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rainbowfic2025-05-13 02:33 pm
paradoxcase) wrote in rainbowfic2025-05-13 02:33 pm
Ecru #12 [The Fulcrum]
Name: After the End
Story: The Fulcrum
Colors: Ecru #12: End
Styles and Supplies: Chiaroscuro, Life Drawing, Panorama, Cartography, Resin (Three weeks for Dreamwidth), Feathers (This Day Trivia May 13 1985: Police burn down a Philadelphia neighborhood)
Word Count: 4587
Rating: T
Warnings: Fantasy Drug (Ab)use, Swearing, Discussion of wartime atrocities
Characters: Setsiana, Qhoroali, Liselye, Cusäfä
In-Universe Date: (Approximately) -10,000; 2434
Summary: Setsiana and Qhoroali go to get Cusäfä some screws.
Before Setsiana could respond to Qhoroali’s question, the front of the tent parted and Liselye reentered. The three of them turned to look at her with slightly guilty expressions.
Liselye frowned. “Why do I get the feeling that I got volunteered for something without my consent?”
“I just need you to go with Cusäfä and collect the substances we need,” said Qhoroali. “You get the easy job today, actually.”
Liselye’s eyes narrowed. “What’s the hard job?”
“I have to go to 2434 to get some screws. It’ll be fine, though.”
“Are you sure? I can come with you.”
“It’ll be fine. I’m taking Setsiana. Also, I literally just had this argument, I’m not having it a second time.” Qhoroali pushed past Liselye and left the tent.
Liselye watched her leave, and then regarded Setsiana with a much cooler and more calculating expression than she had ever had before and approached her to speak to her in a stage whisper. “You know that she is your only way back to your own time, right? Your only way back to any civilized time period. If something happens to her in the 2434, you’re stuck there. I just want to make sure you understand that.”
“I do understand that,” said Setsiana.
Liselye looked at her for another moment, and then said, “Good.”
“You’ll need some appropriate clothing,” said Cusäfä, in a more normal tone of voice. “Qhoroali should be able to show you where we keep it.” This seemed to be a request for her to leave the tent, so Setsiana left.
Outside, Qhoroali was standing still, staring into the great fire pensively. Setsiana approached her uncertainly and said, “Cusäfä said we needed clothing, and that you knew where it was kept.”
This seemed to snap Qhoroali out of whatever reverie she was in. “Right,” she said. “It’s in there.” She pointed at one of the clay structures.
As they walked over, Setsiana asked: “Is there a reason we bring him the screws yesterday instead of today? It just seems like an extra complication.”
“Yeah, there is a reason.” Qhoroali stopped walking, picked up a nearby stick, and used it to draw a large dot in the dirt. She then drew a straight line directly downwards from the dot, and an array of diagonal lines from it in upward directions. “This is where the nanosynthesizer broke,” she said, tapping the dot. “Potentially, there could have been any number of timelines branching from that point.” She indicated the upwards diagonal lines. “So, we could be here, right now.” She drew a second dot along one of the branching timelines. “If we return back to the current point, then in all these other timelines, the nanosynthesizer would just be broken, with no fix.” She indicated the timelines that didn’t have the second dot. “And if we actually return after we left, it would mean we might never return from this errand in some other branching timelines for the same reason, and we generally try to avoid having that happen.”
“I see,” said Setsiana. Something occurred to her, then. “Is that why earlier, we waited until we saw ourselves return from the circle before time traveling? So there would be no timelines where we didn’t return?”
“Precisely. You didn’t see that happen when we went to the Fair, because we time traveled in a different spot, but we did return a couple minutes before we left in that case, as well.”
“Doesn’t that run the risk of there being multiple versions of you, if the timelines could have branched in that short time, because there might be timelines where we return but didn’t wind up actually leaving?”
“Sure, but it’d be relatively rare. It hasn’t happened to us yet, but that’s probably just luck. If it does happen, it’s not the end of the world, though. It’s much better than some of us just going permanently missing.”
They continued on, and entered the building. The doorway was still covered by a length of hide, like the tents, but it was thicker and blocked the wind better than Setsiana expected, and the interior was noticeably warmer than the outside. The building was larger than Cusäfä’s tent, and a few people were clustered around a smaller fire similar to the one Cusäfä had lit there, speaking in a strange language; they looked up briefly as Setsiana and Qhoroali entered, and then returned to their conversations.
Qhoroali led them to one side of the room, where some large baskets were stacked. “We keep these around in case we need to go back to that time period,” she explained. “Since time travel is illegal there, dressing anachronistically can attract unwanted attention. You can choose anything from here; Cusäfä says this is all considered modern in his time.” She indicated one basket. “This one and everything to the right of it are women’s clothing.”
Setsiana began picking through the folded clothing. There were were tops in a wide variety of styles and colors, but to her dismay, almost all of the bottoms were trousers, and the skirts that she did find were all much too short, many seeming to be even above knee level. “Where are the skirts?” she asked, and then clarified, “the full skirts.”
“Those are all the skirts there are,” said Qhoroali. “There aren’t any full skirts in this time period. Full skirts have always been strongly associated with the priesthood — they are the priesthood’s traditional uniform. That’s how they came to be women’s clothing in the first place, because the priesthood held itself up as an icon of womanhood; before it became gender-segregated, full skirts were for all religious leaders and were not associated with any gender. And in Cusäfä’s time, full skirts are for no one, because the government has banned everything to do with the priesthood. If you wore one there, you would be arrested for ‘portrayal of the priesthood’. However, at the time we are going to, it has been over 120 years since the priesthood was ended, and the laws are bit laxer now that they have faded from the immediate cultural consciousness, and less full skirts like the ones you see in the baskets here are allowed. Nothing like the ones on the nurefyes, though.”
