She feels sharper than the rest of us, she explains, because she is more experienced. Because she’s lived outside of the complex of buildings that surround the local fragment, and which has comprised the entirety of our world since we were decanted. She has visited more nodes of Syl Anagist than just the one we live in; she has seen and touched more of the fragments than just our local amethyst. She has even been to Zero Site, where the moonstone rests. We are in awe of this.
“I have context,” she says to us – to me, rather. She’s sitting on my couch. I am sprawled facedown on the window seat, face turned away from her. “When you do, too, you’ll be just as sharp.”
(It is a kind of pidgin between us, using the earth to add meaning to audible words. Her words are simply, “I’m older,” while a whitter of subsidence adds the nuancing deformation of time. She is metamorphic, having transformed to bear unbearable pressure. To make this telling simpler, I will translate it all as words, except where I cannot.)
“It would be good if we were as sharp as you now,” I reply wearily. I am not whining. Rebalancing days are always hard. “Give us this context, then, so the onyx will listen and my head can stop hurting.”
Kelenli sighs. “There’s nothing within these walls on which you can sharpen yourself.” (Crumble of resentment, ground up and quickly scattered. They have kept you so safe and sheltered.) “But I think there’s a way I can help you and the others do that, if I can get you out of this place.”
“Help me… sharpen myself?”
(She soothes me with a polishing stroke. It is not a kindness that you are kept so dull.) “You need to understand more about yourself. What you are.”
I don’t understand why she thinks I don’t understand. “I’m a tool.”
She says: “If you’re a tool, shouldn’t you be honed as fine as possible?”
Her voice is serene. And yet a pent, angry jitter of the entire ambient – air molecules shivering, strata beneath us compressing, a dissonant grinding whine at the limit of our ability to sess – tells me that Kelenli hates what I have just said. I turn my head to her and find myself fascinated by the way this dichotomy fails to show in her face. It’s another way she’s like us. We have long since learned not to show pain or fear or sorrow in any space aboveground or below the sky. The conductors tell us we are built to be like statues – cold, immovable, silent. We aren’t certain why they believe we actually are this way; after all, we are as warm to the touch as they. We feel emotion, as they seem to, although we do seem less inclined to display it in face or body language. Perhaps this is because we have earthtalk? (Which they don’t seem to notice. This is good. In the earth, we may be ourselves.) It has never been clear to us whether we were built wrong, or whether their understanding of us is wrong. Or whether either matters.
Kelenli is outwardly calm while she burns inside. I watch her for so long that abruptly she comes back to herself and catches me. She smiles. “I think you like me.”
I consider the possible implications of this. “Not that way,” I say, out of habit. I have had to explain this to junior conductors or other staff on occasion. We are made like statues in this way as well – a design implementation that worked in this case, leaving us capable of rutting but disinterested in the attempt, and infertile should we bother. Is Kelenli the same? No, the conductors said she was made different in only one way. She has our powerful, complex, flexible sessapinae, which no other people in the world possess. Otherwise she’s like them.
“How fortunate that I wasn’t talking about sex.” There’s a drawling hum of amusement from her; it both bothers and pleases me. I don’t know why.
Oblivious to my sudden confusion, Kelenli gets to her feet. “I’ll be back,” she says, and leaves.
She doesn’t return for several days. She remains a detached part of our last network, though, so she is present for our wakings, our meals, our defecations, our inchoate dreams when we sleep, our pride in ourselves and each other. It doesn’t feel like watching when she does it, even if she is watching. I cannot speak for the others, but I like having her around.
Not all of the others do like Kelenli. Gaewha in particular is belligerent about it, and she sends this through our private discussion. “She appears just as we lose Tetlewha? Just as the project concludes? We’ve worked hard to become what we are. Will they praise her for our work, when it’s done?”
“She’s only a standby,” I say, trying to be the voice of reason. “And what she wants is what we want. We need to cooperate.”
“So she says.” That is Remwha, who considers himself smarter than the rest of us. (We’re all made to be equally intelligent. Remwha is just an ass.) “The conductors kept her away until now for a reason. She may be a troublemaker.”
That is foolish, I believe, though I don’t let myself say it even in earthtalk. We are part of the great machine. Anything that improves the machine’s function matters; anything unrelated to this purpose does not. If Kelenli were a troublemaker, Gallat would have sent her to the briar patch with Tetlewha. This is a thing we all understand. Gaewha and Remwha are just being difficult.
“If she is some sort of troublemaker, that will show itself with time,” I say firmly. That does not end, but at least postpones, the argument.
Kelenli returns the next day. The conductors bring us together to explain. “Kelenli has asked to take you on a tuning mission,” says the man who comes to deliver the briefing. He’s much taller than us, taller even than Kelenli, and slender. He likes to dress in perfectly matched colors and ornate buttons. His hair is long and black; his skin is white, though not so much as ours. His eyes are like ours, however – white within white. White as ice. We’ve never seen another one of them with eyes like ours. He is Conductor Gallat, head of the project. I think of Gallat as a plutonic fragment – a clear one, diamond-white. He is precisely angled and cleanly faceted and beautiful in a unique way, and he is also implacably deadly if not handled with precision. We don’t let ourselves think about the fact that he’s the one who killed Tetlewha.
(He isn’t who you think he is. I want Gallat to look like him the way I want you to look like her. This is the hazard of a flawed memory.)
“A tuning… mission,” Gaewha says slowly, to show that she doesn’t understand.
Kelenli opens her mouth to speak and then stops, turning to Gallat. Gallat smiles genially at this. “Kelenli’s performance is what we were hoping for with all of you, and yet you’ve consistently underperformed,” he says. We tense, uncomfortable, hyperconscious of criticism, though he merely shrugs. “I’ve consulted with the chief biomagestre, and she’s insistent that there’s no significant difference in your relative abilities. You have the same capability that she has, but you don’t demonstrate the same skill. There are any number of alterations we could make to try to resolve the discrepancy, fine-tuning so to speak, but that’s a risk we’d rather not take so close to launch.”
We reverberate in one accord for a moment, all of us very glad for this. “She said that she was here to teach us context,” I venture, very carefully.
Gallat nods to me. “She believes the solution is outside experience. Increased exposure to stimuli, challenging your problem-solving cognition, things like that. It’s a suggestion that has merit and the benefit of being minimally invasive – but for the sake of the project, we can’t send you all out at once. What if something happened? Instead we will split you into two groups. Since there’s only one of Kelenli, that means half of you will go with her now, and half in a week.”
Outside. We’re going outside. I’m desperate to be in the first group, but we know better than to show desire before the conductors. Tools should not want to escape their box so obviously.
I say, instead, “We’ve been more than sufficiently attuned to one another without this proposed mission.” My voice is flat. A statue’s. “The simulations show that we are reliably capable of controlling the Engine, as expected.”
“And we might as well do six groups as two,” adds Remwha. By this asinine suggestion do I know his eagerness. “Will each group not have different experiences? As I understand the… outside… there’s no way to control for consistency of exposure. If we must take time away from our preparations for this, surely it should be done in a way that minimizes risk?”