Which is why Zero Site has never been on Earth.
Thus in the small hours of the morning we are brought to a singular sort of vehimal, doubtless genegineered from grasshopper stock or something similar. It is diamond-winged but also has great carbon-fiber legs, steaming now with coiled, stored power. As the conductors usher us aboard this vehimal, I see other vehimals being made ready. A large party means to come with us to watch the great project conclude at last. I sit where I am told, and all of us are strapped in because the vehimal’s thrust can sometimes overcome geomagestric inertial … Hmm. Suffice it to say, the launch can be somewhat alarming. It is nothing compared to plunging into the heart of a living, churning fragment, but I suppose the humans think it a grand, wild thing. The six of us sit, still and cold with purpose as they chatter around us, while the vehimal leaps up to the Moon.
On the Moon is the moonstone—a massive, iridescent white cabochon embedded in the thin gray soil of the place. It is the largest of the fragments, fully as big as a node of Syl Anagist itself; the whole of the Moon is its socket. Arranged around its edges sits a complex of buildings, each sealed against the airless dark, which are not so very different from the buildings we just left. They’re just on the Moon. This is Zero Site, where history will be made.
We are led inside, where permanent Zero Site staff line the halls and stare at us in proud admiration, as one admires precision-made instruments. We are led to cradles that look precisely like the cradles used every day for our practices—although this time, each of us is taken to a separate room of the compound. Adjoining each room is the conductors’ observation chamber, connected via a clear crystal window. I’m used to being observed while I work—but not used to being brought into the observation room itself, as happens today for the very first time.
There I stand, short and plainly dressed and palpably uncomfortable amid tall people in rich, complex clothing, while Gallat introduces me as “Houwha, our finest tuner.” This statement alone proves that either the conductors really have no clue how we function, or that Gallat is nervous and groping for something to say. Perhaps both. Dushwha laughs a cascading microshake—the Moon’s strata are thin and dusty and dead, but not much different from the Earth’s—while I stand there and mouth pleasant greetings, as I am expected to do. Maybe that’s what Gallat really means: I’m the tuner who is best at pretending that he cares about conductor nonsense.
Something catches my attention, though, as the introductions are made and small talk is exchanged and I concentrate on saying correct things at correct times. I turn and notice a stasis column near the back of the room, humming faintly and flickering with its own plutonic energies, generating the field that keeps something within stable. And floating above its cut-crystal surface—
There is a woman in the room who is taller and more elaborately dressed than everyone else. She follows my gaze and says to Gallat, “Do they know about the test bore?”
Gallat twitches and looks at me, then at the stasis column. “No,” he says. He doesn’t name the woman or give her a title, but his tone is very respectful. “They’ve been told only what’s necessary.”
“I would think context is necessary, even with your kind.” Gallat bristles at being lumped in with us, but he says nothing in response to it. The woman looks amused. She bends down to peer into my face, although I’m not that much shorter than her. “Would you like to know what that artifact is, little tuner?”
I immediately hate her. “Yes, please,” I say.
She takes my hand before Gallat can stop her. It isn’t uncomfortable. Her skin is dry. She leads me over near the stasis column, so that I can now get a good look at the thing that floats above it.
At first I think that what I’m seeing is nothing more than a spherical lump of iron, hovering a few inches above the stasis column’s surface and underlit by its white glow. It is only a lump of iron, its surface crazed with slanting, circuitous lines. A meteor fragment? No. I realize the sphere is moving—spinning slowly on a slightly tilted north-south axis. I look at the warning symbols around the column’s rim and see markers for extreme heat and pressure, and a caution against breaching the stasis field. Within, the markers say, it has re-created the object’s native environment.
No one would do this for a mere lump of iron. I blink, adjust my perception to the sesunal and magical, and draw back quickly as searing white light blazes at and through me. The iron sphere is full of magic—concentrated, crackling, overlapping threads upon threads of it, some of them even extending beyond its surface and outward and … away. I can’t follow the ones that whitter away beyond the room; they extend beyond my reach. I can see that they stretch off toward the sky, though, for some reason. And written in the jittering threads that I can see … I frown.
“It’s angry,” I say. And familiar. Where have I seen something like this, this magic, before?
The woman blinks at me. Gallat groans under his breath. “Houwha—”
“No,” the woman says, holding up a hand to quell him. She focuses on me again with a gaze that is intent now, and curious. “What did you say, little tuner?”
I face her. She is obviously important. Perhaps I should be afraid, but I’m not. “That thing is angry,” I say. “Furious. It doesn’t want to be here. You took it from somewhere else, didn’t you?”
Others in the room have noticed this exchange. Not all of them are conductors, but all of them look at the woman and me in palpable unease and confusion. I hear Gallat holding his breath.
“Yes,” she says to me, finally. “We drilled a test bore at one of the Antarctic nodes. Then we sent in probes that took this from the innermost core. It’s a sample of the world’s own heart.” She smiles, proud. “The richness of magic at the core is precisely what will enable Geoarcanity. That test is why we built Corepoint, and the fragments, and you.”
I look at the iron sphere again and marvel that she stands so close to it. It is angry, I think again, without really knowing why these words come to me. It will do what it has to do.
Who? Will do what?
I shake my head, inexplicably annoyed, and turn to Gallat. “Shouldn’t we get started?”
The woman laughs, delighted. Gallat glowers at me, but he relaxes fractionally when it becomes obvious that the woman is amused. Still, he says, “Yes, Houwha. I think we should. If you don’t mind—”
(He addresses the woman by some title, and some name. I will forget both with the passage of time. In forty thousand years I will remember only the woman’s laugh, and the way she considers Gallat no different from us, and how carelessly she stands near an iron sphere that radiates pure malice—and enough magic to destroy every building in Zero Site.