Quibble, 9. Definition & 10. Glass
Quibble breaks things and learns how One can be hurt Without.
9. Definition
glass. n. 1. An artifact of Within (unknown provenance) which trances Ones and is wielded by Zeros as an instrument of control or kindness. 2. Archaic. A device used by the Ancient. 3. Any of a class of substances derived from fusing silica with boric oxide, aluminum oxide, or phosphorus pentoxide, which are brittle, hard, and transparent or translucent. Chemically classified as a noncrystalline solid formed from the cooling of a parent liquid. 4. Something made of such a substance, e.g. a vessel for holding liquid, a windowpane, a barometer, or a mirror (the latter forbidden by edict). 5. Objects made of glass, collectively. 6. A quantity of liquid contained in a vessel; a glassful. 7. A device, such as a magnifier or a spyglass, containing a lens used to make objects appear closer.
glasses. n. A pair of lenses in a frame worn on the face, used to correct vision.
glass. v. – tr. 1. To encase in glass or put in a glass container. 2. Archaic. To see in a mirror (forbidden). 3. To observe through a spyglass. – intr. To become glassy.
Ety. Modern English, from Middle English glas.
10. Glass @Quibble
I shut the dictionary and put it back on the shelf. Then I lay on the bed a while. Lying there made me want to doze. I got up again. I took the glass, now empty of water, from the table where it resided all morning, when at breakfast Nish pointed out things in the cell and told me names, beginning with gruel, bowl, spoon, water, glass, breakfast.
It helped to give names to things: somehow, it made them more solid, more real. Nish fed me the gruel until I pointed and said, “May I have the spoon?” She handed it to me and looked surprised when I began to feed myself.
I couldn’t shake a feeling I was Within. Nish told me Within was underground, far away. But still I felt closed in, claustrophobic – a rarity in Ones, a defect.
“Maybe it’s the clothes,” Nish said. “Are they confining?”
Getting myself into them had been a struggle, but they didn’t confine once I had them on. “I suppose it’s this – what’s it called? – this cell,” I told her.
Now, I stood with the glass in my hand at the wide window, which let in ample light. There was a lot of light Without, a bright knot of it hovering in the sky. I looked at the things beyond the window. I wanted to be among them. So much to learn, I thought.
With guesswork, I managed to open the window. Then I laid the glass on the windowsill, leaned close to look at it. I turned it upside down and back again. Faintly violet light diffracted around its rim. Did the glass emit the light, as a Zero’s glass does? It hadn’t shone while resting on the table.
I looked up at the bright knot in the sky. Staring at it made my eyes hurt. When I looked away, I found everything around me hazy, as if it had suddenly become night. I lay on the bed again, closed my eyes. The knot’s afterimage stayed a long time, pulsing and morphing on the backs of my eyelids like the ghost of a dream. At last, it faded.
Nish had been gone a long time. She had told me about work; I understood I was only some of her work, not all. I wanted to leave the cell but gathered that without her it was a bad idea. Impatient, I rose and leaned again over the desk.
At the top of the page was a line of badly drawn letters, below it a block of text. I’d written small, as instructed. I was pleased, after a while, to see my writing improve, growing surer and bolder. And then, coming to a thought’s end, I’d known just what to do: start a new paragraph. Funny, I was writing for the first time and I knew the names for everything about it – line, full stop, break, paragraph. Ending the second paragraph, I’d left a little gap and begun to write a poem:
Go now, my Cassandra,
my quibbling sibyl,
say the terrible thing
you have seen — dreams
past the wit of man.
Were anything so simple!
Could foretelling find
a listening heart
among these Trojans,
omens might be believed.
Then none might run
headlong into a sword:
envisioningEnvisioning what? At first I’d felt proud of what I was writing, but as I pressed on with it, disappointment nagged at me. I was satisfied with the mythic allusion, but in some meaningful way the poem didn’t seem real. Rather, it seemed an orphan Without. There were no things in it, only ideas. Without was full of things.
Now I wondered how I could remove the poem from the page. Nish hadn’t told me how to erase text. Was that possible with parchment? Going on instinct, I rubbed the parchment with a finger. The first line’s text blurred a bit but stayed. Not knowing my notion’s provenance, I took the parchment’s edge between the fingers of both hands and began to rip it. Then I stopped, recalling what Nish had said. The parchment was precious. I stood with the page in my hands, contemplating what I’d done.
Laying the page down, I went to the eating table, picked up the bowl, tried to rip it at its rim. At once I fumbled and the bowl fell, cracking apart as it hit the stone floor. I took a quick step back, alarmed more by the sound – like thunder? – than by the sight of the bowl coming to grief. I picked up a piece of bowl and let it fall again. It halved.
Returning to the desk, I picked up the quill, raised it high, dropped it. Nothing but a spattering of ink. What else to test? I took the glass from the sill and stood looking around, passing it from one hand to the other.
How do I take this apart? Do I drop it?
With a last uncertain look at the glass, I flung it against the wall. It shattered. At once I stumbled back, knees collapsing beneath me, and flopped onto the bed. It took a while for me to recover from my shock. Rising, I approached the wall and examined the place where the glass struck it. The wall was perfectly intact: there was not even a trace of the blow on the stone. Then I noticed an unpleasant sensation in my left foot.