Something like panic swept through Setsiana; her arms trembled and she dropped the skirt she was holding. “I can’t wear these,” she whispered.
“What is the problem?” asked Qhoroali.
Setsiana struggled to put it into words. “My legs,” she said. “Below the end of the skirt, they will be naked and bare… everyone will see them…”
“Then why not wear the trousers?”
Setsiana just shook her head violently.
“I understand,” said Qhoroali, unexpectedly. “I know what it is like to be censured and mocked, if not arrested, for wearing the clothing you are comfortable in — the only clothing you can stand to wear. Here,” she sifted through some of the baskets and came up with a pair of trousers. “How would it be to wear the trousers underneath one of these skirts?” She picked up the one that Setsiana had dropped, which was one of the longer ones, and placed it over the trousers, laid out on top of the other clothes in the basket. “Would something like that be ok? These trousers are very wide and loose at the bottoms. They are not a skirt, but maybe it is close enough? Cusäfä says this style is acceptable and will not attract comment.”
Setsiana looked at the proposed clothing and made herself think about it. “I think… maybe.”
For a time they went through all the baskets of womens’ clothing, Qhoroali with her tailor’s understanding of clothing and her knowledge of Setsiana’s measurements telling her how the different skirts and trousers would fit, where they would come down to, how loose or tight they would be, and which ones would fit the best. Eventually, Setsiana picked out a pair of them to wear together, and a top to go with them, and was feeling almost positively about how they would look. Qhoroali picked out a shirt and trousers for herself, and was able to ask one of the villagers for the use of an unoccupied tent in a few halting phrases of their unfamiliar language, where she and Setsiana took turns dressing. They returned to Cusäfä’s tent, where a swish of his wrist transformed his magical device into a mirror, and Setsiana was able to check out how she looked, while Qhoroali took down some notes about their errand from Cusäfä. She still would have preferred a full skirt, but the outfit was at least not one she would be ashamed to be seen in public in. Cusäfä approved of their choices, and they made their way back to the sunburst totem to the north of the camp.
Qhoroali took a bottle of qoire out of her pack, they linked hands and stepped into the circle, and began the long trek 12,000 years back into the future.
After again re-upping the qoire a second time and doing a second long travel, they exited the circle into a very strange place. They were seemingly between the walls of several brick buildings that had been built close together, but there was still enough space for the circle of pegs on the ground, which still existed, even here. The ground was dirty, covered in muck, and the air seemed to carry a thin haze. There was a piece of paper on the ground; driven by some curiosity, Setsiana picked it up. It was a page printed in T’arsi, although she could not understand the words, with the letters running down the two sides of the page and a picture in the middle, hyper-realistic like the one she’d seen on Cusäfä’s device, of a cat in the midst of play.
“Why is it in T’arsi?” Setsiana asked. “Do they speak T’arsi here, now?”
“It’s in the Capital Dialect,” said Qhoroali. “It’s just written using T’arsi letters because the government banned the use of the Cheanya syllabaries due to them being deemed to similar to QuCheanya’s. Someone has lost their cat. Look,” she indicated some of the words. “That’s ‘lost’, and that one is ‘cat’. Do you recognize the roots?”
Now, looking at the text anew as the Capital Dialect written in T’arsi letters, Setsiana could recognize some vague similarities between the words on the page and the ones she knew in her own time’s Capital Dialect. “Where are we?” she asked, looking around again. Between the sides of two buildings, she could see out into a very smoothly paved street, across which were more tall buildings. “This was the middle of nowhere in 2050.”
“It’s Duqhora,” said Qhoroali.
“But in 2050 we took a carriage to a place miles outside of the city—”
“The city expanded. There are so many more people alive now than when we were born, or in 2050. You can’t even comprehend how many people there are now, and they all have to live somewhere. So the cities grew, in some cases cities merged together into giant cities, and now places that were completely uninhabited in 2050 are in the middle of cities.”
While Setsiana stood, taking this in, Qhoroali added: “There is one more thing I forgot to tell you about. We can’t speak QuCheanya here. There are some people who can still recognize it, and almost all of them will have you arrested for speaking it. If you need to speak, we should henceforth use Vrelian, I think we can understand each other well enough that way. Practically no one speaks Vrelian here anymore, or could recognize it, even in Vrel; the government there is actually investing a ton of money into preventing it from dying out entirely after the Capital government spent hundreds of years investing a ton of money into killing it. In any case, I probably won’t be able to hear you, because I’ll be wearing these.” She pulled the black earmuffs from the train out of her pack and put them on, and that seemed to be the end of the conversation.
They emerged out onto the street, which was lined by flat strips of concrete on each side. Qhoroali did not take Setsiana’s hand; evidently she did not think Setsiana would try to run away here, and indeed, Setsiana felt no compulsion to do so. The tall buildings hemmed the street in on either side, and blocked out the sunlight, which was filtering bit by bit over the very tops. Was it just the early dawn, or were cities drenched in eternal darkness in this far-future time? There were people walking past them on the concrete in both directions, but with what Qhoroali had said about the population, Setsiana had no way of knowing if there were actually a large number of them, or maybe there were only very few people compared to the usual foot traffic.
