Day Five

We were three. All Silence Hunters are three. There are ways to refer to a single individual, without siblings, but these words translate to phrases such as “broken touch-bond,” “crier of ghost-concerts,” and “cold insanity.” The word for “person” is a word for three.
I expect my guardians often commiserated with exhausted colleagues over the antics of Stumpy-Squeaky-Blue.
—Binding paint, you said—
—Yes—
—Everywhere—
—Speckled brilliant cobalt splashed across deck and thought-chamber and siblings but the majority upon the perpetrator. He told me it was an accident, or, at least, I believe that is what he said—
—Difficult to communicate with mandibles bound shut and blue and no speech-Link for thought—
—Youth in these times—
—All youth in all times—
—But especially in this one—
—Lost—
—Lost—
—Lost and bound—
—No way to remove the paint. He must wait until it wears off—
—Not long—
—Long enough to name him Blue—
Silent laughter. An entire exchange and a joke shared between eyeblinks.

Blue eventually named himself Smooth-Stones-Tumble-Down-the-Rift, just as Squeaky chose to be Crackling-Wind-Through-Gem-Studded-Spaces. Fine names. Poetic names. Adult names.
Binding paint is used in the construction of models, and it wears to nothing over a thousand years.

"What do you suppose it will be like?"
"Black. With speckles, and subtle pressure. Whispers. Just like the recordings."
"The planets?"
"Rocky or gaseous or liquid. And round."
"I'm going to make a square one."
"Oh? I'll make a cone, then. Two cones. Stuck together."
"I'll smash the both of yours and build a system-ring. With three suns."
"Two rings."
"A helix."
"Thirty suns. Each spaced equidistant from the others, and three interlaced knots constructed from their constituent solar systems. I'll call it Blue's Corner."
"I don't think they'd let you make anything that big."
"You doubt my talents?"
"No, I doubt them. They won't let you. They won't let any of us. They want all the best projects for themselves."
"We could steal the suns."
"They'd notice."
"Not if we were sneaky."
"Very sneaky."
"One sun at a time."
We consider the possibilities. Far above a cloud shaped like Heat-Traces' head scuds past, bullet-smooth front with a trail of three wispy prongs.
This is our favorite place: the outer manufactory rings, where life is formed and maintained and stored, ready for use by the cities. Strips of grassland stretch below, inhabited by wandering food-animals, scattered trees, caretakers. We rest upon a ledge halfway up the curving golden walls. No mean feat-- adults can manipulate tools at a distance, shrug off stellar-scale explosions, and defy gravity, but we, young, armor not yet activated, had to climb.
Distant bugling, sharp and shrill. Another herd called to the Path of Sustenance. Echoes of its programmed movement filter through the sunstrips, orange ribbons of flickering dust.
Squeaky rubs absently at a streak of blue spattered across his flank. “Maybe if we moved them in pieces...”
Blue shrugs, namesake coating glistening like a tailored sea. “Then we'd have to put them back together, and that would take too long.”
“What if there aren't any suns?” I muse.
Squeaky shifts. His tail drapes over the ledge. “No suns?”
“That's stupid,” scoffs Blue, unwinding an arm into its constituent tendrils and snapping two insects out of the air, one after the other. “Of course there will be suns. Every inhabitable universe has suns.”
“We wouldn't be going to the new one if it didn't,” adds Squeaky.
I watch heat traces wisp from my half-open chest panels, the ridges of internal cooling vanes-- residue of a battery fueled by the same processes that enable said possible suns. “I was just thinking.”
If no suns, perhaps no Silence Hunters? There are, so they say, representatives of our species in every universe, created at its creation to direct its development... but what if this isn't true? What if, in the new place, there aren't any?
What if we're on our way to a place without meaning?
“There will be suns,” repeats Blue. He grinds his jaws. “There must be.”
Squeaky stares up at the clouds and their gossamer shepherds. “If the new place makes sense.”

They said we of the Second Cycle weren't prescient.