The Stone Sky

by N. K. Jemisin

  No, she thinks in a sudden fury. She grips his shoulders and shakes him. It takes her whole body to do this because he’s such a big man, but it makes him blink and focus through the blur. “You’re Schaffa,” she says. “You are! And … and you chose.” Because that’s important. That’s the thing the world doesn’t want people like them to do. “You’re not my Guardian anymore, you’re—” She dares to say it aloud at last. “You’re my new father. Okay? And th-that means we’re family, and … and we have to work together. That’s what family does, right? You let me protect you sometimes.”

  Schaffa stares at her, then he sighs and leans forward to kiss her forehead. He stays there after the kiss, nose pressed into her hair; Nassun makes a mighty effort and does not burst into tears. When he speaks at last, the horrible blurriness has faded, as have even some of the pain-lines around his eyes. “Very well, Nassun. Sometimes, you may protect me.”

  That settled, she sniffs, wipes her nose on a sleeve, and then turns to face Steel. He hasn’t changed position, so she pulls away from Schaffa and goes over to him, stopping right in front of him. His eyes shift to follow her, lazily slow. “Don’t do that again.”

  She half expects him to say, in his too-knowing voice, Do what? Instead he says, “It’s a mistake to bring him with us.”

  Cold washes through Nassun, followed by hot. Is it a threat, or a warning? She doesn’t like it, either way. Her jaw feels so tight that she almost bites her tongue trying to speak. “I don’t care.”

  Silence in reply. Is this capitulation? Agreement? Refusal to argue? Nassun doesn’t know. She wants to yell at him: Say you won’t hurt Schaffa again! Even though it feels wrong to yell at any adult. Yet she has also spent the past year and a half learning that adults are people, and sometimes they are wrong, and sometimes somebody should yell at them.

  But Nassun is tired, so instead she retreats to Schaffa, taking his hand tightly and glaring back at Steel, daring him to say anything else. He doesn’t, though. Good.

  The huge green thing sort of ripples then, and they all turn to face it. Something is—Nassun shudders, both revolted and fascinated. Something is growing from the weird nodules all over the thing’s surface. Each is several feet long, narrow, featherlike, attenuating near the tips. In a moment there are dozens of them, curling and waving gently in an unfelt breeze. Cilia, Nassun thinks suddenly, remembering a picture in an old biomestry creche book. Of course. Why wouldn’t people who made buildings out of plants also make carriages that look like germs?

  Some of the feathers are flickering faster than others, clustering together for a moment at a point along the thing’s side. Then the feathers all peel back, flattening against the mother-of-pearl surface, to reveal a soft rectangle of a door. Beyond, Nassun can see gentle light and surprisingly comfortable-looking chairs, in rows. They will ride in style to the other side of the world.

  Nassun looks up at Schaffa. He nods back at her with jaw tight. She does not look at Steel, who hasn’t moved and makes no attempt to join them.

  Then they climb aboard, and the feathers weave the door shut behind them. As they sit down, the great vehicle utters a low, resonant tone, and begins to move.

  Wealth has no value when the ash falls.

  —Tablet Three, “Structures,” verse ten

  Syl Anagist: Two

  IT’S A MAGNIFICENT HOUSE, COMPACT but elegantly designed and full of beautiful furnishings. We stare at its arches and bookcases and wooden bannisters. There are only a few plants growing from the cellulose walls, so the air is dry and a little stale. It feels like the museum. We cluster together in the big room at the front of the house, afraid to move, afraid to touch anything.

  “Do you live here?” one of the others asks Kelenli.

  “Occasionally,” she says. Her face is expressionless, but there is something in her voice that troubles me. “Follow me.”

  She leads us through the house. A den of stunning comfort: every surface soft and sittable, even the floor. What strikes me is that nothing is white. The walls are green and in some places painted a deep, rich burgundy. In the next room, the beds are covered in blue and gold fabric in contrasting textures. Nothing is hard and nothing is bare and I have never thought before that the chamber I live in is a prison cell, but now for the first time, I do.

