"A Psalm for the Wild-Built", ("A Winter's Promise")

[fiefoe]

As Becky Chambers promised, this was indeed a nice cup of tea of a book. Am loving the trend of short and sweet scifi titles that come in a series.

• We had bastardized constructs to the point that it was killing us. Simply put, Chal took our toys away.
  Or, the Ecologians would retort, Bosh was restoring balance before we made Panga uninhabitable for humans.
  Or, the Charismists would chime in, both are responsible, and we should take this as evidence that Chal is Bosh’s favored of the Child Gods (this would derail the entire conversation, as the Charismists’ fringe belief that gods are conscious and emotive in a way similar to humans is the best possible way to get other sectarians hopping mad).
• It was an odd feeling. Any other day, the act of going through a door was something Dex gave no more thought to than putting one foot in front of the other. But there was a gravity to leaving a place for good, a deep sense of seismic change. Dex turned, bag over their back and crate under one arm. They looked up at the mural of the Child God Allalae, their god, God of Small Comforts, represented by the great summer bear.
• The noise of the city was nothing compared to the calamity here, a holy chant in the form of table saws, sparking welders, 3-D printers weaving pocket charms from cheerfully dyed pectin.
• It was, as commissioned, an ox-bike wagon: double-decked, chunky-wheeled, ready for adventure. An object of both practicality and inviting aesthetics... along with a paraphrased snippet from the Insights, a phrase any Pangan would understand.
  Find the strength to do both.
• Everybody knew what a tea monk did, and so Dex wasn’t too worried about getting started... Endless electronic ink had been spilled over the old tradition, but all of it could be boiled down to listen to people, give tea.
• and the villages they led to were as neatly corralled as the City itself. This had been the way of things since the Transition, when the people had redivided the surface of their moon. Fifty percent of Panga’s single continent was designated for human use; the rest was left to nature, and the ocean was barely touched at all. It was a crazy split, if you thought about it: half the land for a single species, half for the hundreds of thousands of others. But then, humans had a knack for throwing things out of balance. Finding a limit they’d stick to was victory enough.
• A forest floor, the Woodland villagers knew, is a living thing. Vast civilizations lay within the mosaic of dirt: hymenopteran labyrinths, rodential panic rooms, life-giving airways sculpted by the traffic of worms, hopeful spiders’ hunting cabins, crash pads for nomadic beetles, trees shyly locking toes with one another. It was here that you’d find the resourcefulness of rot, the wholeness of fungi. Disturbing these lives through digging was a violence—though sometimes a needed one, as demonstrated by the birds and white skunks who brashly kicked the humus away in necessary pursuit of a full belly.
• But if you wanted to see the entirety of a Woodland settlement, the direction to look was up... The hanging homes here looked akin to shells, cut open to reveal soft geometry. Everything there curved—the rain-shielding roofs, the light-giving windows, the bridges running between like jewelry.
• “We name ourselves for the first thing we notice when we wake up. In my case, the first thing I noticed was a large clump of splendid speckled mosscaps.”
• “I wouldn’t have guessed that robots got distracted.”
  “Why not?”
  “Well, can’t you … I don’t know, run programs in the background, or something?”
  Mosscap’s eyes adjusted their focus. “You understand how resource-heavy consciousness is, yes?
• “Oh, no, no, no. Those sorts of words are for people. Robots are not people. We’re machines, and machines are objects. Objects are its.”
  “I’d say you’re more than just an object,” Dex said.
  The robot looked a touch offended. “I would never call you just an animal, Sibling Dex.” It turned its gaze to the road, head held high. “We don’t have to fall into the same category to be of equal value.”
• Mosscap laughed. “It’s very hard to keep track of robots. We get so caught up in things. Fire Nettle, for example. It walked up a mountain one day and we didn’t see it again for six years. I thought it had broken down, but no, it was watching a sapling grow from seed. Oh, and there’s Black Marbled Frostfrog. It’s something of a legend. It’s been holed up in a cave, watching stalagmites form for three and a half decades, and plans to do nothing else. A lot of robots do things like that.
• The robot mulled that over. “So, you see me as more person than object, even though that’s very, very wrong, but you can’t see me as a friend, even though I’d like to be?”
  Dex had no idea what to say to that.
• when you die, bits of you will be taken in turn by bacteria and beetles and worms, and so it goes. We robots are not natural beings; we know this. But we’re still subject to the Parent Gods’ laws, just like everything else. How could we continue to be students of the world if we don’t emulate its most intrinsic cycle? If the originals had simply fixed themselves, they’d be behaving in opposition to the very thing they desperately sought to understand. The thing we’re still trying to understand.”
