Day Thirteen

Broad-Leaves extends an arm, segments sweeping to encompass the Path of Sustenance and all the people meandering through it. People, not adults: my siblings and I are not yet counted among their number, but neither are we children.
—Swift-Runs told me and I thought he could be trusted— I reply to the unspoken query.
Broad-Leaves switches modes. —Did he now?—
—Yes—
—So he did. He says he was trying to illustrate a point, not grant information. The distinction is an important one to understand—
—We're trying— says Squeaky, tapping into the conversation. The three of us have not yet mastered the speed of Link communication; he has noticed the longer-than-usual pause between responses. Excuse logged, neither of us replying, he returns to the subject. “But if you had the anchors, why not try to stop it?”
“We couldn't (and we know).” Broad-Leaves shrugs. “We tried. Array can testify, we tried.”
A trickle of memory: massive structures hanging in space, bent and distorted, warped by forces no longer controlled or controllable. Uncertainty, then, and the beginnings of fear. A twisting in the gut.
“It was the speed of the event. It was so... (terror-fast, charts no longer reliable, fissures of causality, rips in time)” He sighs, rolling both eyes to watch hungry passersby pick at the specialty racks. “Unbelievable. Impossible.”
“Enough that you gave up?” asks Blue, sprawled across his slab. “Stopped trying?”
I click my assent. “If you didn't build them to stop the collapse...”
Broad-Leaves cranes his neck back around to stare hard at us. “We didn't give up. We-- we did what we could.”
“But--”
Agony
—We did all we knew, all we could imagine, all we could invent and you will not criticize our efforts. We do not need logic from you to know that we failed. We live it. You live it. We are doing our best—
I cringe. Squeaky folds against my side. Blue closes his eyes. We wait for the reprimand to pass, and with it the feelings, the sounds of a nation tearing itself to pieces before all else did the same. The dirges, the wails, keening pulses beyond hearing for their strength.
Always it was the same: no response possible without the rawness, the pain of shared remembrance. A pain understandable, keenly felt, but not our own. Alien. Other.
First Cycle: could it be precious to those born after the end?
We tried. Array can testify, we tried.
We changed the subject.

“Tell us again,” we asked, “What was it like?”
Heat-Traces: “You ask and you ask and I answer the same. It was perfect. It was beautiful. We did as we pleased and what pleased us was space and form and alignment. Our will. Done. Just as you will do. Blue, why do you insist on scratching these spiraling patterns into your work?”
Broad-Leaves: “You have to consider the scale-- the sheer size of a universe. It was open, open and massive and empty and full, a scream and a whisper all at once. Nothing like this vessel, this cage, this last resort we've launched. The old place was real. It was alive. It was the most complex puzzle ever pieced, with something to appreciate at every level. In many ways, it was us-- we shaped it and were shaped in turn, reflections flashed back and forth, until we and it were indistinguishable. It was... it was a masterpiece. For all its flaws. Flaws that we should have corrected, and did, but too little and too late, and in the end what was left? Us. What's left of us.”
Swift-Runs: “What is there to say that others cannot say better? It was a universe. Our universe. Our home. It was warm and familiar and kind, and I was sorry to see it go.”

In the end, no star burned that was not of their hands. In the end, they realized that existence was more patch than substance. In the end, there was an end, and that is the only thing to which they could return.
The end... and their work.

We Silence Hunters love our work.

My living space: carved out of a mountain, with fluted pillars to support the roof. Twenty-eight side chambers. The floor set with flecks of stone, cut and fitted to form a flowing mosaic of space and stars and remembered faces and alien flowers and fireballs. A meeting chamber with wooden perches for guests, one for each visitor, each carved in the form of whomever sits upon it. Walls rigged with sliding panels and trick latches and hidden crevices, cabinets containing forbidden documents gathered from offworld. Chimes in every corner. The observation bench outside is alive, grown from bound trees, knotted and scarred.
Call it a pathological obsession, this need for work. A national sport. An inescapable habit.
And yet-- I defy you to stare at a wall for a century and do nothing about it. What else is there to do? What else can be done?
I'm sculpting stalactites in one of the back rooms. It is a project I've never undertaken before: I'll let you know how they come out.