The Art of History
“Our history has never been the truth as it was but the truth as we need it to be.”
(Part 31 of “The Misfits” series)
Getting transported to another life in another era was a historian’s dream. It was the perfect opportunity to see what I’d studied and learned, what was truly real and what was merely said to be about that time. The artifacts Carolina and her friends had discovered took us back a century and a half to Iophos. That in and of itself was a miracle I could hardly believe was unfolding each minute we were there. But for me, to be stuck with the men I shared the adventure with, that too was a stroke of luck all its own.
Colin Altagoss Dreeson was here with us in Iophos, trapped in the body of a man named Colin Knoll. And Colin Dreeson, perhaps more than anyone else in our original era, had an unobstructed view of the history that unfolded in our native time. He was the second son of Barnard Dreeson, Chancellor of Athos, and if anyone in the Dreeson family of our day was the heir apparent to Barnard, it was Colin—or Goss—as he was more familiarly called by friends and family. For me, it was a chance not only to study this time and place on Iophos but also to study Goss, as his family, the Dreesons, weren’t just a passing political dynasty, but they had founded the system itself, going all the way back to the schism that separated Athos and Iophos as sister civilizations at their inception. But more, the Dreesons went back all the way to Charris, where Yuhl and Zair Dreeson won the charter to build the Athosian ring-world in the first place. And for millennia now, even though roughly a hundred Athosian chancellors have come and gone from outside the Dreeson family line, there was almost never a time where the Dreeson family was not a heartbeat from the Seat of Athos. And Goss had absorbed that imperial mindset, which, as much as it frustrated me and clashed with my ideas about a free and fair society, was certainly a mode of being that could never be called unsuccessful, and it was one I intended to study and understand during our time together on Iophos.
I had countless opportunities to ask Goss about his father and the mindset it took to govern a society like Athos—a planetary ring of immense scope encircling the gas giant of the same name. In our day, Athos was home to nearly four trillion souls. Sometimes Goss answered curtly and appeared frustrated at being questioned. Others, especially after he came to know my motivation was curiosity and the study of his genuine expertise rather than an interrogation of it, he grew quite open, a willing and enlightening educator.
“I’ll tell you a story my father told me when I was younger,” he answered me one afternoon when I was asking him about how the Dreesons so consistently managed to keep Athos running smoothly. “It was a story Barnard’s father told him, and it’s going to sound so simple you may not believe me, Airee, but my father swore to me it is his guiding star as Chancellor.”
“I’d love to hear,” I replied earnestly.
I was visiting Goss in his government office in Katherineberg. His alter ego—Colin Knoll—had become a section head in the city’s Office of Community Ethics & Morale. On Athos, we’d have called him an arts officer. Goss related the following story, not necessarily word-for-word, but certainly in essence.
The story concerns a great-great-great Dreeson grandmother of a number of degrees, who was a young mother of three boys at the time. The oldest boy was five, the youngest two. As she was watching them play with blocks, she noticed that because of their differing levels of cognitive and physical development, each of the three boys had their own unique manner of participating that depended upon those abilities. The oldest, at five years, had both the manual dexterity and capacity for planning, such that he could visualize a simple structure—a wall, a house, or a tower—and he could sit and shape the various blocks into the rudimentary creations he envisioned. He was the builder. The middle boy, at three, had learned to sit and patiently watch the elder boy. He, the observer, occasionally even helped and could take basic instructions, passing blocks to his elder brother as needed. The youngest, though, with neither the patience to merely sit and observe nor the ability to construct anything meaningful, could only participate in the activity one way. He would see his brothers playing with the blocks, and feeling desperately left out, would erupt in an outburst of emotion and kick the neatly stacked blocks to the floor, infuriating the two older boys whose work he’d ruined.
According to Goss’s telling. This highly observant Dreeson great-great-great grandmother of generations past related this observation to her husband, who was still too young yet to be the Athosian Chancellor himself but was a high-level officer in the government. And apparently, he joked with his wife about the Athosian populace, how the people also slotted generally into those three categories—the builders, the observers, and the block-kickers. His day job, after all, wasn’t so different from his spouse’s—minimizing the damage of the block-kickers while fostering the development of all three groups. When that distant Dreeson ancestor became Chancellor years later, he never forgot that basic model, though he’d changed his assessment slightly. The simplest job description ever given for the Chancellor of Athos was that it consisted of isolating the block-kickers at every level of society and moving them as far away from the levers of power as humanly and humanely possible.
“It still holds,” Goss told me after he’d finished relating the story. “That is why Athos endures. We Dreesons take our sorting duties seriously.”
When Goss related that story, it was not lost on me—Carsten Airee, professor of history at the College of Historical Specialties, Capitol University in Ithaca, abiding here on Iophos in the body of one Lorne Iosef—that we three time-travelers of sorts almost perfectly exemplified the archetypes. Goss, the consummate architect of societies. I, the historian, observer of societies ancient and contemporary. And then there was Sebastian, or Transom as he was called by his fellow Etteran soldiers, who was the most naturally gifted professional block-kicker I’d ever encountered. He’d spent his entire life blowing up targets of every type, as well as killing all manner of enemies, all in the face of fierce resistance, all without the slightest hint of remorse or regret. He didn’t ever seem to question why, even though I came to know him as a highly-intelligent and shockingly incisive thinker for a man of such action; he simply saw the world as it was, identified the desired change that needed to be made to it, and broke the obstacles necessary to bringing about his preferred future universe.
What better three lenses could there be through which to study this time in Iophan history, especially as our objective was to discover the Iophan roots of the war being waged in our time? We could all see it unfold from our vastly divergent perspectives: the block-kicker, the builder, the observer. They don’t teach you that at university, but truly, those three lenses became far more useful to me in my understanding of history than all the theoretical frameworks I’d encountered before them combined.
We were here to find not just the early roots of the war but the seeds of it, and we each had a lifetime to do it.
Block-kicker, Early Years:
On the day we made the critical connection, I’d met Transom in Katherineberg, where he’d been tracking the wizard Elosh. “Wizard” was the word Transom and Carolina’s crew had been using for the sect’s members since they’d encountered them in their travels a few months before first picking me up from Damon Mines. I didn’t learn about the wizards’ sect until our briefing before coming back here to Iophos. Imagine my shock at learning of the existence of a covert group of functionally-immortal humans acting to protect the integrity of the biological human race by suppressing technologies they deemed “species-ending.” Equally surprising to me was that Goss seemed utterly unfazed by the revelation, as though he’d already known, implying that the Athosian government—or at least the Dreeson family—was well aware of their existence and kept it a secret.
Transom himself had personally fought two of these biologically-immortal humans—the first, in the person of the infamous “Wizard of Athos,” the terrorist Clem Aballi. There was no love lost between those two, and I suspected those encounters, which he detailed to me, were the root of the notably sour tone that came over his voice whenever discussing any of the wizards, almost always generously seasoning such conversations with creative strings of expletives. The second wizard he had fought was the one he’d caught tracking me in our early days here on Iophos. He’d spotted this Elosh and instantly recognized him from a prior encounter he’d had with him while guarding Goss’s younger sister Carolina. Transom had gotten the better of that battle, which had taken place in our own time, and as a result, Transom, Carolina, and Maícon prime were able to gain valuable information regarding Elosh’s sect from him—namely that he was following Carolina to gather intelligence about what Barnard Dreeson’s daughter was doing in the presence of a group of well-known anti-war activists. That activity had been at odds with all the outward discussions they’d held with the sect subsequently. The sect’s claim was that they were completely apolitical and unconcerned with anything beyond securing the ongoing safety of the human race from perilous technologies. Elosh’s activity here on Iophos likewise seemed unconnected to the sect’s primary mission.
Transom was ensconced in the body of a young Iophan man from Xenia called Xeldin Swinney. After we arrived on Iophos and got settled, Transom had gone to work initially in sanitation, quickly moving to the city’s concierge crew, while fixing his eyes toward the community watch. Swinney was not yet eligible to apply to be an officer and still had several more years to keep a clean record before the juvenile case against him would be expunged. That didn’t stop Transom from tracking Elosh in his free hours, though, often enlisting my help in doing so.
I have no idea how, but on the evening in question, Transom had spotted Elosh hiding on a rooftop observing the activities of a small group of students gathered in the Rial district of Katherineberg. It seemed like such a mundane gathering. Neither I nor Transom could begin to guess what Elosh was watching them for. I couldn’t even see Elosh at first.
“Are you sure he’s up there?” I asked Transom, peering around the corner toward the rooftop he assured me Elosh was hiding on.
“He’s there, Airee,” he replied.
“Lorne, please,” I reminded Transom, as it was his habit to use our real names rather than the names of our Iophan identities whenever we were alone. Myself, I always worried I would slip up in front of the wrong people if I got in the habit of calling him Transom or Colin Dreeson by Goss. Transom, though, never seemed to worry about anything.
“Yeah, Airee,” he replied, emphasizing my genuine surname, “I’m sure he’s there. He has a dome up on the building’s edge. He hasn’t poked his head up much, but he’s recording from that position. What should we be watching?”
“Half an eye on the egress,” I replied, “always. In case Elosh sets the dome to record and doesn’t stick around the whole time to collect it.”
“Good. Where else?”
“An eye every now and again on the dome wouldn’t be a bad idea, but I’d also want to keep an eye on what he’s watching.”
“Not bad,” Transom replied, satisfied with the work he’d been doing training me in covert surveillance.
He gestured to the bag I was carrying. In it, I had a bit of personal gear. Lorne, my alter ego, had taken work in the ornithology division, largely on the strength of his skill as a bird builder. Iophos, like Athos, had actual biological birds, but given the vastness of the ring and their relatively short lifespans, many of the main cities supplemented the populations with artificials. Around that time, I was just getting skilled enough to put up units that met department standards. In my spare time, using the city’s workshop in Xenia, I’d built a parakeet I’d brought with me that night.
“Cute,” Transom said, when I opened the birdbox. “Bring it around behind him on a line that doesn’t tip him off.”
“Sure,” I agreed, putting on my eyewear and then pushing the bird up. “You want a perch somewhere?”
“On the far side of the bodega where those kids are gathered. Elosh is too savvy for us to keep that bird on him for long unless we want to make him suspicious.”
I nodded and guided the bird through the cityscape, slowly bringing it up behind the building where Elosh was perched. I’d long since gotten used to flying birds, whose undulating flight paths often gave beginners trouble standing and balancing naturally, unlike ball-drones, copters, saucers, or gliders, whose flight paths were straight and predictable. I’d come to find the movement of the birds relaxing.
Sure enough, even on a quick flyby, I could see Elosh there, sitting with his back to the edge of the building’s outer wall, observing the gathered students on his tablet.
I set the bird down on a high perch overlooking the bodega. It gave us a clear view of the street seating where the youngsters seemed to be engaged in discussion. It was clearly not a party but a serious meeting with definite business being addressed. That parakeet didn’t have good audio on it, though.
“I’ve been thinking about something,” Transom announced as we watched and waited.
“No audio,” I replied, nodding for him to continue with his thought.
“Well, the way I see it, Airee, I’ve trained you pretty well in countersurveillance, which is a hell of a useful skill.”
“For matters like this, it surely is. For my work as well—modes of observing unfolding events in ways they didn’t teach us at university. That’s for sure.”
“I’ve been thinking about that too, professor. But primarily, I’ve been thinking about what I’m getting out of the deal.”
“Apart from my assistance every now and again?”
“Sure,” Transom replied grinning.
“Did you have something in mind, Swinney?”
“You’d better not laugh at me, Airee.”
“What makes you think I’d ever be stupid enough to laugh at you?”
“Fair enough,” he replied. “I’ve been thinking about it for a while now. You know I like to read?”
I shrugged. “You’ve mentioned it before.”
“History, usually.” I nodded and Transom continued. “My question is really what the difference is between you and me. I mean, I’m sure you’ve read a bit more than me, but probably not as much as you think. I’ve spent a lot of time on ships to and from missions, not a lot of which was amongst friends. So what’s the difference between someone like me who’s read hundreds of books on history and a historian like you?”
“It’s a good question,” I replied. “The formal education in the subject is the short answer. And there’s a lot to that. I imagine your formal education was geared toward warfare … what? Tactics, strategy, and the practical application of both?”
“That and tech. War is fought with weapons. I’m better with tech than I let on.”
“You’re better with a lot than you let on,” I said, which was true. I’d never have predicted he’d have been a standout sanitation worker or concierge, but make that a part of his mission, and suddenly he became the most enthusiastic employee in just about any field.
“Strategy,” he replied.
I nodded.
“Anyway, I’m interested, professor.”
“Interested in what?” I’d lost the train of the conversation, my eyes fixed on the students at the meeting, struggling to take good headshots from such an elevated position.
