Freedom to and Freedom from
Note: I’ve decided against doing multi-chapter stories for this narrative, except for A String of Pearls, which will be added to from time to time. Each section of the story has a different theme so I’d rather not lump them all under one description. Also you may have already noticed that I’m a pretentious git, hence all of this silliness.
Title is taken from The Handmaid’s Tale.
.....
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
-T.S. Eliot
The inner turmoil of the Diamond Authority was proving very useful for Rose’s underground leanings. Yellow Diamond regarded the other two as enemies, it was clear to see even as she complimeted their doings and concurred with their meeting points, her ‘gracious’ smile was little more than an upturned grimace and her eyes held poisonous anger.
Blue was becoming increasingly flustered by the hostility and her edicts were sloppy and ill-formed. White, who despised Blue at the best of times, was united with her in their mutual dislike of Yellow, but this alliance frustrated her. Stern and composed she remained, as she always was, but there was a rage bubbling close to her icy surface.
They largely ignored Rose, except to ask for her opinion or to flatter her in some way. She found it incredible that they had cast out the memory of her efficiency in office and on the battlefield and were fully invested in the image she had crafted for the common gems, the gentle romantic dilletant. Nontheless, they were eager to get her onside.
“In a perfect world, maybe we’d be able to take our time, but time is a luxury right now. Blue just doesn’t grasp that,” Yellow told her reasonably when they were in the luger together.
“Yes,” Rose hummed non-commitally.
“These aren’t descisions to be taken lightly. Yellow’s...enthusiasm has served us well in the past, but now is the time for caution,” Blue admonished when they stepped out for air.
“I suppose,” Rose mumbled, looking at nothing in particular.
“It’s all a bit redundant, frankly. You’d swear they were just out of the ground,” White grumbled as they walked to the meeting chambers.
“Hm,” Rose muttered, feigning interest in the folds of her own dress.
“Thank goodness we don’t have to worry about you, Pink,” White laughed sardonically. “No strong feelings one way or the other.”
Rose rolled her eyes at the petty little jab.
How did this happen? We worked together for so long. Why can’t we do that now?
Later, as the meeting devolved into yet another squabble over semantics between Blue and Yellow, Rose let her mind drift back to Sodalite’s words.
She made her choice. It’s your responsibility to see that its fulfilled.
Even so, the thought of the upcoming procedure was making her stomach churn. It didn’t help that her pearl had been as blank as any other pearl after making her decision known. How much would this change her?
It’s not for you to question her choice. Unless you really do think this is the way things should be.
No. No, it wasn’t right at all.
But she had grown very attached to her little pearl. She was the one constant in her tumultuous life, the one gem who was always pleasant with no hidden agenda, a steady, calming influence. The procedure would take that from her.
It’s not about you.
.....
They journeyed to one of the more well-heeled districts by luger and slipped from there down a series of side streets until they reached Sodalite’s base. By practice, Rose knew it was the safest route. Sapphire met them at the door and led them to a room Rose hadn’t been in before; the room where Sodalite performed the surgeries.
It was shockingly crude. Rose had only been in maintainence centres a handful of times and just about recalled the gleaming marble counterspaces, the constantly running mineral pipes and the sterile, white-clad technicians. By contrast, Sodalite’s workspace was rusted and stained by leaking pipes. There was a single marble table in the room, and a trundle-sink of instruments soaking in lye beside it. Only two of the six lights worked.
Sodalite was there, already wearing a lead apron, and she met Rose’s horrified expression with a cutting glare.
“This is an abandoned sulfur processing plant,” she said coolly. “What did you expect?”
“More than this,” Rose said through gritted teeth, resisting the urge to just pick up her pearl and leave. The pearl, for her part, did not even blink.
“We make do. You may not have noticed, but we don’t exactly have money to throw away. I’ve done many succesful surgeries here, and my equipment works perfectly. But by all means, ask your pearl if she wants to turn back now.”
“I will,” Rose told her, and turned to the pearl. “Are you sure you want to go through with this?”
Say you want to go home. We’ll go home, and we’ll carry on as we have been. There’s nothing wrong with that. We’ll be fine.
But there was an internal struggle written on the pearl’s face between the natural urge to do what Rose wanted and the desire she had strengthened by saying it aloud. Rose saw it manifest as an uncontrollable twitching, as she winced and shakily brought her hand to her gem.
“Rose, you’re driving her into full glitch,” Sodalite admonished. “She wants to do this, and you know it.”
Rose sighed. She did know it.
“Go for it,” she said finally. “I’ll be here when it’s finished.”
“Sapphire will take you into the next room to wait, it’s warmer in there,” Sodalite said, manifesting a mask over her mouth and picking up an object that looked suspiciously like a spear.
“No,” Rose told her sternly. “I want to watch you do this.”
“Fine,” Sodalite shrugged.
Sapphire brought a small rickety chair in for Rose to sit on as Sodalite lifted the pearl and laid her, face down, on the table.
“You’ll feel a little pinch and then you’ll retreat into your gem,” Sodalite told the pearl. “When you regenerate, it’ll all be over. Are you ready?”
“Yes,” the pearl said serenely.
Sodalite pressed the spear to the base of the pearl’s spine and she vanished in a puff of smoke.
