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rainbowfic2025-04-29 02:33 pm
paradoxcase) wrote in rainbowfic2025-04-29 02:33 pm
Fresh Thyme #1, Ecru #14, Nacarat #7 [The Fulcrum]
Name: Before Rice
Story: The Fulcrum
Colors: Fresh Thyme #1: Wake-up call, Ecru #14: Claim, Nacarat #7: Duende (Spanish): The mysterious power that a work of art has to deeply move a person.
Styles and Supplies: Panorama, Life Drawing, Portrait, Cartography, Graffiti (Three weeks for Dreamwidth), Glue ("You have a sharp, inquisitive mind, Taurus. Today you're likely to put it to good use exploring some arcane fields. It's likely your chief area of interest is scientific. You will find that if you get online, your research will be particularly fruitful. See if you can link to university sites for some real high-level information.")
Word Count: 8429
Rating: T
Warnings: Fantasy Drug (Ab)use
Characters: Setsiana, Qhoroali, Cusäfä, Liselye
In-Universe Date: Summer of 2050; (approximately) -10,000
Summary: Setsiana, Qhoroali, and Liselye arrive at their destination.
Notes: Sorry, this wound up being 8000 words of worldbuilding, haha. I promise that all of this is going to be actually relevant to the story. Eventually. Let me know if there are any tenses in here that sound wrong, I went back and forth a bit on what tenses some parts of this dialog should be in.
Setsiana must have slept, because the next thing she knew, she was awakening to another impossibly loud noise, the same that had sounded when the train first began to move. Feet were stomping down the aisle on the other side of the door to their room, and a man was shouting something in a language just on the other side of comprehensible. Setsiana sat up and reacquainted herself with her surroundings. In spite of everything, she did feel mostly rested. She stood, and began gathering her things.
In the other bunk, Liselye was busy rousing Qhoroali, who seemed ill-tempered and was muttering Vrelian curses. Setsiana left her to it, and ducked behind the screen with her nurefye. The knife had fortunately not been misplaced. Perhaps she would even get a chance to use it today.
She stepped back out and Liselye took her place. Qhoroali was now fully roused and was packing up her own things, as well as Liselye’s. Setsiana put the last few items into her bag and sat on the bed while the others readied themselves. She had a thought, then, and stood and strode to the door. If she left ahead of them, she could lose them in the crowd of people leaving the train, perhaps.
But Qhoroali had seen her move, and now darted to the door to block her route, smiling, and shaking her head. Setsiana wanted to fight, but it was still too early, and she had not yet shaken off all of the haze of sleep.
Liselye reappeared, and took Qhoroali’s place at the door while Qhoroali went to change. She smiled at Setsiana, and the smile seemed tinted with a soft kind of mockery. Setsiana drew back, and turned away.
When they had finished changing and packing up, they proceeded back down aisle to the front of the train, with Setsiana sandwiched between the two of them once again, but this time with Qhoroali in front. They descended the steps of the first car and exited into another open-air building, much like the train port in Nwórza. Rays of early morning sunlight sifted in over the tops of the walls. The people exiting the train formed a packed crowd, and those filing in from behind made it so that Setsiana could not run away even if Qhoroali and Liselye had not once again taken her arms on either side. The crowd pushed them out of the train port and into the streets of an unfamiliar city that must be Duqhora, where it began to disperse.
Qhoroali led them to a building not far away whose sign advertised in the Capital Dialect that it was a carriage rental. Once again, Setsiana had the odd experience of being able to understand the sign perfectly, but not the snatches of conversation around her.
Inside was a man at a counter, and a very large sign listing rates per mile, or to specific destination cities and towns that were mostly unknown to Setsiana. Qhoroali left Setsiana with Liselye and went to speak with the man in a language that Setsiana could mostly understand as some variant of the Capital Dialect; she caught carriage, and north, and northwest, and three. The man responded in what seemed like a slightly different language that Setsiana felt strongly she should be able to understand but could not, though he and Qhoroali seemed to be able to understand each other perfectly well. Some money changed hands; less money than the smallest amount listed on the sign, Setsiana noted. They returned back outside to the morning sunlight.
A carriage drawn by a single horse was pulling up from around the side of the building, stopping directly in front of them. It was being driven by a man with the kind of washed-out, colorless complexion and sharp cheekbones of the Shayanseen, and his eyes were pinpricks of clear ice. For a moment, Setsiana worried that he would not be able to speak any of the languages they knew, but her fear was assuaged when he greeted them hesitantly in QuCheanya. Qhoroali responded in the same language she had used inside with the man at the counter, and the driver relaxed visibly and replied more fluently.
The carriage was nicer and seemed to travel more smoothly than others that Setsiana had ridden in — was it the later time period, or the bigger city? She might have asked someone, and she was also dying to know where they were headed, but Qhoroali had taken up a position near front of the carriage and was engaged in directing the driver, and Setsiana wasn’t speaking to Liselye anymore.
They passed through crowded city streets, and by taller buildings than Setsiana was used to seeing, and eventually left the crush of the populated areas behind them and wound up on a lonely road leading out of the city. Qhoroali said something, and pointed, and after a word of confirmation, the driver directed the horse to leave the road, and then they were traveling along a dirt track that might have been a cowpath, or nothing at all. Suddenly, Qhoroali spoke to the driver, and he pulled up, and then came to let them out of the carriage. Outside, Qhoroali spoke to him again, and pressed some coins into his hand, and he nodded and seemed to settle in to wait.
They walked a ways further down the cowpath, until they were just out of sight of where the driver waited, behind a line of tall bushes. There, they came upon something that Setsiana recognized: a circle marked out on the ground by wooden posts, an inch or so in height, just like the one she’d seen outside the apartment the times they had time traveled there. What had Liselye said about it? They needed it for the frequent time travel they did in that specific place. What need could there be for frequent time travel in this remote location?
They stood there, Qhoroali and Liselye seemingly waiting for something. After a minute or two, three people appeared at the edge of the circle of posts, as if by magic, and they were not just any people, but were in fact their own doppelgangers — another Qhoroali and another Liselye and another Setsiana, wearing the same nurefyes and with the same braids. Setsiana looked at her double with curiosity and confusion, and her double looked back, but did not turn from where she was headed. The three other versions of themselves walked back down the cowpath and greeted the driver, and the clopping sounds of hooves and the grinding sounds of the wheels crunching in the dirt signaled that the carriage had left.
“Ready?” asked Qhoroali. She reached into her bag for a qoire bottle, and Setsiana got a momentary glimpse into it and saw that there were a number of bottles in there now. The bottle was passed to Liselye and Setsiana to take the three drops, and then back to Qhoroali, who swallowed the mouthful. Setsiana was once again positioned between the two of them, and together they entered the circle and began walking the branches of Time.
This time, it seemed to Setsiana that they walked for so long that she could feel the effects of the qoire start to leave her body, and the timelines began to disappear. Before they disappeared entirely, they left the circle and stopped, and Setsiana thought they must have come to their destination, but no — they simply re-upped the qoire and went back into the circle and continued. They walked for another long period, and the qoire expired again and they left the circle a second time, and Setsiana wondered if they were going to go back for a third, but this time when they stopped, Qhoroali did not reach for another bottle, but for her coat.
It was cold; maybe even winter-cold, although the greenery on the trees she could see to the north seemed to belie that. Here, near the circle, in whatever distant time this was, stood a tall wooden totem, decorated with some wood stain, feathers and animal pelts, and carved stones and common gems. At the top, a bright sunburst of yellow topaz with the face of a man carved into it radiated rays of carved light, and at the bottom, plants and animals and people raised their heads and flowering stalks to heaven. Setsiana stared at the sunburst; it was made of a single piece, not a mosaic of smaller ones. Where had a gem so large been found? From what she could see, the surface of the piece did not seem smooth enough to be glass.
They were still in the middle of nowhere, but whereas they had been able to see the road and even a hint of the distant buildings of Duqhora from this point before the time travel, she realized that neither were in evidence anymore. She thought they had been going in a past-ward direction — perhaps it was so far in the past that Duqhora had not yet been established. It was morning, and only a few birds seemed to stir in the trees to the north. The place seemed cold and empty, uninhabited. She finished putting on her coat, and followed the others as they walked south.
Soon she noticed wisps of smoke rising into the air in front of them, and they came upon a large encampment, or maybe a very small village under construction. Many of the structures were tents of thick hide, but a few were built of more permanent stuff — mud, or clay. Some were in an intermediate state, with hides completing a partially built structure. In the center of the camp, a large fire burned inside a circle of stones, and a number of people were gathered around it, eating or drinking something out of bowls. On the far side of the fire, Setsiana could just make out some shape, obscured by the brightness of the flames and the earliness of the morning, which emitted a piercing green light, like the eye of some otherworldly cat.
As they approached, the people around the fire came into clearer view. All of them save one had long black hair, completely straight, as if it were a mantle of pressed cloth, their skin on the darker side, but not unlike what one might see in Vrel, dressed in animal furs and thick leather. The exception was a person sitting with their back to the three of them, who had a head of short-cut soft golden curls and pale skin. For a moment, Setsiana thought they must be Shayanseen, like the driver who had brought them to this place, but then the light from the rising sun caught the head as it turned, and for just a moment the hair flashed copper.
The person with the red-blond hair stood up… and up and up, and then turned, revealing himself to be the tallest man Setsiana had ever laid eyes on, dressed the same way as the others but wearing, seemingly incongruously, a pair of large rounded spectacles. He smiled warmly at Qhoroali. “I knew you would come today,” he said in QuCheanya. “It’s nice to see you. Here, come inside.” Without waiting for a response, he picked up a nearby torch from the ground and lit it from the fire, and led them to a tent which had been built about twice as tall as any of the others.