“Reciprocity, Airee. I’ve been teaching you ....”
“You want me to teach you history?”
“More the ethos behind your field, or whatever the plural of ethos is. How do you think to think like a historian? That’s what interests me.”
“I can help you with that. Sure. I presume you don’t have a lot of interest in argumentation or rhetoric, that angle?”
“I wouldn’t presume anything, Airee.”
“Well, it’s just a large part of what we do, apart from field work gathering first-hand artifacts and accounts, is argumentation about how those things fit into their historical contexts. But you want to know how to understand what you read about, right? That more than publishing a thesis?”
“Yeah. That’s right.”
“I imagine, though, you’d be decent at the latter if you did want to write. Not a lot of fluff in your personality: no winding about an argument.”
He laughed at that. It was true. He didn’t even have to make the charge to convict me by my own critique of others.
“When we get back,” he said, “I’ll have to read your books.”
I had to laugh at that.
“What’s so funny, Airee?”
“I don’t really have any books.”
He looked at me like he didn’t quite know how to take that statement.
“How’d you get to be a history professor without writing any books?”
“I guess it’s because I’m young. I’ve written—a dissertation that isn’t all that great, as well as a number of articles that are a little better but still not thrilling reading.”
“What the hell would you become a historian for, Airee, if you weren’t planning to write some histories?”
“To teach. To do research, I guess.”
“Huh?”
“Not so compelling an answer, I know. But most historians don’t write a great number of books.”
“All the ones I read do—Capella, Siron of Cathar, Leila DeDuma. Annals of Charris Before the Age of Expansion. The historians who get remembered write the books we still read.”
“It would seem so,” I agreed.
“It is. You should learn to write.”
“I know how to write,” I insisted.
He scoffed at me. “If you really knew you’d already be doing it.”
Leave it to the knife to cut right to the sorest spot.
“I could always improve I suppose.”
“Hell, you’ve got a free life here, man. You could spend the next forty years making yourself into something, and the best part is that even if your first several books aren’t worth a damn here, nobody will ever be able to tie them to you.”
There was a long pause.
“It’s a thought.”
“Forget that thought a minute and look alive, Airee. He’s moving.”
For the life of me, I couldn’t tell how Transom knew it. The dome was still up on the perch, and Elosh was still obscured from our view. My eyes shot to the egress at the bottom of the building.
“Stay on the students until the last minute,” Transom demanded, stepping out casually onto the causeway and hugging the other buildings on the opposite side of the roadway as he walked. I didn’t see Elosh at the main exit to the building as he stepped out onto the street. He was already a good twenty meters from the doorway I’d been watching quite closely.
“Wizard tricks,” I mumbled.
Without Transom there to direct me, though, I was struggling to decide whether to put up the bird from its perch. If Elosh slid away on me, I knew he’d be a difficult target to reacquire. The students seemed less important, so I put up the bird and began to walk, trailing in parallel as Transom had taught me. That was when it became a bit trickier to steer the canary, keeping it out of Elosh’s eyeline as best I could while maintaining a steady gait of my own.
Transom didn’t speak, but I knew enough to know what his expectations were once we began to pursue Elosh. We’d been observing him from varying degrees of proximity for months, and he had never made a mistake.
“He will,” Transom had assured me repeatedly. “I know this guy. He’ll slip.”
That was the night he did.
Rather than ducking back onto the tram and then to the hypermag, this night he made the mistake of walking for slightly more than two kilometers to meet a contact.
“Get that bird down there and get me a picture, Airee,” Transom’s voice came firmly into my earpiece. “That’s our guy.”
I couldn’t see Transom he was so far off when he made that declaration. He must’ve been trailing over two hundred meters behind Elosh.
“How the hell do you know that, Sebastian?”
“Because it’s my damn job to know, Airee. Get us a face shot and forward it to Goss to ID him. Then we can analyze the bodega. I want to figure out what those students are up to.”
I got our shot of Elosh’s contact, and though it took a while for us to hear back from Goss on the mysterious figure’s ID, we did get his Iophan alter ego. We began to build out our map of the wizards’ network from there. Transom’s surveillance expertise had found us our first node. But we had much more observing to do to determine whether that node would be a block to be kicked.
Builder, Early Years:
It was in the time that Transom was running down Elosh’s network in Katherineberg that a young Iophan man named Colin Knoll was climbing rapidly within the city government. Goss just couldn’t sit still and blend in. I was traveling between Xenia and Katherineberg frequently helping Transom track down the wizards, so I met with Goss often in those early years. And I asked him that very question: wouldn’t it be better to just blend in?
“I can blend in from the top as well as the bottom, Airee,” he told me. “And I can see more from the top as well.”
As a Dreeson would, he made parallel departmental moves, quite strategically, to departments where upward mobility was quickest, and then he moved where he wanted to be—cultural influence—once he’d climbed the ranks to the point he’d attained seniority. Goss was trying to figure out how the Iophans ticked and how that differed from us Athosians. He’d worked in the Arts Offices in Ithaca even as young as eleven or twelve alongside one of his elder cousins, imbibing the art of artistic influence. That was where he’d cut his teeth in his father’s administration. He continued taking apprenticeships all the way up the chain within that division.
The contrast between this “builder” and our “block-kicker” couldn’t have been starker, as I often went directly from working alongside Transom to a meeting with Goss following his typically late workday in the Ethics & Morale office in K-Berg. These two men were self-evidently products of their two societies: our Athosian one, where Goss helped to maintain a peaceful, prosperous society on an almost unfathomable scale; and Transom’s Etteran Guild, which had been at war for nearly seventy years at the time of our departure for this Iophos.
That night when Transom and I first sighted Elosh’s Iophan contact, Goss pinged me and demanded I meet with him before I took the hypermag back to Xenia. It had been a long day, and I had work to do that night going over the footage we’d taken of the students in the bodega, not to mention my day job the following morning. I told Goss I couldn’t come. He snapped at me and ordered me to report in that imperious Dreeson way of theirs where you just couldn’t say no regardless of how much you wanted to.
“What the hell’s so important it couldn’t wait, Colin?” I asked him at the Pon-Erion tram stop in the eastern district of the city. He’d asked me to meet him all the way out at the foot of the ring’s southern rim.
And Goss shook his head before answering me, struggling to restrain the reflexive look of disgust that came over his face when I—or anyone else, for that matter—was doing something that didn’t conform to his Dreeson sensibilities.
“Did you know the only difference between a tremendous genius and a tremendous waste of talent is that the genius is busy at his desk when the universe speaks to him? You do know that, Airee, right?”
So unbelievably Goss.
“You know, you might’ve said something like that to me before, Colin,” I replied. “So what’s the universe speaking to you tonight, oh great genius.”
“Not me, Airee. Come on. I’ve found her.”
“Found who?”
“The artist. Who else?”
“Oh. Of course. The artist. Who else?”
He didn’t explain, just started walking toward the rim wall. As we walked, he asked me how things were going with Transom and I in tracking down the wizards. Then he explained to me that his office had been looking for someone to award an important commission to for Xenia. Apparently, he’d found the artist.
“That’s what couldn’t wait, Colin?”
Again that look.
“You told me that you wanted to learn about Iophan culture while you were here, Airee, right?”
“That’s true.”
“Well, you need to learn about what culture is first before you can understand the distinctions between them,” he told me.
I stared back at him, as though to say without saying that I was the professor of history. I studied culture for a living. And here was a career government officer not just implying that I knew nothing about culture but outright saying it. If it hadn’t been Colin Dreeson, I might’ve punched him. And then doubtless he’d have laughed it off and told me I’d been spending too much time with Transom.
“Lesson one,” Colin said.
“Don’t lesson one me, Dreeson.”
“How do you define culture, professor?”
“What? What are you even talking about, Goss?”
“It’s a simple enough question, Airee. No need to get upset if you can answer it simply.”
“It may be a simple question, but it’s a complex answer.”
“No. It’s not. It’s a very simple answer. Define culture for me, please, professor.”
It was a complex answer. There were countless factors that went into describing what constituted what a culture was, how it came to be, its shared events, social structures, customs, beliefs.
And I began to explain this to Colin before he interrupted me and again said, “Lesson one.”
That time, I even balled up my fist as I shook my head at him. He didn’t even acknowledge the affront.
“The definition of culture is this, Airee: A culture is the sum of all rules, written and unwritten, governing the behavioral dynamic between two or more people.”
Then he just stopped talking, as though that brief definition explained everything.
“Well?” I said back. “That’s it?”
“That’s it,” he repeated emphatically. “Well, not for us tonight. I still need to show you the artist—or her work rather. That’s what’s most important anyway. The artist herself is of no consequence.”
He could see by my reaction I was growing beyond impatient with his attitude. I started wondering whether he’d had a drink or three on his way out to Pon-Erion or at the tram stop waiting for me.
“Fine, Airee. You don’t agree. Just let it rattle around in that head of yours for a while and sink in. You won’t ever be able to fully understand the complexities of things until you can appreciate their essence. Hence the need for simple definitions. You’ll see.”
“Just take me to the artwork, please, Colin.”
“Of course,” he replied, turning and leading the way down that long causeway at the foot of the edgehills.”
The statuary was lining the roadway where autocab and sked traffic negotiated the outermost stretches of Katherineberg. The only noticeable difference between here and Athos, or at least the rim wall near Ithaca and New Corinth, was that here, there were no tea plantations climbing the steep hills that made up the ring’s sidewall, just greenery. Steep green walls to our right.
Across the street, as we approached Pon-Erion Circle, Colin’s division had lined the walkway with statues that were part of the city-wide arts contests. Of course there were more entrants than just the sculptures, more categories—everything from dramatic productions to symphonic composition to the juvenile entrance auditions to the conservatory here in Katherineberg. It was a busy time of year. But they had perhaps as many as forty statues lining the roadway, lit up in the late evening by bright ground-level aprons surrounding the plinths.
Silly me, I assumed Goss intended to show me the winner’s work. So I stopped at the first-place entry at the main intersecting roadway coming into the Pon-Erion Circle.
“Why are you stopping, Airee?” Colin asked me as he continued across the street to the causeway on the far side. Again, that look as though I knew absolutely nothing.
I’d looked at a lot of statues. Art history. I had a clue.
We passed the second-place entry. It was fine. The fourth was good. I was wondering how far down we’d end up progressing before Goss showed me the statue that was so important. We kept walking for a stretch.
Twelfth place.
“Holy shit,” I exclaimed involuntarily.
The statue was a life-sized recreation of a moment that had been etched into the minds of most citizens of the Battery Systems. The subject, whom I recognized instantly, was a Charran girl who’d crossed the fence at Delmar as one of the shuttles launched, carrying pioneers to the departing colony ships orbiting Charris. The sculptor had captured the moment when the wash from the shuttle met the girl, her elbow bent at her forehead, shielding her crying, anguished face.
The story we told about that famous image was that the girl was attempting to catch up to the shuttle to board it, devastated at being separated from her departing family. It was footage often captioned with some description styled as “the cost of separation,” “the anguish of departure,” or something of the kind. That was the story that had been conveyed. That poignant image became the snapshot that captured the deep sense of loss when loved ones departed Charris for new colonies. There was a deeper story, though. I knew it. I didn’t know whether Goss did.
“She’s sixteen,” Goss stated, nodding as he observed my reaction to the work. He was talking about the artist, not the subject, I could tell.
The figure was rendered in stone, which might have been the first thing I mentioned to him.
“She’s one of the Kerns,” he continued. “Very wealthy family.”
“This is monumental work. Sixteen, you said?”
Goss nodded.
“How the hell did this only get twelfth place?” I asked him.
“Look at the pedestal,” he replied.
And there on the plinth was the nameplate, which read in a small unassuming font, “The Ones Who Got Away.”
Goss knew the story, and so did the young artist. How something like that had pierced the veil of an Iophan socialite’s educational bubble was beyond me. We certainly didn’t tell those stories to adolescents in Athos. Deeper truths were more for your twenties than teens.
In the weeks before that particular colony ship’s departure, that Charran girl had accused an older relative of a type of crime that was often considered unmentionable in polite circles in Charris—and to be fair on Athos and Iophos as well. The unnamed Charran girl had been trying to stop the shuttle launch because that relative had received an ultimatum that more than a few influential problematic Charran citizens had gotten in those days in lieu of proper justice. Be someone else’s problem.
“That’s why she got twelfth place,” Goss stated, his hands clasped behind his back at his waist. “But the talent ...”
He looked up at the work with an admiration I’d never seen from him before, borrowed eyes or his own.
“Won’t that be a problem?” I asked.
