"The Obelisk Gate"

[fiefoe]

The second book in N. K. Jemisin's trilogy isn't as revelatory, but it deepens its exploration of the theme of perverted parenthood.

• Then the feeling changes and his resolve refocuses. What happened before does not matter. That was a different Schaffa. He has another chance now…If being less than himself means being less than the monster that he was, he cannot regret it.
• But if you stay, no part of this comm gets to decide that any part of this comm is expendable. No voting on who gets to be people.
• “No, I'm telling this wrong. After all a person is herself and others. Relationships chisel the final shape of one's being. I am me and you.”
• You obeyed, once, because you thought it would make you safe. He showed you—again and again, unrelentingly, he would not let you pretend otherwise—that if obedience did not make one safe from the Guardians or the nodes or the lynchings or the breeding or the disrespect, then what was the point? The game was too rigged to bother playing.
• You offered him a hand to help him up, not realizing he weighed of diamond bones and ancient tales untold.
• When a comm builds atop a faultline, do you blame its walls for crushing the people inside when they inevitably crumble? Some worlds are built upon a faultline of pain, held stable—temporarily—by nightmare walls. Don’t lament when they fall apart. Lament that they were ever built in the first place.
• I like being an orogene, Daddy, she says. His eyes widen. This is a terrible things that she is saying. It is a terrible thing that she loves herself.
• “You have seen so much purposeless suffering that at least being killed for a reason can be borne?”
• It is the lies he's telling her - as he has been, Nassun understands suddenly, her whole life - that really break her heart. He's said that he loves her, after all, but that obviously isn't true. He cannot love an orogene, and that is what she is. He cannot be an orogene's father, and that is why he constantly demands she be something other than what she is.
• “You were useful. That worked for the Imperial Orogenes, too.” But being useful to others is not the same thing as being equal.”