The inside of the tent was very sparse. In place a proper bed was simply a low platform with a bedroll made of thick furs. A couple chairs stood around a small table of crude make, stacked with papers, not unlike Qhoroali’s desk. Some full sacks sat along the walls, and in the corner stood a black box, exactly the same as the ones Peatäro had connected and disconnected from Qhoroali’s copier. In the center was a much smaller fire circle, which the tall man lit with the torch, which he then snuffed in a nearby bucket of sand. The smoke easily escaped via a small hole in the roof. In the light of this smaller fire, she saw something she had not noticed outside: the man wore a brilliant red ruby stud in his left ear, which caught the light and glittered. It was the marriage ear — the ear where you would normally wear a marriage hoop, but the ornament was not a hoop. Nor was it a plain white engagement stud that couples often got before the official ceremony. To wear something so expensive in the place designated for the marriage hoop spoke to a great deal of faith that a marriage hoop would never be called for.
Liselye touched Qhoroali’s shoulder lightly. “I’ll leave you to it,” she said. “There are some people I need to say hi to.” She disappeared back out the front of the tent.
The tall man sat in a chair, becoming much less intimidating. “It’s good to see you,” he said, again. He gestured towards Setsiana. “Who have brought to meet me today?”
“It’s a bit of a long story,” said Qhoroali. “I was hoping you could give her a look at some of the stuff we’re going to be making today.”
The man sighed. “Of course,” he said. “You’re only here to get me to make you something new with the nanosynthesizer. That’s always the reason, why did I ever expect something else? I always think that maybe you will say, It’s nice to see you, Cusäfä, it’s been so long, or, How are you doing, Cusäfä, I hope you are well, or What is going on in your life, Cusäfä, or something like that, but you just want to know if I can make you some weird thing that you found in a paper.”
“If you want to tell me about something, you can just start talking and tell me about it,” said Qhoroali. “You know I care about you and am always interested in whatever you have to say. You don’t have to wait until I ask you a question about it.”
“It’s nice to hear the question asked. It’s just a little bit of social ceremony that makes you feel appreciated.”
“It doesn’t make me feel appreciated,” said Qhoroali. “It makes me feel like I have to guess at which specific question you want me to ask you, and then I get punished if I don’t guess the right one. And when people ask me questions like that, I have to guess if they actually want to know the answer, or if they are just asking in order to fulfill a ‘social ceremony’, as you put it.”
“Well, I guess I can appreciate that perspective,” said Cusäfä. “So how about a compromise? When you come to see me, you can just always say, ‘It’s nice to see you, how have you been?’ and then I’ll tell you whatever I want to tell you. That’s the script, there’s no guessing game, I won’t expect anything else from you. Does that work?”
“Ok, that seems fair,” Qhoroali conceded. “So… it’s nice to see you. How have you been?”
“A bit anxious, to be honest. So much progress has been made here… well, at least, way more than has been made in a very long time, at any rate. But I am still worried that they will not survive the Warming.”
“What is the Warming?” asked Setsiana. And then she continued further, since her questions did not seem likely to be answered otherwise: “And where in history are we? Who are these people? What is the totem outside the camp for?”
“We are currently twelve thousand years back in history,” said Cusäfä. “Or rather, twelve thousand years before I was born, and not a lot different from Qhoroali’s perspective. With time differentials like that, what is a mere half a millennium between friends, really? When I think of all the technological developments and changes that have happened just between our birthdates, it’s truly unfathomable. These people have been living the same lifestyle with more or less the same technology for longer than they have recorded history, and now everything is changing, and they are struggling to keep up. Meanwhile, in the future, we caused our own massive changes to the global climate and then fixed and stabilized everything in far less time than the Warming has been happening for.
“The Warming is the transition to the second interglacial warm period. It used to be colder than it is now; for about two thousand years since the end of the first warm period, there was a glacial period, an ice age. That’s what these people know, what they’re used to. Plants were harder to come by, they survived mainly by hunting the megafauna. But now the climate is warming up again, and the megafauna are almost gone — moreso here, in the west, than on the eastern side of the island and in other parts of the world. The animals walked across land and sea ice that connected the island to Meandhshen during the ice age, so there were always more of them in the east, and more humans, too, for the same reason. Now the bridge is gone, and most of the large prey animals that made it out here have been hunted to extinction. These people have always gathered wild plants for various purposes, but now they need to learn how to rely primarily on them. They need to learn to do agriculture, and probably need to start domesticating the wild goats. In my timeline, at least, they didn’t manage it, and they all died with the last of the megafauna. I learned about them when I was briefly studying archaeology at university, before I got into nanotech, about all the stuff they left behind covered in sunbursts, and I wondered what they would have become if they had survived. So, with Qhoroali’s help, I came back here with a nanosynthesizer to help bridge the gap between the death of the megafauna and their success at agriculture and try to save them.”
“You can’t save them,” Setsiana had to say. “If they died in your timeline, that’s what happened, and it can’t be changed.”
“Oh yes, I already had all my hopes and dreams on that account dashed by Qhoroali here. But that’s just my timeline. They might survive in some other one that we don’t know about. And who knows, maybe it was because of me and my nanosynthesizer the whole time.”
“It seems incredibly egotistical to presume such a thing.”
Cusäfä and Qhoroali seemed to share a smile, for an instant. “Oh I know,” he said, “you have some sort of religious regard for things like this. It’s some kind of holy miracle. I don’t see it that way — I see it as me taking a chance and doing my best to help my fellow humans survive global climate change. I don’t think that’s presumptuous.”
“How far have you gotten with the agriculture?” asked Qhoroali.
“See? There you are, asking the right question. You’re not as bad at this as you think.”
“I asked because I wanted to know the answer, not because I’m playing a social game with you.”
Cusäfä waved this away. “Anyway, well.” He turned towards Setsiana, slightly. “She knows most of this already, but I want to explain it to you. They used to move the camp from place to place, depending on the movements of the animals, but this was the place they always came to in late summer, and they would harvest whatever wild rice they found growing along the banks of the river to the south. So, to start with, I had them camp here permanently, and plant new rice in the spring, and watch over it as it grew; had them build their own irrigation so that if the river failed to flood sufficiently, they could do it themselves, had them check on it and help it. We harvested it for the first time since getting everything set up a few weeks ago, and they were amazed by the increase in yield. But I think it is still not good enough for what they need, and we also need crops besides rice. And the nanosynthesizer is starting to wear out. Everything moves so slowly here.”
“What is the ‘nanosynthesizer’, exactly?” Setsiana asked. She put together the roots that she recognized, and made a guess based on what Cusäfä seemed to be using it for. “Does it make tiny animals?”
“Ha! No, in all the millennia we’ve been around, we never managed to improve on nature’s method of creating life. I guess you could say it creates tiny dead animals, though. Or pieces of dead animals. It’s a household commercial model, so it’s got a steak button, which is very convenient and easy for the people here to use. Also chicken, and fish, and good selection of vegetables, and rice, of course, and a few of the more common sauces. It doesn’t make complete meals, the ones that do that cost a fortune, but you can always just combine the stuff it makes in a bowl and get something pretty decent. The main downside of using the commercial model is that when you have demanding friends who always want you to make non-food substances with it—” he looked briefly at Qhoroali— “you have to jailbreak it briefly, at which point you can make anything you can code in. The problem is that jailbreaking it bypasses its safety features. If you get an industrial or research model, you can make almost anything without any jailbreaking, but they do have some hard stops — most models won’t make radioactive material, for example, and they won’t make stuff that will immediately explode or catch on fire. But those models don’t have a steak button. If you want to make steak you have to code it in manually, and organics are always a huge pain and you often wind up with food texture issues. So instead, we have the commercial model, and the steak button, and when Qhoroali wants to make something weird with it, we have to be extremely careful.”
“Wait. Are you saying you can… press a button, and it creates a steak out of thin air?”
“More or less. It’s kind of funny, actually, if it weren’t for that, I don’t think they would have listened to me at all. A stranger who shows up who doesn’t know the language, telling them they have to change their entire way of life? I was a bit naive when I came up with this idea, to tell you the truth. But after I started to get a handle on the language, the first thing I wanted to tell them was how to use the nanosynthesizer. So I explained that it gets power from the solar hubs, and the solar hubs get power from the sun. And they didn’t trust me, and they said, prove it to us. So I left one solar hub outside in the sun for the whole day, and kept another one inside a tent, and then after the sun had set, I showed them that if they plugged it into the one that had been in the sun, it worked, and if the plugged it into the other one, it didn’t. I let them do it themselves, showed them that it wasn’t me playing a trick. And when they were convinced, they said, ‘Oh, we understand now. This object is of divine origin, and it works by divine power. You have been sent to us by the Sun.’ And that was how I found out they worshiped the sun, although possibly I should have guessed earlier from all of the sunbursts. I have managed to convince them that I’m just a regular human at this point, but they continue to regard the nanosynthesizer as divine.”
“Was that what we worshiped even before the soulwrights? The sun?”
“No, and that’s part of what is so interesting about these people. There have never been any people who worshiped the sun that we were able to discover in my time in NoraCheanya, in Shayansee, in Meandhshen — nowhere that’s near here. These people died out and left only their sunburst decorations, and whatever group they came from originally must have, too, and never even left that much behind. There were no other sites found. But there is one place with a religion that involves the sun, even still in my time — very far away from here. Do you know where Ádeya is?”
“No, I’ve never heard of it,” said Setsiana. “Is it one of the Northern Kingdoms?”
