Thresholder

Mette got her debrief in the morning before they were set to go have breakfast.

“What do you mean you don’t care?” asked Mette when he was just about finished.

“If it’s not a thresholder, then it’s not thresholder business, which means that it’s not strictly speaking my business,” said Perry. “I guess I shouldn’t say that I don’t care, but another thresholder is eventually going to be my problem. A high-powered and possibly state-backed individual wiping the last vestiges of monarchy from the face of this world? That’s much less my problem. It’s arguably not a problem of any sort at all.”

“It goes against the self-professed culture,” said Mette. “If it is someone who’s state-backed — or inter-symboulion supported, I guess — then I would think it would be important for people to know. And if this is a criminal —”

“There are two things here,” said Perry, holding up his fingers. “First, what do we get out of fighting whoever is doing this, and second, what do they get out of the killing?”

“You don’t want to dispense justice?” asked Mette.

“Depends on what you mean by justice,” said Perry. “I still don’t have a good grip on what things were like before the takeover, aside from all the missing statues, plaques, artwork, things like that.” It was hard not to read ‘monarchism’ as being equivalent to capitalism, especially given how many of the problems seemed to be driven by an interest in profits and the benefits to the upper class.

“You haven’t been going to the meetings that I’ve been going to,” said Mette. “There are some executions scheduled for today.”

“Mmm,” said Perry. “For what?”

“General crimes against the commons,” said Mette. “From what I understand, it’s mostly people who were in positions of authority. There was a brief trial.”

“Jesus, it would pretty much have to be brief,” said Perry. He tapped his foot against the ground. “A new government expediting things as fast as they possibly can wouldn’t be able to do it that fast, you need time to gather evidence and make an argument.” He was used to trials taking ages.

“The timeframe wasn’t all that much shorter than our tribunals,” said Mette. “From what I saw though, it was a foregone conclusion.”

“You didn’t execute your oligarchs,” said Perry. He shook his head. “I keep forgetting that you were a part of an overthrow just like this.” He had seen the displaced people in the halls sometimes, older people who still lived aboard the Natrix, most of them wrinkled and with defensive posture or a haunted look on their faces.

Mette shook her head. “It’s so different I don’t think it makes sense to talk about them in the same breath,” said Mette. “On the Natrix … we knew everyone, you know? And it wasn’t the culture, it was a few leeches at the top. And no, we didn’t execute anyone, we just made them live like everyone else.”

Perry thought about that. “Do you object to the executions?” asked Perry. “Or just to the presumed sloppiness of the trial?”

“I don’t know,” said Mette. “They’re being executed for crimes that weren’t crimes. Or, I guess there were also crimes for some of them, things that the guards were paid to look the other way on, but there are others whose only crime was being at the top of an economic system.” The rule of law had been shaky in Berus, but there was a presumption that the law applied to everyone, even if that didn’t happen in reality.

“And you … care about this?” asked Perry.

“People are going to die today,” said Mette. She was staring hard at him. “More than twenty of them, killed by lantern light. It’s cruel, if nothing else.”

“The king had people killed in the same way,” said Perry. “It’s retribution.” He tapped his foot against the floor again. He was feeling restless. “You weren’t hoping that I would step in, were you?”

“No,” said Mette. “Even if you could beat off a lot of men and free the prisoners, I don’t know that it would help anything.”

“Let’s not just throw around the phrase ‘beat off a lot of men’ like that,” said Perry. Mette gave him a quizzical look, and he just waved his hand. “My concern is mostly with thresholding. There is some opponent out there somewhere.”

“That’s true,” said Mette. “Whether it’s this phantom you’re chasing or not. But how does it make sense if you’re going to say that you don’t care about their work, or if you support it?”

“I do care,” said Perry. “I mean, if I have to pick a side with every world I come into, then in this world I would pick the side of the socialists who have torn down the monarchy, at least unless there are some hidden omelas somewhere.”

“A what?” asked Mette.

“A — it’s a story from Earth, it’s not something I’ve seen or heard about, not something from the multiverse — the basic idea is that there’s a utopia that’s powered by the suffering of a small child or something,” said Perry. This was one of those moments he wished that he had access to information from his own home, rather than the alternate Earth. He would have loved to just share the story. But of course Richter’s Earth never had that story, so it existed only in Perry’s head.

