Hinete was pale as she stared at the destroyed tower. “That one was defended by clan Fugo — only purified cores were there. Not too many.”
My heart pounded. “Did they all die?”
She gloomily studied the shattered remains like a funeral scent, and the flaming tenement buildings around the wrecked ivory finger. “I do not know.”
At least the ordinary people of Yatamo — at least what passed for the ordinary people here were mostly safe. Unlike any other nation that Sesako was aware of, most of the population had awakened their sparks. But those who were not fit for great wars, those condensing their power, or who had developed their first foundation, but not the golden core hid in the vast network of tunnels under the city.
These tunnels had been built intentionally for such attacks, like the way deep metro lines in Europe had been built during the cold war to survive nuclear bombardment.
This had been the third round of bombardment.
I sighed — I could manage this. Twenty minutes of hell followed by thirty or forty minutes of rest.
Hinete studied me strangely.
There was a clear awkwardness in her manner — she looked as though she did not quite know what to do with a man who was using the body of her dear friend and teacher now that she wasn’t supposed to scream at me, since the dragon had blessed my presence.
I sat down on top of the top stair leading down and groaned. I started rubbing at the back of my neck.
This promised to be a long day — rather worse than crunch time before a product release.
“Well — are you hungry?” She said, “I’m hungry. I’ll bring up some breakfast for us. There will probably be twenty minutes before the next attack. We can eat. I think.”
I raised my head to study her.
She pressed her hands tightly together again and walked right down the stairs past me.
Well.
I shrugged, and then let myself lay down flat on the unbroken marble piece which made up the cap of the tower. I yawned and closed my eyes.
The ward would tell me if another round of the shots were coming.
I felt rather guilty in this nap though, since I was fairly sure there were things that I needed to be alert for that might not trigger the wards until they were very close.
Part of the planned reliance on the seven profound souls of Yatamo was based on us not really needing to sleep during crises — or at least not nearly as much as even a cultivator with a purified core.
Twenty-four hours awake? Easy.
Twenty-four days awake? A bit skeezy, but not a problem.
Twenty-four weeks awake? I might still be alive, but I’d have been completely useless for months.
So, I definitely didn’t need to sleep right now.
But it was a pleasant sunny summer day, and I’d been about as stressed, tense, and just damned fucked up for the past few days as possible.
In this sort of dreamy state, I wondered if Hinete would actually bring me breakfast. I hadn’t eaten since… well I hadn’t eaten since I ‘died.’
Damn. I really wish I’d been able to get that pile of fish and chips.
It would have been nicer if the van had hit me on the way back to the conference venue. I’d have soaked the basket of fish in so much malt vinegar that my lips would still tingle now, after I was reborn into another world.
I drowsed off. There was the sound of crackling flames, and a scent of smoke.
Hinete’s voice forced me awake. “Sleeping?”
The sneer was clear in her tone.
I replied without opening my eyes, “That loud ward will tell me if there is anything that I need to do, and —”
“Not everything, you — you not Sesako! And what if you are needed to support another tower?”
Food!
She’d brought food.
I ignored her accusation to which I had no good reply.
The plate smelled and looked delicious. Some sort of fatty meat with a garnishing of greens, and a pile of some cooked grain that looked like bulger but wasn’t next to it.
I took the plate offered by Hinete and dug in.
It was only when I was halfway through the meal that I realized/ recalled that I was actually eating dolphin meat.
Uhhhhh…
When in Rome, and all. Especially once you’ve become a Roman. But eating a dolphin seemed wrong to me.
Hinete daintily picked at her food, even though there was not much time before the next bombardment.
She noticed me studying her and locked her eyes onto me with an intent frown. “Why did you intend to run? — and steal everything Sesako owned.”
“This isn’t my war. Not my country. It's not my job. And I believed that Sesako was wholly dead — okay. I guess his money belonged to whoever he’d left it to in his will, not me. I’ll claim a right to half of this body now, but I didn’t do any work for the money.”
She pursed her lips, studied me.
“As I gathered everything up,” I added, “there was a bit of Sesako still alive. Furious and angry.”
“Sesako always fights when there is a good cause. If you are supposed to be a parallel of his, why didn’t you choose to fight?”