“Not remotely, although it is also in the northern hemisphere. It’s an island in the middle of the Endless Ocean, thousands and thousands of miles northwest of Shayansee. Or well, I guess you’re supposed to call it Ádeya-Shuznzyon, technically there were two countries there. But it was in the Ádeya part of it specifically where they worshiped the sun, though they also had both moons and Celyira in the pantheon. I visited there once, it’s a nice place. The mountains in Shuznzyon are the tallest in the world and people were constantly killing themselves trying to climb them for bragging rights. But while I was visiting there, I installed an Ádeyan dictionary on my phone for fun, and I’ve been looking through it as I learn more and more of these people’s language, here in this early time… I know the comparative method can’t possibly be reliable over this time scale. But I can see similarities. The people look similar too, these are the only two places I’ve been where every single person has hair as straight as a board. I don’t know, I’m probably very biased. But I think these people came from one of the groups that somehow make it to Ádeya-Shuznzyon during this time period. You know we in NoraCheanya are related to the Shayanseen, right? For ages we called those shared ancestors the Ancient Shayanseen. They will walk over the south pole from southern Meandhshen to southern Shayansee during the warm period that’s coming, and global temperatures will never rise high enough for that to happen again after that — well, except for briefly when we screwed everything up in the modern era. But this is the second warm period that’s coming now. There was a previous one, and, some people thought, a previous polar migration. People had started talking about the ‘North Shayansee People’, who crossed during the first warm period and moved north when the ice age came, and the ‘South Shayansee People’ who will cross during the second and kill off all of the first group. There were a few scraps of archaeological evidence left on the northern coasts of Shayansee of the first group, nothing more. But I think that before they will be killed, some of them will manage to escape across the sea and wind up in Ádeya. And others left even earlier, and wound up here, and may die for a different reason. These people have a myth about crossing an ocean on rafts, following the rising sun to a new land. Going east, from the west. From northern Shayansee, where the North Shayansee People are now.”
“You want to go back to your time and write up a paper about this?” asked Qhoroali.
“God, no. I came here to do something, and I’m going to do it, or die trying. Anyway, the state of scientific research in NoraCheanya never really recovered after the demise of the priesthood. Before I found out about these guys, my first plan was just to find a way to time travel back to when the priesthood was still around. I think that was the biggest mistake we made as a society, getting rid of them.”
“How can you say that after everything I’ve told you about them?” demanded Qhoroali.
“I know,” Cusäfä said. “Believe me, I get it, I understand why you hate them. But look. They actually did research for the sake of doing research. They opened public universities that anyone could go to free of charge and somehow got the government to pay for them. They contained plagues that were devastating the rest of the world at the time. They made us a beacon of literacy for over a thousand years. We had twice the literacy rates of T’arse, even! That’s what you can do with the organized use of time travel. But in my time, the literacy rates were actually worse than they were in yours. T’arse regarded us as backwards and superstitious, because our government didn’t stop ranting about how time travel was evil, when the rest of the world didn’t even believe it existed. They banned all of the books about it. They disappeared people who studied it. They probably would have gotten to me eventually if I hadn’t met you. And if you wanted to go to university, you either had to pay a huge fee, or you had to get sponsored by a private company, and promise to work for them for ten years after you were done. I didn’t think twice about getting my sponsorship, it was what everyone in my social circle was doing, totally normal. But the prospect of spending another seven years at that soul-sucking job was a big part of why I decided to abandon it all for a tent with no central heating during the last leg of the ice age.”
“What happened in 2307 to create your world was entirely the fault of the priesthood,” said Qhoroali. “If it hadn’t been for them, if they hadn’t extorted all of that money from the government for those universities, none of that would have happened.”
“Everyone does both good and evil things. You’re never going to find any person, or organization, that is completely pure. Sometimes you have to admit that the good things that were done can outweigh the bad ones.”
“Nonsense,” said Qhoroali. “I believe in a world without evil. I know it is possible, and I know how to achieve it.”
“By killing God? Oh, sure. Is it just the priesthood’s god you’re after, or are all the other ones on the list, too? Do you need to add my people’s sun god, now? You know, the T’arsi god is supposedly the totality of all of the people who have ever lived in T’arse, combined into a singular entity. Would you be prepared to wipe out the entire population of world’s largest superpower, in every time period and every timeline, to achieve your world without evil?”
“No,” said Qhoroali. “There’s only one god that needs to be killed, and She is one person.”
Setsiana thought about the rug at the T’arsi Fair, with the being made up of a multitude of different people. She had never thought about T’arsi religion much before, and the merchants had never seemed interested in talking about it, but now she was curious. “How does their religion work?” she asked. “Liselye told me their wars have a religious reason, earlier, but didn’t explain.”
“Well, it’s a strange one,” said Cusäfä. “I don’t know if I would explain it correctly, since I’m not from there, but I have gone there fairly frequently to attend academic conferences. As I understand it, they originally believed that every person on the whole eastern continent, both T’arse and Meandhshen, was part of the collective consciousness that is their god. The god is actually named T’arse — it’s not a separate entity from the country, in their minds. So, because everyone on the continent is T’arse, everyone on the continent should be part of the country of T’arse, as well. That’s what the wars are about. Eventually people in Meandhshen got wise and started arguing that if they were all God, that meant T’arse wasn’t allowed to declare war on them, so the Will of T’arse at that time demoted them to being only possibly God — if they were killed in the war, they obviously weren’t God, but if they survived and became contributing citizens of T’arse, they were.
“They were strange even in non-religious matters, to be honest. I would go to a conference there, and afterwards, a researcher would invite me to her house, and introduce me to her husband… and her second husband, and her third husband, and then one of them would ask me how many wives I had, and another one would say ‘They only get one, there, dummy,’ and I would say ‘Actually, I never got married at all,’ and they would all look at me like I had three heads. And then they would change the subject and ask about qoire, since that’s the only thing they know about NoraCheanya other than the government’s insistence that time travel is real, and it’s rude to ask a visiting scientist if they believe in crackpot theories. Anyway, they would ask why it was so incredibly illegal here when it’s pretty harmless and non-addictive and then I’d have to explain that it’s because the government thinks you can use it to time travel, and then there would be another awkward silence. It was even worse when I had a mountain of evidence that it could be used to time travel, but if I actually said so, not only would this researcher kick me out of her house, but also our government would probably find a way to disappear me even though I was thousands of miles away in a foreign country.”
As he was speaking, Setsiana noticed something odd about how he was using the noun tenses in QuCheanya. When he had been talking about the things that were happening here, in this time, the rice farming and the polar migrations, he had used the regular past, present, and future tenses. This clearly wasn’t correct — when you had time-traveled to another time period, and were displaced in time, there were special temporal displacement tenses you were supposed to use. Setsiana had figured he just wasn’t familiar enough with them; she herself had only gotten an opportunity to use them in a non-academic context just recently, although she had been getting a lot of practice in since she’d been abducted. But now, when he talked about his old life, where he had lived in what must be a far future time, when he had visited T’arse and Ádeya, he was using those temporal displacement tenses. She realized suddenly that he was speaking as if he had been temporally displaced in his own time, where he had been born and raised, and as if this time, at the beginning of humanity, before the priesthood, before Cheanya, before Tuari, before rice, was his proper home.
“Oh, but we were talking about Ádeya earlier,” he said, suddenly, seeming to cheer up a bit. “That reminded me, I wanted to show you some pictures I took when I was there.” He went over to where the black box sat, picked up something small that was sitting on top of it, and removed some tiny cord or tail from it. “Here, look.”
Whatever it was fit easily in the palm of one hand, though Setsiana could see its shiny black back between his fingers and thumb. With his other hand, he traced arcane symbols in the air in front of it. “Look,” he said, again. “Does she remind you of anyone?”
Qhoroali had moved to stand near him, in order to see the thing from the same direction as he was. “Who am I supposed to be reminded of?”
“Doesn’t she look like you?”
“I mean, I guess maybe if you think every woman with my coloring looks like me.”
Setsiana cautiously moved over to join them. The device seemed to be a very thin, flat, sheet of glass, not more than a few inches in length and width, and on its surface was a small but very intricate picture: A light-skinned woman with black hair streaming behind her rode a gigantic white wolf as if it were a horse, dressed in a black cloak lined with white fur. In the background, more giant wolves howled, and another figure stood, almost obscured in shadow, dressed head to foot in a very traditional set of T’arsi armor and carrying a flag on a standard depicting the large moon, Yeari, on a field of blackness. The only thing that could be seen of their body between the joints of the armor was that the skin was very dark. Setsiana looked at Qhoroali and then back at the picture; there was a certain similarity.
“Who is she?” Qhoroali asked.
“A god, one of the Shuznzyon ones. Well, maybe the Shuznzyon one, they did call her Shuzn and then called themselves ‘Shuzn’s people’. Supposedly she led an army that killed the Creator, and then brought winter to Celyira, and accepts bribes to make it go away again. A dark kind of theology. They worshiped her in Ádeya, too, though they borrowed her as the personification of Yeari, since the Shuznzyon often used that imagery for her, and also winter, of course, and apparently she was also the patron of accountants and mathematicians for some reason.”
“Who is the T’arsi?” asked Setsiana. “Is that another god?”
“Sort of. In Shuznzyon tradition that person was a genderless demon who was Shuzn’s right hand during the war against the Creator; in Ádeya they were a shape-shifter who could be male or female or both depending on their whim, and were often considered a personification of the small moon, but they were more of a cultural hero or a trickster there than a god.” Cusäfä seemed hesitate slightly. “Their worship in Shuznzyon predates Shuznzyon’s contact with T’arse significantly, and by the time they did encounter T’arse, it was no longer common to see armor of this style there. But all of the older depictions clearly show this exact armor design. There was a good deal of argument among scholars about whether it was just a coincidence, or whether they actually did somehow encounter T’arsis much earlier than was previously thought. It’s hard to say which theory seems less plausible; T’arse was barely interested in sea exploration even after longitude was solved.”