“One has to understand what is meaningful in order to render something meaningful. As far as the subjects, Airee, that will be in our control, not hers. She’s sixteen. I’d sooner put a bolt rifle in a six-year-old’s hands and send him out into the Sondomme in the middle of Founder’s Week. This girl will never decide what she sculpts again. She gets to be celebrated and paid; she doesn’t get a voice.”
“What’s the commission for?”
“What do you think her commission should be for, Airee? This time? This moment? The right symbol? Show me you know something about culture.”
“I’m not sure. Something unifying,” I told him after considering for a while. “A treaty signing or something like that.”
“Yes, nothing like a treaty signing to stir the deepest well of our spirits, Airee. Brilliant. Real cultural expert you are.”
“That’s not really what I do, Colin.”
“Yes, I’m aware. You study in still life. A snapshot here and there of the aftermaths of decisions of consequence. I’m trying to show you how to make them. This girl is a cultural weapon—Ianeria Kern.”
“She’s clearly a genius,” I answered looking up at the sculpture again. “But if that’s so, and I believe it to be, I wonder why we didn’t already know her name before we arrived. What happened to her in our timeline to relegate her to obscurity?”
“Maybe twelfth place,” Colin stated. “Perhaps that has something to do with it, Airee.”
Again that look. That was Goss, though. I hated that I felt like I learned something important every time I talked to him, but I did.
In the early years, things were very much like that between us.
Observer, Early Years:
While splitting time between Goss and Transom, I, the observer, had little time for much else. I did find the work I was able to secure in the ornithology group in Xenia fulfilling. It was quite different from anything I’d ever done before and would have been entirely beyond me if not for the skills I absorbed from my host Lorne Iosef. He was a skilled young roboticist, and with his base knowledge, I was able to advance the skillset considerably. My work was at the point I was building some excellent birds at a fairly young age by the standards of Iophan roboticists. And, observer that I am, the poetic nature of a historian building tools for an overview was not lost on me.
All that work left little time for history, though. Most of my reflections on my true field came as I sat idly on the hypermag between Xenia and Katherineberg. I did find myself adopting, from the center, the lessons of those two counterpoles—builder and block-kicker. Transom’s advice to begin writing, I decided, was perhaps the best advice I’d ever been given. He wasn’t the first to suggest something like it—Looper Vonn, an asteroid miner in the Letters had made a comment like it in passing, that he’d look for my memoirs one day. It was a common enough belief about historians that Looper was not the first or the last to make such a comment. But I wasn’t actively engaged in writing the type of “history” that people think academic historians write. We tend to write for the internal debates within the field, not for people nor posterity. That was what Transom told me to learn to do as well, and I thought a lot in those early years on Iophos about how to begin.
At the same time, Goss was teaching me to reframe my understanding of my assumptions in ways I’d never considered. That definition of culture, for instance. Lesson one. Sure, in the moment, I’d wanted to smack him one. That would’ve made for a good first lesson, as well. And I might have even forgotten the lesson entirely if he hadn’t delivered it in a way that so infuriated me. I’ll be damned if I didn’t keep going over and over that altercation in my mind, and as I did, I tried to poke holes in Goss’s simple definition of culture: A culture is the sum of all rules, written and unwritten, governing the behavioral dynamic between two or more people.
And just like Goss had promised, it did rattle around in my mind. And it was nearly as infuriating as the arrogance with which he’d delivered it. I found it impenetrable. It worked for a marriage, for a family, for a group of friends, for a crew on a spaceship, for a class, a college, a congregation. It worked for a neighborhood, a city, a nation, an empire, or a world.
Who were the Iophans? What was Iophan culture? Well, they were the people who adhered to the set of written and unwritten rules that governed the behavioral dynamic here on Iophos. Damn.
But what made that culture the way that it was, and how were they different from us Athosians? What rules were different, and how did those rules get to be different from ours?
We are sister civilizations, but by all measures, Iophos is the little sister. Both planetary rings were built by the same group of explorers, and though others have chronicled the creation of the rings in greater detail—just as Goss would have it—one needs to appreciate the essence of things in order to appreciate the details. And to understand the essence of Iophan culture, one needs to understand how Iophos came to be.
Unlike Athos, Iophos was not planned. It was not the life’s ambition of Yuhl Dreeson the way Athos was. In fact, it was never supposed to be built at all. It wasn’t even the secondary byproduct of the schism among the people building Athos in the same way you could make the case Hellenia was. When the Athosian project split apart during the decades of construction, it was mainly into two camps—those who left with Carol Dreeson to live on the moon we now call Hellenia and those who remained behind to build the largest civilization in human history on Athos.
Iophos came into being as an afterthought. Dreeson’s system had this other smaller gas giant, Iophos. And there remained among the engineers a significant group of people who believed their standing in the newly-formed Athosian civilization would not be representative of the work they’d done to bring that civilization about. They wanted their own nation where their children wouldn’t be subordinate to the children of the Dreeson siblings, who’d already carved out prime space for themselves on the ring world before Athos was even fully functioning.
There was also a large contingent within the Technicians Rights and Services Protectorate who simply looked out into space from Athos—with an army of workbots at their backs, an armada of ships fit for purpose, a near-limitless supply chain of metals, and the largest contingent of engineers ever assembled—and they saw that naked nearby planet, Iophos, ringless, and they thought, as the Trasp always seem to, “Why the hell would we stop building now?”
Those two types were the ones who built Iophos—they and the colonists they recruited to join the project from Charris. And those late-joiners had a character of their own as well, because Athos was recruiting heavily at the time, looking to populate the empty sections of their vast, already-completed ring world. So to join the Iophan project was to join for the explicit purpose of joining the work rather than the promise of the life at the end of it. Any Charran who’d wanted that life could’ve had it already on Athos.
Iophos, by dint of the planet’s smaller size, had to be a smaller ring. Thus, she would always be the little sister by virtue of her size. Additionally, though, construction on Iophos didn’t fully begin in earnest until the major superstructures on both Athos and Hellenia were fully complete—the main reason being TR&SP contractual obligations following the schism that broke apart the original Athosian charter. Thus, the construction of the Athosian ring was more or less complete a full seven decades before the same could be said of Iophos. By then, Athos was a nation almost four full generations deep, both in culture and in number. And even further, among the builders of Iophos, there was still that contingent of inveterate builders who couldn’t contain their hunger to populate the galaxy with megastructures. As they finished, colonies were going up all over the Battery, and those projects thirsted for engineers with vision, creativity, and drive. At the same time, tens of thousands of the Trasp engineers found themselves ill-suited to a life of quiet comfort on the new Iophan ring they’d just constructed. Once the second ring was complete, those restless Trasp engineers left Dreeson’s system in droves.
All those factors meant it would be centuries before the cities on Iophos were properly populated in the way their Athosian sister cities were.
So who were the Iophans?
They were the people in between. They were the people left behind when the Trasp departed the ring they’d constructed for the opportunity to build the Western Battery into a vast diaspora of burgeoning interstellar nations. They were the little sister, struggling to get her steps as big sister Athos strode forward with confidence and certainty. They were flushed with admiration for big sister, more than willing to imitate in technology, art, fashion, and, yes, culture. But there were differences between us that always seemed to go back to that initial distinction: Little sister; Big sister.
The big distinction seemed to be the most important of the unwritten rules governing this vast group of people living here together on the Iophan ring, and it was a simple one. We are not them: We Iophans are not Athosians. More importantly, they didn’t want to be. At least that’s what they all seemed to tell themselves.
These things I observed first-hand from the body of an Iophan man millennia later, when both rings were populated far beyond the wildest conceptions of those original builders.
Block-Kicker, Middle Years:
The story of tracking Elosh and the sect’s network was not a short or simple one. From that first night we’d set eyes on “the guy,” as Transom had called that principal in their network, it was over half a decade before we even laid eyes on him a second time. Part if it was the wizards and the care they took to be discreet. Part of it was us, our limited resources and our low standing in Iophan society. Goss was really the only one of us who ever developed any pull.
Transom did make it into the K-Berg community watch, but it took nearly five years from our arrival for him to make the academy. From there, it was another few years before he was a full officer.
Myself, or Lorne Iosef rather, I became one of the senior programmers for the ornithology group in Xenia. That was quiet, fun, and once I fully learned the trade, gave me time to think about other things. But it was also quite strategic. Just like my canary, the municipally operated birds in every city had the capacity to be used for surveillance. It wasn’t their stated purpose, but one of the features of this pre-war Iophos was that no one even thought that way. If I had raised the possibility that the birds could be tapped into to spy on anyone in Iophan society, they’d have thought me quite mad.
But we did use birds as resources, not much in Xenia, where I lived and worked, but once I became a senior programmer, I had access to data for all the systems across Iophos for research and comparison, and it wasn’t difficult to build a backdoor from there for passive surveillance. And once we’d identified that initial principal target among the wizards, whom we simply called Alpha, slowly, through years of watching and networking algorithms run through my Precops AI keys, we eventually developed a comprehensive map of the sect’s network on Iophos.
Still, we had to watch them. It was not shocking that they were in every octant, all the major commercial and capital cities, in the census bureau, in supporting roles in government offices, in university research departments, or in corporations that developed tech. That was their charge, after all. What we did, with the help of my mapping program, was to distinguish the activities that deviated from their stated purpose.
Elosh was certainly one of the outliers. Alpha was also an outlier, and usually, there were five or six wizards to an octant who operated as double-agents. We had our names for them, and thanks to Transom’s position in the community watch, it was easy to learn their Iophan names as well. What we didn’t have for any of them except Elosh were their true identities—their wizard names within the sect.
While Goss got on with his arts work, he kept his eye on what Transom and I were doing, both with the wizards’ network and with the student activists, whose own network and influence was also burgeoning in those years.
Transom was well established as an officer in K-Berg when he called me one afternoon demanding I drop what I was doing and get on the hypermag immediately. Alpha had popped up on the Katherineberg community watch’s citywide surveillance network. Transom and Goss had discussed it and decided that if it was possible, we were going to corner Alpha an confront him on his actions. It was quite an escalation as well as a risk. Transom had expressed to me over and over that these wizards were powerful beings I shouldn’t ever approach alone. And now we were talking about cornering the Alpha.
Alpha worked as an engineer on the local tram in Petrazzia all the way on the opposite side of the ring in the Feyil Octant. The place was obscure and the man was obscure. But the wizard we understood him to be suggested that was a deep cover where he was merely lying low.
I met Goss first in the outer square at the rear of the Katherineberg octant’s governmental offices.
“What’s this business, Airee?” Goss asked me as I arrived. “The Etteran hasn’t briefed me on Alpha in a while.”
“Nothing specific to my knowledge,” I replied. “Nothing new, anyway. But he’s here in K-Berg. Better to confront him in our own jurisdiction I suppose.”
“Have you been training?”
“Training?” I answered. “Not much. I think I’m better for preventing a fight than actually being in one.”
“I suppose that’s what the Etteran is for,” Colin replied. “They’re fierce fighters, apparently, these wizards.”
“That’s the story,” I said, shrugging.
“I’m no use in a scrap,” Goss declared in a tone that both conveyed a truth and what he thought of the prospect of violence to begin with.
To a political animal like Goss, it was a bit like how an architect might regard the tools of construction. He knew they existed and were necessary. He’d just never figured he’d ever be called upon to pick them up himself.
Transom called us to a causeway in one of K-Berg’s quieter districts, a mostly residential area of flats between the government hub for the octant and the financial and corporate offices that lined the city center. We hopped in an autocab and joined Transom at the corner of a back street where Alpha was meeting with another sect operative who was local to the octant but not to Katherineberg. They were in a restaurant called The Mastiff, which looked like quite a warm place to take a meal.
“Should we?” I asked Transom.
“Should you what?” he asked me back.
“If the intention is to confront this guy and blow our cover, why not take advantage of our anonymity one last time?”
“You and Goss?”
“Why not? He’d notice you with the uniform if you went in, but I doubt he’d notice if we were in the restaurant,” I answered. “You haven’t been teaching me about surveilling all this time for nothing, have you?”
Transom looked over at Goss skeptically.
“I’ll be fine, Sebastian,” Colin insisted. “It’s a good plan.”
“Eyewear,” Transom stated.
I nodded, meaning I’d keep my glasses on so Transom could watch and eavesdrop from my perspective.
Colin and I went inside, sat, ordered a meal, and listened in on one of the most mundane conversations either of us had ever heard. They were either speaking in code or were two genuinely boring individuals discussing their cover lives as though they were living them earnestly. Neither seemed to have any clue they were being observed.
Twenty minutes or so into our meal, Transom was in my ear.
“Shit, Airee. Incoming.”
I wasn’t exactly at liberty to talk back to him directly, but I said something to Goss that let Transom know it would be good to have something more specific to prepare for.
“Elosh just walked up,” Transom informed me. “He knows your face.”