A noise had begun behind them, a kind of low roar, which increased steadily in volume until Setsiana reflexively put her hands to her ears and turned her head. Some large contraption sped past on the road, as fast as the train had been, or maybe faster. The sound as it passed was incredible, but it quickly faded as the thing disappeared into the distance. A few seconds later, a second one sped by going the other direction, and then a third. A different kind of roar sounded from in front of them, and Setsiana saw something else zip past on a raised platform above the road, some distance in front of them; it was very long and it took some seconds for it to pass completely across the corridor formed by the two rows of buildings. It might have been a train, but it was going too fast for Setsiana to tell. Something sounded overhead, and Setsiana looked up; at first she thought she was looking at a bird, some kind of falcon, but it stayed unnaturally still, stuck in a spread-eagled position, moving in a straight line through the sky, more or less following the road. The noise tapered off as it disappeared over the horizon.
The other people walking by them did not lift their heads or glance at any of the noisy machines; these seemed to be normal parts of life in this time period. Setsiana tried to do her best to emulate them, and to not flinch when some new monstrosity went by on the road, but it took a good deal of her concentration. She wished she had her own pair of Qhoroali’s sound-blocking earmuffs.
At length, Qhoroali pushed open the door to one of the buildings on the side of the road, and they entered. The shop was blessedly quiet, and Qhoroali removed the earmuffs. It seemed to contain an array of tools, some simple ones that Setsiana was well familiar with, and others that seemed impossibly complex. Qhoroali walked down several aisles and eventually turned in to one, where there was a row of glass bins filled with small metal pieces that on closer inspection, were screws of a variety of different shapes and sizes. Qhoroali pulled on a roll of some clear sheeting that was affixed to a wall nearby, and then tore the end off, and then somehow opened the sheet into a bag, and, after checking something on one of her notes against the bins, began putting screws from one of them into the bag. When she judged she had enough, she tied the open end shut and left the aisle.
At the back of the store was a man standing behind a counter with a machine on it. He took the bag of screws from Qhoroali wordlessly, and placed it on metal shelf on the counter; some T’arsi numbers flashed in bright lights on a strip of black attached to it. When they stopped changing, the man said something to Qhoroali. She fished something out of her pack; it was a handful of strips of paper with intricate drawings on them — not hyper-realistic as the others had been, but drawn using a huge number of extremely small lines. As the paper moved and bent, a drawing of a man seemed to smile at her, for a moment, before relaxing his expression once again. Setsiana stared at it.
Qhoroali and the man behind the counter did not seem to find these papers remarkable. The man pressed some buttons on his machine, which emitted some beeps, and then took the papers and put them into a drawer that opened of its own accord. Qhoroali put the bag of screws into her pack, put her earmuffs back on, and led Setsiana back out to the street.
There were a lot more people walking along the side of the street now, and it was lighter — rays of sunlight streamed over the buildings to their left and painted the ones to their right. So it must just be early, then. The loud machines speeding along the road had become more frequent, too; there was never a moment when at least one of them could not be heard, and more often, many were going past at the same time. Setsiana wished again for something of her own to block out the noise of it.
Qhoroali seemed more on-edge, in this more populated atmosphere. Her eyes darted around at the growing crowds, and Setsiana wondered if there was something in particular she was looking out for. As they walked further along the road, it became apparent what that was: a man in a brown police-man’s uniform was among the crowd now, walking toward them at a sedate pace. He wore what must be a gun on his hip, but it looked very different than the ones she had seen at the Fair — smaller, sleeker, shinier, and much more intricate. Qhoroali’s eyes followed him cautiously.
Suddenly, something seemed to have distracted Qhoroali from the police officer. Setsiana saw Qhoroali’s hands fly to her earmuffs — once, twice, and a third time, each time a little more shaky and panicked. A final time, and she took them off, and frantically peered at some tiny part of them that Setsiana couldn’t see clearly, prodding it with her fingers. “Fuck,” she whispered, in her strange Vrelian. “The batteries. Fuck, fuck, fuck.” Her hands fisted, and then went to her ears. Ahead of them, something had caught the attention of the police officer. He pointed ahead of him, and shouted something in an unfamiliar language, and then began to run, pushing other people out of his way.
For one horrible moment, Setsiana felt sure that he had been pointing and shouting at them, but in the next, he was shoving them aside just as he had everyone else, and running past them to whatever he had seen behind them. At almost the same moment, Qhoroali pulled them through a door and into another building.
The inside of the building was dark and silent, with just a few soft lights providing just enough light to see by. Setsiana took a moment to catch her breath and calm her racing heartbeat, and then noticed that Qhoroali was trembling.
It occurred to her then that Qhoroali’s apparent reliance on the earmuffs, and her reaction when they had seemingly stopped working, reminded her of Zlúnrays’ reaction to getting overwhelmed by sounds, way back in Taleinyo. She had strategies for working with Zlúnrays, but Qhoroali was a grown woman, and not a ten-year-old. She did not have a script for this. And Liselye had been right — if something happened to Qhoroali here, she was stuck in this terrible time forever.
Fortunately, Qhoroali seemed to have her own plans. She grasped one of Setsiana’s hands, and began repeatedly tracing a figure eight on the palm with the pad of her thumb, with a not insignificant amount of pressure. Setsiana let her, and watched as she gradually calmed down, taking slower and slower breaths, her grip feeling more and more steady. She remembered Qhoroali’s warning about not speaking QuCheanya, but at length she ventured an “Are you alright?” in Vrelian.
A flicker of a smile flashed across Qhoroali’s lips. “You do sound just like a Mázghwent play,” she replied in her own dialect. “Like I am getting comforted by Princess Khr’adi, or something.”
