Crecheling (2 page)

Maybe that was how death always was.

She knew, in a way that she suspected her Crechemates did not, that she was being brought here this day to confront the great mystery of death, and thereby become an adult. She thought that her sense of this necessity, and her Crechemates’ obliviousness to it, was why she had been Called in her Lot Letter to be a Magister, and they had been summoned to other occupations. Not less important Callings, not less worthy ones, but roles that weren’t so entwined with the growth of the soul, weren’t so tightly wound into the fabric of the family that was Buza System.

She trembled, though the sun’s rays were warm on her skin.

The Hangman pushed through the ring of Creche-Leavers and climbed the wooden steps onto the Gallows Tree’s platform. The Hangman was a woman, burly and square. She wore a Guardsman’s tabard, but her face was obscured by a hood, like a sack over her head, with holes for eyes.

She passed the lever that operated all five traps and stepped to the edge of the platform.

At the sight of her, all the crowd’s ordinary murmur and rumble ceased, as if its collective windpipe had suddenly been stoppered.

“These five criminals die!” she shrieked. Her voice was surprisingly shrill, coming out of her barrel-like body. Shaped ceramic walls at the edges of the Plaza bounced the sound back so that everyone could hear her words, but Dyan had no need. She stood directly in front of the Hangman, and in her imagination the hooded eyes looked right at her.

Then she heard a tune.

“Death shows no mercy!” the Hangman continued. “The System can afford no remorse!”

Tension rippled through the crowd. Dyan looked at Magister Zarah, looking for an example of how she should hold herself for this experience. Expecting dignity and reserve, she was shocked to see a tortured look on the Magister’s face and a single tear on her cheek.

Was this the reaction that was expected of her, too? She realized, to her surprise, that she felt a thick lump in her throat. Her eyes stung and she looked away. She looked randomly at anything, trying not to see the Tree and the condemned man on it, and when she looked into the crowd she found herself looking into a stranger’s face.

The woman wore a Magister’s robe and medallion. Her jowls and nose drooped in a matronly way, and one eye fluttered slightly. It was not a strange or a frightening face, but where every other face in sight was turned towards the tree, this unknown Magister focused squarely on Dyan.

Beside the Magister stood a man, and the sight of him made Dyan’s breath catch in her throat. His face alone was striking—he was tall, with a strong, pointed nose and smallish ears—but that wasn’t what caught Dyan’s attention. The man wore a white tunic and trousers, and Dyan thought, seeing him in the Yard, how similar that clothing made him look to the condemned criminals. The difference was that on his chest, in black, was emblazoned the sign of the tree, and around his shaved head he wore a tight-fitting silver circlet, like a plain ring just above his thick eyebrows.

He was a Cogitant, a member of the Council. Dyan had never seen one of them so close, and this man stared at her.

And his eyes and face were cold.

Dyan heard the melody again, and she realized that one of the condemned criminals was
whistling
. She looked back at the Tree, which was the source of the melody, and then stared even harder. She hadn’t noticed it before, but the man about to die looked
familiar
. He was a tall man, slightly stooped, with a thin beard. He looked out into space and whistled his tune.

And then Dyan realized she had heard the melody before. She felt her heart beat faster. What was that? She ran through all the songs she knew from the Creche in her head, martial songs, marches, hymns, nursery rhymes … none of them matched the melody, the familiarity of which now seemed eerie, haunting.

“These die, but the System lives!”

Was that it? Maybe Dyan didn’t know the man at all, but she had heard the melody before, and in recognizing it she had convinced herself that she recognized him.

Dyan sniffed. She looked up at Magister Zarah in time to see another tear fall.

Then, with a loud
CHUNK!
the Hangman pulled her lever.

The condemned fell.

***

Chapter Two

Dyan’s horse ate up the miles without effort, carrying her out of the Treasure Valley of Buza System and into the wild wilderness beyond. She was trained to ride—they all were, as they were all trained to fight with bola, whip, and vibro-blade, like they were all trained in basic engineering skills, shooting a bow, and reading and writing, because you didn’t know what your Calling was going to be until you got your Lot Letter. So all Creche-Leavers had to be capable of entering into the first stages of any Calling. Crechelings were apprentice-everythings in the System.

But horses, and tracking and hunting, and knowing the habits of animals, were more Shad’s special gift than hers. It had been no surprise to Dyan that he had opened his Lot Letter and read “Outrider” to all his Crechemates. No surprise to her, but a great thrill to him. He’d picked her up off the ground and spun her in a three hundred sixty degree circle before putting her back down again. She was small, and he was a big man.

Cheela’s assignment to the same calling was more surprising. She hadn’t ever shown the same gifts. Or maybe, Dyan reflected as she watched Cheela ride easily over the tall yellow grasses and gray-green sage, slouched comfortably in the saddle, Dyan simply hadn’t wanted to admit that Cheela was good at the same things Shad was.

And better at some. Dyan had once seen her shoot the jackrabbit out of a soaring hawk’s talons from two hundred feet away. She hadn’t needed the rabbit; she had only wanted to show Shad that she could do it. In front of Dyan.

The memory made Dyan want to grab Shad’s elbow again, but on horseback she couldn’t do it.

They passed a heavy Collector’s wagon, inbound for the System. The wagon was ten feet tall at least from its bed to the tops of its poles, and all that space was piled high with sacks and bales of harvested crops contributed by Landsmen farmers. The Collector rode with a whip across his lap; one Outrider rode ahead and a second behind; and the wagon was flanked by four Guardsman. It was the fourth Collector they’d seen since leaving the System—the harvest was being brought in.