Looking down, I saw a remnant of glass, no longer clear but as brightly red as a lit control, protruding from the ball of my foot below the big toe. Taking care to step on no more remnants, I half-staggered, half-hopped to the chair at the desk, sat, and drew the foot atop my thigh. I touched the sliver, winced at the pain.
There was quite a lot of the red stain. I rubbed some between my fingers, feeling its sticky liquidity. With a jolt, I recalled a memory of touch and, with that, another pain than that of control. My first menstruation, at twenty Fears. I’d been terrified even after Quiddity said she expected it and there was no reason to worry – this was normal.
Now the pain in my foot grew, and I cried out. I had known all kinds of pain as a One, but only once had it felt like this. That time, an excruciating, breathless pang in my belly made me scream wildly. Even as I screamed, I emerged from wakeful black into a gentle green light. A bodiless voice – the Zero whose glass mesmerized me – told me to breathe deeply. I obeyed. Then the glass-dream’s light became a blank, soothing indigo, and I felt nothing. Later, after a succession of other colors followed by the pitch dark in which I heard Ones speaking, the pain returned. But it was duller, bearable. The pain of the glass now in my foot was somehow worse than that whole ordeal, though.
I’d never seen the cause of any pain, except the pain of a lit control. But control is transient. Here, I realized, pain meant damage inflicted on the body – the damage I did to the parchment, the bowl, the glass. Would this damage be permanent? Had I, in one incautious moment, deprived myself of the ability to walk?
Looking away, I held my foot by the ankle and cried, giving myself up to fear.
A sound came from the door, and then someone opened it and walked in. He looked at the floor first, then at me. His eyes were brown, keen. Realizing his rudeness in staring, he returned his gaze to the floor. “You’ve made quite the mess,” he said.
“I meant no harm,” I replied, sniffling. “I was learning about something.”
He clucked. “Oh, I can see that!” He hurried off, then came back a moment later with things in his hands. Moving quickly but methodically, he used one thing to brush bits of bowl and glass into the other thing.
Work, I thought.
“Name’s Quotation, but call me Quote,” he said as he worked.
“I’m Quibble.”
He glanced at me with a winning smile and laughed. “Two cues!” Q, he meant.
“I can do that,” I offered. “I made the mess.”
“No, sit tight. It won’t do for you to irritate that cut.” He stole another glance out the corner of his eye – skancing, Nish called this – at my foot. “Gash. It’ll want stitches.”
“Stitches?”
“Oh, they’re the worst!”
His work done, Quote laid the things aside. He held out an arm, pulled back his tunic sleeve to bare it, and pointed. A tangled mess of jagged white lines shone from the skin on his forearm’s underside, beginning halfway from elbow to wrist and ending just at the flesh of his palm.
“Chap’s got a fierce hold,” Quote said, “and he’s such a dunderhead! He gouged me. I should’ve known not to handle him without the falconer’s glove. Nish sewed it up with thread – stitches. It hurt like hell.”
As if summoned by Quote’s words, Nish appeared in the doorway. She stared at him, then me, and a look – horror? – passed over her face. She hurried to me and knelt, grasping my foot. I shrieked and tried to jerk it away, but she held it fast.
“None of that, Quibble.” Seeing the heap of broken bowl and glass lying nearby, she skanced Quote. “You cleaned up but didn’t fetch me or tell anyone she was hurt?”
“Where were you?” he said as hotly. “Tending newly Dazed isn’t my job.”
“Get out,” Nish ordered.
Quote gathered up his things and left, mumbling as he went.
“Adroit, too!” Nish exclaimed once he was gone. “He’s been Without as long as I have, but I swear he’s learned nothing.”
“He is the Quotation I knew,” I said. “I don’t think he remembers me.”
“He wouldn’t.”
She frowned, grew quiet. I wanted to ask what she meant, but something about her silence forbade it. She didn’t enjoy speaking ill of Quote, I guessed. She had done so only out of thoughtlessness in her alarm at my injury.
I gritted my teeth as Nish dabbed at the edges of the gash with her tunic sleeve.
“Listen, Quibble, I have to take the glass out of your foot,” she said. “Then I have to clean and sew and bandage it.”
“No! Please don’t.”
“I must. The cut’s too big to heal itself. I can’t have you bleeding out.”
“Bleeding?”
She nodded at the red-stained hand in my lap. “That stuff. Blood.”
“It’s not so bad.”
“It belongs inside you, not out.”
“I’ve bled before, Nish.”
“Not that kind of bleeding,” she said, skancing me. “That’s different. Ordinary. This is dangerous. Bleed enough and you’ll die.”
“Die? We still die? Even Without?”
“Especially Without,” she muttered as she stood, and I sensed I’d struck a nerve. Was this somehow a taboo subject? She didn’t say so, as I thought she would, forthright as she was. Maybe she just disliked talking of it, as she disliked speaking ill of someone. “I’ll be back in a jiff,” she said, turning away.
As she reached the door, I called out her name. She turned to look at me, met my eyes briefly. I had a strange sensation I’d named a thing Without and it had responded. Yet she’s not a thing, I thought. She’s a person. She is being One with me now.
“Yes?” she said.
“I want to go outside.”
“All right.”