• Mosscap nodded slowly. “So, the paradox is that the ecosystem as a whole needs its participants to act with restraint in order to avoid collapse, but the participants themselves have no inbuilt mechanism to encourage such behavior.”
  “Other than fear.”
  “Other than fear, which is a feeling you want to avoid or stop at all costs.” The hardware in Mosscap’s head produced a steady hum. “Yes, that’s a mess, isn’t it?”
• Dex angled their head toward the robot. “So, we’re smarter than our remnants, is what you’re saying.”
  Mosscap gave a slow nod. “If we choose to be.” It brushed its palms together, wiping them clean. “That’s what makes us different from elk.”
  They both watched the light for a few moments—the light, and the pollen dancing within it. A shadow of a bird sailed by. A delicate spider meticulously lay anchor lines of silk between old control levers. A vine stretched, its movement out of sync with human time.
  “It’s pretty here,” Dex said. “I wouldn’t have imagined I’d say that about a place like this, but—”
  “Yes, it is,” Mosscap said, as if making a decision within itself. “It is. Dying things often are.”
  Dex raised an eyebrow. “That’s a little macabre.”
  “Do you think so?” said Mosscap with surprise. “Hmm. I disagree.” It absently touched a soft fern growing nearby, petting the fronds like fur. “I think there’s something beautiful about being lucky enough to witness a thing on its way out.”
• “Yes. I have a remnant of beer. Of knowing what beer is, anyway.”
  “You remember beer but not butter?”
  Mosscap shrugged. “Ask the originals, not me.”
  “So … wait, what else drinks beer?”
  “Not beer. Fermented things. Woolwing birds will fight over fermented fruit if they can find it, even if there’s fresh fruit around. They are tremendously ridiculous afterward.”
• Dex narrowed their eyes. “You can’t bait yourself.”
  “Why not? It’s a possibility I’ve never considered. I have bugs inside me all the time. Why not a ferret? That could be fun.”
  “Sure. Or a bear.”
  “Ah,” Mosscap said. “Yes, you’re right. I couldn’t guarantee a small scavenger.”
• robot’s hand was so much bigger, but the two fit together all the same. Dex exhaled and squeezed the metal digits tightly, and as they did so, the lights on Mosscap’s fingertips made their skin glow red.
  “Oh, my!” Mosscap cried. “Is that—” It pulled Dex’s hand up, and pressed one of its fingertips to theirs, bringing out the red more intensely. “Is that your blood?” Mosscap looked enthralled. “I’ve never thought to do this with an animal before! I mean, I can’t imagine one would let me get close enough to—” Its eyes flickered; its face fell. “This isn’t the point of holding hands, is it?” it said, embarrassed, already knowing the answer.
• The Hart’s Brow Hermitage had been beautiful, once. Dex could see it if they pushed their eyes past the weathered decay. It was a single-story building with a large dome at the center, orbited by attached rooms that clustered and spread, flowerlike. These were roofed with concentric rings that alternated between abandoned turf planters and antiquated solar panels.
• No blatant symbol of Trikilli had jumped out at Dex, so they gazed around the room, lips pursed. “Oh,” Dex said, with an appreciative laugh. “Oh, neat.” They pointed at the fire pit, a containment area for that most famous display of molecular interaction, then drew their hand up toward the circular flue in the ceiling above. “Imagine the smoke,” they said. Mosscap wasn’t getting it, so Dex stretched their fingers flat, tilted their hand to the side, and drew a line from the pit to the sky—a vertical line.
• the monk who came over to us—she was so cool. She had icons tattooed all over her arms, and she was wearing plants—like little sprouts and moss balls set in brooches and earrings and things, and tiny strands of solar lights woven though her hair.
• “‘Find the strength to do both,’” Mosscap said, quoting the phrase painted on the wagon.
  “Exactly,” Dex said.
  “But what’s both?”
  Dex recited: “‘Without constructs, you will unravel few mysteries. Without knowledge of the mysteries, your constructs will fail. These pursuits are what make us, but without comfort, you will lack the strength to sustain either.’”... “But the thing is, the Child Gods aren’t actively involved in our lives. They’re … not like that. They can’t break the Parent Gods’ laws. They provide inspiration, not intervention. If we want change, or good fortune, or solace, we have to create it for ourselves.
• “That’s something I’m doing. That’s not my reason for being. When I am done with this, I will do other things. I do not have a purpose any more than a mouse or a slug or a thornbush does. Why do you have to have one in order to feel content?”
  “Because…” Dex itched at where this conversation had gone. “Because we’re different.”
  “Are you,” Mosscap said flatly. “And here I thought things had changed since the Factory Age. You keep telling me how humans understand their place in things now.”
• “Do you not find consciousness alone to be the most exhilarating thing? Here we are, in this incomprehensibly large universe, on this one tiny moon around this one incidental planet, and in all the time this entire scenario has existed, every component has been recycled over and over and over again into infinitely incredible configurations, and sometimes, those configurations are special enough to be able to see the world around them. You and I—we’re just atoms that arranged themselves the right way, and we can understand that about ourselves. Is that not amazing?”

