Day Twenty-Three

A low scraping, mandible on mandible.
I take a place beside him, squeezed between his side and that of another bond admiring the display (two suns circling a common point, a string of worlds in corkscrew orbits), and carefully do not look up to meet his eye. "A delicate balance, this system. Hard to keep the worlds from boiling or falling away entirely."
"Yes. Very delicate."
"So far it's the most expansive one here. I wish success to its creator."
"When it is time to build, it will be built. Regardless of any difficulties that may arise. < With no resort to dangerous and foolish tests >"
< It is for that reason I have told no one the truth >
< So you don't appear foolish? >
I shift from foot to foot. Already the incident has cast me and my siblings as somewhat less than competent. Foolish? Yes. Crazy? Yes. But an unfocused rumor is better than failure brought out in sharp relief.
To fail is to fulfill expectations, and I would rather be mistaken as one dangerous than one wrong.
The one beside me adjusts his weight at the wrong time, just as I sway in his direction, and I flash an automatic apology as we bump plates.
"A popular display," he replies. < No need to worry >
Heat-Traces raises his head over mine. "Whirling-Dances, did you hear about that shunt collision yesterday?"
The older Silence Hunter betrays nary a flicker of recognition, rolling one eye to regard my guardian and keeping the other on the display. "Yes, of course. Deliberate, they say. Seems the new place is having... interesting effects on people. And I don't mean the sickness." He chuckles. "Although that may be part of it."
“Were you aware that it was a test?”
“A test? Whatever for?”
Heat-Traces keeps his tone light. “To see if accidents can be prevented by intending to cause accidents.”
“You don't say.” Whirling-Dances shifts both eyes back to the display, arms curling. “Didn't work, did it?”
“It did,” I mutter. “It did work.”
“As a test, perhaps,” the other First allows, and I wonder how much of this was arranged beforehand. “Success or failure, and even failure has a measure of worth. Provided, that is, the correct parameters are set and the right questions asked.”
I raise a foreleg and rest my claws on the display rim. “If, perhaps, the bond responsible had asked the right questions, what worth might they have found? < Heat-Traces, please, I know it was wrong-- you don't have to bring outside evidence to tell me >
< Me? Bringing evidence? No such thing. Perhaps you should listen >
“What worth?” repeats Whirling-Dances. He flicks a tendril-tip and the system slides into measured motion, planets pouring like water between tangled suns. "If said bond had asked who was responsible for the accidents instead of what— then they may have found solace in failure."
'No such thing' indeed. "How so?"
Whirling-Dances shrugs. "Would you prefer that some outside agency was directing our actions? That we are, in fact, not responsible for what we do? That, in the grand scheme, we hold no power of our own?"
"But then a failure would mean—"
"That all problems are our own. A much more agreeable state of affairs, don't you think?"
"But that's not what...the bond... was testing," I point out. "They wanted to know what. Not who."
"If a what, what matters? Whats are nothing to a who. We can adapt to a what."
"We can remove a who."
Another chuckle. "Can we?"
Memory: a cylinder with jagged wings. Three swept fins around a flaming engine, rows of lights slowly spinning on a common axis, long swiveling protrusions on front and sides. Matte black. Little more than a shadow against the stars. Not ours. Strange, sinister, alien, but nothing to the sound accompanying it.
Gargling.
More precisely, long undifferentiated streams of high-pitched burps and burbles and sputtered gutturals, wet and loose and slurping like innards sucked through chitin.
I shake the vision away. Feed from one of the probes, it had to be. "What is it?"
Heat-Traces blinks, first one eye and then the other. "Reason to ponder."

Now, being infinitely more learned, I can tell you what the message said.
"Riches-kin, I think I love you.
Modest Rina, I think I'm pregnant."

It seemed much more menacing at the time.

A folly, now, to think that creatures such as yourselves would have been capable enough to eliminate the native Silence Hunters of your universe. Unlike us, they would have known the rules. Unlike us, they would have recognized the power of intelligence. If Silence Hunters had existed at your dawn you would have never lived to see the sun rise.
For it is intelligence that caused our problems. Yours, and ours.
You are the who that we feared.
We are the who that we never suspected.
There was no what. There never was a what.
Madwork is the effect of intelligence upon the universe, and without a who it is nothing at all.

I will be blunt. Though we did not realize it, our machines were failing. The ontodynamics were only the beginning. They died quickly, and they died because madwork killed them: victim of the dominant force in a place where only minds may reshape reality.
The rest-- the Builders, the probes, our armor, even our Link-- was not foreign enough to destroy yet not native enough to survive untouched, and so it was replaced with the closest analogy. Your analogy. Madwork. All of our technology displaced by distilled force of will, concentrated impossibility, solid hope and belief. Your way depends on thought for its direction, and we thought nothing of it.
It worked because we expected it to work, and it failed because we knew it didn't exist.
You might say that we could fly so long as we never looked down.
As it was, the trajectory was gentle, and sloped, and descending.


CHAPTER SIX
Five years in the new place. Twelve shards placed. Five more under construction.
Shell-World one-hundredth of one percent completed.
Countless set-backs.

< Yours said that, too? >
< Indeed they did. 'Your work, it is fine enough when it is finished, but it is never finished. Always you encounter some imbalance, some discoloration, some imperfection in the materials or the calculations or the fitting of parts. Not acceptable. Not acceptable at all.' And all this when they've hardly managed to churn out ten shards themselves! >
< Ours have sixteen >
< Yours don't spend so much time nagging. We're doing our best, we really are, but... > A long-distance shrug, almost as though I've shrugged myself, plates rippling. < The Gap-Shift. What can we do? >
< What can we do >
I clamber over the arched prongs of my Builder. Gap-Shift. The sliding separation between now and then, here and there, Second and First. The lurking malefactor behind each jammed rock grinder, each broken flash mould, each twisted skein-spinner and inversed void-slicer and misplaced nondecimal. Small problems, but over time they gather force. Most sibling-bonds have been driven to regular maintenance; even guardians. Self-repair and self-cleaning mechanisms fail, too.
Recently I myself had to endure a stay on the slab, when my small-scale tensor manipulators gave out. For two frustrating days I found myself unable to crush diamonds. Given that I was, at the time, in the middle of a project involving the crushing of diamonds (for clouds, see), my siblings had to do it for me. Others have suffered more pressing mishaps.
Something has caught in the teeth of my Builder, and it almost chewed up one of our manufactory rings.
< Complain, I suppose > says Newer, no less amused for being on the other side of Echo-Source, < We can complain >
< As we are >
< All we have to offer each other, remember? Except for a modicum of support against our elders >
I drop beneath the offending prong, a gold-plated hook three kilometers in length, its underside studded with shifting protrusions and projectors. A single solid piece, a Builder, components all interconnected, but capable of change— part of the hull lifts away at my command and its insides reshape themselves to bring pinpointed problems to the fore.
< You know how it works, Crusher > Newer continues. He's working on a malfunction of his own, one of several hundred. We all commiserate. < You know what it means to go out and try managing things yourself >
I'm not sure why I don't block him.
< I wasn't the only one to try it >
< Doesn't matter. Our guardians would never permit such a thing >
< Neither would ours >
< All the same >
Blue's voice slips into the conversation. < Almost repaired? >
< Still working >
< A little while ago they were going on about their last project again— you know, the...