The year: Unknown, but sooner than you'd like.
Welcome to the Citadel. A young man, a survivor of a special ordeal with a special purpose, waits for visitors from the villages in the valley below. He remembers his former kidnappers and the terror they set on both his sister and himself.
He's not waiting to judge them - though he now has the power to do so.
He's waiting to accept their strange gifts - and give strange gifts in return, in a ritual that has existed for many years.
His name is Cain. This is about his redemption as much as anyone else's.
To the barbarians outside, it was all the same when one passed the Perimeter. First, the wind and dust would seemingly kick up, forming a wall of black hissing cutting fog – this was the diamond-edged graphite matrix of the Perimeter. Then the diamondoid nanobots would accelerate to high speed; only the briefest pulse of this terrible power was sufficient to vaporize a large man.
Prolonged testing of the barrier would prompt the Perimeter to accelerate to hypersonic velocities, generating heat sufficient to melt rock. Outside the perimeter was a ring of fused glass, half a kilometer wide.
In the event intruders came with countermeasures - occasionally the Highwaymen had found leftover hovertanks and simpler tracked troop carriers from the old wars – the Perimeter could lance out with portions of itself across very large distances.
The Highwaymen had eventually resorted to talking and trade with the Citadel.
The Offertory was the result of those arrangements.
This year’s Spring Solstice, the Day of Offering, I waited on the inside of the Perimeter to play my part in the Offertory Ritual. This year, as every other before for half a century, the Highwaymen would approach very carefully, singing loudly and badly their supplications to the demon cyclone that took friend and stranger alike - either to die instantly, or just to take away. This is how it seemed to them.
The Perimeter raises up to a fresh breeze, its standby mode. A thin shadow fell across the setting sun in the west behind the approaching column of ground cars. There was plenty of energy – most cars had functioned on multiple sources by the Collapse, and there were now so few people left anywhere on Earth. What we do here is our small contribution to making the world a home again.
They know of us in the Citadel as the Blessed. They can see us from afar, when we venture out to tend to our own observation instruments, or sight the stars and still-extant space habitats, Citadels dying in their own sad lonely fashion, unable to help us – we unable to help them – save through consolation and the occasionally useful counsel.
“Hail, Blessed!” the Highwayman chieftain, Grail, calls out. It is at once name and title.
“Hail, Enduring!” I reply, a kind word I grated at using. Yet, long before I had arrived, the Citadel had worked out a dialogue; so few of us could venture out of the Perimeter. Most of those who can leave, like those who can enter the Perimeter whole, do not come back.
Those of us who remember the life before – I am one such person, another is my sister - do not remember that life fondly.
A desire to lure this entire Highwayman band to their instant death fills me.
Peace, A voice chastises me; it is that of my sister, Aria, in the Citadel. She observes through my eyes, my senses. It is a mechanical rapport; a counterfeit telepathy. We are past vengeance. And we need this relationship with the Highwaymen to survive.
She is correct, of course, and I calm myself down.
The Grail is dressed in simple rough cloth but in a style that the Americans who once ruled this land would recognize as poor but kindred – boots, jeans, plaid homespun. He even had a gun holster and a pistol for it – useless against the Perimeter – and the remote defenses inside, should the chieftain ever cross it successfully – but perfectly useful in the wilderness beyond.
“We bring fifteen supplicants to the Citadel, Cain, once of us!” he says my name among his tribe.
“You recognize me.” The Highwaymen ceremonially ‘adopted’ their kidnaps, gave them names – often ominous and Biblical ones, perhaps to weigh the judgment of the Perimeter against strangers . They did this because for every two outsiders that they offered, they would offer one of their own people as well.
"I do. How is your sister?" I can see the flash of a smile. "I remember her."
Peace, brother! Aria reminds me.
"She is Blessed... come see for yourself, Great Grail!" Please accept the temptation, I pray.
Cain! Aria scolds.
“We bring fifteen supplicants to the Citadel!" the Grail repeats. He will not take the bait.
“Ten from the Beyond, and Five from the Hearth?” I ask formally.
“Ten from the Beyond, Five from the Hearth,” the Grail replies in unison with his chieftains.
Do we have enough supplies in trade for such a bounty? Aria worries.
We do, I answer her mentally.
This was our own shame in this charade. However many people were offered, we would compensate – and only on this one day. The Grails – for “Grail” was a title more than a personal name, in truth – were hard bargainers, this one no different from the one he had replaced. We gave supplies – like a real-life Zardoz to our own Exterminators – only the Grails traded nothing but candidates for the grain and cheap manufacturing printers we gave them. We needed nothing in the way of materials from them – only intelligence on the world around, perhaps some simple security (to keep the Perimeter from killing much more ignorant newcomers wholesale). In truth, the trade gave the Highwaymen sufficient strength to keep their position as our self-appointed priests. They in turn traded some of the offerings they received from us.
And we replenished our numbers… and those of the Highwaymen, too, after a fashion.
