The Stone Sky

by N. K. Jemisin

  It only now occurs to me that Stahnyn thinks I mean to run away.

  It only now occurs to me to run away.

  What the conductor has just told me isn’t an insurmountable hurdle. Easy enough to steal food to take with me, though I would die when it ran out. My life would be short regardless. But the thing that truly troubles me is that I have nowhere to go. All the world is Syl Anagist.

  “The garden,” I repeat, at last. This will be my grand adventure, my escape. I consider laughing, but the habit of appearing emotionless keeps me from doing so. I don’t really want to go anywhere, to be honest. I just want to feel like I have some control over my life, if only for a few moments. “I want to see the garden for five minutes. That’s all.”

  Stahnyn shifts from foot to foot, visibly miserable. “I could lose my position for this, especially if any of the senior conductors see. I could be imprisoned.”

  “Perhaps they will give you a nice window overlooking a garden,” I suggest. She winces.

  And then, because I have left her no choice, she leads me out of my cell and downstairs, and outside.

  The garden of purple flowers looks strange from this angle, I find, and it is an altogether different thing to smell the star-flowers up close. They smell strange—oddly sweet, almost sugary, with a hint of fermentation underneath where some of the older flowers have wilted or been crushed. Stahnyn is fidgety, looking around too much, while I stroll slowly, wishing I did not need her beside me. But this is fact: I cannot simply wander the grounds of the compound alone. If guards or attendants or other conductors see us, they will think Stahnyn is on official business, and not question me … if she will only be still.

  But then I stop abruptly, behind a lilting spider tree. Stahnyn stops as well, frowning and plainly wondering what’s happening—and then she, too, sees what I have seen, and freezes.

  Up ahead, Kelenli has come out of the compound to stand between two curling bushes, beneath a white rose arch. Conductor Gallat has followed her out. She stands with her arms folded. He’s behind her, shouting at her back. We aren’t close enough for me to hear what he’s saying, though his angry tone is indisputable. Their bodies, however, are a story as clear as strata.

  “Oh, no,” mutters Stahnyn. “No, no, no. We should—”

  “Still,” I murmur. I mean to say be still, but she quiets anyway, so at least I got the point across.

  And then we stand there, watching Gallat and Kelenli fight. I can’t hear her voice at all, and it occurs to me that she cannot raise her voice to him; it isn’t safe. But when he grabs her arm and yanks her around to face him, she automatically claps a hand over her belly. The hand on the belly is a quick thing. Gallat lets go at once, seemingly surprised by her reaction and his own violence, and she moves the hand smoothly back to her side. I don’t think he noticed. They resume arguing, and this time Gallat spreads his hands as if offering something. There is pleading in his posture, but I notice how stiff his back is. He begs—but he thinks he shouldn’t have to. I can tell that when begging fails, he will resort to other tactics.

  I close my eyes, aching as I finally, finally, understand. Kelenli is one of us in every way that matters, and she always has been.

  Slowly, though, she unbends. Ducks her head, pretends reluctant capitulation, says something back. It isn’t real. The earth reverberates with her anger and fear and unwillingness. Still, some of the stiffness goes out of Gallat’s back. He smiles, gestures more broadly. Comes back to her, takes her by the arms, speaks to her gently. I marvel that she has disarmed his anger so effectively. It’s as if he doesn’t see the way her eyes drift away while he’s talking, or how she does not reciprocate when he pulls her closer. She smiles at something he says, but even from fifty feet away I can see that it is a performance. Surely he can see it, too? But I am also beginning to understand that people believe what they want to believe, not what is actually there to be seen and touched and sessed.

  So, mollified, he turns to leave—thankfully via a different path out of the garden than the one Stahnyn and I currently lurk upon. His posture has changed completely; he’s visibly in a better mood. I should be glad for that, shouldn’t I? Gallat heads the project. When he’s happy, we are all safer.

