The Doktor's Spyglass

Chapter 13.2

Seffa didn't appear the following afternoon. It wasn't the first time she'd failed to show up; both of them did occasionally have to behave like normal children. Key had appointments with tutors, uniform fittings, physician's appointments. Invitations to classmates' birthday parties were not generally a problem. And Seffa had...whatever it was Seffa had to do.

It occurred to Key that afternoon both that he knew very little about what her life outside their enclave was like, as well as that the reason for today's particular failure to appear may indeed be related to his apparent failure of social interaction the day before.

He considered this while dissecting a sewer rat, and found that the matter intruded on his mind sufficiently to affect the quality of his observations of the animal's kidneys. He was interested in the way blood was supplied to the vital organs, which necessitated careful and minute dissection, a steady hand and a careful mind. After the second ragged incision, he threw his scalpel down in disgust and scoffed loudly. The noise echoed off the walls of the manmade cavern, bouncing around the pipes that lined the ceiling.

He was on the verge of going home, in a distinctly bad mood, when he heard her quiet footsteps in the great cistern's west entrance.

She walked up to his workbench and, from one of her small, perfect hands, produced the necklace, letting it tumble gently onto the surface in front of him.

"I'm sorry, Key," she said. "I wasn't nice, yesterday. You can study it. Just please be careful with it."

"Of course," he said, for once not as diverted by the stone as by her eyes. Some stunted part of him realized that there were things he should say, now; that in his place, others would know how to draw out whatever emotions warred inside of her. He couldn't begin to imagine how to do that. The idea of eliciting personal feelings from anyone, particularly a girl around his own age, was more daunting to him than the most rigorous examination at school. He'd rather be caught by his father.

"I'm sorry," he said at last. "I'm sorry."

Seffa shook her head a little, and seemed to be about to say more, but instead she retreated to her little chair and started reading one of the books stacked beside it. Key watched her for a moment, filled with an unusual regret, before finally looking down at his prize.

He set it up on the stage of his microscope and rotated the turret to the lowest power objective lens, only to discover a smooth amber field before his eyes. His light source was a hooded lantern, which he could open or close as needed to control the amount of illumination reflected by the circular mirror on the bottom of the microscope. He flooded the crystal light, now, resulting only in a somewhat brighter amber surface. Curious, he switched to the most powerful lens on the turret, and only at a thousand power was he able to discern any structure to the stone at all.

Unlike the crude quartzes he'd dug out of the stone caves lining the Wall, the elekstone's structure was apparently so fine as to be all but invisible even at the limits of his instruments. It was the first time his little laboratory had felt inadequate. At the University they had microscopes powerful enough to see inside living cells, a level of experimental capability Key could only dream about.

He focused again on the amber vision in his eyepiece, wishing he could see closer. But as he moved the lantern light around, changing the angle of the illumination, he could see strange striations in the crystal. Steadying the light at a good angle, he studied the structures, noticing that they branched and flowed not unlike the branches of a tree—or, indeed, the circulatory system of a person or an animal.

As he watched, the light shifted, ever so slightly, and a one of the veins of darker amber within the gem seemed to pulse, almost as if—as if it's moving, Key thought. As if the vein was just that: a conduit for a vital fluid, pumping with the force of the substance moving through it.

"Impossible," breathed Key, and Seffa, unbeknownst to him, looked up.

"What?" she asked.

"It's alive," he said. "It lives."

"My necklace?" she asked.

"The world," said Key. "There is life in its body." 

I'm sorry for the delay in posting this section.  The attacks on Paris came just as I was finishing it, and I confess my attention was shattered.   My thoughts go out to mes freres et soeurs Francais--vive la France.