Wandering Star 43: Making Magic

Tyk, diplomatically, does her best not to look horrified by whatever that could possibly mean. She has trouble picturing what a ‘lightning river’ could be, but it definitely doesn’t sound good. Dem spots her expression, says ‘wait’, and seems to think very hard for a moment before trying again. This sentence, unlike the lightning river one, is constructed from echoes of voices that Tyk knows very well rather than the voices of the Hiveless.

“They are designing a stone for collecting sunlight,” Dem says slowly, with pauses between almost every word, “to make magic for the magic stones.”

“They’re making a new magic stone to provide magic?”

“Yes, if they can find the right rocks.”

“That’s why they need Smon? To know where the rocks are?”

“Yes.”

That makes sense. Smon talks a lot about sunlight being food for everything, getting trapped by the plants in ‘small sunlight shapes’ that then feed the animals and people that eat them. It makes sense that the magic stones get food from the sun, too. But Smon’s boat and farm and little magic stones already have plenty of magic from her heat-making magic stone; don’t these people have one of those?

Tyk glances about at the light stones on the floor, and the echo stone on Dem’s face. They must. “But you already have magic for your magic stones,” she points out.

“Not forever,” Dem says. “Small magic for small stones, yes. But we will need more magic to build homes and feed everyone, and the magic we have will run out. Getting things to make sunlight traps is very complicated and will take many years, probably. We need to be ready.”

“Smon says that you can’t repair your magic stones if they break.”

“That’s right. We will have to make simpler magic stones, or find other ways to do things.” She screws up her face. “This wasn’t the plan.”

“The plan?”

“We were supposed to all land very close to each other. We didn’t expect to be scattered. We didn’t expect there to be people here, either. And people is a very good thing! But also a very complicated thing. Landing in somebody else’s home is…” She pauses for a while, concentrating on her echo stone like she’s searching for a word, then seems to give up. “Complicated. What is your home like? Saima says that hives are very different from out here.”

“They’re safer,” Tyk says. “More organised. Rain like this wouldn’t be a problem for a hive. This tunnel would be in good condition, and there would be plenty to do, and plenty of food stored if something went wrong. And a lot more people to help.”

Dem nods. “I miss people.”

“You have Kana and Yotoru. And Smon.”

“Indeed. And many more, once the Rayjo Tau is up and singing.”

“Are you coming to help build it?”

“We can’t. We can’t leave the reservoir. Not until it’s made enough food for a long journey, and enough to feed us while we build another one at our destination.”

“That makes sense.” Smon’s mobile farm can barely feed her, let alone three new sky people. “So you’re trapped here, then?”

Dem laughs. “Settled here. Or settling, at least. The neima say that it’s a bad location for a permanent home, since we’ve come past leafdrop, but we should have plenty of time to get ourselves prepared to move on before influx.”

Neima, huh? That must be what this group of Hiveless call themselves. Tyk isn’t uneducated; she can work out what a work like that means. ‘Sa’ is an ancient word for ‘horn’, much how ‘ke’ is an ancient word for ‘wing’, which Tyk assumes is why the women out here name themselves as they do. ‘Ne’ is the ancient word for a hive; not the place, but the people. The two words became one over time, as words to, but in the very old stories, the people within a hive were not called the hive, but the ne. These Hiveless were Ima’s Hive.

Well. Ima’s group. They were still Hiveless, after all. Which was why they had to name themselves after their leader Saima, and not a place.

That word, she could figure out, but some of Dem’s other words were a bit more confusing. “Leafdrop? Influx?”

Dem nods. “Leafdrop was a couple of generations ago, they say.”

Which explains absolutely nothing. “What is leafdrop?”

Dem gives her a look that, if it were Smon, Tyk would call surprised, but she has no idea what could be surprising about her question. After a moment, Dem explains. “The sweetroot plants dried up and crumbled away aboveground a couple of generations ago. So there’s very limited time before an influx – before people from hives that are exhausted and unlivable come back to build here again. Saima says that the land could be ready within Tama’s lifetime, although the influx probably won’t occur that soon – it depends on how long the nearby hives remain habitable, and whether the people from there find somewhere better to go instead. She says that it’s best to leave the land for as long as possible before burrowing.”

“Unless any of the other hives are in dire straits, it shouldn’t be within Tama’s lifetime,” Tyk assures him. “I can’t speak for any disasters or overharvesting or sweetroot infections that might hurry people up, but the natural rot of the sweetroot on the other side of the river has only just started. That’s usually what forces a hive to disband; the last of the sweetroot rotting away in the ground, no matter how long it takes to dig up. Our elders say there’s still generations left in it.”

“Well, that’s good to hear. Although I sure hope we’re not still here for generations. We’re hoping to gather any star sailors in the area here to feed from the reservoir, gather the food we need from it and go to set up… somewhere more stable. Probably the Rayjo Tau, if you and Smon succeed in your mission.”

“There are more of you around here?” Tyk asks, surprised.

