Page 114 of The Shape of Monsters
Finally he meets another one in a city halfway around the world, in a city built on top of another city built on top of another city. This one is human still, and has no intention of being otherwise. He is old, maybe too old to truly be considered entirely human, but he’s never changed his inner design except to maintain health. He has an unbelievable number of great-grandchildren and just enough wealth by the standards of the city on a city on a city to be able to care for them all a little bit. While Never knows him, he spends his time listening to the buzzing of a beehive and tells Never that if he ever understands bees, he’ll probably die.
Never doesn’t understand, but at the same timeunderstands. This human man says the insides of everything are the same, that he can manipulate the fundamentals because the fundamentals aren’t that complicated, merely very flexible. And just like all the beings and nonbeings in the world (and probably beyond) share universal fundamental parts, there is a universal language for communicating beingness itself. The language is pristine, simultaneously both simple and complex, and the human considers all conscious beings and maybe less self-aware consciousnesses, even, to be born with basic knowledge of it!
(It’s math.)
What this human wants to understand about bees is their instincts. How bees communicate knowledge from queen and worker to larva. Their behaviors are so complex they surely cannot be communicated in the observable-by-people types of communication they share: dancing and smell. So where is the information processed? The old man can change it, can change what bees are by changing their invisible information, but he can’t read it. He can’t parse it.
Never thinks Shade would be delighted to try to become a bee for a few generations, and practice dancing like this. “And,” the old man says, “andis an individual bee the sum of its behavior, of its self, or must you look at the entire hive to understand what beesare?”
To be honest, philosophy is not Never’s interest, either. But he stays for many long years because if this human can change one thing into another, then can’t he become a god, too, like the mother? Can’t he find her? Know her? Explain why she did what she did?
“It’s because I understand the fifth force,” the old man tells Never, “that I don’t use it very often.”
A hundred years later Never meets several numena all in the same place! It’s a chain of islands in the warm oceans far, far south of the crater of its birth. They know what these humans with the power of the fifth force are: sunderers.
It’s rare, but some humans are born with an instinct for the slippery fifth force, the force of creation that creates all other forces. It’s natural, they say, but not for humans with their limited instincts to tap into.
“Why can’t we?” Never asks.
Family says, “We aren’t made of the same stuff.”
“I thought everything was made of everything.”
“We aren’t organized in the same way, Family means,” says Courage.
“Why would we want to be,” sneers Obedience.
Never agrees. “Do you remember, or did you ever know, a sunderer who fell from the sky and made a crater in the desert on the continent north of here?”
“Silence!” cries Beauty. “You mean Silence?”
Strength says, “That was a sunderer, not one of us?”
Never frowns. “She was human, until she was not. She changed herself like a sunderer changes material, and it was her fifth force that birthed me and my brother.”
The numena of the Ceres islands hum in thought. But they don’t have answers, either.
Because it is near, and because it has been centuries, Never chooses to return home to the crater, to Shade. Though Never is disinclined to let Shade hear it call the craterhome.
It arrives to find a thriving city, an expansive empire, dedicated to the same sunderer Never has sought for so many hundreds of years. They’ve given Silence a human name, and Never can’t make itself care much if it’s the name of a god that existed before or was her own human name before she was a shimmer of light.
The energy of the crater is balanced and familiar. At first Never wanders the precincts touching elaborate architectural designs, impressed and intrigued. It can’t shake the strange feeling that everything is too familiar, and it listens for word of a loudmouth wild god, but only hears of a king, a brutal people with red-brown skin like the rock of the crater (like the bark of an ancient old tree), Aharté of Silence, and the Moon-Eater.
Oh, Never is very, very upset.
The energy permeating the city is familiar because it all feels like Shade. The thinnest, most underlying sense of his roots, rooting this entire fucking empire in place!
It slips into the palace and finds the core of its other self, the spark that bursts every day, once a day, very much like a tiny explosion of the fifth force. But it is no sunderer sparking the seed of Shade’s existence. It is just a human, a human using her internal design to keep alive a cycle, a rhythm, a spell. They call it communing with a god, but it is design. Practically sundering.
Well, Never doesn’t make the best choices when it’s emotionally compromised, just like anyone else. It tries to tear apart Shade’s prison, even if that means tearing apart the woman waking her internal design to ecstasy in order to draw Shade close to consciousness every day.
Every day! Trapped in this half-waking nightmare!
Never is caught because Never allows itself to be caught. It needs time to understand this cage and how to free Shade.
Being very old doesn’t always make a being very patient, but in Never’s case, it was born that way. It waits, it studies, and to be honest it grows less and less enamored with humans—and it barely liked them to begin with.
It’s easy to let them think they contain it, that they can cut off its head or strangle it or make it bleed, or that a null collar makes a difference to it. For several decades Never amuses itself pretending the humans are cute, watching them as if they’re its pets, like an ant farm, or maybe a beehive just like the old man in the city on a city on a city studied.
