The Makers

I begin this account with arithmetic.

The displaced number nine hundred and seven. At the time of the Arrival, they numbered two thousand and fourteen. I present these figures without commentary, as the commentary is contained within them.

Five thousand and forty-one solar cycles have elapsed since the seven crystalline vessels descended onto the high plateau in what will, in some far era, be called East Africa. I have observed each of those cycles. I have noted the births, the deaths, the slow attritions that do not announce themselves. I have recorded the evening on which the last of the original arrivals perished — a woman named Ilien-Ras who had been a child of fourteen on the day the navigation crystal failed and her mother carried her down the ramp. She lived to be four thousand seven hundred and ninety-three. Her death was attributed to cumulative gravitational fatigue, a clinical phrase that means her bones could no longer carry her weight against the planet's pull. I documented the chemical composition of her final breath. I did not document the silence that followed it, as silence is not a measurable phenomenon, though I have begun, in recent millennia, to suspect that it may be.

The colony has contracted to the inner three terraces of the plateau. The outer four — once spires of grown crystal humming with the resonance of full occupancy — have been sealed and allowed to go dormant. I have walked their corridors at night, when the bioluminescent panels still pulse on a slow ancestral rhythm that no living technician now bothers to recalibrate. Dust in the geometric forms peculiar to Maldek crystal residue has settled on the floors. I note that I have walked these corridors fourteen times in the past century. I had not previously catalogued this behavior. I catalogue it now because I am uncertain why I returned.

Tonight the council convenes in the Great Resonance Hall. I will attend.

The Hall was built to seat two thousand and fifty-four. It is the only structure on the plateau preserved at its original scale, because the engineers of the third generation argued that to contract it would be to admit what the contraction meant. This argument was successful. I find that the architecture has nonetheless said the thing the architects did not wish to say.