The Stargazer's War - Chapter 3.18

Chapter 3.18: Not My Problem

“And?”

“And nobody seems to care!  The local sect representative refuses to investigate, and my fellow disciples just continue their sparring as if he’ll return any day now, but he won’t!  Someone’s taken him.  The wards at the entrance to his private quarters were broken, and even though the lock—”

I interrupted him before he could waste any more of my time.  “I meant what do you expect me to do about it?”

“Find him.  Save him!  Master Nguyen would’ve told his trusted disciples had he left of his own volition.  Someone must’ve—”

“I’m a vac welder,” I cut him off for a second time, “not a detective.  I barely even know the city.  You want me to, what, drop everything and go look for clues?  I wouldn’t know where to start.”

I tried to step past him but he followed me.  “Please!  You’re the only hope I have.”

“That’s kind of sad.”  I let out a breath.  “Look, I can’t help you.  Even if I wanted to, I couldn’t, and frankly, I don’t want to.  It’s not my problem.  Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go clock in, coo over holos of my coworker’s new baby, and take one of those shiny new no-ats I’ve been hearing about for a spin.”

I made it a few steps before Buzz called after me.  “I’ll pay you!  I have some credits saved up.  If you could just—”

Don’t get involved, I told myself.  It’s not worth getting involved.

It didn’t work.

“Tell you what,” I gave in.  “I’ll send you my buddy Carlos’s contact into.  He actually knows this place well enough he might be able to find something.  At the very least he probably knows someone more qualified to help you.”

Visible relief fell upon Buzz’s shoulders.  “Thank you!  The hidden master’s magnanimity deserves songs in its honor.”

I blinked at him.  “If you say so.”  With a swipe I forwarded Carlos’s info, mentally praying to the threads this wouldn’t come back to bite me.  I looked back to Buzz.  “Don’t tell anyone you found me here.  The last thing I need is more cultivators bothering me for favors.”

He snapped into a salute.  “Of course, hidden master.  My lips are sealed!”

“Great.  I wash my hands of this.  Go… do whatever it is you do all day.  I have a job to get to.”  I didn’t wait for his reply before turning and stepping into the staging area.  I made a beeline for the already dispersing crowd to find Ursula already putting away her holopad as she moved to suit up.  She flashed me an apologetic grin.

Bill greeted me more boisterously.  “Caliban!  Welcome back!  You have to try driving these new no-ats.  They handle like a dream.  You know, I told Foreman Lou to go with the G-eighteen model, but I’m starting to think he was right about the tri-axel counterweight getting in the way of…”

I smiled and suited up as Bill rambled, taking joy in his excitement at the new vehicles my near-death experience had earned us.  I listened, I chattered back, I got to work, and for a few hours, I didn’t worry about new techniques or cognitohazards or missing cultivators.  I did my job, I did it well, and that was enough.

It was good to be back.

——

“Look, if you didn’t want to come along, nobody’s forcing you,” Micaiah’s exasperation boiled over as the sect archive came into view.

Nolan kept stride with her as they approached the unassuming doorway, tucked away on an out-of-the-way sub level where such pointless things as primary sources and unindexed research wouldn’t distract anyone from their cultivation.  “I didn’t say I didn’t want to come along, I said this is a waste of time.”

“Don’t tell me you’re not a little bit curious,” Micaiah tried.  “The cradle of humanity, lost to phenomena beyond modern understanding… there’s something fundamentally compelling about that, right?”

“So watch a movie about it, or play one of the billion hologames set there.  It’s been there for thousands of years.  You’re not going to find anything new about the MEZ in the sect archive.”

Micaiah swiped her holopad at the entrance terminal.  The door slid open.  “I might find something new to me.  Don’t you want to know what happened?  What went wrong?  The scholarship still can’t agree on whether the extreme concentration of death qi in the sector is the cause or just a byproduct of some other cataclysm.”

“And you think the answer is here?”  Nolan countered as they wove through the stacks to a tucked-away table and sat across from each other.  “All that’s here are old research projects and field reports that weren’t even worth indexing on the localnet.  The personal diary of some two-hundred-years dead copper who blew himself up trying to build a focus out of plutonium isn’t going to reveal the secrets of the universe.”

“It might.”  Micaiah keyed in her holopad to the projector built into the table.  “That’s the thing about insight, it pops up where you least expect it.”

Nolan sat back in his chair.  “Mausoleum had been dead for three thousand years before human settlers came to the Dueling Stars.  Any useful info would’ve in the databases they brought with them, not the junk they tossed in the basement for safekeeping since then.”

“Maybe.  Maybe not.  It’s worth a look, isn't it?  Either way, there’s something… significant about places built to preserve knowledge.  This place is, in a sense, a shrine to the Thread of History.”

