Freedom, Humanity, and Other Delusions (Death's Handmaiden Book 3) Read online

  ‘She certainly seems to be wise for someone of her apparent age. I think I’d like to meet her.’

  ‘She’s pretty shy. As far as I know, I’m the only person to ever see her.’

  ‘That’s quite possibly true. I do have a few tricks up my sleeve unavailable to the majority of people, however.’

  ~~~

  236/1/18.

  Nava stood in what was approximately the centre of the school, between the teaching buildings. More precisely, in the space between the teaching buildings used by the first four years; the buildings for the fifth and sixth years were generally smaller, but they had a pair of slightly larger structures for the more specialised and intensive studies which were a little away from the other ones to the south.

  ‘What are you going to do when you find her?’ Mitsuko asked. Mitsuko and Melissa had come out to see the start of Nava’s Harbinger hunt, even if Nava had suggested it was going to be boring and they should just leave her to it.

  ‘Talk to her,’ Nava replied. ‘Well, I believe Trudy to be benevolent, or at least not malevolent, so I’d like to talk to her. If that turns out to be wishful thinking, Carina is going to be short an invisible friend and I’ll deal with that if it happens.’

  ‘If Trudy is responsible for Carina’s delusions–’

  ‘I don’t believe she is. I may be wrong.’

  ‘From what you said,’ Melissa said, ‘I think you’re right. Trudy appears to be discouraging Carina from this Key to Darkness belief.’

  ‘A skilled manipulator could appear to do just that while really encouraging it,’ Mitsuko countered. ‘If Trudy is a Harbinger, she’s probably had a couple of hundred thousand years to learn to manipulate people.’

  Nava shook her head. ‘A couple of hundred. Not that that isn’t plenty of time, but the colony on Grimalkin is about two hundred years old. I doubt Trudy would have encountered humans prior to that. It seems unlikely that the psychology of the two species would be closely related. Applying techniques from Harbingers to humans would likely result in less than perfect results.’

  ‘That’s just being pedantic. If you’re going to talk to her, be careful.’

  ‘Have you ever known me to be careless?’

  ‘Be more careful then.’

  ‘I’ll try.’ Nava focused her mind on the schema for the Sense Spirits spell Rochester and Hoshi had originally created to hunt for a ghost. Quintessence flowed, expanded, returned… ‘Nothing,’ Nava said. ‘To be expected. She could be anywhere and it’s a big campus.’

  ‘So, what now?’ Melissa asked.

  ‘Now I go to the area where Carina’s living and try again.’

  ‘This could take hours. Days!’

  ‘I did say it would be boring to follow me around.’

  ~~~

  It was boring and also lacking in results. By lunchtime, Nava had nothing to report. She had lost Mitsuko and Melissa after about thirty minutes, but she had continued walking around the campus and setting off pings every so often to no effect. There was Flight Club in the afternoon, and the sky was clear, and Nava was seriously contemplating dropping the matter to try again tomorrow.

  Still, Flight Club was not now, so Nava walked back to the teaching buildings and tried again. She set her mind to the spell, sent out energy to act as a sensor pulse, and… To the east, a single target. Nava turned on her heel and began marching in that direction.

  After five hundred metres, she fired off another pulse. Same direction. She continued walking. By now, she was walking through the residential areas. She was, if she was remembering right, heading straight for Carina’s apartment building. Maybe Trudy had been elsewhere this morning but was checking in on Carina this afternoon.

  She checked again after another three hundred metres and got the same result. She was fairly sure she was getting closer, but the spell did not provide that kind of information well. You got a direction and an indication of numbers. She tried a deeper analysis of the returning signal and got an impression of form. That form seemed to be similar to the Harbinger she had encountered before, but then she had never used this spell on that Harbinger, so it was hard to tell for sure.

  After another hundred metres, Nava changed course slightly to follow the direct line to her target. She was close, she was sure of it. And she was heading straight for Carina’s building, maybe even straight for her apartment if Nava was remembering the position right.

