The Stone Sky (The Broken Earth, #3) - N. K. Jemisin Page 0,113

They are not inferior. They do not deserve it. And so it is the society that must change. There can be peace this way, too, but not before conflict.

No one reaches this place without a false start or two.

When Alabaster was a young man, he loved easily and casually. Oh, he was angry, even then; of course he was. Even children notice when they are not treated fairly. He had chosen to cooperate, however, for the time being.

He met a man, a scholar, during a mission he’d been assigned by the Fulcrum. Alabaster’s interest was prurient; the scholar was quite handsome, and charmingly shy in response to Alabaster’s flirtations. If the scholar hadn’t been busy excavating what turned out to be an ancient lore cache, there would be nothing more to the story. Alabaster would have loved him and left him, perhaps with regret, more likely with no hard feelings.

Instead, the scholar showed Alabaster his findings. There were more, Alabaster told you, than just three tablets of stonelore, originally. Also, the current Tablet Three was rewritten by Sanze. It was actually rewritten again by Sanze; it had been rewritten several times prior to that. The original Tablet Three spoke of Syl Anagist, you see, and how the Moon was lost. This knowledge, for many reasons, has been deemed unacceptable again and again down the millennia since. No one really wants to face the fact that the world is the way it is because some arrogant, self-absorbed people tried to put a leash on the rusting planet. And no one was ready to accept that the solution to the whole mess was simply to let orogenes live and thrive and do what they were born to do.

For Alabaster, the lore cache’s knowledge was overwhelming. He fled. It was too much for him, the knowledge that all of this had happened before. That he was the scion of a people abused; that those people’s forebears were, too, in their turn; that the world as he knew it could not function without forcing someone into servitude. At the time he could see no end to the cycle, no way to demand the impossible of society. So he broke, and he ran.

His Guardian found him, of course, three quartents away from where he was supposed to be and with no inkling of where he was going. Instead of breaking his hand—they used different techniques with highringers like Alabaster—Guardian Leshet took him to a tavern and bought him a drink. He wept into his wine and confessed to her that he couldn’t take much more of the world as it was. He had tried to submit, tried to embrace the lies, but it was not right.

Leshet soothed him and took him back to the Fulcrum, and for one year they allowed Alabaster time to recover. To accept again the rules and role that had been created for him. He was content during this year, I believe; Antimony believes it, in any case, and she is the one who knew him best during this time. He settled, did what was expected of him, sired three children, and even volunteered to be an instructor for the higher-ringed juniors. He never got the chance to act on this, however, because the Guardians had decided already that Alabaster could not go unpunished for running away. When he met and fell in love with an older ten-ringer named Hessionite—

I have told you already that they use different methods on highringers.

I ran away, too, once. In a way.

It is the day after our return from Kelenli’s tuning mission, and I am different. I look through the nematode window at the garden of purple light, and it is no longer beautiful to me. The winking of the white star-flowers lets me know that some genegineer made them, tying them into the city power network so that they can be fed by a bit of magic. How else to get that winking effect? I see the elegant vinework on the surrounding buildings and I know that somewhere, a biomagest is tabulating how many lammotyrs of magic can be harvested from such beauty. Life is sacred in Syl Anagist—sacred, and lucrative, and useful.

So I am thinking this, and I am in a foul mood, when one of the junior conductors comes in. Conductor Stahnyn, she is called, and ordinarily I like her. She’s young enough to have not yet picked up the worst of the more experienced conductors’ habits. And now as I turn