Peturabo

This was the thirtieth millennium after Jesus died.

Galaxy, Olympia, Lokos, beneath the Prygia Cliffs.

Deep within the dense forest, far from human habitation.

A smooth silver-plated copper plate was placed into a dark box, the dark box was placed into a camera obscura, and the room's lighting was adjusted to the ideal balance of brightness and shadow.

"A long time ago, in Europa on Old Terra, a craftsman invented daguerreotypy..."

Someone muttered quietly to himself as he adjusted the machine.

Within the boundaries framed by this ancient method of photography, an unwilling boy was shoved before the lens, faint anger burning in his ice-blue eyes.

If that fire could break through the shackles of idealism, it would surely ignite the dense, spiky green leaves around him and the fence surrounding the wooden cabin.

"Photography? You won't succeed." The boy ground his teeth.

"Oh." Beyond the camera's frame, a cold male voice spoke at the same time as panels clashed within the camera obscura. "You think I care?"

The boy resolved to resist.

He stepped over the thorny vegetation, his bare feet treading upon gravel and parched earth. His skin had not yet become tough enough to resist injury from the outside world; short grass cut his ankles, but it was not enough to frighten him.

"Damn it." A low mutter.

Another man entered the camera's frame. He was tall and lean, with disheveled black hair. Unlike the loose, brightly colored robes worn by the locals, his black shirt and trousers were tightly bound to his limbs with straps of the same color.

He forcibly slung an arm around the boy's shoulders. Some inexplicable energy restrained the boy's movements.

A string of ice crystals formed across the grass, cold crept up the camera obscura, and the daguerreotype camera began to operate.

"I must record this incomparably important moment, and this camera is the only tool I could construct with my bare hands. A nonhuman boy who fell from the cliffs... For the camera to capture such a wondrous sight is an event rarely seen in centuries."

The man explained coolly. It was difficult to read any useful information from his face.

The boy could not help associating the malicious Maelstrom of Stars watching him from the sky with this nameless man, even though his logic could not form any hypothesis he would be proud to acknowledge as rational.

He forced himself to stop looking at the man's hateful, harsh face and ignored the cold hand on his shoulder.

The lens captured the boy's face again: stubborn, hard, like an unworked lump of ironstone.

"I..." A brief syllable escaped the boy's lips, while pride swallowed the rest of his words.

The man asked, "You don't like it?"

The boy was unwilling to answer. Any question that could expose his weakness made him feel as though a part of him was being forcibly laid bare—the part he hated most.

The corner of the man's mouth briefly lifted, and did not fall again.

The long exposure required by daguerreotypy made him decide to remain still, but that did not stop him from speaking. Saying anything at all was far too easy for him.

"If you cannot answer, I shall assume you like daguerreotypy." A peculiar arrogance lurked in his tone. The boy loathed it.

Arrogance.

The boy chewed over the word with contempt.

He hated this man.

And the only reason he could currently endure his vile conduct was that he could not defeat him by force.

"I still have not received your answer," the man said airily. "What? Did you suddenly stop understanding what I'm saying?"

His tongue suddenly produced a rapid series of soft hisses, mixed with breath that seemed almost caressing. The boy easily recognized it as a more archaic language of this planet, with the same meaning as the previous question.

Before he could take pride in his own knowledge, the man moved on without pause to another language, crisp and quick, filled with countless open vowels, like an iron wire striking a two-pronged tuning fork.

The boy frowned. He understood it, but he did not understand how another person in this world could know such an ancient language—something had to be wrong.

The man's fingers were cold as frozen iron. The boy began to find the scenery around him hateful.

The towering cliffs were hateful, the shrubs and gorse were hateful, and the deep-green olive leaves were hateful beyond measure.

He had not originally disliked the planet he now stood upon. The man had changed that all by himself.

Above them, he ignored the gaze of the Maelstrom of Stars as usual.

A third language followed. Its excessive trills and rising endings made it sound frivolous. Then came a fourth. A fifth.

