Episode 06
My apology to all allegations
I made a mistake. Keep it in the record. Whoever's writing this down, and I can hear the pen, leave it in exactly as I say it, because this story has not been told for the first time in this room, and I would like this to be the last telling, and the last telling should have the mistakes in it where they were made.
It wasn't the origami.
I told this council, two sittings ago, that the Japanese Kaiser folded the continent. He didn't. The origami was his grandmother's. Holy her; rest in peace. She made the folds. A smart woman with a lot of time, who took a full world and worked out how to knick it, and fold it, and repeat, so that every family had a place and every marriage was a crease and the whole thing stood up by itself. That was hers. What her grandson made, married to a djinn, walking through the djinn's fantasies like rooms, was the thing on top of it.
The kaleidoscope.
Same paper. Same folds. But you don't work with what's there; you say where you want to go, and you shake it, and you twist, and the folds fall into the picture you asked for. The origami was built on the old principle, the one the ancient kingdom calls Gahni: rebirth, a plan of time, build the columns, keep the power in check, all of it based on what is. The kaleidoscope is based on what we want. That's the whole difference and it's the whole of everything, and I carry the shape of that continent in my head, every crease of it, so you'd think I of all people would know whose hands made it. I did know. I said it the wrong way round anyway, for six sittings, and I'm sorry.
Here's why it matters. The old system needed warriors. If you build a thing on what is, then anyone who wants it different has to hit it, and so we hit them, for thousands of years, on both sides of the layer. In a kaleidoscope you watch where you, as a people, want to stand, and you support each other on the way there, with real effort and kindness, and nobody has to hit anyone. I'm not saying it worked. I'm saying that was the idea, and it was the Kaiser's, and the folds were his grandmother's, and I owed them both the distinction.
The trolls. I promised this council the trolls and I've been putting it off, because trolls are hard to put in a record without the record getting bigger. Ask the clerk.
The troll kingdom was always a fan of the grandmother. Knick, fold, repeat; they liked that. It was done by a smart woman, and trolls respect a smart woman more than anything on earth, though they'll never say so, and I've tried to make them. But who has the time. That's what the trolls said, when the kaleidoscope came: who has the time to say where we want to go and shake it. And the answer, in troll land, was: the Venturis.
The Venturis are camp. I don't have a better word and neither do they. They rule in troll land because, let's be honest, trolls, or, and I'll stop there, because not every troll. Every troll has a personality, and is his own personas, plural, several at once, and is perfectly capable of governing himself and simply doesn't want to. But they listen. That's the thing about trolls. They listen better than anyone in this room, and I include the chair.
The trolls and I buttered each other, back in the day. I called them my little pebbles. They called me something I won't repeat in a record, because it's a compliment in troll and an insult in every other language, and the clerk would have to spell it. And they had troll magic, which is a thing apart: it can only be used by trolls, no matter how controlling the Venturis got, no matter who held the ledger, and it is the one power in this whole story nobody has ever managed to steal. I say that as somebody who was in the room for most of the stealing.
Before the Venturis there were the Centuries. The first. There long before anyone else, peaceful, and they lost a bet. I'll tell the council the bet at the end because it's stupid. They had to move. Where do you move in a full world? They put their belongings through one of the portals the Nymphen make, not that the Venturis wanted any of the stuff, and they all live in peace, and that's the trolls, more or less. The Century is here by proxy. He can nod.
Ask a troll where he comes from and you get the best things. An angry woman threw him so hard he flew through the galaxy and landed in this tree, and he counts how many trees have grown from that tree since, one, two, three, and a while later, and I mean a while, he says six hundred and twenty-nine. Ask a big troll and he'll just tell you he killed a person when he landed, and grin. I've never known if they're lying. I've decided it doesn't matter, and I'd ask the record to reflect that it doesn't.
And the Venturis, of course, knew about the pebbles. And the Venturis had their own Gucci.
I mean that as the worst thing I can say about a family, and I have a sister.
She built the aquarium.
After the model of the zoo, which she'd heard about the way everyone heard about the zoo. But instead of mice she took a pebble, one of my little pebbles, and split it in two, and put one half in a fish and the other in a spinone, which is a dog, a large one, with a beard, and the two halves could feel each other across the whole of the water. Isn't that madness. And the worst of it: you can't see it from the zoo. The mice can't feel a fish. So she could do her mischief in the dark, for a long time, and nobody upstairs had a door for it.
I found out from a troll. Of course I did. He'd been listening.
Then something good happened, and I want it in, because I've given this council five sittings of bad.
After the attack on the prince became known, an alliance formed. Not the Alliance; a first one, smaller. And it gave me a new idea, and Gucci, who could still take an idea and run with it in those years, developed it further, and made her own kind of oracle. Small. Sent to her allies, for their security, because she was worried, very worried, and this was how she showed it. Very technical, I'd say, if you asked me, and nobody did. But something happened that nobody had planned: the offspring of those oracles developed abilities, natural ones, without any technology at all, that were very close to the original.