“What is the good cause? — a nation that… honestly, I can barely understand your political structure based on the memories I have from Sesako, but you are ruled by a bunch of these clan chiefs, and maybe the dragons — this is not a democracy where everyone has an equal say in how it is run. I am looking at one nation ruled by a tiny cabal of elites that weren’t chosen by the people fighting another nation whose ruler was not chosen freely by the people over territory. No good cause here.”
She looked at me with a snarl.
“I suppose,” I admitted, since honesty compelled me, “That fighting for your independence against a giant empire is a cause that always looks better than fighting to conquer someone else. But this is still not my country… This is insane. I was a…” The phrase ‘computer programmer’ did not exist in her language for me to say — “well anyways, I had a job, and it never involved fighting, if I had any choice, I still wouldn’t be here —”
Was that still true?
Somehow that fight this morning had changed something.
A part of the protective instincts that Sesako felt towards his tower, towards his city, towards his country, and towards his dragons was smearing off onto me.
I didn’t like how that made me feel, it was as though I was becoming slowly contaminated.
“Even if your people had not recently been in a war, surely the cultivators are trained into a militia for defense.”
“Nope, no universal service — and there are no cultivators because magic doesn’t exist where I’m from.”
“What! That’s impossible.”
Before she queried me further, the ward throbbed between my ears again. WRONG! WRONG!
I instinctively shut it off and searched the sky for the stones hurtling towards us.
Three of them.
Hinete called off the closest one, and I knocked it aside, and we were fighting again.
By now this felt almost… normal.
Like baseball.
Though in baseball the pitcher didn’t want to hit your face and blow you to bits.
We quickly cleared the three shots aimed at me.
This time the bombardment centered on our side of the city, with the warding towers on either side of me along the perimeter, and in the closest parts of the inner city to my tower receiving most of the stones.
At various attempts to overload them, Hinete ordered me to start aiding the other towers in knocking aside stones that were attacking them.
This was harder, perhaps because Sesako had less practice, and because it was intrinsically more complicated to track stones that weren’t aimed directly at my face.
Still, I performed creditably, though not in an exemplary manner.
Once the hordes of stones ceased hurtling at us, I sat down against the marble parapet, and began to eat the rest of my dolphin meat breakfast.
Disturbingly yummy.
Dolphins really were far too intelligent for it to be okay to eat.
“You have to have magic where you are from.” Hinete sat down several feet away, cross legged, and exclaimed, “Chi is part of the fundamental animating life force, without it the existence of anything but bare dead rocks would be impossible, and —”
“Nope — or maybe that is the way it works here. But back where I’m from, we knew exactly how life worked. It was an unbelievably large number of tiny, tiny, tiny machines working together. And we had no magic. Honestly, I kind of suspect that this whole thing is a pre-death dream, except it doesn’t seem very dreamlike.”
The hot summer sun was gleaming down on us, but just like I experienced the cold in the high mountains as simply an awareness that the temperature was cold, I experienced this hot sun as simply an awareness that the temperature was hot and beating on me. It wasn’t dangerous, or going to give me a headache, or a reason to do anything.
I took another bite of the dolphin.
Chewy flavor explosions.
I felt guilty about enjoying the meat — honestly, I’d always felt pretty guilty about eating meat. A lot of my friends were vegans as they didn’t want to cause additional animal suffering — and the animals in factory farms suffered a lot.
That at least was clear, whether the suffering of animals was really unimportant next to what was happening to people or not: It was not good to be a factory farmed animal. At the very least the anti-factory farming position had always made sense to me: the mass farming of ten billion chickens a year, followed by killing them, all done in horrific conditions was a really BAD thing.
It was just… meat is tasty and convenient. And I always donated ten percent of my income to helping other people, and as my salary had started getting really good, I was increasing that percentage.
The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
I’d always agreed that it was very bad to make animals suffer, and that the treatment of them in factory farms was horrible, but I was someone who was very far from perfect, and in this area I did not live up to my own values, and continued to just eat factory farmed meat, even though I knew that there were reasonably simple ways to have fun eating without meat.
Still, maybe I should be a bit less judgmental about others who did evil things because they were convenient and socially reinforced.
I am not sure if I am very different from people who enjoyed clothes where the fabric was produced by slaves, or people who lived off of the proceeds of direct theft.
I mean this seriously: Raising beings that can see, feel happiness, and feel pain in packed, unhealthy, uncomfortable conditions, force feeding them till they were so fat their legs broke under them, and then killing them for food is not okay. It doesn’t matter how tasty, how natural, or how embedded in culture and tradition it is.