• Silly pendantry is a luxury you've rarely been able to enjoy in your life.
• He knows who she is now though. A child so willful that her own mother broke her hand to make her mind. A girl whose mother never loved her, only refined her.
• Give Father Earth his lost child, and perhaps his wrath will be appeased.
• He is a child in this memory, he realizes. Then he hears the other children’s screams, followed by and mingling into whirring, cutting sounds. There is also a low watery hum that he will never hear again (yet it will be very familiar to you and any other orogene who has ever been near an obelisk), because from this moment forth his own sessapinae will be repurposed, made sensitive to orogeny and not to the perturbations of the earth.
• “To enslave your kind.” When Nassun sits back to frown at him, he smiles again, but this time it is sad. “Or perhaps it is more accurate to say that we perpetuated their enslavement of themselves, under Old Sanze. The Fulcrum was nominally run by orogenes, you see—orogenes whom we had culled and cultivated, shaped and chosen carefully, so that they would obey. So that they knew their place. Given a choice between death and the barest possibility of acceptance, they were desperate, and we used that. We made them desperate.”
• This is not like the thing happening, far away and underground, to Alabaster. That is slower, crueler, yet much more refined. Artful. What hits Eitz is a catastrophe: a hammer blow of disordered atoms reordered at not quite random. The lattice that should naturally form dissolves into chaos. It starts on his chest when Nassun’s hand tries to slap him away, and spreads in less time than it takes for the other children present to draw breath in gasps. It spreads over his skin, the brown hardening and developing an undersheen like tigereye, then into his flesh, though no one will see the ruby inside unless they break him. Eitz dies almost instantly, his heart solidifying first into a striated jewel of yellow quartz and deep garnet and white agate, with faint lacing veins of sapphire. He is a beautiful failure. It happens so fast that he has no time for fear. That may comfort Nassun later, if nothing else.
• Jija goes still for a long, pent breath. There’s nothing in his head worth relating, even speculatively. He says nothing, though he makes a sound. When the children speak later of this tableau, they leave out this detail: the small, strangled whine uttered by a man who is trying not to loose his bladder and bowels, and who can think of nothing beyond imminent death. It is mostly nasal, back-of-the-throat sound. It makes him want to cough.
• Nassun doesn’t know where they take him, the beautiful sea-born boy with the sad smile and the kind eyes, and she never knows anything of his ultimate fate other than that she has killed him, which makes her a monster.
  “Perhaps,” Schaffa tells her as she sobs these words. He holds her in his lap again, stroking her thick curls. “But you are my monster.” She is so low and horrified that this actually makes her feel better.
• (This is a familiar series of thoughts. Once, as you trained Nassun, you told yourself that it did not matter if she hated you by the end of it; she would know your love by her own survival. That never felt right, though, did it? You were gentler with Uche for that reason. And you always meant to apologize to Nassun, later, when she was old enough to understand… Ah, there are so many regrets in you that they spin, heavy as compressed iron, at your core.)
• He shakes his head to the degree that he can. “It’s amazing, when you think about it. Everyone in the Stillness is like this. Never mind what’s in the oceans, never mind what’s in the sky; never look at your own horizon and wonder what’s beyond it. We’ve spent centuries making fun of the astronomests for their crackpot theories, but what we really found incredible was that they ever bothered to look up to formulate them.”
  You’d almost forgotten this part of him: the dreamer, the rebel, always reconsidering the way things have always been because maybe they should never have been that way in the first place. He’s right, too. Life in the Stillness discourages reconsideration, reorientation. Wisdom is set in stone, after all; that’s why no one trusts the mutability of metal. There’s a reason Alabaster was the magnetic core of your little family, back when you were together.
• This is what you need to understand. “What does the Earth want?”
  Alabaster’s gaze is heavy, heavy. “What does any living thing want, facing an enemy so cruel that it stole away a child?”
  Your jaw tightens. Vengeance.
• He quarter-smiles with the half of his mouth that hasn’t been burned. “You never change. If I ask you for help, you tell me to flake off and die. If I don’t say a rusting word, you work miracles for me.” He sighs. “Evil Earth, how I’ve missed you.”
  This… hurts, unexpectedly. You realize why at once: because it’s been so long since anyone said anything like this to you. Jija could be affectionate, but he wasn’t much given to sentimentality. Innon used sex and jokes to show his tenderness. But Alabaster… this has always been his way. The surprise gesture, the backhanded compliment that you could choose to take for teasing or an insult. You’ve hardened so much without this. Without him. You seem strong, healthy, but inside you feel like he looks: nothing but brittle stone and scars, prone to cracking if you bend too much.
• It has something to do with the whining, and with the falseness of them: They are clearly uncomfortable with the arrival of Guardians, clearly afraid and angry, and yet they pretend courtesy. It makes her think of her mother, who pretended to be kind and loving when Father or anyone else was around, and who was cold and fierce in private. Thinking of the Antarctic Fulcrum as a place populated by endless variants of her mother makes Nassun’s teeth and palms and sessapinae itch.
• It never stops doing so now, and he will not let her ease his pain because this makes her slow and tired the next day. She watches him endure it, and hates the little thing in his head that hurts him so. It gives him power, but what good is power if it comes on a spiked leash?
• She has sat beside Schaffa, quietly offering herself, as he has huddled on this very bench clutching his head and whispering replies to a voice she cannot hear and shuddering as it punishes him with lashes of silver pain. Even now it is a low, angry throb inside him, pushing him to obey. To kill her. She makes herself available because her presence eases the pain for him, and because she does not believe he will actually kill her. This is folly, she knows. Love is no inoculation against murder. But she needs to believe it of him.
• as he probes gingerly at the raw edges of his torn memories.
• “It’s okay, Daddy,” Nassun makes herself say. It is a terrible thing that Nassun is beautiful and strong like her mother, but love always comes bound in terrible things. “I miss her, too.” Because she does, in spite of everything.
  Jija stiffens slightly, and a muscle along the curve of his jaw flexes a little. “I don’t miss her, sweetening.”
  This is so obviously a lie that Nassun stares and forgets to pretend to agree with him. Forgets lots of things, apparently, including common sense, because she blurts, “But you do. You miss Uche, too. I can tell.”
• It was awkward for about a day, between you. By forbidding a vote, you undercut Ykka’s authority and destroyed everyone’s illusion of having a say in the comm’s management. That was necessary, you still believe; everyone shouldn’t have a say in whose life is worth fighting for. She actually agreed, she admitted as you talked. But it damaged her.
  You didn’t apologize for that, but you’ve tried to spackle the cracks. “You are Castrima’s best weapon,” you said firmly. You even meant it. That Castrima has lasted this far, a comm of stills who have repeatedly failed to lynch the roggas openly living among them, is miraculous. Even if “hasn’t yet committed genocidal slaughter” is a low bar to hop, other communities haven’t even managed that much. You’ll give credit where it’s due.
  It eased the awkwardness between you. “Well, just don’t rusting die,” she told you at last. “Not sure I can keep this mess together without you, at this point.” Ykka’s good at that, making people feel like they’ve got a reason to do something.
• You keep thinking about Alabaster, too, though. Is this grief? You hated him, loved him, missed him for years, made yourself forget him, found him again, loved him again, killed him. The grief does not feel like what you feel about Uche, or Corundum, or Innon; those are rents in your soul that still seep blood. The loss of Alabaster is simply... a thinning of who you are.
  And maybe now is not the time to consider your cataclysm of a love life.
• Ykka rubs her eyes. “You gotta stop threatening people, Essie. I mean, I know you grew up in the Fulcrum and don’t really know any better, but… it’s not good community behavior.”
  You blink, a little thrown and a lot insulted. But… she’s right. Comms survive through a careful balance of trust and fear. Your impatience is tilting the balance too far out of true.
• A flinch. I remember the words for movement: flinch, inhale, swallow, grimace. “Earthfires. Then—” He sobers and turns to look at the bedroom curtain.
  Yes. When you wake, you will want to go find your daughter. I watch this realization soften Lerna’s face, weigh down the tension of his muscles, slacken his posture. I have no idea what any of these things means.
• Nassun closes her eyes. Yes. It’s all so understandable, really, when she thinks about it. The way of the world isn’t the strong devouring the weak, but the weak deceiving and poisoning and whispering in the ears of the strong until they become weak, too. Then it’s all broken hands and silver threads woven like ropes, and mothers who move the earth to destroy their enemies but cannot save one little boy.
  (Girl.)
  There has never been anyone to save Nassun. Her mother warned her there never would be. If Nassun ever wants to be free of fear, she has no choice but to forge that freedom for herself.
  “Daddy," she says again, this time putting more of a needy whine into her voice. It is the thing that has swayed him, these times when he has come near to turning on her: remembering that she is his little girl. Reminding him that he has been, up to today, a good father.
  It is a manipulation. Something of her is warped out of true by this moment, and from now on all her acts of affection toward her father will be calculated, performative. Her childhood dies, for all intents and purposes. But that is better than all of her dying, she knows.