“Gibberish. Plate tectonics for the sky.” You stare, disbelieving, and she waves a hand. “Anyway, I told you how the obelisks followed you to Tirimo. Where you go, they go. That makes them satellites to your primary.”
You shudder, not liking the thought that comes into your head—of thin, invisible tethers anchoring you to the amethyst, the nearer topaz, and now the distant onyx whose dark presence is growing in your mind. And oddly, you also think of the Fulcrum. Of the tethers that bound you to it, even when you had the apparent freedom to leave it and travel. You always came back, though, or the Fulcrum would’ve come after you—in the form of the Guardians.
“Chains,” you say softly.
“No, no,” Tonkee says distractedly. She’s working on the hank again, and having real trouble with it. Her knife has gone blunt. You leave for a moment and go into the room that you share with Hoa, fetching the whetstone from your pack. She blinks when you offer it to her, then nods thanks and starts sharpening the knife. “If there was a chain between you and an obelisk, it would be following you because you’re making it follow you. Force, not gravity. I mean, if you could make an obelisk do what you wanted.” You let out a little breath of amusement at this. “But a satellite reacts to you regardless of whether you try to make it react. It’s drawn to your presence, and the weight you exert upon the universe. It lingers around you because it can’t help itself.” She waves a wet hand distractedly, while you stare again. “Not to ascribe motivations and intentions to the obelisks, of course; that would be silly.”
You crouch against the far wall of the room to consider this while she resumes work. As the remainder of her hair begins to loosen, you recognize it at last, because it’s curly and dark like your own, instead of ashblow and gray. A little looser in the curl, maybe. Midlatter hair; another mark against her in the eyes of her family, probably. And given the bog-standard Sanzed look of her otherwise—she’s a bit on the short and pear-shaped side, but that’s what comes of the Yumenescene families not using Breeders to improve themselves—it’s something you would’ve remembered about her from that long-ago visit she made to the Fulcrum.
You don’t think Alabaster was talking about the obelisks when he mentioned this moon thing. Still—“You said that thing we found in the Fulcrum, that socket, was where they built the obelisks.”
It’s immediately clear you’re back on ground that Tonkee is actually interested in. She sets the knife down and leans forward, her face excited through the dangling uneven remainder of her hair. “Mmm-hmm. Maybe not all of them. The dimensions of every obelisk recorded have been slightly different, so only some—or maybe even just one—would have fit in that socket. Or maybe the socket changed every time they put one in there, adapting itself to the obelisk!”
“How do you know they put them in there? Maybe they first… grew there, then were faceted or mined and taken away later.” This makes Tonkee look thoughtful; you feel obliquely proud to have considered something she hasn’t. “And ‘they’ who?”
She blinks, then sits back, her excitement visibly fading. Finally she says, “Supposedly, the Yumenescene Leadership is descended from the people who saved the world after the Shattering Season. We have texts passed down from that time, secrets that each family is charged with keeping, and which we’re supposed to be shown upon earning our use and comm names.” She scowls. “My family didn’t, because they were already thinking about disowning me. So I broke into the vault and took my birthright.”
You nod, because that sounds like the Binof you remember. You’re skeptical about the family secret, though. Yumenes didn’t exist before Sanze, and Sanze is only the latest of the countless civilizations that must have come and gone over the Seasons. The Leadership legends have the air of a myth concocted to justify their place in society.
Tonkee continues, “In the vault I found all sorts of things: maps, strange writing in a language like none I’ve ever seen, objects that didn’t make sense—like one tiny, perfectly round yellow stone, about an inch in circumference. Someone had put it in a glass case, sealed and plastered with warnings not to touch. Apparently the thing had a reputation for punching holes in people.” You wince. “So either there’s some truth to the family stories, or amazingly, being rich and powerful makes it easy to assemble quite the collection of valuable ancient objects. Or both.” She notices your expression and looks amused. “Yeah, probably not both. It’s not stonelore, anyway, just… words. Soft knowledge. I needed to harden it.”
That sounds like Tonkee. “So you snuck into the Fulcrum to try to find the socket, because somehow this proves some rusty old story your family passed down?”
“It was on one of the maps I found.” Tonkee shrugs. “If there was truth to part of the story—about there being a socket in Yumenes, deliberately hidden away by the city’s founders—then that did suggest there might be truth to the rest, yes.” Setting the knife aside, Tonkee shifts to get comfortable, idly brushing the shed hairs into a pile with one hand. Her hair is painfully short and uneven now, and you really want to take the scissors from her and shape it. You’ll wait till she’s given it another wash first, though.
“There’s truth to other parts of the stories, too,” Tonkee says. “I mean, a lot of the stories are rust and mellow-smoke; I don’t want to pretend otherwise. But I learned at Seventh that the obelisks go as far back as history goes, and then some. We have evidence of Seasons from ten, fifteen, even twenty thousand years ago—and the obelisks are older. It’s possible that they even predate the Shattering.”
The first Season, and the one that nearly killed the world. Only lorists speak of it, and the Seventh University has disavowed most of their tales. Out of contrariness, you say, “Maybe there wasn’t a Shattering. Maybe there have always been Fifth Seasons.”
“Maybe.” Tonkee shrugs, either not noticing your attempt to be obnoxious, or not caring. Probably the latter. “Mentioning the Shattering was a great way to set off a five-hour argument in the colloquium. Stupid old farts.” She smiles to herself, remembering, and then abruptly sobers. You understand at once. Dibars, the city that housed Seventh, is in the Equatorials, only a little west of Yumenes.
“I don’t believe it, though,” Tonkee says, when she’s had a moment to recover. “That we’ve always had Seasons.”
“Why not?”
“Because of us.” She grins. “Life, I mean. It’s not different enough.”
“What?”
Tonkee leans forward. She’s not quite as excited as she gets about obelisks, but it’s clear that just about any long-hidden knowledge sets her off. For a moment, in the gleam of her open, cheeky face, you see Binof; then she speaks and becomes Tonkee the geomest again. “‘All things change during a Season,’ yes? But not enough. Think of it this way: Everything that grows or walks on land can breathe the world’s air, eat its food, survive its usual shifts in temperature. We don’t have to change to do that; we are precisely the way we need to be, because that’s how the world works. Right? Maybe people are the worst of the lot, because we have to use our hands to make coats instead of just growing fur… but we can make coats. We’re built for that, with clever hands that can sew and brains that can figure out how to hunt or grow animals for fur. But we aren’t built to filter ash out of our lungs before it turns into cement—”
“Some animals are.”