“Houwha,” says a voice behind me.

(Me? Me.)

I turn from the stinging window and the garden of winking flowers. A woman stands with Gaewha and one of the conductors, and I do not know her. To the eyes, she is one of them – skin a soft allover brown, eyes gray, hair black-brown and curling in ropes, tall. There are hints of other in the breadth of her face – or perhaps, viewing this memory now through the lens of millennia, I see what I want to see. What she looks like is irrelevant. To my sessapinae, her kinship to us is as obvious as Gaewha’s puffy white hair. She exerts a pressure upon the ambient that is a churning, impossibly heavy, irresistible force. This makes her as much one of us as if she’d been decanted from the same biomagestric mix.

(You look like her. No. I want you to look like her. That is unfair, even if it’s true; you are like her, but in other ways than mere appearance. My apologies for reducing you in such a way.)

The conductor speaks as her kind do, in thin vibrations that only ripple the air and barely stir the ground. Words. I know this conductor’s name-word, Pheylen, and I know too that she is one of the nicer ones, but this knowledge is still and indistinct, like so much about them. For a very long time I could not tell the difference between one of their kind and another. They all look different, but they have the same non-presence within the ambient. I still have to remind myself that hair textures and eye shapes and unique body odors each have as much meaning to them as the perturbations of tectonic plates have to me.

I must be respectful of their difference. We are the deficient ones, after all, stripped of much that would’ve made us human. This was necessary and I do not mind what I am. I like being useful. But many things would be easier if I could understand our creators better.

So I stare at the new woman, the us-woman, and try to pay attention while the conductor introduces her. Introduction is a ritual that consists of explaining the sounds of names and the relationships of the… families? Professions? Honestly, I don’t know. I stand where I am supposed to and say the things I should. The conductor tells the new woman that I am Houwha and that Gaewha is Gaewha, which are the name-words they use for us. The new woman, the conductor says, is Kelenli. That’s wrong, too. Her name is actually deep stab, breach of clay sweetburst, soft silicate underlayer, reverberation, but I will try to remember “Kelenli” when I use words to speak.

The conductor seems pleased that I say “How do you do” when I’m supposed to. I’m glad; introduction is very difficult, but I’ve worked hard to become good at it. After this she starts speaking to Kelenli. When it becomes clear that the conductor has nothing more to say to me, I move behind Gaewha and begin plaiting some of her thick, poufy mane of hair. The conductors seem to like it when we do this, though I don’t really know why. One of them said that it was “cute” to see us taking care of one another, just like people. I’m not sure what cute means.

Meanwhile, I listen.

“Just doesn’t make sense,” Pheylen is saying, with a sigh. “I mean, the numbers don’t lie, but…”

“If you’d like to register an objection,” begins Kelenli. Her words fascinate me in a way that words never have before. Unlike the conductor, her voice has weight and texture, strata-deep and layered. She sends the words into the ground while she speaks, as a kind of subvocalization. It makes them feel more real. Pheylen, who doesn’t seem to notice how much deeper Kelenli’s words are – or maybe she just doesn’t care – makes an uncomfortable face in reaction to what she’s said. Kelenli repeats, “If you’d like to, I can ask Gallat to take me off the roster.”

“And listen to his shouting? Evil Death, he’d never stop. Such a savage temper he has.” Pheylen smiles. It’s not an amused smile. “It must be hard for him, wanting the project to succeed, but also wanting you kept – well. I’m fine with you on standby-only, but then I haven’t seen the simulation data.”

“I have.” Kelenli’s tone is grave. “The delay-failure risk was small, but significant.”

“Well, there you are. Even a small risk is too much, if we can do something about it. I think they must be more anxious than they’re letting on, though, to involve you —” Abruptly, Pheylen looks embarrassed. “Ah… sorry. No offense meant.”

Kelenli smiles. Both I and Gaewha can see that it is only a surface layering, not a real expression. “None taken.”

Pheylen exhales in relief. “Well, then, I’ll just withdraw to Observation and let you three get to know each other. Knock when you’re done.”

With that, Conductor Pheylen leaves the room. This is a good thing, because when conductors are not around, we can speak more easily. The door closes and I move to face Gaewha (who is actually cracked geode taste of adularescent salts, fading echo). She nods minutely because I have correctly guessed that she has something important to tell me. We are always watched. A certain amount of performance is essential.

Gaewha says with her mouth, “Coordinator Pheylen told me they’re making a change to our configuration.” With the rest of her she says, in atmospheric perturbations and anxious plucking of the silver threads, Tetlewha has been moved to the briar patch.

“A change at this late date?” I glance at the us-woman, Kelenli, to see if she is following the whole conversation. She looks so much like one of them, all that surface coloring and those long bones that make her a head taller than both of us. “Do you have something to do with the project?” I ask her, while also responding to Gaewha’s news about Tetlewha. No.

My “no” is not denial, just a statement of fact. We can still detect Tetlewha’s familiar hot spot roil and strata uplift, grind of subsidence, but… something is different. He’s not nearby anymore, or at least he’s not anywhere that is in range of our seismic questings. And the roil and grind of him have gone nearly still.