At the same time, I kept eating meat, while feeling guilty.
I personally — again unlike some of my friends — viewed humans as more special than other species. We have language, self-awareness, and our giant cooperative social structures — as though all of this makes our existence more meaningful than that of a cat, a pig, or a chicken.
“You must be mistaken about magic. Without magic —”
“Tiny automatons, trillions of tiny automatons.”
“That makes no sense.”
I shrugged. “Maybe it doesn’t make sense here — I bet it does though. The main point is that there are no cultivators, no magic. It’s all a fiction where I am from.”
“You must be shocked to see such a big city and so many people at once, was that what scared you?”
“Uhhhhh… no.”
“I mean if you are from somewhere so primitive that —”
“I lived in a city with more than twenty times the population of Kyit. I died while visiting one with ten times the population. We have an enormously sophisticated and advanced society. The reason that we have missed the presence of magic in the world I am from is because things are different there.”
“Not even the capital of the empire is that big.”
I rolled my eyes, “Far more people live in my world than live here. The farmers here don’t seem to have figured out chemical fertilizers, and they seem bad at growing food in a variety of other ways, even though magic is available. Maybe the way that I can do the most good is simply by checking to make sure that nitrogen actually is the main bio productivity constraint here, and then figuring out how to fix it out of the air with magic so that all the farmers can get fertilizer.”
She stared at me. She could tell that I was not treating her entirely seriously, but also that I was saying what I believed to be true.
She at last fixated on one point from what I said. “You want to improve the yield from land? — when will Sesako be back?”
“I don’t know… a few more hours, I’d guess. There is this feeling… like a pressure in my head that grows over time. He is under that pressure. It builds up. And when it reaches a certain point, the control will simply flip over.”
We were quiet for a while.
Both of us had finished the meals and put the plates aside. Sesako kept no servants to automatically cook the food or take away the plates — though he did have cooks in the city prepare their meals, and they would then be stored in deep magical freezers, after which point, they would be heated up, again by magic.
Apparently, I had not said goodbye and adieu forever to the questionable convenience of microwave dinners — except this food was actually good. The heating spell evenly heated up everything on the plate — except the salad, which didn’t heat up at all.
Magic 1; Technology 0.
Maybe I could find coffee here too, though Sesako had no memory of the beverage.
Another wave of the bombardment came, and this time they did not attack us at all. Another tower on the margins of the defenses was struck, but this time it wasn’t destroyed, but just damaged and blackened.
I wondered what the reason was that they didn’t concentrate on one edge of the city, to exhaust the towers one by one. These attacks evenly struck at the defenses.
I then ‘remembered’, usually attacks were spread evenly around a city, because for some complicated reason whose explanation involved a book that was as thick as my hand towers used less magical energy to deflect each stone if they had already been activated within the previous few minutes.
A wave of attacks would be sent against a single point in the defenses only if the attackers believed that it was a weak point where they might actually miss a stone and be destroyed.
I was fairly sure that even though Sesako fully understood the explanation, I’d need pen, paper and at least an hour of scribbling out the logic to understand all of the details.
“What do you care about?” She asked. “If you don’t care about us.”
“People being happy. But it doesn’t matter who they are — the people attacking this city, the poor peasants in the empire, a poor hunter who has no land, and who can’t awaken his spark in the jungles in the south. People who haven’t been born yet, but who might be — they all matter. They all deserve to be happy, to be safe, to have control over their own lives and to be supported by institutions that help them live the lives they want to live. Really that simple.”
“We are better than the empire.”
“Every nation believes they are the best. But what do you do for those who are less fortunate? Nothing of any significance. The people do not rule this place, but —”
“The clan chiefs have a duty to the people under them, just like the people owe obedience to their clan chiefs.”
“But you don’t choose them. Not directly. It is hereditary, or sort of hereditary at least — anyway, this is a war.”
“Yes…” She looked at me as though she could not grasp my point.
“War destroys things, it doesn’t create. So that means war is always… It is a rare, rare war where either side makes the world better by fighting.” I grimaced. That wasn’t really true. “Except — I know full well that if no one ever defended themselves, then everyone would be pillaged by thieves, pirates, and raiders. The potential for violence has to be part of any stable system — or at least almost any stable system. I can imagine models without violence that might be stable, but…”
“What is your point?”