“Superstition?  Really?  I thought you were a scientist.”

Micaiah scoffed.  “Find me a scientist who isn’t superstitious and I’ll quit cultivation here and now.  I personally know a chemist who refuses to look at her subpartical position determiner while it’s running, a botanical geneticist who plants his samples exactly four point two inches away from each other, and six archaeologists who won’t touch artifacts with their left hands.  Scientists are people.  They have all the same idiosyncrasies as anyone else.”

“And that’s reason enough to trek all the way out here for, what, the off chance the History Thread looks kindly on you?”

Micaiah shrugged.  “Well, that and as an excuse to get out of the apartment.  Some of us can’t just sit in a room and meditate all day.”

“You’ll never reach the heavens with so little dedication,” Nolan said.

“Who says I’m not dedicated?”

“You’re here, aren't you?  Xavier is honing himself in the dueling arenas.  Charlotte is positioning herself as a promising scion of a great house.  You’re… here, reading through defunct reports from long dead nobodies.”

“You’re here too,” Micaiah pointed out.

“I assumed you came here for a reason.  Clearly your mentor was a cultivator of some success, so it logically followed your Way had some purpose out here.  Apparently I was mistaken.”

“Sorry to disappoint,” Micaiah said without looking away from the holo screen, eyes scanning through an incident report from a beast hunt on Ilirian.  “Turns out there’s more to life than cultivation.”

Nolan scoffed.  “Don’t be absurd.”

“Excuse me?”

“Cultivation is all there is.”  Nolan leaned in, his elbows pressed against the aluminum tabletop.  “Every interaction between two people is fundamentally driven by their relative cultivation.  Every relationship, every business transaction, every political decision, every conversation is a function of the cultivators involved.”

“That’s not true.”

“Sure it is.  Do you think any of you would be here were it not for Charlotte’s prodigious rise to iron?  Do you not realize the protection you enjoy simply in your association with as powerful an entity as Lucy?  Surely your relationship with Caliban couldn’t exist in the same state were you at different stages.”

Micaiah scowled.  As far as Nolan knew, Cal remained a lowly bronze rather than someone pushing towards the edge of titanium.  She could hardly reveal such a secret for the sake of winning an argument.  “I wouldn’t say that.  He was a higher stage than me when we first met.”

“Is that better?” Nolan pressed.  “Can a healthy relationship exist at all with such a blatant power disparity?”

“I don’t see why not.  Look at the great houses.  Practically all the top tier cultivators married people below them.”

A soft laugh escaped Nolan’s lips.  “The next time you see Charlotte, ask her about her parents’ relationship.”

“That’s hardly a good example,” Micaiah said.  “From everything I’ve heard, Jean Jack Velereau is power hungry asshole.”

“Jean Jack Velereau is a paragon of the Dragon’s Right Eye.  He’s devoted his very being to doing anything and everything he can to improve himself and his position.  If he hadn’t so single-mindedly dedicated himself to his own growth, he may not have been able to hold the line against the void beasts all those years ago.”

“Don’t act like he’s making the sect stronger.  He’s cultivating political power more than anything else.  People have died for his schemes.  That’s cultivation resources and training time and thousands of focus room hours gone to waste.”

“All power comes at a cost.  Internal strife keeps us prepared for when the Left Eye moves against us.  Those that die, while tragic, prove in their weakness that they were never worth of sect resources in the first place.  The sect as a whole only gains by ceasing to invest in the sunk cost of their mediocrity.”

Micaiah stared at him.  “I… genuinely don’t know how to respond to that.  If you don’t see the evil in getting people killed for political clout, I don’t think we’re ever going to agree on anything.”

Nolan snorted.  “Oh, get off your pedestal.  Obviously it would be better of nobody died.  That should go without saying.  I’m just explaining why Sect Master Morris allows these schemes to continue.  They bring tangible benefits to the sect.  You can’t save everyone.”

“Does that make it any better?  If this is the system functioning as intended, then it’s not just the system but the intentions that are—”  The sound of an opening door cut Micaiah off.

“We can talk here,” an androgynous voice echoed from the direction of the entrance.  “Nobody ever comes to this place.”

Micaiah raised an eyebrow at Nolan before craning her neck back towards the source of the noise.  Shelves of drives and records and miscellaneous junk blocked her view.

The androgynous voice continued.  “Well?  Did you do it?”

A bass responded, its deep pitch belied by the adolescent bravado.  “Last night.  You’re looking at the Right Eye’s most promising young cultivator.”

Micaiah moved to stand to announce her presence, but Nolan grabbed her arm.  He glared at her and silently shook his head.

“What was it like?”  Awe filled the first voice.

