Once we’re dead, the Plutonic Engine’s magic will surge unrestricted down all the conduits of the city, frying them beyond repair. Every node of Syl Anagist will shut down – vehimals dying unless they have backup generators, lights going dark, machinery stilling, all the infinite conveniences of modern magestry erased from furnishings and appliances and cosmetics. Generations of effort spent preparing for Geoarcanity will be lost. The Engine’s crystalline fragments will become so many oversized rocks, broken and burnt and powerless.
We need not be as cruel as they. We can instruct the fragments to come down away from the most inhabited areas. We are the monsters they created, and more, but we will be the sort of monsters we wish to be, in death.
And are we agreed, then?
Yes. Remwha, furious.
Yes. Gaewha, sorrowful.
Yes. Bimniwha, resigned.
Yes. Salewha, righteous.
Yes. Dushwha, weary.
And I, heavy as lead, say, Yes.
So we are agreed.
Only to myself do I think, No, with Kelenli’s face in my mind’s eye. But sometimes, when the world is hard, love must be harder still.
***
Launch Day.
We are brought nourishment – protein with a side of fresh sweet fruit, and a drink that we are told is a popular delicacy: sef, which turns pretty colors when various vitamin supplements are added to it. A special drink for a special day. It’s chalky. I don’t like it. Then it is time to travel to Zero Site.
Here is how the Plutonic Engine works, briefly and simply.
First we will awaken the fragments, which have sat in their sockets for decades channeling life-energy through each node of Syl Anagist – and storing some of it for later use, including that which was force-fed to them through the briar patches. They have now reached optimum storage and generation, however, each becoming a self-contained arcane engine of its own. Now when we summon them, the fragments will rise from their sockets. We’ll join their power together in a stable network and, after bouncing it off a reflector that will amplify and concentrate the magic still further, pour this into the onyx. The onyx will direct this energy straight into the Earth’s core, causing an overflow – which the onyx will then shunt into Syl Anagist’s hungry conduits. In effect, the Earth will become a massive plutonic engine too, the dynamo that is its core churning forth far more magic than is put into it. From there, the system will become self-perpetuating. Syl Anagist will feed upon the life of the planet itself, forever.
(Ignorance is an inaccurate term for what this was. True, no one thought of the Earth as alive in those days – but we should have guessed. Magic is the by-product of life. That there was magic in the Earth to take… We should all have guessed.)
Everything we have done, up to now, has been practice. We could never have activated the full Plutonic Engine here on Earth – too many complications involving the obliqueness of angles, signal speed and resistance, the curvature of the hemisphere. So awkwardly round, planets. Our target is the Earth, after all; lines of sight, lines of force and attraction. If we stay on the planet, all we can really affect is the Moon.
Which is why Zero Site has never been on Earth.
Thus in the small hours of the morning we are brought to a singular sort of vehimal, doubtless genegineered from grasshopper stock or something similar. It is diamond-winged but also has great carbon-fiber legs, steaming now with coiled, stored power. As the conductors usher us aboard this vehimal, I see other vehimals being made ready. A large party means to come with us to watch the great project conclude at last. I sit where I am told, and all of us are strapped in because the vehimal’s thrust can sometimes overcome geomagestric inertial… Hmm. Suffice it to say, the launch can be somewhat alarming. It is nothing compared to plunging into the heart of a living, churning fragment, but I suppose the humans think it a grand, wild thing. The six of us sit, still and cold with purpose as they chatter around us, while the vehimal leaps up to the Moon.
On the Moon is the moonstone – a massive, iridescent white cabochon embedded in the thin gray soil of the place. It is the largest of the fragments, fully as big as a node of Syl Anagist itself; the whole of the Moon is its socket. Arranged around its edges sits a complex of buildings, each sealed against the airless dark, which are not so very different from the buildings we just left. They’re just on the Moon. This is Zero Site, where history will be made.
We are led inside, where permanent Zero Site staff line the halls and stare at us in proud admiration, as one admires precision-made instruments. We are led to cradles that look precisely like the cradles used every day for our practices – although this time, each of us is taken to a separate room of the compound. Adjoining each room is the conductors’ observation chamber, connected via a clear crystal window. I’m used to being observed while I work – but not used to being brought into the observation room itself, as happens today for the very first time.
There I stand, short and plainly dressed and palpably uncomfortable amid tall people in rich, complex clothing, while Gallat introduces me as “Houwha, our finest tuner.” This statement alone proves that either the conductors really have no clue how we function, or that Gallat is nervous and groping for something to say. Perhaps both. Dushwha laughs a cascading microshake – the Moon’s strata are thin and dusty and dead, but not much different from the Earth’s – while I stand there and mouth pleasant greetings, as I am expected to do. Maybe that’s what Gallat really means: I’m the tuner who is best at pretending that he cares about conductor nonsense.
Something catches my attention, though, as the introductions are made and small talk is exchanged and I concentrate on saying correct things at correct times. I turn and notice a stasis column near the back of the room, humming faintly and flickering with its own plutonic energies, generating the field that keeps something within stable. And floating above its cut-crystal surface —
There is a woman in the room who is taller and more elaborately dressed than everyone else. She follows my gaze and says to Gallat, “Do they know about the test bore?”
Gallat twitches and looks at me, then at the stasis column. “No,” he says. He doesn’t name the woman or give her a title, but his tone is very respectful. “They’ve been told only what’s necessary.”
“I would think context is necessary, even with your kind.” Gallat bristles at being lumped in with us, but he says nothing in response to it. The woman looks amused. She bends down to peer into my face, although I’m not that much shorter than her. “Would you like to know what that artifact is, little tuner?”
I immediately hate her. “Yes, please,” I say.
She takes my hand before Gallat can stop her. It isn’t uncomfortable. Her skin is dry. She leads me over near the stasis column, so that I can now get a good look at the thing that floats above it.
At first I think that what I’m seeing is nothing more than a spherical lump of iron, hovering a few inches above the stasis column’s surface and underlit by its white glow. It is only a lump of iron, its surface crazed with slanting, circuitous lines. A meteor fragment? No. I realize the sphere is moving – spinning slowly on a slightly tilted north-south axis. I look at the warning symbols around the column’s rim and see markers for extreme heat and pressure, and a caution against breaching the stasis field. Within, the markers say, it has re-created the object’s native environment.
No one would do this for a mere lump of iron. I blink, adjust my perception to the sesunal and magical, and draw back quickly as searing white light blazes at and through me. The iron sphere is full of magic – concentrated, crackling, overlapping threads upon threads of it, some of them even extending beyond its surface and outward and… away. I can’t follow the ones that whitter away beyond the room; they extend beyond my reach. I can see that they stretch off toward the sky, though, for some reason. And written in the jittering threads that I can see… I frown.
“It’s angry,” I say. And familiar. Where have I seen something like this, this magic, before?
The woman blinks at me. Gallat groans under his breath. “Houwha —”
“No,” the woman says, holding up a hand to quell him. She focuses on me again with a gaze that is intent now, and curious. “What did you say, little tuner?”