There is talking in the reduced language of the Highwaymen, what some of the Citadel disparagingly call “E Pleb Neesta Speak”. However, these are not the Yangs from the Star Trek Apocrypha, though they and we were survivors of a plague war.
We are doing better at coexisting, though at a needful distance. The problem is we are succeeding too well at replenishing out numbers. We need the supplies more and more each year; there is less margin to spare. The Highwaymen are, thanks to us, regaining fertility and they need the supplies more that we give in trade. With more of their own to spare, and more need, they risk more to gain stranger-supplicants through kidnapping and, yes, rapine (we can tell this is done, though my sister and I knew before we came to this place).
“Will the Blessed share, as they have, to the number of fifteen?” the Grail asks.
I look down at a notepad, one of the few such surviving relics. “We shall share to the number of fifteen.” I turn and raise my right hand to signal.
Out they come, five fertile restorations, people whose patterns had been absorbed by the Perimeter but were now, after several years of gestation, ready to return home. Their minds are erased; they are like the gholas of the Dune myth – nothing but shadows and spots of color remain of their former lives. They have been reeducated over years as part of the gestation process, both in civilized ways and to prepare them for the life to which they will eventually return.
However, they are synths - synthetics, made from scratch, optimized in every particular – not by us, but by the Perimeter’s infrastructure, carved by its guiding intelligence out of the bedrock of the Citadel Mesa itself.
The Perimeter stored all patterns and, given time, would return everyone that it claimed, better than before. However, there is a price to pay to do so; the gestation process requires an equal amount of biomass, a price we are not prepared to pay with our own flesh and blood.
I look at the five Redeemed, as the Highwaymen called them, dressed in white robes as I am, but bedrolls containing the clothing and accessories of Highwayman life. They would relearn it – learn it with their hands and pain as well as from holographic simulations – and they would go one to reacquaint with people they would have to know and love anew, who would – some – not wish to renew this life. Many would have moved on in their lives.
One of the older men in the group, though reduced in biological age to thirty years, had been in gestation for twenty years. His wife had passed on. His son… this was going to be interesting.
Each of The Five, as I think of them, has with them on a hand-pulled floater cart twice their mass in trade goods – it is sufficient volume to compensate the Highwaymen for their supplicants.
After all, as I now knew, everyone is saved.
Yes, we all are, Cain, Aria says from her place in the mountain.
She had been fertile, too, and had made it across the Perimeter. However, the rape of the Highwaymen had destroyed her; she had lingered but even with the advanced trauma care of the Citadel, she had perished.
And the Citadel people had said – it will fine. You will see.
For inside the moutain, every thought and feeling could be recorded. The Perimeter recorded only the flesh; the Citadel recorded souls.
Aria’s voice was real. She would one day have a newer, better fertile body again to go with her now-untroubled mind.
“I envy you,” I say.
“You envy me?” the former Grail, father of the current Grail, asks me.
I smile and pat his shoulder. “All of you.”
The man frowns and shakes his furrowed brow slightly. “You are Blessed; you can cross with us, if you wish.”
“I will… when my sister is ready as you are today.”
The man nods. “Family is important… “ he gazes through the darkening Perimeter; it is absorbing some of the supplicants, allowing others – terrified at the disappearance of friends and loved ones around them. – through. Others of the Citadel, safely fertile, are nearby to lead them to their new lives.
“How... many... pass?” the Grail beyond the Perimeter shouts, barely discernable over the roar of the Perimeter.
“All!” I cry back. And it is the truth. All are saved, in their way, in their time.
“That voice…” Something familiar about it.
“It is your son,” I answer his unspoken question. “Do you wish to announce yourself?”
The man shakes his head. “No. I am told it would only hurt and confuse him.” He pauses. “I am going to forget this place, aren’t I?”
I nod. “You will retain much of the knowledge, but specifics about us –the people, the workings of the Citadel – the moment you pass the Perimeter, that knowledge will pass from you.” I add. “The Highwaymen know not to ask. It is for their safety as much as ours.” Which was true; if their enemies knew they had special knowledge, they would unite and tear the information from them. We would be unable to do a thing to help them.
What I would give to give them such a deadly prize, my anger says. I recall Aria’s earlier words, and fight down the wrath.
“Come forth, Redeemed!” the chieftain cries out.
“Farewell, Cain,” the man said, and walked promptly through the Perimeter. The others followed, leaving their own Citadel minders standing with me.
They passed out of sight; the Perimeter was in full defensive mode, darkening out the western sky. Gradually the cheers of the Highwaymen outside faded and the motor column returned down the well-maintained road to their villages in the valley below.
One tin soldier rides away… Aria sings in my head. I smile at the lyrics. I know the song. Yet this story, so far, continues better than that song. The village people cannot take our buried treasure – for we give it freely to them. And by doing so here, and there, we will slowly redeem us all.
One by one, in the time and way to which each of us are suited.
I watch the Perimeter power down, and the last limb of the sunset vanish off the purpling clouds high beyond the western horizon. I watch a space habitat in high orbit slowly climb from the west; another seemingly chases it.
I think of the isolated people up there. One by one, I remember the redemption mantra. One by one.