Free Too Like the Lightning by Ada Palmer Page B

forged Newton’s Principia letter by letter with his own black fingers, or the clerk who brought the coffee to Brill’s circle as the master ranted into the wee hours, with silent Cullen in the corner, already dreaming of her bash’es. In any of these servitudes I would probably have cursed the great works I touched, the great men I called masters, nor would knowing they were great have lessened my suffering one toil-smeared jot. Yet somehow the idea warms me, that, out of every thousand lives of suffering my ancient counterparts endured, one slave was building something that his soul, if it could view all from outside of time, might call Great. It cannot wash away humanity’s great cruelties, but Fate’s cruelties, those, I think, it mitigates a little, and, for me, a little is enough.
    I was scrubbing spilled perfume from Thisbe’s bedroom floor when Carlyle Foster made his timid way back to the Saneer-Weeksbooth bash’house. I watched him through the security system which, for Bridger’s safety, Thisbe let me access. He started toward the little stair to Thisbe’s door again, but the main door opened for him, beckoning him across the walkway to the front hall, dark and empty.
     The words appeared as text in Carlyle’s lenses, and the log of them makes it easy for me to reconstruct the scene.
    The sensayer tiptoed across the walkway and peered into the spartan trophy hall. “Hello?”
    
    â€œMycroft said I’d be back?” Carlyle crept along the empty hall, nervous as a new cat.
    
    Carlyle’s breath caught when he reached the central room where Mukta hung in her place of honor, looking so like the textbooks. Or perhaps it was the two people sprawled on the floor who made him gasp. Both wore time-scuffed bathrobes over body suits of transparent conducting film, tight as a second skin. Thin, molded helmets covered their scalps and ears, and a strip of plastic taut across the eyes kept the real world’s light from interfering with the computer’s. The films over their limbs were pocked by the round red spots of tactile feedback discs, positioned far apart on the less discerning surfaces of shoulders and fleshy thighs, but dense as strawberry seeds on the nerve-packed skin of hands and faces where a millimeter’s difference is perceptible. One of the two snored softly, but the other waved.
    
    Carlyle smiled. “Hello. You must be Member Eureka Weeksbooth?”
     Perhaps Carlyle could see Eureka’s subtle wiggles as they texted, or perhaps he thought he could.
    â€œAnd that’s Member Sidney Koons?” Carlyle gestured to the sleeping one before remembering Eureka could not see.
    
    â€œI have to if I’m going to be your sensayer. My first appointment with you is next Thursday, I believe.”
     Eureka flailed vaguely toward a couch to their left. I will use ‘they’ for Eureka, for there is nothing female about a creature to whom the body is no more than the mind’s imperfect interface, and the sex organ one more convenient place to cluster sensors. Even if Eureka’s robe falls so loose that this guest can see the spiral of peeking pubic hair, Carlyle would feel nothing but awkwardness.
    â€œMy stat trail?” Carlyle scratched his head, his blond hair shining glossy in the light