It was true that Elosh knew me. But it had been maybe a decade since Transom had caught him tailing me. We also had no reason to believe my alter ego had any knowledge of Elosh. I figured the odds were good he wouldn’t even notice I was there in the restaurant when he entered. I was wrong.
I did my best to engage my eyes with Colin, not even looking as Elosh entered. I had a periphery setting on my eyewear, though. I saw as Elosh looked directly at me, and though he was a talented enough observer that he didn’t react in any outward way, his gaze did hang on me for a moment. Lorne Iosef was tall, conspicuously so, even seated. This was the whole reason we’d never poked our heads out, so to speak. One misstep like this, years before, could have prompted these double-agent wizards to change their entire mode of operating.
Now though, they didn’t react, the three wizards at that table. They talked amicably about even more mundane nonsense—sports teams, policy changes in their departments, co-workers, mutual friends—and all of these topics could’ve been entirely fabricated or coded for all we knew. Then, the threesome got up to leave.
Transom had a spot in mind to corner them, a residential tower that was under a complete renovation order. It was a tremendous stroke of luck, as the site was damn near perfect for such an encounter. Work hadn’t begun yet, but all the residents had already relocated. Even the internal surveillance had been taken offline. Transom had the building’s keysets through the community watch. We just had to catch them at the right moment as they walked past and pull them inside. And, toward what seemed like more of our good fortune, the third wizard walked away from The Mastiff in a different direction, while Alpha and Elosh headed right down the route back toward the local tram stop, which brought them directly past our vacant residential tower.
“Are we on?” I asked Transom.
Goss was still eating lunch with a convincing gusto, probably because he was more interested in the lunch than being part of Transom’s counterintelligence op.
“Yeah, Airee,” Transom stated. “We won’t get a better opportunity. Just watch our six. Make sure that third guy isn’t on your tail when we nab Alpha and Elosh.”
“Are we really going to have to fight them, Airee?” Goss asked me.
“I don’t know. It certainly isn’t the best case. Just try to look angry, you know, kinda the way you do naturally. I’m big enough most people wouldn’t want to fight me. That’s sort of intimidating. Maybe they’ll think better of it, two on three.”
We didn’t know how Transom aimed to get them into the building, but the front door of the tower opened up to the causeway itself. We were following at a pretty good distance, but it was still close enough to see that the door was open as the two wizards were approaching. And sometimes, I swear that Etteran was so surreal that at moments you couldn’t even believe the universe could produce a person so perfectly absurd.
I was watching from behind as the two wizards stepped along, and all I saw from our vantage was a hand reach out from that door and yank Alpha into the building by the collar like this ordinary afternoon was some sort of comic stage production. Elosh was so taken aback, I could see him pause for a moment, wide-eyed, before he ran into the building himself, presumably to intervene on behalf of his colleague.
When we arrived on the scene seconds later, it was a pile of three bodies scuffling. Transom—or his alter ego Officer Xeldin Swinney, more rightly—was shouting at Alpha that he was under arrest.
“You have no right!” Alpha kept shouting back at Transom, who saw that we’d arrived and gestured for us to quickly pull the main door shut, securing it behind us.
Elosh saw this and quickly understood all wasn’t as it seemed—a simple misunderstanding with the local authorities. I don’t think he’d connected seeing me in the restaurant to this seemingly random confrontation until he saw me there again. Then he realized.
“What do you three want?” he stated, putting a hand to Alpha’s back as he and Transom were still engaged in a grappling stalemate.
“A private conversation,” Goss told them. “Nothing more. Apologies for the unconventional lengths we’ve had to go to in bringing it about.”
The two grapplers eased up.
“I remember you,” Elosh said, eyeing me. “You other two I have no idea about.”
Alpha glared over at Goss. “You’re government. I have no business with K-Berg division.”
“Right, because you’re a tram operator,” Goss replied. “I’ll speak plainly. We’ve been following your network now for several years, and we’d like a straight answer on what you’re up to here on Iophos.”
The two wizards looked at each other, almost as though it was a joke.
“You’re in way over your head,” Alpha replied. “You need to go back to your desk at the ...?
“I’m the chief arts officer of the city.”
Elosh couldn’t restrain a laugh. Transom, seemingly out of nowhere socked him in the solar plexus so hard we all heard his lungs deflate as he dropped to a knee.
“Show some damn respect,” Transom barked.
Alpha glared at him. “If you want it to be that way, I assure you it can be that way, and I assure you, there are more of us than there are of you, and we have much more powerful friends.”
“That’s good to know,” Goss said, completely unfazed by the altercation, as though it was merely a hiccup in the conversation he wanted to have. “You presume we know far less than we do, so you can begin by presuming we know all about your sect, including the exact number of operatives you have here on Iophos, your nature, your ostensible mission—all that. I don’t know you, though. I presume you all report to Marnier?”
“How the hell do you know that name?” Alpha asked Goss.
“Refer to my previous statements, please. Are you willing to share your name so we can have a polite conversation?”
“I don’t know you,” Alpha replied.
“Nor I you,” Goss repeated. “I’ll tell if you will.”
“What exactly do you want to know, Mr. local arts chief of Katherineberg?”
“You’re operating a secondary division within your sect here on Iophos, and we want to know it’s purpose, nothing more.”
“All of this is well above you three,” Alpha said.
Elosh, who had been quietly coughing on one knee and getting his breath about him, slowly brought himself back to his feet.
“This is about the stupidest way you clueless idiots could’ve gone about this,” Elosh said, turning and spitting on the floor behind him and then huffing.
“How’s your gut?” Transom asked.
Elosh grinned at him.
“We decline,” Alpha stated. “Now stand aside. We’ll be going about our business and none of you will ever bother us again if you value your lives.”
“We don’t,” Transom declared.
Alpha turned his head to look at Transom, clearly surprised by an answer he found perplexing.
“Perhaps you’ll reconsider.”
I could see in his face Transom was not reconsidering. He was getting ready for the fight. He’d been training that body—Xeldin Swinney’s body—since he’d arrived, turning that teenage athlete into a fighter in his mid twenties. He was a rock now, but the wizards were themselves perpetually youthful, bolstered in some way by blood-borne nanotech, and had centuries of training. Transom would have to win one of those fights fast enough that the other wizard wasn’t pounding Goss and I into dust by the time Transom won his first battle. Oh, but that wasn’t to be.
Just then, three men approached the front door to the building. One was the third wizard from the restaurant. The other two, Transom and I both recognized from our surveillance as local members of their tribe.
Transom let out this bizarre, cocky laugh. I didn’t know what to make of it.
Goss looked like he’d seen a ghost.
I think I just sighed. I’d never been beat up before. I was prepared to go back to our time when we died, but I’d always presumed it would be of natural causes. At that moment, I had my doubts, especially since the door which I’d secured behind us magically seemed to click open, and I remember thinking quite clearly: that figures, doesn’t it? Tech wizards.
Those five tech wizards kicked the shit out of us for about ten minutes straight. It seemed like hours.
They went to extraordinary lengths to pound on Goss and me in places it wouldn’t be outwardly obvious we’d been beaten to a pulp. Our thighs, torsos, arms, the upper back—one of them almost pulled my shoulder out of its socket, and very well could’ve, mind you; instead he just brought it right to the cusp of dislocation to hear me howl, at which point one of his colleagues stuffed his sock in my mouth.
They needed three of them together to be a match for Transom, and they still took some serious knocks before finally getting him on the ground. Goss and I were propped up against a pillar in the building’s reception area at that point, doubtless bleeding into our innards, huffing-in the smallest aching breaths our bruised ribs could tolerate.
Transom seemed like he was finished. He was on the ground, bloodied beyond belief, on all fours.
“He’s had enough,” Alpha declared, turning to Goss then. “You three will never bother us again or we will be quickly and unceremoniously dumping your flailing bodies into Iophos.”
As it seemed like they were turning to go, Elosh made the mistake of putting his hand on Transom’s head, rustling his hair like you would to a child, a taunt of sorts I guessed. But as Elosh pulled his hand away, Transom, every part of his borrowed body battered to a pulp, reached up so lightning fast you’d have missed it if you’d blinked, and he snatched at Elosh’s hand with his thumb and forefinger, latching onto the web between Elosh’s index finger and thumb like a vice and squeezing it so ruthlessly that the wizard howled and instantly fell to the floor screaming bloody murder. Transom crushed that pressure point so fiercely that Elosh couldn’t pull his hand away. It took all four of the others stomping him mercilessly for what had to be twenty seconds before Elosh finally wrenched his hand free, rolled to one side, and huddled with his wounded hand cradled against his chest.
After the others stopped kicking Transom, he got up to his hands and knees again and grinned a sick, bloody grin over at Elosh as though he was enjoying himself.
“We’re not done, Elosh,” he taunted the wizard, who was still holding his hand against his chest, a look of utter disbelief on his face.
“Must be a roughneck bastard,” one of the other wizards remarked.
“Hell, even they’re not that crazy. This one’s a psychopath,” the third wizard from the restaurant answered. “We should dump him out the funerary chute tonight before he causes any more trouble.”
“Walk away now and Marnier won’t hear of this,” Goss said, wincing, almost spitting the words.
I was thinking that this couldn’t possibly have gone much worse. Alpha looked over at Goss and seemed to consider what he’d said—that name Marnier—it must have carried some weight.
Just then two more young men came in the front door, and they took in the scene as though unsurprised, as though they were well familiar with all these wizards, their ways, and the type of backroom business this mess with our little trifecta had become. And imagine my shock as I recognized one of them as one of the student activists Goss and Transom had insisted I keep my eyes on. I even knew his name: DeVierry Soo. That was his Iophan name anyway.
None of us had any idea he was a wizard, not even Transom. How he’d slipped under our surveillance for all those years was beyond me, but it sure was a link. Threads suddenly connected. It began the oddest internal debate in that moment, my cerebral side versus my pain receptors, I suppose. Was that beatdown worth it? I asked myself earnestly in that aching moment, every part of my arms, legs, and torso throbbing.
I sure knew what Transom would say.
Builder, Middle Years:
Goss brought the girl in early, when she was still young enough to believe his interest was in her art for art’s sake. Even as cynical as her art showed her to be at that tender age, she was still a young, wealthy, Iophan girl. She hadn’t met a shark yet. It was beyond her realm of experience, so to think the kindly government arts officer was there to take advantage of her talents wouldn’t have crossed her mind.
It was a smart play—to get them working for the office before they were old enough to be cynical. And that was the most cynical lens one could put on it. Really, Goss made a convincing case that it was what was best for the society. Culture, after all, was shaped by the stories the people told themselves about themselves. “Their mythology,” he told me assuredly one afternoon he called me to his office. “We Iophans are ...”
And being in the arts office, Goss certainly managed the voice that told the people about themselves during those years. And the girl—Ianeria Kern—she was gifted with a resounding voice of her own. Goss made sure she had a platform from which to project it, even if he made sure she never got to choose what to say with that voice. He awarded her first modest commission at sixteen to create an innocuous set of statues that served as corner posts of a fence that enclosed a playground. He also assured Ianeria that it would lead her to greater work if she did a commendable job with the small tasks. These, he informed me, were conditioning. As many times as he could make her jump in service of her community, the less it would feel like a betrayal later when he asked her to write the story of her community in a way she might not completely believe herself.
And that cynic in her was a genuine part of her personality. I found this out one night when I was sitting in with the student activists in Xenia.
In the early years, I was still young enough that I could table with them in the cafes where they gathered to share reading materials and discuss their beliefs, sometimes in hushed tones, sometimes in heated arguments and speeches. I was a passive member of the group, never lending my name to any official list of signatories or appearing in pictures accompanying a call to action. I had my government position to consider. And, we knew that Elosh was observing the group too, so I only ever dropped in on them in person when we knew Elosh to be elsewhere on the ring.
About six months after that first night Goss introduced me to her work, Ianeria Kern strolled into one of the meetings looking quite like a first-timer—slightly hesitant, unfamiliar, and with wide, curious eyes.
She was several years my junior, and I had no desire to be so direct as to approach her. But that first evening I saw her, there were so many first-time attendees that the organizers ran an activity they called a rotating roundtable, where all the activists, novice and veteran alike, rotated by number, trading places with an assigned partner to make new acquaintances. Eventually, I found myself across from Ianeria.
What struck me first was that drawl, which I’d come to characterize as “high-Iophan,” and my mind couldn’t help but draw an instant connection to Lee Ira. Young, pretty, rich, socially significant, and in Ianeria’s case, extremely talented as well as bright.
I told her I made birds. She was quite taken with that fact. She told me she used to paint them when she was younger.
“Paint?” I asked her. “You’re an artist?”
“Now, I sculpt,” she replied modestly.
“Really? You’re a sculptor?”
“Nothing major yet. Silly little playground statues and the like.”
