Chapter 84: Clemency and Fury

Garen did not like “teleporting.”

He must have used it - teleportation - and he had not felt himself die. Many scholars wondered how the Transients could get from one place to another. The technique resembled the theseism of passage into the After: one generated an atom by altering the texture of vacuum fluctuations, an atom copied from the thing one wanted to transport, and one destroyed that atom on the original.

Atom by atom, preserving the physical properties. The copied replica was then “called back” by some hidden physical power, but the destruction of the original was carried out by absorption into the quantum vacuum, and a mysterious balance allowed the body to remain in reality.

This mode of transport, reserved for gods, provoked in him an almost paralyzing anxiety, and Garen found himself reduced to traveling by ships like any mediocre human being, of course pretending it was an act of humility and rapprochement with his peers. If they only knew...

Not only did he struggle to convince himself that the arriving Garen Antor was the same as the one who had departed, even though his continuity of consciousness was evident, but on top of that he had declared war on the Transients. What if they managed to deceive the “mysterious balance” of physics during the generation of his body and he was recalled to oblivion?

After his victory on the Royal Planet, he had made his rounds - on Jerimadeth, where envoys from œcumenical convents had subtly shown him disrespect with their restrained enthusiasm, then on Titus, where the crowd had been far more pleasant. He had read in their minds their boundless devotion, and that had pleased him. Strangely, when he was in a room of the prefectural palace, he felt a great emptiness that he could neither identify nor fill. He could influence his emotions, but a moment’s lapse in concentration and they returned stronger. After a few efforts in that direction, he altered his appearance and, incognito, moved through the crowded streets of the center, then took a train north - the Express of the Stars, which ran at 2,000 kilometers per hour and was so named because it served the ship-engine construction sites.

He pushed on into the evening to Vedrana, the terminus, which was nothing more than a row of prefabricated dwellings along a poorly lit muddy road. He followed a solitary woman who hurried home despite being very drunk, and, offended, sent a perpetual shadow of guilt into her heart. He entered a longhouse and bought himself a dish of soybean sprouts in a spicy tomato sauce, producing a citizen card from fluctuations of the vacuum.

His counter neighbor started talking to him right away. Kristofor, called Kris, lived off his citizen card and small illegal jobs. The card provided food every day, but in the center, he explained, sometimes the longhouse is full or the pantry is empty. Other guys came in: sturdy types who loaded and unloaded goods from the Express of the Stars for a few thalers. Garen showed generosity on tour with thalers produced from vacuum fluctuations - which was no small feat, each thaler being tied to a central database that also had to be altered - and to change from being the king of men, thus became the king of the evening.

Garen had lived the loneliness of a demanding family, of a demanding school, of the knot of viperish politics, the rejection and ostracism of the Lodovico project, the great solitude ... and then the burden of the Aleph. Solitude. He looked at these people whom he judged objectively limited and despicable, but he would have liked to be like them. He loved them, and despised himself so much for that feeling ... between two laughs, he wired a million thalers into each of their bank accounts.