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Fortitude's mother named her during a fad for virtue names; her zerothschool class had two Kindnesses, a Wisdom, a Forgiveness, and an Acceptance.
When she was a little kid, Fortitude played Medical Caravan, the same way that children in a different world played Astronaut. It was the most glamorous job in the world. Traveling to far-off regions of the world, fighting off bandits and angry townsfolk, giving people vaccinations and antibiotics and birth control, saving lives. When adults asked her, Fortitude always said that she wanted to be a doctor in a medical caravan.
Fortitude's aptitude test scores put her in average for Quant and above average for Verbal, which she found intolerable. Doctors didn't have average Quant scores. When other children were outside playing, she sat in her bedroom reviewing flashcards until she could answer them in seconds and working through math problems until she could solve them cold. She would have breakdowns whenever she couldn't understand them, and bit her arm and hated herself because she would never be able to work in a medical caravan, and then she went back to work, tears streaming down her face. When she was nine, she was promoted to the above average Quant class. Her name had been a little bit prophetic.
When Fortitude was thirteen, she attempted suicide by overdose after she failed a test. The test wouldn't have stopped her from being in a medical caravan; the suicide attempt did. People who wound up in the hospital after attempting suicide couldn't become doctors, much less carrying a gun.
When she graduated thirdschool at fourteen, she didn't end up going to fourthschool or taking an apprenticeship. If she wasn't going to be a doctor-- she tearfully told her parents-- she didn't want to do anything else, she was just going to be a factory worker, so there.
(Decisions along these lines are common enough that you can go to fourthschool at any age.)
Fortitude turned out to like factory work: she worked in quality control in a factory that made jellybeans, which was just finicky enough to give her a sense of satisfaction without actually being hard or having a chance of failing. She briefly listened to the fiction podcasts all her coworkers were into, but eventually gravitated to how-to-do-it nonfiction. Her appetite was voracious and indiscriminate: starting a fire without matches; building houses; surviving in the Arctic; creating antibiotics from bread mold; building an electrical generator from scratch. When she dipped into fiction, it was about people lost on remote islands or dropped into preindustrial societies. She tried listening to a podcast about a medical caravan, once; it led to her second suicide attempt.
When she was nineteen, she and her parents agreed she was ready to move out. he left her parents' house and drifted through a couple of bad landladies with housemates she didn't much like. She had her third and fourth suicide attempt, as people did: one after a bad breakup, one when she had a crush on a guy who didn't like her back.
And then, when she was twenty-three, fed up with the latest landlady, Fortitude looked for a new housemate and stumbled across Moderation (Moderation's parents had been trendsetters with the virtue names). Herbs covered the balcony and every available surface with adequate sunlight. The housemates talked about camping, urban exploration, churning their own butter. Moderation served sauteed mushrooms for dinner and warned Fortitude not to eat them because Moderation had picked them in the wilderness herself, and Fortitude had no reason to trust Moderation's mycology expertise.
The mushrooms were the most delicious dish Fortitude had ever eaten.
Fortitude moved in as quickly as possible and fell in the rhythm of their life. She wore clothes that her housemate had sewed. She went to the makerspace where her housemates synthesized industrial chemicals and learned to purify water. She went climbing at the local climbing gym. And, six months later, when her housemates pronounced her ready, she went caving.
Fortitude had never thought of herself as an especially spiritual person before that day. She followed the logos, of course, and went to weekly spiritual direction. But her daily prayers were a rushed five minutes when she remembered them at all, she usually zoned out during rituals, she'd never read a theology or ethics book once it was no longer required, and math to her was a skill and not a devotion.
When she finally pushed through the tiny opening and saw the river flowing underground, for the first time, she understood. When she and her housemates slept in the cave, hands and legs intertwined so they knew each other were there, the splashing of the river and each other's breathing the only sounds. When they sang in the morning, hymns that Fortitude was bored by but that now echoed off the walls with extraordinary meaning. Morning has broken, like the first morning, blackbird has spoken, like the first bird. Praise for their singing, praise for the morning, praise for them springing fresh from the Word..
Fortitude didn't tell her spiritual director before she went caving, for fear that she would be forbidden to do it. She stumbled through an explanation afterward. Some people caved because they wanted to die, she'd met them at the climbing gym, but it wasn't like that for Fortitude. If she let other people judge her, their judgment would be based on social consensus and not wanting to offend. Fortitude wanted to test herself against reality, the ultimate arbiter. She couldn't argue her way out of a cave. Breaking into tears wouldn't move it. Lying down and refusing to do anything would only kill you. She earned her victory on her own merits.
And when she saw the river that only two dozen other humans had seen, she saw the logos Itself.
Her spiritual director listened, told her that there were rules for a reason but if the logos was telling you to do something else then you should break them, and offered her a referral to a spiritual director who specialized in wilderness adventurers.
Wilderness adventurer. It was an odd word for Fortitude to apply to herself, but it sure fit better than factory worker.
When she got time off work, Fortitude went hiking, caving, mountain climbing, foraging. She learned to recognize mushrooms and to build engines and to make every chemical you needed for a basic industrial base. She still didn't go to most of the classes the adultschools offered-- she didn't care to clarify her ethical system and thought that caving was much better than any class for coming to terms with death-- but she got certifications in first aid and CPR and emergency nursing and disaster response. She got a no-nihil-obstat catalog and, thrilled by the sense of the forbidden, ordered some medical textbooks. There was one for people who worked in medical caravans.
It was good for her, she thought. The skills they'd taught in school mattered now. When she practiced radical acceptance or opposite action, it was because if she didn't she would die. And Fortitude didn't want to die. There was so much to live for.
After a while, Fortitude was tired of working in a factory; she could be more than just a pair of hands. She got a job with the transportation system. There was a constant demand to know who might disturb your meditation center, nice restaurant, opera performance, or whatever. The obvious solution that occurred to most businesspeople was to make people show their quiet-car card. Some cities banned the use of quiet-car cards for anything other than determining whether you got to be in the quiet car on the train. Fortitude's city had chosen a different approach of explicitly making the cards a government certification that you could be trusted not to disturb things in general. But that meant that there had to be some approximation of due process. And that meant that they needed reliable, determined people who could keep confidentiality oaths to read everyone's character witness statements and explanations of their previous disturbing behavior.
Fortitude had normally given the one percent required of people in her economic situation, but now she allotted twenty percent of her income to the government, and gave it all to the medical caravans.
She read a medical-caravan memoir, and cried only a little bit.
Fortitude's city had passed a law allowing non-monks on government committees. Fortitude thought that if she did well on her job and kept up with her certifications she could run to be on the disaster preparedness committee.
Her housemate Kahan, whom Fortitude had slept with a couple of times and liked well enough, began shyly bringing up the concept of marriage. (Fortitude had easily discerned marriage when she was fourteen. She was reasonably emotionally stable, she liked kids, she didn't want to do any high-risk professions, and the thought of being a monk made her suicidal.) We can take them camping on school breaks, he said. We can teach them better chemistry than they learn in Quant class, and make sure they know first aid the way they know their hymns.
She said yes.
They would marry in the proper way, with a monk, in front of their families. But as far as Fortitude was concerned, they really married in a cave, in the first cave she had ever been in, when they exchanged vows just the two of them and then made love for the first time without a contraceptive and then she put a hand on her belly and hoped that her child would be conceived there, conceived out of love not just for Kahan but for the world.
And then, the next morning, Fortitude woke up somewhere else.
