Another suggestion was for you to encourage Tonkee to do the same, since thus far Tonkee’s done nothing but eat and sleep and bathe on the comm’s generosity. Granted, a certain amount of the lattermost has been necessary for the sake of comm socialization. At the moment Tonkee is kneeling over a basin of water in her room, hacking at her hair with a knife to chop out the matted bits. You’re keeping well back because the room smells of mildew and body odor and because you think you see something moving in the water along with her shed hair. Tonkee may have needed to wear filth as part of her commless disguise, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t actual filth.
“A moon,” you say. It’s a strange word, brief and round; you’re not sure how much to stretch out the oo sound in the middle. What else had Alabaster said? “A… satellite. He said a geomest would know.”
She frowns more while sawing at a particularly stubborn hank. “Well, I don’t know what he’s talking about. Never heard of a ‘moon.’ The obelisks are my area of expertise, remember?” Then she blinks and pauses, letting the half-hacked hank dangle. “Although, technically, the obelisks themselves are satellites.”
“What?”
“Well, ‘satellite’ just means an object whose motion and position are dependent on another. The object that controls everything is called a primary, the dependent object is its satellite. See?” She shrugs. “It’s something astronomests talk about when you can get any sense out of them. Orbital mechanics.” She rolls her eyes.
“What?”
“Gibberish. Plate tectonics for the sky.” You stare, disbelieving, and she waves a hand. “Anyway, I told you how the obelisks followed you to Tirimo. Where you go, they go. That makes them satellites to your primary.”
You shudder, not liking the thought that comes into your head—of thin, invisible tethers anchoring you to the amethyst, the nearer topaz, and now the distant onyx whose dark presence is growing in your mind. And oddly, you also think of the Fulcrum. Of the tethers that bound you to it, even when you had the apparent freedom to leave it and travel. You always came back, though, or the Fulcrum would’ve come after you—in the form of the Guardians.
“Chains,” you say softly.
“No, no,” Tonkee says distractedly. She’s working on the hank again, and having real trouble with it. Her knife has gone blunt. You leave for a moment and go into the room that you share with Hoa, fetching the whetstone from your pack. She blinks when you offer it to her, then nods thanks and starts sharpening the knife. “If there was a chain between you and an obelisk, it would be following you because you’re making it follow you. Force, not gravity. I mean, if you could make an obelisk do what you wanted.” You let out a little breath of amusement at this. “But a satellite reacts to you regardless of whether you try to make it react. It’s drawn to your presence, and the weight you exert upon the universe. It lingers around you because it can’t help itself.” She waves a wet hand distractedly, while you stare again. “Not to ascribe motivations and intentions to the obelisks, of course; that would be silly.”
You crouch against the far wall of the room to consider this while she resumes work. As the remainder of her hair begins to loosen, you recognize it at last, because it’s curly and dark like your own, instead of ashblow and gray. A little looser in the curl, maybe. Midlatter hair; another mark against her in the eyes of her family, probably. And given the bog-standard Sanzed look of her otherwise—she’s a bit on the short and pear-shaped side, but that’s what comes of the Yumenescene families not using Breeders to improve themselves—it’s something you would’ve remembered about her from that long-ago visit she made to the Fulcrum.
You don’t think Alabaster was talking about the obelisks when he mentioned this moon thing. Still—“You said that thing we found in the Fulcrum, that socket, was where they built the obelisks.”
It’s immediately clear you’re back on ground that Tonkee is actually interested in. She sets the knife down and leans forward, her face excited through the dangling uneven remainder of her hair. “Mmm-hmm. Maybe not all of them. The dimensions of every obelisk recorded have been slightly different, so only some—or maybe even just one—would have fit in that socket. Or maybe the socket changed every time they put one in there, adapting itself to the obelisk!”
“How do you know they put them in there? Maybe they first… grew there, then were faceted or mined and taken away later.” This makes Tonkee look thoughtful; you feel obliquely proud to have considered something she hasn’t. “And ‘they’ who?”
She blinks, then sits back, her excitement visibly fading. Finally she says, “Supposedly, the Yumenescene Leadership is descended from the people who saved the world after the Shattering Season. We have texts passed down from that time, secrets that each family is charged with keeping, and which we’re supposed to be shown upon earning our use and comm names.” She scowls. “My family didn’t, because they were already thinking about disowning me. So I broke into the vault and took my birthright.”
You nod, because that sounds like the Binof you remember. You’re skeptical about the family secret, though. Yumenes didn’t exist before Sanze, and Sanze is only the latest of the countless civilizations that must have come and gone over the Seasons. The Leadership legends have the air of a myth concocted to justify their place in society.
Tonkee continues, “In the vault I found all sorts of things: maps, strange writing in a language like none I’ve ever seen, objects that didn’t make sense—like one tiny, perfectly round yellow stone, about an inch in circumference. Someone had put it in a glass case, sealed and plastered with warnings not to touch. Apparently the thing had a reputation for punching holes in people.” You wince. “So either there’s some truth to the family stories, or amazingly, being rich and powerful makes it easy to assemble quite the collection of valuable ancient objects. Or both.” She notices your expression and looks amused. “Yeah, probably not both. It’s not stonelore, anyway, just… words. Soft knowledge. I needed to harden it.”
That sounds like Tonkee. “So you snuck into the Fulcrum to try to find the socket, because somehow this proves some rusty old story your family passed down?”
“It was on one of the maps I found.” Tonkee shrugs. “If there was truth to part of the story—about there being a socket in Yumenes, deliberately hidden away by the city’s founders—then that did suggest there might be truth to the rest, yes.” Setting the knife aside, Tonkee shifts to get comfortable, idly brushing the shed hairs into a pile with one hand. Her hair is painfully short and uneven now, and you really want to take the scissors from her and shape it. You’ll wait till she’s given it another wash first, though.
“There’s truth to other parts of the stories, too,” Tonkee says. “I mean, a lot of the stories are rust and mellow-smoke; I don’t want to pretend otherwise. But I learned at Seventh that the obelisks go as far back as history goes, and then some. We have evidence of Seasons from ten, fifteen, even twenty thousand years ago—and the obelisks are older. It’s possible that they even predate the Shattering.”
The first Season, and the one that nearly killed the world. Only lorists speak of it, and the Seventh University has disavowed most of their tales. Out of contrariness, you say, “Maybe there wasn’t a Shattering. Maybe there have always been Fifth Seasons.”