The Stone Sky

by N. K. Jemisin

  Schaffa has soiled himself, Nassun finds. It makes her feel ashamed to have to pull his clothes off and clean him, using stretchy cloths she finds in the bathroom, but it would be worse to leave him in his own filth. His eyes are open again, though he does not move while she works. They’ve opened during the day, and they close at night, but though Nassun talks to Schaffa (pleads for him to wake up, asks him to help her, tells him that she needs him), he does not respond.

  She gets him into the bed, leaving a pad of cloths under his bare bottom. She trickles water from their canteens into his mouth, and when that runs out, she cautiously tries to get more from the strange water pump in the kitchen. There are no levers or handles on it, but when she puts her canteen beneath the spigot, water comes out. She’s a diligent girl. First she uses the powder in her runny-sack to make a cup of safe from the water, checking for contaminants. The safe dissolves but stays cloudy and white, so she drinks that herself and then brings more water to Schaffa. He drinks readily, which probably means he was really thirsty. She gives him raisins that she first soaks in water, and he chews and swallows, although slowly and without much vigor. She hasn’t done a good job of taking care of him.

  She will do better, she decides, and heads outside to the garden to pick food for them both.

  Syenite told me the date. Six years. It’s been six years? No wonder she’s so angry. Told me to go jump in a hole, since it’s been so long. She doesn’t want to see me again. Such a steelheart. Told her I was sorry. My fault, all of it.

  My fault. My Moon. Turned the spare key today. (Lines of sight, lines of force, three by three by three? Cubical arrangement, like a good little crystal lattice.) The key unlocks the Gate. Dangerous to bring so many obelisks to Yumenes, though; Guardians everywhere. Wouldn’t have time before they got me. Better to make a spare key out of orogenes, and who can I use? Who is strong enough. Syen isn’t, almost but not quite. Innon isn’t. Coru is but I can’t find him. He’s just a baby anyway, not right. Babies. Lots of babies. Node maintainers? Node maintainers!

  No. They’ve suffered enough. Use the Fulcrum seniors instead.

  Or the node maintainers.

  Why should I do it here? Plugs the hole. Do it there, tho … Get Yumenes. Get the Fulcrum. Get a lot of the Guardians.

  Stop nagging me, woman. Go tell Innon to fuck you, or something. You’re always so cranky when you haven’t gotten laid. I’ll jump in the hole tomorrow.

  It becomes a routine.

  She takes care of Schaffa in the mornings, then goes out in the afternoon to explore the city and find things they need. There’s no need to bathe Schaffa, or to clean up his waste again; astonishingly, the bed takes care of that, too. So Nassun can spend her time with him talking, and asking him to wake up, and telling him that she doesn’t know what to do.

  Steel vanishes again. She doesn’t care.

  Other stone eaters periodically show up, however, or at least she feels the impact of their presence. She sleeps on the couch, and one morning wakes to find a blanket covering her. It’s just a simple gray thing, but it’s warm, and she’s grateful. When she starts picking apart one of her sausages to get the fat out of it, intending to make tallow—the candles from her runny-sack are getting low—she finds a stone eater in the stairwell, its finger curled in a beckoning gesture. When she follows it, it stops beside a panel covered in curious symbols. The stone eater is pointing toward one in particular. Nassun touches it and it alights with silver, glowing golden and sending threads questing over her skin. The stone eater says something in a language Nassun does not understand before it vanishes, but when she returns to the apartment, it’s warmer, and soft white lights have come on overhead. Touching squares on the wall makes the lights go off.

  One afternoon she walks into the apartment to find a stone eater crouched beside a pile of things that look to have come from some comm’s storecache: burlap sacks full of root vegetables and mushrooms and dried fruit, a big round of sharp white cheese, hide bags of packed pemmican, satchels of dried rice and beans, and—precious—a small cask of salt. The stone eater vanishes when Nassun approaches the pile, so she cannot even thank it. She has to blow ash off of everything before she puts it away.

