But what if the reference were smaller? Less complete? Imagine that the night Toby asked Mira home with him, it was because he’d underestimated the power of a new drink. Call it Ambler’s Ale. Your friends might say, “Remember the night Toby drank Ambler’s?” Now you are more at a loss. Your context is less useful. You might guess that Toby overindulged, but the details beyond that, shared though they are by the group, are lost to you. Or you might think he’d disliked the drink in some way that caused him distress and the others amusement. Or that it had been someone else’s drink, picked up and consumed in error. Or any of a thousand other possibilities. Without more information, there is no way to choose one interpretation over another. Now imagine they only said “Tony and the Ambler’s.” Or just “The Ambler’s night.”
The meaning of all these references is identical to those who carry the context with them, but for the naïve listener, hope of understanding retreats quickly.
In this metaphor, the Carrath stonemakers are the friends, and the artifacts are the references to Toby’s indiscretion. And we are—or specifically I am—the new girl in the pub, trying to make sense of what’s going on around her.
My example sounds light-hearted, I know, but I chose it carefully. Because I believe the great majority of you listening to me know have had an experience like that. A moment of feeling excluded by those around you. Of knowing that there is something there that you are outside of. It is distressing—even painful—to know that there is an answer to your question, but that you cannot access it.
And because you and I share that context, I can give you a sense of the frustration of working with the Carrath stones.
It was strange to have a lover who was not Nadima. Sexually, he was awkward at first. Yva was forthright in what she wanted and guided him clearly to her own satisfaction. Peros was surprised to find that, outside the bedroom, he didn’t know what he wanted from her or else did not have a vocabulary to ask for it.
The journey to Ouroboros was uneventful, though the sense of displacement and disorientation that came with the slip was perhaps a bit more pronounced for Peros than usual. Touchdown on the fourth planet was on a calm day, atmospherically speaking, and crew and passengers alike walked into the local sunlight with the air of going to a new park on a picnic. The Forger into Darkness ceased for a time to be a ship and became instead a village. For the months of the expedition, it would act as base camp for the scientists, and then become a ship again, riding the slip to Bercale-3. And, Yva made gently clear, after that she and he would not know each other.
“You should stay here,” he said one evening after they had fucked and eaten dinner. “It’s not good to be alone so much.”
“I’m not alone,” she said. “My work is very good company.”
“Maybe I wasn’t talking about you.”
If she had been Nadima, she would have heard the hurt in his voice. She would have bent a little. If not enough to change her plan, at least enough to offer him some little reassurance. Yva laughed.
“You should come to the site.”
“I’m a pilot. What would I do there?”
“See it. Look. We came all this way. Seems like a shame not to take in the sights.”
“I will if you want me to.”
She laughed again and shook her head. “Oh, bunny.” Bunny was not her pet name for him. It was what she called anyone she liked but was presently annoyed by. He had come to understand her that well, at least.
The site was a series of sandstone caves at the side of a wide, green-gray sea. Yva drove a cart there with two of the other science team members and Peros. They talked about superimposed magnetostatic potentials and diagrammatic quantum analysis. He watched the local sun setting over the water, the clouds going pink and gold as the sky slid to indigo.
In the caves, a truckback reactor fed electricity through a snakepit of conduit and wires to assaying equipment and sensor arrays, work lights and climate-controlled habs. A dozen or more people worked there at any given time in rolling ten-hour shifts like they were running a ship. Peros walked through the place with his hands in his pockets. The smell of saltwater and local algae equivalents was rich and pungent.
Yva took his hand, pulling him toward the central chamber. “Come on. Big show is this way.” He pretended to be reluctant, but in truth his curiosity was piqued.
The stone was as tall as a man, striped gray and white with tiny flecks of red unlike the sandstone walls around it. The surface was covered in complex lines that reminded him equally of wiring diagrams and calligraphy. The lines glowed, and though they were silent, he had the sense of hearing someone speaking too softly to make out the words. Yva stood before it, her hand in his. Her eyes had hunger and excitement in them, and for a moment she reminded him of a cat he and Nadima had kept in the common house on Molos, the way the little beast would stare at a mouse hole.
“This is impressive,” he said, knowing the words were too small.
“It is,” Yva said, and then the shared moment was over.
He stayed for an hour, watching and staying out of the way. When he told Yva he was going back to the ship, she answered with a grunt, not looking up from the screens. As he rode back to the ship, the stars had come out. The galactic disk glowed, its contours slightly different as they were on every world. Peros felt a thickness in his throat and chest and wondered if he might be growing ill or having some allergic reaction to the local air.
When he got back to the ship, he took a long shower which did not relax him, drank a glass of wine that the ship generated, and put in a connection request to Nadima, expecting it to go unanswered as his previous attempts had done. This time, however, the homunculus shifted and changed. Between one moment and the next, it developed long white hair with just a bit of yellow to it as if it had once been blonde, though it had not. Her face, tiny now to fit the homunculus’s thumb-sized skull, was pale, deeply lined, and serene. She wore a dress of purple tapestry, wrapped around her shoulders, and a necklace of silver set with huge turquoise stones. Nadima had still not gone for regeneration, and the annoyance he felt at that was like hearing the name of an old friend he had almost forgotten.
She didn’t speak, and—caught between What were you thinking to do this to us? and I have taken a new lover and I miss you—he didn’t either. The homunculus tilted her head. The tiny smile seemed amused by him.
“I didn’t think you would answer,” he said.
“I almost didn’t. But you keep trying, and I thought maybe if I did this once, it would help you be free.”
“I don’t want to be free. What were you thinking, Nadi? Why are you doing this?”
She shook her head. “I had my time with you. It was good, when it was good. It was less good when it was bad. And then I was finished.”
“Oh, please. Marriage isn’t a meal. You don’t take your fill and then push your plate away. You and I are two parts of the same thing. We belong together.”
“We did,” she agreed. “But the woman you’re thinking of doesn’t exist anymore. She hasn’t for years, really. There’s only me now, and I don’t fit the same way that she did.”
He leaned over his desk, towering over the homunculus, scowling at it. “This is ridiculous. You’re not talking sense. You are going to come home when I am finished with this contract. You and I are going to counseling or something. We’ll work this out.”
Her sigh was soft and gentle, and it made him realize that wherever she was, she was not being towered over. For her, there was a homunculus that looked like him, only tiny, on her own desk. It made him feel small here as well.