YUMI MADE PAINTER wait a week—eleven whole days—before she let him move to the next step of his training.
Eleven. Days.
He spent each and every one just sitting there. Picking up rocks and trying to judge their weight, their balance. Studying them, trying to “understand” them. Ad nauseam.
This was a new kind of boredom for Painter. It wasn’t the indecisive boredom of someone with a hundred things to do, none of them particularly appetizing. It was old-school, despotic boredom—the kind forced upon you by a society lacking choices. A place where “free time” was a sin and “leisure” was a word used only in conjunction with the rich.
That sun made it so much worse. The heat from both above and below, Painter pressed between the two, the pancake between hot plates. There was a certain enervating effulgence to the sunlight, sapping away strength, leaving him lethargic. Perhaps, Painter thought, that was what the sun subsisted on—burning as fuel the willpower of those who lived beneath it.
“You must understand the stone,” Yumi said, walking around him in a circle. Each time she passed in front of the sun, her form briefly diffused its light like a pane of stained glass.
Understand. One week later, and he still didn’t grasp what she meant by this term. In fact, today—despite having promised that he could finally move to the next step—she made him do some weighing to “warm up.”
Who would need any further warming up in this place?
“Close your eyes,” she said, striding around him, wearing a bright green-and-blue dress, bell-shaped, with an enormous bow across the front that trailed its ends almost to her knees. It was shorter on him of course, but didn’t look bad really. He’d worn skirts as part of formal wear during celebration days, and while these colors were a little bright to be masculine among his kind, the people of Torio didn’t care.
Here men commonly wore pinks and yellows.
So he didn’t find the clothing humiliating. At least it was reasonably comfortable. And today for once, the heat didn’t seem… overwhelming. Was he changing, or was the weather just better today? Odd. And yes, the ground was hot, but at least those thermals constantly blowing upward were pleasant. They fanned out the bell and gave some semblance of a breeze. (I haven’t figured out how the thermals worked. My current theory is microfractures in the stones, with air being forced up through them and out. The plants also had something odd about them, to float as they did.) While Painter didn’t mind the clothing, Yumi’s instruction was humiliating. One week, and still she didn’t trust him to do anything without direct, condescending instruction.
“Close your eyes,” she said, leaning forward to glare at him. “Now.”
He sighed and complied.
“Now, pick up a stone.”
He selected one. Most were new today, having been replaced overnight by the townspeople. His thick gloves protected his hands from the stone’s heat.
“Feel it,” she said. “Weigh it. Find the center of balance.”
“You don’t need to explain each step. I—”
“Hush,” she said. “You are the student. You listen, I speak. That is the way.”
Well, at least he knew why the spirits had made them unable to touch one another. Because he absolutely would have strangled her at some point during this.
“Do you understand the stone?” Yumi asked. “You may speak to answer me.”
“Center of balance,” he said, weighing the stone on his gloved hand. “Right here, when holding it on this side. Here when holding it the other direction. Three nooks—here, here, and here—where I can catch it on another stone for stability.”
“Good,” Yumi said.
“Shadows cling to this dimple here,” he said, his voice softer, “and the grain goes this direction here—rougher near the top, creating tiny jagged shadows. It’s not quite oblong, but shadows pull in at the sides, like a waist—and that’s also where the single vein of quartz runs.”
Yumi was silent for a moment. “How did you know that?” she asked. “I told you to close your eyes.”
“I looked it over earlier, knowing you’d make me pick up a stone near me,” he said. “You want me to understand the rock? That’s how I do it.”
“All of that is immaterial to stacking.”
“It works for me.” He cracked an eye to look at her.
“I should make you do another week of this,” she said, folding her arms. “I had to do it for months.”
“Go ahead,” he said with a yawn. “Torment me out of spite. Waste our time when the spirits are waiting, perhaps in pain, for you to finish training me.”
“Couldn’t the spirits,” she said (lowly), “possibly have sent me a man who wasn’t so smug? There was no one else available?”
“Maybe,” he replied (highly), “you’re just such a wonderful teacher that they wanted to give you a challenge.”
She glanced away, as if that barb had for some reason actually stung. He hesitated, frowning. “Yumi?”
She held herself a little tighter, still looking away. “The next phase of your training,” she said, “is low stacks, focused on stability. The
base of your stack needs to be the sturdiest part. Take fewer chances with the base; use it to give yourself as solid a foundation as possible, allowing for more daring choices later. Here, let’s begin.”
She knelt and grabbed the soul of one of the stones, then demonstrated stacking it on another, with their flat portions touching.
Painter smiled, thrilled at being able to start at last.
