You nod slowly. “After Allia, I can see why no one would’ve wanted us to learn how to manipulate obelisks.”
“Rust the obelisks. They didn’t want us to create something better. Or worse.” He takes a deep breath carefully. “We’re going to stop manipulating stone now, Essun. That stuff you see in me? That’s what you have to learn to control. To perceive, wherever it exists. It’s what the obelisks are made of, and it’s how they do what they do. We have to get you to do those things, too. We have to make you a ten-ringer, at least.”
At least. Just like that. “Why? Alabaster, you mentioned something. A… moon. Tonkee doesn’t have a clue what that is. And all the things you’ve said, about causing that rift and wanting me to do something worse—” Something moves at the periphery of your vision. You glance up and realize the man who’s been working with Lerna is coming with a bowl in his hands. Dinner, for Alabaster. You drop your voice. “I’m not, by the way. Helping you make things worse. Haven’t you done enough already?”
Alabaster glances at the oncoming nurse, too. Watching him, Alabaster says in a low voice, “The Moon is something this world used to have, Essun. An object in the sky, much closer than the stars.” He keeps switching between calling you one name and another. It’s distracting. “Its loss was part of what caused the Seasons.”
Father Earth did not always hate life, the lorists say. He hates because he cannot forgive the loss of his only child.
But then, the lorists’ tales also say the obelisks are harmless.
“How do you know—” But then you stop, because the man has reached you, so you sit back against a nearby cot, digesting what you’ve heard while he spoon-feeds Alabaster. The stuff is watery mash of some kind, and not much of it. Alabaster sits there and opens his mouth for the feeding like a babe. His eyes stay on you throughout. It’s unnerving, and finally you have to look away. Some of the things that have changed between you, you cannot bear.
Finally the man is done, and with a flat look in your direction that nevertheless conveys his opinion that you should have been the one to administer the food, he leaves. But when you straighten and open your mouth to ask more questions, Alabaster says, “I’m probably going to need to use that bedpan soon. I can’t control my bowels very well anymore, but at least they’re still regular.” At the look on your face, he smiles with only a hint of bitterness. “I don’t want you to see that any more than you want to see it. So why don’t we just say you should come back later? Noon seems to work better for not interfering with any of my gross natural functions.”
That isn’t fair. Well. It is, and you deserve his censure, but it’s censure that should be shared. “Why did you do this to yourself?” You gesture at his arm, his ruined body. “I just…” Maybe you could take it better if you understood.
“The consequence of what I did at Yumenes.” He shook his head. “Something to remember, Syen, for when you make your own choices in the future: Some of them come with a terrible price. Although sometimes that price is worth paying.”
You can’t understand why he sees this, this horrible slow death, as a price worth paying for anything—let alone for what he got out of it, which was the destruction of the world. And you still don’t understand what any of it has to do with stone eaters or moons or obelisks or anything else.
“Wouldn’t it have been better,” you cannot help saying, “to just… live?” To have come back, you cannot say. To have made what little life he could with Syenite again, after Meov was gone but before she found Tirimo and Jija and tried to create a lesser version of the family she’d lost. Before she became you.
The answer is in the way his eyes deaden. This was the look that was on his face as you stood in a node station once, over the abused corpse of one of his sons. Maybe it’s the look that was on his face when he learned of Innon’s death. It’s certainly what you saw in your own face after Uche’s. That’s when you no longer need an answer to the question. There is such a thing as too much loss. Too much has been taken from you both—taken and taken and taken, until there’s nothing left but hope, and you’ve given that up because it hurts too much. Until you would rather die, or kill, or avoid attachments altogether, than lose one more thing.
You think of the feeling that was in your heart as you pressed a hand over Corundum’s nose and mouth. Not the thought. The thought was simple and predictable: Better to die than live a slave. But what you felt in that moment was a kind of cold, monstrous love. A determination to make sure your son’s life remained the beautiful, wholesome thing that it had been up to that day, even if it meant you had to end his life early.
Alabaster doesn’t answer your question. You don’t need him to anymore. You get up to leave so that he can at least keep his dignity in front of you, because that’s really all you have left to give him. Your love and respect aren’t worth much to anyone.
Maybe you’re still thinking of dignity when you ask one more question, so that the conversation doesn’t end on a note of hopelessness. It’s your way of offering an olive branch, too, and letting him know that you’ve decided to learn what he has to teach you. You’re not interested in making the Season worse or whatever he’s on about… but it’s clear that he needs this on some level. The son he made with you is dead, the family you built together has been rendered forever incomplete, but if nothing else he’s still your mentor.
(You need this, too, a cynical part of you notes. It’s a poor trade, really—Nassun for him, a mother’s purpose for an ex-lover’s, these ridiculous mysteries for the starker and more important why of Jija murdering his own son. But without Nassun to motivate you, you need something. Anything, to keep going.)
So you say, with your back to him: “What did they call it?”
“Hn?”
“The obelisk-builders. You said they had a word for the stuff in the obelisks.” The silvery stuff thrumming between the cells of Alabaster’s body, concentrating and compacting in the solidifying stone of him. “The stuff of orogeny. What was their word, since we don’t have one anymore?”
“Oh.” He shifts, perhaps readying himself for the bedpan. “The word doesn’t matter, Essun. Make one up if you like. You just need to know the stuff exists.”
“I want to know what they called it.” It’s a small piece of the mystery he’s trying to shove down your throat. You want to wrap your fingers around it, control the ingestion, at least taste some of it along the way. And, too, the people who made the obelisks were powerful. Foolish, maybe, and clearly awful for inflicting the Seasons upon their descendants, if they are indeed the ones who did so. But powerful. Maybe knowing the name will give you power somehow.
He starts to shake his head, winces as this causes him pain somewhere, sighs instead. “They called it magic.”
It’s meaningless. Just a word. But maybe you can give it meaning somehow. “Magic,” you repeat, memorizing. Then you nod farewell, and leave without looking back.
The stone eaters knew I was there. I’m certain of it. They just didn’t care.
I observed them for hours as they stood motionless, voices echoing out of nowhere. The language they spoke to each other was… strange. Arctic, perhaps? One of the Coastals? I’ve never heard the like. Regardless, after some ten hours I will admit that I fell asleep. I woke to the sound of a great crash and crunch, so loud that I thought the Shattering itself was upon me. When I dared to lift my eyes, one of the stone eaters was scattered chunks upon the ground. The other stood as before, save for one change, directed right at me: a bright, glittering smile.
—Memoir of Ouse Innovator (nat Strongback) Ticastries, amateur geomest. Not endorsed by the Fifth University.
7
Nassun finds the moon