She carefully closed the curtain behind her as she left.
To continue where I left off:
Dear Reader, you probably know all about my upbringing and mission because you are one of my sisters.
But if you are not, if you’re some stranger wondering why this long-delayed expenses claim form is getting in the way of your regular workflow, and why I am so desperate to get to Shin-Tethys that I am willing to work my passage on a damaged church run by a mad priest who is trying to simultaneously integrate multiple death-traumatized personalities, well—it’s a long story. And it will be even longer if we need to pause to examine the fundamentals of identity. For example, it’s possible that you are a Fragile person, bound by raw biology to exist in certain tightly constrained biospheres, with a linear identity from extrusion to death. Or you might be a Lobster-person, wet and squishy within a hard-shell, vacuum-proof carapace. We may well be members of different human subspecies, adapted to the exigencies of different worlds. You might be a near contemporary of mine, or you might be reading this at some huge remove of deep time—thousands or millions of standard years after my senescence and obsolescence. Just as individuals age and die, so do lineages: Only debt is forever. So I’m not going to explore all the ramifications of my identity. Instead, here’s the capsule version:
I’m Krina Alizond-114, a mu-female by genderplan, of roughly traditional sapiens phenotype, and of middle age by the reckoning of my type. Which is to say, I am over a hundred standard years old, but still retain some mental agility: I have a century or more before I begin the long slide down into stasis, and with various cognitive treatments, neural senescence may be staved off indefinitely. Physical age is, of course, irrelevant—if maintained correctly, we do not deteriorate over time. Nor is my kind particularly vulnerable to radiation damage. The ’cytes from which our bodies are constructed are designed, not evolved, so that while we approximate a Fragile human in outward morphology, we’re far more robust and can operate in a much wider range of environments. We’re no more intelligent, alas—there are complexity issues involved in building better brains that preclude progress unless we are willing to become something not even remotely human—but you can’t have everything.
Back in the dawn of history, the Fragile created our ancestors to serve them, making us in their own image—robots, they called the first people of our kind—shortly before they became extinct for the first time. Since then, we’ve prospered and spread: We’ve even resurrected our creators on at least three occasions. But they are vulnerable and easily damaged, codependent on the ecosystem of related species they evolved among. With a handful of exceptions (domed habitats on a few not-entirely-hostile planets; and, of course, the cathedrals of the Church of the Fragile) they don’t flourish away from their home world. Unlike us.
I was created aboard a free-flying habitat, New California, en voyage from Gliese 581c4 to somewhere forgettable. (Destinations are of no significance to migratory habs other than as sources of resupply—unlike colony ships, to whose voyages there is a very definite end in mind, free-flyers are worlds unto themselves.) I’m a member of the Alizond lineage, an old and prestigious sisterhood. Over my first decades, I paid off my instantiation debt and worked my way up the family firm until I became a senior partner in the statistical research division of the bank. However, I am not actually an expert in banking. Rather, my specialty was more long-term and abstract: I’m a scholar of the historiography of accountancy and a leading specialist in one particularly recondite corner of that field.
(A historian who works for a bank: That’s not the most likely background for someone who capers around the cosmos having adventures, is it? Bear with me, though, and all shall become clear.)
Back on New California, I lived and worked for the family firm in one of my mother’s palaces, on a seashore overlooking a hillside that slopes down to a bay, where the green-tinted waves wash gently across the glittering black sands. (Did I mention that New California, by the standards of spacegoing habs, is immense?) The palace, over three hundred standard years old and built in an archaic, historical style even then, was a haven of tranquillity; my office quarters were spacious and comfortable, opening inward onto the cloister surrounding the sisterhood’s museum of antiquities (of which I was one of the part-time volunteer curators). A visiting architectural critic once memorably (and uncharitably) described the palace as a dusty tomb full of dried-up nun-accountants, but I would take issue with that description: There’s nothing ascetic about it, and in any case, it was my home.
(Many years have passed since I departed. My sisters probably think of me seldom by now. And when they do, it’s probably with a sigh of envy at the thought of the adventures I must be having among the stars. Oh, the irony!)
You’re probably wondering what could possibly prompt a staid, mature professional to set off on a trip to a half-civilized frontier water world. Well, Shin-Tethys wasn’t my original destination, and I had what seemed like a perfectly good reason at the time: But as I said, it’s a long story, and right now the deacon wants me to check that the contents of the chapel are all strapped down for acceleration. I’ve a feeling it’s going to be hard, physical labor for the next few standard days as we get under way, so I don’t have time to tell you everything yet—let’s just say, I’m here because one of my pen pals’ letters was late.
The stalker followed Krina to the air-lock node, where the chapel was docked with all due haste.
Unlike her target, the stalker had no problem navigating the souk; nor did she pause for introspection before entering the air lock. The stalker’s purpose was simple and direct: to hunt down Krina Alizond-114, extract certain information from her prior to disposal, then continue on her journey while taking her place. Straightforward identity theft and impersonation, in other words. But there was a problem: The target was escaping.
The stalker cranked vigorously at the air-lock wheel, rotating the cylinder around her until the door swung round onto darkness. She paused, staring into the void. The void, for its part, stared back unblinking: But she had no soul for it to gain a toehold on.
Someone had cemented a tape to the handrail beside the edge of the door. It dangled before the opening in limp coils, like a dead tapeworm. Beyond it hung the gargoyle-encrusted steeple of a small church, poised end on like a great stone spear aimed straight at the air lock. Glimpsed some way behind and below it, flying buttresses merged with the domed end-caps of reaction-mass tanks, pregnant with icy, deuterated, borane slush. It was hard to judge distances in the sharp-edged monochrome illumination of Taj Beacon’s approach lights, but the chapel looked to be almost a hundred meters away. The firefly flicker of orientation thrusters (artfully set within the gargoyles’ nostrils) told the stalker that it was under way, pushing back in readiness to turn into one of the taxiways that would take it clear of the beacon station before Traffic Control authorized it to light up its main engine.