“I think six wouldn’t be cost-effective or efficient,” Kelenli says, while silently signaling approval and amusement for our playacting. She glances at Gallat and shrugs, not bothering to pretend that she is emotionless; she simply seems bored. “We might as well do one group as two or six. We can plan the route, position extra guards along the way, involve the nodal police for surveillance and support. Honestly, repeated trips would just increase the chance that disaffected citizens might anticipate the route and plan… unpleasantness.”
We are all intrigued by the possibility of unpleasantness. Kelenli quells our excited tremors.
Conductor Gallat winces as she does this; that one struck home. “The potential for significant gains are why you will go,” Conductor Gallat says to us. He’s still smiling, but there’s an edge to it now. Was the word will ever so slightly emphasized? So minute, the perturbations of audible speech. What I take from this is that not only will he let us go, but he has also changed his mind about sending us in multiple groups. Some of this is because Kelenli’s suggestion was the most sensible, but the rest is because he’s irritated with us for our apparent reluctance.
Ah, Remwha wields his annoying nature like a diamond chisel as usual. Excellent work, I pulse. He returns me a polite thank-you waveform.
We are to leave that very day. Clothing suitable for travel outdoors is brought to my quarters by junior conductors. I pull on the thicker cloth and shoes carefully, fascinated by the different textures, and then sit quietly while the junior conductor plaits my hair into a single white braid. “Is this necessary for outside?” I ask. I’m genuinely curious, since the conductors wear their hair in many styles. Some of them I can’t emulate, because my hair is poufy and coarse and will not hold a curl or bear straightening. Only we have hair like this. Theirs comes in many textures.
“It might help,” says the junior. “You lot are going to stand out no matter what, but the more normal we can make you seem, the better.”
“People will know we’re part of the Engine,” I say, straightening just a little in pride.
His fingers slow for a moment. I don’t think he notices. “That’s not exactly… They’re more likely to think you’re something else. Don’t worry, though; we’ll send guards along to make sure there’s no trouble. They’ll be unobtrusive, but there. Kelenli insists that you can’t be made to feel sheltered, even if you are.”
“They’re more likely to think we’re something else,” I repeat slowly, thoughtfully.
His fingers twitch, pulling a few strands harder than necessary. I don’t wince or pull away. They’re more comfortable thinking of us as statues, and statues aren’t supposed to feel pain. “Well, it’s a distant possibility, but they have to know you aren’t – I mean, it’s…” He sighs. “Oh, Evil Death. It’s complicated. Don’t worry about it.”
Conductors say this when they’ve made a mistake. I don’t ping the others with it right away, because we minimize communication outside of sanctioned meetings. People who are not tuners can perceive magic only in rudimentary ways; they use machines and instruments to do what is natural for us. Still, they’re always monitoring us in some measure, so we cannot allow them to learn the extent to which we speak to each other, and hear them, when they think we cannot.
Soon I’m ready. After conferring with other conductors over the vine, mine decides to brush my face with paint and powder. It’s supposed to make me look like them. It actually makes me like someone whose white skin has been painted brown. I must look skeptical when he shows me the mirror; my conductor sighs and complains that he’s not an artist.
Then he brings me to a place that I’ve seen only a few times before, within the building that houses me: the downstairs foyer. Here the walls aren’t white; the natural green and brown of self-repairing cellulose has been allowed to flourish unbleached. Someone has seeded the space with vining strawberries that are half in white flower, half in ripening red fruit; it’s quite lovely. The six of us stand near the floor pool waiting for Kelenli, trying not to notice the other personnel of the building coming and going and staring at us: six smaller-than-average, stocky people with puffy white hair and painted faces, our lips arranged in defensively pleasant smiles. If there are guards, we do not know how to tell them from the gawkers.
When Kelenli comes toward us, though, I finally notice guards. Hers move with her, not bothering to be unobtrusive – a tall brown woman and man who might have been siblings. I realize I have seen them before, trailing her on other occasions that she’s come to visit. They hang back as she reaches us.
“Good, you’re ready,” she says. Then she grimaces, reaching out to touch Dushwha’s cheek. Her thumb comes away dusted with face powder. “Really?”
Dushwha looks away, uncomfortable. They have never liked being pushed into any emulation of our creators – not in clothing, not in gender, definitely not in this. “It’s meant to help,” they mutter unhappily, perhaps trying to convince themselves.
“It makes you more conspicuous. And they’ll know what you are, anyway.” She turns and looks at one of her guards, the woman. “I’m taking them to clean this dreck off. Want to help?” The woman just looks at her in silence. Kelenli laughs to herself. It sounds genuinely mirth filled.
She herds us into a personal-needs alcove. The guards station themselves outside while she splashes water on our faces from the clean side of the latrine pool, and scrubs the paint away with an absorbent cloth. She hums while she does it. Does that mean she’s happy? When she takes my arm to wipe the gunk off my face, I search hers to try to understand. Her gaze sharpens when she notices.
“You’re a thinker,” she says. I’m not sure what that’s supposed to mean.
“We all are,” I say. I allow a brief rumble of nuance. We have to be.
“Exactly. You think more than you have to.” Apparently a bit of brown near my hairline is especially stubborn. She wipes it off, grimaces, wipes it again, sighs, rinses the cloth and wipes at it again.
I continue searching her face. “Why do you laugh at their fear?”
It’s a stupid question. Should’ve asked it through the earth, not out loud. She stops wiping my face. Remwha glances at me in bland reproach, then goes to the entrance of the alcove. I hear him asking the guard there to please ask a conductor whether we are in danger of sun damage without the protection of the paint. The guard laughs and calls over her companion to relay this question, as if it’s ridiculous. During the moment of distraction purchased for us by this exchange, Kelenli then resumes scrubbing me.
“Why not laugh at it?” she says.
“They would like you better if you didn’t laugh.” I signal nuance: alignment, harmonic enmeshment, compliance, conciliation, mitigation. If she wants to be liked.
“Maybe I don’t want to be liked.” She shrugs, turning to rinse the cloth again.
“You could be. You’re like them.”
“Not enough.”
“More than me.” This is obvious. She is their kind of beautiful, their kind of normal. “If you tried —”
She laughs at me, too. It isn’t cruel, I know instinctively. It’s pitying. But underneath the laugh, her presence is suddenly as still and pent as pressurized stone in the instant before it becomes something else. Anger again. Not at me, but triggered by my words nevertheless. I always seem to make her angry.
They’re afraid because we exist, she says. There’s nothing we did to provoke their fear, other than exist. There’s nothing we can do to earn their approval, except stop existing – so we can either die like they want, or laugh at their cowardice and go on with our lives.
I think at first that I don’t understand everything she just told me. But I do, don’t I? There were sixteen of us once; now we are but six. The others questioned and were decommissioned for it. Obeyed without question, and were decommissioned for it. Bargained. Gave up. Helped. Despaired. We have tried everything, done all they asked and more, and yet now there are only six of us left.