[Issue 2024.70]

‘Matryoshka City’, Albert Chu

Art © 2024 Katharine A. Viola

---

The murdered man’s sister cheered, like everyone else, at the Guild Day parade. She and the rest of the Automation Guild, all wearing their purple uniforms, marched and pumped their fists and chanted, while leadership, on top of the Guild’s float, waved at the crowd in tasteful silence. The loudest chant of all was nothing but their president’s name: Gar-ni-er! Gar-ni-er!

The parade filled the Arc, usually a strolling ground for couples and window-shoppers, from side to side, slowly crawling through like syrup in a straw. To find the sister, I only needed to pick a spot along its path and wait.

When I saw her, I dove into the crowd and began shouldering my way through. Automation Guild members surrounded me, but the chanting and triumphant atmosphere enraptured them too much to notice. I slipped through the few remaining people standing between us and grabbed her arm.

She froze mid-cheer. The smile on her face dissolved; she furrowed her brows, and apprehension glimmered in her eyes.

“Victoire?” I asked. “Victoire Morvan?”

She tugged her arm away, and, suddenly self-aware, I released her. “My apologies,” I said. I clasped my hands behind my back. “There’s something important that I must discuss with you.”

Victoire glanced around her; we were the only two people in sight not cheering. “Do I know you?”

“It’s about him.”

As she realized my meaning, I watched her apprehension condense into fear. Guilt pricked at me—even talking to her about her brother put her at risk. I’d come to this planet to fulfill my duty as a man of the Fond, and Victoire had nothing to do with my mission here. But I’d still felt compelled to intervene.

She could easily turn away from me and melt back into the crowd, but her brother had been missing for a week, and I wagered that her desire to know the truth would outweigh her instinct to hide behind the façade of a loyal Automation Guild member. After a moment, she nodded.

We moved against the parade’s current until we left it behind, and only stragglers remained. Some paradegoers, having split off from the procession earlier, emerged from bakeries with their arms full of pastries. Others descended to the subway—the Arc line would take them to any neighborhood in Ronemat’s northern half.

I led Victoire to a garden nestled inside the Arc walkway. Tall hedges provided shade from the sun and muffled the noise of pedestrians outside; roses grew in neat square beds, and their scent filled the air. We were alone.

“What is this?” Victoire asked. She crossed her arms. “I’ve no idea who you are, how you found me, or what you want. Explain.”

I gave a shallow bow. This would be a difficult conversation, and I wanted to show respect. “My name is Gose. I’m new to this planet—I’ve only been in Ronemat for a week, on business. On my first day here, I found your brother.”

Victoire pressed her lips together. “You found Michel?”

“Yes. He’s dead. Murdered.”

The garden was silent. In the distance, the parade’s marching band started up a new number. I could only just hear the clear, high notes of the brass ensemble, the melody growing fainter every second.

Victoire’s cheeks were pale, and she clenched her fists. “That can’t be. You’re lying.”

I reached into the folds of my wrap and withdrew a slip of paper, folded into quarters. Carefully, I opened it and handed it to Victoire. I already knew what it said—four sticks of butter, one carrot, one onion, one stick of celery—signed, at the end, V. I’d found it among Michel Morvan’s belongings, tucked into his wallet with his identification card. For the last week, I’d tracked down that sole connection to Michel, that V.

Victoire’s eyes skipped over the page. “Is this supposed to be evidence? Michel could have dropped this.”

“You’re right,” I said. “Only your brother’s body can prove that he was murdered. I ask, then, that you come with me into the Margins. I’ll show you where the automata left Michel.”

A confused laugh, discordant with our grim conversation, escaped Victoire. “What?” she asked. “You can’t enter the Margins.” It was as if I’d suggested that we’d find Michel’s body after flying on wings to Ronemat’s moon.

I’d expected this reaction. Other members of the Fond had visited planets where the local anomaly affected not just space and time, but also the human mind, and they had encountered the same incredulity. The same denial.

“Think,” I said. I’d spent so long locating Victoire; now that she was before me, I had to try to reach her. “Isn’t it strange that you believe it’s not possible to enter? There are no walls—what could stop you? The city deceives you.”

As she considered my words, her lips parted and her eyes widened. She stepped backwards without looking, and her trousers snagged on a rosebush’s thorn. Then, she shook her head. “This is nonsense. You’re… confused.”

I sighed. “I’m not confused. I’ve heard the whispers about your brother’s disappearance, Victoire. I know who everybody suspects. Do you truly believe that it’s impossible to enter the Margins, or are you afraid of what we’ll find?”

We were alone in the garden, and still, Victoire’s eyes darted from side to side. “I don’t know what you’re trying to say.”

I thought back to the float. There was Garnier, the gilded folds of his purple tunic gleaming in the sun. In the week I’d spent in Ronemat, I’d seen his face plastered on dozens of billboards and heard his name spoken in café after café. He’d won contracts and wage increases from the city government, and he was, I gathered, certain to win reelection as the Automation Guild’s president.

Another man stood next to him on the float. From a distance, he seemed just as resplendent, but up close, something was wrong. Garnier’s son resembled his father so much that, next to the man himself, he came across as only a lesser imitation.