===============================
Christelle Dabos' setup held promise but the delivery was tedious and the characters outright odious. Another could-not-finish. 

• It’s often said of old buildings that they have a soul. On Anima, the ark where objects come to life, old buildings tend mostly to become appallingly bad-tempered.
• Next, a bit further down, a bended knee poked through, and in tow came a body that pulled itself right out of the mirrored wardrobe, as if from a bathtub. Once clear of the mirror, the figure amounted to nothing more than a worn-out old coat, a pair of gray-tinted glasses, and a long three-colored scarf.
• You’re more accommodating than a chest of drawers, never raising your voice, never throwing tantrums, but the minute anyone mentions a husband, you send more sparks flying than an anvil.
• Touching all these dishes without protective gloves had sent her back in time. She could have described, down to the smallest detail, everything her great-uncle had eaten off these plates since he’d first owned them.
• Agatha instantly pulled away to look her up and down. “Holy hot water bottle! Have you looked at yourself in a mirror?
• Ancestors alive, thought a shocked Ophelia,
• “At this hour? And what about the feast? The celebrations? Our stomachs are rumbling in all directions, over here!”
• Only twice in her life had Ophelia got the chance to meet the spirit of her family. She couldn’t recall the first, the occasion being her baptism.
• The cracked lenses were already starting to heal up, but they’d still need several more hours to get the all clear. Ophelia placed them on her nose. An object repaired itself quicker if it felt useful, it was all a question of psychology.
• “Nothing to do with it! To read an object requires forgetting oneself a little, to leave room for the past of someone else. Traveling through mirrors, that requires facing up to oneself. One has to have guts, y’know, to look oneself straight in the peepers, see oneself as one really is, plunge into one’s own reflection. Those who close their eyes, those who lie to themselves, those who see themselves as better than they are, they could never do it. So, believe me, it’s no run-of-the-mill thing.”
• When Ophelia’s gaze wandered out of the large observation window, what she saw took her breath away. The flaming autumnal forests, gilded by the sun and battered by the wind, had just been replaced by a sheer wall of rock that disappeared into a sea of fog. The airship moved on, and Anima, hanging in the sky, appeared entirely surrounded by a ring of clouds. The further they moved away, the more it looked like a sod of earth and grass that an invisible spade had dug from a garden. So that was it, then, an ark seen from a distance? That little clod lost in the middle of the sky? Who would imagine that lakes, meadows, towns, woods, fields, mountains, and valleys stretched across this ridiculous chunk of world?
• Aunt Rosaline dabbed her mouth with her napkin. “Paper. I smooth out, I restore, I mend.” She grabbed the wine menu, unceremoniously tore it, and then, with a mere slide of the finger, resealed the edges.
• Hanging there, in the middle of the night sky, its towers steeped in the Milky Way, a marvelous citadel floated above the forest, with nothing attaching it to the rest of the world. It was a totally crazy spectacle, an enormous beehive disowned by the earth, a tortuous interlacing of keeps, bridges, crenellations, stairs, flying buttresses, and chimneys. Jealously guarded by a frozen ring of moats, their long streams solidified in the void, the snowy city soared above and plunged below this line. Spangled with lit windows and street lamps, it reflected its thousand-and-one lights onto the mirror of a lake.
• Berenilde’s needle remained suspended in midair. “An accident with a mirror? I confess that I don’t quite understand.”
  “I remained stuck in two places at the same time, for several hours,” muttered Ophelia. “Since that day, my body no longer obeys me as readily. I endured some physiotherapy, but the doctor predicted that I’d be left with some aftereffects. Some discrepancies.”
• She didn’t have the heart to wake up her scarf, dozing at the bottom of the bed, curled in a ball. Ophelia dived, body and soul, into the mirror in her room, sprang out from the mirror in the hall,
• Archibald burst out laughing. “Thankfully not! Life would be frightfully dull if I could read women’s hearts like an open book. Let’s say instead that it’s I who can make myself transparent to you. This tattoo,” he added, pounding his forehead, “is the guarantee of that very transparency that our society is so cruelly lacking. We always say what we think and we prefer to be silent than to lie.”
• Ophelia was flabbergasted. The spirit of the family? This woman was pregnant by her own ancestor?
• With a twinge of sorrow, Ophelia had even caught her repairing the wallpaper in the laundry.
• “Why is it raining?”
  It was the strangest question Ophelia had ever heard.
  “It’s nothing,” Berenilde assured him with a winning smile. “My nerves are just a little on edge.”
• the fake moon was as brilliant as a nacreous sun, and the fake stars evoked a real firework display.
• Fox leant towards her ear. “The conjugal bedroom of the late master and mistress, parents of the young master. They died years ago, but it’s never been erased.” <> Erase a room?
• Ophelia thought that if there was one man she’d never trust, it was definitely him. One really doesn’t organize an orgy in honor of an expectant mother.
• In this world, servants had very little value. They weren’t descendants of Farouk, issuing instead from the people with no powers, so had to compensate with their hands for what they couldn’t contribute with their talents. It certainly gave one food for thought. A Mirage who conjures up illusions is thus considered better than those who clean his linen and prepare his meals?
  The closer Ophelia got to Pole society, the more disenchanted she became. She’d come here hoping to find trustworthy people, but all she saw around her were big, capricious children . . . starting with the host.