The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain

She remembered the prophet saying how the Practice outlasted failure, how it failed and failed and continued to exist. “Here it is,” the old man had said. “Right here. In this room.” He cupped his hands, in which a flake of light from the bulb above him nestled as if alive.

Everything is good for them, the woman thought suddenly. The thought startled her. Its violence. Gil’s bracelet clicked against his keyboard. The woman remembered a line from the jaded elder’s draft of the project, now deleted: Can the University be a place of both training and transformation?

The web extended throughout the Fleet, through stone and slag, through dirt and leaf and fur and milk and water, electric, coiling, hard as diamond, pliable as flesh, impressible and fluid, gathering in waves. He did not know what would happen if he dared to pull this chain. Would the force of it shock the phones to death?

The problem was that the unspoken orders were not always the same. Every room, every gathering, every scene came with its own specific demands, and even when he had learned the basic orders of a place there might be changes that stemmed from causes imperceptible to him.

Bleak and dogged he made his way, always feeling that he was somehow walking sideways, or as if everything around him hung at an angle. The light upstairs was hot, immense, and ruthless. He noticed the pattern of his eyelashes. People asked him questions and took his photograph.

The Practice, he remembered, was the longing for understanding. It was a desire that began with an intake of breath. He breathed in knowledge with the humid air.

The problem was that in order to make her work legible to the personnel committee (legibility being an area where she must improve, she had been told), it was necessary to set up her argument with theories familiar to the discipline, to couch her work in terms her audience knew.

“It’s how we live—by collecting the castoff of the universe. We miners, we’re scavengers. Why not learn survival strategies from those who have survived?” Gil took a sip of wine. He said it was really great, really stimulating, what she was saying, they just had to word it right, to be careful how they expressed it, to emphasize the difference of t

He would start with the living. He would begin with the child. And as if in response to his resolution, the great web tensed and quivered and he knew. He knew exactly where she was.