Rise of the Horde - Chapter 626 - 625

Captain Baldred learned to sleep without waking screaming in exactly the same way that he learned everything difficult in the months following his recovery from the soul-binding: by refusing to accept that the alternative was permanent, and by applying the same stubborn, methodical attention to the problem of his own mind that he had applied to every problem he had faced in thirty years of military service where the problems had mostly been external and visible and could be addressed with formations and tactics and the clear-eyed assessment of terrain.

His mind was harder terrain than any mountain he had navigated.

The nightmares were not about the Tekarr Mountains, though they visited those landscapes with the faithful regularity that trauma established as its preferred schedule. They were not about the dungeon beneath the Arass manor, though that setting appeared with enough frequency that Baldred had memorized its dimensions from the inside, the precise texture of its stone walls, the particular quality of cold that a cellar maintained even when the air above was warm. They were not about Gerber’s purple eyes or Kael’s episodes or the young worker who still stood in a corner of the medical wing waiting for commands that no longer came.

The nightmares were about being almost but not entirely restored. In the dreams, the binding was still present at the level of ninety-nine percent dissolved, the final percentage holding like a hair of iron through soft tissue, pulling him toward compliance on matters he could not identify, shaping responses he could not entirely trust. In the dreams, the certainty of his own will was the one thing that was always just beyond reliable reach, the floor of himself that should have been solid returning the uncertain feeling of something that had been weight-bearing and was now load-tested.

He described this to Sorrel during their weekly sessions. She listened with the particular quality of attention she brought to testimony from her patients, which was neither clinical detachment nor the engaged emotional investment that would have made her useless as an analyst of what she was hearing. She listened like someone who understood that what was being described mattered beyond the descriptive facts and who was trying to understand both the facts and the mattering simultaneously.

“The uncertainty you feel,” she said, “is not residual programming. It is the appropriate response of a consciousness that was violated to the question of whether it can trust its own conclusions. A mind that was compromised and then restored faces a verification problem that minds with no history of compromise do not face. You cannot simply accept your own assessments as reliable because you cannot rule out that the basis of the assessment was shaped by something external to yourself.”

“How does someone live like that?” he asked. The question was not rhetorical. He was asking because she might know.

“The same way everyone lives with any form of uncertainty about the reliability of their own perceptions. Empirically. You test your conclusions against external evidence. You look for the things that would be different if the conclusion were wrong. You develop the habits of epistemological hygiene that distinguish productive doubt from paralytic doubt. And you remember that the doubt itself is not the problem. The doubt is the recovery. A consciousness that questions its own reliability is functioning more correctly, not less, than one that accepts its conclusions without examination.”

“That is a very rational way to describe something that feels like standing on a floor that might give way.”

“Yes,” she agreed. “Recovery is rational in its structure and very much not rational in the experience of it. That is the central difficulty of the field I am inventing from your case and your comrades’ cases and the working hypothesis that people who have been through what you have been through have what they need to recover, provided they receive the support and the time that recovery requires.”

“And if the hypothesis is wrong?”

“Then I revise it. That is what hypotheses are for.” She made a note in the document that was growing on her desk, which was part case record and part textbook in the discipline she was constructing in real time. “You are writing a new kind of literature, Captain, whether you intended to or not. Every conversation we have is material for understanding that did not exist before you and your colleagues came back from wherever the binding took you.”

Baldred sat with this for a moment. The idea that his suffering had utility beyond his own recovery was neither comforting nor uncomfortable. It was simply true, and he had spent enough of his life in the military to understand that the use of difficult things was not a dilution of their difficulty but a reason to have survived them.

His physical recovery had outpaced his psychological one, as the healers had predicted. The inscriptions that Marius had dissolved were scars now, raised pale tissue against his skin that would never fully fade, a permanent topography of what had been done to him. He traced them sometimes in the dark, mapping the geography with his fingertips as if understanding the physical reality of the binding’s inscription would help him understand the less visible impressions it had left elsewhere. It did not help in any way he could measure. He did it anyway, because the body’s attempts to comprehend its own history were not always rational but were consistently human.

He had been given a desk assignment in the Frontier Force’s administrative section, which he was grateful for in the mornings and restless with in the afternoons. The desk required him to apply the intelligence skills that the binding had, in its ghastly way, accidentally refined in him. He understood, from twenty-two years of military service and from the intimate experience of having his own consciousness used as a terrain to be manipulated, how information could be shaped to produce compliance. The dark knowledge was not, as Marius had told him in one of their carefully supervised consultations, contamination. It was knowledge. And knowledge of how systems failed was among the most valuable tools available to someone building systems that needed to resist failure.