Excitement for stacking rocks. Who would have thought? He squatted down carefully—even with kneepads on, he’d burned himself multiple times—and picked up a stone. He tried making a stack. The stones were unstable, so he tried again, this time aligning the centers of gravity.
He eventually got it. At her prompting, he added another stone.
And it stayed on.
“Oh no,” he said under his breath.
“What?” she asked.
“This is definitely easier now,” he said, grabbing another rock and balancing it too. Then another. “A week ago, I could barely get three rocks on top of one another.” He removed his hand, letting the fifth stone balance. It was precarious, but didn’t topple. He looked toward Yumi and heaved out a long, annoyed sigh. “I can’t believe that your training actually worked.”
“It did,” she said, her eyes widening. “It did.” She smiled, eager. It was an intoxicating smile, for how genuine it was. Smiles, like radiation, are made more potent by proximity.
He added a sixth rock, and the whole thing collapsed. But she eagerly pointed for him to try another stack, so he did, and managed to get five again.
“It worked,” she said, her voice soft. “I…actually…I actually trained you.”
“I could have used a less tyrannical approach. But I guess I have to admit that you kind of know what you’re talking about.”
Staring at his stack, she looked like she might burst into tears. He managed to get a sixth, very small rock balanced on top before the whole thing fell down again.
“Six,” he said, folding his arms. “Not bad, eh? So when do the spirits show up?”
“You’ll need thirty stones or more per stack to draw them consistently,” she said. “And one stack by itself is never enough. To be certain, you’ll need twenty or so different stacks, in a pattern, arranged artistically.”
“Twenty or more stacks,” he said flatly, “of thirty or more stones.”
“You can go less high with challenging stacks that look interesting,” she said. “It’s a relatively easy task to get forty stones straight up— but that should be done sparingly, as it’s the interesting balances and odd-shaped stones that truly please the spirits.”
He gazed at his little stack of fallen stones. He…didn’t feel so excited anymore.
“Don’t get discouraged,” Yumi said softly. “That’s what you need to consistently draw them. My first spirit came to me after only two weeks of training—but the next took another four months. It was years before I could do it every time, but we don’t need you to hit that level of skill. I keep feeling that even a single spirit could give us guidance.”
He heaved out a sigh, then nodded and gave her a smile.
Unfortunately, she fell back into strict proctor mode, launching him into his next phase of training: forming solid bases for stacks. It wasn’t quite as mind-numbing as the previous week’s work. Neither was it exhilarating. It reminded him of his anatomy classes, where he’d drawn the same muscles over and over again.
Yet a little success brews eagerness, and the hours passed quickly.
Particularly because Yumi seemed to catch the taste of success herself, and was somewhat less demanding. Instead of looming over him and snapping out instructions, she spent more time showing him examples. Sadly, she couldn’t manage to build anything higher than a
handful of stones before what she’d stacked started disintegrating to smoke. Her incorporeal creations had a lifespan of a couple minutes.
They stopped periodically for drinks of water, and remarkably Painter found as the day wore on that he was almost enjoying himself. He still didn’t understand what was artistic about piling up rocks, and the spirits were an erratic bunch if they responded to it.
But…it was moderately fun.
Besides, Yumi’s enthusiasm was infectious. Halfway through the day he paused to watch her make a little stack of ten stones, her lips pursed, her eyes focused, but her posture relaxed—as opposed to rigid with worry in anticipation of a collapse like he was as he stacked. She moved with a flowing suppleness—scooping the stones up instead of seizing them. Encountering them instead of seeking them.
She placed many of her stones on their short edges and let pieces hang out to the sides to stack other stones on, forming little towers.
Instead of making the obvious choice with each stone, she somehow accounted for its individual irregularities and fit them all together into an unexpected puzzle. Each new stone was like a key change in a symphony: Abrupt, yet immediately right. So delightful you were left surprised you had enjoyed the song before that.
She was right, he thought (highly). It is an art. In her hands, at least.
She was part of the art—her motions a performance to be relished, then remembered. It was…beautiful. If he’d been a spirit, he would absolutely have been drawn to this.
Unfortunately, her bottom rock vanished at that moment, and the entire stack collapsed into swirling black smoke. She sat back on her heels and released a long, trailing sigh—exhaled like a eulogy. You know the sort. They’re fashioned from the corpses of dreams.
Painter stared at Yumi, pained for her. That emotion, the one he saw in her face—he knew that emotion. He’d never thought he would meet another who understood it the same way he did.
Her passion, he realized, is the same passion I used to feel.