I raised my eyebrows as though it was impressive. It was, actually, for someone as young as she to have any commission. Plus, I knew how talented she was.
“That must be very rewarding,” I replied. “I’ll have to come see your work some time.”
She sort of rolled her eyes.
That look was such a small thing. Lorne Iosef, young as he was, likely wouldn’t have made anything of it beyond teenage angst. But Carsten Airee? I knew that cynicism. Here at this meeting? This artist was a rebel. There was something burning in her core. And part of me—a big part of me, most of me, nearly all of me—was itching to see that part of Ianeria Kern stick her finger right in Colin Dreeson’s self-righteous eye.
I didn’t tell Goss when I met her, but I did ask him about her from time to time. And he would tell me how things were progressing in his way. Lesson two, Airee. Listen up.
Culture, he insisted, could only be allowed to be organic in places it wouldn’t harm the people who had to exist within that culture. A crew on a shuttle that ran between Iophos and the cylinders could be allowed to dictate their own culture to some degree. In fact, freedom to dictate their own small pockets of culture served as a pressure release, giving those citizens the sense that they did have control over their lives on Iophos.
An officer in the government offices couldn’t think that way, though. Nor could city employees who worked in the community—the concierges, sanitation workers, community watch, planners, not even the bird builders like me. And the artist? She got no latitude. She made the myths—carved them into stone.
In a culture as vast as Iophos, with billions affected by the drifting of the cultural winds, those winds had to be under just as tight controls as the magnetic buffers on the ring cables, according to Goss. There was no room for block-kicking on a planetary ring with two-plus trillion souls abiding on it, and an artist could not only kick blocks herself with her work, but that work could inspire others to kick blocks just as destructively, potentially in droves if her work was convincing enough.
“What about artistic freedom?” I asked Goss.
Again, that classic look of Gossian disgust. “Freedom is an illusion, Airee. People are social creatures. We can’t disconnect ourselves from each other and think that cutting those ties in our own minds means they’re cut in anyone else’s. The abstraction of freedom certainly doesn’t entitle anyone to spread poisonous ideas to fellow citizens that result in concrete deterioration of the society. If she wants to brood alone in her bedroom, even that is damaging to society, because that’s time she could be using her talents to make something that lifts her fellow Iophans up. Even so, isolation and brooding can be tolerated. Freedom of any public kind cannot. Not from her. Especially artistic freedom. Are you kidding? She’s a child. She doesn’t even know how power functions, much less how to wield it.”
“Yet her work is powerful.”
“And carefully directed. You can bet on that.”
I asked Goss about Ianeria, about that first piece that had drawn him to her work. “That was a bit of freedom, though, wasn’t it? She told a true story about the Charran exodus, even if it was subtle.”
“And what did the people see when they sped past, Airee? That statue was on display for four weeks in twelfth position at the farthest corner of K-Berg beside the ring wall. And the people who saw it in passing saw the story they knew, not the supposed truth she intended to reveal. Children don’t get to dictate truth to a society that cares about its future. Grown citizens don’t for that matter either, not unrestrained.”
“You think you can control her?”
“That’s my job, Airee. This is the part about history you haven’t quite grasped yet yourself. I know you’re disillusioned and you have been since you were a student. That’s why you gravitated toward my sister. The fun part for you will be when you realize that we’re talking about you every bit as much as the artist when we talk about culture. That you’re here right now is only an accident of association—that you came to know my sister Carolina. But if you think you ended up exiled out to those abandoned mining colonies by your own choice, you’re delusional. Our offices in Ithaca do this same work because we must, truth be damned, because it has to be damned.
“We Dreesons are the stewards of Athosian civilization, my friend. The continued success or failure of any civilization is the success or failure of its leaders to tell the story of their civilization in a manner that encourages young citizens to become the zealous future stewards of that civilization. Those stories must be compelling; they need not be true. Our history has never been the truth as it was but the truth as we need it to be.”
Goss explained to me how arts offices were little different to the colleges that offered grants and decided which professors sat in which chairs, how those professors guided their students’ courses of study, how they let out the leash on talented people to offer the illusion of academic freedom in the same way I spoke about Ianeria’s artistic freedom, and he explained how that leash got yanked in just the right ways. The stories that got told to the public and taught in children’s lessons were the stories the cultural officers wanted told, crafted just so. Even the stories that I knew, like the alternative version—the true version—behind Ianeria’s first statue, those stories merely gave me the illusion that I was privileged, one of the wise ones allowed to have a peek behind the curtain. Even disillusioned professors behaved in certain ways to ensure they wouldn’t get cut off from those alternative narratives that made them feel special.
“You’ll never really get to see behind the curtain, though, Airee. You have neither the temperament nor the talent.”
“This isn’t a look behind the curtain, Goss? Traveling back in time? The wizards? These discussions about fabricating Iophan history?”
“You don’t even know what you don’t know. I do hope that one day you’ll find your way, but frankly, you’re wandering around in the wilderness looking for all the wrong things. You really could be something if you found your direction. I like you, Airee, I really do. You’re a good man, but you think too much like my sister does. Carolina is learning, though. You still have much farther to go.”
“Carolina’s learning?”
He shrugged. “Now? Only just.”
I looked at him as though to inquire with a look what he meant by that.
“Dumping you back on Damon Mines was perhaps the first sensible thing of consequence she’s ever done. No offense. And, yes, we’re trying to bring her along, my father and I. She can’t keep adventuring around the Letters looking to avenge some perceived injustice she not only doesn’t understand but can’t even define and isn’t genuinely certain ever existed. But this is quite an adventure, this life, isn’t it?”
“I should say so, Goss.”
“Well, that’s enough for today, I think. I’m sure you have birds to build back in Xenia tomorrow.”
Sometimes we had weird, wandering, contentious philosophical talks like that.
Goss brought Ianeria along during those middle years, progressing her from statues of children as fence posts to busts of faithful bureaucrats to line the halls of city and octant government buildings. Occasionally, he would feed her a crumb—some small symbolic representation of civic duty in some form. But always, in the back of my mind, I held that question he’d asked me that very first time he showed me the girl’s work: What should the real commission be? The big one? The project for her time and her talents? Her moment?
Goss clearly had something in mind for her, but he never told me what it was. Each piece Ianeria did for her civic work seemed to be a progressively deeper act of ritual humiliation designed to tug on the leash Goss described. I even spoke to her one time at a meeting while she was struggling. She was grappling with the dilemma of artistic control that Goss had cycling perpetually through her head. From time to time, she held studio shows. And because of her obvious talent, private buyers paid handsomely for her work. That work? The pieces that got displayed? Those were her choices, of course, displayed in those private sales.
I ducked into one of her smaller gallery showings mid-morning, when I knew there was almost no chance of seeing her there in person. Nor did I see the Ianeria I knew in the work displayed. They were beautiful pieces, all. Sure. But Goss might as well have been standing in the corner himself dangling the possibility of that one major commission—the career-maker, posterity, the statue in the square that millions and millions of Iophans would pass on the way to the Capitol for a thousand years to come. Just like the small government commissions, these pieces she sold to happy Iophan retirees were the stories she had to tell about Iophos to get there.
I was left wondering where her real art was.
Observer, Middle Years:
Through those years we were living the borrowed young-adult lives of these three Iophan men, I tried to convey what I knew to Transom about history, even as Goss seemed to be blasting holes in the value of it each time we talked. The one thing I knew still held—and I tried to impress the importance of this to Transom—was that no historical event happens out of context. Thus, in order to understand a historical event, the better one understood the context, the better they would understand the event itself. It sounds obvious, but there are implications.
Unsurprisingly, Transom liked to study warfare and spycraft. Before the outbreak of the West Battery War, which was still more than a century in the future from this Iophos, we had no meaningful examples of sustained warfare in our history except what happened on Earth before our ancestors departed for the stars. On Earth, there was no shortage of wars to study. Our stellar civilizations were certainly the outlier. So Transom and I discussed examples we were both familiar with—the World Wars mostly. And it was easy to trace the waves of history—how one conflict washed over the other, nearly impossible to understand one without the other.
Yet, I found Transom also picking up on another key problem we historians are forced to carefully grapple with constantly—the missing pieces we don’t know. It became a sort of joke with him, that each time we seemed to come to a conclusion that satisfied on a topic, I would always wait a beat and then say ... maybe. And that maybe was a nod to the things that remained hidden in the obscurity of our distant past, shaping the things we still saw in ways we couldn’t know.
He started doing it too, not just in our historical discussions, but in our present work. Is this the full network from the Abrams Octant? Yes, I think so ... maybe.
We came looking for the roots of the war. So it should’ve been my way to go back to the schism and trace the waves forward, revealing the dynamic between Athos and Iophos, shining a light on the key points—the crests of the waves.
I am an Athosian, through and through. The Airees came from Charris in the second wave following the schism, when Iophos wasn’t yet a conception. But the workforce building Athos had already broken apart by then. So my Athosian roots are quite deep. It was not difficult for me to pick out the glaring differences between our sister societies, even as numerous as the similarities are.
The most glaring distinction tourists from the Battery often pick out just as easily as cultural experts. All over Iophos, they have subtle yet distinct differences in their accents, almost always stratified along class lines.
It was glaring in our young artist from the prominent Kern family, just like it was with Lee Ira and her parents. They all spoke with a form of drawling “high-Iophan” that aspired to something that was difficult to characterize.
Like on Athos, there was a clear recognition in status between the people who lived on the surface layer of the ring, versus the more numerous citizens who kept residences in the sub-surface flats. That was always more about where people lay their heads at night than where they lived, as centuries of studies have shown, most Athosians and Iophans spend nearly equal time external to their dwellings on the surface layer—in jobs, in the city, walking between shops and restaurants, in parks, socializing. Still, that class distinction was always clear on both rings.
And like every human society before us, different neighborhoods carried class distinctions as well. But on Athos, it has always been rare to find that distinction imprinted on our manner of speaking. The affectations of a Dreeson of the inner circle in Ithaca differ little from a logistics officer on the freight line in Shalinor-Zair.
Immediately, though, in speaking to an Ira, Kern, Kedi, or Pak in Katherineberg, one got the sense that they were making an aristocratic claim with every sentence they uttered. Their accent was a glaring contrast to the majority of Iophans, who, to my Athosian ears, could pass for locals in just about any city on Athos with little trouble.
The high-Iophans’ peculiar manner of speaking was enough of a curiosity to me that I took some time to explore the phenomenon, and found its origins in the custom of private schooling in Io in the early generations of the ring’s occupation. There was a cluster of elite schools where the children of the wealthy founders were taught mostly by embodied Svaarta clones during their pre-school years. And to generalize, linguistically speaking, children acquire their mother tongue mostly from their mothers; however, they acquire their accents from their peers. So the children in these elite schools collectively picked up pieces of Svaarta’s affectations over the years, and the effect most likely got magnified by legacy attendees, when children of these elite schools sent their own children to learn from these same AI clones, where the accent was cemented amongst the elite in Io. And this manner of speaking grew prominent enough that many social climbers who didn’t attend the schools merely imitated it. This was the best explanation I could discover for high-Iophan.
There was, of course, the other Iophan accent. Its origin is far less certain. Whether it’s called “dock-speak” or “dock-talk,” as the Iophans themselves call it or “old Iophan roughneck,” as most outsiders deem it, nobody seems sure where it came from exactly. “Space” was the answer I most commonly got when inquiring, an answer that seemed to make some sense. The speakers are almost always spacehands of some sort—welders, foundry workers, asteroid miners, barge crew. You can still hear this cant spoken in every port city on the ring, usually in proximity to the port and the lifts heading down to those levels.
I actually hadn’t heard it spoken much before arriving in Xenia. It wasn’t all that unfamiliar to me, though. The first time I made the connection was while surveilling one of the wizards passing through K-Berg as he met a contact at the port. That contact was Iophan and spoke in this roughneck accent to our visiting wizard.
Perhaps the only time I felt genuinely threatened by Transom while we were on Iophos was that night. I casually said to him, “Sound familiar?”
“What the hell do you mean by that, Airee?” he asked, his eyes blazing a hole through me.
“Nothing. It just seems like he sounds ... well ... similar to how Etterans ...” I stopped talking.
“You’re saying I talk like that, Airee?”
I shrugged and didn’t deny it.
He turned his head away from me and spat on the floor.
“I don’t sound anything like those knuckle-dragging rock-breakers,” he insisted. “Get your ears checked.”
It was also not in the too-distant past that a certain terrorist had etched his voice into the consciousness of all us Athosians with his taunts and threats. I attempted to lower the tension.
“Come to think of it,” I replied after a long pause, “he sounds more like that terrorist Clem Aballi.”
Transom turned back toward me like he wanted to murder me. “Are you trying to get me to snap your neck, professor?”
