SIMURIA · SEVEN WEEKS AFTER LANDFALL
Gin found the crack in the cart before the carter did.
It was a small one, in the near wheel, four spokes along from the iron.
He had not gone looking for it. He never went looking.
His cursed energy went out from him all day in threads too fine to see, and it touched things, and it came back knowing them.
A wheel. A wall. A man.
He had lost the ability to switch it off somewhere in the third year and had decided, on the whole, that he did not mind.
"Your wheel goes inside a week," he said in their language, as the cart came past.
The carter told him what he could do with his opinion.
Eight days later the wheel went on the switchback above the ditch, and Gin was two valleys away and did not get to enjoy it.
That was the thing about him, and he knew it was the thing about him.
Everything ever made had a joint in it. Everything alive had a place where two parts had been talked into being one.
He had never once looked at something and failed to find where it came apart.
He had been on this planet seven weeks.
* * *
The road ran east along the spine of a dry ridge, and the frost on it had gone faintly pink. There was ore in the ground everywhere here, and the ore caught the light a little before the sun bothered to.
Halima Okonjo crouched behind a boulder with three cold cases open at her knees, breathing out white.
"Say it again," she said. "Slowly. I would like to be able to sleep tonight."
"They do the difficult part for us." Gin nodded down the slope, where a column was coming up the road.
Twenty spears, a priest, and a rope of thin men walking behind.
"Those are condemned. When this country sentences a man the priest crosses the god's name out of the middle of his name, and after that he belongs to nobody at all."
"No family claims him. No temple counts him. He goes in a hole at the workings and the hole is not written down anywhere."
"And that is why we are lying in a ditch at dawn."
"That is the whole rule, Doctor." He watched the priest working down the line with his board. "A missing farmer starts a search. A missing condemned man starts nothing whatsoever. We never take one they would notice."
Okonjo did not say anything for a while.
"You could have lied to me about that," she said.
"I could have. You would have found out in about a fortnight, and then I would have had a scientist who did not trust me, which is a great deal more nuisance than a scientist who cannot sleep."
They went down to the ditch below the switchback once the bells had worn out.
She worked fast and hummed while she did it, calling out the temperature of each one the way you read a list to somebody in the next room.
Four out of the ditch. Two off the border road.
And the last one, a soldier of the ruling tribe whose people had not come back for him.
Fine grey-gold threads ran through the skin of both wrists. They went down into the meat and did not stop.
"Oh," said Okonjo. "Oh, he is lovely."
Then she laughed. It was the first time she had laughed since they landed, and she did not notice she had done it.
Gin put the sound away somewhere he could find it again later.
* * *
The veil took three evenings to make and it hid nothing at all, which was the point of it.
All it did was take the last half second off a look.
Eyes slid away before they finished arriving, and the mind, which likes a tidy answer, filled the gap with somebody it already knew.
A cousin. A man from the low valleys. That fellow who came about the salt.
He spent a morning in the market town at the bottom of the pass being nobody in particular.
He liked them. That was the trouble with the assignment.
They were loud and they haggled very badly.
One of the local gods was asleep against the warm side of the cistern with too many joints folded under it, breathing slowly. Two boys were sitting on its back eating something sticky.
Nobody thought this was worth remarking on.
On this world a god was a large friendly animal that lived in the ground and came when you called it, and children climbed on them.
At the third stall a girl was minding a tray of sweets while her grandmother argued about weights.
She looked at Gin, and went on looking. She was six and had not yet learned that you are supposed to stop.
He knew how he would kill her before he had finished smiling back.
He had never once asked for that particular piece of information. It arrived anyway, every time, about everybody.
A hand's width under the left ear, sixty degrees off the vertical, one motion, less effort than opening a jar, and it would be finished before she got her mouth open.
She grinned at him because he was grinning at her.
He bought a sweet and handed it straight back to her, and she took it with the enormous outrage of a child getting away with something. Her grandmother called her in.
He thought about her most of the way back up the pass, which was not like him at all.
* * *
Twelve days later a raiding party was caught alive at a dry border gully.
Gin lay on the rock above it under a barrier thinner than a suggestion, and watched the thing he had come four light-years to understand.
There were eleven raiders, thin the way people get where nothing grows. There were twenty spears, two priests, and the man the spears were arranged around.
His name was Tessek Ukhan Dral. He was forty-one and his left shoulder had hurt him since the spring.