He was good at the work. Better than he expected. He wrote intelligence protocols that Colonel Gresham reviewed and approved with the particular quality of attention that characterized his command decisions, which was to say attention that was searching for flaws rather than performing the review as a formality. Gresham found few flaws. The ones he found were genuine and Baldred addressed them with the same methodical precision he brought to his own recovery: one problem at a time, solved to the degree the problem allowed, filed and moved past.

Kael’s recovery was longer and less linear. His timeline had no reliable pattern because the ninety-percent conversion had left cognitive pathways that healed unevenly, progress in one area coexisting with regression in another in a way that defied the straightforward narrative of improvement that recovery ought to have and did not always provide. He had days where his recall of events before the Tekarr expedition was complete and accurate and connected to the present by the normal chains of memory and association. He had other days where the connection between his past and his present felt thin and unreliable, requiring him to verify his own history against the testimony of people who had been there, because his internal record of it was not trustworthy in the way that internal records of one’s own life ought to be.

Sorrel documented everything. Not primarily for Kael’s benefit, though having the documentation helped him on the days when his own record was thin. She documented because the cases of Baldred and Kael and Gerber represented the first surviving data on what it meant to return from soul-binding, and the Order of the Seal’s protective protocols required that data to be useful rather than simply tragic.

Gerber’s situation was the most complex and the most painful to observe for anyone who had known him before. Marius’s restoration had been functional rather than complete, producing a consciousness that was recognizably Gerber’s in its broad structure but unreliable in its particulars, especially those particulars that connected to the period of captivity. He knew his name. He knew his history before the Tekarr expedition. He knew the faces of the people who had gone through the mountains with him and he responded to them with what appeared to be genuine warmth rather than performed recognition. But the months of his captivity were largely absent, replaced by a vague and sourceless sense of wrongness that he had no specific memories to attach it to, making it ungriefable in the way that losses with names and faces and dates can be grieved.

Baldred and Kael had developed an exercise with Sorrel that helped, or that appeared to help measured against the standards available for measuring such things. Each day, one of them would describe to Gerber a memory from the dungeon period. Not the worst memories. Ordinary ones: what they had been given to eat on a given day, what sound the chains made when the temperature changed, what the quality of light was through the cellar’s narrow window on mornings when the sun was actually visible. The accumulation of specific ordinary details gave Gerber’s restored consciousness something to attach the vague wrongness to, giving it edges and a location in time and a name that it could be called by instead of simply endured.

It was uncertain whether this worked in any clinical sense. Sorrel recorded the sessions and analyzed the recordings and noted improvements that might have been genuine progress or might have been the natural tendency of any consciousness to organize itself around the material provided to it. She noted this uncertainty in the documentation with the academic precision she applied to everything and continued the sessions, because the sessions were the best available intervention for the best approximation of the actual problem, and stopping them because they might not work was a worse option than continuing them in case they did.

The young worker from the Tekarr expedition stood in his corner of the medical wing and waited. His name was Halveth. Baldred had told Sorrel this and she had begun using the name in the medical documentation, because the boy deserved to be named and the act of naming him in the record was the minimum form of recognition available to people who had not yet found a way to offer him more.

The investigation into Covenant research records had yielded documents from a Church administrator’s property and from a laboratory in the northern provinces whose practitioners had been conducting binding research under a therapeutic cover. The practitioners were in custody. They were cooperating. What they described about complete conversion was not encouraging in its broad outline and was more nuanced than the broad outline when the details were examined with the focused attention that Marius applied to them over three weeks of careful analysis.

The research suggested that “complete” was less binary than the Arass practice had assumed. There were gradients at the high end of conversion that the crude Arass methodology had collapsed into a single undifferentiated category, and within those gradients there might exist, in theory, techniques finer than anything Marius possessed that could find and amplify the fragments of original consciousness that survived even at near-total conversion.

The techniques were theoretical. The equipment required was specialized. The risk of failure was that Halveth remained exactly as he was. The cost of not attempting was that Halveth remained exactly as he was with certainty.

Baldred wrote the recommendation with the directness that had characterized every report he had written in his military career, and it was perhaps the most important report of his life, which he did not fully appreciate at the time because the most important reports rarely announce themselves as such at the moment of composition.

“Attempt the technique,” he wrote. “The mathematics of the situation are unambiguous. One option guarantees the current outcome. The other offers a possibility of a different one. In any situation where certainty of a bad outcome and possibility of a better one are the choices available, the ethical selection is possibility. I am aware that this argument could be used to justify reckless intervention in situations where greater caution is warranted. This situation is not one of those. Halveth survived the Tekarr Mountains, the dungeon, and the complete application of the soul-binding process, which is to say he has demonstrated a tendency toward survival that ought to be honored rather than accepted as having reached its limit.”