“Michel was last seen with Garnier’s son, Victoire,” I said. “Why did the automata take Michel’s body into the Margins instead of simply leaving it? What if we discover that the younger Garnier is a murderer, and that the elder Garnier conspired to conceal the truth? Then the Automation Guild—”

“You said that you are not from Ronemat, yes?” She advanced on me, her eyes narrowed. “Let me tell you something about our city. Here, we’re proud of our guilds; because of them, we work with dignity. When we have problems with leadership, we express those problems in the right ways, like the ballot box. We don’t spread baseless rumors. If all you have are theories about my brother’s disappearance, you should go find a city detective.” She sniffed. “Or a tabloid.”

We stood there, facing each other. Anger radiated from Victoire, and a shadow from one of the tall perimeter hedges cut across her face. Part of her had reached for the truth—she had come here with me, after all. But for another part, it was easier to believe that I lied instead.

I exhaled. “My apologies. It wasn’t my place to impose this painful conversation on you.” I stepped around Victoire and headed towards the garden’s exit. A cold breeze blew through the gap in the hedges, and I tugged the sides of my wrap closer together. “Excuse me.”

I left her behind, and I didn’t look back.

After walking down the Arc for a few minutes, I stopped in the middle of the road. I needed to clear my head. The red and white bricks of the walkway, interlaced in a herringbone pattern, stretched before me.

Why had I tried to tell Victoire the truth about her brother? I should have concerned myself only with Ronemat’s anomaly—I needed to study it to identify its properties and then devise a means of neutralizing it. But a week ago, when I’d first slipped inside the city and found myself in the Margins, I’d discovered a murdered man.

Since then, I had uncovered some of the secrets of Ronemat’s anomaly, but not all of them. Instead, I had spent my time investigating Michel’s murder and finding Victoire. Was the anomaly’s strength so great that it would deter a woman from seeking justice for her brother? I had thought that if I could only speak to Victoire, I could break the anomaly’s hold over her, but I’d failed.

What now? I closed my eyes and recalled my truth-seeds. They’d been bestowed upon me as a final preparation before my service as a man of the Fond began; they allowed me to access the experiences of others as if they were my own. Learning to transmit a truth-seed required many years of study, and few in the Fond were capable of it. To receive them was a rare gift.

The truth-seeds recorded how others walking the path of the Fond had unwound different anomalies on other planets. I’d combed through them dozens of times, searching for guidance. But the originators of the truth-seeds didn’t extrapolate teachings or lessons from their experiences—they only quietly performed their duties, never speaking to me. They didn’t mar the truth with perspective.

I reopened my eyes. I was a man of the Fond, and my mission here remained unfinished. I could no longer concern myself with this one murder, this one injustice, no matter how much the memory of its discovery clung to me. I needed to refocus on answering the remaining mysteries of Ronemat’s anomaly.

I was decided.

I ducked into a café, purchased a local beverage, and took it with me down the stairs to the Arc line. As the doors of my train car slid shut, I took my first sip—the liquid nearly scalded my tongue, and the bitter, medicinal taste lingered long after I swallowed. Fewer people rode the trains today than I’d seen before; most of the city was out celebrating Guild Day. The cars glided so smoothly over the rails that only the tunnel lights flashing past the windows gave any indication that we moved.

I rode the train to its last stop and walked the rest of the way. As I went, the neighborhoods grew thinner, and pedestrians became scarce. I discarded my drink in a sidewalk waste bin; it was the last one I saw. Soon, the sidewalk disappeared as well.

The city wall, which the Ronematians called the Muhr, loomed ahead. Its peak was high enough to be invisible.

I’d entered the Margins, which surrounded Ronemat proper and separated it from the Muhr. Nobody knew precisely where it began, but they all agreed that it was impossible to venture too far inside. A thick layer of fog perpetually covered the Margins, and it descended over me now. The hazy forms of distant buildings wavered, then melted away.

I wasn’t alone, though. There were the automata. They approached noisily, announcing themselves with the whirring of servos and the heavy clunks of metallic footsteps. Then, a dozen feet away, one of them broke through the fog: a rectangular, matte black torso topped by a bulbous array of sonic detectors and emitters. When it moved away from me, the fog swallowed it from sight, and its footsteps faded into the distance.

The automata all carried bins. They filled them in Ronemat proper, and after ferrying them into the Margins, they added them to mountainous piles of other identical bins.

When I’d first explored the Margins, I’d opened some of them to see what was inside. Reams of paperwork, scattered on the bottom like leaves. An old doll with a red stain over a missing button eye. A small wooden ring box, placed in the exact center of the bin. Forgotten things.

Michel’s body lay in one of the piles, in one of the bins. Nothing was different about that bin. The automata discarded a body as easily as ordinary garbage.

Finally, I reached the surface of the Muhr itself. On instinct, I looked up, and for a moment, my resolve faltered against the Muhr’s all-encompassing size. But I was a man of the Fond; I had a duty. I placed a hand on the cold, stone surface, turned to my right, and started walking.

A subtle property of Ronemat’s anomaly that I’d discovered during an earlier exploration—all the city’s maps showed that it had a perfectly elliptical shape. The inside of the border should have been concave. But as I walked, keeping one hand on the Muhr, the shape of the wall pulled me to the left, not the right.

