The Church of the Fragile
My name is Krina Alizond-114, and my species is metahuman.
I was instantiated—born, in natalist terminology, if you are one of those who adhere to the conventions of the Fragile—aboard the migratory habitat New California, in the 912th Year of Our Voyage. I was one of a round hex of newly forked children spawned from and raised by order of our ancient and incalculably wealthy lineage mater, Sondra Alizond-1. She had grown staid and overly ’prisoned by habit and convention as the centuries passed, and was acutely aware of it: She was desirous of regaining some of the youthful drive and energy that had fueled her rise to wealth and power. So every few centuries, she forked a brood of youngsters (in my case, sixteen): callow and edited copies of her younger self, bound to servitude in the cloistered basement of her countinghouse until we could repay the debt of our creation.
Child slavery was the custom in New California at the time of our birth, but I wouldn’t want to mislead you into thinking that we were harshly exploited. Sondra indentured us entirely legally and with the loftiest of moral reasons: For by so doing, she enabled us to repay the not-insubstantial debt of our creation as soon as possible, without falling victim to the full misery of compound interest. Indeed, our lack of legal personhood gave us the full protection of our mater’s not-inconsequential status at an age when most newborn citizens would be struggling. We were born to wear platinum fetters, as she never tired of reminding us.
(Fuck you too, Mother.)
Although for our first years we were confined to our narrow stone cells in the basement of her chateau by the coast of the Bay of Tears on the Girdle Sea of level six—and, on the rare occasions when we were granted a ticket of leave to enjoy the fleshpots of Saint Cruise, we could transact our affairs only as extensions of her legal person—we were not badly mistreated by the standards of the ship of our birth.
Child slavery as an institution has one mitigating feature: Once you reach the age of majority, you are no longer alive only on your owner-creator’s sufferance—you became a legal person, albeit one still burdened by the debt of your creation. If you manage to keep your nose clean, keep working, save money, and pay off the mortgage on your body, then in no time at all—a billion seconds, thirty years if you count time planetary-style—you can escape. (Even if you’re not so energetic, you may escape servitude in the event that a Jubilee is declared.) It takes a certain cold patience and cunning—and a determination not to provoke the mater into aborting you before you came of age—but nine out of hexteen of us made it through childhood alive, and seven of us eventually earned out.
From the first morning when I awakened innocent and confused, wondering where I was, Sondra shaped me to fit a plan that she had laid in place decades (if not centuries) before. She shaped all of my hex: The mater bent Zoe toward actuarial statistics, twisted Lemiske in the direction of derivatives, and turned Briony (for no reason I ever understood) to the study of classical biology and a niche in the priesthood. And when her servitors led me from my birthing cell to Quality Assurance, then to my tutorial station (where I would be introduced to the fearsome Proctor Das), they did so to assess my suitability for the career she had chosen for me: For I, alone of my generation, was to become a scholar of the historiography of accountancy practices.
Which, by way of numerous diversions, is why I am in this predicament: floating in the air lock of a church, about to take a working passage to a water world in a star system far from the place of my birth, there to establish what happened to my sib-of-an-earlier-spawning Ana and thereby recover a lost treasure trove and the goodwill of my sisters. Who have probably forgotten I ever existed by now, for I have been gone on this errand for almost thirty years already, with no end in sight.
I oriented myself in the chapel’s air lock, twisting until my feet pointed in the same direction as the floorward arrows. There was a wheel, decorative rather than purely functional—nine spokes shaped like Fragile arm bones, a rim in the shape of ossified hands wired fingertip to wrist (eighteen in all)—I rotated it slowly, soaking in the strangeness of the architecture. The vestibule behind the air lock was decorated in ancient Gothic style: stone arches resting on skeletal Fragile caryatids, separated by engravings (illustrating afterlife myths from the distant past) etched onto the wall panels. A handrail of foamed metal textured like rope led past fistula-like openings in the tunnel wall. There was a traditional flat floor, but the side tunnels appeared to be designed for a life of intermittent microgravity. Eleven hollow tubular candles burned erratically in sconces mounted over air ducts, thriving in the forced draft. I blinked at this latter detail—naked flames aboard a spacegoing construct?—but as I looked closer, I noticed the flame-suppression hoods folded nearby. It might belong to a religious order, but it was at least one that took a sensible approach to safety: I approved.
Something rustled and clattered behind me, a dry, rattling sound. I spun round, missed my grip on the handrail, and kept spinning, catching only a brief impression of something or someone lifelike but not, scuttling hand over withered hand toward me. My left leg twitched, bouncing me headfirst into the ceiling with a flash of sudden pain. The thing-person came closer, revealing itself to be a rattling rack of baroque calcified sticks. After a few seconds I recognized it to be a deceased Fragile structural core returned to implausible life. The skeleton wore a flaccid space suit, glove, boot, and helmetless: the ritual devotional vestments of the Church.
I emitted an involuntary squeak as it grabbed the handrail and jolted to a crunchy stop, turning its bony face toward me.
“Greetings, visitor.”
Details came into focus: the small camera beads glinting blackly from within the shadowed eye sockets, the buzzing speaker wedged between its yellowing fangs, the glint of wires and actuators in the gaps between the long bones, holding it together with a semblance of animating life.
“H-Hello?” I asked.
“Be at peace. You are Krina Alizond-114, I believe? I am Deacon Dennett. Please follow my remote.”
The skeleton turned away from me and clattered off into the darkness, clawing hand over hand along the knotted rope guideway. After a moment of nervous indecision, I followed it. A job interview was a job interview after all, even one administered by a specter in the depths of a spacegoing charnel house.
After ten and a half meters, the skeleton paused for me to catch up, then kicked off sideways into a tunnel that resembled a giant stone Fragile’s trachea. It was of oval cross section, and clearly designed around a “down” and “up” axis, but the verticality did little to dispel the gloom. The walls were punctuated every meter and a half with niches, and within each niche another mummified Fragile husk floated in final repose, restrained by a network of fine wires. They wore space suits, the open visors of which framed their sunken eye sockets and silently screaming jaws. The bones of their hands clutched at devotional models of the Holy Starship, the rosary of their faith. Desiccation shrank the skin around their bones, drawing their limbs into prayerful curves and curling their spines. It was disturbingly like being surrounded by the corpses of real people—only the minor differences testified that these were not in fact actual persons but our Fragile human forerunners. It was a (I had to think for a few seconds before the word popped to the surface of my memory) catacomb; hardly what I was expecting!