The bad news is that there are more of the boilbug mounds this week than there were last week. That’s probably not a good thing, but you don’t let the children see your worry.
There are seventeen children altogether—the bulk of Castrima’s complement of orogenes. A couple are in the teen range, but most are younger, one only five. Most are orphans, or might as well be, and that does not surprise you at all. What does surprise you is that all of them must have relatively good self-control and quick wits, because otherwise they wouldn’t have survived the Rifting. They would’ve had to sess it coming in time enough to get to someplace isolated, let their instincts save them, recover, and then go someplace else before anybody started trying to figure out who was at the center of the circle of non-destruction. Most are Midlatter mongrels like you: lots of not-quite-Sanzed-bronze skin, not-quite-ashblow hair, eyes and bodies on a continuum from the Arctic to the Coaster. Not much different from the kids you used to teach in Tirimo’s creche. Only the subject matter, and by necessity your teaching methods, must be different.
“Sess what I do—just sess, don’t imitate yet,” you say, and then you construct a torus around yourself. You do it several times, each time a different way—sometimes spinning it high and tight, sometimes holding it steady but wide enough that its edge rolls close to them. (Half the children gasp and scramble away. That’s exactly what they should do; good. Not good that the rest just stood there stupidly. You’ll have to work on that.) “Now. Spread out. You there, you there; all of you stay about that far apart. Once you’re in place, spin a torus that looks exactly like the one I’m making now.”
It isn’t how the Fulcrum would’ve taught them. There, with years of time and safe walls and comforting blue skies overhead, the teaching could be done gently, gradually, giving the children time to get over their fears or outgrow their immaturities. There’s no time for gentleness in a Season, though, and no room for failure within Castrima’s jagged walls. You’ve heard the grumbling, seen the resentful looks when you join use-caste crews or head down to the communal bath. Ykka thinks Castrima is something special: a comm where rogga and still can live in harmony, working together to survive. You think she’s naive. These children need to be prepared for the inevitable day that Castrima turns on them.
So you demonstrate, and correct their imitations with words when you can and once with a torus-inversion slap when one of the older children spins his too wide and threatens to ice one of his comrades. “You cannot be careless!” The boy sits on the icy ground, staring at you wide-eyed. You also made the ground heave under his feet to throw him down, and you’re standing over him now, shouting, deliberately intimidating. He almost killed another child; he should be afraid. “People die when you make mistakes. Is that what you want?” A frantic headshake. “Then get up, and do it again.”
You flog them through the exercise until every one of them has demonstrated at least a basic ability to control the size of their torus. It feels wrong to teach them only this without any of the theory that will help them understand why and how their power works, or any of the stabilizing exercises designed to perfect the detachment of instinct from power. You must teach them in days what you mastered over years; where you are an artist, they will be only crude imitators at best. They are subdued when you walk them back to Castrima, and you suspect some of them hate you. Actually, you’re pretty sure they hate you. But they will be more useful to Castrima like this—and on the inevitable day that Castrima turns on them, they’ll be ready.
(This is a familiar series of thoughts. Once, as you trained Nassun, you told yourself that it did not matter if she hated you by the end of it; she would know your love by her own survival. That never felt right, though, did it? You were gentler with Uche for that reason. And you always meant to apologize to Nassun, later, when she was old enough to understand… Ah, there are so many regrets in you that they spin, heavy as compressed iron, at your core.)
“You’re right,” Alabaster says as you sit on an infirmary cot and tell him about the lesson later. “But you’re also wrong.”
It’s later than usual for you to be visiting Alabaster, and as a result he is restless and in visible pain amid his nest. The medications that Lerna usually gives him are wearing off. Being with him is always a competition of desires for you: You know there’s not much time for him to teach you this stuff, but you also want to prolong his life, and every day that you wear him down grates on you like a glacier. Urgency and despair don’t get along well. You’ve resolved to keep it brief this time, but he seems inclined to talk a lot today, as he leans against Antimony’s hand and keeps his eyes closed. You can’t help thinking of this as some kind of strength-saving gesture, as if just the sight of you is a drain.
“Wrong?” you prompt. Maybe there’s a warning note in your voice. You’ve always been protective of your students, whoever they are.
“For wasting your time, for one thing. They’ll never have the precision to be more than rock-pushers.” Alabaster’s voice is thick with contempt.
“Innon was a rock-pusher,” you snap.
A muscle flexes in his jaw, and he pauses for a moment. “So maybe it’s a good thing that you’re teaching them how to push rocks safely, even if you aren’t doing it kindly.” Now the contempt is gone from his words. It’s as close to an apology as you’re probably going to get from him. “But I stand by the rest: You’re wrong to teach them at all, because their lessons are getting in the way of your lessons.”
“What?”
He makes you sess one of his stumps again, and—oh. Ohhhh. Suddenly it’s harder to grasp the stuff between his cells. It takes longer for your perception to adjust, and when it does, you keep having to reflexively jerk yourself out of a tendency to notice only the heat and jittering movement of the small particles. One afternoon of teaching has set your learning back by a week or more.
“There’s a reason the Fulcrum taught you the way it did,” he explains finally, when you sit back and rub your eyes and fight down frustration. He’s opened his eyes now; they are hooded as they watch you. “The Fulcrum’s methods are a kind of conditioning meant to steer you toward energy redistribution and away from magic. The torus isn’t even necessary—you can gather ambient energy in any number of ways. But that’s how they teach you to direct your awareness down to perform orogeny, never up. Nothing above you matters. Only your immediate surroundings, never farther.” He shakes his head to the degree that he can. “It’s amazing, when you think about it. Everyone in the Stillness is like this. Never mind what’s in the oceans, never mind what’s in the sky; never look at your own horizon and wonder what’s beyond it. We’ve spent centuries making fun of the astronomests for their crackpot theories, but what we really found incredible was that they ever bothered to look up to formulate them.”
You’d almost forgotten this part of him: the dreamer, the rebel, always reconsidering the way things have always been because maybe they should never have been that way in the first place. He’s right, too. Life in the Stillness discourages reconsideration, reorientation. Wisdom is set in stone, after all; that’s why no one trusts the mutability of metal. There’s a reason Alabaster was the magnetic core of your little family, back when you were together.
Damn, you’re nostalgic today. It prompts you to say, “I think you’re not just a ten-ringer.” He blinks in surprise. “You’re always thinking. You’re a genius, too—it’s just that your genius is in a subject area that no one respects.”
Alabaster stares at you for a moment. His eyes narrow. “Are you drunk?”