The man took a moment before answering. “Death by scythe is not a natural death. We Tonists do not acknowledge it.”
Citra cleared her throat, biting back the verbal reaming she wanted to give him, and did her best to remain professional. “There’s one more thing. ?Although you didn’t live with her, you are her only documented relative. That entitles you to a year of immunity from gleaning.”
“I don’t want immunity,” he said.
“Why am I not surprised.” This was the first time she had ever encountered anyone who refused immunity. Even the most downhearted would kiss the ring.
“You’ve done your job. ?You may go now,” Brother Ferguson said.
There was only so long Citra could restrain her frustration. She couldn’t yell at the man. She couldn’t use her Bokator moves to kick him in the neck or take him down with an elbow slam. So she did the only thing she could do. She picked up the mallet and put all of her anger into a single, powerful strike at the tuning fork.
The fork resounded so powerfully, she could feel it in her teeth and her bones. It rang not like a bell, which was a hollow sound. This tone was full and dense. It shocked the anger right out of her. Diffused it. It made her muscles loosen, her jaw unclench. It echoed in her brain, her gut, and her spine. The tone rang much longer than such a thing should, then slowly began to fade. She had never experienced anything that was quite so jarring and soothing at the same time. All she could say was, “What was that?”
“F-sharp,” said Brother Ferguson. “Although there’s a standing argument among the brethren that it’s actually A-flat.”
The fork was still ringing faintly. Citra could see it vibrating, making its edge look blurry. She touched it, and the moment she did it fell silent.
“You have questions,” said Brother Ferguson. “I’ll answer what I can.”
Citra wanted to deny that she had any questions whatsoever, but suddenly she found that she did.
“What do you people believe?”
“We believe many things.”
“Tell me one.”
“We believe that flames were not meant to burn forever.”
Citra looked to the candles by the altar. “Is that why the curate was dousing candles?”
“Part of our ritual, yes.”
“So you worship darkness.”
“No,” he said. “That’s a common misconception. People use that to vilify us. What we worship are the wavelengths and vibrations that are beyond the limits of human sight. We believe in the Great Vibration, and that it will free us from being stagnant.”
Stagnant.
It was the word Scythe Curie used to describe the people she chose to glean. Brother Ferguson smiled. “Indeed, something resonates in you now, doesn’t it?”
She looked away, not wanting to meet his intrusive gaze, and found her eyes settling on the stone basin. She pointed to it. “What’s with the dirty water?”
“That’s primordial ooze! It’s brimming with microbes! Back in the Age of Mortality, this single basin could have wiped out entire populations. It was called ‘disease.’”
“I know what it was called.”
He dipped his finger in the slimy water and swirled it around. “Smallpox, polio, Ebola, anthrax—they’re all in there, but it’s harmless to us now. We couldn’t get sick if we wanted to.” He raised his finger from the foul sludge and licked it off. “I could drink down the whole bowl and it wouldn’t even give me indigestion. Alas, we can no longer turn water into worm.”
Citra left without another word, and without turning back . . . but for the rest of the day she couldn’t get the stench of that foul-smelling water out of her nostrils.
* * *
The business of the Thunderhead is no business of mine. The Thunderhead’s purpose is to sustain humanity. Mine is to mold it. The Thunderhead is the root, and I am the shears, pruning the limbs into fine form, keeping the tree vital. We are both necessary. And we are mutually exclusive.
I do not miss my so-called relationship with the Thunderhead—nor do the junior scythes I’ve come to see as disciples. The absence of the Thunderhead’s uninvited intrusions into our lives is a blessing, for it allows us to live without a safety net. Without the crutch of a higher power. I am the highest power I know, and I like it that way.
And as for my gleaning methods, which, now and then, have been brought under scrutiny, I say merely this: Is it not the job of the gardener to shape the tree as much as possible? And shouldn’t branches that begin to reach unreasonably high be the first to be pruned?
—From the gleaning journal of H.S. Goddard
* * *
23
The Virtual Rabbit Hole
Just down the hall from Citra’s room was a study. Like every other room in the residence, it had windows on multiple sides, and like everything else in Scythe Curie’s life, was kept in perfect order. There was a computer interface there, which Citra used for her studies—because unlike Faraday, Scythe Curie did not shun the digital when it came to learning. As a scythe’s apprentice, Citra had access to databases and information that most people didn’t. The “backbrain” it was called—all the raw data within the Thunderhead’s memory that was not organized for human consumption.
Before her apprenticeship, when she did a standard search for things, the Thunderhead would invariably intrude, saying something like, I see you are searching for a gift. May I ask for whom? Perhaps I can help you find something appropriate. Sometimes she would let the Thunderhead help her, other times she enjoyed searching alone. But since becoming a scythe’s apprentice, the Thunderhead had gone disturbingly mute, as if it were nothing more than its data.
“You’ll have to get used to that,” Scythe Faraday had told her early on. “Scythes cannot speak to the Thunderhead, and it will not speak to us. But in time you’ll come to appreciate the silence and self-reliance that comes from its absence.”
Now more than ever she could have used the Thunderhead’s AI guidance as she browsed through its data files, because the worldwide public camera system seemed designed to thwart her efforts. Her attempts to track Scythe Faraday’s movements on the day he died was proving harder than she thought. ?Video records in the backbrain were not organized by camera, or even by location. It seemed the Thunderhead linked them by concept. A moment of identical traffic patterns in completely different parts of the world were linked. Footage featuring people with similar strides were linked. One strand of associations led to images of increasingly spectacular sunsets, all caught by streetcams. The Thunderhead’s digital memory, Citra came to realize, was structured like a biological brain. Every moment of every video record was connected to a hundred others by different criteria—which meant that every connection Citra followed led her down a rabbit hole of virtual neurons. It was like trying to read someone’s mind by dissecting their cerebral cortex. It was maddening.
The Scythedom, she knew, had created its own algorithms for searching the unsearchable contents of the backbrain—but Citra couldn’t ask Scythe Curie without making her suspicious. The woman had already proven that she could see through any lie Citra put forth, so best not to be in a position where Citra would have to lie.
The search began as a project, quickly evolved into a challenge, and now was an obsession. Citra would secretly spend an hour or two each day trying to find footage of Scythe Faraday’s final movements, but to no avail.
She wondered if, even in its silence, the Thunderhead was watching what she did. My, oh my, you’ve been picking through my brain, it would say if it were allowed, with a virtual wink. Naughty, naughty.
Then, after many weeks, Citra had an epiphany. If everything uploaded to the Thunderhead was stored in the backbrain, then not just public records were there, but personal as well. She couldn’t access other people’s private records, but anything she uploaded would be available to her. Which meant she could seed the search with data of her own. . . .
? ? ?