Cusäfä made a gesture in front of the picture with two fingers, as if he had licked them and was using them to turn the page of a book. As if by magic, the picture transformed into a completely different one of a man and a woman standing on either side of a sign. Unlike the previous picture, the style was of extreme hyperrealism; it was as if Setsiana stood in front of a clear window looking through it at the two people in real life. For all of the skill that had gone into that, though, the composition seemed to lack artistry; the subjects slouched in a casual manner, and did not seem to be intentionally posed. The man’s very straight hair was shoulder-length, but the very front locks hung much longer and draped forward over his shoulders, each woven into a very small plait. The woman’s hair was slightly shorter, and she also seemed to have the long forelocks, but she had tied them back around the top of her head, like an unbraided T’arsi hair circlet. The sign was in a language Setsiana did not recognize. The letters were curvilinear like the T’arsi ones, but the curves were much broader and they were written horizontally.
Cusäfä pointed to the man in the picture. “That’s Rethálan, he’s from Ádeya. I met him at— well, I don’t remember what year the conference was, anymore. He was exploring ways to get nanosynthesizers to run on battery power, so they could be used in disaster zones, or war zones, or at the top of the Shuznzyon mountains. He would have loved Peatäro’s solar hubs, it’s a shame we never got that far with solar in our timeline. Anyway, he and his wife took me to this museum to see that art of Shuzn, and it was his husband who got me to put the Ádeyan dictionary on my phone.”
“They have multiple spouses there, too?” asked Qhoroali. “Another cultural contribution from theoretical ancient T’arsi explorers?”
“Ha! No. Marriage in Ádeya worked very differently than it did in T’arse. In T’arse, all your spouses were supposed to have the same relationship with you. Well, at least in theory, my understanding is that in practice a lot of T’arsis had very little to do with some of their spouses. But in theory, you were supposed to have a sexual and romantic relationship with all of them. In Ádeya, you only got one spouse you could have a sexual relationship with, one you could have a romantic relationship with, and one you could raise children with. You could also do all three of those things with the same person if you wanted to, but you could have multiple spouses who fulfilled different roles. So, Rethálan’s wife was his sexual partner, and his husband was his romantic partner and also the person he raised his kids with. When his wife got pregnant, he adopted the child into the marriage he had with his husband. She didn’t want to raise kids at all, but if she had, and she’d had a different spouse to do that with, she could also have adopted those kids into her other marriage. And if you didn’t want a sexual relationship, or you didn’t want a romantic relationship, you didn’t have to have any spouse for that role, if you didn’t want to.” He turned his head to look more fully at Qhoroali. “Don’t you think that’s a grand way of doing things? I would have loved to raise a child with someone, if I didn’t have to pretend to be in love with them. Maybe in another universe, if I’d been born there…” he touched the ruby in his ear, briefly. “And it would be perfect for you, too.”
“It’s… interesting,” Qhoroali said. “I don’t know. Just… interesting. I can’t quite believe it would really work. And romance isn’t that bad, you know.”
“You say that, but I know for a fact that yours brought you nothing but pain.”
“That’s not true. It’s… complicated.” Qhoroali shook her head. “Well, that was interesting, and thank you for sharing the pictures. But you are actually going to help me make my ‘weird stuff’ with the nanosynthesizer, right?”
“For sure. Show me what you need.”
Qhoroali dug through her bag and produced two papers. “Seventeenth century,” she said, passing over the first, and “twenty-second,” for the second. He set aside the small device and held them out in front of him, eyes narrowed.
“I’m not familiar with these,” he said. “Hold on, let me look them up.” He set the pages down and grabbed the device again and made a series of complicated gestures at it. Pages and pages of text in what looked like T’arsi flashed by on its surface, replaced by more pages of text, interleaved with chemical diagrams. He continued this in silence for some minutes, and then shook his head. “These are not in the database at all.”
“I thought you said that database contained every molecule they knew about in your time. In 2307, the government raided all the temples and stole all of their research. These papers came from temples. The priesthood doesn’t lose papers, it just doesn’t. These must have been there when the temples were raided, so their contents must have been stolen along with everything else. Why would your government not know about it?”
“They didn’t keep everything they found in those raids. Anything they thought was related to time travel, or was practical instructions on how to do it, they burned.”
“So you’re saying that these compounds were related to time travel?”
“Maybe. You have to keep in mind that they didn’t actually know anything about time travel, so they made a lot of mistakes when doing that purge. I know for a fact that they missed a lot of stuff that does relate directly to time travel, so it’s entirely possible that they also burned some completely unrelated things. But that’s the only reason I can think of for these not being in the database.” He tapped the paper that Qhoroali had identified as “seventeenth century”. “This I don’t recognize, but it has a lot of structures in it that I’m familiar with from elsewhere, so I’m confident it’s not dangerous.” He set the paper aside and indicated the other. “This one…” he tapped one of the symbols. “I don’t know what that element is called in QuCheanya, but I know the symbol. It had been synthesized and named by the priesthood, and the government wanted to rename it something different, so they held a contest to come up with the name, and the public ultimately voted for ‘Element McElement-face’, which the government immediately discarded and then they renamed it after some Northern Kingdoms country or other. That all happened nearly a century before my birth, and whatever the original name for it was that they wanted to expunge, I never learned it, so I guess they succeeded there. I don’t think anyone has ever gotten it to do anything interesting in a lab, or observed it in nature before, so everyone just knows it as that element that was called ‘Element McElement-face’ for 15 seconds. What did your paper call it?”
“‘Dreamstuff’. That’s the name in QuCheanya, apparently.”
“Why that name? Does it have something to do with dreams?”
“I don’t know, the paper wasn’t about etymology, and it’s difficult to track down coinages like that in QuCheanya. The paper was about dreams, to a certain extent, I guess, but it wasn’t the main focus.”
“Well, regardless. Stuff like that that tends to not like forming compounds also tends to not like staying in compounds, and often likes to exit them immediately, which causes an explosion. This seems like it might work and won’t explode, but I’m not a real chemist, I’m just an engineer. So, if you want me to make this one, we have to take the nanosynthesizer a few miles away from the camp and use the hazmat suits. I only have two of those, so only one of you can come with me. But don’t worry, the other two of you won’t have to stay here waiting for a few hours while we do that, because I’ve actually got a favor of my own I need to ask of you.”
“Oh?”
“Like I said, the nanosynthesizer is starting to wear out. Late last night, something broke inside of it, I won’t bore you with the details, but I had to unscrew everything and clean some parts and reset some things and do some maintenance. When I was putting it back together again, one of the screws broke. These are kind of specialty screws, unfortunately, they were only produced for a period of about 10 years before I came here, so we can’t get them from a more convenient time period, and other screws don’t work with this model. Fortunately, you had arrived earlier yesterday with exactly the screws I needed, and also the editions of Evolving Nanotech from the years 125, 126, and 127, which was amazing and exactly what I’ve been missing from life lately, so thank you very much for that. Anyway, I understood from the other version of you who I think is still asleep somewhere in the camp that you right here are going to leave now to go do that for me, presumably with Liselye.”
Qhoroali shook her head. “Can’t. If that’s the way it shakes out, I have to leave Liselye with you to oversee the creation of the compounds.”
“Why her? I thought you said she was the one interested in the compounds.” Cusäfä indicated Setsiana.
“She is… but I can’t trust her alone with that stuff yet. It’s a little complicated. If only one person can go with you, it has to be either me or Li, and it sounds like I’m going to be getting you screws.”
“You don’t trust her alone with some flasks, but you’ll trust her to have your back in 127?”
“No, I’ll go alone. You know I can manage time travel by myself.”
“Think about this first,” said Cusäfä. “You’re going to be traveling 12,000 years there, and 12,000 years back. And you know what it’s like there. Take someone with you.” He hesitated. “And if I understand correctly, you don’t necessarily have to go, if you don’t want to. The timeline might have diverged since then, and if there are multiple timelines where we have this conversation, you only have to do this errand in one of them. So if you want to, you can give yourself a break, let alternate timeline Qhoroali do this one. I know you don’t do well there.”
Qhoroali’s wore a very pinched expression now. “I can do this, you know I can,” she said, in a voice that was querulous with anger. “I’m not a child that needs to be protected from the world that you experienced every day for over 30 years. If it were Li here, or any other adult, talking about doing you this favor, you wouldn’t be speaking to her like this.” During the previous conversation, the disagreements about killing Sapfita, about whether Sapfita even existed, about whether the priesthood had done more good than evil, those arguments had seemed to be familiar and comfortable ones that were hashed out in a genial, good-natured way. This relatively innocent entreaty somehow seemed to have crossed some line that Setsiana could not envision.
Cusäfä was momentarily taken aback. Then he paused for a moment, bowed his head in acknowledgment, and said: “I’m sorry, you’re absolutely right. I was wrong to treat you that way, and I apologize. But I do still stand by my recommendation that you take someone else with you — I would make that recommendation to anyone.”
Qhoroali seemed mollified by this. “I’ll take Setsiana, then,” she said. “Li absolutely has to be the one to go with you. Don’t worry about it, we’ll be fine.” She turned to face Setsiana, a smile making it back onto her face as the tenseness left it. “Well, you said you wanted to know what things were like after 2307, right?”
Story: The Fulcrum
Colors: Fresh Thyme #1: Wake-up call, Ecru #14: Claim, Nacarat #7: Duende (Spanish): The mysterious power that a work of art has to deeply move a person.
Styles and Supplies: Panorama, Life Drawing, Portrait, Cartography, Graffiti (Three weeks for Dreamwidth), Glue ("You have a sharp, inquisitive mind, Taurus. Today you're likely to put it to good use exploring some arcane fields. It's likely your chief area of interest is scientific. You will find that if you get online, your research will be particularly fruitful. See if you can link to university sites for some real high-level information.")