Realizing that recontextualized everything, and he started to wonder if there were other things she knew that he once had. That worry she
displayed…was that the same worry he had always felt about getting things wrong—about not being the person everyone thought he was?
Loneliness, even in a group. Shame and its stalwart companion: those whispers that say you aren’t worthy of attention or love.
He understood. Without needing to touch her, he understood.
She glanced at him and he fumbled, collapsing the stones he’d been stacking.
“Put the heaviest on the bottom,” she suggested. “That’s not always the biggest, depending.”
He nodded, hoping she hadn’t seen him staring. As he tried again, he wondered how the last week had been for her. Forced to give him instructions rather than doing what she loved—she could have been constructing stone towers all the while. It felt more tragic if both of them had been having such a bad time.
He tried to see the stones as she did for his next few constructions, but that was less effective and he felt himself backsliding. He didn’t have her effortless ability to evaluate, to see the placement for a rock, to visualize a larger whole. So he returned to piling flat ones.
She shook her head. “You’ll need to learn to judge a center of balance for the entire tower, not just individual stones. You keep perpetuating imbalances instead of correcting for them with new stones.”
“I…” He hesitated as he saw townspeople gathering outside. He looked to Yumi, who frowned. Liyun was supposed to keep the people away so he could practice in peace. What was… They weren’t gathering for him. Something was happening. He could sense noise. A disturbance.
“It probably doesn’t involve us,” Yumi said. She said it in a half- hearted way though.
Painter heaved himself to his feet, stiff from having worked so long in basically the same posture. He crossed the place of ritual to the fence, outside of which Chaeyung and Hwanji were also distracted by the crowding people. It seemed that a wagon had arrived? Yes, another floating wagon, larger than Yumi’s, pulled by the flying devices made from spirits.
Painter absently pushed out of the place of ritual, noticing that Liyun had vanished somewhere. His two attendants yelped and
hurried to catch up, trying to obscure him with their fans as he walked toward the crowd. Although he was clothed, he wasn’t technically on display now, and their duty was to hide him.
“We should stay at the place of ritual,” Yumi said, yanked after him.
“Painter. We aren’t to leave!”
But he’d seen crowds like this before. At the scene of a disturbance. A nightmare appearance. He pushed the fans away, and when they returned he pushed them more forcefully—and the attendants fell back. The crowd made way for him, speaking in hushed tones as he approached the source of their consternation.
It wasn’t a scene of violence or fear, thankfully. The wagon had deposited a group of men with long mustaches, beards on their chins, and white clothing. Their most striking feature was their strange hats.
Black, with tall backs and shorter fronts, like…well, kind of like little chairs. Only there were wings at the sides too.
“Scholars,” Yumi said, stepping up beside him. She put a hand to her lips. “From Torio City. The university. I’ve…always wanted to see them.”
“…heard of the unfortunate nature of your plight,” the lead scholar was saying, “even all the way in Torio City. So we have come to bless you.”
He addressed the town’s pudgy mayor, though the words were obviously for the entire crowd. The mayor, in turn, bowed to the scholars, then bowed again as if worried the first one might not stick.
“Honored scholars,” he said in the highest and most flowery of forms, “you are welcome to our humble town.”
Painter frowned. Those were the kind of linguistic forms they used in the historical dramas to address a king. It left little ambiguity about how scholars were regarded.
Behind the four scholars, a group of younger men in smaller hats— simple black caps—opened the doors on the rear of the wagon, then heaved something out. Roughly the size of a clothing dresser, it was a metal construction with a great number of long rods. Spiderlike, if said spider had grown a few dozen extra legs.
“This town,” the tallest of the scholars said, “has suffered an embarrassing flaw in our system. The most (highly) appreciated yoki- hijo”—he bowed to Painter—“is of course a revered member of our
tradition. However, human beings are limited in their capacity, and it is highly inefficient that we must depend on them for the needs of our society. At the Institute of Mechanical Solutions, with the blessing of Her Majesty, we have developed something to aid in this situation.”
He gestured with one hand to the machine, and everything clicked for Painter. Even before the assistant scholars poured rocks on the ground around it, he knew.
“What are they talking about?” Yumi asked.
She’d see soon enough. The tallest scholar held his pose for an uncomfortably long time as his assistants fiddled with the contraption.
Finally he glanced toward the group, and one of them rushed up to speak in his ear.
Harsh whispers followed, along with animated gestures. Then the head scholar turned back to the crowd. “The demonstration,” he said, “will naturally come after we’ve had proper time to set up and relax from our arduous journey.”
“But demonstration of what, honored scholars?” the mayor said, bowing again.
The lead scholar smiled. “Our machine,” he said, “for stacking stones.”