Then, without warning, my hand touched empty air. I’d found a gate. Tall enough to fit a tower inside, they were carved straight through the stone, without doors.

When I’d first found a gate, I hadn’t entered it. Nobody in Ronemat had walked through the Margins; nobody had ever laid eyes on one of these gates. The anomaly itself barred Ronemat’s residents from passing through the Muhr—why? What lay on the other side? And the Muhr curved away from me, convex. Was I inside Ronemat or outside it? I needed answers, and I couldn’t stay here any longer.

Victoire’s eyes, swirling with fear and anger, floated before me. As I met them, they sank into the fog.

I walked through the gate.

---

At first, the Muhr seemed to be a mirror: the Margins that lay on the other side were a copy, occupied by the same automata, haunted by the same metallic footfalls. A difference revealed itself only at the inner edge of the Margins, as the fog dissipated and Ronemat itself began. It wasn’t visible or audible. It was in the air I breathed—the black smell of smoke.

I found the smell’s source in the city. Wheeled vehicles rumbled down the streets, emitting exhaust from pipes in their rear. They were large enough to hold many, but I usually only saw the vehicle’s operator inside. Sometimes, they filled entire streets, unmoving. Automata standing in the intersections held red flags above their head. At intervals, their arms swiveled like the hands of a clock, a green flag popped up, and the column of vehicles moved.

The vehicles lacked aesthetic appeal and efficiency, but I’d seen uglier and slower things on other planets. The smell, however, was uniquely awful. I held a loose fold of my wrap against my nose. How could anyone tolerate this?

The city was at once my familiar Ronemat and a different Ronemat entirely. Major streets had different names, different paths, and sometimes didn’t exist. Nobody wore guild uniforms, and the ubiquitous campaign posters for guild office had disappeared. Product advertisements replaced them, promoting clothing, cosmetics, or those wheeled vehicles.

Between gaps in buildings, I glimpsed something else in the skyline. I stared at the small sections I could see, uncomprehending, before I tailed a tenant into an apartment building and rode the elevator up to the roof. I needed a better view.

On the rooftop, I finally saw the whole structure: it was an elevated road, straddling the northern half of the city, tall enough to cast a shadow over several blocks. Ramps, rising from the ground at regular intervals, connected it to the city’s ordinary street network. It was like an overgrown centipede, snaking across Ronemat, walking on hundreds of support structures and ramps.

I recognized its path. It was this Ronemat’s Arc.

But this Arc’s western end was severed. There, the road ended suddenly, without descending back to the surface. Smoke rose from the ground at that end’s base—not the thin, gray wisps produced by the vehicles, but the thick, billowing cloud of something on fire.

I watched the smoke for only a few seconds longer, and then I left. I needed to understand what was happening here.

I spent an afternoon trekking to the Arc’s western end—without the benefit of trains, it took much longer than before. The streets wore a grim face. Men in business clothing, accompanied by bodyguards, hurried into vehicles and peeled away. Groups of workers, tools dangling from their belts and helmets covering their heads, gathered at street corners. They stared at me with cold eyes, rimmed with soot.

Finally, after I rounded a corner, I found the fire’s source. A pit gaped open, surrounded by construction equipment and lined with scaffolding. The black smoke I’d seen from the rooftop spewed from the pit’s mouth. The Arc’s abrupt end hung like a cliff over the scene.

Two groups of men confronted each other in the Arc’s shadow, at the lip of the hole. I recognized the conflict, a familiar sight from other planets—workers and the police.

I jogged closer to the clash’s frontline. On one side, the police formed a phalanx, as still and silent as the Muhr. On the other, the workers chanted and yelled, and some brandished crowbars and hammers. With their makeshift weapons and protest signs held aloft like battle flags, they looked ready, even eager, for violence. I quickly saw, however, that few had actually prepared for it. When the police launched gas grenades, nobody had masks.

The grenades went off in a series of pops, and a thick layer of gas covered the crowd. The yelling turned from anger to pain and fear. I heard coughing and retching. And then, sensing weakness, the police surged forwards.

The workers’ line broke. They fled, but other police units, held in reserve, emerged from side streets to corral as many as possible. Sprinting workers streamed down the avenue I stood in, one of the few escape routes left. The city swallowed them behind me.

Was it the place of a man of the Fond to intervene? How would doing so help me better understand Ronemat’s anomaly? But before I could answer these questions, my instinct acted. I ran into the chaos, against the current of retreat.

The gas stung my eyes and throat, but the augmentations of my Fond body protected me from the worst effects. At the mouth of the street, I met the police. A group of them had fallen on a straggler and wrestled him to the ground, but another lone worker, wearing a stolen gas mask, prevented them from claiming their prize. The situation devolved into a brawl, as the worker scrambled over his fallen companion, trying to pry him away from the melee, then shielding his body as the police drew batons and struck—

I caught the baton mid-swing. With one fluid motion, I ripped it out of the policeman’s hands, and then I squeezed. The wood snapped in my fist. As everyone watched, stunned, I opened my hand. Wood splinters clattered to the ground.

Then, before the police recovered from their shock and used lethal weapons, I reached into my wrap, withdrew a pinprick of light, and tossed it into their midst. It exploded—a blinding flash cut through the gas and bathed the street in a white glow. I scooped the fallen worker onto my shoulder and ran.