That opened a marriage market across the land. The population shot up. Nobody could get enough. And for a while, and I want the council to hear me say it because I don't say it often, it was peaceful.
Until the nuke.
About the nuke. I've let this council think a thumb came down once. Here's the dome.
The experiment in the clean city was started so many times. Sometimes it didn't work because the technology failed. Sometimes it didn't work because a child was the wrong colour, or the head was too big, and you could tell in seconds. And there was a button. And I would say, honestly, that everyone in that dome pressed the button once. Everyone. I was in that dome. It was that kind of place. But nobody nuked it. Not for years. And after the attack in which two of the boy's friends died, that version of him, the father, the angel, woke up in a psychiatric ward, and was there a year, and then it was done. Then the thumb. And you'll ask, as I've asked, couldn't they have done it right away? And the answer is that nobody in that dome could, which is the only kind thing I have to say about any of them.
Whose thumb, the chair will want. The chair has wanted it for six sittings. I was in the war room and I'm still not saying.
Since I'm doing corrections, the machinery, quickly, because this council is going to need it and the ninja are going to come up.
Gucci's system, the techno-fairy's, works with gravitation. If your power reaches far enough you can position black holes so that they act like a camera, and with a camera like that you can measure gravity and manipulate it. With three or more, bigger targets. That's all it is. It sounds like magic and it's plumbing.
And the ninja took it. Thanks to her experiments there were more and more people who could communicate with creatures, and they used their larger connection to the universe to found a network of their own. Tuned to their brainwaves, they send an extra image into the eye, like a portal, and with a proxy of mass out in the universe they can manipulate others by triangulation. What they cannot do is change reality. That's reserved: for the Nymphen, and for the Krallen. But over time, even for a djinn, it became opaque who was doing what to whom, and the Krallen staged the first purge, and that was the first great war in the old realm.
There were smaller systems too, of course. Smaller, bigger. None like mine. Mine is a continent, and it's folded, and I'll thank the council not to shake it.
The chair interrupted me here, and I want the question and the answer in.
She said: if you're telling all this, why aren't you afraid? Why no worry?
And I said: "We tested first. Whether all of it is safe. And we bring it to you in a detailed and understandable way, on purpose."
"So why tell it at all?"
"Because it fits so seamlessly. And in the hope that someone else gets the chance to look at something bigger than themselves through it, and finds in it the missing detail they need for their own story. So drive in, kxb.team, and tell yours. I would honestly rather have told a sad testimony about how I came to be, through and through. But I wanted to make sure it was fun."
The clerk asked me to spell kxb. I said it's not a word, it's a team, and the clerk wrote that down too, and I'd like it left.
And then, because the chair was still looking at me: "I confirm for the record that I did not read any of the old things. Who has time to read every nice thing the eldest ever did, like sharing bread with someone. And enter."
Here's our dilemma, then, and I'll say it to her, because she's in the room and it's for her.
Running the experiment over and over was expensive. If the thumb was the only way to end a run, then every run cost a city. So after the page, and Gucci, and Emeraldo, and Weakling, and a clone the Venturis had made, went to the ancient kingdom to clear things up, after we were told a group over there was moving, they talked to the Nymphe, and they promised to take care of it, and because he was the avatar they told him how to stop it. And we recorded it. He and I. In a fashion way, in a diamond, because that's what we do. I cut the stone. And that, Gucci, is how you learned it.
And what you did with it was this. When the first child came out wrong, wrong colour, head too big, and it was clear in seconds, instead of building new each time, you developed a kill switch. A button. Next to the nuke button. And you gave it to a mouse in a lizard.
When he came to stop that, you killed his dragon. And his name. Heul. That was his word for it, the one word, and I've never heard him use it again.
But you never thought it through. Do they feel something, on the other side? Is it maybe a bad idea? You never once asked. I was standing next to you. I'd have heard.
And here's the thing he'd have said to you if you'd let him finish in the hall, and I'm saying it because I've got the floor and you don't. As avatar his power is bound. Time is off limits. But instead of the idea of bringing back the real one, maybe we don't need a shortcut. The people were so able to have children in the shape they liked, and while they documented it, cycles occurred, in complex constellations, and that's why the origami was invented in the first place, on the Gahni principle, a plan of time, columns, power in check. And the kaleidoscope on top of it: not what we are, but where we want to go.
So instead of taking the start, take the end, and go straight to the start. I know how that sounds. I've heard how it sounds; I've sung it, badly, in a diamond. But in a world that old, and that planned through, it was actually possible. All he needed was an end.
That's the apology. All allegations. And the bet, since I promised: the clerk is telling me the sitting is over. Good. It was stupid. Ask the Century; he's still nodding.
And my sister, from her chair, not looking up from her hands: "You still can't sing."