their gene pool continues to throw up such intelligent specimens, even continuously thinned as it is.”
“What?” Magister Stanton looked slightly offended, or maybe shocked.
Zarah smiled thinly at him and tucked the cards away somewhere under her cloak. “I do not express doubt, Magister Stanton,” she said. “Only wonder. Is there anything I should worry about?”
Stanton frowned and recovered. “The boy Jak,” he said.
“Troublemaker?”
Stanton shook his head. “Smart. That family regularly produces smart children. His older sister was Selected.”
“You think he knows?”
“I think he suspects.”
Dyan did not follow the conversation at all, other than to understand that someone named Jak must be watched carefully.
“Very well. Come out, and show me the parents. Dyan, stay close to me.” Zarah inclined her head slightly to her fellow-Magister and left.
Evening’s shadow fell over the settlement and the festivities began in earnest. When Dyan reached the reservoir shore again, in Zarah’s wake, the air rang with the music of stringed instruments and thumped to the sound of sticks banged together or against hide drums. She passed Wayland and Deek at a table and saw the Healer-designate pressing a wooden cup into Deek’s hand.
“Try this one,” he said, grinning broadly.
Shad stood in a circle of Landsmen youth. The contrast between his fine coat and hat and their woolen cloaks and tunics was as stark as the difference between his lightly tanned skin and their nut-brown hides, but he grinned and cracked jokes. A pair of Landsmen girls edged closer to him in the group, smiling eagerly, until Cheela pounced on them, scattering them with bared teeth and, no doubt, some cutting comment that Dyan couldn’t hear.
Dyan tried to ignore her Crechemates and focus on the Magister. Stanton introduced Zarah to t
hree couples, one old woman, and a single burly man, each the parent or parents of one of the Landsmen youth who had been “Selected.” Dyan didn’t understand, but she knew that this was part of her own Calling, whether she was to follow in Zarah’s footsteps or in Stanton’s, so she tried to pay close attention. Each time, Zarah introduced herself as a Magister from Buza System. Their child, she said again and again, had been Selected. It was an honor, they should be proud. Also, since they wouldn’t see their child again after tomorrow, they should be certain to say appropriate farewells tonight.
As Magister Zarah turned away from the old woman, a stray wash of firelight showed Dyan tears sliding down her cheek.
The tears shocked her, but then the entire process was astonishing to Dyan. She knew as a matter of science that she had parents, two adult human who contributed separate haploid gametes to create her in her initial zygotic state, whether or not the two adults ever met. She had no idea if they had, or who they were. How could she? Dyan’s entire life to this moment had been the Creche and the Magisters, lessons about everything, and preparation for a Calling in the System.
A clapperless bell rung with a hard stick, insistent in its ding-ding-ding-ding-ding! silenced the musicians and made the revelers rotate and face in the same direction. Dyan realized that the bell had been rung almost in her ear, and when the Landsmen turned to look they were looking at her.
Along with the two Magisters and three old Landsmen, two women and a man.
“Children,” Magister Zarah called, and Dyan’s four Crechemates joined them, arraying themselves to stand in a line with Dyan behind their Magister. Deek wobbled a bit when he walked, and he smelled sour, like vinegar.
“This is Magister Zarah!” bellowed one of the Landsmen elders, a paunchy, bearded man. “She’s come from the System!”
An electric murmur ran through the crowd, mingling with the crackling sound of the bonfires.
“She has come for the Selection!” added the woman elder.
“Hear her!” chimed in their third colleague, a carrot-nosed man.
Zarah stepped forward, raising both hands over her head. In one, Dyan saw she held her glittering medallion of authority. In the other, she held the sheaf of cards Magister Stanton had given her.