The other one was smart enough to follow. I fell behind him in our flight, trusting his familiarity with the city over mine. When we made it into a narrow alleyway, he stripped off his gas mask and work jacket, revealing a nondescript, wrinkled tunic underneath. He leaned on his knees and gasped heavy, greedy breaths. I unslung my charge from my shoulder and laid him down.

He was in bad shape—he’d breathed too much of the gas. Coughs wracked his chest, and foam gathered at his mouth. His lips flapped open and shut, as if to speak, but he made no sound.

I found my medicine pouch, undid the drawstring, and produced a vial of clear liquid. Its contents glowed in the city’s fading sunlight.

The other worker crouched next to me. “Will he be all right?” he asked.

“We’ll see,” I said. I brought the vial next to my charge’s face and removed the stopper. Its contents slithered out from the opening like a living thing, the head twisting and turning in the air. Then, as if it sensed its target, it slipped into his mouth and disappeared. A flash of light escaped from between his lips, and a shudder passed through his body. His coughing stopped. He breathed evenly, his eyes closed.

“What is that?” Now the other worker stared at the vial.

“A tool of my profession,” I answered. I stoppered the vial and returned it to my wrap. “We are healers, of sorts.”

The panic of escape faded from the worker’s face, and now he narrowed his eyes. “Healers? Who exactly are you? There weren’t any doctors with us.”

“Perhaps. I’m certainly not with them,” I said. “My name is Gose.”

“What are you wearing?”

“It’s my profession’s traditional clothing. I’m not from Ronemat.”

The worker tensed at my answer. “An off-worlder? We don’t get many of those.”

Because of Ronemat’s anomaly, only those with Fond training could find and enter the city, making me the only “off-worlder” here—but I held that comment. “Is it problematic that I’m from a different planet?”

“Why help us if you’re not from here? You’ve got no stake.”

I remembered my initial hesitation before I’d decided to act, and shame tingled my cheeks. “I wasn’t sure if I would, at first,” I said. I paused to consider the rest of my answer. “In a life before this one, I saw other fights like those, on other worlds. I am in my profession now because I wanted to do right. I couldn’t just watch while they beat you.”

The sleeping man stirred between us, senseless noises escaping his lips. I lowered my head to his chest to check his breathing, and when I raised it again, I found the worker studying me.

“I’m Jean,” he said. He gave me a curt nod. “Thank you.”

We sat in silence for a while. Periodically, I examined my charge’s condition—with the serum’s help, he was recovering. Behind us, the black plume of smoke rose in the air, and we could still hear shouting and screaming.

“That smoke,” I said. “What happened? An accident?”

Jean shook his head. “Not an accident. We said the council’s project could be completed either safely or by their deadline, not both. You can guess what they chose. Their tunnel’s been delayed too much to worry about some blood.”

“A tunnel, under the Arc?’ I asked. “But there’s already a road.”

“They’re going to tear the whole thing down. Put a train underneath. It’s the future of transportation.” Jean spat a globule of saliva directly between his boots. “Haven’t you heard?”

The puzzle clicked into place. I was in the past.

In the Ronemat I’d first visited, the elevated road was long gone, a subway tunnel bored underneath, and a pedestrian walkway laid on top. Now, in this past Ronemat, there were no subway lines, vehicles choked the streets, and the government needed to improve the city’s infrastructure. So they’d begun this massive construction project, cut corners, and…

“How many died?” I asked.

“We don’t know.” My question’s weight settled on Jean’s shoulders, and he slumped. “When we decided to fight, they were still finding bodies. I had to point out my friend this morning.”

“I’m sorry.”

An explosion sounded behind us, muffled by the distance into something gentle.

“I hope to the stars,” he said, “that the council never gets their train. If I’m alive when it’s finished, I’ll bomb it myself.”

If someone could break the anomaly’s hold and walk through the Muhr, they’d enter a Ronemat of the past. What would they find? Different roads, different clothing, different politics, different people, and yet something undeniably familiar. This other Ronemat was no alternate fantasy; everything here had happened, and the anomaly shrouded it, locking it away from the people. How many of them knew, before they had their guilds, of the blood spilled to build their subways?

How was I supposed to unravel this anomaly?

Jean’s eyes focused on me. “Something’s bothering you.”

“I wish I could stop it all,” I said. I shook my head. “The violence. The injustice.”

He snorted. “You’re softer than you seem at first.”

The sky began to darken. A flash of light came from above, and we startled—but it was only a streetlamp, flickering on. After a few seconds, we relaxed.

From my study of my truth-seeds, I understood the connection between anomalies and injustice. They reinforced each other in an endless feedback loop, working in concert to drag planets deeper and deeper into chaos and suffering. My mission was to break this planet’s anomaly before it brought more harm to everyone in Ronemat, but one man’s murder had already distracted me.

The sleeping man groaned, and his eyes fluttered open. “What…”

Jean was at the man’s side at once. “Can you stand?”

“Y-yes. What happened?”

“Time for that later; we’ve stayed here long enough. Up you go, friend.”

They stood together, the man’s arm wrapped around Jean’s shoulders for support. A second later, I stood with them.

“Gose,” Jean said. “Are you coming?”