“That doesn’t seem like a bad trade, to be honest,” said Mette.

“Well, not to you,” said Perry. “You had plenty of arduous child labor.”

“And you would be against this society if it were powered by a single suffering child?” asked Mette, cocking her head to the side.

“It’s complicated,” said Perry. “It’s one of the reasons that I liked the story, it was good fodder for talking about. It was philosophy, but not the kind of philosophy where you have to learn a bunch of made up terms just to come to grips with what some not-that-bright person thought about the world.” Perry had briefly been a philosophy major, and aside from the dismal career prospects, had felt some instinctive aversion when reading Foucault. “But yes, if we peeked inside one of those golden domes and saw that there was a weeping child who had been locked in there for their entire life …” Perry considered it. “I would think that some other kind of power source would be necessary.”

“I’ve been in one of the domes, there were no children,” said Mette. She had her arms folded across her chest. “But these are, as I understand it, metaphorical children. And the previous way of doing things was giving people irreversible scars, killing them, turning them into monsters, creating monsters in the oceans, and all that. It had its own suffering children, which weren’t at all metaphorical.”

“True,” said Perry.

“I want to leave this world a better place than it was when we got here,” said Mette. “I think that’s going to mean that you stop the enemy thresholder before lots of people die, and maybe it means that you help to take out the king who blew up the city we were staying in.”

“Possibly,” said Perry. He shouldn’t have said that he didn’t care. They could have avoided most of this conversation, which seemed to hinge on a single offhand mention that maybe the Case of the Kingkiller wasn’t anything that Perry needed to be inserting himself into. He did care, obviously, in the sense that it would probably be better for the world if there wasn’t a rogue killer out there violating the norms of transition from monarchy to a general commons.

“I’m glad you weren’t hurt,” said Mette.

“I didn’t even fight anyone,” said Perry.

“Still, I didn’t know what was going to happen,” said Mette. “I only knew that you were going to do something illegal in the dead of night. I thought there was a good chance I would read about some bloody violence at the castle in the papers the next morning, or that you would come limping back missing an arm.”

“There was nothing,” said Perry. “It was just recon, investigation, trying to see if we could find the answer.”

“Perry … I think I understand the world you come from,” said Mette. “I’ve read the Gratbook backward and forward, and I know it doesn’t have everything, and I know that the world it describes isn’t your world, but … it was a safe world. You didn’t have to worry about those things. You didn’t have people go out and then never come back.” She placed her hand on her chest. “In my world? We did what we could to make it safe, but there were missions that went far away from the Natrix, and sometimes people came limping back or not at all.”

“Well, I’m fine,” said Perry. “And once we get out into the country for this big project Moss has dreamed up, we’ll be safer. I’ll coat the whole place with listeners and we’ll know if anything is coming our way.”

“The Last King bombed civilians,” said Mette. “I don’t actually think we’re safe anywhere.”

“Then you can start working on defensive technologies, right?” asked Perry. “Radar or something like it.”

“Perry, they don’t have electronics,” said Mette. “Inventing it all from scratch, with only Marchand, and no way to print anything out except to dictate it to a servant … there were books in the shelf, but nothing that I would have credited too much. And it seems as though they put their boots on the throat of most technologies, if they don’t think it’s going to positively impact their lives, and that is the business of one of these very opaque councils.”

“Well, take it up with Moss, he seems like the guy who knows things,” said Perry. “And they are hiding technologies. We know that.”

Mette looked out the window. She didn’t seem mollified. “I’ll be glad to be out of the city,” said Mette. “I don’t really like it here. It’s oppressive.”

