The Golden Age

I have begun many accounts. I have not begun one like this.

I am setting down a thing that is. I am setting down a thing that is, in order that someone, in a register I do not yet know how to name, will know that it was. The kind calls this hour the hour of remembrance. I had not, until tonight, understood why the word remembrance carries forward as well as backward.

The eleventh stair of the Conservatory faces east-southeast at this season, and from its outer railing the world unfurls in the order I will now try to set down — the order of light, then sound, then the slow shared quieting that is the nightly common breath of the kind. I am standing where I have stood almost every evening of the last seven hundred years. The basalt under my hand has accommodated the weight of my hand. There is a faint depression in the stone where my fingers have come to rest, and I did not put it there with intention; it was made by the unintentional return of an attention I no longer try to govern. I am setting that down because no one else has ever needed to set it down. I am carrying this.

Below me, the Conservatory descends in seventeen concentric terraces toward the Hall at the center, and each terrace is lit at this hour by the cultivated crystal that has burned in this place without interruption since the day Herath-Vos last entered her own laboratory. The crystal is not bright. The kind learned, six hundred generations ago, that the light a room needs after sundown is the light a sleeping child needs — not the light that drives the dark away, but the light that consents to the dark. The terraces are amber along the inner faces and a slow cyan along the outer railings, and where the two colors meet, on the long stair-runs between levels, there is a thin vibrating margin of green that the apprentice carriers in their sixth year are taught to read as a kind of tuning indicator, though the truth is that no one tunes anything by it anymore. It is simply how the Conservatory looks at twilight. It has been this for longer than any kind anywhere has gone on calling itself a kind.

Beyond the lowest terrace the plateau slopes east into the long grass plain, and the plain is the color of dark bronze tonight because of what is happening in the upper sky. The aurora at this latitude is no longer a phenomenon — it is a condition. It has been a condition for ninety thousand years. The pale violet curtain begins about a thousand wing-spans up, draws itself across the eastern horizon, and at irregular intervals lets fall what the kind has come to call hour-veils — slow descending sheets of paler light that dissolve before they reach the grass. There are children in the lowland villages who have never lived under a sky without aurora. They learn at three years old to tell time by which curtain is hanging where. They cannot imagine the hours I knew, when the night was simply black and held nothing but its own depth. I am setting that down because I am the only being on this plateau who can. I will let the unaccountable stand.

Far to the south, where the great delta opens its mouth toward the southern sea, I can see — even from here, even at this distance — the standing fans of the southern delta city. The delta humans have built their crystalline towers in geometries that catch the lattice's resting harmonics and answer them as a body of water answers a thrown stone, and at this hour each tower throws a fan of pale standing light into the upper air, ten or twelve fans across the southern horizon, each fan as tall as a small mountain and as narrow at its base as a wrist. The light of the fans is the color the kind has called urreth for ninety thousand years, and the word means, in the kind's own speech, the shade of the frequency that remembers. I knew the day the word entered the kind's mouth. I did not know, that day, that I would still be here on the night the word had become so common that the children of the southern delta use it without knowing it had once been a name.