Chương 9: What to reveal and to whom

Why are people so surprised that we colonised the solar system within a few thousand years after discovering ways to survive on other planets and building vastly superior spaceships? It had taken humans hundreds of thousands of years to move from Eurasia to the Americas, even though at the time Eastern Siberia and Alaska were connected - but once we reached the Americas, it took us barely a few hundred years to completely colonise it. And that was with no technology.

- Joseph Moran, History Professor at University 8 Everyone knew Ghilim Habuza. You could find him in one of two places: the bar, or the street outside it. He wore the same dirty brown clothes every day, covering him from neck to toe, the colour a reasonable match for his hair. His face was covered by a dirty white mask - two slits showing light brown eyes, a wider slit near the mouth for operational purposes. People had tried to remove the mask. Nobody had managed it, which had become its own kind of attraction.

Nobody knew where he came from. One day he simply hadn't been there, and then he had been, and he had sat down at the bar and gotten drunk and become, within the week, the most interesting thing to have happened to the settlement in living memory. The settlement was small - a community of retired old-timers, mostly, people who had found a quiet patch of tropical forest and decided that the pace of the wider world no longer suited them.

They grew what they needed, connected virtually with younger family when the mood struck, and otherwise let the days proceed at whatever speed they chose. With enhanced bodies, eighty looked nothing like it once had - someone climbing a tree for fruit with the easy competence of someone half their age raised no eyebrows - yet the appetite for adventure had, for most of them, been satisfied some years back. Ghilim had remedied the entertainment deficit considerably.

They weren't entirely sure that Ghilim was his name. Someone had asked, early on, and he had made a sound that nobody could precisely reproduce but that the collective had agreed to render as Ghilim. He didn't speak, not in any language any of them recognised - he communicated in sounds and gestures and expressions, and it turned out that this was sufficient for most things, and that most things were sufficient.

The first day, Cranky Pete had taken exception to a muttered string of sounds directed at nobody in particular, and had attempted to make his feelings known physically, and Ghilim's response had been to simply not be where Pete's hands arrived. This had gone on for some time. Pete had not landed a single blow. The bet had been running since that week.

Anyone who could get Ghilim to the ground won the pot, which had been accumulating for some months and was now significant enough that new challengers arrived periodically from nearby settlements, took their turn, and left with the same result as everyone else. The rules were simple: you could try to wrestle him however you liked, and all Ghilim would do was avoid being caught. He never fought back. He never hurt anyone.

He just moved, exactly the way a drunk man moves, if a drunk man also happened to be impossible to lay hands on. Three challengers at once had failed. The consensus was that four would be unsporting. They bought him drinks because the drinks made him mutter, and the muttering annoyed Pete, and Pete's annoyance was the reliable trigger for the evening's entertainment. It was a good system. It had been running smoothly for months. Today was a standard evening.

Ghilim had been bought two drinks by Plump Hicky's husband, whose name was Pete and who was called Cranky to distinguish him from Helpful Pete, Quiet Pete, and the one everyone just called Other Pete, and was settling into the comfortable early-muttering phase of his night. The usual crowd had gathered in no hurry, the way people gather when they know how the next hour will go and are looking forward to it. The door opened. Two men and a woman walked in, and the atmosphere of the bar changed.

They wore navy fitted clothing, military in cut, and on each of their foreheads was a tattoo - a T and an F intertwined, surrounded by eight globes, the third one glowing bright green. Two of the old-timers nearest the door fainted. The rest went very still. The Task Force. The primary peacekeeping organisation in the known universe. Branches on every planet. The head of the organisation was reportedly S-grade, which placed them at a level most people spent their entire lives being unable to conceptualise.

Their membership started at Tier 6, and that was the trainees. They operated by their own law, which was generally considered fair, and they came for people who had done things significant enough to warrant the attention of an organisation that always had enough problems to concern itself with. Nobody in this settlement had ever seen a member of the Task Force. Nobody in this settlement had ever expected to. The woman in front, tall and composed, surveyed the room.