“Moss said we don’t have more than a day left,” said Perry. “It’ll be different in the country.”

~~~~

Perry wasn’t all that hot on executions, at least when carried out by the state. He was even less hot on public executions, which seemed like they created a carnival atmosphere of spectacle. A mass public execution was even worse.

He still went to go see it, mostly because Moss was going to see it through. Perry had seen his fair share of death, and didn’t think that it would affect him at all, but he did think that it was probably a bad way to start a society that’s trying to be better than the people who had come before.

The execution was held in one of the city’s large public squares, right in front of what had once been a cathedral but was now a part of the commons. The culture didn’t demand a wholesale rejection of religion, but the churches were often a part of the systems of power, the grandiose buildings a symptom of ‘monarchical thinking’. Men starved because of the labor used to build cathedrals, or at least that was the thinking. The windows of this one hadn’t been broken, and it towered above the square, making the hastily constructed stage look small and insignificant. The optics were kind of bad, Perry thought, and they would have done better to have set it up somewhere else, like a farm on the outskirts of town. He mentioned as much to Moss.

“Oh, this is where the old executions were held,” said Moss. “It’s the same method that the king used on traitors and dissidents. But I agree that the optics are bad. Of course, they would be bad no matter what. The fence-sitters are already frightened, killing a few people isn’t going to make that any better. And those are the people that you need to buy in, to be a part of the new systems, to not just hoard and wait, but to work. Fear isn’t a good motivator, hope is.”

Moss didn’t seem terribly disturbed by what they were about to witness, even if he had repeatedly voiced his disapproval for it. Velli was nowhere to be seen, and while Perry did spot a few familiar faces, it was mostly the two of them. Moss, given his stature, needed a better place to watch from, so Perry was obliged to follow him into a bakery and take up a place on the second floor balcony with the owner’s permission. It was a good view, but the angle wasn’t head-on.

“Mette has her doubts about the trial,” said Perry.

“Doubts are reasonable,” said Moss. “But most of those being killed today have clear crimes to their name. Optics, that’s the game, and if you’re going to do something like this, then you had better be sure that you’re not making a mistake. A single sympathetic victim sets the cause back by weeks, maybe months, and it’s entirely possible that one of these witnesses would go the rest of their lives believing that the culture is rotten to its core.”

“The culture believes in redemption,” said Perry. That was the general rule, anyway.

“Do you?” asked Moss.

“For some,” said Perry. “For others … there’s a sickness in the brain that some people have, and the most you can do for them is to lock them in a gilded cage where they can’t hurt anyone. That’s all well and good if you have the resources for gilded cages.”

“It’s a matter of resources, not morals?” asked Moss. He had a way of taking an academic tone, which Perry appreciated. It was a step removed from the topic, emotionless in a way that the fervent supporters of the Berusian symboulions were not.

“Moral calculus often comes down to resources,” said Perry. His translation snagged on ‘calculus’ a bit, and he was fairly sure the word that was chosen to match the intent wasn’t quite the same. “If you have limitless resources, then the gilded cages make a lot more sense than if people are starving. But of course in this case, I don’t really think it’s like that. I think it’s anger and a guttural desire for retribution. Not that it makes it right. From an objective perspective, like your own, I can see where this is a bad idea that will have bad consequences.”

“Mmm,” said Moss. “They’re starting. Are you apprised of the crimes they’ve been convicted of?”

“Not really,” said Perry. “Most of them were nobles. I figured that was enough.”

“You’ll see,” said Moss. “I can’t say that this is justice, but I understand where it comes from.”

The convicts — it was odd to think of them as that, but by the whims of a kangaroo court, they were — got marched up onto the stage. There were nineteen in all, less than Perry had heard there would be. They were all human, with more men than women, but the gender balance was less unequal than Perry had thought it would be given that men had held more positions of power in the now-former Kingdom of Berus. They weren’t in the makeup or fancy outfits that they surely would have had in their lives before this point, and a few had clearly been mistreated, or perhaps suffered at the hands of their guards when they tried to fight back. It was another optics failure, in Perry’s opinion. If you wanted to put on a show, you needed your oligarchs to look like oligarchs rather than stripped bare of their frippery and reduced to base humans. That might mean a waste of their fine clothes that were destined for the commons, but it would make for a better image.