“I’m not sure.” I shrugged and shook my head. I was rambling. “Hinete, I was part of a group of people who had chosen to focus on trying to make the biggest difference in the world that we could. While we weren’t cultivators, even average people in the country that I was born in were vastly richer than poor people in many other countries. And not helping those who are less fortunate when you can— I’d been studying philosophy in… a sect for advanced learning. But I decided that instead of studying philosophy, I wanted to do something to make a bigger impact — and the biggest impact I thought I could make was through earning as much money as I could, and then donating a large fraction of it to groups providing healers to people in small countries. So instead of trying to become a teacher, I became a… ah… there is not only no word, but no concept — or wait. My job was trying to get sophisticated enchanted devices to do what they were supposed to.”
She smiled at me. “No magic, remember.”
I waved my hand around. “Automatic math solvers were almost magic. Huh, an automatic math solver is not a good translation.” I laughed. “Maybe I’ll figure out how to make one here, and you’ll see how cool they are. Probably not, I’m just one person and it took a lot of people working together to make them. Maybe magic will let me cheat.”
“Just what could these ‘automatic math solvers’ do — besides solve math problems?”
“Well with the use of one of them you could play literally any piece of music ever made — with better fidelity than those music playing stones that you and Sesako spend your time enchanting.”
“How would you be able to do that without magic?”
“I said it was like magic?”
We both laughed together.
“You decided to get this job because you wanted to give away the money.” Her voice was rather skeptical.
“It also sounded fun, a lot of my friends were doing it, and I was good at it. If I’d really been trying to make as much money as I could, and some people did this, I’d have gone into banking, but that just sounded stressful, and I wasn’t actually sure how well I’d do in interviews. Anyway, I did make a lot of money. And I was steadily earning more money. A long time ago — when I was in that educational sect, I decided to always donate at least ten percent of whatever I earned to help people who had no connection to me, except that we both were thinking, feeling creatures. I ended up donating more once I was earning enough that it just… seemed a bit ridiculous to spend all of that money on myself. But the important point always was to give something solely for the sake of helping people who had no connection to me, no matter what my excuse was.”
For the first time she looked at me with actual approval. “Few would do that. It was very noble of you.”
“No, no. It wasn’t really — it just felt right. Like this was me being who I wanted to be, a better version of myself — and there were lots and lots of things I cared about, things I loved and did otherwise. Most of my life was about… getting laid, hanging out with friends, buying expensive automated math solvers. It is not a failure to love yourself and have your own projects. I was human. I made a lot of money, and I enjoyed having it — it just was… there were people who didn’t die because I bought them the care they needed to survive. That was amazing. It was like I was enjoying my own life, and my own story, and they were enjoying theirs, and I’d somehow doubled my experience in the world.”
She nodded. “Why didn’t you become a healer? You had some guilt about having such a good life — I’ve been ridiculously lucky too — you tried to pay off that guilt by donating a bit of your luck. But you hadn’t really dedicated yourself to helping other people.”
“Ummmm. You are not the first person to make this sort of objection. Someone called the movement I was part of ‘consumer heroism’ — I suppose I have a few self-defensive arguments about that though. First, let me repeat: The people who are helped are the ones who matter. This wasn’t about me saying that I was better than other people. I mean sometimes I thought I was, and sometimes I didn’t — it was about making the lived experience of human beings in bad, poor, or difficult situations better. Or that part of the money that went to trying to stop diseases and potential disasters that could kill giant amounts of people was about making sure that everyone was able to stay alive. It wasn’t about me.”
I stood up and paced back and forth several times on the parapet and looked down at the city. “If we defend the dragons, if we save some one’s life, or house, or something that matters to them — who cares if I did it because I was actually being altruistic, or because I wanted to illegitimately feel good about myself, or because I was trying to prove to someone that I was better than them. None of that matters. What matters is whether the person actually was helped or not.”
“Yes, but if you actually wanted to help people, you would have given more than just a simple percentage. I mean you said you still had a vast amount left over.”
“I actually did give a bit more than ten percent because of that — but the point of ten percent was to… look, the idea was to create a movement, a system for helping other people that was sustainable. Anything sustainable is something that actual human beings can participate in. And in practice actual humans find it far easier, and far more enjoyable to decide once how much they will give, and then to enjoy being selfish with the rest of their stuff. I never felt deprived, and that meant I kept giving.”
