Chapter 20 Visa Interview

There are three in the maintenance team. Only three humans awake on Earth, apart from the Lamb herself. There were many other maintainers once; the backchannel proffers a list of the dates when each resigned their commission and left to join the diaspora. These last three were also among the first to volunteer for this work. They have been doing this for longer than the Clave Eight existed; longer than the entire Clave series, in fact, which to the caretaker makes them elder gods, respected and more than a little feared. The Lamb can sense the Clave's reluctance to suspect them, or even approach them. The maintainers move freely among the polities, at least the ones they have contracts with, and cannot be tracked by any caretaker outside their own territories. So the first interview is driven mostly by the convenience of this maintainer's timing in entering Clave territory. The Lamb would have preferred to have seen all the murder sites first, but can't argue with opportunity.

The maintainer is called Fern. They find her at work, just a megasec away from the Bunker by dropship, at a riverbed that seems to have been dry for some time. The earth is cracked and an unearthly blue, as if from some kind of chemical spill that has tainted this soil forever. The Lamb lands on it with a puff of blue dust, the crust spiderwebbing on impact. The colour stains her feet immediately. The Clave refused to land, much less directly participate in the interrogation; the dropship retreats to a safe distance. So much for the confidence of that earlier we. Perhaps the Clave fears that the maintainers might uninstall them if offended. The Lamb feels some osmotic trepidation, and grumbles under her breath at the caretaker for infecting her with it.

The sky is grey and oppressively low. Even knowing that this is merely a happenstance of weather, it feels to the Lamb as if the sky must always be this way in this tortured place. She tries to scrape the blue dust off one foot with the other, but it seems the dermal armour has already taken a permanent stain.

The maintainer Fern is doing something with a big rock that sits half buried in the riverbed. It is a very large rock, several times bigger than the Lamb, roughly ovoid, most of its bottom half stained blue. Fern is climbing over it, poking and prodding, as if dissatisfied with the rockness of the rock. A handshake protocol issues automatically from the Lamb's open backchannel as she approaches, offering basic courtesies: greetings, format converters, considered selection of translations. Fern does not turn to look at the Lamb. She is vaguely hominid, with asymmetric beetle extrusions; one wing, which is clearly cosmetic; three extra limbs, which seem purposeful; something iridescent and glimmering about half her face; a single forked mandible juts from one side of her jaw, oddly similar in its branching to the Lamb's own antlers. None of the blue dust sticks to her.

Fern's presence in data is dark and obscure at every level of representation the Lamb can access. Perhaps that is simply how she appears to the Lamb's archaic technology; in the real, Fern is bright, her extrusions glittering even in the clouded light, her human skin a rich brown, marred by—no, enhanced by a cosmetic melanoma on her flank, a dark, irregular, fashionable patch whose period and context are entirely unfamiliar to the Lamb.

"I'd like to ask you some questions," the Lamb calls up.

Fern does not respond for almost half a kilosec, and the Lamb wonders if she will be humiliated by the maintainers by being simply ignored, beneath their notice or even contempt, rendered as useless in her secondary-tier work as she was in her primaries. But then, thankfully, Fern turns her head to look at the Lamb, her beetleface viridian in a stray sunbeam. The Lamb wonders if the maintainer arranged that sunbeam.

"There's one here," Fern says, tapping the rock. "Sleeping sleeping."

"One what?" the Lamb asks.

"One two three tick tick timebomb," Fern says. "But not one the likes of me can deal with. I'll leave a note for Embi, if she ever comes down again." She jumps up and down on the rock as if testing its stability, her extra legs skittering in a way that seems unbalanced. She does not fall. She flows down to the riverbed, not quite in front of the Lamb but to one side, cocking her head again. "Vintage. Nice. Contingency?"

The Lamb pushes data, her face a little warm through some remembered protocol of human embarrassment. Fern accepts the data and parses it in a cheerful blink. "Oh, murder," she says. "I did hear Contingencies were dying off. A little bird told me. Where is the little bird? Hiding?"

The Lamb feels her jaw tighten. "The Contingencies are being killed," she corrects. "Someone is breaking into the Bunkers and rewriting them into quasi-organic gunk."

"Yes, yes," Fern says. "I read the file. Have you considered—"

And she pushes a gigantic blob of data that the Lamb struggles to download, much less parse. She reads the headers and shakes her head. "More technical speculation," the Lamb says. "Thank you, but no. I will pass this on to the… little bird. I wanted to ask you about the work you've done here."