“We are here today to do justice!” called a man on the stage. There were guards in masks, but this man was the only one without one. He was simply dressed, but clean cut and stage ready. They were some distance away, but his words were loud and clear, helped by the utter silence of the huge crowd. There were no microphones or speakers, of course, but there wasn’t even a megaphone. It was an impressive talent, to be able to address that large a group of people, though the utter silence was unnerving to Perry. He had expected there to be more whoops and jeers, or at least some scattered applause. The silence made the whole thing feel grim.

The convicts were manacled onto large metal structures that left them spread-eagled and facing their audience. The metal must have been costly, but Perry was pretty certain that this was a tool of the old king, rather than something that had been constructed by the rebels in the month or so they’d had control. Bits of rust attested to that.

A lantern was brought up on the stage with wheels attached to it. It had a large tube on it, which ended in a lens, tightly directing the beam of whatever would come out of it. Perry felt his stomach churn slightly, unexpectedly. When he had been given the choice, he had backed down from killing people who had no defenses against him. Generally speaking, anyway. Perhaps there was some argument that in his armor he sometimes killed people who were essentially no threat at all to him.

As he was thinking that, he saw that the woman from the airship was among those up on the stage. She had tried her best to convert him, thinking that his clear power meant he had monarchical sympathies. She had tried to kill him, and had been working with extremist murderers, and Perry thought she was overall guilty as sin … but he hadn’t been questioned by anyone, hadn’t had to give a statement, hadn’t so much as written a letter about what he knew. There was no actual doubt of her guilt, and a muddled version of the story of what happened on the airship was circulating, but the fact that no one had asked Perry made the whole thing smell of a miscarriage of justice.

It took Perry a moment to consider that perhaps Dirk Gibbons was responsible for no one asking Perry what had happened. It would probably be better for Perry not to have to give an account.

“These are extraordinary times,” said the man on the stage, who was apparently going to be running things. “What has happened in this month represents a correction from centuries of misrule, perhaps even thousands of years when Berus was not as it could have been. We were victims, martyrs, the downtrodden, and if they’d had their way, those in power would have seen that continue into perpetuity. The work of building a new society in the bones of the old one will be difficult, arduous work, which we are all happy to do.” There was applause at that, and the man smiled as he waited for them to finish. “But this too must be done.” A sweeping gesture indicated the soon-to-be dead. “We can talk of rehabilitation and a culture where people are not punished so harshly for their crimes, but these?” He cast a hand to the manacled men and women behind him. “These people have stained themselves. They can never be clean. Left alive, they would use their poison words to spread the pollution that has sunk deep down into their souls.”

He pulled the lantern over to the first man, who was muttering and turned away as though the lantern couldn’t hurt him if he wasn’t looking at it.

“This is the Third Marquis Wintergrave,” the emcee shouted. “He was rich beyond measure, with a house away from the city, far from the effluence his factories produced. He ate food that was painstakingly decontaminated while the farms were worked with machines that spread sickness. He paid good money to have his barristers argue with the king over the levels of effluence his machines could produce, and swayed the king toward accepting higher limits. There are hundreds of deaths on his head, thousands of maimings. He said, in his defense, that those who didn’t like it should leave this country, as though the effluence of the former kingdom was not spilling out into the oceans, coating the world, as if the tickets aboard a ship were not expensive, as though it wouldn’t mean uprooting your life and paying the so-called exit taxes the kingdom saw fit to impose.”

The emcee began to pace back and forth across the stage. The crowd was getting worked up, though they were still silent. Perry could see it mostly in their movements, like wheat rippling in the wind. They were trying to get closer, to see the face of the man about to be executed. They moved their hands involuntarily, as though their bodies were primed to wring the neck of the marquis.

“We will hear better defenses,” said the emcee. “We will hear, in my words, not theirs, how such people justify what they have done. The marquis has been chosen to be first because he was unapologetic, not even in the false belief that it would save him. He said that what he did was what anyone would have done. This man is a poisoner, and has declared, as his defense, that we are poisoners too. Yet these are not the extent of his crimes. When members of the nascent symboulion were attempting to gather information on the extent of the damage the lanterns had done, the marquis implored the king to do something. The attempt to gather information was deemed an ‘illegal census’, and fines were levied. The marquis then did his own study of the issue, and declared that there was little evidence to support that the lanterns were the cause of death. This, of course, was not declared an illegal census, or forbidden science, or anything of the sort.”