  Nassun has figured out that the apartment, like the garden, must have been used until recently. The detritus of another person’s life is everywhere: pants much too big for her in the drawers, a man’s underwear beside them. (One day these are replaced with clothing that fits Nassun. Another stone eater? Or maybe the magic in the apartment is even more sophisticated than she thought.) Books are piled in one of the rooms, many of them native to Corepoint—she’s beginning to recognize the peculiar, clean, not-quite-natural look of Corepoint things. A few, however, are normal-looking, with covers of cracking leather and pages still stinky with chemicals and handwritten ink. Some of the books are in a language she can’t read. Something Coaster.

  One, however, is made of the Corepoint material, but its blank pages have been handwritten over, in Sanze-mat. Nassun opens this one, sits down, and begins to read.

  WENT

  IN THE HOLE

  DON’T

  don’t bury me

  please DON’T, Syen, I love you, I’m sorry, keep me safe, watch my back and I’ll watch yours, there’s no one else who’s as strong as you, I wish so much that you were here, please DON’T

  Corepoint is a city in still life.

  Nassun begins losing track of time. The stone eaters occasionally speak to her, but most of them don’t know her language, and she doesn’t hear enough of theirs to pick it up. She watches them sometimes, and is fascinated to realize that some of them are performing tasks. She watches one malachite-green woman who stands amid the windblown trees, and belatedly realizes the woman is holding a branch up and to one side, to make it grow in a particular way. All of the trees, which look windblown and yet are a little too dramatic, a little too artful in their splaying and bending, have been shaped thus. It must take years.

  And near the edge of the city, down by one of the strange spokelike things that jut out into the water from its edge—not piers, really, just straight pieces of metal that make no sense—another stone eater stands every day with one hand upraised. Nassun just happens to be around when the stone eater blurs and there is a splash and suddenly his upraised hand holds by the tail a huge, wriggling fish that is as long as his body. His marble skin is sheened with wet. Nassun has nowhere in particular to be, so she sits down to watch. After a time, an ocean mammal—Nassun has read of these, creatures that look like fish but breathe air—sidles up to the city’s edge. It is gray-skinned, tube-shaped; there are sharp teeth along its jaw, but these are small. When it pushes up out of the water, Nassun sees that it is very old, and something about the questing movements of its head makes her realize it has gone blind. There’s old scarring on its forehead as well; something has injured the creature’s head badly. The creature nudges the stone eater, who of course does not move, and then nips at the fish in its hand, tearing off chunks and swallowing them until the stone eater releases the tail. When it is done, the creature utters a complex, high-pitched sound, like a … chitter? Or a laugh. Then it slides further into the water and swims away.

  The stone eater flickers and faces Nassun. Curious, Nassun gets to her feet to go over and speak to him. By the time she’s standing, though, he has vanished.

  This is what she comes to understand: There is life here, among these people. It isn’t life as she knows it, or a life she would choose, but life nevertheless. That gives her comfort, when she no longer has Schaffa to tell her that she is good and safe. That, and the silence, give her time to mourn. She did not understand before now that she needed this.

  I’ve decided.

  It’s wrong. Everything’s wrong. Some things are so broken that they can’t be fixed. You just have to finish them off, sweep away the rubble, and start over. Antimony agrees. Some of the other SEs do, too. Some don’t.

  Rust those. They killed m
y life to make me their weapon, so that’s what I’m going to be. My choice. My commandment. We’ll do it in Yumenes. A commandment is set in stone.

  I asked after Syen today. Don’t know why I care anymore. Antimony’s been keeping tabs, though. (For me?) Syenite is living in some little shithole comm in the Somidlats, I forget the name, playing creche teacher. Playing the happy little still. Married with two new children. How about that. Not sure about the daughter but the boy is pulling on the aquamarine.

  Amazing. No wonder the Fulcrum bred you to me. And we did make a beautiful child in spite of everything, didn’t we? My boy.

