“Just doesn’t make sense,” Pheylen is saying, with a sigh. “I mean, the numbers don’t lie, but …”
“If you’d like to register an objection,” begins Kelenli. Her words fascinate me in a way that words never have before. Unlike the conductor, her voice has weight and texture, strata-deep and layered. She sends the words into the ground while she speaks, as a kind of subvocalization. It makes them feel more real. Pheylen, who doesn’t seem to notice how much deeper Kelenli’s words are—or maybe she just doesn’t care—makes an uncomfortable face in reaction to what she’s said. Kelenli repeats, “If you’d like to, I can ask Gallat to take me off the roster.”
“And listen to his shouting? Evil Death, he’d never stop. Such a savage temper he has.” Pheylen smiles. It’s not an amused smile. “It must be hard for him, wanting the project to succeed, but also wanting you kept—well. I’m fine with you on standby-only, but then I haven’t seen the simulation data.”
“I have.” Kelenli’s tone is grave. “The delay-failure risk was small, but significant.”
“Well, there you are. Even a small risk is too much, if we can do something about it. I think they must be more anxious than they’re letting on, though, to involve you—” Abruptly, Pheylen looks embarrassed. “Ah … sorry. No offense meant.”
Kelenli smiles. Both I and Gaewha can see that it is only a surface layering, not a real expression. “None taken.”
Pheylen exhales in relief. “Well, then, I’ll just withdraw to Observation and let you three get to know each other. Knock when you’re done.”
With that, Conductor Pheylen leaves the room. This is a good thing, because when conductors are not around, we can speak more easily. The door closes and I move to face Gaewha (who is actually cracked geode taste of adularescent salts, fading echo). She nods minutely because I have correctly guessed that she has something important to tell me. We are always watched. A certain amount of performance is essential.
Gaewha says with her mouth, “Coordinator Pheylen told me they’re making a change to our configuration.” With the rest of her she says, in atmospheric perturbations and anxious plucking of the silver threads, Tetlewha has been moved to the briar patch.
“A change at this late date?” I glance at the us-woman, Kelenli, to see if she is following the whole conversation. She looks so much like one of them, all that surface coloring and those long bones that make her a head taller than both of us. “Do you have something to do with the project?” I ask her, while also responding to Gaewha’s news about Tetlewha. No.
My “no” is not denial, just a statement of fact. We can still detect Tetlewha’s familiar hot spot roil and strata uplift, grind of subsidence, but … something is different. He’s not nearby anymore, or at least he’s not anywhere that is in range of our seismic questings. And the roil and grind of him have gone nearly still.
Decommissioned is the word the conductors prefer to use, when one of us is removed from service. They have asked us, individually, to describe what we feel when the change happens, because it is a disruption of our network. By unspoken agreement each of us speaks of the sensation of loss—a pulling away, a draining, a thinning of signal strength. By unspoken agreement none of us mentions the rest, which in any case is indescribable using conductor words. What we experience is a searing sensation, and prickling all over, and the tumbledown resistance tangle of ancient pre-Sylanagistine wire such as we sometimes encounter in our explorations of the earth, gone rusted and sharp in its decay and wasted potential. Something like that.
Who gave the order? I want to know.
Gaewha has become a slow fault ripple of stark, frustrated, confused patterns. Conductor Gallat. The other conductors are angry about it and someone reported it to the higher-ups and that’s why they have sent Kelenli here. It took all of us together to hold the onyx and the moonstone. They are concerned about our stability.
Annoyed, I return, Perhaps they should have thought of that before—
“I do have something to do with the project, yes,” interrupts Kelenli, though there has been no break or disruption of the verbal conversation. Words are very slow compared to earthtalk. “I have some arcane awareness, you see, and similar abilities to yours.” Then she adds, I’m here to teach you.
She switches as easily as we do between the words of the conductors and our language, the language of the earth. Her communicative presence is radiant heavy metal, searing crystallized magnetic lines of meteoric iron, and more complex layers underneath this, all so sharp-edged and powerful that Gaewha and I both inhale in wonder.
But what is she saying? Teach us? We don’t need to be taught. We were decanted knowing nearly everything we needed to know already, and the rest we learned in the first few weeks of life with our fellow tuners. If we hadn’t, we would be in the briar patch, too.
I make sure to frown. “How can you be a tuner like us?” This is a lie spoken for our observers, who see only the surface of things and think we do, too. She is not white like us, not short or strange, but we have known her for one of ours since we felt the cataclysm of her presence. I do not disbelieve that she is one of us. I can’t disbelieve the incontrovertible.
Kelenli smiles, with a wryness that acknowledges the lie. “Not quite like you, but close enough. You’re the finished artwork, I’m the model.” Threads of magic in the earth heat and reverberate and add other meanings. Prototype. A control to our experiment, made earlier to see how we should be done. She has only one difference, instead of the many that we possess. She has our carefully designed sessapinae. Is that enough to help us accomplish the task? The certainty in her earth-presence says yes. She continues in words: “I’m not the first that was made. Just the first to survive.”
We all push a hand at the air to ward off Evil Death. But I allow myself to look like I don’t understand as I wonder if we dare trust her. I saw how the conductor relaxed around her. Pheylen is one of the nice ones, but even she never forgets what we are. She forgot with Kelenli, though. Perhaps all humans think she is one of them, until someone tells them otherwise. What is that like, being treated as human when one is not? And then there’s the fact that they’ve left her alone with us. We they treat like weapons that might misfire at any moment … but they trust her.
“How many fragments have you attuned to yourself?” I ask aloud, as if this is a thing that matters. It is also a challenge.
“Only one,” Kelenli says. But she’s still smiling. “The onyx.”