“An adult has choices,” Magister Zarah said, snatching Dyan’s attention back from the wagon. The Creche-Leavers rode shoulder to shoulder, a little ragged in their line, and she rode behind them, so they could all hear her voice without shouting or straining their necks. They had all read the maps, and the road to Ratsnay Station was well marked, so any one of them could have led the party. “You children have not had to choose anything. Your dormitories and food have been provided for you, you have had no say in your education, and even your Lot Letter designated each of you for a Calling without any decision on your parts.”

“We’re still children?” Cheela muttered, shooting a sidelong glance at Shad and shaking her head slightly.

The Magister continued as if she hadn’t heard. “No decision,” she intoned, “means no commitment, no risk, no price.”

“Just the way I like it,” Wayland added. He spoke loud enough to be heard by the Magister.

“Tomorrow, children,” Magister Zarah said, “you will make your first real choice.”

Shad rolled his eyes at the word “
children
.” He rolled them at Cheela, and Dyan felt a cold impact in the pit of her stomach, like she’d been punched by an icicle. Her jealousy warred with an intense curiosity at the Magister’s words, and a sense of mild surprise. Something was happening here, something that felt large and inevitable but that she hadn’t expected.

“Is it our Callings?” Deek asked. “Do I get to choose what kind of Mechanical I’ll be?”

“Every single choice you ever make,” the Magister said, “beginning tomorrow and for the rest of your lives, will have two attributes.”

The sun, beginning to drift down on Dyan’s right shoulder, was warmer than could really be comfortable, especially since Dyan was dressed in an Outrider-style traveling coat and hat. They all were. She took off her hat and wiped sweat off her forehead, squinting against the yellow glare.

“First,” the Magister continued her lecture, “every choice will exact of you a price.” Dyan had heard many explanation from Magister Zarah—and from earlier Magisters—while walking or riding, so in one sense this discussion of choices seemed very normal, very run of the mill. On the other hand, Zarah’s words implied that everything was changing in the Creche-Leavers’ world. Which, of course, it was.

Dyan gulped, remembering the sight of the unknown, whistling man falling to his death, his neck snapping instantly and his feet jerking for a few seconds, like the body of a slaughtered chicken.

“You mean in Scrip?” Deek asked.

“Some choices cost Scrip, yes,” Magister Zarah agreed. Her voice was always stern and tough, but now it sounded truly hard, even bitter. “But for everything you choose, you pay a price by turning your back on all the other things you might have chosen.”

“That’s what Coolers are for,” Wayland chuckled. “So I can have the iced cream today and still choose the berries tomorrow.”

“Consider Love-Matches,” Zarah said.

Dyan looked instantly at Shad. He looked down at his saddle, adjusting something with one hand, but he looked up and caught her glance after a moment. And smiled, a little.

“Oh, I consider them all the time!” Cheela snapped.

“A Love-Match is an exclusion.” Something in Magister Zarah’s voice made Dyan turn around and look at her teacher. The brim of her rider’s hat obscured Zarah’s eyes, but her mouth seemed to be twitching slightly at the corners as she spoke. “A Love-Match says
I choose this one and none other, and no other may choose me
.”

Dyan settled back into her saddle, facing forward again. “All those other possibilities are the price you pay for love,” she said, understanding.

“The price I pay for being Called to be a Healer is that I won’t be riding the canyons of the Wahai with bola in hand, looking for runaways,” Wayland said. “Though that sounds like it’s really a price paid by the Outrider Corps.”

“All the other Callings are paying a great price for your gift to Healing,” Dyan joked, and Wayland laughed. His whole body shook when he did so, which set the others to laughing, too, and spooked his horse. It broke into a jittery canter and rattled ahead several lengths before he could rein it in.

Dyan thought about the Magister’s words while Wayland struggled, and when the Creche-Leavers had regained their formation, she shared her thoughts. “But that means that we’ve been paying prices all along,” she concluded. “Only instead of prices of our own decisions, we’ve been paying the prices of the decisions of other people … of the Magisters, I guess. Of the Council.”

She looked back again and was pleased to see the Magister smiling. “That’s right, Dyan,” she said. “Your Lot Letter obviously marked you for the right calling.”

“Yes,” Cheela drawled, running fingers through her hair. “We’re all pleased that Dyan gets to stay with the milkmouths.”

“But I would have said that until now you have been paying the prices of the System’s decisions,” Zarah added. “Some things simply
are
the way they
must be
, with no question of fairness or how it might have been.”

“Is that the second attribute of choices?” Deek asked. “That doesn’t sound quite right.”

“People,” Zarah said, “are not as predictable or as regular as machines.”

“They’re not as dependable, either,” Deek added.

“I’m glad to see your Lot Letter also reached the right recipient.” Zarah laughed, a rare sound, and it made Dyan smile. “The second attribute of all your choices—beginning tomorrow—is that every choice you make will affect your relationship to Buza System.”

Dyan felt a shiver down deep inside her, like the string of a musical instrument connecting her neck and her tailbone had just been plucked.

“For instance,” Cheela yawned, “you could run away. And then the System would send Outriders to hunt you down.” She patted the whip on her belt affectionately.

“You mean like the criminals this morning,” Dyan said.

“Yes.”

They rode in silence for a minute. This was the Magister’s way, Dyan knew, of giving her Crechelings—her Creche-Leavers, now—time to consider and absorb a new point.

“The Hanging is an extreme case,” the Magister picked up where she had left off, “as are outlaws captured by Outriders.”

“Killed,” Cheela said.

“Captured or killed,” Shad added.

“But every single choice you make strengthens the System or it weakens it,” Zarah continued. “Or it strengthens one part of the System at the expense of another.”

“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.”