“Intense.”  Micaiah thought she heard a shudder on the man’s breath.  “I’ve never felt anything like it, like a fire was burning my meridians into new shapes.”

“Wow,” the androgyne said.  “Did you… did you have to see them?”

“No, thank the threads.  I heard them, though.  You will too once it’s your turn.  They’re… loud.”  He paused, inhaling deep before letting out a long and slow breath.  “Worth it, though.  I can feel the qi trickling in.  At this rate I’ll make bronze before Hector!”

“I’m so jealous.  You haven’t felt any of the—what-ya-ma-call-em’s, right?”

“Localized qi destabilizations?  Nope.  I feel great!  Powerful.  Like I could take on a void beast horde solo.”

“So cool.  Can you show me?”

“Not here.  Ma would kill me if I got caught sparring outside of dueling ring again.  C’mon.  Let’s go grab one.”

The door to the archives hissed open and shut once more.  Micaiah let out a breath.  Silence greeted her.

Nolan raised his eyebrows.  “Well, that was interesting.  Maybe I was wrong about the archives after all.”

“Any idea who they were?”

He shrugged.  “Not a clue.  I don’t interact much with coppers.”

Micaiah tapped away at her holopad as she spoke.  “And the—uh—whatever it was the guy went through?  Any ideas?”

“Some kind of experimental procedure, I’d guess.  They pop up every once in a while, new ideas on ways to accelerate one’s cultivation.  Sounds like this one works.”

Micaiah read aloud from the info page she’d searched up.  “‘Localized qi destabilizations are a common secondary effect to a number of qi attacks from both humans and spiritual beasts.  They can occur when a technique uses the victim’s own meridians as a vector to attack their core.  There is no known treatment for localized qi destabilizations, as by the time they form, the attack that caused them has already breached the victim’s defenses and ruptured or otherwise damaged their core.’”

“So it’s a risky procedure.”  Nolan sat back nonchalantly.  “I wonder if it only works on coppers.”

Micaiah blinked.  “You can’t seriously be considering…”

“Of course I am.  I’d be a fool not to.  The most promising cultivators receive the most resources.  Advantages compound.  If there’s any method to accelerate my advancement, I have to consider it.”

“Absolutely not.  It looks like localized qi destabilization can cripple you for life even if they don’t kill you outright, not to mention whatever ‘they’ that guy was talking about hearing.  He sounded harrowed.”

“Probably qi beasts who have some special technique the researchers are modifying,” Nolan theorized.  “You said it was qi attacks that normally cause destabilizations.  That’s gotta be their method.”

“So you’re willing to, what, let monsters attack you in the hopes they damage you in just the right way to improve your cultivation?  That’s insane.”

“I doubt it’s that simple,” Nolan countered.  “They clearly thought it was worth pursuing.  If there’s an advantage to be found, they’re probably right.”

“Look, I’m as motivated a cultivator as anyone, but I’ve worked hard for the progress I’ve made.  There’s no way I’d risk it all on some experiment.”

“Then you’ll never succeed as a cultivator.  Risk is necessary for growth.  Fortune favors the bold, and as we all compete for limited resources, those willing to take chances will come out on top.”

“Why does it have to be a competition?  Yes, I get it, everyone’s racing to be as strong as possible as fast as possible, but what’s the rush?  We have here a fairly safe, stable qi supply.  That’s enough to get to tungsten.”

“Power is the rush.”  Nolan gazed directly into her eyes, a sudden intensity to his voice.  “Power is in and of itself the ultimate and only worthwhile pursuit.  Systemic change, social good, development of knowledge, civilization itself is all a byproduct of the decisions made by the powerful.  Whatever you want to achieve, whatever noble cause you want to devote yourself to, is best served by you accumulating as much power as possible.  If you can help ten people a year as a bronze and thirty people as an iron, are you not ethically mandated to pursue advancement above all else?  Your motivations, your goals don’t actually matter.  The means to achieve them is always the same.  More resources, more political connections, more advancements.”

Micaiah sighed.  “I see where you’re coming from.  It’s not an uncommon line of thought, a very sect way of thinking.  I don’t think I can agree, though.”

“Why not?  It’s basic math, isn’t it?”

“Pursuing power now with the intent of wielding it for good in the future… that’s how you get Jean Jack Velereaus.  It’s too easy to justify evil in the present for the nebulous good you might do in the future.”  Micaiah shook her head.  “Good, however you define it, needs to be constant pursuit.  If you set aside your goals for long enough, they tend to stay there.”

Nolan didn’t reply.

Whether he was reconsidering his views or silently dismantling hers or had simply given up on arguing with her, Micaiah didn’t particularly care.  Silence suited her just fine.  

She had research to do, anyway.

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