  I have thought many new things this day, especially during our journey to this house. We walked the whole way, our feet aching with the unaccustomed use, and the whole way, people stared. Some whispered. One reached out to stroke my hair in passing, then giggled when I belatedly twitched away. At one point a man followed us. He was older, with short gray hair almost the same texture as ours, and he began to say angry things. Some of the words I did not know (“Niesbred” and “forktongue,” for example). Some I knew, but did not understand. (“Mistakes” and “We should have wiped you out,” which makes no sense because we were very carefully and intentionally made.) He accused us of lying, though none of us spoke to him, and of only pretending to be gone (somewhere). He said that his parents and his parents’ parents taught him the true horror, the true enemy, monsters like us were the enemy of all good people, and he was going to make sure we didn’t hurt anyone else.

  Then he came closer, big fists balled up. As we stumbled along gawping, so confused that we did not even realize we were in danger, some of our unobtrusive guards abruptly became more obtrusive and pulled the man into a building alcove, where they held him while he shouted and struggled to get at us. Kelenli kept walking forward the whole time, her head high, not looking at the man. We followed, knowing nothing else to do, and after a while the man fell behind us, his words lost to the sounds of the city.

  Later, Gaewha, shaking a little, asked Kelenli what was wrong with the angry man. Kelenli laughed softly and said, “He’s Sylanagistine.” Gaewha subsided into confusion. We all sent her quick pulses of reassurance that we are equally mystified; the problem was not her.

  This is normal life in Syl Anagist, we understand, as we walk through it. Normal people on the normal streets. Normal touches that make us cringe or stiffen or back up quickly. Normal houses with normal furnishings. Normal gazes that avert or frown or ogle. With every glimpse of normalcy, the city teaches us just how abnormal we are. I have never minded before that we were merely constructs, genegineered by master biomagests and developed in capsids of nutrient slush, decanted fully grown so that we would need no nurturing. I have been … proud, until now, of what I am. I have been content. But now I see the way these normal people look at us, and my heart aches. I don’t understand why.

  Perhaps all the walking has damaged me.

  Now Kelenli leads us through the fancy house. We pass through a doorway, however, and find an enormous sprawling garden behind the house. Down the steps and around the dirt path, there are flower beds everywhere, their fragrance summoning us closer. These aren’t like the precisely cultivated, genegineered flower beds of the compound, with their color-coordinated winking flowers; what grows here is wild, and perhaps inferior, their stems haphazardly short or long and their petals frequently less than perfect. And yet … I like them. The carpet of lichens that covers the path invites closer study, so we confer in rapid pulse-waves as we crouch and try to understand why it feels so springy and pleasant beneath our feet. A pair of scissors dangling from a stake invites curiosity. I resist the urge to claim some of the pretty purple flowers for myself, though Gaewha tries the scissors and then clutches some flowers in her hand, tightly, fiercely. We have never been allowed possessions of our own.

  I watch Kelenli surreptitiously, compulsively, while she watches us play. The strength of my interest confuses and frightens me a little, though I seem unable to resist it. We’ve always known that the conductors failed to make us emotionless, but we … well. I thought us above such intensity of feeling. That’s what I get for being arrogant. Now here we are, lost in sensation and reaction. Gaewha huddles in a corner with the scissors, ready to defend her flowers to the death. Dushwha
spins in circles, laughing deliriously; I’m not sure exactly at what. Bimniwha has cornered one of our guards and is peppering him with questions about what we saw during the walk here; the guard has a hunted look and seems to be hoping for rescue. Salewha and Remwha are in an intense discussion as they crouch beside a little pond, trying to figure out whether the creatures moving in the water are fish or frogs. Their conversation is entirely auditory, no earthtalk at all.

  And I, fool that I am, watch Kelenli. I want to understand what she means us to learn, either from that art-thing at the museum or our afternoon garden idyll. Her face and sessapinae reveal nothing, but that’s all right. I also want to simply look at her face and bask in that deep, powerful orogenic presence of hers. It’s nonsensical. Probably disturbing to her, though she ignores me if so. I want her to look at me. I want to speak to her. I want to be her.