  She stopped walking and looked around. The Ascend spell she was about to use had one significant drawback: you could not take anything with you when you jumped into the Q-field. That included clothes, which were left behind when the spell was cast. Nava had personal experience of this, having left her clothes in the middle of a nightclub the first time she had used it. Mitsuko and Courtney had been with her that time, so they had collected her outfit for her. Now she was alone, which was, in retrospect, something of a mistake.

  Selecting an area behind some bushes at the side of the walkway that happened to be reasonably close to the wall of one of the buildings, Nava crouched down under some cover. If someone found her uniform while she was in another reality, things were likely to get interesting, but she would hopefully find them where she left them. And then she would have to get dressed while hiding behind bushes that barely reached her hips, but she would solve that problem when she got to it.

  One last time, she cast Sense Spirits and got the answer she expected. Then she spent a second pushing her mind into the right shape for Ascend, forced quintessence into the spell, and found herself looking at a muted, weird landscape. She also found herself looking at her clothes as they dropped to the ground through her insubstantial body, but it was the shifted reality which told her that the spell had worked.

  Everything was monochrome. Or, more or less monochrome. There were colours, but they were so muted that they were all shades of grey tinted with a hint of variant wavelengths. The leaves on the evergreen bushes were a dark grey tinted with green. The rendering on the apartment building was a light grey tinted with very light brown. It had been night the last time she had done this and it was daylight today. The sunlight came to her as though through a particle filter; there was a graininess to it, a granularity. It was almost as if she was perceiving individual photons. She was sure she was not really seeing reality with her eyes this time. She was not sure how she was perceiving things, but sight was not it.

  There was another weird feature of this reality she had yet to explain: the dimensions seemed all wrong. It was not that the physical objects were distorted. Everything looked the same as it had, barring the flattened colours. Instead, if she turned her head, it seemed as though she was looking at a lot of two-dimensional objects which turned to keep themselves looking right, but with a slight lag. It was disconcerting. Perhaps more so since, when she looked at her own body, that appeared entirely three-dimensional and solid.

  Enough sightseeing, pulling Flight forward in her mind, Nava lifted into the air and made straight for the side of Carina’s apartment building. Unhindered, she flew through a wall, through the apartment of an oblivious male student who was hard at work browsing some form of comic strip artwork, through a corridor, and into Carina’s apartment.

  ‘… stuff is easy,’ Carina was saying. Her voice sounded muted, as though Nava was hearing it through a wall or earplugs. ‘I could do this when I was twelve.’

  ‘Just be careful that you don’t get complacent,’ said the Harbinger standing behind her. ‘Teachers have a terrible habit of– Ah! How did you find me? What are you doing here?!’ The last part was addressed to Nava, who the alien had just noticed, and it appeared that Carina had not heard it.

  ‘Trudy?’ Carina looked around, twisting in her chair. She did not, however, look at the Harbinger. Instead, her gaze fixed on a spot to her left where she, apparently, perceived ‘Trudy’ to be.

  ‘Some sort of mental illusion?’ Nava asked, speculating. ‘She sees this girl in a rainbow outfit you’re projecting into he
r head rather than the real you.’

  ‘Yes,’ the Harbinger said, ‘but that’s beside the point. Why are you–’

  ‘We’re going to have a chat. I want to know what you’re up to. I want to know what you want with Carina.’

  ‘Trudy,’ Carina said, ‘is something wrong? You just cut off mid-sentence.’

  The Harbinger stared at Nava for a second and then looked down at Carina. Looking down was easy for something that was well over two metres tall. ‘It’s nothing, Cari. I need to take care of something, so I’ll be vanishing for a bit.’

  ‘Okay…’

  ‘You know what you’re doing with this homework. It’s just metaphysics. Be careful you don’t overlook anything in the problem.’

  ‘Okay, but come back soon.’