With my help, they had escaped arrest, but only for now. There was peril and battle ahead of them, and from what I’d seen of the future, they were fated for defeat. Still, I could stay. I could use the gifts of the Fond to fight for justice here.

But the city before me was Ronemat at only one point in its history; this struggle was only one of many. I understood now that Ronemat’s anomaly and its history were intertwined, and in order to destroy the former, I needed to find the complete truth of the latter. To do that, I couldn’t stay here.

“No,” I said. Emotion stirred in my chest, but I stifled it. “I cannot. There’s business I must attend to.”

Jean’s lips twitched. “Off-world business?”

“Something like that.”

Under the starless night sky, the alleyway’s streetlamps, casting their cold electric glow, provided the only light. For a few seconds, neither of us turned to leave. Then Jean nodded at me. “Goodbye, Gose. Thank you.”

He turned and went his way, and I did the same. I left behind me the vehicles crammed nose-to-end in the streets. The Arc crawling across the northern half of the city. The smoke—exhaust, fire, and toxic gas—that hung over it all.

Again, I traversed the Margins and found a gate in the Muhr. I walked through and descended further.

---

The layers continued.

In prisons, the innocent reached with open hands through cell bars. In the bombed rubble of a reformer’s campaign headquarters, spikes of reinforcing steel stuck out of chunks of concrete like arrows piercing a corpse. In the middle of a street, a woman stood as a wall of policemen advanced. She planted her feet firmly in the ground, and she held her chin high. As the policemen swallowed her, the only sound was the rhythmic thump of rubber boots against asphalt. The last I saw of her, she still stood tall.

The layers passed before me like the pages of a flipbook, constantly shifting. As soon as I understood why a change had occurred, the city shifted again, and more questions appeared.

I kept searching. I needed to see enough of Ronemat’s history to understand it as a cohesive whole, its behavior governed by predictable rules. But the only constant in each layer was injustice—Ronemat showed me crime after crime. What did it matter if I stopped in one layer to address the wrongs I found there? I’d only find more in the next one.

And always, the Muhr split the sky. Ronemat’s people accepted that they could never pass it, and they never spoke of the crimes that I found in deeper layers.

I was lost, no closer to destroying the anomaly than before. I reviewed my truth-seeds countless times, reliving the experiences of my betters. Where had I failed to understand the teachings of the Fond? What did I still need to learn?

I didn’t know. I only knew, as I dived deeper into Ronemat, that duty compelled me to continue.

---

Footsteps did not echo in the gates through the Muhr. Vast, empty space muffled the sound, and in the middle of the passage, mist hid both the entrance and exit. Then the air lightened, I left the cavernous gate, and I entered another Ronemat.

As I walked through these Margins, making my way towards the city, an automaton crossed my path. These, like the Margins themselves, never changed. Their form was constant, they all carried the same bins, and their footfalls always kept time to the same beat.

But I noticed a small difference with this automaton: the lid of its bin was askew. Some long, thin object stuck out from inside the bin and prevented the lid from seating properly.

I walked closer to see what the object was, and then I stopped. It was a human arm, dangling from the bin’s lip, swaying in time with the automaton’s footsteps.

The automaton continued its walk. I hurried to follow it.

Soon, other automata broke through the fog, walking in the same direction. I moved in their midst, a lone human in a pack of machines. Sometimes, almost inaudibly high, the chirping from their sonic emitters scratched my eardrums.

Eventually, we came to the automata’s destination: one of the bin piles, where they unloaded their cargo with mechanical precision. The one that I’d first followed did the same, and now a single crooked lid marred the otherwise perfect pile.

I opened the bin with the arm and peered inside. The arm belonged to a gaunt woman with shallow cheekbones, wearing little more than rags. She stared, with open, hollow eyes, at the side of her bin.

Slowly, I reached in and shifted the rags covering her chest aside. Her skin sank into her ribcage, each bone as sharply defined as a picture in perfect focus. She’d starved to death.

I struggled to make sense of it. Hunger had never been widespread in any of the other layers I’d visited. How had this happened?

Around me, the automata continued working, adding their cargo to the pile, which grew, one bin at a time, ever larger. I stood there for a while, listening. One bin, one clank. Another bin, another clank. One after the other. Clank. Clank.

My breath stilled.

I opened the bin to the left of the first one and found another corpse—a skeletal old man. Then the bin to the right—this one a boy, with half his hair fallen out and his fingers interlaced beneath his swollen belly. I moved down the row and opened bin after bin. Most of the bodies I found had succumbed to starvation, but some of the corpses bore festered wounds. Infection had taken these.

I stopped and backed away from the pile. My eyes slid over it from top to bottom, end to end. Its size crushed me.

I ran. The feet pounding against the ground, the breath wheezing in panic and exhaustion—neither felt like they belonged to me. I wasn’t here. I still stood by the mountain of bins, searching for answers. Even as my distance from that pile grew, the smell of death continued to smother my nose. Why did I keep travelling through Ronemat’s layers, only to find more stories of suffering? Why continue, when I never succeeded?

Soon I could run no more. I stood at the cusp of Ronemat proper, the beginnings of the city peeking through the fog, and willed my breath to slow. The haze of the Margins beckoned for me from behind. I didn’t have to enter another of Ronemat’s stories. I could walk back into the gray purgatory of forgotten things and abandon the city to its history.