Dem shrugs. “Using Smon’s data about the survival rate on your side of the river, I have to assume so. Communication between the groups out here is not particularly frequent. They cross paths during migration sometimes, but they don’t have… your thing.” Dem focuses on the echo stone for a moment. “The wingsong stream.”

“Neither have we, recently,” Tyk grumbles.

“So I heard. I’m sorry to hear that. We were surprised to be so far apart and not able to talk when we fell, but we didn’t have a whole society built on it. It’s much more dangerous when you’re relying on it.”

“Everyone will manage,” Tyk says.

“I’m sure you will. You seem quite resilient.”

Dem seems to have a lot more complicated, precise language in her echo stone than Smon. Or perhaps that was just how she likes to speak, and Smon prefers looser language. Tyk can’t help but notice that her more technical words were all in the voices of the Hiveless, which she feels irrationally defensive about. The Redstone River Hive could teach Smon complicated and clever words, too, if she had wanted them! Smon simply hadn’t asked about words like ‘migration’ and ‘resilient’. It must be a personality difference between Smon and Dem. Or Smon and Kana and Yotoru.

Anyway, there are three of them and only one Smon. Of course they’d have collected more words, especially since the Hiveless here are happy to relax while it was raining and probably had lots of free time to teach them. Tyk could’ve taught Smon just as many impressive words, if there’d been three of her asking.

“The communication difficulties did cause a food production problem,” Tyk tells Dem. Not because she needs to prove her knowledge and intelligence to this stranger. She’s just making conversation. “Our moss farms rely on a complex water filtration system during the wet season, and we were going to run out of seastone to make the filters. We hadn’t confirmed our trade requirements for the season with the other hives, so without the wingsong stream we couldn’t be certain whether they’d risk the journey and bring enough for our needs. But we resolved the issue.”

Dem nods. “Metal-time collapse,” she says. “Before-new-shell-time collapse.”

“What?”

“It’s something that happens on our Earth sometimes. That’s what we call the two biggest events, although it happens on a smaller scale quite often. The more complex your society, the more vulnerable it is to one missing part. Resilience is important, but efficiency is important too, and resilience that isn’t needed is the opposite of efficiency. So if you make something more and more efficient when it doesn’t need to be resilient, and then something important breaks and it suddenly did need that resiliency…” She shrugs. “I’m glad you solved your problem, Tyk. Many societies don’t.”

The Redstone River Hive had been facing inconvenience, not collapse, but Tyk knows what she means. “We call it the rot curse,” she says.

“The rot curse?”

“Yeah. The older a hive gets, the more… unique… it becomes. It adapts to its environment, does what it does best and trades with other hives for what they do best. Redstone River is well placed to farm bamboo, so we trade bamboo to hives that are less well placed for that. Whitesand and Sharp Spire hive started needing a lot of bamboo a few generations ago and they have a lot of seastone, and being so close to the river makes it a bit harder than normal to safely dig for sweetroot in some directions, so a few generations ago we started farming far more blackmoss, which needs the seastone but is much easier for a hive in our position to feed ourselves with. This issue only arose because of that uniqueness. The older a hive gets, the more of these problems can happen. We call it the rot curse because it feels like the closer the sweetroot gets to rotting, the more bad luck we have.”

“We’ll be facing the biggest rot curse of all time, soon enough,” Dem remarks, looking back at the other three sky people.

So that’s why she’s not helping to plan the sunlight trap. “You think they’ll fail?”

“Of course they’ll fail. Even if they want find the right land to have the right stones, they’ll have to find the stones themselves and dig them out, and they don’t have the tools for that and won’t have enough people to do it when everybody is busy surviving. And even if they dig it out, they’ll have to purify it and craft it and mix it with other things and craft it again, and that all takes special tools that they’d need to make first, which means finding the things to make those tools. And even if they did succeed, it wouldn’t matter because our magic-holding-stones will still have magic long after everything else breaks.” She indicates the echo stone on her face. “So they’d be collecting magic for simpler stones, but making things to store and channel and run on magic is all so hard and so complicated and relies on so many things. Even just making good lightning-rivers is so much more work than they’re acknowledging. They can’t make the sunlight traps, and even if they could it wouldn’t be worth all the time and effort, and even if they did anyway they’re preparing for a future that can’t exist.”

Tyk looks at the three sky people in animated discussion, then back at Dem. “They seem to think they can do it.”

“No, they don’t. They know it’s impossible as well as I do. It’s just what we were supposed to have. We were supposed to be slower when we got to our new Earth, and have lots of time to drop sunlight traps and all the right tools from the sky, and the longboat was supposed to stay in the sky and be Rayjo Tau until we didn’t need it any more. We were supposed to have the tools and the people and the plans to be resilient. But we didn’t have the time or space when dropping here, so we have this situation instead. They’re just having a nice dream, for a while.”

Smon’s laughter fills the tunnel momentarily, before she reaches down to change something on the crude map in front of her. Yotoru is shaking her head, but smiling, while Kana tries to bat Smon’s hand away and change the design back.

It’s hard to fault a nice dream.