“Shit. Sore subject? I didn’t mean anything by it.”
He shook his head and huffed. We stood there monitoring our target in silence for minutes before either of us uttered another word. Eventually he explained. Clem Aballi was a sore subject for him. At that time, it had never crossed my mind that Transom might have ever crossed paths with the infamous “Wizard of Athos,” but he had, and it had almost killed him.
“Come to think of it, though,” Transom said. “That’s how I got all tangled up in this mess. Burch and those assholes were the ones who got roped into flying me around while I hunted him down for Etterus, and they brought me aboard the Yankee-Chaos after that bastard Aballi blasted me. That was right before Burch picked up Carolina.”
I didn’t say it, but it seemed he was coming to the realization that if it hadn’t been for Aballi, his life—if he were still even alive—would’ve been very different. He’d still be fighting in the war.
Transom and I had a long night watching those roughnecks and that visiting wizard on the docks that night. He told me the whole story—from the moment he got picked up by Hale Burch to his last confrontation with Aballi, how that wizard had stood over him as he was bleeding out onto the sands of some no-name planet. He even did a fair—albeit quite comical—imitation of Clem Aballi himself, a full accounting of what he’d thought to be his final conversation of his life. Transom had even calmed down a little by the time he’d finished the story.
“Anyway, yeah. He does talk like those bastards,” Transom concluded, tilting his head toward our Iophan targets. “What do you reckon these wizards are doing down here with these roughnecks, though?”
“I don’t know,” I answered him. “There’s not a whole lot of ground-breaking tech in the docks.”
“Unless it’s moving through it,” Transom replied, shrugging. “Other than that, they don’t really have a lot of business down here, one would think.”
By those days, Transom had some influence in the community watch in Katherineberg. The ports weren’t under their authority, but he could get information when he requested it. And we began to keep an eye on things down there. It wasn’t long before we found a curious connection down by the docks as well: DeVierry Soo—the wizard we’d missed, the one from the student activists’ meetings.
Block-kicker, Final Years:
Goss hadn’t ever had a hand laid on him in anger before that ill-fated attempt we made at accosting Alpha and Elosh. I’m not sure it even crossed his mind that we might get beaten to a pulp like that. Probably the closest thing I’d ever experienced to a fight was when Transom and Sōsh had abducted me, stuffed my head in a bag, and brought me aboard the Yankee-Chaos. But Carolina had given them orders, I’m sure, that I wasn’t to be properly roughed up. At the time, I couldn’t fathom that a violation of my personal sovereignty could be more egregious than that.
I’d since toughened up a little bit. Still, getting the shit kicked out of us like that was a shock to my system. For Goss, Barnard Dreeson’s son, an anointed member of the inner-circle and future leader of the galaxy’s most powerful dynasty, getting his chest stomped by two people at the same time was a first. And though he never let me know it affected him, he was never quite as abrasive with me afterward. It was almost as though, intellectually, he knew he had to be the same man and make the same decisions, many of them cold decisions, yet he seemed to make them with a quieter understanding of their weight. When your job is to be the metaphorical foot on someone’s neck, it’s easier to be that foot when you don’t understand what it’s like to fall under it.
Goss was undeterred in our mission to trace these wizards and their actions despite that beating. He surely wasn’t going to be caught in a room with them again, though.
Transom on the other hand dug in his heels.
After they’d left us bloody and bruised in that empty building that day, I’d told Transom that I recognized one of the wizards—that younger, late-arrival to the ass kicking. Transom spat out some blood and said, “That’s interesting. If I can keep from coughing out my spleen in the next half hour, I might find it in me to give a shit, Airee.”
He did give a shit, though. I knew right away. It was significant. DeVierry Soo turned out to be a key player. And what we managed to unravel with a few months of further surveillance, was that the wizards were playing a role in organizing those student activist groups.
In the early years, none of their activity seemed like anything. But the longer it went on, the more I wondered whether my perception of the student activists wasn’t clouded by my bias as an Athosian. And perhaps Goss couldn’t see it for the same reason: we’d always understood Iophan resentment as an ever-present aspect of their society. Athos’s little sister. And Transom, for all his skill at picking out targets and surveilling, he didn’t always know what he was looking at in Katherineberg. This was the first peaceful society he’d spent any extended time residing in. So for him to see such low-level resentment didn’t register as anything more than teenagers and young adults blowing off steam. And it never amounted to anything particularly kinetic, certainly never violence. Speeches, the occasional protest, the signing of petitions, and then they’d grow up, get tired of the same schtick, and then perform their community outreach hours like everyone else, get jobs, get married, have kids of their own, and settle down—literally and figuratively. I watched it with my own eyes.
But then there was DeVierry Soo. Each year, the student group in Xenia shed members as they graduated university. Similarly, they brought in each incoming year’s crop of angry fringe outliers, mostly slightly-disillusioned teenagers with some disenchantment about Iophan society that they could rarely articulate. The group tried to direct that angst in the same way Goss’s office used art to steer the masses. They gave it a target and a vocabulary. And in Xenia, one of the main symbols of this wrath was familiar to us three visitors: it was the death of Marion Ira.
The story they told themselves was that Marion was left to die because she was Iophan. By then, I’m sure even Lee Ira had come to some measure of peace with her sister’s tragic death. But for the group the myth of Marion Ira wasn’t really about Marion Ira, it was about Athos being first, always the culturally dominant force in the system. Athosian fashions, Athosian music, Athosian stories—everything important filtered through the larger ring first, and the Iophans got left out in space to die, not so much out of malice but indifference. These kids, year-in and year-out would gather to shout in each other’s ears that they existed. They were important too.
And in the years that I was still young enough to pass amongst them, mostly I felt sorry for them. And, as much as it pained me to yet again admit that Goss was right, I couldn’t help but feel embarrassed. All those furious discussions I’d had with Carolina about her family and the politics of Athos. The anger. The unfairness. I couldn’t help but look back on all the years I’d endured the tyranny of my own pent-up emotions misdirecting me.
There was Goss, looking at the ring as it was and working, striving each day to learn how he could keep that society running as perfectly as possible for as many people as possible. I spent those years shouting at the cracks in the road without ever stopping to realize what a miracle it was that someone had managed to do something so miraculous as build a road. I knew nothing of the struggles of wandering in the wilderness that preceded the roadbuilders.
That’s what those Iophan kids felt like to me—young, disillusioned Carsten Airee. And even more frustrating than having to listen to them and pretending to relate, I knew there wasn’t anything I could’ve told them to convince them otherwise. I wouldn’t have listened to reason at their age either.
I think I was about twenty-four the last time I attended a meeting. DeVierry Soo had left Katherineberg a few years prior, but he popped up again at another university in Abrams at their chapter. And that re-appearance was how we cracked their pattern.
I had developed a tagging tech with the birds—it was a complex visual pattern-recognizing algorithm that relied on our artificial birds taking snapshots of every other bird they encountered. We were able to map the movements of all the birds—real and artificial—as they traversed Xenia. Eventually, I started advancing the code to do the same thing on the fringes of the city. Then I figured since the program ran in the background using such a small percentage of each unit’s processing power, why not? I set the algorithm to self-propagate. Two years later, we had a complete ornithological map of the entire ring.
We used both the model and the birds themselves to take pictures of all the student groups across Iophos. It took nearly a decade to finish, but we discovered quite a few wizard embeds within the student activist groups.
Truth be told, by then, Transom seemed to have lost interest. Goss had told him he didn’t want to ever confront the wizards directly again. And it seemed to me that Transom didn’t quite see the point in surveilling them if he was never going to get to walk one of them into a corner and beat the full story out of him. Transom never confessed as much to me in so many words, but that was the sense I got.
I surely didn’t see his disappearance coming, though. It was something I only understood in hindsight.
His body—our bodies, as I was the same age—we were approaching forty by then. The wizards? They rotated; they moved about; they changed names; but they didn’t age. Transom had spent plenty of hours turning Xeldin Swinney the teenage athlete into Xeldin Swinney the muscular, intimidating community watch officer. Transom broke up more than his fair share of near-physical altercations simply by walking up and asking, “Is there a problem here?”
“No, sir. No problem,” was almost always the answer.
But we were finally aging. I felt it. I didn’t think anything of it, but I felt it.
We were watching the wizards still, but we weren’t watching nearly as closely as in the early years. Then something funny happened. Without any prior indication, Elosh simply vanished from our network.
It was odd, but I didn’t think much of it. Wizards did that from time to time. After all, they didn’t exactly take a commercial space flight to report back to their vault, or wherever they went to report back to their sect.
But Elosh never returned. Shortly after that, Alpha shifted locations, popping up with a new identity on a small community watch clear on the opposite side of the ring.
Two more wizards vanished in the span of three weeks. That had never happened before. Then DeVierry Soo vanished from our surveillance map. During that whole stretch, Transom had been even more aloof than usual, going in and out of contact for days at a time.
Still I didn’t put it together. The wizards did, though.
The last time I saw him, he told me something critical. We were in my flat aggregating data on the student groups. He wasn’t acting out of character in any discernible way, but when he finally turned to leave, he told me, “You know, Airee, we have a large data set of all these disillusioned kids dating back what? A couple decades? I’ve been thinking, you know what you’ve always said about history, one wave being related to the last. It might be worth looking into where all these kids are now, what they’re up to.”
It seemed like a tremendous amount of work that I wasn’t inclined to do.
I never saw Xeldin Swinney again after that day, though, and neither did anyone else.
By two weeks, Goss and I figured one of two things had happened. He’d either given up on our mission and done what he’d planned on doing that night he sent Carolina back to our time—found a tower to leap off so he could get back to his real life; or he’d decided he’d done his part here on Iophos and hopped a flight to Lime Harbor or some other bright place in the Indies or the Etteran Guild, where he could live out these remaining free years on a beach reading histories in peace and quiet.
I should have known better.
Transom? Peace and quiet?
Goss and I were having a drink one night in K-Berg near his offices. It was probably about two full months after Transom had disappeared. He hadn’t even come up in our conversation that night. We were probably talking about the artist.
I looked up at a shadow out of the corner of my eye, as it seemed someone was approaching our table. And looking back down at me—and at Goss—was Alpha. He didn’t utter a word. He just stared at us and smiled.
“All right,” Goss said to him. “Fine.”
And Alpha turned and walked away.
Neither of us ever saw him again either.
I suppose it didn’t suit Transom to die of old age, not in his own life, nor in this borrowed one.
Builder, Final Years:
I kept a casual friendship with Ianeria Kern over the years, well after we’d both left the student activist group in Xenia. By all outward appearances, the radical fringes of her youthful exuberance had been trimmed off neatly by all the years of conditioning Goss had put her through. She’d played the part of the good little artist for him.
Goss prided himself on thinking he had the pulse of the community. In the case of Ianeria, though, I could never quite figure out why Goss cared so deeply. Arts chief was just his cover, ostensibly. But her case seemed like a major part of what he seemed to be trying to uncover on Iophos—even more than the mission Carolina had outlined for us at the beginning. If Ianeria Kern had something major to do with the start of the war, I couldn’t see what it was.
Transom had been gone for about four years by the time I brought it up with him. Goss didn’t know it yet, but I was planning on leaving Xenia. In fact, I was going to leave Iophos altogether. I’d run that entire network analysis that Transom had suggested before he’d gotten himself killed by the wizards. The data was interesting, but I’m not sure I understood how to interpret it the way Goss would. My plan was to give him that dataset and the keysets to our other mapping programs and leave. I had at least another thirty good years left in Lorne Iosef’s body—a priceless opportunity to go out into the Letters and witness the expansion of later colonies as I’d only read about. I could even tour the Protectorate before their walls went up. I wanted to see outposts that were destroyed in the early campaigns. Dana Point—Nessel, as the Trasp called it—the strategic importance of the fight that ensued there—that was a must-visit location. Lime Harbor wasn’t dead here yet, and every time I saw someone walking around Katherineberg with a hook bracelet or a necklace from that famous holiday spot, it was a reminder of the gift this bonus life was. And I’d gotten the sense that whatever we were supposed to see here in Xenia and K-Berg in this time, if we hadn’t already seen it, we weren’t going to.
I was working through how I was going to tell Goss. Maybe I’d stay a while to see what he could make of the data. I was getting ready to present it to him one evening while we were having dinner at the “Maj,” which was the nickname the octant’s government officers had for the Magisterial—a rooftop restaurant overlooking the octant’s capitol building at Katherineberg Square. It was a hangout for types like Goss—the longtime government higher-ups whose life’s work was wielding the octant’s institutional power positions. For whatever reason, it didn’t seem like the right time to tell him.
“Ianeria Kern,” he said, completely out of the blue while we were eating. “Do you remember her, Airee?”
Goss and I hadn’t talked about her in a long time—years perhaps.
