The Stone Sky (The Broken Earth #3)(74)
We have heard enough, however. Later, when we process all this, I will tell the others, She wants to be a person.
She wants the impossible, Dushwha will say. Gallat thinks it better to own her himself, rather than allow Syl Anagist to do the same. But for her to be a person, she must stop being… ownable. By anyone.
Then Syl Anagist must stop being Syl Anagist, Gaewha will add sadly.
Yes. They will all be right, too, my fellow tuners… but that does not mean Kelenli’s desire to be free is wrong. Or that something is impossible just because it is very, very hard.
The vehimal stops in a part of town that, amazingly, looks familiar. I have seen this area only once and yet I recognize the pattern of the streets, and the vineflowers on one greenstrate wall. The quality of the light through the amethyst, as the sun slants toward setting, stirs a feeling of longing and relief in me that I will one day learn is called homesickness.
The other conductors leave and head back to the compound. Gallat beckons to us. He’s still angry, and wants this over with. So we follow, and fall slowly behind because our legs are shorter and the muscles burn, until finally he notices that we and our guards are ten feet behind him. He stops to let us catch up, but his jaw is tight and one hand taps a brisk pattern on his folded arms.
“Hurry up,” he says. “I want to do start-up trials tonight.”
We know better than to complain. Distraction is often useful, however. Gaewha says, “What are we hurrying to see?”
Gallat shakes his head impatiently, but answers. As Gaewha planned, he walks slower so that he can speak to us, which allows us to walk slower as well. We desperately catch our breath. “The socket where this fragment was grown. You’ve been told the basics. For the time being each fragment serves as the power plant for a node of Syl Anagist – taking in magic, catalyzing it, returning some to the city and storing the surplus. Until the Engine is activated, of course.”
Abruptly he stops, distracted by our surroundings. We have reached the restricted zone around the base of the fragment – a three-tiered park with some administrative buildings and a stop on the vehimal line that (we are told) does a weekly run to Corepoint. It’s all very utilitarian, and a little boring.
Still. Above us, filling the sky for nearly as high as the eye can see, is the amethyst fragment. Despite Gallat’s impatience, all of us stop and stare up at it in awe. We live in its colored shadow, and were made to respond to its needs and control its output. It is us; we are it. Yet rarely do we get to see it like this, directly. The windows in our cells all point away from it. (Connectivity, harmony, lines of sight and waveform efficiency; the conductors want to risk no accidental activation.) It is a magnificent thing, I think, both in its physical state and its magical superposition. It glows in the latter state, crystalline lattice nearly completely charged with the stored magic power that we will soon use to ignite Geoarcanity. When we have shunted the world’s power systems over from the limited storage-and-generation of the obelisks to the unlimited streams within the earth, and when Corepoint has gone fully online to regulate it, and when the world has finally achieved the dream of Syl Anagist’s greatest leaders and thinkers —
— well. Then I, and the others, will no longer be needed. We hear so many things about what will happen once the world has been freed from scarcity and want. People living forever. Travel to other worlds, far beyond our star. The conductors have assured us that we won’t be killed. We will be celebrated, in fact, as the pinnacle of magestry, and as living representations of what humanity can achieve. Is that not a thing to look forward to, our veneration? Should we not be proud?
But for the first time, I think of what life I might want for myself, if I could have a choice. I think of the house that Gallat lives in: huge, beautiful, cold. I think of Kelenli’s house in the garden, which is small and surrounded by small growing magics. I think of living with Kelenli. Sitting at her feet every night, speaking with her as much as I want, in every language that I know, without fear. I think of her smiling without bitterness and this thought gives me incredible pleasure. Then I feel shame, as if I have no right to imagine these things.
“Waste of time,” Gallat mutters, staring at the obelisk. I flinch, but he does not notice. “Well. Here it is. I’ve no idea why Kelenli wanted you to see it, but now you see it.”
We admire it as bidden. “Can we… go closer?” Gaewha asks. Several of us groan through the earth; our legs hurt and we are hungry. But she replies with frustration. While we’re here, we might as well get the most out of it.
As if in agreement, Gallat sighs and starts forward, walking down the sloping road toward the base of the amethyst, where it has been firmly lodged in its socket since the first growth-medium infusion. I have seen the top of the amethyst fragment, lost amid scuds of cloud and sometimes framed by the white light of the Moon, but this part of it is new to me. About its base are the transformer pylons, I know from what I have been taught, which siphon off some of the magic from the generative furnace at the amethyst’s core. This magic – a tiny fraction of the incredible amount that the Plutonic Engine is capable of producing – is redistributed via countless conduits to houses and buildings and machinery and vehimal feeding stations throughout the city-node. It is the same in every city-node of Syl Anagist, all over the world – two hundred and fifty-six fragments in total.