N. Jemisin - The Obelisk Gate

“Sort of.” He can’t really smile easily anymore. You hear it in his voice, though. “There’s a massive shield volcano there, though it’s under the ocean. Biggest one I’ve ever sessed; you could fit the Antarctics into it. The city sits directly above it, on the ocean. There’s nothing visible around it: no land for farming, no hills to break tsunami. No harbor or moorings for boats. Just… buildings. Trees and some other plants, of varieties I’ve never seen elsewhere, gone wild but not a forest—sculpted into the city, sort of. I don’t know what to call that. Infrastructures that seem to keep the whole thing stable and functioning, but all strange. Tubes and crystals and stuff that looks alive. Couldn’t tell you how a tenth of it worked. And, at the center of the city, there’s… a hole.”

“A hole.” You’re trying to imagine it. “For swimming?”

“No. There’s no water in it. The hole goes into the volcano, and… beyond.” He takes a deep breath. “The city exists to contain the hole. Everything about the city is built for that purpose. Even its name, which the stone eaters told me, acknowledges this: Corepoint . It’s a ruin, Essun—a deadciv ruin like any other, except that it’s intact. The streets haven’t crumbled. The buildings are empty, but some of the furniture is even usable—made of things not natural, undecaying. You could live in them if you wanted.” He paused. “I did live in them, when Antimony brought me there. There was nowhere else to go and no one else to talk to… except the stone eaters. Dozens of them, Essun, maybe hundreds. They say they didn’t build the city, but it’s theirs now. Has been, for tens of thousands of years.”

You’re mindful of how much he hates being interrupted, but he pauses anyway. Maybe he’s expecting commentary, or maybe he’s giving you time to absorb his words. You’re just staring at the back of his head. What’s left of his hair is getting too long; you’ll have to ask Lerna for scissors and a pick soon. There are absolutely no suitable thoughts in your head, besides this.

“It’s something you can’t help thinking about, when you’re confronted with it.” He sounds tired. Your lessons rarely last more than an hour, and it’s been longer than that already. You would feel guilty if you had any emotion left in you right now other than shock. “The obelisks hint at it, but they’re so…” You feel him try to shrug. You understand. “Not something you can touch or walk through. But this city. Recorded history goes back what, ten thousand years? Twenty-five if you count all the Seasons the University’s still arguing about. But people have been around for much longer than that. Who knows when some version of our ancestors first crawled out of the ash and started jabbering at each other? Thirty thousand years? Forty? A long time to be the pathetic creatures we are now, huddling behind our walls and putting all our wits, all our learning, toward the singular task of staying alive. That’s all we make now: Better ways to do field surgery with improvised equipment. Better chemicals, so we can grow more beans with little light. Once, we were so much more.” He falls silent again, for a long moment. “I cried for you and Innon and Coru for three days, there in that city of who we used to be.”

You ache, that he included you in his grief. You don’t deserve it.

“When I… they brought me food.” Alabaster skips past whatever he would’ve said so seamlessly that at first the sentence doesn’t make sense. “I ate it, then tried to kill them.” His voice turns wry. “Took me a while to give that up, actually, but they kept feeding me. I asked them, again and again, why they’d brought me there. Why they were keeping me alive. Antimony is the only one who would speak to me at first. I thought they were deferring to her, but then I realized they just didn’t speak my language. Some of them weren’t used to interacting with people at all. They stared, and sometimes I had to shoo them away. I seemed to fascinate some, disgust others. The feeling was mutual.

“I learned some of their language, eventually. I had to. Parts of the city talked in that language. If you knew the right words, you could open doors, turn on lights, make a room warmer or colder. Not everything still worked. The city was breaking down. Just slowly.

“But the hole. There were markers all around it, lighting up as you got closer.” (You suddenly remember a chamber at the Fulcrum’s heart. Long narrow panels igniting in sequence as you walked toward the socket, glowing with no discernible fire or filament.) “Barriers big as buildings in themselves, which sometimes glowed at night. Warnings that would write themselves in fire on the air before you, sirens that would sound if you got too near. Antimony took me to it, though, on the first day that I was… functional. I stood on one of the barriers and looked down into a darkness so deep that it…”

He has to stop. After he swallows, he resumes.

“She’d told me already that she took me from Meov because they couldn’t risk me being killed. So there, at Corepoint’s heart, she told me, ‘This is why I saved you. This is the enemy you face. You are the only one who can.’”

“ What? ” You’re not confused. You think you understand. You just don’t want to, so you decide that you must be confused.

“That’s what she said,” he replies. Now he’s angry, but not at you. “Word for word. I remember it because I was thinking that was the reason Innon and Coru died and you got thrown to the rusting dogs: because sometime in the ass-end of history, some of our so-smart ancestors decided to dig a hole to the heart of the world for no rusting reason. No; for power, Antimony said. I don’t know how that was supposed to work but they did it, and they made the obelisks and other tools to harness that power.

“Something went wrong, though. I got the sense that even Antimony didn’t know exactly what. Or maybe the stone eaters are still arguing about it and nobody’s come to a consensus. Something just went wrong. The obelisks… misfired. The Moon was flung away from the planet. Maybe that did it, maybe some other things happened, but whatever the cause, the result was the Shattering. It really happened, Essun. That’s what caused the Seasons.” The muscles in his back flex a little against your hand. He’s tense. “Do you understand? We use the obelisks. To stills, they’re just big strange rocks. That city, all those wonders… that deadciv was run by orogenes . We destroyed the world just like they always say we did. Roggas. ”

He says it so sharply and viciously that his whole body reverberates with the word. You feel how he stiffens as he says it. Vehemence hurts him. He knew it would and said it anyway.

“What they got wrong,” he continues, sounding weary now, “are the loyalties. The stories say we’re agents of Father Earth, but it’s the opposite: We’re his enemies. He hates us more than he hates the stills, because of what we did. That’s why he made the Guardians to control us, and—”

You’re shaking your head. “’Baster… you’re speaking as if it, the planet, is real. Alive, I mean. Aware. All that stuff about Father Earth, it’s just stories to explain what’s wrong with the world. Like those weird cults that crop up from time to time. I heard of one that asks an old man in the sky to keep them alive every time they go to sleep. People need to believe there’s more to the world than there is.”

And the world is just shit. You understand this now, after two dead children and the repeated destruction of your life. There’s no need to imagine the planet as some malevolent force seeking vengeance. It’s a rock. This is just how life is supposed to be: terrible and brief and ending in—if you’re lucky—oblivion.