  Kelenli stands gazing after him until he is gone. Then her head turns and she looks right at me. Stahnyn makes a choked sound beside me, but she is a fool. Of course Kelenli will not report us. Why would she? Her performance was never for Gallat.

  Then she, too, leaves the garden, following Gallat.

  It was a last lesson. The one I needed most, I think. I tell Stahnyn to take me back to my cell, and she practically moans with relief. When I’m back and I have unwoven the magics of the monitoring equipment, and sent Stahnyn on her way with a gentle reminder not to be a fool, I lie down on my couch to ponder this new knowledge. It sits in me, an ember causing everything around it to smolder and smoke.

  And then, several nights after we return from Kelenli’s tuning mission, the ember catches fire in all of us.

  It is the first time that all of us have come together since the trip. We entwine our presences in a layer of cold coal, which is perhaps fitting as Remwha sends a hiss through all of us like sand grinding amid cracks. It’s the sound/feel/sess of the sinklines, the briar patch. It’s also an echo of the static emptiness in our network where Tetlewha—and Entiwha, and Arwha, and all the others—once existed.

  This is what awaits us when we have given them Geoarcanity, he says.

  Gaewha replies, Yes.

  He hisses again. I have never sessed him so angry. He has spent the days since our trip getting angrier and angrier. But then, so have the rest of us—and now it’s time for us to demand the impossible. We should give them nothing, he declares, and then I feel his resolve sharpen, turn vicious. No. We should give back what they have taken.

  Eerie minor-note pulses of impression and action ripple through our network: a plan, at last. A way to create the impossible, if we cannot demand it. The right sort of power surge at just the right moment, after the fragments have been launched but before the Engine has been spent. All the magic stored within the fragments—decades’ worth, a civilization’s worth, millions of lives’ worth—will flood back into the systems of Syl Anagist. First it will burn out the briar patches and their pitiful crop, letting the dead rest at last. Next the magic will blast through us, the most fragile components of the great machine. We’ll die when that happens, but death is better than what they intended for us, so we are content.

  Once we’re dead, the Plutonic Engine’s magic will surge unrestricted down all the conduits of the city, frying them beyond repair. Every node of Syl Anagist will shut down—vehimals dying unless they have backup generators, lights going dark, machinery stilling, all the infinite conveniences of modern magestry erased from furnishings and appliances and cosmetics. Generations of effort spent preparing for Geoarcanity will be lost. The Engine’s crystalline fragments will become so many oversized rocks, broken and burnt and powerless.

  We need not be as cruel as they. We can instruct the fragments to come down away from the most inhabited areas. We are the monsters they created, and more, but we will be the sort of monsters we wish to be, in death.

  And are we agreed, then?

  Yes. Remwha, furious.

  Yes. Gaewha, sorrowful.

  Yes. Bimniwha, resigned.

  Yes. Salewha, righteous.

  Yes. Dushwha, weary.

  And I, heavy as lead, say, Yes.

  So we are agreed.

  Only to myself do I think, No, with Kelenli’s face in my mind’s eye. But sometimes, when the world is hard, love must be harder still.

  Launch Day.

  We are brought nourishment—protein with a side of fresh sweet fruit, and a drink that we are told is a popular delicacy: sef, which turns pretty colors when various vitamin supplements are added to it. A special drink for a special day. It’s chalky. I don’t like it. Then it is time to travel to Zero
Site.

  Here is how the Plutonic Engine works, briefly and simply.

  First we will awaken the fragments, which have sat in their sockets for decades channeling life-energy through each node of Syl Anagist—and storing some of it for later use, including that which was force-fed to them through the briar patches. They have now reached optimum storage and generation, however, each becoming a self-contained arcane engine of its own. Now when we summon them, the fragments will rise from their sockets. We’ll join their power together in a stable network and, after bouncing it off a reflector that will amplify and concentrate the magic still further, pour this into the onyx. The onyx will direct this energy straight into the Earth’s core, causing an overflow—which the onyx will then shunt into Syl Anagist’s hungry conduits. In effect, the Earth will become a massive plutonic engine too, the dynamo that is its core churning forth far more magic than is put into it. From there, the system will become self-perpetuating. Syl Anagist will feed upon the life of the planet itself, forever.