“Should this demon take me, then let the world burn,” said Setsiana, quoting the play, and Qhoroali smiled again. “What made you think of that one?”
“It’s full of awful people being awful to each other, so this time period always brings it to mind. He must have really hated T’arse, for some reason.”
“It was written about a specific event,” Setsiana said. “All of his plays were. T’arse had conquered a city on Meandhshen, Fojheik. When the army escorted the intake officers in to process the population, the people all had signs hanging from every window and every building, disparaging T’arse, and the Will, and their religion, and saying ‘We will never be T’arse.’ All over the city like that, ‘We will never be T’arse’. The Will became enraged, and had the entire city burnt to the ground, along with everyone in it. That’s why Princess Khr’adi burns down her brother’s house in the play, it was about that. Even the Will must have known she went too far afterwards, the ambassadors started telling everyone that she had been temporarily possessed by a demon.”
“Ah, so that’s why there’s a demon in the play,” said Qhoroali. “I knew it had to be something. Why didn’t they teach us about that in school?”
“I don’t know, but our Governor really hated that one. They tried to perform it during the T’arsi Fair the year after the city was burned, and he arrested the players for it. I think he thought the Fair merchants would be offended, but I don’t think they even knew enough Vrelian to understand what the play was about.”
“Imagine having that much power,” Qhoroali said, “the power to burn a city to the ground in an instant, because you were having a bad day. Sometimes I think about that — if I’d been born to be the Will of T’arse, what terrible things would I be responsible for?”
“I don’t think you would actually do something like that,” Setsiana said, on pure reflex.
A dark smile inched its way across Qhoroali’s face, and then disappeared again. “Do you think you know me so well already? To accomplish my goal, anything is worth the cost. There is no more worthy cause, so there’s no price I wouldn’t pay for it. The only thing that I worry about is that I might have a momentary lapse of judgment and be wrong about what costs are truly necessary. I’m sure that that Will of T’arse felt the same way, when she ordered the city burned.”
“Where are we going next?” Setsiana asked, changing the subject. “Where do we find Cusäfä’s books?”
“We’re already here,” said Qhoroali, and indeed, Setsiana now saw by the dim lights that they were in a bookstore, with a tall shelf of volumes standing next to them. Qhoroali released Setsiana’s hand, and turned to face them. Along one of the vertical struts of the shelf was a sign written in the T’arsi alphabet; the spines of the books were labeled similarly. Qhoroali looked at the sign for a moment. “Biology,” she muttered. “All right.” She led Setsiana into another row of shelves.
After some more searching and reading more of the vertical signs, Qhoroali located the books Cusäfä wanted: three slender volumes with covers in white and green, taken from a high shelf. They went to the back of the store, where there was a long counter full of piles of books, and, somewhere in the chaos, another machine like the one they’d seen in the hardware store. Qhoroali touched a bell on the counter and a man appeared from among the book piles. He accepted more of the strange bills with the smiling man on them and put Qhoroali’s books into a bag.
Qhoroali said something in an unknown language, halting and a bit uncertain. The man nodded, and ducked down, fumbling around below the countertop for a moment, before reappearing again. He placed a small object on the counter: a shiny metal cylinder. This did not seem to be for sale, and no further money changed hands. Qhoroali said some word of thanks and then began some maintenance on her earmuffs, popping off some hard piece of the outside and removing a similar shiny cylinder from within. She replaced it with the one the bookseller had provided. The bookseller took the discarded cylinder and dropped it into a wastebasket.
Back at the front of the store, before putting the earmuffs back on again to leave, Qhoroali said: “We’re going back to the hardware store. I need to get some more batteries while we’re here.”
Out on the street, there were even more people walking past, but thankfully, no more police officers. They went back to the hardware store and Qhoroali found a package of the small cylinders, sealed in some invisible material, and paid for them, and then it was back to the alley and the circle of wooden posts where they had time traveled in.
The journey back 12,000 years into the past was very similar to the one they had taken after getting off the train, and after another (seemingly) long period of walking, they were back in the strange, cold, lonely world that existed before the domestication of rice.
“We’ll stay the night here,” said Qhoroali, in QuCheanya once again. “Tomorrow, we will arrive from the future and we can leave with Li then.”
Setsiana put this together in her mind. “Won’t there be a timeline branch?” she asked. “There must be some timeline where you decide not to go on this errand, right? If we wind up in that one, there will be duplicates of us — us here, and the ones who decided not to go to the future.”
Qhoroali shrugged. “If there are, so be it. I can’t bring myself to care right now.”
“Can’t you bring us back to right before we left for the future?” Setsiana was suddenly imagining a scenario where, in a timeline with two Setsianas, Qhoroali decided to return the other one to 1647 to resume Setsiana’s life there, and kept Setsiana herself a prisoner.
“You want me to figure out how to time travel us less than a day into the future, rather than just staying the night?” Qhoroali’s face twisted. “I can’t— that’s not going to happen. I can’t deal with any more of this right now. I can’t. I just want to drop this stuff off with Cusäfä and get some sleep. I don’t think that’s too much to ask.”
Qhoroali did not seem open to further discussion, and Setsiana had no response to this anyway, so she simply followed Qhoroali back to the camp and prayed for the best.
They spent the night in surprisingly warm beds of furs provided by Cusäfä’s people, and when they awoke, it had transpired that the other Qhoroali and Setsiana had already left on their errand, and the eventuality of two Setsianas was never realized.
Liselye reported that Cusäfä’s creation of Qhoroali’s substances had gone without incident. “How was 2434?” she asked.
Qhoroali shrugged. “Same as it always is,” she replied. “Everything went fine.” Setsiana did not contradict her.