Word Count: 8429
Rating: T
Warnings: Fantasy Drug (Ab)use
Characters: Setsiana, Qhoroali, Cusäfä, Liselye
In-Universe Date: Summer of 2050; (approximately) -10,000
Summary: Setsiana, Qhoroali, and Liselye arrive at their destination.
Notes: Sorry, this wound up being 8000 words of worldbuilding, haha. I promise that all of this is going to be actually relevant to the story. Eventually. Let me know if there are any tenses in here that sound wrong, I went back and forth a bit on what tenses some parts of this dialog should be in.
Setsiana must have slept, because the next thing she knew, she was awakening to another impossibly loud noise, the same that had sounded when the train first began to move. Feet were stomping down the aisle on the other side of the door to their room, and a man was shouting something in a language just on the other side of comprehensible. Setsiana sat up and reacquainted herself with her surroundings. In spite of everything, she did feel mostly rested. She stood, and began gathering her things.
In the other bunk, Liselye was busy rousing Qhoroali, who seemed ill-tempered and was muttering Vrelian curses. Setsiana left her to it, and ducked behind the screen with her nurefye. The knife had fortunately not been misplaced. Perhaps she would even get a chance to use it today.
She stepped back out and Liselye took her place. Qhoroali was now fully roused and was packing up her own things, as well as Liselye’s. Setsiana put the last few items into her bag and sat on the bed while the others readied themselves. She had a thought, then, and stood and strode to the door. If she left ahead of them, she could lose them in the crowd of people leaving the train, perhaps.
But Qhoroali had seen her move, and now darted to the door to block her route, smiling, and shaking her head. Setsiana wanted to fight, but it was still too early, and she had not yet shaken off all of the haze of sleep.
Liselye reappeared, and took Qhoroali’s place at the door while Qhoroali went to change. She smiled at Setsiana, and the smile seemed tinted with a soft kind of mockery. Setsiana drew back, and turned away.
When they had finished changing and packing up, they proceeded back down aisle to the front of the train, with Setsiana sandwiched between the two of them once again, but this time with Qhoroali in front. They descended the steps of the first car and exited into another open-air building, much like the train port in Nwórza. Rays of early morning sunlight sifted in over the tops of the walls. The people exiting the train formed a packed crowd, and those filing in from behind made it so that Setsiana could not run away even if Qhoroali and Liselye had not once again taken her arms on either side. The crowd pushed them out of the train port and into the streets of an unfamiliar city that must be Duqhora, where it began to disperse.
Qhoroali led them to a building not far away whose sign advertised in the Capital Dialect that it was a carriage rental. Once again, Setsiana had the odd experience of being able to understand the sign perfectly, but not the snatches of conversation around her.
Inside was a man at a counter, and a very large sign listing rates per mile, or to specific destination cities and towns that were mostly unknown to Setsiana. Qhoroali left Setsiana with Liselye and went to speak with the man in a language that Setsiana could mostly understand as some variant of the Capital Dialect; she caught carriage, and north, and northwest, and three. The man responded in what seemed like a slightly different language that Setsiana felt strongly she should be able to understand but could not, though he and Qhoroali seemed to be able to understand each other perfectly well. Some money changed hands; less money than the smallest amount listed on the sign, Setsiana noted. They returned back outside to the morning sunlight.
A carriage drawn by a single horse was pulling up from around the side of the building, stopping directly in front of them. It was being driven by a man with the kind of washed-out, colorless complexion and sharp cheekbones of the Shayanseen, and his eyes were pinpricks of clear ice. For a moment, Setsiana worried that he would not be able to speak any of the languages they knew, but her fear was assuaged when he greeted them hesitantly in QuCheanya. Qhoroali responded in the same language she had used inside with the man at the counter, and the driver relaxed visibly and replied more fluently.
The carriage was nicer and seemed to travel more smoothly than others that Setsiana had ridden in — was it the later time period, or the bigger city? She might have asked someone, and she was also dying to know where they were headed, but Qhoroali had taken up a position near front of the carriage and was engaged in directing the driver, and Setsiana wasn’t speaking to Liselye anymore.
They passed through crowded city streets, and by taller buildings than Setsiana was used to seeing, and eventually left the crush of the populated areas behind them and wound up on a lonely road leading out of the city. Qhoroali said something, and pointed, and after a word of confirmation, the driver directed the horse to leave the road, and then they were traveling along a dirt track that might have been a cowpath, or nothing at all. Suddenly, Qhoroali spoke to the driver, and he pulled up, and then came to let them out of the carriage. Outside, Qhoroali spoke to him again, and pressed some coins into his hand, and he nodded and seemed to settle in to wait.
They walked a ways further down the cowpath, until they were just out of sight of where the driver waited, behind a line of tall bushes. There, they came upon something that Setsiana recognized: a circle marked out on the ground by wooden posts, an inch or so in height, just like the one she’d seen outside the apartment the times they had time traveled there. What had Liselye said about it? They needed it for the frequent time travel they did in that specific place. What need could there be for frequent time travel in this remote location?
They stood there, Qhoroali and Liselye seemingly waiting for something. After a minute or two, three people appeared at the edge of the circle of posts, as if by magic, and they were not just any people, but were in fact their own doppelgangers — another Qhoroali and another Liselye and another Setsiana, wearing the same nurefyes and with the same braids. Setsiana looked at her double with curiosity and confusion, and her double looked back, but did not turn from where she was headed. The three other versions of themselves walked back down the cowpath and greeted the driver, and the clopping sounds of hooves and the grinding sounds of the wheels crunching in the dirt signaled that the carriage had left.
“Ready?” asked Qhoroali. She reached into her bag for a qoire bottle, and Setsiana got a momentary glimpse into it and saw that there were a number of bottles in there now. The bottle was passed to Liselye and Setsiana to take the three drops, and then back to Qhoroali, who swallowed the mouthful. Setsiana was once again positioned between the two of them, and together they entered the circle and began walking the branches of Time.
This time, it seemed to Setsiana that they walked for so long that she could feel the effects of the qoire start to leave her body, and the timelines began to disappear. Before they disappeared entirely, they left the circle and stopped, and Setsiana thought they must have come to their destination, but no — they simply re-upped the qoire and went back into the circle and continued. They walked for another long period, and the qoire expired again and they left the circle a second time, and Setsiana wondered if they were going to go back for a third, but this time when they stopped, Qhoroali did not reach for another bottle, but for her coat.
It was cold; maybe even winter-cold, although the greenery on the trees she could see to the north seemed to belie that. Here, near the circle, in whatever distant time this was, stood a tall wooden totem, decorated with some wood stain, feathers and animal pelts, and carved stones and common gems. At the top, a bright sunburst of yellow topaz with the face of a man carved into it radiated rays of carved light, and at the bottom, plants and animals and people raised their heads and flowering stalks to heaven. Setsiana stared at the sunburst; it was made of a single piece, not a mosaic of smaller ones. Where had a gem so large been found? From what she could see, the surface of the piece did not seem smooth enough to be glass.
They were still in the middle of nowhere, but whereas they had been able to see the road and even a hint of the distant buildings of Duqhora from this point before the time travel, she realized that neither were in evidence anymore. She thought they had been going in a past-ward direction — perhaps it was so far in the past that Duqhora had not yet been established. It was morning, and only a few birds seemed to stir in the trees to the north. The place seemed cold and empty, uninhabited. She finished putting on her coat, and followed the others as they walked south.
Soon she noticed wisps of smoke rising into the air in front of them, and they came upon a large encampment, or maybe a very small village under construction. Many of the structures were tents of thick hide, but a few were built of more permanent stuff — mud, or clay. Some were in an intermediate state, with hides completing a partially built structure. In the center of the camp, a large fire burned inside a circle of stones, and a number of people were gathered around it, eating or drinking something out of bowls. On the far side of the fire, Setsiana could just make out some shape, obscured by the brightness of the flames and the earliness of the morning, which emitted a piercing green light, like the eye of some otherworldly cat.
As they approached, the people around the fire came into clearer view. All of them save one had long black hair, completely straight, as if it were a mantle of pressed cloth, their skin on the darker side, but not unlike what one might see in Vrel, dressed in animal furs and thick leather. The exception was a person sitting with their back to the three of them, who had a head of short-cut soft golden curls and pale skin. For a moment, Setsiana thought they must be Shayanseen, like the driver who had brought them to this place, but then the light from the rising sun caught the head as it turned, and for just a moment the hair flashed copper.
The person with the red-blond hair stood up… and up and up, and then turned, revealing himself to be the tallest man Setsiana had ever laid eyes on, dressed the same way as the others but wearing, seemingly incongruously, a pair of large rounded spectacles. He smiled warmly at Qhoroali. “I knew you would come today,” he said in QuCheanya. “It’s nice to see you. Here, come inside.” Without waiting for a response, he picked up a nearby torch from the ground and lit it from the fire, and led them to a tent which had been built about twice as tall as any of the others.
The inside of the tent was very sparse. In place a proper bed was simply a low platform with a bedroll made of thick furs. A couple chairs stood around a small table of crude make, stacked with papers, not unlike Qhoroali’s desk. Some full sacks sat along the walls, and in the corner stood a black box, exactly the same as the ones Peatäro had connected and disconnected from Qhoroali’s copier. In the center was a much smaller fire circle, which the tall man lit with the torch, which he then snuffed in a nearby bucket of sand. The smoke easily escaped via a small hole in the roof. In the light of this smaller fire, she saw something she had not noticed outside: the man wore a brilliant red ruby stud in his left ear, which caught the light and glittered. It was the marriage ear — the ear where you would normally wear a marriage hoop, but the ornament was not a hoop. Nor was it a plain white engagement stud that couples often got before the official ceremony. To wear something so expensive in the place designated for the marriage hoop spoke to a great deal of faith that a marriage hoop would never be called for.
