The Stone Sky (The Broken Earth #3)(59)

Once the Niess were gone, of course, it became clear that the fabled Niess sessapinae did not exist. Sylanagistine scholars and biomagestres had plenty of prisoners to study, but try as they might, no discernible variance from ordinary people could be found. This was intolerable; more than intolerable. After all, if the Niess were just ordinary human beings, then on what basis had military appropriations, pedagogical reinterpretation, and entire disciplines of study been formed? Even the grand dream itself, Geoarcanity, had grown out of the notion that Sylanagistine magestric theory – including its scornful dismissal of Niess efficiency as a fluke of physiology – was superior and infallible.

If the Niess were merely human, the world built on their inhumanity would fall apart.

So… they made us.

We, the carefully engineered and denatured remnants of the Niess, have sessapinae far more complex than those of ordinary people. Kelenli was made first, but she wasn’t different enough. Remember, we must be not just tools, but myths. Thus we later creations have been given exaggerated Niess features – broad faces, small mouths, skin nearly devoid of color, hair that laughs at fine combs, and we’re all so short. They’ve stripped our limbic systems of neurochemicals and our lives of experience and language and knowledge. And only now, when we have been made over in the image of their own fear, are they satisfied. They tell themselves that in us, they’ve captured the quintessence and power of who the Niess really were, and they congratulate themselves on having made their old enemies useful at last.

But we are not the Niess. We aren’t even the glorious symbols of intellectual achievement that I believed we were. Syl Anagist is built on delusions, and we are the product of lies. They have no idea what we really are.

It’s up to us, then, to determine our own fate and future.

***

When Kelenli’s lesson is done, a few hours have passed. We sit at her feet, stunned, changed and changing by her words.

It’s getting late. She gets up. “I’m going to get us some food and blankets,” she says. “You’ll stay here tonight. We’ll visit the third and final component of your tuning mission tomorrow.”

We have never slept anywhere but our cells. It’s exciting. Gaewha sends little pulses of delight through the ambient, while Remwha is a steady buzz of pleasure. Dushwha and Bimniwha spike now and again with anxiety; will we be all right, doing this thing that human beings have done throughout history – sleeping in a different place? The two of them curl together for security, though this actually increases their anxiety for a time. We are not often allowed to touch. They stroke one another, though, and this gradually calms them both.

Kelenli is amused by their fear. “You’ll be all right, though I suppose you’ll figure that out for yourselves in the morning,” she says. Then she heads for the door to go. I am standing at the door, looking through its window at the newly risen Moon. She touches me because I’m in her way. I don’t move at once, though. Because of the direction that the window in my cell faces, I don’t get to see the Moon often. I want to savor its beauty while I can.

“Why have you brought us here?” I ask Kelenli, while still staring at it. “Why tell us these things?”

She doesn’t answer at once. I think she’s looking at the Moon, too. Then she says, in a thoughtful reverberation of the earth, I’ve studied what I could of the Niess and their culture. There isn’t much left, and I have to sift the truth from all the lies. But there was a… a practice among them. A vocation. People whose job it was to see that the truth got told.

I frown in confusion. “So… what? You’ve decided to carry on the traditions of a dead people?” Words. I’m stubborn.

She shrugs. “Why not?”

I shake my head. I’m tired, and overwhelmed, and perhaps a little angry. This day has upended my sense of self. I’ve spent my whole life knowing I was a tool, yes; not a person, but at least a symbol of power and brilliance and pride. Now I know I’m really just a symbol of paranoia and greed and hate. It’s a lot to deal with.

“Let the Niess go,” I snap. “They’re dead. I don’t see the sense in trying to remember them.”

I want her to get angry, but she merely shrugs. “That’s your choice to make – once you know enough to make an informed choice.”

“Maybe I didn’t want to be informed.” I lean against the glass of the door, which is cool and does not sting my fingers.

“You wanted to be strong enough to hold the onyx.”

I blurt a soft laugh, too tired to remember I should pretend to feel nothing. Hopefully our observers won’t notice. I shift to earthtalk, and speak in an acid, pressurized boil of bitterness and contempt and humiliation and heartbreak. What does it matter? is what it means. Geoarcanity is a lie.

She shakes apart my self-pity with gentle, inexorable slipstrike laughter. “Ah, my thinker. I didn’t expect melodrama from you.”

“What is melo —” I shake my head and fall silent, tired of not knowing things. Yes, I’m sulking.

Kelenli sighs and touches my shoulder. I flinch, unused to the warmth of another person’s hand, but she keeps it in place and this quiets me.

“Think,” she repeats. “Does the Plutonic Engine work? Do your sessapinae? You aren’t what they made you to be; does that negate what you are?”