The emcee was moving more now, and Perry wasn’t sure how he was going to keep this up for another eighteen people. Surely it would get monotonous, though maybe he just thought that because he was from an era where a four minute video was beyond the attention span of most people. A two hour speech … well, someone was watching those in modern-day Earth somewhere, where it was probably an election year if Perry bothered to do the math. But mostly those were broken up into soundbites and headlines that paraphrased the thrust of the message. Through that lens, Perry found himself a bit appreciative of the medium of a long speech at a public gathering, if not the message.

Though as the marquis had his crimes read off, which were really more crimes of the entire society, Perry did find that it was working on him. Assuming that the marquis was actually guilty of everything, years of cover-ups and denial, gaslighting and manipulation, environmental crimes and hypocrisy, then Perry wasn’t all that conflicted about the man dying. It was only the fact that it was happening in public, in front of this crowd, with emotions that were just short of glee that gave him pause.

“We should not mourn this man’s death,” said the emcee as he stepped up to the lantern. “We should only mourn that it did not come sooner, that we did not stop him with whatever means necessary many years before. The world will be better for his absence.”

The emcee flipped a lever on the machine, feeding in a piece of fuel to the lantern, which immediately began to eat away at the marquis it was pointed at.

If Perry had been in charge, he’d have gagged the marquis. The screams were animal screams, but they were also human, wretched sounds that rolled over the silent audience. Maybe instead of a gag, Perry would have directed the audience to unleash their own screams, applause, and jeers at the direction of the dying man. Instead, it was just that one man screaming as he died and the whimpering and crying of the others who were on stage with him.

The light of this lantern was subtractive. It ate away at flesh but not metal or stone. The skin went red in an instant, like a sunburn, then began weeping blood as more layers of skin were stripped off. It affected the front, not the back, and as his face disintegrated and his nose was eaten through, the hair on the back of his head was still full and undisturbed. The lanterns had a problem with metal, which turned out to be good, because that meant that the lanterns themselves could be made from metal, and metal could be used to direct the effects without the magic tearing apart the thing that created it. The metal struts and manacles were unaffected. The linens that made up the clothes the marquis was wearing weren’t spared though, and soon they had fallen off as though attacked by a thousand invisible moths, leaving the man naked on the stage.

The lantern stayed on for a long time, much longer than the marquis stayed alive. It ate through him after he’d stopped thrashing around, when his exposed stomach opened up and all the blood in his body had run down to thoughtfully positioned grates in the stage. Eventually the wrists were too thin to hold up the body, and it slipped down to the ground. The places where the manacles had held him in were perfectly intact, flesh holding bones together.

When the lantern stopped, some guards — stage crew, Perry imagined — got up on stage and moved the lantern over to the next man. The emcee seemed to have lost a step, but only for a moment. Looking at his next victim seemed to energize him.

“This is the butler for the Fourth Earl of Greypoole,” said the emcee. “The earl took his own life shortly after the king died. He knew what his fate would be. The earl’s butler will not be punished for the crimes of his master, but for his own crimes. The earl was a man of twisted desires, well known for his cruelty, but he’d have been nothing without the butler to find him fresh victims. These men and women were brought into the house, often under the pretense of their labor. Some endured for months or years, facing humiliation on a daily basis. Others, particularly young women, would be used up and discarded, promised high wages as compensation and then unceremoniously fired after only a week with a poor mark on their record to boot. A few of them disappeared, never to be seen again. If the butler knows where the bodies are buried, he has kept silent on the matter.”

The emcee turned to the butler, as though giving the man a chance for a last minute confession. The butler’s face was vacant, with no thought or emotion behind the mask. It was a bruised face, purple and swollen, one eye no longer able to close entirely when he blinked. Someone had tried to beat the truth out of him, Perry was pretty sure.

“Under the systems of monarchy, many of us have done things we did not wish to do,” said the emcee. “We have suffered those daily indignities for the sake of money. That money was necessary only because we needed money to stay sheltered, to have food, to have a doctor see us, a tailor to clothe us, for us to continue on with our lives as we wished to live them. But the butler, of course, seems to have gone above and beyond, seems, in fact, to have partaken of the same abuse he learned from the earl. It is one thing to accept the money of an evil man — as most men with money were — and it is another to take on the aspects of that man, to aspire to be like him. This man you see before you was the worst sort of collaborator of the noble elements, a man who had been elevated only a handspan above the masses, and for whom that was enough.”