  I won’t let them find your boy, Syen. I won’t let them take him, and burn his brain, and put him in the wire chair. I won’t let them find your girl, either, if she’s one of us, or even if she’s Guardian-potential. There won’t be a Fulcrum left by the time I’m done. What follows won’t be good, but it’ll be bad for everyone—rich and poor, Equatorials and commless, Sanzeds and Arctics, now they’ll all know. Every season is the Season for us. The apocalypse that never ends. They could’ve chosen a different kind of equality. We could’ve all been safe and comfortable together, surviving together, but they didn’t want that. Now nobody gets to be safe. Maybe that’s what it will take for them to finally realize things have to change.

  Then I’ll shut it down and put the Moon back. (It shouldn’t stone me, the first trajectory adjustment. Unless I underestimate Shouldn’t.) All I’m rusting good for anyway.

  After that … it’ll be up to you, Syen. Make it better. I know I told you it wasn’t possible, that there was no way to make the world better, but I was wrong. I’m breaking it because I was wrong. Start it over, you were right, change it. Make it better for the children you have left. Make a world Corundum could have been happy in. Make a world where people like us, you and me and Innon and our sweet boy, our beautiful boy, could have stayed whole.

  Antimony says I might get to see that world. Guess we’ll see. Rust it. I’m procrastinating. She’s waiting. Back to Yumenes today.

  For you, Innon. For you, Coru. For you, Syen.

  At night, Nassun can see the Moon.

  This was terrifying, on the first night that she looked outside and noticed a strange pale whiteness outlining the streets and trees of the city, and then looked up to see a great white sphere in the sky. It is enormous, to her—bigger than the sun, far larger than the stars, trailed by a faint streak of luminescence that she does not know is the off-gassing of ice that has adhered to the lunar surface over the course of its travels. The white of it is the true surprise. She knows very little of the Moon—only what Schaffa told her. It is a satellite, he said, Father Earth’s lost child, a thing whose light reflects the sun. She expected it to be yellow, given that. It disturbs her to have been so wrong.

  It disturbs her more that there is a hole in the thing, at nearly its dead center: a great, yawning darkness like the pinpoint pupil of an eye. It’s too small to tell for now, but Nassun thinks that maybe if she stares at it long enough, she will see stars on the other side of the Moon, through this hole.

  Somehow it’s fitting. Whatever happened ages ago to cause the Moon’s loss was surely cataclysmic on multiple levels. If the Earth suffered the Shattering, then the fact that the Moon also bears scars feels normal and right. With a thumb, Nassun rubs the palm of her hand where her mother broke the bones, a lifetime ago.

  And yet, when she stands in the roof garden and stares at it for long enough, she begins to find the Moon beautiful. It is an icewhite eye, and she has no reason to think badly of those. Like the silver when it swirls and whorls within something like a snail’s shell. It makes her think of Schaffa—that he is watching over her in his way—and this makes her feel less alone.

  Over time, Nassun discovers that she can use the obelisks to get a feel for the Moon. The sapphire is on the other side of the world, but there are others here above the ocean, drawn near in response to her summons, and she has been tapping and taming each in turn. The obelisks help her feel (not sess) that the Moon will soon be at its closest point. If she lets it go, it will pass, and begin to rapidly diminish until it vanishes from the sky. Or she can open the Gate, and tug on it, and change everything. The cruelty of the status quo, or the comfort of oblivion. The choice feels clear to her … but for one thing.

  One night, as Nassun sits gazing up at the great white sphere, she says aloud, “It was on purpose, wasn’t it? You not telling me what would happen to Schaffa. So you could get rid of him.”

  The mountain that has been lingering nearby shifts slightly, to a position behind her. “I did try to warn you.”

  She turns to look at him. At the look on her face, he utters a soft laugh that sounds self-deprecating. This stops, though, when she says, “If he dies, I’ll hate you more than I hate the world.”