Liselye touched Qhoroali’s shoulder lightly. “I’ll leave you to it,” she said. “There are some people I need to say hi to.” She disappeared back out the front of the tent.
The tall man sat in a chair, becoming much less intimidating. “It’s good to see you,” he said, again. He gestured towards Setsiana. “Who have brought to meet me today?”
“It’s a bit of a long story,” said Qhoroali. “I was hoping you could give her a look at some of the stuff we’re going to be making today.”
The man sighed. “Of course,” he said. “You’re only here to get me to make you something new with the nanosynthesizer. That’s always the reason, why did I ever expect something else? I always think that maybe you will say, It’s nice to see you, Cusäfä, it’s been so long, or, How are you doing, Cusäfä, I hope you are well, or What is going on in your life, Cusäfä, or something like that, but you just want to know if I can make you some weird thing that you found in a paper.”
“If you want to tell me about something, you can just start talking and tell me about it,” said Qhoroali. “You know I care about you and am always interested in whatever you have to say. You don’t have to wait until I ask you a question about it.”
“It’s nice to hear the question asked. It’s just a little bit of social ceremony that makes you feel appreciated.”
“It doesn’t make me feel appreciated,” said Qhoroali. “It makes me feel like I have to guess at which specific question you want me to ask you, and then I get punished if I don’t guess the right one. And when people ask me questions like that, I have to guess if they actually want to know the answer, or if they are just asking in order to fulfill a ‘social ceremony’, as you put it.”
“Well, I guess I can appreciate that perspective,” said Cusäfä. “So how about a compromise? When you come to see me, you can just always say, ‘It’s nice to see you, how have you been?’ and then I’ll tell you whatever I want to tell you. That’s the script, there’s no guessing game, I won’t expect anything else from you. Does that work?”
“Ok, that seems fair,” Qhoroali conceded. “So… it’s nice to see you. How have you been?”
“A bit anxious, to be honest. So much progress has been made here… well, at least, way more than has been made in a very long time, at any rate. But I am still worried that they will not survive the Warming.”
“What is the Warming?” asked Setsiana. And then she continued further, since her questions did not seem likely to be answered otherwise: “And where in history are we? Who are these people? What is the totem outside the camp for?”
“We are currently twelve thousand years back in history,” said Cusäfä. “Or rather, twelve thousand years before I was born, and not a lot different from Qhoroali’s perspective. With time differentials like that, what is a mere half a millennium between friends, really? When I think of all the technological developments and changes that have happened just between our birthdates, it’s truly unfathomable. These people have been living the same lifestyle with more or less the same technology for longer than they have recorded history, and now everything is changing, and they are struggling to keep up. Meanwhile, in the future, we caused our own massive changes to the global climate and then fixed and stabilized everything in far less time than the Warming has been happening for.
“The Warming is the transition to the second interglacial warm period. It used to be colder than it is now; for about two thousand years since the end of the first warm period, there was a glacial period, an ice age. That’s what these people know, what they’re used to. Plants were harder to come by, they survived mainly by hunting the megafauna. But now the climate is warming up again, and the megafauna are almost gone — moreso here, in the west, than on the eastern side of the island and in other parts of the world. The animals walked across land and sea ice that connected the island to Meandhshen during the ice age, so there were always more of them in the east, and more humans, too, for the same reason. Now the bridge is gone, and most of the large prey animals that made it out here have been hunted to extinction. These people have always gathered wild plants for various purposes, but now they need to learn how to rely primarily on them. They need to learn to do agriculture, and probably need to start domesticating the wild goats. In my timeline, at least, they didn’t manage it, and they all died with the last of the megafauna. I learned about them when I was briefly studying archaeology at university, before I got into nanotech, about all the stuff they left behind covered in sunbursts, and I wondered what they would have become if they had survived. So, with Qhoroali’s help, I came back here with a nanosynthesizer to help bridge the gap between the death of the megafauna and their success at agriculture and try to save them.”
“You can’t save them,” Setsiana had to say. “If they died in your timeline, that’s what happened, and it can’t be changed.”
“Oh yes, I already had all my hopes and dreams on that account dashed by Qhoroali here. But that’s just my timeline. They might survive in some other one that we don’t know about. And who knows, maybe it was because of me and my nanosynthesizer the whole time.”
“It seems incredibly egotistical to presume such a thing.”
Cusäfä and Qhoroali seemed to share a smile, for an instant. “Oh I know,” he said, “you have some sort of religious regard for things like this. It’s some kind of holy miracle. I don’t see it that way — I see it as me taking a chance and doing my best to help my fellow humans survive global climate change. I don’t think that’s presumptuous.”
“How far have you gotten with the agriculture?” asked Qhoroali.
“See? There you are, asking the right question. You’re not as bad at this as you think.”
“I asked because I wanted to know the answer, not because I’m playing a social game with you.”
Cusäfä waved this away. “Anyway, well.” He turned towards Setsiana, slightly. “She knows most of this already, but I want to explain it to you. They used to move the camp from place to place, depending on the movements of the animals, but this was the place they always came to in late summer, and they would harvest whatever wild rice they found growing along the banks of the river to the south. So, to start with, I had them camp here permanently, and plant new rice in the spring, and watch over it as it grew; had them build their own irrigation so that if the river failed to flood sufficiently, they could do it themselves, had them check on it and help it. We harvested it for the first time since getting everything set up a few weeks ago, and they were amazed by the increase in yield. But I think it is still not good enough for what they need, and we also need crops besides rice. And the nanosynthesizer is starting to wear out. Everything moves so slowly here.”
“What is the ‘nanosynthesizer’, exactly?” Setsiana asked. She put together the roots that she recognized, and made a guess based on what Cusäfä seemed to be using it for. “Does it make tiny animals?”
“Ha! No, in all the millennia we’ve been around, we never managed to improve on nature’s method of creating life. I guess you could say it creates tiny dead animals, though. Or pieces of dead animals. It’s a household commercial model, so it’s got a steak button, which is very convenient and easy for the people here to use. Also chicken, and fish, and good selection of vegetables, and rice, of course, and a few of the more common sauces. It doesn’t make complete meals, the ones that do that cost a fortune, but you can always just combine the stuff it makes in a bowl and get something pretty decent. The main downside of using the commercial model is that when you have demanding friends who always want you to make non-food substances with it—” he looked briefly at Qhoroali— “you have to jailbreak it briefly, at which point you can make anything you can code in. The problem is that jailbreaking it bypasses its safety features. If you get an industrial or research model, you can make almost anything without any jailbreaking, but they do have some hard stops — most models won’t make radioactive material, for example, and they won’t make stuff that will immediately explode or catch on fire. But those models don’t have a steak button. If you want to make steak you have to code it in manually, and organics are always a huge pain and you often wind up with food texture issues. So instead, we have the commercial model, and the steak button, and when Qhoroali wants to make something weird with it, we have to be extremely careful.”
“Wait. Are you saying you can… press a button, and it creates a steak out of thin air?”
“More or less. It’s kind of funny, actually, if it weren’t for that, I don’t think they would have listened to me at all. A stranger who shows up who doesn’t know the language, telling them they have to change their entire way of life? I was a bit naive when I came up with this idea, to tell you the truth. But after I started to get a handle on the language, the first thing I wanted to tell them was how to use the nanosynthesizer. So I explained that it gets power from the solar hubs, and the solar hubs get power from the sun. And they didn’t trust me, and they said, prove it to us. So I left one solar hub outside in the sun for the whole day, and kept another one inside a tent, and then after the sun had set, I showed them that if they plugged it into the one that had been in the sun, it worked, and if the plugged it into the other one, it didn’t. I let them do it themselves, showed them that it wasn’t me playing a trick. And when they were convinced, they said, ‘Oh, we understand now. This object is of divine origin, and it works by divine power. You have been sent to us by the Sun.’ And that was how I found out they worshiped the sun, although possibly I should have guessed earlier from all of the sunbursts. I have managed to convince them that I’m just a regular human at this point, but they continue to regard the nanosynthesizer as divine.”
“Was that what we worshiped even before the soulwrights? The sun?”
“No, and that’s part of what is so interesting about these people. There have never been any people who worshiped the sun that we were able to discover in my time in NoraCheanya, in Shayansee, in Meandhshen — nowhere that’s near here. These people died out and left only their sunburst decorations, and whatever group they came from originally must have, too, and never even left that much behind. There were no other sites found. But there is one place with a religion that involves the sun, even still in my time — very far away from here. Do you know where Ádeya is?”
“No, I’ve never heard of it,” said Setsiana. “Is it one of the Northern Kingdoms?”