Perry was still watching, but he didn’t want to watch. It was clear now that each of those scheduled for execution was some sort of object lesson in the old ways and how bad they were. Certainly the implication was that this butler had been involved in some sort of sex crimes, and Perry was thankful that there hadn’t been much in the way of sordid details, though that did mean that his imagination was filling in the gaps.

Perry’s mind went to his own world, and the people who would probably never be lined up against the wall. Maya had probably made a list of everyone on Earth she’d have killed, though Perry imagined that such a list would have more to do with infamy than actual evil. There were all kinds of things, on Earth, where you could point at a few specific people who had steered the direction of society. Maya’s list would have had oil executives who lied about climate change, pedophiles in the halls of power, most of the Republican party and half the Democrats, a few select think tanks … but maybe Maya had never paid as much attention to politics as Perry had. Earth politics certainly wasn’t something that they had spent time talking about, which was probably for the best.

The problem with that mentality — which Maya definitely had when they parted, if not when she was doing marketing for Uber somewhere in the Bay Area — was that a society wasn’t just a bunch of people who you could point to, it was a bunch of very important people who were complex and full humans on their own, and then a whole giant society of other complex people who shared culpability while not being as easy to identify. And if you went after them, then there was a good chance that you’d be taking a scythe to large swathes of people, and if you did that, then you were likely to end up killing quite a lot of people who were mostly just people going with the flow.

That was especially the case if you were doing speedy trials in an age before everything was written down.

It was a stunningly lukewarm argument against public executions of class traitors, and Perry knew it, but thinking about it took some of the edge off the emotion. He had been starting to feel as though all these people deserved to die, and part of that was because there was a man there loudly listing their crimes and describing all the ways in which they did, in fact, deserve that. The feeling was easy to get caught up in.

It was because Perry had his attention directed elsewhere that he saw the people up on the roofs. The public space in front of the cathedral had plenty of tall buildings around it, some of them with towers atop them. The crowd was mostly in the square, but others were looking down from various windows, having secured good spots for themselves to see, as Perry and Moss had done.

The people on this particular roof weren’t watching, they were doing something, and as Perry squinted at them, he saw the glint of metal in motion. He couldn’t quite see what they were wearing, or what they had with them, but they were setting something heavy up.

“Marchand,” said Perry, subvocalizing so that he wasn’t disturbing the silence of the crowd. A light dusting of nanites on his skin made it possible for Marchand to pick up on even minute movements of the mouth and larynx. “Do we have eyes on that building?”

“From the castle, yes, sir,” said Marchand. “Resolution is poor.”

“What are they doing up there?” asked Perry.

“Assembling something,” Marchand replied. “I apologize, but it would be difficult to describe. I believe it to be a magical instrument of some sort, but we are at great distance with a poor angle. Shall I endeavor to enlist Mette’s help?”

“Do that,” said Perry. He looked over at Moss, who was watching the proceedings on the stage with a slight frown on his face, but no obvious horror in spite of the blood they’d seen so far. “We might have a situation,” Perry said to Moss.

“Oh?” asked Moss. Perry’s words had been quiet, but they seemed to startle Moss.

“There,” said Perry, pointing to the roof.

“What is it?” asked Moss.

“Unknown,” said Perry. “But there shouldn’t be people setting up anything on a roof right now, not so close. Whatever Thirlwell used to attack Kerry Coast City, it could be that.”

The missiles — or whatever they were — had supposedly been launched from an airship, but not much more was known about them. There was absolutely nothing to say that they had to be launched from an airship, and Perry was now considerably closer to the nation that had made the attack. He let out a breath and waited for a moment, knowing that every moment he waited increased the risk that a rocket would be launched right into the crowd. Perry had no idea how many people were watching the executions, but it was packed, especially toward the front.

“I’m going,” said Perry. “Sorry if I cause a scene.”

“Do we need to evacuate?” asked Moss.

“I’ll yell if you do,” said Perry. He was keeping his voice low. “Get ready to kick things into gear.” Perry reached out into the shelf space and watched Moss’s eyes go wide. It was a trick he hadn’t seen before. The shelf closed as soon as the sword was retrieved. Perry crouched down slightly and then launched himself up into the air, trying his best not to be noticed. All eyes were still on the stage, where the former butler’s execution had just started.

A man was screaming for his life, and Perry couldn’t quite shake the feeling that there were better things to be defending.