  ‘I will.’ The Harbinger turned its cold, blue eyes back on Nava and pointed upward. Then it began to glide up through the ceiling and Nava followed. They stopped on the flat roof, though having something under their feet seemed to be largely a matter of convention. ‘I wasn’t aware that humans had worked out how to enter the Q-field like this,’ the Harbinger said.

  Nava decided to answer the implied question, mostly because it suited her needs. ‘Last year, someone brought a Harbinger device here for study. Everyone was very excited because it appeared to be functional. It turned out that it was some sort of prison and the inmate got out.’

  The Harbinger actually flinched. ‘A discorporated Harbinger sealed within a shell of force? That punishment was reserved for really bad people.’

  ‘It was a particularly sadistic serial killer. It liked to possess people and then use them to torture their loved ones to death. The Ascend spell was developed to allow me to meet it on its own ground and destroy it. Which I did. I used a burst of quintessence to reduce it to… well, nothing.’

  Harbingers were basically tall, thin, blue aliens with elongated limbs. They had a large cranium, but little in the way of facial features. Their noses were a couple of slits; their mouths were small and had thin lips. Their angular eyes had black sclera – assuming what they had could be described in human terms – and icy-blue irises. If they had expressions, nothing was obvious. Somehow, this one gave off the impression that it was grinning in a knowing fashion. ‘That was a moderately subtle effort to indicate that you could kill me if you wanted.’

  ‘Correct,’ Nava stated flatly. ‘It also indicates, I believe, that I don’t have a good history with your species. I prefer to take people on an individual, case-by-case basis, but I am obviously somewhat sceptical of the motives of a transcendent alien being who appears to be pretending to be a human in order to talk to a delusional human girl.’

  The alien opened its mouth, paused, and then closed it again, holding up one very long finger to ask for a pause. It was a rather human gesture. This being had clearly spent quite a while learning to act in a human manner. Nava could empathise in some ways. It had also learned English quite well. There was a weird accent to its words, probably the result of slightly incompatible vocal equipment. P and B sounds came out a bit wrong, as though its lips could not quite form the sounds. Also, the voice did not really register as female to Nava’s ears. Then again, it did not quite sound male either. It did have a lighter tone than the other Harbinger Nava had met.

  ‘We,’ the Harbinger said, ‘that is, the species you refer to as Harbingers, aren’t entirely different to humans. To be specific, we are made up of individuals, all with different motives and interests. Some of us are good. Some are bad. Many are, at least regarding other species, entirely indifferent.’ It paused again. ‘That may have changed. I haven’t seen any others of my kind in two hundred years. Longer, really. I happen to be very interested in other species. I’m a biologist by profession. Humans interest me, but Cari… I’m not entirely sure whether it was her power or her situation which made me decide to look out for her. You interest me too. There’s something about you…’

  ‘Carina doesn’t appear to have much power,’ Nava said. ‘Unless she really has sealed it away somehow. I was given to understand that you don’t encourage this Key to Darkness idea she has.’

  ‘I don’t.’ The Harbinger turned, clasped its hands behind its back, and began to pace back and forth across the rooftop. ‘I don’t think there is a Key to Darkness, but she does have a lot more power than those crude tests you people use would suggest. I know a spell to determine the precise power of a magician, which is why I know that you are a powerful sorceress. Cari isn’t quite at your level, but she should be close. It’s my belief that her kidnapping experience and the loss of her mother caused her to place a psychological block on her sorcery. If you want some proof, get her to improvise something. Something as large as she’s able to. You’ll find that she does so too easily. The closer you are to your capacity, the harder it is to force your mind into the right shape, correct?’ Nava nodded a reply. ‘You’ll find that, even at her supposed limit, Carina is barely troubled by a spell’s complexity. Almost as though her real capacity is much greater.’

  ‘I may try that sometime, but for now I’m going to take your word for it.’

  ‘Thank you. Can I ask a question?’

  ‘I’m sure you’re capable.’

  Trudy stared at Nava for a second. ‘I can’t tell whether you’re being malicious, or sarcastic, or anything else.’

  ‘I’m aware. What was the question?’