  (Ignorance is an inaccurate term for what this was. True, no one thought of the Earth as alive in those days—but we should have guessed. Magic is the by-product of life. That there was magic in the Earth to take … We should all have guessed.)

  Everything we have done, up to now, has been practice. We could never have activated the full Plutonic Engine here on Earth—too many complications involving the obliqueness of angles, signal speed and resistance, the curvature of the hemisphere. So awkwardly round, planets. Our target is the Earth, after all; lines of sight, lines of force and attraction. If we stay on the planet, all we can really affect is the Moon.

  Which is why Zero Site has never been on Earth.

  Thus in the small hours of the morning we are brought to a singular sort of vehimal, doubtless genegineered from grasshopper stock or something similar. It is diamond-winged but also has great carbon-fiber legs, steaming now with coiled, stored power. As the conductors usher us aboard this vehimal, I see other vehimals being made ready. A large party means to come with us to watch the great project conclude at last. I sit where I am told, and all of us are strapped in because the vehimal’s thrust can sometimes overcome geomagestric inertial … Hmm. Suffice it to say, the launch can be somewhat alarming. It is nothing compared to plunging into the heart of a living, churning fragment, but I suppose the humans think it a grand, wild thing. The six of us sit, still and cold with purpose as they chatter around us, while the vehimal leaps up to the Moon.

  On the Moon is the moonstone—a massive, iridescent white cabochon embedded in the thin gray soil of the place. It is the largest of the fragments, fully as big as a node of Syl Anagist itself; the whole of the Moon is its socket. Arranged around its edges sits a complex of buildings, each sealed against the airless dark, which are not so very different from the buildings we just left. They’re just on the Moon. This is Zero Site, where history will be made.

  We are led inside, where permanent Zero Site staff line the halls and stare at us in proud admiration, as one admires precision-made instruments. We are led to cradles that look precisely like the cradles used every day for our practices—although this time, each of us is taken to a separate room of the compound. Adjoining each room is the conductors’ observation chamber, connected via a clear crystal window. I’m used to being observed while I work—but not used to being brought into the observation room itself, as happens today for the very first time.

  There I stand, short and plainly dressed and palpably uncomfortable amid tall people in rich, complex clothing, while Gallat introduces me as “Houwha, our finest tuner.” This statement alone proves that either the conductors really have no clue how we function, or that Gallat is nervous and groping for something to say. Perhaps both. Dushwha laughs a cascading microshake—the Moon’s strata are thin and dusty and dead, but not much different from the Earth’s—while I stand there and mouth pleasant greetings, as I am expected to do. Maybe that’s what Gallat really means: I’m the tuner who is best at pretending that he cares about conductor nonsense.

  Something catches my attention, though, as the introductions are made and small talk is exchanged and I concentrate on saying correct things at correct times. I turn and notice a stasis column near the back of the room, humming faintly and flickering with its own plutonic energies, generating the field that keeps something within stable. And floating above its cut-crystal surface—

  There is a woman in the room who is taller and more elaborately dressed than everyone else. She follows my gaze and says to Gallat, “Do they know about the test bore?”

  Gallat twitches and looks at me, then at the stasis column. “No,” he says. He doesn’t name the woman or give her a title, but his tone is very respectful. “They’ve been told only what’s necessary.”

  “I would think context is necessary, even with your kind.” Gallat bristles at being lumped in with us, but he says nothing in response to it. The woman looks amused. She bends down to peer into my face, although I’m not that much shorter than her. “Would you like to know what that artifact is, little tuner?”

  I immediately hate her. “Yes, please,” I say.

  She takes my hand before Gallat can stop her. It isn’t uncomfortable. Her skin is dry. She leads me over near the stasis column, so that I can now get a good look at the thing that floats above it.