"Here?" Fern spreads her arms and one of the beetle legs. "I'm actually not even the maintainer of this zone. Just filling in while Embi's on sabbatical."

"I mean on Earth," the Lamb says. "The healing. The regreening."

"Oh that," Fern says. "Meh. It's a disaster, you know. Total clusterfuck. Everything that can go wrong goes wrong. We've lost the balance and had to restart from scratch seventy-three thousand times. We've lost a lot of the records altogether. Leopards are no longer leopards, did you know? We lost the genes. Had to plagiarize from the other big cats. Hand-drew the spots back on myself."

"Did you really," the Lamb asks. She tries to keep her tone dry. Fern is in movement again, though not drifting far; she's back to examining the rock, testing how firmly it's lodged in the earth. At one point she even tugs at it with her beetle legs, as if she wants to pluck it out.

"No," Fern says. "That was obviously a lie. Anyway, it was 'Miya who did leopards. Only she's not speaking to me, so I can make up whatever I like."

The Lamb knows that Embi and 'Miya are the other two maintainers in the team. There are old records identifying them and the other early maintainers, but their current social network presence is entirely private. The Lamb can dimly sense the presence of a group chat log that takes up more storage space than any other human artefact in the history of the planet. She does not have the access to so much as check its timestamps, never mind read it.

"Why is she not speaking to you?" the Lamb asks.

"Oh, the torture thing," Fern allows. "I did some stuff." Then, seeing the Lamb about to question: "It was another life. A long, long time ago, long before the diaspora. Before spaceflight, even. After the pyramids. Sorry, what's your timeline again? The format converter choked on your past life records."

"I don't have those," the Lamb says hesitantly. Something about that feels false, though it isn't intentionally a lie. "I just have the one life. I thought everybody did."

"Oh no," Fern says. "Yes, but that makes sense; trance memory was invented in untranslatable reference, likely calendrical>, well after the era of the Contingencies. You just don't remember that you're haunted. Be happy! It's nothing but a source of misery and arguments… because some people can't let anything go! Ever!"

"Some things can't be let go," the Lamb says.

"Of course you take her side," Fern says. She sighs, the wing fluttering. "Everybody always takes her side. It's easy; she was the victim, and I was the torturer. But it wasn't me me; that's what I keep saying about past lives. They're not really us. They're like ancestors. We inherit something, but we don't have continuity of self, even if we can reclaim memories; we didn't make those decisions. We can't be held responsible."

The Lamb feels terribly confused, but more than confused, feels a deep wanting, a sense of loss that she can't understand. She feels left out. "Can I… see these memories? Are they records that can be shared?"

"No and yes," Fern says. "Trance memory is a technology for retrieving memories of past lives from the akashic record and integrating them, but human memory is, in any format, flawed. We fictionalize ourselves in the retelling. I can't guarantee truth, but I can put on a play for you."

And she puts on a play called The Broken Bough. It flows smoothly, as if she's performed it many, many times. Time elapses, or does not lapse. Time elongates; time elopes; time lopes like a leopard that is not a leopard. The play unfolds like a paper flower; then it is done. The Lamb blinks.

"I like the epigraphs," she says, when it seems that the silence might become awkward. This play—it was not written for her, for the likes of her. She is not part of the audience, is she? She feels more like an invisible stagehand, bumping into obstacles in the dark. Or a scholar in one of the play's ancient libraries or museums, looking up the records of an unperformable performance, like the instructions for a ritual that could never be carried out, a potion that could only be theoretically brewed.

Fern does not seem offended. The Lamb studies her again, her who was once Fern?o full of rage and spite with a knife in his hand, but also Fernando the scholar, stumbling over words in a dead language—or may have been those things. How much of the play is in good faith and how much self-disserving, self-erasing, self-hating? How many peaceful lives must follow a violent one, not to redeem it, exactly, but to remove the violence from relevance? Is the play more of a history or a fiction? Is Fern more or less a suspect now? The Lamb can still feel the knife sawing away in Fern?o's hand. Is Fern right that she can't be held responsible for what he did? A wrong question. But what is the right question?

"Where can I find 'Miya and Embi?" she asks, though she knows this is also the wrong question.

Fern throws a couple of location references over in the backchannel; the Lamb catches them awkwardly, unable to integrate them with a map. "Thank you," she says anyway. "I can get the little bird to help me." There is something else in the data, something sharp and glinting that she can't parse. It feels dangerous, like a knife.

Fern shrugs. "The trance memory protocol," she says. "It feels wrong to deny it to any human on Earth, and I don't want to do badly by you, rare cousin. Do what you will."