It had gone quiet when she entered, and she carried herself like someone used to that.

"Well. That took longer than it should have." She addressed this to the general space, and then her eyes settled.

"Mr. G - if you'd come with us, please. We understand you feel wronged. Running from us only establishes guilt. There will be a fair trial, and if you're found innocent, you'll be compensated for your time." Ghilim was looking at his drink. Caring Mary, who had been coming to the bar for thirty years and was not going to let a minor crisis interfere with her manners, raised her hand.

"Forgive me - are you speaking to Ghilim Habuza?"

"I am. We'd appreciate it if everyone could step out while we apprehend him. It may get dangerous." Big Balbeer laughed. It was the laugh of a man who had spent considerable time trying to put Ghilim on the floor and had opinions about the word dangerous.

"Him? He's about as dangerous as a fly. Just as hard to catch." He laughed again at the second part, which he felt was the better line. Some of the tension in the room found an exit through the laughter. They all liked Ghilim. Whatever this was, it was clearly a misunderstanding of some kind. Surely the Task Force made those.

"Suit yourselves," the woman said. The slighter of the two men moved. The word moved did not adequately capture what happened - he crossed the room at a speed faster than anyone else in the room had seen before, gloved hands sparking with electricity, aimed at Ghilim's back. The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon. Ghilim fell off his stool. Fell - the loose, graceless topple of a man whose relationship with gravity had become negotiable after his third drink.

The dodge was incidental. The sparking hands passed through the space where he had been and found nothing. He hit the floor in a tangle and the second man released two small projectiles that tracked toward him with intent. Ghilim rolled, looking for all the world like a man who had not planned to roll and was simply going along with what his body suggested, and the projectiles hit the counter instead, bursting into small sharp shrapnel that caught the wood with the clear indication that it would hurt if it landed.

What followed lasted about three minutes and was, by unanimous consensus of those present, the finest entertainment the settlement had ever produced. The Task Force were precise, coordinated, and operating at a level that none of the bar's occupants could approximate - and Ghilim stumbled and lurched and tilted around all of it, in a sequence that looked exactly like a drunk man failing to stay upright and nothing at all like someone deliberately making three highly trained operatives look foolish.

Except that the result was three highly trained operatives looking foolish, and the crowd, who had stopped being terrified somewhere around the thirty-second mark, were watching closely now, the way you watch a masterpiece in a genre you did not know existed. Eventually, Ghilim stumbled into Plump Hicky, who was simply standing there, and the woman from the Task Force swept his legs and both the Task Force men came down on him simultaneously, and it was over.

He was saying something as they hauled him up - muffled sounds, emphatic, the register of a man making a point he considered important - but they stuffed his mouth and moved him out and loaded him onto one of the griffons waiting outside.

"I've heard you've got quite the handsome face. Why hide it?" the woman said, pulling off the mask. The hair came with it, attached, the whole thing lifting free in one piece. Staring back at her was the face of a very angry old man. Inside the bar, the commotion of the last few minutes was settling into the early stages of a story that would be told for years. Plump Hicky looked around for her husband, who had been standing right beside her not five minutes ago and was no longer there.

"Has anyone seen Cranky Pete?" The noise Kara made on the way down had no discernible meaning. He seemed to have found a knack of involuntarily falling into water from a not insignificant height. He hit the water and then came up coughing and splashing and getting his bearings in the order they became available. Salt water. Ocean. His body was present and accounted for. He was alive, which given the rate at which things had been happening to him over the last three years was always worth confirming.

He had several things to say to Pranky. He had been compiling them for three years and the list was comprehensive. The problem was that Pranky was not here, and the ocean was, and the list would have to wait. He couldn't see most of his body, which produced a brief spike of alarm before he remembered the suit. Right. Invisible below the neck. He looked down at the water and found his feet visible beneath the hem of the suit, where it ended. He made a note of this.