  I decide that what I’m feeling is love. Even if it isn’t, the idea is novel enough to fascinate me, so I decide to follow where its impulses lead.

  After a time, Kelenli rises and walks away from where we wander the garden. At the center of the garden is a small structure, like a tiny house but made of stone bricks rather than the cellulose greenstrate of most buildings. One determined ivy grows over its nearer wall. When she opens the door of this house, I am the only one who notices. By the time she’s stepped inside, all the others have stopped whatever they were doing and stood to watch her, too. She pauses, amused—I think—by our sudden silence and anxiety. Then she sighs and jerks her head in a silent Come on. We scramble to follow.

  Inside—we cram carefully in after Kelenli; it’s a tight fit—the little house has a wooden floor and some furnishings. It’s nearly as bare as our cells back at the compound, but there are some important differences. Kelenli sits down on one of the chairs and we realize: This is hers. Hers. It is her … cell? No. There are peculiarities all around the space, things that offer intriguing hints as to Kelenli’s personality and past. Books on a shelf in the corner mean that someone has taught her to read. A brush on the edge of the sink suggests that she does her own hair, impatiently to judge by the amount of hair caught in its bristles. Maybe the big house is where she is supposed to be, and maybe she actually sleeps there sometimes. This little garden house, however, is … her home.

  “I grew up with Conductor Gallat,” Kelenli says softly. (We’ve sat down on the floor and chairs and bed around her, rapt for her wisdom.) “Raised alongside him, the experiment to his control—just as I’m your control. He’s ordinary, except for a drop of undesirable ancestry.”

  I blink my icewhite eyes, and think of Gallat’s, and suddenly I understand many new things. She smiles when my mouth drops open in an O. Her smile doesn’t last long, however.

  “They—Gallat’s parents, who I thought were my parents—didn’t tell me at first what I was. I went to school, played games, did all the things a normal Sylanagistine girl does while growing up. But they didn’t treat me the same. For a long time I thought it was something I’d done.” Her gaze drifts away, weighty with old bitterness. “I wondered why I was so horrible that even my parents couldn’t seem to love me.”

  Remwha crouches to rub a hand along the wooden slats of the floor. I don’t know why he does anything. Salewha is still outside, since Kelenli’s little house is too cramped for her tastes; she has gone to stare at a tiny, fast-moving bird that flits among the flowers. She listens through us, though, through the house’s open door. We all need to hear what Kelenli says, with voice and vibration and the steady, heavy weight of her gaze.

  “Why did they deceive you?” Gaewha asks.

  “The experiment was to see if I could be human.” Kelenli smiles to herself. She’s sitting forward in her chair, elbows braced on her knees, looking at her hands. “See if, raised among decent, natural folk, I might turn out at least decent, if not natural. And so my every achievement was counted a Sylanagistine success, while my every failure or display of poor behavior was seen as proof of genetic degeneracy.”

  Gaewha and I look at each other. “Why would you be indecent?” she asks, utterly mystified.

  Kelenli blinks out of her reverie and stares at us for a moment, and in that time we feel the gulf between us. She thinks of herself as one of us, which she is. She thinks of herself as a person, too, though. Those two concepts are incompatible.

  “Evil Death,” she says softly, wonderingly, echoing our thoughts. “You really don’t know anything, do you?”

  Our guards have taken up positions at the top of the steps leading into the garden, nowhere in earshot. This space is as private as anything we have had today. It is almost surely bugged, but Kelenli does not seem to care, and we don’t, either. She draws up her feet and wraps her arms around her knees, curiously vulnerable for someone whose presence within the strata is as deep and dense as a mountain. I reach up to touch her ankle, greatly daring, and she blinks and smiles at me, reaching down to cover my fingers with her hand. I will not understand my feelings for centuries afterward.