Sorrel added her endorsement. Marius read the document in his supervised workshop and was silent for long enough that his guard handler noted the length of the silence in the security log. Then he wrote: “If we attempt this and it fails, it is on me. I built the technique. I will conduct the attempt. I accept responsibility for both outcomes.”

Aliyah approved the attempt from the Tekarr arch with the administrative directness that characterized all her command decisions, and then added a line that was not administrative language at all: “Do not give up on him. The mountains should not be the last thing he survived.”

The attempt was scheduled. The equipment was built. The practitioners were assembled. Sorrel cleared the medical wing’s controlled chamber and prepared her diagnostic instruments with the focused preparation of someone who had been told that what she was about to observe had never been observed before and who intended to observe it with sufficient precision that it would not need to be repeated to be understood.

On the afternoon before the attempt, Baldred sat with Halveth in the medical wing’s common room. He did not speak. He did not know if the boy could hear him or register his presence as anything more than another warm object in the room. He sat there because sitting there was what felt right, and feeling had been one of the things the binding had tried to take from him and that he had been slowly, deliberately reclaiming in the months since Marius had handed it back.

The light moved. The afternoon advanced. The sounds of the capital pressed warmly through the glass of the tall windows, each ordinary sound an ordinary proof that the world continued to be inhabited by people going about the business of living, which was perhaps the most extraordinary and underappreciated fact available to anyone who had recently witnessed what the alternative looked like.

Halveth stood in his corner and waited for commands that did not come.

Tomorrow, Marius would try to give him back the capacity to wait for something else.

The sessions with Sorrel continued twice weekly through the spring and into the summer, their structure evolving as Baldred’s recovery progressed from the acute phase where the primary work was establishing that recovery was happening into the longer-term phase where the work was understanding what it meant to be a person who had been through this specific experience and was now expected to continue as a person. The distinction between the phases was not clean. Recovery did not operate with neat boundaries. But the shift in the texture of the sessions was real, conversations moving from the documentation of symptoms and responses to the more difficult territory of what a person did with the experience once the acute crisis had passed.

He talked about the decision-making in the Tekarr Mountains. Not the tactical decisions, which he had reviewed many times with Gresham in the context of the Frontier Force’s intelligence protocols and which he could discuss with professional detachment that made them useful for planning. He talked about the personal decisions, the moments when he had chosen to keep going when stopping had been available as an option, and whether those choices had been expressions of genuine will or whether, looking back at them from the other side of the soul-binding, they had been the kind of choice a person makes when circumstances narrow the options until what appears to be a choice is actually just the thing that remains when everything else has been removed.

Sorrel listened with the careful attention she brought to everything Baldred said and then asked a question she had been holding for three sessions while she determined whether the moment had arrived. The question was: when you look at those choices now, does the answer to whether they were genuinely free matter to how you value them? He could not answer in that session. He thought about it for four days and returned to the next with an answer he recognized was imperfect but was what he actually believed rather than what he thought he should believe. The answer was yes. The answer to whether the choices were free mattered to him because the choices were one of the things he still had from before the binding, one of the things he was certain of, and if they were not what they had felt like at the time, then they were part of a record of himself that was less reliable than he needed it to be.

Sorrel wrote this down and said it was a reasonable thing to need. Then she asked the follow-up question the answer made available: and if you cannot be certain, one way or the other, what do you do with the uncertainty? He had known the answer to that one immediately because it was the same answer he had been living for months and that had not changed just because the stakes of the question shifted. You keep moving. You act on the best available information, which includes the information about yourself that you can access with honesty, and you do not confuse the absence of certainty with the absence of knowledge. Imperfect information, as anyone who had ever commanded in the field understood, was the only kind available. The field did not wait for certainty. Neither did recovery.

The question about Halveth occupied a separate corner of his attention, present but not consuming, held at the distance that Sorrel had suggested was appropriate. He had written the recommendation for the restoration attempt with complete conviction and then had spent the days before the attempt practicing not thinking about it in ways that were not actually not-thinking about it but were a reasonable approximation. The night before the attempt, he had slept without nightmares for the first time in six weeks, which either meant that his unconscious had resolved something he was not aware of having resolved, or that exhaustion had finally produced the kind of sleep that consciousness was too tired to disturb. He had decided it did not matter which, because the sleep itself was the important thing regardless of its mechanism.