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