The first thing he did was have the prisoners given water. He stood there while they drank it.
Then the priests began, and Gin had been expecting a word and a flash of light, and what he got instead took nearly an hour.
It was a ladder.
Every promise Tessek had made to his god since he was nine years old, read out in order, one rung at a time. A soldier stood in the cold and had his paperwork confirmed by something enormous underground.
At the last rung he said the word for it. Descent. The going down of a thing into a thing that has agreed to hold it.
The ground went warm.
It came from below and from a long way off, the way heat comes off a sleeping dog, and it came up through the man.
Grey-gold surfaced under his skin in fine threads, along the jaw and down the backs of both hands.
His shoulders went back the way a man's do when somebody strong takes the other end of a weight.
"Ready," said Tessek.
Then he said it again half a beat later, in a voice that was not his. The two landed on top of one another and made a single flat sound with an echo inside it.
The raiders were still holding the water skins.
He did not touch them. He did not lift his hand or raise his voice.
He looked along the line the way a man checks a fence.
One after another, in the order he looked at them, eleven people sat down.
The last one got most of the way through a word first.
The god had not wanted them dead. Gin went looking for the wanting and could not find any anywhere.
It had been asked, and it had answered, the way a tap answers a hand. Generous, immediate, and with no opinion at all, because that was the entire thing it was for.
Afterwards it went out of Tessek slowly. The threads sank back under the skin and left it grey. He stood with his hands on his knees while the priest wrote in the book.
There was more of him than there had been at dawn, and all of it was in the wrong places.
At the temples. At the knuckles. At the corners of the eyes.
Then he said the words over the bodies. All eleven of them, with his hat off.
"Was he comfortable?" he asked the priest. "At the end. He had my shoulder all morning and I could not get him to put it down."
"He hears you, Dral."
"I know he hears me." Tessek got his hat back on. "I would like him told anyway."
Gin stayed up on the rock a long time after they had gone.
He went over the man three times while he was still in sight. Then he sat and did it again from memory, which he could do, and which he had never before needed to do twice.
Where the god had been inside him there was no border.
Not a hidden one. Not a clever one.
There was no line where the man stopped and the other thing started. There had not been one for years, and nobody involved had the faintest idea.
* * *
"One signature," Okonjo said, and turned the slate round so Aizen could see it, which was a habit she had picked up from him. "The people. The gods. The rock. Same marker, all three."
"You have run it against us."
"Against everything, including me." She laughed once. "That was a very strange afternoon."
"Show him the other one," said Gin.
She brought up the soldier from the ditch. The wrists, the threads, the sections stacked along the bottom of the screen.
"This is the part where I stopped enjoying my job," she said, quite cheerfully. "I went looking for the boundary. There is not one."
"No overlap, no rejection, no margin. Somewhere past halfway down that vein I stopped being able to tell you which of the two things I was holding."
"And I am very good at telling you which of two things I am holding."
Aizen looked at it for a while.
"They are not men wearing gods," Gin said. "They are men becoming one. Slowly. Badly. And with permission."
"How long does it take?"
"Longer than they get." He shrugged, eyes shut, smiling at nothing.
"The one at the gully had been at it thirty-two years and he was about two thirds of the way. It goes by how high you climb, not by how long you live."
"Every descent is another rung up the ladder. Stop early and you go grey at sixty with clean wrists. The ones who climb, die."
The smile went somewhere else.
"And none of them are doing it on purpose, Aizen-san. Every one of them thinks he is borrowing."
Aizen was quiet for long enough that Okonjo found something to do with a cable clip.
"I have built one thing in this life," he said at last. "Everything else has been in service of it. It is a door."
The small courteous smile arrived.
"I have never once managed to hold it open longer than the instruments took to notice. And here is a species that has left one standing ajar for two thousand years and calls it religion."
"They would be terribly pleased to hear you say so."
"They would not understand it." He said it the way a man corrects a date.
Gin unfolded himself and went to the door, and stopped there with his hand on the frame.
"Aizen-san. Do you ever look at a thing and not see where it comes apart?"
"No."
"Right." The fox came back all at once. "Just making sure I have not been sold a faulty one."
Down in the valleys the evening bells started up, all of them at once and none of them together, and went up.
"How many of them are there?"
Gin did not turn round.
"Four hundred on the continent, near enough," he said. "Perhaps nine that matter."
"Then we have nine experiments."