“Of course I remember her. Quite well. What about her?”
“It’s her time. It has been actually, for a while now. It’s just been a matter of waiting for the right opportunity. She’s long overdue.”
“You have work for her? I’m sure she’ll be glad to hear it.”
“Not just work, Airee. The work, the big one.”
“What is it?”
“The commission of a lifetime. It’s the type of thing that comes up once in a generation. They’re renovating the eastern quadrant of the 8th Octant Mall between the hypermag hub and the Capitol. We haven’t made it public yet, but we’re relocating the existing statuary to the Museum of the Octant, as it’s dated. The central part of that plaza will be opened up, the aging trees felled, and there will be an iconic statue in the center that will be one of the most prominent public monuments in all of K-Berg, if not Iophos itself. Ianeria Kern will be the sculptor.”
“And what piece of physical propaganda will you be having Ianeria render for everyone to admire for the next thousand years, Colin?”
He looked back at me as though inviting me to answer my own inquiry. He’d asked me that same question all those years ago, the very first night he’d shown me her work: What was the right piece for this artist, this time?
By then we’d both been in Katherineberg long enough to know the history of the city and its place on Iophos.
“Katherine Slane?” I suggested.
Goss sighed. “Lacks imagination,” he replied.
“You’re the one always going on about instilling a sense of pride in the civilization. Pride begins with our founding myths.”
“Fair, but, no. Look at the layout, Airee. What do you see?”
We could see the Mall quite well from up there. That area of the park wasn’t directly in the line of sight from the Magisterial, but I knew the park well enough to have a clear mental picture.
“Well, there’s the Capitol directly in front. And the Museum of the Octant on the left, if you’re facing the Capitol.”
“And on the right?”
“The auditorium at the CoA, no?”
“Exactly. The concert hall.”
“Something musical?”
“Even you may not know this, Airee, but before she debuted the Nebula Songbooks, Terra Michel toured Iophos with Liryre Garson, and they presented the sitting mayor of Katherineberg with a replica of a wooden cello from Earth that had been in the Sondomme’s collection for over five centuries. It happened right in that square, and it was more than just a gesture of goodwill. It was a way of lending legitimacy to the premier Iophan conservatory, which, at that time, wasn’t in Io but right in the Koppen neighborhood on the far side of the CoA.”
“I didn’t know that,” I confessed. “That’s a little outside of my area.”
“That’s exactly my area, though,” Goss boasted. “What do you think of it?”
I considered the optics. I considered the current context. I considered the city, the growing undercurrent of resentment toward Athos, especially here in K-Berg and Xenia.
“How old were they then, Terra and Liryre?”
“Twenty-three,” Goss answered, smiling.
“Unifying gift, universally-loved artists, bolstering the legitimacy of the city. It’s subtle. Joyful. Impossible to hate. I don’t know that even Ianeria will be able to find a cynical layer to hide a subversive message in.”
“She’d never get anything like that past me on a project of this magnitude, Airee.”
“Actually, I have to hand it to you on this one, Goss. It’s pretty damn perfect.”
“And the best part—I’ve procured white marble for the plinth and an extremely rare Sondomme-yellow alabaster from out in the Letters for the statues themselves. Three figures’ worth.”
“Sounds like you’ve got a hell of a plan.”
“I should say. It’s only taken two decades to come to fruition.”
“Can I ask you? I’ve always wondered. Why the hell is she so important to you? Or is it even Ianeria? What is it with this project?”
“In confidence, Airee—the strictest confidence?”
I looked around, as though to ask who I could possibly tell in that world that mattered.
“I mean, I guess so.”
“Not here,” he replied. “When we go back.”
“Oh, I get it. Of course. Dreeson family secret.”
“No. Governmental secret, or maybe not so secret. Not nearly as secret as we’d like.”
“Sure, Goss. My lips will be sealed.”
“Do you know what graffiti is, Airee?”
For once, I got the opportunity to flash that condescending look back at him. “I study history and archaeology, Colin. Of course I know what graffiti is.”
“Do you even know?” he replied.
“Know what?”
“Were you in Athos after the Clem Aballi problem? Or were you still out in the Indies digging out ghost towns?”
“No. I was out in Damon Mines. I heard about it, though.”
“So you haven’t been back to Athos since before it happened?”
I shook my head.
“There’s discontent. Public discontent.”
“There’s graffiti?” I asked. “On Athos? Where?”
“Carolina didn’t tell you? All over Athos. Ithaca. She found a mural herself last year when she came back—right in the damn Sondomme, Airee!”
“No shit.”
“Exactly,” Goss stated, raising an eyebrow. “And that business with Carolina. You know she got shot at, right?”
“Not at, Colin. She got shot. Happened right before she picked me up.”
“Right. Of course,” he replied, shaking his head in disbelief. “So there are problems, you see. Discontent.”
“Oh, hell,” I exclaimed, as something Transom had told me popped into my head at that moment. “You think all that discontent has something to do with Clem Aballi? The graffiti?”
“Yes. That’s what I’m saying, Airee. That’s what started the whole thing.”
“You know Transom fought Aballi?” I asked Goss.
“I got briefed on everything my father did when Carolina came home last year.”
“So you know what he told him, right?” I asked.
“Who? The Etteran?”
“No. What Aballi told Transom. About Athos.”
“I’m not sure what you’re talking about, Airee.”
“Transom told me the whole story one night when we were surveilling down on the docks—the conversation he’d had with Aballi.”
I left out the part where Transom was bleeding to death. I’m not sure I wanted Goss to have the pleasure of that image in his head—although, I’m sure Goss had even less love for Aballi than Transom.
“Well? Don’t leave me in suspense. What did Aballi say?” Goss asked.
“That he never intended to kill anyone. The words Aballi used, if I remember correctly, were something like: you don’t kill Athos by murdering a trillion people, you murder Athos with a mirror.”
Goss snorted. “Something like that, Airee. Yeah. That bastard knows.”
“So what’s this business here in Iophos? A dry run in Katherineberg? You patch up this discontent and see what you can learn? Then take it back with you as a model for Athos?”
Goss didn’t confirm that assessment, but he didn’t deny it either. Now it was my turn to laugh.
“Oh, perfect,” I replied.
“You just said you haven’t been back on Athos, Airee. You don’t know.”
“No. You’re right. I don’t know anything.”
“The undercurrent,” Goss insisted, punctuating that statement with a puff of air from his nose.
“A few of us pesky citizens must have looked in the mirror,” I joked, which Goss didn’t find remotely amusing. “Well, I hope you learn what you need to know, Colin. You’ll certainly have plenty of time to see how it works out.”
“Don’t say anything to the artist,” Goss demanded as I got up from the table. “That could spoil the whole project.”
“And all this time I thought we were pulling in the same direction.”
“There’s only ever one direction, Airee,” Goss replied.
And he didn’t even have to tell me which one.
Athos. For Colin Dreeson, everything was only ever about Athos.
Observer, Final Years:
I didn’t ever let on to Ianeria Kern that I knew Colin Knoll, who was her chief sponsor, but for all purposes, Goss was really her handler at the arts office for all those years. She was no longer the angsty teenager I’d met all those years before. That angst, informed by both childish emotions and a genuine sense of real injustice in her world, had matured into a far more reasoned understanding of the need for pragmatism. And though she never had a direct conversation about the way the government managed the power of her work with Goss, at least as far as I knew, it did seem that such a reality had steeped into her consciousness over the years. She didn’t seem particularly bothered by it anymore, though. She was a mother now. She took her children to the very playground where her statues decorated the corner posts. Ianeria Kern the mother didn’t want discontent in the streets of the city where her daughters would grow into women. Childish things, at some point, must be put aside.
That was my impression on the rare occasions we still met. I was never close enough to Ianeria to learn otherwise.
Finally getting her commission was the thrill of her life. Just as Goss had always insisted, what the artist covets more than anything is a place of prominence to display her greatest work. In the same way a physical beauty lusts to be seen, a peerless athlete craves competition, or an intellectual titan thirsts to be read, the great artists need their work to be seen. Vanity demands nothing less. Ianeria Kern was no different.
I visited her studio and got to see the sketches as they developed. She had pictures of Terra Michel and Liryre Garson projected all over her walls. She showed me samples of the stone.
“Where in the galaxy he found this precious stone, I can’t imagine,” she said, taking that small sample block of alabaster, enclosing it in her hand, and holding it to her chest as she shook her head in gratitude.
“I can’t wait to see the sculpture unveiled,” I told her. “I wouldn’t miss it for anything.”
I had no way of knowing at the time that the stone was everything.
During the year and eight months while Ianeria was working on the sculpture, I continued aggregating data on the wizards and their contacts all over Iophos. Unfortunately, because the movements of spacehands were so far flung, neither Goss nor I were able to put together any definitive map that outlined the connections between the roughnecks in the ports and our Iophan wizards. They were the missing link. Our knowledge of their movements stopped at the ports, and most of the roughnecks weren’t well established on the Iophan ring itself for long periods of time. They tended to come in for weeks-long stretches and then vanish to the obscurity of space again, largely to work on infrastructure projects out in the Lettered Systems, the Indies, or the Trasp Protectorate. What we had established, though, was certainty that there was a definite and long-standing connection between Alpha and his organization and the Iophan roughnecks.
As far as the student radicals were concerned, though, we had a wealth of data. We’d tracked thousands of members of varying commitment levels across activist groups in most of the major cities over decades. It wasn’t surprising to see that some of them had gone into all types of positions of influence as they graduated out into functional adult life. For most, we imagined that they would mature into more adult perspectives as well, genuinely taking up their responsibilities earnestly as the reality of running their small part of society opened their eyes to the challenges and limitations that faced the leadership class they spent their student years railing against. As the saying went, the shoe was now on the other foot. Some others, though, we were unsurprised to see, still kept in contact with their radical friends. And some still kept in contact with the student groups as well, offering guidance to their chapter’s leadership, many even ushering like-minded graduates into entry-level positions beneath them in government and industry.
What struck me as I analyzed the data was where these student activists didn’t go. With the exception of rare cases, the student radicals did not take jobs like mine—infrastructure, transport, engineering, scientific research. No. They clustered around centers of power and influence in the government; in executive pipelines within the corporate sphere, particularly in Iophos’s most powerful companies; in education, far more so in administration and curriculum design than in the classroom; and particularly, they loved arts offices like Goss’s.
I, the historian, started thinking far more like a scientist than I ever had before. My typical analytical session ended with the same thought that punctuated nearly every scientific paper ever written: Needs more study. Yes, I wished I had more data. Twenty years was too short a study. It called me back to Transom and our lessons on the connections between the crests of the waves in historical time. Events never existed in isolation but were the product of the entire cultural ocean they rose up out of.
With Ianeria, I was there to see the entire buildup. Still I didn’t foresee the way it crested. I visited her studio several months prior, and there was no outward indication of the wave she was about to set loose across the ring.
The yellow alabaster Goss had procured was rare and expensive. Thus, the block the octant’s government purchased was carefully selected and accounted for down to the square centimeter, supposedly, but it was all weighed and measured in a precise enough manner that no one could have predicted that such a coup would even be possible.
The stone came in one contiguous block that was to be cut into thirds at the artist’s direction according to the needs of each figure. Goss inspected the whole stone as it arrived at the port and once more as the pieces arrived at Ianeria’s studio after they had been cut by laser at the K-Berg mason’s shop at the outer docks. All the stone that came into the octant was measured and cut at that one shop in Katherineberg and then sent out for local delivery through the freight system. Goss found in Ianeria’s studio exactly what he’d expected—three appropriately large cuts of Sondomme-yellow alabaster. And he expressed to me his satisfaction with her progress each time he checked on Ianeria through the months she was sculpting the scene, which the Arts board had unanimously voted to title “The Bonds of Friendship.”
The last time I spoke to Ianeria was seven months before the unveiling. I considered that she was merely focused on her work, being that it was the most important work of her life. I imagine only her family and closest friends were visiting her in the studio in the days leading up to the unveiling, which, as I’d promised her, I did attend.
Her sculpture was a grand triumph.
The afternoon of the unveiling was a sublime experience as well. Seeing the renderings was one thing, but it was a remarkable event to finally be out in the square with thousands upon thousands of proud residents of Katherineberg, all of us sharing in the thrill of being the first to see the work fully realized in its proper setting.
The sculpture itself was magnificent. Those two prodigious musicians, still with the brightness of youth illuminating their joyous bearing—all that came through in the stone. Those two faces were the perfect choice—well-remembered and beloved as the faces of friendship between our two peoples. Terra Michel and Liryre Garson kept the optics from appearing anything but innocent and positive; while the scene also conveyed the story of Athos bestowing her blessing—a priceless gift, both symbolically and concretely in the form of the irreplaceable and unique musical instrument, which was still proudly on display in the museum to the present day. And the unveiling rang with music that was written by Terra Michel and Liryre Garson, as well as Iophan pieces inspired by those two legendary prodigies.