But I remembered duty and the path of the Fond. I walked forwards.

The further I walked from the Margins, the more the city bloomed. The buildings—short and squat, with none more than a few stories tall—caught my eye with rich facades of vermillion and violet and yellow-gold. Tall wrought-iron lampposts, carrying their lights in nests of ornate filigree, lined the streets; multi-colored ribbons wound up their surfaces like vines and fluttered in the breeze. Families had taken their children out to enjoy frozen desserts together, and groups of schoolgirls in matching skirts walked in tight-knit packs, clutching textbooks to their chests.

It might have been beautiful.

After my experience with the strikers, I preferred to observe a layer from a distance, without immediately involving myself in the city’s stories and conflicts. But here, as soon as I stepped into the street, I found I couldn’t do that.

Everyone—the schoolgirls, the children, the parents, everyone on the street and even people behind storefront windows—stared at me. Even automata, standing motionless by street corners, swiveled their sensor arrays to face me.

A hand fell on my shoulder. “Sir?”

I turned around. The man who had stopped me wore a dark navy uniform, and two others wearing the same uniform stood at his sides. Behind them, people gathered to watch the spectacle and whisper among themselves.

“Can I help you?” I asked.

The men shared a look. “Sir, we need you to come with us.”

I took a step backwards. “Could you explain to me why?”

Another look passed between the men, this one harder than the first. The two on the sides advanced, flanking me. For a moment, I considered resisting. I could easily overpower these three and make my escape, but then what? This Ronemat was completely unfamiliar to me, and I had the attention of everyone on this street. I had nowhere to run.

I let them pull my arms behind my back and bind my hands. A transport vehicle with an open back rolled up to us, and more uniformed men hopped out. Some of them dispersed the crowd with a few short gestures; others dragged me into the rear of the vehicle. After all the men filed back inside, we were away.

They drove me into a camp. They’d cleared an entire city street to erect a long, snaking chain of tents and supply depots. A concrete wall, topped with barbed wire, lined one side of the street. Watchtowers and searchlight posts dotted its length.

My understanding of the scene shifted, and I realized that this was more than a camp. It was an armed border. The city with the schoolgirls and colorful ribbons was on one side, and something else was on the other, where the men in the watchtowers aimed their weapons.

The men drove to a short, long building and brought me to a room inside, lacking any furnishing but a table and two chairs. They unbound my hands after I sat. Then they left, and the lock clicked into place behind them. I could do nothing but wait.

Time passed. Vehicles rumbled outside the building.

A man entered the room. He wore a stiff brown coat with large, rectangular pockets stitched to both breasts—not the sharp, military dress of the men who’d brought me here. His stringy hair parted down the middle, and a bald patch on his crown reflected the room’s single lightbulb. With a loud scraping sound, he pulled out the chair opposite mine and sat.

“Good afternoon. My name is Tristan; I’m a member of the Bureau of Cultural Affairs.” He inclined his head, as if to greet me. “According to a report from the Guard, you do not appear in the city’s database of registered residents and guests. They referred you to the Bureau for registration.”

The automata in this Ronemat, posted at the intersections—they’d scanned me and ran my biometrics against a surveillance database. The city had stuck the mark of an outsider on me the second I’d walked inside.

“All right,” I said. Behind me, I rubbed the chafed skin of my wrists. “I wasn’t aware of a registration requirement. I apologize.”

“In addition,” Tristan said, “the Guard observed that you had difficulty acclimating to Ronemat. We at the Bureau can happily orient you to our city’s unique customs and habits.”

I blinked. “I’m not sure what you mean. Acclimate?”

“Yes, of course. It’s difficult to acclimate to a place without understanding it. Perhaps the registration process will clarify matters.”

First came a dark briefcase that Tristan set on the table with a heavy thud; then came a thick stack of yellow papers from inside the briefcase. After taking a moment to square the edges of the stack, he placed it between us.

I leaned over and examined the papers. The first page asked me for my name, age, sex, height, weight, the color of my hair, eyes, and skin—

I flipped through the stack. The questions in the later pages were fewer in number, but large sections of blank lines followed them. Evidently, the city wanted respondents to elaborate.

How much evidence is required to sustain a belief?

What are the benefits and drawbacks of an unregulated media?

Should society’s protections be extended to everyone, regardless of circumstance?

I pushed the stack back at Tristan. “This is a test, not a registration form. You’re looking for correct answers.”

He tilted his head. “There are no correct answers. We are proud of our diverse viewpoints and cultures in Ronemat. We must understand how our residents differ from one another, so we ask these questions.”

“Diverse viewpoints?” I repeated. For a second, I closed my eyes, and in my mind, the automata added another bin to that pile in the Margins. I lost patience for games. “What’s the purpose of this camp?”

“The Guard is responsible for the city’s security.”

“Why is there a border cutting through Ronemat?” I pointed towards the other side of the border. “Who is there?”

“I don’t understand your concern.”

“I saw them. Bodies in the Margins. Deaths of hunger and illness. What is happening on the other side? Why is your city doing this?”

Tristan held up a hand. “Excuse me,” he said. “You said you saw these bodies in the Margins? That’s impossible.”