Story: The Fulcrum
Colors: Ecru #12: End
Styles and Supplies: Chiaroscuro, Life Drawing, Panorama, Cartography, Resin (Three weeks for Dreamwidth), Feathers (This Day Trivia May 13 1985: Police burn down a Philadelphia neighborhood)
Word Count: 4587
Rating: T
Warnings: Fantasy Drug (Ab)use, Swearing, Discussion of wartime atrocities
Characters: Setsiana, Qhoroali, Liselye, Cusäfä
In-Universe Date: (Approximately) -10,000; 2434
Summary: Setsiana and Qhoroali go to get Cusäfä some screws.
Before Setsiana could respond to Qhoroali’s question, the front of the tent parted and Liselye reentered. The three of them turned to look at her with slightly guilty expressions.
Liselye frowned. “Why do I get the feeling that I got volunteered for something without my consent?”
“I just need you to go with Cusäfä and collect the substances we need,” said Qhoroali. “You get the easy job today, actually.”
Liselye’s eyes narrowed. “What’s the hard job?”
“I have to go to 2434 to get some screws. It’ll be fine, though.”
“Are you sure? I can come with you.”
“It’ll be fine. I’m taking Setsiana. Also, I literally just had this argument, I’m not having it a second time.” Qhoroali pushed past Liselye and left the tent.
Liselye watched her leave, and then regarded Setsiana with a much cooler and more calculating expression than she had ever had before and approached her to speak to her in a stage whisper. “You know that she is your only way back to your own time, right? Your only way back to any civilized time period. If something happens to her in the 2434, you’re stuck there. I just want to make sure you understand that.”
“I do understand that,” said Setsiana.
Liselye looked at her for another moment, and then said, “Good.”
“You’ll need some appropriate clothing,” said Cusäfä, in a more normal tone of voice. “Qhoroali should be able to show you where we keep it.” This seemed to be a request for her to leave the tent, so Setsiana left.
Outside, Qhoroali was standing still, staring into the great fire pensively. Setsiana approached her uncertainly and said, “Cusäfä said we needed clothing, and that you knew where it was kept.”
This seemed to snap Qhoroali out of whatever reverie she was in. “Right,” she said. “It’s in there.” She pointed at one of the clay structures.
As they walked over, Setsiana asked: “Is there a reason we bring him the screws yesterday instead of today? It just seems like an extra complication.”
“Yeah, there is a reason.” Qhoroali stopped walking, picked up a nearby stick, and used it to draw a large dot in the dirt. She then drew a straight line directly downwards from the dot, and an array of diagonal lines from it in upward directions. “This is where the nanosynthesizer broke,” she said, tapping the dot. “Potentially, there could have been any number of timelines branching from that point.” She indicated the upwards diagonal lines. “So, we could be here, right now.” She drew a second dot along one of the branching timelines. “If we return back to the current point, then in all these other timelines, the nanosynthesizer would just be broken, with no fix.” She indicated the timelines that didn’t have the second dot. “And if we actually return after we left, it would mean we might never return from this errand in some other branching timelines for the same reason, and we generally try to avoid having that happen.”
“I see,” said Setsiana. Something occurred to her, then. “Is that why earlier, we waited until we saw ourselves return from the circle before time traveling? So there would be no timelines where we didn’t return?”
“Precisely. You didn’t see that happen when we went to the Fair, because we time traveled in a different spot, but we did return a couple minutes before we left in that case, as well.”
“Doesn’t that run the risk of there being multiple versions of you, if the timelines could have branched in that short time, because there might be timelines where we return but didn’t wind up actually leaving?”
“Sure, but it’d be relatively rare. It hasn’t happened to us yet, but that’s probably just luck. If it does happen, it’s not the end of the world, though. It’s much better than some of us just going permanently missing.”
They continued on, and entered the building. The doorway was still covered by a length of hide, like the tents, but it was thicker and blocked the wind better than Setsiana expected, and the interior was noticeably warmer than the outside. The building was larger than Cusäfä’s tent, and a few people were clustered around a smaller fire similar to the one Cusäfä had lit there, speaking in a strange language; they looked up briefly as Setsiana and Qhoroali entered, and then returned to their conversations.
Qhoroali led them to one side of the room, where some large baskets were stacked. “We keep these around in case we need to go back to that time period,” she explained. “Since time travel is illegal there, dressing anachronistically can attract unwanted attention. You can choose anything from here; Cusäfä says this is all considered modern in his time.” She indicated one basket. “This one and everything to the right of it are women’s clothing.”
Setsiana began picking through the folded clothing. There were were tops in a wide variety of styles and colors, but to her dismay, almost all of the bottoms were trousers, and the skirts that she did find were all much too short, many seeming to be even above knee level. “Where are the skirts?” she asked, and then clarified, “the full skirts.”
“Those are all the skirts there are,” said Qhoroali. “There aren’t any full skirts in this time period. Full skirts have always been strongly associated with the priesthood — they are the priesthood’s traditional uniform. That’s how they came to be women’s clothing in the first place, because the priesthood held itself up as an icon of womanhood; before it became gender-segregated, full skirts were for all religious leaders and were not associated with any gender. And in Cusäfä’s time, full skirts are for no one, because the government has banned everything to do with the priesthood. If you wore one there, you would be arrested for ‘portrayal of the priesthood’. However, at the time we are going to, it has been over 120 years since the priesthood was ended, and the laws are bit laxer now that they have faded from the immediate cultural consciousness, and less full skirts like the ones you see in the baskets here are allowed. Nothing like the ones on the nurefyes, though.”