Enough, the boy thought.

But the man's provocation did not stop.

The knowledge that the man's mouth would look ridiculously blurred in the eventual daguerreotype gave the boy a small measure of self-deceiving comfort.

A sixth language. Older, more complex. It came from another planet humanity had once set foot upon. Even the boy had to dig deep into the lowest layers of his memory to unearth the language's map of knowledge.

The meaning had not changed. Yet the boy could not stop himself from deciphering it anew. He could not admit defeat.

A seventh.

The boy felt the whole world beginning to sway around the hand the man had placed on his shoulder. He wavered, deciphered half the words, and used the rest of the time to tell himself that he was indestructible steel.

An eighth. A tonal language rich in ideograms, where meaning outweighed structure, function words were plentiful, grammar was weak, and logic was loose—of course he understood it, but...

"Enough!" the boy screamed in High Gothic. "What are you trying to prove? What do you want from me?"

Anger broke through everything. He used all his strength in an attempt to break free. As far as he remembered, this was the first time.

Then again, his memories began only thirty minutes ago, when he had been climbing the cliffs and lost his footing because of the laughter of the black-clad man beside him.

After that, the nameless man had brought him before the cabin where he lived alone, far from the distant city-state, separated from the platinum soldiers and bronze gates, parted from the village streams and terraced reservoirs, gazing toward the palace walls' triple ramparts and the triple spires atop its towers—and made him pose here for some damned daguerreotype!

Who was he? How dared he treat me like this!

His response was the man's sudden release of force, followed by a disdainful snort of laughter. "We are finally having a conversation."

Within the frame, the man crossed the grass and extended a hand wrapped in black cloth toward the camera.

The silver plate was removed. Due to the insufficient exposure time and the excessive movement of the photographed subject, every detail upon it was blurred.

Before the boy could mock him, low temperatures swept over the plate. That unknown energy directly carved their portrait into it with supreme precision and astonishing accuracy.

A trace of pleasure crossed the man's face, which meant more provocation to the boy.

"Mm, I think it looks good," he said. "You look like a bad child, but that is no longer my concern. Tell me your name."

"Peturabo," Peturabo said rapidly. "That is my name. I will not change it. I do not know what it means, but I will find out. You cannot change my name."

"What made you think I wanted to change you? Because I dragged you into taking a picture? Oh, perhaps it cannot count as a picture. That is the trouble with landing on such a backward planet and being unable to carve chips by hand. It was a technique a friend invented over thirty thousand years ago. It is good enough that I remember the general idea."

The man's smile rested naturally on his face, softening his cold appraisal.

He raised the engraved silver-plated copper plate in his hand. By then, the boy's name had been etched into its lower-right corner, with a blank space left beside it.

"Peturabo, I am a fair man, so I am going to give you a reward."

I will not accept it. Peturabo thought indignantly. In his imagination, the man had already died ten thousand times in the most agonizing ways, yet in reality, the only resistance he could offer was to refuse a reward.

Just wait. Just wait. He knew that he would grow incredibly fast, that knowledge always surfaced naturally in his mind, that he had been born extraordinary. If the man kept him here, sooner or later he would kill him.

The man held the silver plate flat before his eyes and examined it as he said blandly, "You may name me."

"What?"

"That is the reward I am giving you." The man seemed to consider the silver plate in his hand several degrees more important than observing the boy's resentment and indignation.

Peturabo could barely endure such humiliation. Before considering why the man had no name, he gave an insulting answer.

"Carnass," he cursed. It was the High Gothic term for an organ.

The man laughed in surprise. "I will not accept that. Care to choose another?"

"Mors." Peturabo backed down. He offered another word with an equally inauspicious meaning, though far milder.

The man nodded. "Death?" he repeated in the eighth language he had used earlier, then engraved the word Mors into the blank space on the silver plate.

"Now you may leave, Peturabo." Mors put away the silver plate and turned away coldly.