Anger and frustration pulsed through my blood, but they were dulled by weariness. The anomaly held him, like all the rest, captive. “That’s not my point.”

“Your claim that you saw these bodies in the Margins is nonsense. Nobody can enter the Margins. You’re deeply mistaken, and in order for you to properly acclimate to Ronemat, we must correct such grievous experiential errors. Without agreement on basic facts, diversity of thought is impossible.”

He reached under the table; I heard him press a button. The Guard filed back into the room and hoisted me from the chair by my armpits. I stared at Tristan. “For this? Claiming that I’ve been inside the Margins is criminal?”

“As I said, serious errors—”

“But it’s true! Even if you say it’s not! Why can’t you see that? Is this city’s delusion so important that it’s worth imprisoning people? Is it worth a human life?”

The people on the other side of the border—the prisoners. They were so many that this Ronemat had transformed an entire section of the city into their prison. What were they guilty of? Perhaps some had committed violence against others, while others had thought without permission. I suspected that for many, it was a combination of both. In a city like this, incorrect thought and violence were the same. One begot the other.

All fight had left my body, and I was limp in the arms of the Guard. Was there anything that I could say that would make them stop the killing? I was a man of the Fond, and above all else, our duty was to truth. But what could I say on truth’s behalf?

And then I realized—even if I could speak for truth, nobody could speak for the dead.

Tristan hadn’t listened to me; he was already halfway done packing his suitcase. He waved a hand at the Guard. “Take him.”

They’d carried me halfway to the door when the explosion hit.

My consciousness refocused in a cloud of smoke and dust. An explosive had struck the side of the building and collapsed it, and now a hole gaped through the wall. Shouts, bangs, and the rattle of weaponry streamed through the new opening. Tristan lay, crumpled, in a corner of the room. Next to me, a navy-coated arm stuck out from under a pile of rubble. It didn’t move.

I staggered outside the building to find the camp engulfed in battle. Guardsmen, weapons strapped to their shoulders, ran past me in the direction of the border. A section of the concrete wall had been blown open, and several watchtowers lay toppled on the ground. Prisoners scrambled over the debris. Distance and haze obscured their faces and forms; they looked like ghosts.

At first, the prisoners seemed to not carry weapons, but then one of them raised their arm. With a subtle, practiced motion, they twirled it once, twice, and I saw that they held a length of rope in their hands. Then they struck—their arm snapped forwards—and a glowing white payload shot out. It whistled through the air, like a high note on a flute. When it hit the side of a tent, it exploded and set the tent to flame.

I ducked behind a toppled vehicle and watched. For all their determination, the prisoners were outmatched. Soon I heard the familiar mechanical sounds of automata. One of them sprayed thick white powder out of its arms to extinguish a fire; another sprinted towards a prisoner, uncaring of the explosions that went off around it, and wrestled them to the ground.

The number of explosions rocking the camp dwindled. The prisoners had run out of explosive ammunition for their slings, but they were still throwing. Instead of producing dramatic balls of fire, there was only the delicate sound of breaking glass, or a small cloud of dust thrown up in the dirt. Something landed next to my foot, and I picked it up. It was only a stone.

They didn’t yell. Even when they died, it was quiet.

I slipped away as the battle ended; the lingering chaos concealed my escape. As I took one final look behind me, I finally recognized the path that the border cut through Ronemat. Where other versions of the city had built elevated roads or train lines, this one had built a wall.

I made my way back to the Muhr, hiding from both automata and people as I went.

I’d wanted to see all of Ronemat’s history. Surely, I’d thought, all the beatings, imprisonments, and killings were only surface disturbances, hiding something deeper. Any one injustice counted for only a small part of a vastly complex picture, which I had dove further and further to understand in its entirety. I’d searched for truth, a steady firmament beneath the waves of change.

But I was wrong. Truth was not a foundation. Truth was a stone, hurled from a sling.

I saw before me, with eyes newly sharpened, the path of the Fond. I made a plan.

It had required a week of rituals to grant me my truth-seeds; I had only dreamed of one day understanding the theory and technique necessary to do it. But I knew, now, that there was a different way. I had everything I needed.

This time, when I walked through the Muhr, I resisted the siren call of history’s infinite layers. Instead, I returned to the time of my own beginning in Ronemat.

---

For the second time, Victoire Morvan cheered during the Guild Day parade. Her headshot featured in the pages of the Automation Guild’s monthly magazine; she’d quickly risen through the ranks of various engineering teams. She heard the same rumors about her brother and Garnier’s son as everyone else, and she was too intelligent to not suspect anything.

But the first time I’d met her and offered her the truth, she’d walked away.

I made my move again. I plucked her from the Guild Day parade and led her to the shade of the garden. She crossed her arms and opened her mouth. What is this—that was her line.

But this time, she said nothing. Perhaps she remembered, however faintly, that we had met in this garden before, on a different version of this day. In the wordless silence between us, only the wind, rustling through the garden’s hedges, spoke.

Finally, I stepped forwards. “My name is Gose,” I said. “I’m a man of the Fond, an organization reaching across worlds. We find planets affected by anomalies—things that distort reality and bring harm to the planet’s people—and destroy them. That’s why I’m here.”