Sea creatures encountering a floating face and pair of feet was an unknown variable and he didn't have the energy for unknown variables right now. Land was visible to the south - a coastline, perhaps two hours' swim. Knowing Pranky, the distance was deliberate. Knowing Pranky, it could have been worse. He made it in just over an hour, which was better than his estimate and which he attributed to three years of training and the dungeon's thorough rearrangement of his baseline.

The beach was empty - white sand, a line of coconut palms, tropical forest beyond. No settlements visible. His interface would have flagged proximity to one of the settlements, and it hadn't, which meant he was in between things and would have to figure out which things. The coastline and the tropical forest were a clue - Area 2 or 8, possibly, or maybe Area 11. That didn't exactly narrow it down. Without a settlement flag on his interface, he was on his own for now.

The saltwater macaques found him before he found them. They announced their feelings about a floating face emerging from the ocean with considerable volume, from the trees above the beach. Kara considered his options, then covered his feet by stepping on the hem of the suit and pulled the hood over his face. The reaction to total invisibility was, if anything, louder. He uncovered his face. The reaction reset. He covered it again. He did this several more times.

He stopped when he caught himself grinning, because the grinning had made him think of something he did not want to think about right now. He was reminded of a certain someone on an unknown island, with the implication that three years of proximity had produced in Kara something he was not prepared to accept. He climbed a tree near the coast - easily, automatically, the act of climbing long past needing his attention - and found a position on a wide branch and covered himself fully with the suit.

The vision through the hood had a reddish cast, which was strange and which he set alongside the many things about the suit he did not yet fully understand. The macaques were still going strong, which was inconvenient for sleep but useful as a perimeter alarm. He lay there and let his mind go where it wanted to go, which was home. His parents would be in the Area 11 city now.

That was new - they had always moved with bands, the way most people did, the loose travelling communities that were how most of the world lived these days. The city placement had come with the attention that his brother's epic skill had drawn, and the suit had come from that placement, and the suit had led in some indirect way to everything that had followed, which was a chain of causation Kara preferred not to follow too carefully. He thought about his brother. Gomot.

Three years older, already Tier 5 when Kara had left - methodical, steady, the kind of person who improved at things systematically, through the consistent application of attention over time rather than sudden breakthroughs. He had never needed words particularly. He had the gift of making his presence felt without them, of communicating what needed communicating through action and proximity and timing.

His speech had always been different - difficult to understand, which had caused its own complications over the years, the usual human response to something they couldn't immediately categorise. People had mistaken the difficulty for something it wasn't. Kara hoped university was different. He hoped the people there had more patience than average, or at least more willingness to wait and find out. Gomot had an epic skill now and an ability that justified any patience invested in it. Eventually, they would see it.

He hoped eventually wasn't too long. He thought about his own skills. Five of them, sitting in his interface like a hand he hadn't been dealt so much as excavated from himself over six months of damage and dark and the curriculum of a dungeon that had apparently known exactly what it was doing. The unique skill sat at the end of the list and he thought about it the way you thought about something you hadn't fully taken the measure of yet. Fluid State.

Active and passive, Amateur rank, the first of its kind in over a century on Earth. He had spent his whole life managing what it did. He had never once considered what it could do, if he let it. He would have to be careful about what he revealed and to whom. The epic skill alone would change things - he knew this from watching what his brother's epic skill had done to their family's visibility, and that had been before university, before any kind of platform.

He was coming home after three years missing, which was its own conversation, and he was coming home with five skills including one that had no precedent, and he would need to think carefully about how much of that he handed to the world before the world had demonstrated it could handle it. The macaques had quieted. The forest behind him was doing what forests did at night - the continuous low conversation of everything living in it, going about its business. He closed his eyes.

The question of what to reveal, and to whom, and when, turned itself over in his mind without resolving, the way questions did when the answer depended on things you didn't yet know. He let it turn. There was time. He slept.