“Not remotely, although it is also in the northern hemisphere. It’s an island in the middle of the Endless Ocean, thousands and thousands of miles northwest of Shayansee. Or well, I guess you’re supposed to call it Ádeya-Shuznzyon, technically there were two countries there. But it was in the Ádeya part of it specifically where they worshiped the sun, though they also had both moons and Celyira in the pantheon. I visited there once, it’s a nice place. The mountains in Shuznzyon are the tallest in the world and people were constantly killing themselves trying to climb them for bragging rights. But while I was visiting there, I installed an Ádeyan dictionary on my phone for fun, and I’ve been looking through it as I learn more and more of these people’s language, here in this early time… I know the comparative method can’t possibly be reliable over this time scale. But I can see similarities. The people look similar too, these are the only two places I’ve been where every single person has hair as straight as a board. I don’t know, I’m probably very biased. But I think these people came from one of the groups that somehow make it to Ádeya-Shuznzyon during this time period. You know we in NoraCheanya are related to the Shayanseen, right? For ages we called those shared ancestors the Ancient Shayanseen. They will walk over the south pole from southern Meandhshen to southern Shayansee during the warm period that’s coming, and global temperatures will never rise high enough for that to happen again after that — well, except for briefly when we screwed everything up in the modern era. But this is the second warm period that’s coming now. There was a previous one, and, some people thought, a previous polar migration. People had started talking about the ‘North Shayansee People’, who crossed during the first warm period and moved north when the ice age came, and the ‘South Shayansee People’ who will cross during the second and kill off all of the first group. There were a few scraps of archaeological evidence left on the northern coasts of Shayansee of the first group, nothing more. But I think that before they will be killed, some of them will manage to escape across the sea and wind up in Ádeya. And others left even earlier, and wound up here, and may die for a different reason. These people have a myth about crossing an ocean on rafts, following the rising sun to a new land. Going east, from the west. From northern Shayansee, where the North Shayansee People are now.”
“You want to go back to your time and write up a paper about this?” asked Qhoroali.
“God, no. I came here to do something, and I’m going to do it, or die trying. Anyway, the state of scientific research in NoraCheanya never really recovered after the demise of the priesthood. Before I found out about these guys, my first plan was just to find a way to time travel back to when the priesthood was still around. I think that was the biggest mistake we made as a society, getting rid of them.”
“How can you say that after everything I’ve told you about them?” demanded Qhoroali.
“I know,” Cusäfä said. “Believe me, I get it, I understand why you hate them. But look. They actually did research for the sake of doing research. They opened public universities that anyone could go to free of charge and somehow got the government to pay for them. They contained plagues that were devastating the rest of the world at the time. They made us a beacon of literacy for over a thousand years. We had twice the literacy rates of T’arse, even! That’s what you can do with the organized use of time travel. But in my time, the literacy rates were actually worse than they were in yours. T’arse regarded us as backwards and superstitious, because our government didn’t stop ranting about how time travel was evil, when the rest of the world didn’t even believe it existed. They banned all of the books about it. They disappeared people who studied it. They probably would have gotten to me eventually if I hadn’t met you. And if you wanted to go to university, you either had to pay a huge fee, or you had to get sponsored by a private company, and promise to work for them for ten years after you were done. I didn’t think twice about getting my sponsorship, it was what everyone in my social circle was doing, totally normal. But the prospect of spending another seven years at that soul-sucking job was a big part of why I decided to abandon it all for a tent with no central heating during the last leg of the ice age.”
“What happened in 2307 to create your world was entirely the fault of the priesthood,” said Qhoroali. “If it hadn’t been for them, if they hadn’t extorted all of that money from the government for those universities, none of that would have happened.”
“Everyone does both good and evil things. You’re never going to find any person, or organization, that is completely pure. Sometimes you have to admit that the good things that were done can outweigh the bad ones.”
“Nonsense,” said Qhoroali. “I believe in a world without evil. I know it is possible, and I know how to achieve it.”
“By killing God? Oh, sure. Is it just the priesthood’s god you’re after, or are all the other ones on the list, too? Do you need to add my people’s sun god, now? You know, the T’arsi god is supposedly the totality of all of the people who have ever lived in T’arse, combined into a singular entity. Would you be prepared to wipe out the entire population of world’s largest superpower, in every time period and every timeline, to achieve your world without evil?”
“No,” said Qhoroali. “There’s only one god that needs to be killed, and She is one person.”
Setsiana thought about the rug at the T’arsi Fair, with the being made up of a multitude of different people. She had never thought about T’arsi religion much before, and the merchants had never seemed interested in talking about it, but now she was curious. “How does their religion work?” she asked. “Liselye told me their wars have a religious reason, earlier, but didn’t explain.”
“Well, it’s a strange one,” said Cusäfä. “I don’t know if I would explain it correctly, since I’m not from there, but I have gone there fairly frequently to attend academic conferences. As I understand it, they originally believed that every person on the whole eastern continent, both T’arse and Meandhshen, was part of the collective consciousness that is their god. The god is actually named T’arse — it’s not a separate entity from the country, in their minds. So, because everyone on the continent is T’arse, everyone on the continent should be part of the country of T’arse, as well. That’s what the wars are about. Eventually people in Meandhshen got wise and started arguing that if they were all God, that meant T’arse wasn’t allowed to declare war on them, so the Will of T’arse at that time demoted them to being only possibly God — if they were killed in the war, they obviously weren’t God, but if they survived and became contributing citizens of T’arse, they were.
“They were strange even in non-religious matters, to be honest. I would go to a conference there, and afterwards, a researcher would invite me to her house, and introduce me to her husband… and her second husband, and her third husband, and then one of them would ask me how many wives I had, and another one would say ‘They only get one, there, dummy,’ and I would say ‘Actually, I never got married at all,’ and they would all look at me like I had three heads. And then they would change the subject and ask about qoire, since that’s the only thing they know about NoraCheanya other than the government’s insistence that time travel is real, and it’s rude to ask a visiting scientist if they believe in crackpot theories. Anyway, they would ask why it was so incredibly illegal here when it’s pretty harmless and non-addictive and then I’d have to explain that it’s because the government thinks you can use it to time travel, and then there would be another awkward silence. It was even worse when I had a mountain of evidence that it could be used to time travel, but if I actually said so, not only would this researcher kick me out of her house, but also our government would probably find a way to disappear me even though I was thousands of miles away in a foreign country.”
As he was speaking, Setsiana noticed something odd about how he was using the noun tenses in QuCheanya. When he had been talking about the things that were happening here, in this time, the rice farming and the polar migrations, he had used the regular past, present, and future tenses. This clearly wasn’t correct — when you had time-traveled to another time period, and were displaced in time, there were special temporal displacement tenses you were supposed to use. Setsiana had figured he just wasn’t familiar enough with them; she herself had only gotten an opportunity to use them in a non-academic context just recently, although she had been getting a lot of practice in since she’d been abducted. But now, when he talked about his old life, where he had lived in what must be a far future time, when he had visited T’arse and Ádeya, he was using those temporal displacement tenses. She realized suddenly that he was speaking as if he had been temporally displaced in his own time, where he had been born and raised, and as if this time, at the beginning of humanity, before the priesthood, before Cheanya, before Tuari, before rice, was his proper home.
“Oh, but we were talking about Ádeya earlier,” he said, suddenly, seeming to cheer up a bit. “That reminded me, I wanted to show you some pictures I took when I was there.” He went over to where the black box sat, picked up something small that was sitting on top of it, and removed some tiny cord or tail from it. “Here, look.”
Whatever it was fit easily in the palm of one hand, though Setsiana could see its shiny black back between his fingers and thumb. With his other hand, he traced arcane symbols in the air in front of it. “Look,” he said, again. “Does she remind you of anyone?”
Qhoroali had moved to stand near him, in order to see the thing from the same direction as he was. “Who am I supposed to be reminded of?”
“Doesn’t she look like you?”
“I mean, I guess maybe if you think every woman with my coloring looks like me.”
Setsiana cautiously moved over to join them. The device seemed to be a very thin, flat, sheet of glass, not more than a few inches in length and width, and on its surface was a small but very intricate picture: A light-skinned woman with black hair streaming behind her rode a gigantic white wolf as if it were a horse, dressed in a black cloak lined with white fur. In the background, more giant wolves howled, and another figure stood, almost obscured in shadow, dressed head to foot in a very traditional set of T’arsi armor and carrying a flag on a standard depicting the large moon, Yeari, on a field of blackness. The only thing that could be seen of their body between the joints of the armor was that the skin was very dark. Setsiana looked at Qhoroali and then back at the picture; there was a certain similarity.
“Who is she?” Qhoroali asked.
“A god, one of the Shuznzyon ones. Well, maybe the Shuznzyon one, they did call her Shuzn and then called themselves ‘Shuzn’s people’. Supposedly she led an army that killed the Creator, and then brought winter to Celyira, and accepts bribes to make it go away again. A dark kind of theology. They worshiped her in Ádeya, too, though they borrowed her as the personification of Yeari, since the Shuznzyon often used that imagery for her, and also winter, of course, and apparently she was also the patron of accountants and mathematicians for some reason.”
“Who is the T’arsi?” asked Setsiana. “Is that another god?”
“Sort of. In Shuznzyon tradition that person was a genderless demon who was Shuzn’s right hand during the war against the Creator; in Ádeya they were a shape-shifter who could be male or female or both depending on their whim, and were often considered a personification of the small moon, but they were more of a cultural hero or a trickster there than a god.” Cusäfä seemed hesitate slightly. “Their worship in Shuznzyon predates Shuznzyon’s contact with T’arse significantly, and by the time they did encounter T’arse, it was no longer common to see armor of this style there. But all of the older depictions clearly show this exact armor design. There was a good deal of argument among scholars about whether it was just a coincidence, or whether they actually did somehow encounter T’arsis much earlier than was previously thought. It’s hard to say which theory seems less plausible; T’arse was barely interested in sea exploration even after longitude was solved.”
Cusäfä made a gesture in front of the picture with two fingers, as if he had licked them and was using them to turn the page of a book. As if by magic, the picture transformed into a completely different one of a man and a woman standing on either side of a sign. Unlike the previous picture, the style was of extreme hyperrealism; it was as if Setsiana stood in front of a clear window looking through it at the two people in real life. For all of the skill that had gone into that, though, the composition seemed to lack artistry; the subjects slouched in a casual manner, and did not seem to be intentionally posed. The man’s very straight hair was shoulder-length, but the very front locks hung much longer and draped forward over his shoulders, each woven into a very small plait. The woman’s hair was slightly shorter, and she also seemed to have the long forelocks, but she had tied them back around the top of her head, like an unbraided T’arsi hair circlet. The sign was in a language Setsiana did not recognize. The letters were curvilinear like the T’arsi ones, but the curves were much broader and they were written horizontally.