  The contact seems to strengthen Kelenli. Her smile fades and she says, “Then I’ll tell you.”

  Remwha is still studying her wooden floor. He rubs the grain of it with his fingers and manages to send along its dust molecules: Should you? I am chagrined because it’s something I should have considered.

  She shakes her head, smiling. No, she shouldn’t.

  But she does anyway, through the earth so we will know it’s true.

  Remember what I have told you: The Stillness in these days is three lands, not one. Their names, if this matters, are Maecar, Kakhiarar, and Cilir. Syl Anagist started out as part of Kakhiarar, then all of it, then all of Maecar, too. All became Syl Anagist.

  Cilir, to the south, was once a small and nothing land occupied by many small and nothing peoples. One of these groups was the Thniess. It was hard to say their name with the proper pronunciation, so Sylanagistines called them Niess. The two words did not mean the same thing, but the latter is what caught on.

  The Sylanagistines took their land. The Niess fought, but then responded like any living thing under threat—with diaspora, sending whatever was left of themselves flying forth to take root and perhaps survive where it could. The descendants of these Niess became part of every land, every people, blending in among the rest and adapting to local customs. They managed to keep hold of who they were, though, continuing to speak their own language even as they grew fluent in other tongues. They maintained some of their old ways, too—like splitting their tongues with salt acid, for reasons known only to them. And while they lost much of the distinctive look that came of isolation within their small land, many retained enough of it that to this day, icewhite eyes and ashblow hair carry a certain stigma.

  Yes, you see now.

  But the thing that made the Niess truly different was their magic. Magic is everywhere in the world. Everyone sees it, feels it, flows with it. In Syl Anagist, magic is cultivated in every flower bed and tree line and grapevine-draped wall. Each household or business must produce its share, which is then funneled away in genegineered vines and pumps to become the power source for a global civilization. It is illegal to kill in Syl Anagist because life is a valuable resource.

  The Niess did not believe this. Magic could not be owned, they insisted, any more than life could be—and thus they wasted both, by building (among many other things) plutonic engines that did nothing. They were just … pretty. Or thought-provoking, or crafted for the sheer joy of crafting. And yet this “art” ran more efficiently and powerfully than anything the Sylanagistine had ever managed.

  How did it begin? You must understand that fear is at the root of such things. Niespeople looked different, behaved differently, were different—but every group is different from others. Differences alone are never enough to cause problems. Syl Anagist’s assimilation of the world had been over for a century before I was ever made; all cities were Syl Anagist. All languages had become Sylanagistine. But there are none so frightened
, or so strange in their fear, as conquerors. They conjure phantoms endlessly, terrified that their victims will someday do back what was done to them—even if, in truth, their victims couldn’t care less about such pettiness and have moved on. Conquerors live in dread of the day when they are shown to be, not superior, but simply lucky.

  So when Niess magic proved more efficient than Sylanagistine, even though the Niess did not use it as a weapon …

  This is what Kelenli told us. Perhaps it began with whispers that white Niess irises gave them poor eyesight and perverse inclinations, and that split Niess tongues could not speak truth. That sort of sneering happens, cultural bullying, but things got worse. It became easy for scholars to build reputations and careers around the notion that Niess sessapinae were fundamentally different, somehow—more sensitive, more active, less controlled, less civilized—and that this was the source of their magical peculiarity. This was what made them not the same kind of human as everyone else. Eventually: not as human as everyone else. Finally: not human at all.

  Once the Niess were gone, of course, it became clear that the fabled Niess sessapinae did not exist. Sylanagistine scholars and biomagestres had plenty of prisoners to study, but try as they might, no discernible variance from ordinary people could be found. This was intolerable; more than intolerable. After all, if the Niess were just ordinary human beings, then on what basis had military appropriations, pedagogical reinterpretation, and entire disciplines of study been formed? Even the grand dream itself, Geoarcanity, had grown out of the notion that Sylanagistine magestric theory—including its scornful dismissal of Niess efficiency as a fluke of physiology—was superior and infallible.