“But… you just weren’t really doing as much as you could.”
“I know that. I never claimed I was. I’m not an altruistic saint. I am just an ordinary human being, who like most ordinary human beings cares about people just because they are people. The only difference between me and most people is that I was part of a group of people where it became socially normal to make a substantial, but still limited, effort to actually help distant people. And so, I did.”
“It still would have made more sense for you to become a healer, instead of an automated math device craftsman.” She had a smirk, rather like she was arguing just for the sake of poking me to see how I’d respond. Her tone reminded me of the people I’d studied with while doing my philosophy double major alongside computer science.
I laughed at the way that she now described a programmer. “I don’t think I would have been a better than average healer — and in practice the good I could do by being a healer is based on how much better I would be as a healer than the person who I pushed out of the schools for healers. It simply is the case that even in places where there were no healers, the bigger limit was money for treatments, and to hire healers, and not the existence of healers.”
“Hmmmm.” She frowned and looked up at the clouds of smoke in the sky, and the reddish sun high up. “Even if you had been one of those healers, you’d have spent half your time begging friends and groups in your home for the money for potions, enchanted devices, perhaps an assistant so that you could actually do the work of healing.”
“Exactly. It made sense to me to become the person who provided the money, and then a doctor could focus on healing instead of begging. If I became a healer who stayed in my home country, I’d be doing little good, because our healers were generally very talented, and very well paid, and someone else would have the exact job I filled.”
“Were there many people who became healers and who then volunteered to work in poor countries without being paid much.”
“There certainly were some. Also, many of the people who trained to be doctors in poor countries moved to my country, so the lack of doctors there was fundamentally a matter of money, not of talent. Maybe, I would have done more good if I had become a healer and spent my entire life just asking barely enough salary to survive But that would have been unpleasant, and eventually I would have returned to my home country, where again I would have done very little good, because there were already enough healers.”
“Like you said, you are not a saint.”
“Nope. But I did some good. If I didn’t have my job, someone else would have gotten the exact same job, done roughly the same work, and earned the same money, but they probably wouldn’t have donated nearly as much of the money as I did.”
“In other words,” she smiled, “You were able to find an excellent argument for feeling good about doing exactly what you wanted to do anyways.”
I laughed. “And shouldn’t everyone have such an argument? Life is too short, far too short, to not be impressed with yourself and your own moral superiority, and if you can actually help someone else in the process of feeding your own ego, that is even better. I will repeat though: I am not what matters. What matters is the results.”
“It seems to me that you like to believe things that are convenient, and that feel easy for you, and don’t require you to change anything fundamental about yourself or your society. You wanted to play the hero without actually suffering for it. And now, when you were in a place where you can be a true hero, your actual character was shown when you refused to risk yourself.”
“No.” I gestured at the city below us. “I’m so strange, and the impact that someone like Sesako has is far, far bigger than I ever imagined that my own impact could be.”
“Sesako has a duty. You now have a duty.”
“And if we survive, I’ll be able to use my portion of this body’s abilities to improve the life of thousands of people — maybe hundreds of thousands of people. That is my duty.”
“You find, as always, a belief that is convenient for you to hold.”
“Okay. Look I’ve died once. I am scared — I refuse to be ashamed. But I can do things that matter. It is important that I live through this war. So much here can be improved. I don’t want to let Sesako kill us. I’m scared he will. If I could stop him from fighting I would. But I can’t. I don’t want to die. But I would die, I swear to you, I would die if I knew that I’d make a great difference for a great many people. I would not place myself above thousands.”
She opened her mouth, as though to throw this confession of cowardice back in my face. But she sighed, as though… as though she almost understood. After a minute she said quietly, “I am frightened of when I shall try to open my second dantian – not even for myself, but Sesako would despise himself if I died while he tried to guide the process.”
I wanted to put my hand on her arm, but I didn’t dare.
She looked down and nibbled on her lip. “I'm beginning to understand you better.”
“Perhaps I am lying to myself, but it should not be about me and how I feel. It must be about other people, purely as ends in themselves, not as tools for making me feel good about myself.”
“Perhaps you are lying to yourself.” Hinete smiled weakly at me. “But perhaps you aren’t. And perhaps it really doesn’t matter.”