Something like panic swept through Setsiana; her arms trembled and she dropped the skirt she was holding. “I can’t wear these,” she whispered.
“What is the problem?” asked Qhoroali.
Setsiana struggled to put it into words. “My legs,” she said. “Below the end of the skirt, they will be naked and bare… everyone will see them…”
“Then why not wear the trousers?”
Setsiana just shook her head violently.
“I understand,” said Qhoroali, unexpectedly. “I know what it is like to be censured and mocked, if not arrested, for wearing the clothing you are comfortable in — the only clothing you can stand to wear. Here,” she sifted through some of the baskets and came up with a pair of trousers. “How would it be to wear the trousers underneath one of these skirts?” She picked up the one that Setsiana had dropped, which was one of the longer ones, and placed it over the trousers, laid out on top of the other clothes in the basket. “Would something like that be ok? These trousers are very wide and loose at the bottoms. They are not a skirt, but maybe it is close enough? Cusäfä says this style is acceptable and will not attract comment.”
Setsiana looked at the proposed clothing and made herself think about it. “I think… maybe.”
For a time they went through all the baskets of womens’ clothing, Qhoroali with her tailor’s understanding of clothing and her knowledge of Setsiana’s measurements telling her how the different skirts and trousers would fit, where they would come down to, how loose or tight they would be, and which ones would fit the best. Eventually, Setsiana picked out a pair of them to wear together, and a top to go with them, and was feeling almost positively about how they would look. Qhoroali picked out a shirt and trousers for herself, and was able to ask one of the villagers for the use of an unoccupied tent in a few halting phrases of their unfamiliar language, where she and Setsiana took turns dressing. They returned to Cusäfä’s tent, where a swish of his wrist transformed his magical device into a mirror, and Setsiana was able to check out how she looked, while Qhoroali took down some notes about their errand from Cusäfä. She still would have preferred a full skirt, but the outfit was at least not one she would be ashamed to be seen in public in. Cusäfä approved of their choices, and they made their way back to the sunburst totem to the north of the camp.
Qhoroali took a bottle of qoire out of her pack, they linked hands and stepped into the circle, and began the long trek 12,000 years back into the future.
After again re-upping the qoire a second time and doing a second long travel, they exited the circle into a very strange place. They were seemingly between the walls of several brick buildings that had been built close together, but there was still enough space for the circle of pegs on the ground, which still existed, even here. The ground was dirty, covered in muck, and the air seemed to carry a thin haze. There was a piece of paper on the ground; driven by some curiosity, Setsiana picked it up. It was a page printed in T’arsi, although she could not understand the words, with the letters running down the two sides of the page and a picture in the middle, hyper-realistic like the one she’d seen on Cusäfä’s device, of a cat in the midst of play.
“Why is it in T’arsi?” Setsiana asked. “Do they speak T’arsi here, now?”
“It’s in the Capital Dialect,” said Qhoroali. “It’s just written using T’arsi letters because the government banned the use of the Cheanya syllabaries due to them being deemed to similar to QuCheanya’s. Someone has lost their cat. Look,” she indicated some of the words. “That’s ‘lost’, and that one is ‘cat’. Do you recognize the roots?”
Now, looking at the text anew as the Capital Dialect written in T’arsi letters, Setsiana could recognize some vague similarities between the words on the page and the ones she knew in her own time’s Capital Dialect. “Where are we?” she asked, looking around again. Between the sides of two buildings, she could see out into a very smoothly paved street, across which were more tall buildings. “This was the middle of nowhere in 2050.”
“It’s Duqhora,” said Qhoroali.
“But in 2050 we took a carriage to a place miles outside of the city—”
“The city expanded. There are so many more people alive now than when we were born, or in 2050. You can’t even comprehend how many people there are now, and they all have to live somewhere. So the cities grew, in some cases cities merged together into giant cities, and now places that were completely uninhabited in 2050 are in the middle of cities.”
While Setsiana stood, taking this in, Qhoroali added: “There is one more thing I forgot to tell you about. We can’t speak QuCheanya here. There are some people who can still recognize it, and almost all of them will have you arrested for speaking it. If you need to speak, we should henceforth use Vrelian, I think we can understand each other well enough that way. Practically no one speaks Vrelian here anymore, or could recognize it, even in Vrel; the government there is actually investing a ton of money into preventing it from dying out entirely after the Capital government spent hundreds of years investing a ton of money into killing it. In any case, I probably won’t be able to hear you, because I’ll be wearing these.” She pulled the black earmuffs from the train out of her pack and put them on, and that seemed to be the end of the conversation.
They emerged out onto the street, which was lined by flat strips of concrete on each side. Qhoroali did not take Setsiana’s hand; evidently she did not think Setsiana would try to run away here, and indeed, Setsiana felt no compulsion to do so. The tall buildings hemmed the street in on either side, and blocked out the sunlight, which was filtering bit by bit over the very tops. Was it just the early dawn, or were cities drenched in eternal darkness in this far-future time? There were people walking past them on the concrete in both directions, but with what Qhoroali had said about the population, Setsiana had no way of knowing if there were actually a large number of them, or maybe there were only very few people compared to the usual foot traffic.