Of course she tries it. Oyster, knife. How could she not? She does it as soon as she is back aboard the dropship, heading to the location that Fern had given for Embi. There are a few kilosecs of travel time and a hard border to negotiate, the Clave said; the Lamb asked for undisturbed rest, calculating that the Clave would be uncertain if the Lamb required this culturally or biologically. She stretches out on the metal floor of the dropship and wedges her feet (they no longer seem unreasonably huge to her) into the bench, wiggling her blue-stained toes.

The Lamb has been thinking about Embi ever since the play. Surely she is the prime suspect now; the only human on Earth possessed by a devil, bound to it by blood—was it not summoned to murder an army? Perhaps Embi has decided that the army of Contingencies violates her sacred Earth. Perhaps the Rake has unknowable reasons of its own. How can she guess what a Rake might want, a being so strange, so far out of time?

The knife slips in smoothly and pries her open—no, it's not quite like that, not quite so invasive or violent. The trance memory protocol activates more like a third eye opening in the middle of her forehead, vertical and secret, when she had not known it was there all along. A part of her body that had been closed up, unused, now open and blinking in a flood of fiery light invisible to her first eyes. The instructions are sparse, but not unhelpful; she takes deep breaths and focuses on riding the deluge of what are not yet memories. Images: an old man in a devil mask. An old woman drinking tea. A pyre in city streets. A rubber tire rolling along a dirt road by a lake. A lake of monsters. A still pond full of dread. Faces and faces. So many people; she feels nothing for them. No, perhaps curiosity. She wonders who they are. Who they were, to her. But no great revelations present themselves; no voice speaks out of the past to tell her who she is.

It's only when the Clave wakes her with a ping that she understands that she fell asleep. That this body is even capable of sleep, of dreams. The inside of the dropship seems coated in grainy ash, pouring down its surfaces to pool around the Lamb's head, tickling her cheeks. This seems wrong, altogether wrong in a way that can no longer be blamed on the malfunctioning satellites alone.

The Clave's pings grow more urgent. The Lamb hauls herself to a sitting position, and everything hurts, as if the memory of lifetimes of pain had been recovered. She is disappointed to discover that she was awakened not because they've found Embi, but for a visa interview.

The dropship is hovering at a border policed by one of the two Earth polities bigger and more powerful than the Clave Eight. It is called the Landoffrey Hombre, and when the Lamb looks outside through the openings in the dropship's airframe, she can catch glimpses of drone gunships that look exactly like what they are: ugly missiles with smaller, parasitic missiles on them. They aren't even aerodynamic; they look tumorous, lopsided. There is an indeterminate number of them, in constant movement all around the dropship, exchanging places with each other in some kind of complex polyhedral containment formation.

"This border is more militarized than I expected," the Lamb says to the Clave, who updates the last-pointed-at timestamp on the unread datadump of political history in a gesture that combines exasperation with resignation.

Below them, the earth is not green but brown and slimy, speckled with sinkholes of various sizes: some no wider across than the Lamb's outstretched fingers, others big enough that the dropship seems like a speck. The sinkholes are deep and shadowed, their inner surfaces marked by the aftermath of some kind of weapon, the rock partially melted and re-formed. The backchannel offers no data, and the Lamb can't see a bottom to any of the sinkholes. Even the hallucinations of ash do not trouble her sight, as if they, too, are foreign to this land.

The Hombre does not offer anything as crude as conversation. There is a series of forms to fill in, biometrics to provide, and proofs of residence, citizenship, and assets. The Lamb lists her Bunker as her only asset, though she has never thought of it as property, much less her property, but the Clave says it would be problematic to present oneself as entirely lacking in assets. The purpose of this process seems to be to reassure the Hombre that the Lamb has roots in the Clave and is not attempting to immigrate.

"There's no category for investigator or consulting detective," the Lamb says.

"Just put tourist," the Clave says.

The Hombre rejects her visa application. There is no explicit reason given, though there is a string of reference codes. The Clave merely sighs and backtracks the dropship, the nozzles turning forward in its stubby wings to move in reverse. The Lamb shifts her legs to face forward again. The gunships do not follow.

Neither of them speaks until they are out of range of those weapons, and even then the Clave maintains a silence that feels pointed. She supposes this is a failure of her alleged skills at international diplomacy. "Some things haven't changed," she says, and in saying so, the memories arrive not in an overwhelming flood but like a leaf drifting in without a tree in sight, carried who knows how far on the wind. The ripple when it lands is gentle, but it doesn't end, reverberating through her sense of self until its edges blur into shimmer.