Decommissionedis the word the conductors prefer to use, when one of us is removed from service. They have asked us, individually, to describe what we feel when the change happens, because it is a disruption of our network. By unspoken agreement each of us speaks of the sensation of loss – a pulling away, a draining, a thinning of signal strength. By unspoken agreement none of us mentions the rest, which in any case is indescribable using conductor words. What we experience is a searing sensation, and prickling all over, and the tumbledown resistance tangle of ancient pre-Sylanagistine wire such as we sometimes encounter in our explorations of the earth, gone rusted and sharp in its decay and wasted potential. Something like that.

Who gave the order?I want to know.

Gaewha has become a slow fault ripple of stark, frustrated, confused patterns. Conductor Gallat. The other conductors are angry about it and someone reported it to the higher-ups and that’s why they have sent Kelenli here. It took all of us together to hold the onyx and the moonstone. They are concerned about our stability.

Annoyed, I return, Perhaps they should have thought of that before —

“I do have something to do with the project, yes,” interrupts Kelenli, though there has been no break or disruption of the verbal conversation. Words are very slow compared to earthtalk. “I have some arcane awareness, you see, and similar abilities to yours.” Then she adds, I’m here to teach you.

She switches as easily as we do between the words of the conductors and our language, the language of the earth. Her communicative presence is radiant heavy metal, searing crystallized magnetic lines of meteoric iron, and more complex layers underneath this, all so sharp-edged and powerful that Gaewha and I both inhale in wonder.

But what is she saying? Teach us? We don’t need to be taught. We were decanted knowing nearly everything we needed to know already, and the rest we learned in the first few weeks of life with our fellow tuners. If we hadn’t, we would be in the briar patch, too.

I make sure to frown. “How can you be a tuner like us?” This is a lie spoken for our observers, who see only the surface of things and think we do, too. She is not white like us, not short or strange, but we have known her for one of ours since we felt the cataclysm of her presence. I do not disbelieve that she is one of us. I can’t disbelieve the incontrovertible.

Kelenli smiles, with a wryness that acknowledges the lie. “Not quite like you, but close enough. You’re the finished artwork, I’m the model.” Threads of magic in the earth heat and reverberate and add other meanings. Prototype. A control to our experiment, made earlier to see how we should be done. She has only one difference, instead of the many that we possess. She has our carefully designed sessapinae. Is that enough to help us accomplish the task? The certainty in her earth-presence says yes. She continues in words: “I’m not the first that was made. Just the first to survive.”

We all push a hand at the air to ward off Evil Death. But I allow myself to look like I don’t understand as I wonder if we dare trust her. I saw how the conductor relaxed around her. Pheylen is one of the nice ones, but even she never forgets what we are. She forgot with Kelenli, though. Perhaps all humans think she is one of them, until someone tells them otherwise. What is that like, being treated as human when one is not? And then there’s the fact that they’ve left her alone with us. We they treat like weapons that might misfire at any moment… but they trust her.

“How many fragments have you attuned to yourself?” I ask aloud, as if this is a thing that matters. It is also a challenge.

“Only one,” Kelenli says. But she’s still smiling. “The onyx.”

Oh. Oh, that does matter. Gaewha and I exchange a look of wonder and concern before facing her again.

“And the reason I’m here,” Kelenli continues, abruptly insistent upon delivering this important information with mere words, which somehow perversely serves to emphasize them, “is because the order has been issued. The fragments are at optimum storage capacity and are ready for the generative cycle. Corepoint and Zero Site go live in twenty-eight days. We’re finally starting up the Plutonic Engine.”

(In tens of thousands of years, after people have repeatedly forgotten what “engines” are and know the fragments as nothing but “obelisks,” there will be a different name for the thing that rules our lives now. It will be called the Obelisk Gate, which is both more poetic and quaintly primitive. I like that name better.)

In the present, while Gaewha and I stand there staring, Kelenli drops one last shocker into the vibrations between our cells:

That means I have less than a month to show you who you really are.

Gaewha frowns. I manage not to react because the conductors watch our bodies as well as our faces, but it is a narrow thing. I’m very confused, and not a little unnerved. I have no idea, in the present of this conversation, that it is the beginning of the end.

Because we tuners are not orogenes, you see. Orogeny is what the difference of us will become over generations of adaptation to a changed world. You are the shallower, more specialized, more natural distillation of our so-unnatural strangeness. Only a few of you, like Alabaster, will ever come close to the power and versatility we hold, but that is because we were constructed as intentionally and artificially as the fragments you call obelisks. We are fragments of the great machine, too – just as much a triumph of genegineering and biomagestry and geomagestry and other disciplines for which the future will have no name. By our existence we glorify the world that made us, like any statue or scepter or other precious object.

We do not resent this, for our opinions and experiences have been carefully constructed, too. We do not understand that what Kelenli has come to give us is a sense of peoplehood. We do not understand why we have been forbidden this self-concept before now… but we will.

And then we will understand that people cannot be possessions. And because we are both and this should not be, a new concept will take shape within us, though we have never heard the word for it because the conductors are forbidden to even mention it in our presence. Revolution.

Well. We don’t have much use for words, anyway. But that’s what this is. The beginning. You, Essun, will see the end.