A noise had begun behind them, a kind of low roar, which increased steadily in volume until Setsiana reflexively put her hands to her ears and turned her head. Some large contraption sped past on the road, as fast as the train had been, or maybe faster. The sound as it passed was incredible, but it quickly faded as the thing disappeared into the distance. A few seconds later, a second one sped by going the other direction, and then a third. A different kind of roar sounded from in front of them, and Setsiana saw something else zip past on a raised platform above the road, some distance in front of them; it was very long and it took some seconds for it to pass completely across the corridor formed by the two rows of buildings. It might have been a train, but it was going too fast for Setsiana to tell. Something sounded overhead, and Setsiana looked up; at first she thought she was looking at a bird, some kind of falcon, but it stayed unnaturally still, stuck in a spread-eagled position, moving in a straight line through the sky, more or less following the road. The noise tapered off as it disappeared over the horizon.
The other people walking by them did not lift their heads or glance at any of the noisy machines; these seemed to be normal parts of life in this time period. Setsiana tried to do her best to emulate them, and to not flinch when some new monstrosity went by on the road, but it took a good deal of her concentration. She wished she had her own pair of Qhoroali’s sound-blocking earmuffs.
At length, Qhoroali pushed open the door to one of the buildings on the side of the road, and they entered. The shop was blessedly quiet, and Qhoroali removed the earmuffs. It seemed to contain an array of tools, some simple ones that Setsiana was well familiar with, and others that seemed impossibly complex. Qhoroali walked down several aisles and eventually turned in to one, where there was a row of glass bins filled with small metal pieces that on closer inspection, were screws of a variety of different shapes and sizes. Qhoroali pulled on a roll of some clear sheeting that was affixed to a wall nearby, and then tore the end off, and then somehow opened the sheet into a bag, and, after checking something on one of her notes against the bins, began putting screws from one of them into the bag. When she judged she had enough, she tied the open end shut and left the aisle.
At the back of the store was a man standing behind a counter with a machine on it. He took the bag of screws from Qhoroali wordlessly, and placed it on metal shelf on the counter; some T’arsi numbers flashed in bright lights on a strip of black attached to it. When they stopped changing, the man said something to Qhoroali. She fished something out of her pack; it was a handful of strips of paper with intricate drawings on them — not hyper-realistic as the others had been, but drawn using a huge number of extremely small lines. As the paper moved and bent, a drawing of a man seemed to smile at her, for a moment, before relaxing his expression once again. Setsiana stared at it.
Qhoroali and the man behind the counter did not seem to find these papers remarkable. The man pressed some buttons on his machine, which emitted some beeps, and then took the papers and put them into a drawer that opened of its own accord. Qhoroali put the bag of screws into her pack, put her earmuffs back on, and led Setsiana back out to the street.
There were a lot more people walking along the side of the street now, and it was lighter — rays of sunlight streamed over the buildings to their left and painted the ones to their right. So it must just be early, then. The loud machines speeding along the road had become more frequent, too; there was never a moment when at least one of them could not be heard, and more often, many were going past at the same time. Setsiana wished again for something of her own to block out the noise of it.
Qhoroali seemed more on-edge, in this more populated atmosphere. Her eyes darted around at the growing crowds, and Setsiana wondered if there was something in particular she was looking out for. As they walked further along the road, it became apparent what that was: a man in a brown police-man’s uniform was among the crowd now, walking toward them at a sedate pace. He wore what must be a gun on his hip, but it looked very different than the ones she had seen at the Fair — smaller, sleeker, shinier, and much more intricate. Qhoroali’s eyes followed him cautiously.
Suddenly, something seemed to have distracted Qhoroali from the police officer. Setsiana saw Qhoroali’s hands fly to her earmuffs — once, twice, and a third time, each time a little more shaky and panicked. A final time, and she took them off, and frantically peered at some tiny part of them that Setsiana couldn’t see clearly, prodding it with her fingers. “Fuck,” she whispered, in her strange Vrelian. “The batteries. Fuck, fuck, fuck.” Her hands fisted, and then went to her ears. Ahead of them, something had caught the attention of the police officer. He pointed ahead of him, and shouted something in an unfamiliar language, and then began to run, pushing other people out of his way.
For one horrible moment, Setsiana felt sure that he had been pointing and shouting at them, but in the next, he was shoving them aside just as he had everyone else, and running past them to whatever he had seen behind them. At almost the same moment, Qhoroali pulled them through a door and into another building.
The inside of the building was dark and silent, with just a few soft lights providing just enough light to see by. Setsiana took a moment to catch her breath and calm her racing heartbeat, and then noticed that Qhoroali was trembling.
It occurred to her then that Qhoroali’s apparent reliance on the earmuffs, and her reaction when they had seemingly stopped working, reminded her of Zlúnrays’ reaction to getting overwhelmed by sounds, way back in Taleinyo. She had strategies for working with Zlúnrays, but Qhoroali was a grown woman, and not a ten-year-old. She did not have a script for this. And Liselye had been right — if something happened to Qhoroali here, she was stuck in this terrible time forever.
Fortunately, Qhoroali seemed to have her own plans. She grasped one of Setsiana’s hands, and began repeatedly tracing a figure eight on the palm with the pad of her thumb, with a not insignificant amount of pressure. Setsiana let her, and watched as she gradually calmed down, taking slower and slower breaths, her grip feeling more and more steady. She remembered Qhoroali’s warning about not speaking QuCheanya, but at length she ventured an “Are you alright?” in Vrelian.
A flicker of a smile flashed across Qhoroali’s lips. “You do sound just like a Mázghwent play,” she replied in her own dialect. “Like I am getting comforted by Princess Khr’adi, or something.”
“Should this demon take me, then let the world burn,” said Setsiana, quoting the play, and Qhoroali smiled again. “What made you think of that one?”
“It’s full of awful people being awful to each other, so this time period always brings it to mind. He must have really hated T’arse, for some reason.”