Slowly, Victoire uncrossed her arms. “It would be nice if you were insane,” she said. It was an even, frank admission. “But you don’t seem like you are. Well, then, man of the Fond. What do you want with me?”

“Your help,” I said. “I want justice for Michel. I know that you’re afraid to investigate his disappearance too closely. I’m a stranger to Ronemat, protected from consequence; if we anger the wrong people, you stand to lose much more than I do. So if you’d like to walk away, I understand.”

That familiar fear reappeared in Victoire’s eyes, and she lowered her voice. “If you understand the danger, then why approach me?”

“Because, before you make your decision, I’d like to offer you something,” I said. “You may come to treasure what I give you, but it is not a gift. It has no material worth and grants you no power. Just as you may treasure it, you may also despise it.”

I eased myself down to sit cross-legged in the garden grass. A beetle, disturbed by my landing, took flight and shot across my vision.

“I offer you the truth, as I lived it,” I said. “Do you accept?”

Victoire, still standing, looked down at me. Then, slowly, she also sat in the grass, and with exacting deliberation, she nodded.

So I spoke the truth with righteous purpose. I believed, as the Fond taught, that truth held sacred power, a small amount of which I imbued in every word. I called on that power to help me bring justice for this one woman and her murdered brother. The path of the Fond opened before me; I invoked its magic, and it answered.

As I spoke, sweet fire alighted on my lips, and awe dawned across Victoire’s face. As the truth-seed took root inside her, she saw as I saw, and truth bound our hearts as one.

I spoke of my first day in Ronemat, when I’d passed through the Margins and found Michel’s body, cold and dead inside an automaton’s bin. I told her how I’d investigated the murder for a week, all the while wondering if I’d strayed from my duty in doing so. Her eyes widened when she saw, from my perspective, how I’d met her in this garden.

Before her, the police broke the strikers’ lines so that the Arc subway tunnel, running under our feet, could be built. Countless prisoners, trapped behind an Arc lined with barbed wire and watchtowers, lived out their final days. She witnessed hopeless struggles and the blood spilled by unspoken, forgotten crimes. The city she had known her whole life peeled back its layers before her, blooming like a terrible flower.

After I finished transmitting the truth-seed, we sat in silence. I knew, from my own experience, that the foreign memories implanted by the truth-seed took time to settle. While we sat, still and quiet, the beetle returned to land on my knee. It crawled, resolutely, up my thigh.

“Thank you,” I said, “for accepting my offer.”

Victoire nodded, closed her eyes, and breathed, in and out. When she reopened them, she said, “I want to see my brother.”

We rode the Arc line together in silence, and when the conductor announced the last stop, we disembarked. While she carried my truth-seed, Ronemat’s anomaly could not hold her. We faced no resistance as we walked into the Margins.

The bin that contained Michel’s body sat alone in an empty field, distinguished only by the stack of rocks I had placed next to it. We stood several paces away, and neither of us moved any closer.

“I didn’t know,” she said.

“No.” Behind the bin, the Muhr swallowed the view. We were only two dots at its base. “That is the heart of this planet’s anomaly. Every Ronemat has built a wall between the truth and the lie. Sometimes the city must kill to keep the wall standing, but that is a small price to pay. It is the greatest of Ronemat’s walls—behind it, the truth is a prisoner, and it dies, forgotten.”

Victoire shook her head. “They sent armies and bombed neighborhoods. They erased their enemies’ names from history. Compared to that, what is my brother’s murder? One man’s life?”

“Everything.” My voice shook, and I did not collect myself. I let the waves of rage and sorrow take me under. “It’s everything. Its price is infinite. It alone may tip the scales of justice. It alone guards truth.”

The emotion drained out of me, leaving behind only exhaustion. I had been walking through Ronemat for so long.

“They killed your brother, Victoire,” I said. “It happened. Don’t let them say it didn’t.”

I finally understood. My mission was to destroy Ronemat’s anomaly, but here, having done this one thing, I stood as a man of the Fond.

She stepped towards me and laid a hand on my arm. Her eyes, sharp and focused, did not leave mine. “All right,” she said. “I won’t.”

She gripped the lid of the bin, and with a single push, it clattered to the dirt. And as she looked on her slain brother’s face, she saw the truth.

A low rumble filled the air, and we raised our heads in alarm. The sound came from far in the distance, in the direction of the Muhr.

A sudden wind whipped at our hair and clothes, and the fog between us and the Muhr rolled back. Everything between here and there became clear—the piles of bins, the automata, the paths their feet had beaten into the ground over countless years. As the rumbling grew louder, the automata stopped moving. They turned their sonic detectors back and forth, as if trying to make sense of this new sound.

The rumbling’s vibration rattled my teeth and bones, but I was not afraid. Even as the ground itself began to shake, I clasped my hands at my chest, supplicating myself before this power.

With one final, deafening noise, the rumbling stopped. Victoire and I stared down the corridor of clear air at the Muhr’s face.

Where once it had been flawless, now a crack, wide enough to fit several buildings, split its surface. Sunlight spilled through and further boiled away the fog. In the distance, through the crack, we saw a mountain range. Snow, mottled by rock, covered the peaks.

© 2024 Albert Chu

[Issue 2024.70]

Comment on the stories in this issue on the TFF Press blog.