it, reducing them to component atoms, hunting the place where lead becomes gold, where flesh becomes cosmic principle of the universe. Reed looks at her coolly. He will not tell her no, not in so many words, because Leigh is rarely fully wrong; she understands the deep threads of the project as few others do, himself included. The scales of human mercy do not cloud her eyes.
He will also not accede to her requests. They’ve spent too much time already, devoted too many resources, to cut themselves short when they are so blissfully close to victory. Unless the project has become an active danger, it will continue. The road to the Impossible City has always welcomed accidental travelers. Sometimes he suspects that’s the only way to truly get there at all.
“How are they embracing their aspects?”
Leigh looks at him with sullen hatred in her eyes, and does not speak.
Reed sighs. Sometimes it’s sadly necessary to remind her of what she is, what he is, and why she is here. “You could be replaced, Leigh. It would be a dire loss, and I’d miss you, but you could be replaced.”
“The boy speaks seven languages, and he’s been asking for more lessons,” says Leigh, eyes still burning hate. “His soft palate has remained flexible; there don’t seem to be any sounds he can’t make. He hasn’t realized yet how unusual that is, or what a freak of nature it makes him. Maybe he never will. It depends on how long he remains operational. The girl plays chess at a grandmaster level. She could make a career of it, but she doesn’t care enough; she’d rather be doing pure mathematics. Probably will, once her parents stop pushing her to have a normal life. As if that were ever going to be possible.” There’s a venom in Leigh’s voice that can’t be explained by any of the things she’s said, something deep and cold and brutally cruel.
Reed says nothing. He looks at her, and he waits.
The wait is not a long one. “They’re not good work,” she finally explodes. “The boy could be a king by now—he can make anyone do anything by snapping his fingers and telling them what he wants, and what does he do? Academic decathlon, and a girlfriend, and reading up on linguistic dead ends. We’re supposed to be making tools, not scholars afraid of their own shadows. And the girl! She’s socially maladjusted, she’s withdrawn and dysfunctional, and she hasn’t laughed since we broke contact between the two of them. We need to scrub this generation and start over.”
“It was your idea to sever that initial contact, Leigh. You were the one who used Galileo’s planetary charts to prove that intersecting their orbits too early would be detrimental to their development. I listened to you, because you’ve been right before. Now you’re telling me severing that contact may have damaged them, and that this justifies canceling their portion of the project. Which is it? Did we serve the Doctrine or do it irreparable harm when we untangled them from one another?”
“I said to keep them apart, not to send them out into the world. If we damaged the Doctrine’s manifestation, it was because they weren’t properly made,” Leigh says. “If a vase shatters when you cool it, it’s not because it wasn’t meant to be cooled. You must cool what you bake. But sometimes there are flaws in the making, places where the clay fails to properly bond. It’s not my fault if they’re bad clay. It’s not my fault if they can’t hold when they’re fired.”
“Perhaps not, but I think you’re too swift to dismiss them as poorly made,” says Reed. He sees the reasons for her objection now, sees them more clearly than she ever will. Leigh relishes destruction, the point where one thing can be broken down to make way for the next, because her true devotion is to perfection, the line past which nothing can be improved. To her, their cuckoos have been a spiral of increasing elegance, but they are not yet perfect.
“I think you’re too swift to embrace them as the ideal.”
“What would you have me do?”
“Start again. We know more now; we have a better idea of the shapes we need, the angles we desire. We can make them better.”
Her point is valid. There is a compromise to be reached. “I’ll approve your creation of another generation of cuckoos to race for the manifestation, but you must agree to stop calling for