  ‘Why are you naked?’

  ‘Because the spell I used doesn’t let me bring anything with me when I come here. I berated the inventor of the spell for this, but when it comes right down to it, it’s not like anyone is going to see me. You’re naked. Are you actually female? Or is the image Carina sees purely for her benefit?’

  ‘I created the Trudy image because I thought Cari would react better to someone around her age. And a human, obviously. I wanted to help her. She was lonely, and so was I… I am, however, not female. Nor am I male. Harbingers have one biological sex. Had. We were all capable of bearing children, though bearing isn’t quite the right– Do you really want a lecture on our reproduction system?’

  Nava shook her head. ‘I believe I can get by without. I’m not sure I like thinking of you as an “it,” however, so if you don’t mind, I’ll think of you as Trudy, a female. What’s your real name?’

  ‘You would never be able to pronounce it. There’s a sound a bit like ‘trudy’ in the middle, so I decided to use that as a name after examining a large database of human names. Since I selected it, I’m very happy for you to use it to designate me. I also have no issue with you thinking of me as female. When I was material, I did prefer to act in a manner which you might consider feminine in nature. For example, I never had children, but if I had, I would have wished to be the birthing parent.’ There was a slight pause and another impression of a grin. ‘Frankly, discovering a species with a binary reproductive scheme was fascinating. I spent years observing your mating rituals.’

  Nava shook her head. ‘You sound just like the pervy aliens in old science-fiction vids.’

  ‘Humans have huge databases of mating observations from the various animals on your home world! I’m a biologist. Observing other species is what we do!’

  ‘Just don’t observe me. You said that one of the reasons you became attached to Carina was that you were lonely. Grimalkin was a Harbinger colony long ago. I find it hard to believe there were no others of your kind there.’

  ‘And you would be rightly sceptical a few tens of thousands of years ago. When the Migration happened, pretty much everyone ascended. A few people chose to remain physical, but they died eventually and that left the rest of us to continue on. Except… Immortality can be hard. I had an entire ecosystem to document. Things changed. Evolution did not stop, even if we were gone. Maybe it was even more pronounced because we left all the animals to get on with things. But even I got bored after a while.’

  ‘I can imagine,’ Nava said. ‘I could, maybe, imagine a few thousand years…�
�

  ‘Exactly. So, some left the planet, flying off into space to find new places to explore. Some self-terminated, unwilling to continue with a life they’d grown bored with. I decided to suspend my consciousness. I put myself in suspended animation, if you will. That way, I could let the planet get on with things for ten thousand years or so, and then wake up to find out what happened.’

  Nava nodded. ‘And one day you woke up alone.’

  There was a definite sadness to Trudy’s gaze. ‘Yes. None of the others were left. Either they died or they left, but they weren’t there. I did my usual research, but there was no one to share it with. I was seriously contemplating ending it all when the colonists turned up.’

  Loneliness, it seemed, was not just a human condition. Nava could empathise with that too. After her sisters had all died or vanished, even though she was surrounded by researchers and trainers, she had been alone. She had got used to it, but that did not mean she had liked it.

  ‘Anyway,’ Trudy went on, ‘the humans turned up and suddenly I had a whole new research project. Humans are fascinating. Fascinating! When Cari’s family sent her here, I decided to tag along on the ship so I could see more humans.’ She paused, eyes fixed on Nava. ‘I’ve never met one quite like you, however. There’s something about you. I don’t know what it is… I got the strong impression you can sense when I’m nearby.’

  ‘I can. Though I admit it was supposition that I was sensing Harbingers until I confirmed that you were here. It’s a vague sensation of nervousness. There’s no direction or anything else, just a feeling that something a little disturbing is nearby.’

  ‘I don’t think I’m disturbing.’

  Nava fought the urge to laugh. ‘Harbingers look like something out of a horror vid. Sorry.’ She paused, considering briefly. ‘Carina said you had seen some of these people she thinks are watching her. You don’t believe they’re from this secret organisation, but you’ve seen them.’