Then there is nothing but the light, and the stairs, and the long-forgotten city somewhere below.
***
2699: Two Fulcrum blackjackets summoned to Deejna comm (Uher Quartent, Western Coastals, near Kiash Traps) when Mount Imher showed eruption signs. Blackjackets informed comm officials that eruption was imminent, and that it would likely touch off the whole Kiash cluster, including Madness (local name for the supervolcano that triggered the Madness Season; Imher sits on the same hot spot). Upon determining that Imher was beyond their ability to quell, the blackjackets – one three-ringer, the other supposedly seven although did not wear rings for some reason – made the attempt anyway, due to insufficient time to send for higher-ringed Imperial Orogenes. They successfully stilled the eruption long enough for a nine-ring senior Imperial Orogene to arrive and push it back into dormancy. (Three-ringer and seven-ringer found holding hands, charred, frozen.)
— Project notes of Yaetr Innovator Dibars
Syl Anagist: Three
Fascinating. All of this grows easier to remember with the telling… or perhaps I am still human, after all.
***
At first our field excursion is simply the act of walking through the city. We have spent the brief years since our initial decanting immersed in sesuna, the sense of energy in all its forms. A walk outside forces us to pay attention to our other, lesser senses, and this is initially overwhelming. We flinch at the springiness of pressed-fiber sidewalks under our shoes, so unlike the hard lacquerwood of our quarters. We sneeze trying to breathe air thick with smells of bruised vegetation and chemical by-product and thousands of exhaled breaths. Their first sneeze frightens Dushwha into tears. We clap hands over our ears to try, and fail, to screen out many voices talking and walls groaning and leaves rustling and machinery whining in the distance. Bimniwha tries to yell over it all, and Kelenli must stop and soothe her before she will try speaking normally again. I duck and yelp in fear of the birds that sit in a nearby bush, and I am the calmest of us.
What settles us, at last, is finally having the chance to gaze upon the full beauty of the amethyst plutonic fragment. It is an awesome thing, pulsing with the slow flux of magic as it towers over the city-node’s heart. Every node of Syl Anagist has adapted in unique ways to suit its local climate. We have heard of nodes in the desert where buildings are grown from hardened giant succulents; nodes on the ocean built by coral organisms engineered to grow and die on command. (Life is sacred in Syl Anagist, but sometimes death is necessary.) Our node – the node of the amethyst – was once an old-growth forest, so I cannot help thinking that something of ancient trees’ majesty is in the great crystal. Surely this makes it more stately and strong than other fragments of the machine! This feeling is completely irrational, but I look at my fellow tuners’ faces as we gaze at the amethyst fragment, and I see the same love there.
(We have been told stories of how the world was different, long ago. Once, cities were not just dead themselves, stone and metal jungles that did not grow or change, but they were actually deadly, poisoning soil and making water undrinkable and even changing the weather by their very existence. Syl Anagist is better, but we feel nothing when we think of the city-node itself. It is nothing to us – buildings full of people we cannot truly understand, going about business that should matter but does not. The fragments, though? We hear their voices. We sing their magic song. The amethyst is part of us, and we it.)
“I’m going to show you three things during this trip,” Kelenli says, once we’ve gazed at the amethyst enough to calm down. “These things have been vetted by the conductors, if that matters to you.” She makes a show of eying Remwha as she says this, since he was the one who made the biggest stink about having to go on this trip. Remwha affects a bored sigh. They are both excellent actors, before our watching guards.
Then Kelenli leads us forward again. It’s such a contrast, her behavior and ours. She walks easily with head high, ignoring everything that isn’t important, radiating confidence and calm. Behind her, we start-and-stop-and-scurry, all timid clumsiness, distracted by everything. People stare, but I don’t think it’s actually our whiteness that they find so strange. I think we just look like fools.
I have always been proud, and their amusement stings, so I straighten and try to walk as Kelenli does, even though this means ignoring many of the wonders and potential threats around me. Gaewha notices, too, and tries to emulate both of us. Remwha sees what we are doing and looks annoyed, sending a little ripple through the ambient: We will never be anything but strange to them.
I answer in an angry basso push-wave throb. This is not about them.
He sighs but begins emulating me, too. The others follow suit.
We have traveled to the southernmost quartent of the city-node, where the air is redolent with faint sulfur smells. Kelenli explains that the smell is because of the waste reclamation plants, which grow thicker here where sewers bring the city’s gray water near the surface. The plants make the water clean again and spread thick, healthy foliage over the streets to cool them, as they were designed to do – but not even the best genegineers can stop plants that live on waste from smelling a bit like what they eat.
“Do you mean to show us the waste infrastructure?” Remwha asks Kelenli. “I feel more contextual already.”
Kelenli snorts. “Not exactly.”
She turns a corner, and then there is a dead building before us. We all stop and stare. Ivy wends up this building’s walls, which are made of some sort of red clay pressed into bricks, and around some of its pillars, which are marble. Aside from the ivy, though, nothing of the building is alive. It’s squat and low and shaped like a rectangular box. We can sess no hydrostatic pressure supporting its walls; it must use force and chemical fastenings to stay upright. The windows are just glass and metal, and I can see no nematocysts growing over their surfaces. How do they keep safe anything inside? The doors are dead wood, polished dark red-brown and carved with ivy motifs; pretty, surprisingly. The steps are a dull tawny-white sand suspension. (Centuries before, people called this concrete.) The whole thing is stunningly obsolete – yet intact, and functional, and thus fascinating for its uniqueness.
“It’s so… symmetrical,” says Bimniwha, curling her lip a little.
“Yes,” says Kelenli. She’s stopped before this building to let us take it in. “Once, though, people thought this sort of thing was beautiful. Let’s go.” She starts forward.
Remwha stares after her. “What, inside? Is that thing structurally sound?”
“Yes. And yes, we’re going inside.” Kelenli pauses and looks back at him, perhaps surprised to realize that at least some of his reticence wasn’t an act. Through the ambient, I feel her touch him, reassure him. Remwha is more of an ass when he is afraid or angry, so her comfort helps; the spiky jitter of his nerves begins to ease. She still has to play the game, however, for our many observers. “Though I suppose you could stay outside, if you wanted.”
She glances at her two guards, the brown man and woman who stay near her. They have not kept back from our group, unlike the other guards of whom we catch glimpses now and again, skirting our periphery.
Woman Guard scowls back at her. “You know better.”
“It was a thought.” Kelenli shrugs then, and gestures with her head toward the building, speaking to Remwha now. “Sounds like you don’t actually have a choice. But I promise you, the building won’t collapse on your head.”
We move to follow. Remwha walks a little slower, but eventually he comes along, too.
A holo-sign writes itself in the air before us as we cross the threshold. We have not been taught to read, and the letters of this sign look strange in any case, but then a booming voice sounds over the building’s audio system: “Welcome to the story of enervation!” I have no idea what this means. Inside, the building smells… wrong. Dry and dusty, the air stale as if there’s nothing taking in its carbon dioxide. There are other people here, we see, gathered in the building’s big open foyer or making their way up its symmetrical twin curving stairs, peering in fascination at the panels of carved wooden decoration which line each stair. They don’t look at us, distracted by the greater strangeness of our environs.