“It was written about a specific event,” Setsiana said. “All of his plays were. T’arse had conquered a city on Meandhshen, Fojheik. When the army escorted the intake officers in to process the population, the people all had signs hanging from every window and every building, disparaging T’arse, and the Will, and their religion, and saying ‘We will never be T’arse.’ All over the city like that, ‘We will never be T’arse’. The Will became enraged, and had the entire city burnt to the ground, along with everyone in it. That’s why Princess Khr’adi burns down her brother’s house in the play, it was about that. Even the Will must have known she went too far afterwards, the ambassadors started telling everyone that she had been temporarily possessed by a demon.”
“Ah, so that’s why there’s a demon in the play,” said Qhoroali. “I knew it had to be something. Why didn’t they teach us about that in school?”
“I don’t know, but our Governor really hated that one. They tried to perform it during the T’arsi Fair the year after the city was burned, and he arrested the players for it. I think he thought the Fair merchants would be offended, but I don’t think they even knew enough Vrelian to understand what the play was about.”
“Imagine having that much power,” Qhoroali said, “the power to burn a city to the ground in an instant, because you were having a bad day. Sometimes I think about that — if I’d been born to be the Will of T’arse, what terrible things would I be responsible for?”
“I don’t think you would actually do something like that,” Setsiana said, on pure reflex.
A dark smile inched its way across Qhoroali’s face, and then disappeared again. “Do you think you know me so well already? To accomplish my goal, anything is worth the cost. There is no more worthy cause, so there’s no price I wouldn’t pay for it. The only thing that I worry about is that I might have a momentary lapse of judgment and be wrong about what costs are truly necessary. I’m sure that that Will of T’arse felt the same way, when she ordered the city burned.”
“Where are we going next?” Setsiana asked, changing the subject. “Where do we find Cusäfä’s books?”
“We’re already here,” said Qhoroali, and indeed, Setsiana now saw by the dim lights that they were in a bookstore, with a tall shelf of volumes standing next to them. Qhoroali released Setsiana’s hand, and turned to face them. Along one of the vertical struts of the shelf was a sign written in the T’arsi alphabet; the spines of the books were labeled similarly. Qhoroali looked at the sign for a moment. “Biology,” she muttered. “All right.” She led Setsiana into another row of shelves.
After some more searching and reading more of the vertical signs, Qhoroali located the books Cusäfä wanted: three slender volumes with covers in white and green, taken from a high shelf. They went to the back of the store, where there was a long counter full of piles of books, and, somewhere in the chaos, another machine like the one they’d seen in the hardware store. Qhoroali touched a bell on the counter and a man appeared from among the book piles. He accepted more of the strange bills with the smiling man on them and put Qhoroali’s books into a bag.
Qhoroali said something in an unknown language, halting and a bit uncertain. The man nodded, and ducked down, fumbling around below the countertop for a moment, before reappearing again. He placed a small object on the counter: a shiny metal cylinder. This did not seem to be for sale, and no further money changed hands. Qhoroali said some word of thanks and then began some maintenance on her earmuffs, popping off some hard piece of the outside and removing a similar shiny cylinder from within. She replaced it with the one the bookseller had provided. The bookseller took the discarded cylinder and dropped it into a wastebasket.
Back at the front of the store, before putting the earmuffs back on again to leave, Qhoroali said: “We’re going back to the hardware store. I need to get some more batteries while we’re here.”
Out on the street, there were even more people walking past, but thankfully, no more police officers. They went back to the hardware store and Qhoroali found a package of the small cylinders, sealed in some invisible material, and paid for them, and then it was back to the alley and the circle of wooden posts where they had time traveled in.
The journey back 12,000 years into the past was very similar to the one they had taken after getting off the train, and after another (seemingly) long period of walking, they were back in the strange, cold, lonely world that existed before the domestication of rice.
“We’ll stay the night here,” said Qhoroali, in QuCheanya once again. “Tomorrow, we will arrive from the future and we can leave with Li then.”
Setsiana put this together in her mind. “Won’t there be a timeline branch?” she asked. “There must be some timeline where you decide not to go on this errand, right? If we wind up in that one, there will be duplicates of us — us here, and the ones who decided not to go to the future.”
Qhoroali shrugged. “If there are, so be it. I can’t bring myself to care right now.”
“Can’t you bring us back to right before we left for the future?” Setsiana was suddenly imagining a scenario where, in a timeline with two Setsianas, Qhoroali decided to return the other one to 1647 to resume Setsiana’s life there, and kept Setsiana herself a prisoner.
“You want me to figure out how to time travel us less than a day into the future, rather than just staying the night?” Qhoroali’s face twisted. “I can’t— that’s not going to happen. I can’t deal with any more of this right now. I can’t. I just want to drop this stuff off with Cusäfä and get some sleep. I don’t think that’s too much to ask.”
Qhoroali did not seem open to further discussion, and Setsiana had no response to this anyway, so she simply followed Qhoroali back to the camp and prayed for the best.
They spent the night in surprisingly warm beds of furs provided by Cusäfä’s people, and when they awoke, it had transpired that the other Qhoroali and Setsiana had already left on their errand, and the eventuality of two Setsianas was never realized.
Liselye reported that Cusäfä’s creation of Qhoroali’s substances had gone without incident. “How was 2434?” she asked.
Qhoroali shrugged. “Same as it always is,” she replied. “Everything went fine.” Setsiana did not contradict her.
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Thank you! And yeah, there are bigger turning points for them in the future, but this is really the first one, I think.