Oh. Oh, that does matter. Gaewha and I exchange a look of wonder and concern before facing her again.
“And the reason I’m here,” Kelenli continues, abruptly insistent upon delivering this important information with mere words, which somehow perversely serves to emphasize them, “is because the order has been issued. The fragments are at optimum storage capacity and are ready for the generative cycle. Corepoint and Zero Site go live in twenty-eight days. We’re finally starting up the Plutonic Engine.”
(In tens of thousands of years, after people have repeatedly forgotten what “engines” are and know the fragments as nothing but “obelisks,” there will be a different name for the thing that rules our lives now. It will be called the Obelisk Gate, which is both more poetic and quaintly primitive. I like that name better.)
In the present, while Gaewha and I stand there staring, Kelenli drops one last shocker into the vibrations between our cells:
That means I have less than a month to show you who you really are.
Gaewha frowns. I manage not to react because the conductors watch our bodies as well as our faces, but it is a narrow thing. I’m very confused, and not a little unnerved. I have no idea, in the present of this conversation, that it is the beginning of the end.
Because we tuners are not orogenes, you see. Orogeny is what the difference of us will become over generations of adaptation to a changed world. You are the shallower, more specialized, more natural distillation of our so-unnatural strangeness. Only a few of you, like Alabaster, will ever come close to the power and versatility we hold, but that is because we were constructed as intentionally and artificially as the fragments you call obelisks. We are fragments of the great machine, too—just as much a triumph of genegineering and biomagestry and geomagestry and other disciplines for which the future will have no name. By our existence we glorify the world that made us, like any statue or scepter or other precious object.
We do not resent this, for our opinions and experiences have been carefully constructed, too. We do not understand that what Kelenli has come to give us is a sense of peoplehood. We do not understand why we have been forbidden this self-concept before now … but we will.
And then we will understand that people cannot be possessions. And because we are both and this should not be, a new concept will take shape within us, though we have never heard the word for it because the conductors are forbidden to even mention it in our presence. Revolution.
Well. We don’t have much use for words, anyway. But that’s what this is. The beginning. You, Essun, will see the end.
3
you, imbalanced
IT TAKES A FEW DAYS for you to recover enough to walk on your own. As soon as you can, Ykka reappropriates your stretcher-bearers to perform other tasks, which leaves you to hobble along, weak and made clumsy by the loss of your arm. The first few days you lag well behind the bulk of the group, catching up to camp with them only hours after they’ve settled for the night. There isn’t much left of the communal food by the time you go to take your share. Good thing you don’t feel hunger anymore. There aren’t many spaces left to lay out your bedroll, either—though they did at least give you a basic pack and supplies to make up for your lost runny-sack. What spaces there are aren’t good, located near the edges of the camp or off the road altogether, where the danger of attack by wildlife or commless is greater. You sleep there anyway because you’re exhausted. You suppose that if there’s any real danger, Hoa will carry you off again; he seems able to transport you for short distances through the earth with no trouble. Still, Ykka’s anger is a hard thing to bear, in more ways than one.
Tonkee and Hoa lag behind with you. It’s almost like the old days, except that now Hoa appears as you walk, gets left behind as you keep walking, then appears again somewhere ahead of you. Most times he adopts a neutral posture, but occasionally he’s doing something ridiculous, like the time you find him in a running pose. Apparently stone eaters get bored, too. Hjarka stays with Tonkee, so that’s four of you. Well, five: Lerna lingers to walk with you, too, angry at what he perceives as the mistreatment of one of his patients. He didn’t think a recently comatose woman should be made to walk at all, let alone left to fall behind. You try to tell him not to stick with you, not to draw Castrima’s wrath upon himself, but he snorts and says that if Castrima really wants to antagonize the only person in the comm who’s formally trained to do surgery, they don’t deserve to keep him. Which is … well, it’s a very good point. You shut up.
You’re managing better than Lerna expected, at least. That’s mostly because it wasn’t really a coma, and also because you hadn’t lost all of your road conditioning during the seven or eight months that you lived in Castrima. The old habits come back easily, really: finding a steady, if slow, pace that nevertheless eats up the miles; wearing your pack low so that the bulk of its weight braces against your butt rather than pulling on your shoulders; keeping your head down as you walk so that the falling ash doesn’t cover your goggles. The loss of the arm is more a nuisance than a real hardship, at least with so many willing helpers around. Aside from throwing off your balance and plaguing you with phantom itches or aches from fingers or an elbow that doesn’t exist, the hardest part is getting dressed in the morning. It’s surprising how quickly you master squatting to piss or defecate without falling over, but maybe you’re just more motivated after days in a diaper.
So you’re holding your own, just slowly at first, and you’re getting faster as the days go by. But here’s the problem with all of this: You’re going the wrong way.
Tonkee comes over to sit by you one evening. “You can’t leave until we’re a lot further west,” she says without preamble. “Almost to the Merz, I’m thinking. If you want to make it that far, you’re going to have to patch things up with Ykka.”
You glare at her, though for Tonkee, this is discreet. She’s waited till Hjarka is snoring in her bedroll and Lerna’s gone off to use the camp latrine. Hoa is still nearby, standing unsubtle guard over your small group within the comm encampment, the curves of his black marble face underlit by your fire. Tonkee knows he’s loyal to you, though, to the degree that loyalty means anything to him.
“Ykka hates me,” you finally say, after glaring fails to produce anything like chagrin or regret in Tonkee.
She rolls her eyes. “Trust me, I know hate. What Ykka’s got is … scared, and a good bit of mad, but some of that you deserve. You’ve put her people in danger.”