  At first I think that what I’m seeing is nothing more than a spherical lump of iron, hovering a few inches above the stasis column’s surface and underlit by its white glow. It is only a lump of iron, its surface crazed with slanting, circuitous lines. A meteor fragment? No. I realize the sphere is moving—spinning slowly on a slightly tilted north-south axis. I look at the warning symbols around the column’s rim and see markers for extreme heat and pressure, and a caution against breaching the stasis field. Within, the markers say, it has re-created the object’s native environment.

  No one would do this for a mere lump of iron. I blink, adjust my perception to the sesunal and magical, and draw back quickly as searing white light blazes at and through me. The iron sphere is full of magic—concentrated, crackling, overlapping threads upon threads of it, some of them even extending beyond its surface and outward and … away. I can’t follow the ones that whitter away beyond the room; they extend beyond my reach. I can see that they stretch off toward the sky, though, for some reason. And written in the jittering threads that I can see … I frown.

  “It’s angry,” I say. And familiar. Where have I seen something like this, this magic, before?

  The woman blinks at me. Gallat groans under his breath. “Houwha—”

  “No,” the woman says, holding up a hand to quell him. She focuses on me again with a gaze that is intent now, and curious. “What did you say, little tuner?”

  I face her. She is obviously important. Perhaps I should be afraid, but I’m not. “That thing is angry,” I say. “Furious. It doesn’t want to be here. You took it from somewhere else, didn’t you?”

  Others in the room have noticed this exchange. Not all of them are conductors, but all of them look at the woman and me in palpable unease and confusion. I hear Gallat holding his breath.

  “Yes,” she says to me, finally. “We drilled a test bore at one of the Antarctic nodes. Then we sent in probes that took this from the innermost core. It’s a sample of the world’s own heart.” She smiles, proud. “The richness of magic at the core is precisely what will enable Geoarcanity. That test is why we built Corepoint, and the fragments, and you.”

  I look at the iron sphere again and marvel that she stands so close to it. It is angry, I think again, without really knowing why these words come to me. It will do what it has to do.

  Who? Will do what?

  I shake my head, inexplicably annoyed, and turn to Gallat. “Shouldn’t we get started?”

  The woman laughs, delighted. Gallat glowers at me, but he relaxes fractionally when it becomes obvious that the woman is amused. Still, he says, “Yes, Houwha. I think we should. If you d
on’t mind—”

  (He addresses the woman by some title, and some name. I will forget both with the passage of time. In forty thousand years I will remember only the woman’s laugh, and the way she considers Gallat no different from us, and how carelessly she stands near an iron sphere that radiates pure malice—and enough magic to destroy every building in Zero Site.

  And I will remember how I, too, dismissed every possible warning of what was to come.)

  Gallat takes me back into the cradle room, where I am bidden to climb into my wire chair. My limbs are strapped down, which I’ve never understood because when I’m in the amethyst, I barely notice my body, let alone move it. The sef has made my lips tingle in a way that suggests a stimulant was added. I didn’t need it.

  I reach for the others, and find them granite-steady with resolve. Yes.

  Images appear on the viewing wall before me, displaying the blue sphere of the Earth, each of the other five tuners’ cradles, and a shot of Corepoint with the onyx hovering ready above it. The other tuners look back at me from their images. Gallat comes over and makes a show of checking the contact points of the wire chair, which are meant to send measurements to the Biomagestric division. “You’re to hold the onyx, today, Houwha.”

  From another building of Zero Site, I feel Gaewha’s small twitch of surprise. We’re very attuned to one another today. I say, “Kelenli holds the onyx.”

  “Not anymore.” Gallat keeps his head down as he speaks, unnecessarily reaching over to check my straps, and I remember him reaching the same way to pull Kelenli back to him, in the garden. Ah, I understand, now. All this while he has been afraid to lose her … to us. Afraid to make her just another tool in the eyes of his superiors. Will they let him keep her, after Geoarcanity? Or does he fear that she, too, will be thrown into the briar patch? He must. Why else make such a significant change to our configuration on the most important day in human history?