Cusäfä pointed to the man in the picture. “That’s Rethálan, he’s from Ádeya. I met him at— well, I don’t remember what year the conference was, anymore. He was exploring ways to get nanosynthesizers to run on battery power, so they could be used in disaster zones, or war zones, or at the top of the Shuznzyon mountains. He would have loved Peatäro’s solar hubs, it’s a shame we never got that far with solar in our timeline. Anyway, he and his wife took me to this museum to see that art of Shuzn, and it was his husband who got me to put the Ádeyan dictionary on my phone.”
“They have multiple spouses there, too?” asked Qhoroali. “Another cultural contribution from theoretical ancient T’arsi explorers?”
“Ha! No. Marriage in Ádeya worked very differently than it did in T’arse. In T’arse, all your spouses were supposed to have the same relationship with you. Well, at least in theory, my understanding is that in practice a lot of T’arsis had very little to do with some of their spouses. But in theory, you were supposed to have a sexual and romantic relationship with all of them. In Ádeya, you only got one spouse you could have a sexual relationship with, one you could have a romantic relationship with, and one you could raise children with. You could also do all three of those things with the same person if you wanted to, but you could have multiple spouses who fulfilled different roles. So, Rethálan’s wife was his sexual partner, and his husband was his romantic partner and also the person he raised his kids with. When his wife got pregnant, he adopted the child into the marriage he had with his husband. She didn’t want to raise kids at all, but if she had, and she’d had a different spouse to do that with, she could also have adopted those kids into her other marriage. And if you didn’t want a sexual relationship, or you didn’t want a romantic relationship, you didn’t have to have any spouse for that role, if you didn’t want to.” He turned his head to look more fully at Qhoroali. “Don’t you think that’s a grand way of doing things? I would have loved to raise a child with someone, if I didn’t have to pretend to be in love with them. Maybe in another universe, if I’d been born there…” he touched the ruby in his ear, briefly. “And it would be perfect for you, too.”
“It’s… interesting,” Qhoroali said. “I don’t know. Just… interesting. I can’t quite believe it would really work. And romance isn’t that bad, you know.”
“You say that, but I know for a fact that yours brought you nothing but pain.”
“That’s not true. It’s… complicated.” Qhoroali shook her head. “Well, that was interesting, and thank you for sharing the pictures. But you are actually going to help me make my ‘weird stuff’ with the nanosynthesizer, right?”
“For sure. Show me what you need.”
Qhoroali dug through her bag and produced two papers. “Seventeenth century,” she said, passing over the first, and “twenty-second,” for the second. He set aside the small device and held them out in front of him, eyes narrowed.
“I’m not familiar with these,” he said. “Hold on, let me look them up.” He set the pages down and grabbed the device again and made a series of complicated gestures at it. Pages and pages of text in what looked like T’arsi flashed by on its surface, replaced by more pages of text, interleaved with chemical diagrams. He continued this in silence for some minutes, and then shook his head. “These are not in the database at all.”
“I thought you said that database contained every molecule they knew about in your time. In 2307, the government raided all the temples and stole all of their research. These papers came from temples. The priesthood doesn’t lose papers, it just doesn’t. These must have been there when the temples were raided, so their contents must have been stolen along with everything else. Why would your government not know about it?”
“They didn’t keep everything they found in those raids. Anything they thought was related to time travel, or was practical instructions on how to do it, they burned.”
“So you’re saying that these compounds were related to time travel?”
“Maybe. You have to keep in mind that they didn’t actually know anything about time travel, so they made a lot of mistakes when doing that purge. I know for a fact that they missed a lot of stuff that does relate directly to time travel, so it’s entirely possible that they also burned some completely unrelated things. But that’s the only reason I can think of for these not being in the database.” He tapped the paper that Qhoroali had identified as “seventeenth century”. “This I don’t recognize, but it has a lot of structures in it that I’m familiar with from elsewhere, so I’m confident it’s not dangerous.” He set the paper aside and indicated the other. “This one…” he tapped one of the symbols. “I don’t know what that element is called in QuCheanya, but I know the symbol. It had been synthesized and named by the priesthood, and the government wanted to rename it something different, so they held a contest to come up with the name, and the public ultimately voted for ‘Element McElement-face’, which the government immediately discarded and then they renamed it after some Northern Kingdoms country or other. That all happened nearly a century before my birth, and whatever the original name for it was that they wanted to expunge, I never learned it, so I guess they succeeded there. I don’t think anyone has ever gotten it to do anything interesting in a lab, or observed it in nature before, so everyone just knows it as that element that was called ‘Element McElement-face’ for 15 seconds. What did your paper call it?”
“‘Dreamstuff’. That’s the name in QuCheanya, apparently.”
“Why that name? Does it have something to do with dreams?”
“I don’t know, the paper wasn’t about etymology, and it’s difficult to track down coinages like that in QuCheanya. The paper was about dreams, to a certain extent, I guess, but it wasn’t the main focus.”
“Well, regardless. Stuff like that that tends to not like forming compounds also tends to not like staying in compounds, and often likes to exit them immediately, which causes an explosion. This seems like it might work and won’t explode, but I’m not a real chemist, I’m just an engineer. So, if you want me to make this one, we have to take the nanosynthesizer a few miles away from the camp and use the hazmat suits. I only have two of those, so only one of you can come with me. But don’t worry, the other two of you won’t have to stay here waiting for a few hours while we do that, because I’ve actually got a favor of my own I need to ask of you.”
“Oh?”
“Like I said, the nanosynthesizer is starting to wear out. Late last night, something broke inside of it, I won’t bore you with the details, but I had to unscrew everything and clean some parts and reset some things and do some maintenance. When I was putting it back together again, one of the screws broke. These are kind of specialty screws, unfortunately, they were only produced for a period of about 10 years before I came here, so we can’t get them from a more convenient time period, and other screws don’t work with this model. Fortunately, you had arrived earlier yesterday with exactly the screws I needed, and also the editions of Evolving Nanotech from the years 125, 126, and 127, which was amazing and exactly what I’ve been missing from life lately, so thank you very much for that. Anyway, I understood from the other version of you who I think is still asleep somewhere in the camp that you right here are going to leave now to go do that for me, presumably with Liselye.”
Qhoroali shook her head. “Can’t. If that’s the way it shakes out, I have to leave Liselye with you to oversee the creation of the compounds.”
“Why her? I thought you said she was the one interested in the compounds.” Cusäfä indicated Setsiana.
“She is… but I can’t trust her alone with that stuff yet. It’s a little complicated. If only one person can go with you, it has to be either me or Li, and it sounds like I’m going to be getting you screws.”
“You don’t trust her alone with some flasks, but you’ll trust her to have your back in 127?”
“No, I’ll go alone. You know I can manage time travel by myself.”
“Think about this first,” said Cusäfä. “You’re going to be traveling 12,000 years there, and 12,000 years back. And you know what it’s like there. Take someone with you.” He hesitated. “And if I understand correctly, you don’t necessarily have to go, if you don’t want to. The timeline might have diverged since then, and if there are multiple timelines where we have this conversation, you only have to do this errand in one of them. So if you want to, you can give yourself a break, let alternate timeline Qhoroali do this one. I know you don’t do well there.”
Qhoroali’s wore a very pinched expression now. “I can do this, you know I can,” she said, in a voice that was querulous with anger. “I’m not a child that needs to be protected from the world that you experienced every day for over 30 years. If it were Li here, or any other adult, talking about doing you this favor, you wouldn’t be speaking to her like this.” During the previous conversation, the disagreements about killing Sapfita, about whether Sapfita even existed, about whether the priesthood had done more good than evil, those arguments had seemed to be familiar and comfortable ones that were hashed out in a genial, good-natured way. This relatively innocent entreaty somehow seemed to have crossed some line that Setsiana could not envision.
Cusäfä was momentarily taken aback. Then he paused for a moment, bowed his head in acknowledgment, and said: “I’m sorry, you’re absolutely right. I was wrong to treat you that way, and I apologize. But I do still stand by my recommendation that you take someone else with you — I would make that recommendation to anyone.”
Qhoroali seemed mollified by this. “I’ll take Setsiana, then,” she said. “Li absolutely has to be the one to go with you. Don’t worry about it, we’ll be fine.” She turned to face Setsiana, a smile making it back onto her face as the tenseness left it. “Well, you said you wanted to know what things were like after 2307, right?”
no subject
Also I laughed a lot at It had been synthesized and named by the priesthood, and the government wanted to rename it something different, so they held a contest to come up with the name, and the public ultimately voted for ‘Element McElement-face’, - even in this universe? XD /o\
... and now poor Setsiana's going to get dragged into another time period? It's a lot.
no subject
Thank you!
The whole reason for the Boaty McBoatface reference is that shortly after that whole thing happened, Google released an open-source English dependency parser that they named Parsey McParseface, and this is honestly my favorite thing to tell people who have nothing to do with the field. Anyway, I put a lot of myself into Cusäfä, just in terms of him being an engineer who is also a social science geek, and I thought it would be fun if he had his own Boaty McBoatface story to tell. It also meant I didn't actually have to come up with a non-QuCheanya name for the element.
no subject
XD This was really interesting to read, I appreciate the detailed worldbuilding. The nanosynthesizer is really cool, it reminds me of the replicators in Star Trek or 3d printers! And "Element McElement-face" made me laugh!
no subject
Thank you! This part was very fun to write, as well.