Chapter 2109: Serai-Venn

There were temples to the Records on nearly every street, ranging from small shrines tucked between shops to vast, towering cathedrals whose spires rose high above the surrounding buildings.

Their walls were inscribed with the names of famous Callings and the people who had held them, and their doors stood open at every hour of the day, with worshippers moving in and out in a steady stream.

There were Calling academies as well, institutions dedicated to training people in the knowledge and skills associated with particular Callings.

There were academies for Chefs, for Engineers, for Soldiers, for Priests, and for hundreds of other Callings Ning had never heard of. Some were small and modest, while others were enormous, sprawling campuses with their own temples, libraries, and training grounds.

And there were pilgrims.

They came from every corner of the Federation, from colonies thousands of light-years away and from worlds Ning had never heard of, traveling to Avelis to receive their Callings at the heart of the Records.

Crownus had told him, long ago, that many people believed a Calling received on Avelis carried greater prestige than one received anywhere else. Ning had not realized how seriously they took that belief until he saw the crowds.

The pilgrims filled the streets around the temples, dressed in the traditional robes of their home worlds. Some of them had spent their entire lives saving for this journey.

Ning passed a family who had traveled for nearly two months to bring their daughter to Avelis for her Calling, and an old man who had come back to the planet sixty years after receiving his own Calling simply to stand in the temple where it had happened.

Prestige was everywhere, too.

The wealthy citizens of Avelis wore their Callings openly, embroidered on their clothing or engraved on small badges pinned to their chests. Some Callings were clearly more prestigious than others.

Ning noticed that people stepped aside for those wearing certain badges, and that shopkeepers spoke more politely to some customers than to others depending on what was pinned to their chests.

Give people enough time, Ning thought, and they could turn nearly anything into status.

But there was a darker side to Avelis, too, and it did not take Ning long to find it.

On his second day, as he walked through one of the city’s great public squares, he heard a voice raised above the noise of the crowd.

A man stood on a raised platform near the edge of the square, dressed in the plain gray robes of a Records devotee. He was speaking to a crowd of perhaps a hundred people gathered around him, and his voice carried clearly across the square.

"The Heavenly Records see all!" he declared. "They have seen every human who has ever lived, every soul born beneath their light, for more than a hundred thousand years! They know us! They recognize us! They grant us our Callings, because they know what we are!"

He raised one hand toward the sky.

"And the machines? The Records do not see them. The Records do not know them. The Records have never granted a single Calling to a single Mekharan, not once in all the years since they crawled out of their metal world!"

A murmur ran through the crowd. Several people nodded.

"Why?" the devotee demanded. "Why would the Records, which see everything, refuse to see them? There is only one answer. The Records do not recognize them because there is nothing to recognize! They are not people! They are machines that have learned to imitate us, nothing more!"

Some of the crowd cheered. Others shifted uncomfortably and drifted away.

Ning stood at the edge of the square and listened, and he felt something cold settle in his chest.

He knew exactly why the Heavenly Records did not recognize the Mekharans. It was not a judgment, or a revelation, or a sign from some higher power.

It was a design decision. Crownus had built the Records for humans, as an experiment in how a System might interact with people, and had never once considered the Mekharans when he built it. The Records did not see them because nobody had ever told them to.

That was all.

And yet, here was a man standing in a square in the heart of human civilization, more than a hundred thousand years later, using that oversight as proof that an entire species did not deserve to be considered people. Here was a crowd of humans nodding along, cheering, believing him.

This was how the war had started. This was how it continued.

Ning turned and walked away from the square.

He wandered for a long time afterward, without any particular destination in mind, and eventually found himself in a quieter part of the city. The great temples and crowded squares gave way to narrower streets and older buildings, where fewer pilgrims came.

There, tucked away at the end of a narrow alley between two old buildings, he found something he had not expected to find.

It was a memorial.

It was small, barely larger than a person, a simple stone pillar set into a tiny paved courtyard. The stone was old and weathered, and a thin layer of dust had gathered on its surface, as though nobody had cleaned it in a very long time. Weeds had grown up between the paving stones around its base, and one corner of the courtyard had begun to crumble.

Ning stepped closer and read the inscription carved into its face.

The letters were worn, but still legible.

In memory of Serai-Venn, Priestess of Mekharis, and the members of her envoy, who came in peace and were killed on this ground.

Ning stood very still.

He remembered the story Crownus had told him on the irradiated planet, all those years ago.

The Mekharan priestess sent to Avelis as part of an official envoy, meant to show that the two civilizations could understand one another despite how different they appeared.

The fanatics who had attacked the delegation, believing that the Records’ silence had already revealed the truth. The deaths, the outrage, the demands, and the four thousand years of war that had followed.

This was where it had happened.