The yellow stone gleamed. Similarly, Ianeria herself reveled in her moment. The Arts board had their moment in the spotlight as well. Goss, typically, did his best to remain in the background, only stepping forward when called out for recognition by the artist herself.
When the festivities finally ended, I boarded the hypermag back to Xenia thinking that after all the years of speculation, the unimaginable patience and forethought, the give-and-take grooming this artist into his perfect cultural mouthpiece, decades later, Goss not only had his unifying message on full display in front of the Capitol in magnificent stone, but more, one couldn’t begin to calculate the consternation and subversive messaging he’d squelched by keeping those other works of Ianeria Kern that never came into existence out of the public sphere for all time. That was the builder using all his tools, not just by choosing to add but by skillfully eliminating the unwanted messaging of a restive culture he’d kept from creeping out of the shadows.
How well hidden those pieces had been.
I hadn’t spoken to Goss at the event. He was too close to the dais and the crowds were too large. Also, for as much as it was a Dreeson’s way to win, it was also their way to act as though it was foreordained. It wasn’t in Goss’s makeup to crow about an expected victory.
When he pinged me halfway home, I expected he was calling to ask my impressions of the day. But I knew immediately something was amiss.
“Something’s happening in Xenia,” he stated. “You’re on the hypermag now, I presume, Airee?”
“I am, Colin. Can you be more specific?”
“There’s some sort of traffic problem in Reader’s Circle. I don’t know the details yet, but I’d like you to get down there. I’m hearing rumors about a disturbance.”
“What part of Reader’s Circle?” I asked him.
“The actual circle part of it, Airee. You know the one.”
“Okay,” I replied. “No need to get short with me. I’ll head right down there the moment I get off the hypermag.”
“Keep me posted,” he demanded.
Goss and I both had a shared memory of the place. It was a couple tram stops from the hypermag hub in Xenia’s center. Still Reader’s Circle—the actual circle part of it—was a short walk from the tram stop bearing the same name.
I noticed immediately as I got off the tram that there was an unusual volume of activity for that part of the city, especially at that part of the afternoon during the weekend. There was a considerable amount of foot traffic, and it was all headed in the same direction, flowing toward Reader’s Circle proper. And the people weren’t merely walking. They were walking with a buzz about them. There was an energy in the air. It was a different energy from the day’s event in K-Berg. I’d never felt anything like it, and it certainly wasn’t negative, but it was a stark contrast from the sanctioned optimism and civic spirit that had punctuated the unveiling back in Katherineberg. There was a kind of righteous zeal in the air that came from somewhere deeper, organic, even spiritual.
The feeling built as I walked. And it was at times like those I truly appreciated the benefit of the unusual height of my borrowed body. From a good distance, I could see the crowd around Reader’s Circle that had brought autocab and sked traffic to a halt. The roundabout was packed solid with people such that no vehicles could pass. The transport units were backed up and swarmed by pedestrians crowding in to see whatever the disturbance was causing all this commotion.
Goss hadn’t pinged me back, which meant he was either on his way or had his answer already. I guessed it was the latter considering the time it took me to get down there. And given his silence, I was guessing he wasn’t happy about whatever it was.
I heard the name Lee Ira. And then people started shouting “Lee!” seemingly randomly. I’d only seen Lee’s face a few times in passing in all the years we’d shared a city. Her name brought back past memories and deep emotions. I surveyed the crowd, looking down on the faces of my fellow Xenians hoping to find her nearby. “Lee!” I heard over and over as I got closer to the circle.
It became, “For Lee!” as I neared the outer ring of the circle itself. The entire roundabout was filled with people crowding in, their voices buzzing. I crowded in too, trying to get to the spot they all seemed to be competing to approach. I realized I knew that spot. It was the edge of the pedestrian causeway just in front of the memorial to Lee Ira’s twin sister Marion.
When I finally pushed my way through, I was astounded.
There in that same yellow alabaster stone was a life-sized statue of Lee Ira, knelt down on that sidewalk, her face in her hands, huddled over, weeping uncontrollably for the loss of her sister. My God, that scene was a moment I could never forget, only on that night there hadn’t been a crowd like this in Reader’s Circle. Just Goss, myself, a few students watching from the stone walls lining the circle, and, of course, Lee Ira herself, but it hadn’t really been Lee. It was Carolina in Lee’s body that night. But now, in stone, it was only Lee, and the symbolism of that figure was striking.
The sculptor’s work was just as unmistakable as the stone. I don’t know how she could have done it, but she had, and she’d kept it secret as well. There hadn’t been a hint of betrayal on Ianeria Kern’s face during the unveiling in Katherineberg that day, perhaps because she didn’t even think of this as a genuine betrayal. Those positive images of Iophos Goss had prodded out of her all those years—those were true. This was true too.
Lee Ira’s pain was true. The cry of the students who’d lamented their forgotten status as subaltern in the shadow of Athos—their indignation was true too. The people here in Reader’s Circle, laying their hands on Ianeria’s alabaster rendering of Lee Ira, I hadn’t seen anything truer in all these borrowed years I’d spent on Iophos.
Suddenly all the passing moments that had built to this surging paroxysm of history unfolding revealed themselves, fully connected in my mind. The feelings that were welling up in Reader’s Circle? They didn’t magically appear. Nor did the statue’s sudden appearance conjure them. The statue merely told the story of the sense they’d all been carrying with them in their bones until the image gave it a name. “Lee!” I heard that name over and over that night.
What could I do but remain to watch.
The situation brewed like that for several hours entirely peacefully until nightfall. As the darkness spread over Reader’s Circle, the scene got quieter and more reverent. Rumors and whispers began to circulate. Word spread that the community watch had been told to disperse the crowd. Bots could be seen at the periphery ready to move people off.
I pinged Goss.
“Don’t,” I told him. “I know it’s not your call alone. Maybe you don’t have a say at all. But you know I am right. I can give you a thousand examples from history of martyrs galvanizing a movement in a way a living body never could. I’m telling you I am here on the same spot we were all those years ago, Goss. Let them have this or it will explode into something you’ll never be able to control.”
“How long do you suppose the traffic in Reader’s Circle can remain shut down?”
“Surely you’re joking?” I asked Goss.
I could hear him laughing. “I’m not an idiot, Airee. Most dramas don’t unfold on a stage.”
That was all he said to me that night. It was such an odd way to put it, and knowing Goss as I’d come to know him, I decided I would stay right there in Reader’s Circle for as long as I could to watch this drama unfold.
He’d clearly had no idea what Ianeria Kern had been up to before it happened. His voice when he’d called me on the hypermag told me as much. But once it happened and he understood the significance of Ianeria’s coup, the builder in Goss had gone to work.
Over the course of the next several days, rumors continued to spread through Reader’s Circle and Xenia, usually followed by official statements that backed off what was expected to unfold. The threat of breaking up the crowd brought in more citizens. They stood in Reader’s Circle in solidarity until the government folded, handing the people a victory. Then the crowds slowly dispersed. A few, though, remained to keep watch as rumors swirled that the Arts board in Xenia had ordered the statue removed. People returned en masse to keep watch. There were protests. The removal was scheduled and pushed back as people kept vigil around Lee’s statue. The Xenia board relented. The octant’s Arts division in Katherineberg stepped in and ordered the statue removed; this time, it was Goss’s direct order. Yet again, people rallied around the statue—that unsanctioned piece of rebel civic art. And Colin Knoll played the perfect heel, bringing the tension right to the point of eruption, over and over, for several weeks. Will they? Won’t they?
It wasn’t long before I realized what was happening behind the scenes. Goss knew he’d been defeated on day one. What he couldn’t abide was the sense that it could be that easy. When it was finally declared that the statue in Reader’s Circle would be sanctioned by the governor of the octant, the narrative was cemented in the minds of this aggrieved people. Their government wasn’t a merciless, uncaring one. It felt their pain. It understood. And in extraordinary circumstances, only after a monumental fight, could an unsanctioned story become a part of their mythology, the story they told themselves about themselves to tell them who they were.
Lee and Marion Ira would henceforth be part of that story.
Goss and I were there in Reader’s Circle when Lee and her family met the governor of the Katherineberg Octant, as well as Xenia’s city officials and the octant’s representatives in the Iophan national congress in Io. Ianeria Kern was there at the ceremony in Reader’s Circle as well. She never revealed her confederates who’d installed the piece or how she managed to cut the stone in just such a way that there would be a large enough remaining block to render Lee Ira’s life-size kneeling form.
She didn’t seem overly grateful for the attention, Lee Ira. She looked older, but she didn’t look sad. We never met eyes, and I don’t think she recognized us that day.
I told Goss after that far more subdued consecration that I was leaving Iophos. If I didn’t feel it before, I certainly had the sense then that whatever Carolina had sent us back to see, if we hadn’t seen it yet, it wasn’t going to reveal itself.
“That’s fine, Airee,” Goss told me. “You’ve done your part. Go study your antebellum history while you still can. Myself, I plan to stick around and see this through.”
The Builder and the Observer, On Leaving:
Those adventures in those times would be nothing but fiction in our universe, as sometimes I think our time was on Iophos, the realest of fictions in the lives of strangers who came to be our own. Over the following decades, I wrote about my extensive travels there, but of course those stories could only ever remain in that world, for the history that followed was theirs alone.
When we met again in Xenia, Goss and I weren’t just old men but elderly men. I had a far more difficult time moving about than he did. By that time, I was wearing exo-braces to steady my long legs and flattened feet. A fall from my height at that age was no small matter.
Goss had spent nearly half a century inside the government of the octant honing his craft, learning the Iophan system, and monitoring the movements of the activists, who had increasingly folded themselves into the fabric of the civic institutions that held Iophos together. Even after he retired, Colin Knoll could be seen in open council meetings observing, lending his wisdom as a citizen in open comment sessions or through the many letters he wrote to leaders across the ring.
We ambled through Xenia’s arboretum down into Reader’s Circle following our lunch together. Never had I felt that the wash of history was so plainly evident than to see that place again after so many decades.
The Sondomme-yellow of the alabaster statue of Lee Ira had not really faded, as nothing eroded naturally on a planetary ring like Iophos. It wasn’t a natural space but a constructed one, as much as the ring’s interior had been constructed to feel natural. Rather, it was my memory of the statue that had changed, making that yellow stone seem somehow duller to my eyes than the vividness with which my memory had painted the place in my mind. And it seemed so quiet now. How could it compare to those weeks when Reader’s Circle was bustling with Lee Ira’s countless defenders?
Lee had passed by then, Goss informed me. Her dates had been etched into the sidewalk in front of her kneeling figure. It was a strange feeling knowing that we would both be soon to follow, yet not to follow. Our deaths would return us to our real lives again. And in all that time, what had we learned?
“Lesson one,” Goss joked as we sat on one of the benches at the arboretum gate. The willows that shaded the footpath were ancient by then.
“Time washes over everything,” I replied. “That’s lesson one. Ironically, it takes half a century of careful observation to learn lesson one properly.”
“One of those things you have to see for yourself to fully understand,” Goss agreed. He gestured toward the statue across the way with his head. “Lesson two is that some things take a lot longer to wash away than others.”
“Will it change you?” I asked him.
It was a vague question, but he knew exactly what I meant. Colin Dreeson’s destiny was the same as ever.
He shook his head as though pondering. With decades of intervening time to consider, I found that I’d returned to Xenia with a totally different read on Goss. I had to consider that this one life—a full life as it certainly had been—was still just a drop in the bucket of the collective wisdom of his Dreeson ancestors. The education of a lineage of leaders who’d steered the greatest civilization in human history. By our time, on balance, more human lives had lived under the authority of a Dreeson than hadn’t. This life of Colin Knoll? What could it have taught him that his education hadn’t?
“And you, Airee,” he asked me, “in all your travels?”
“Wisdom takes the sum of a lifetime to acquire, and still it’s elusive.”
“When we go back, we’ll know these people,” Goss declared. “That’s a life well spent.”
I thought about my own education and how it could only ever pale in comparison to his. If the things I believed about history were true—that its connections into the past revealed its truths and that it required a lifetime to acquire the wisdom it takes to see with clarity—how could one only ever study history with but flawed, incomplete, imperfect eyes? Not much of a revelation after all these years that the art of history was in learning to see despite our ignorance and biases. But now, it was a deeper feeling, one that could only be felt in aging, aching bones.
To remember all this becomes the challenge now.
So it was observed by Iosef of Iophos, his final and most important work, authored over the Chancellorships of Stoll, Ball, Deth, Ray-Emira, Knoxx, and Denisiera.