  It is a war of attrition, she’s begun to realize, and she’s going to lose. In the weeks (?) or months (?) since they came to Corepoint, Schaffa has noticeably deteriorated, his skin developing an ugly pallor, his hair brittle and dull. People aren’t meant to lie unmoving, blinking but not thinking, for weeks on end. She had to cut his hair earlier that day. The bed cleans the dirt out of it, but it’s gotten oily and lately it keeps getting tangled—and the day before, some of it must have wrapped around his arm when she wrestled him onto his belly, cutting off his circulation in a way she didn’t notice. (She keeps a sheet over him, even though the bed is warm and does not need it. It bothers her that he is naked and undignified.) This morning when she finally noticed the problem, the arm was pale and a little gray. She’s loosed it, chafed it hoping to bring the color back, but it doesn’t look good. She doesn’t know what she’ll do if something’s really wrong with his arm. She might lose all of him like this, slowly but surely, little bits of him dying because she was only almost-nine when this Season began and she’s only almost-eleven now and taking care of invalids wasn’t something anyone taught her in creche.

  “If he lives,” Steel replies in his colorless voice, “he will never again experience a moment without agony.” He pauses, gray eyes fixed on her face, as Nassun reverberates with his words, with her own denial, with her own growing sick fear that Steel is right.

  Nassun gets to her feet. “I n-need to know how to fix him.”

  “You can’t.”

  She tightens her hands into fists. For the first time in what feels like centuries, part of her reaches for the strata around her. This means the shield volcano beneath Corepoint … but when she “grasps” it orogenically, she finds with some surprise that it is anchored, somehow. This distracts her for a moment as she has to alter her perception to shift to the silver—and there she finds solid, scintillating pillars of magic driven into the volcano’s foundations, pinning it in place. It’s still active, but it will never erupt because of those pillars. It is as stable as bedrock despite the hole at its core burrowing down to the Earth’s heart.

  She shakes this off as irrelevant, and finally voices the thought that has been gathering in her mind over all the days she has dwelled in this city of stone people. “If … if I turn him into a stone eater, he’ll live. And he won’t have any pain. Right?” Steel does not reply. In the lengthening silence, Nassun bites her lip. “So you have to tell me how to—to make him like you. I bet I can do it if I use the Gate. I can do anything with that. Except …”

  Except. The Obelisk Gate doesn’t do small things. Just as Nassun feels, sesses, knows that the Gate makes her temporarily omnipotent, she knows, too, that she cannot use it to transform just one man. If she makes Schaffa into a stone eater … every human being on the planet will change in the same manner. Every comm, every commless band, every starving wanderer: Ten thousand still-life cities, instead of just one. All the world will become like Corepoint.

  But is that really so terrible a thing? If everyone is a stone eater, there will be no more orogenes and stills. No more children to die, no more fathers to murder them. The Seasons could come and go, and t
hey wouldn’t matter. No one would starve to death ever again. To make the whole world as peaceful as Corepoint … would that not be a kindness?

  Steel’s face, which has been tilted up toward the Moon even as his eyes watch her, now slowly pivots to face her. It’s always unnerving to see him move slowly. “Do you know what it feels like to live forever?”

  Nassun blinks, thrown. She’s been expecting a fight. “What?”

  The moonlight has transformed Steel into a thing of starkest shadows, white and ink against the dimness of the garden. “I asked,” he says, and his voice is almost pleasant, “if you know what it feels like to live forever. Like me. Like your Schaffa. Do you have any inkling as to how old he is? Do you care?”

  “I—” About to say that she does, Nassun falters. No. This is not a thing she has ever considered. “I—I don’t—”

  “I would estimate,” Steel continues, “that Guardians typically last three or four thousand years. Can you imagine that length of time? Think of the past two years. Your life since the beginning of the Season. Imagine another year. You can do that, can’t you? Every day feels like a year here in Corepoint, or so your kind tell me. Now put all three years together, and imagine them times one thousand.” The emphasis he puts on this is sharp, precisely enunciated. In spite of herself, Nassun jumps.