.....
The procedure took a long time, and to distract herself from watching Sodalite scrape at the hole she had bored into her pearl’s gem with long needle-like scalpels, she recalled why Sodalite was doing what she did. Sodalite had been eager for Rose to trust her, and willing to bare her soul to do it. So when Rose asked her what had brought her to where she was, Sodalite answered honestly.
“I’ve done surgery on forty-two different pearls,” she began. “But before that, I was probably responsible for killing about five hundred of them, give or take.”
She laughed at the way Rose stared.
“Of course, we never used the word ‘kill.’ That would imply they count as real gems. No, we ‘processed’ them. If they were broken, or stolen, or if their owner wanted a new model, they were sent to us to be processed.”
Sodalite took a sip of compound mix and sighed before continuing.
“We have a machine that does the processing for us. It’s pretty simple, it’s just two fortified steel plates attached to a motor. Anything that gets in between the plates gets crushed into dust. We crushed pearls with their masses intact, or as intact as we got them, because then the nacre and carbonite compounds could be recycled and used to fill in the gaps for new pearls. It was an easy job, all you had to do was put the pearl in and flip the switch, then boom. No more pearl, lots of dust to sweep into a mineral pack and send off to the factories. An idiot could have done that job.”
She waited for Rose to say something. Rose met her gaze and said nothing.
“No pearl ever begged me not to flip that switch,” Sodalite continued. “Even the ones that were perfect. Nearly new. They all hopped under those plates and waited to get crushed. And I thought that was normal for them, you know? For whatever reason, they weren’t useful anymore and needed to be disposed of. Why would they protest that?”
She took a sudden, savage gulp of her compound mix. Her face tensed with concealed anger.
“So one day, this pearl gets sent to my machine, and she’s pretty much a paragon of a pearl. Utterly perfect. Her owner must have taken really good care of her. I remember thinking it was a hell of a waste when I put her under the plates. I mean, she was really something. Half of the pearls we saw were scuffed or broken. She had this long glossy yellow hair, big blue eyes, not a scratch on her. And her owner clearly cared about her, she was wearing this floaty white....thing, it was sparkly. Turns out the owner was a highly respected military gem who died in battle, and her pearl had to be purged because she might have had military documents hidden in her system. Tough break.”
You love her, Rose thought, struck with quiet awe. You fell in love with a pearl.
It wasn’t unheard of for gems to develop attachments to a pearl, but it was the punchline of a cruel joke. Socially inept gems had to buy affection from the one ‘gem’ that would have them.
“This was when Almandine was going through her huge sleeve phase, and everyone had huge sleeves on their outfits. Including us process workers. And we’d been warned about it, but we kept on doing it,” Sodalite continued, raking a hand through her black bobbed hair, disrupting the symmetry. Rose couldn’t imagine this composed gem as a fashion follower.
“So of course my sleeve got caught in one of the gears, and I got pulled into the machine.”
Rose gasped, and Sodalite grinned without humour.
“As you can see, I survived. But there I was, thrown in beside the pearl, screaming for help and knowing that nobody could hear me over the noise of the machine. Doomed. But that’s when the pearl sat up and pushed against the plates. They actually stopped moving. Then she grabbed my sleeve, ripped it out of the gear and threw me out of the machine. She stayed there like that until someone came to help me.”
A rush of warmth filled Rose, a welcome happiness.
“I couldn’t really explain it, nobody believed me when I said the pearl saved me. They shouldn’t have that kind of strength, and even if they did she wasn’t ordered to help me. She did it of her own accord. I can only imagine that she figured out where the balance of the plates was optimized and disrupted it, and if she was able to do that it means that pearls are far more intelligent than we know.”
“As for why she saved me...” she sighed, deeply. “I got the chance to ask her. She told me it was because she felt I wasn’t ready to die. She felt that. And it prompted her to act on her own.”
“Where is she now?” Rose asked as Sodalite looked like she was drifting into deep reminiscence.
“Where is she?”
Sodalite smiled, an awful sharp-toothed rictus grin.
“I still had my job to do when I came back. I crushed her. And she didn’t even try to stop me.”
.....
Could Sodalite be trusted? Even now, her motives weren’t quite readable. They were coming to the end of the surgery now, and she had found the spike. She was teasing it out of the gem gradually, continually shaving away little sections of the surrounding nacre.
“Oh, for....damn!”
Suddenly, she growled low and threw the tongs down on the operating table. The spike jittered there, free of its moorings.
“What?” Rose demanded. “What happened?”
Sodalite peered into the tiny hole she had made in the pearl’s gem, frowning.
“I think a piece broke off,” she muttered. And it’s slipped to the base. I won’t be able to get it.”
“What does that mean?” Rose asked, a chill trickling down her being.
“Probably nothing. It won’t be able to work properly if it’s not complete, as far as I know. But we won’t know anything until she reforms,” Sodalite said, waving away her mask. “It might mean she gets an unexpected shock every now and then. Not as many as usual. But I have nothing to compare it to, so I have no idea how it’ll affect her cognative abilities.”
This was a mistake. I knew it would be. I’m such a fool.
“But even one small shock every now and then is better than constant mass-wide shocks,” Sodalite continued, and ruefully Rose had to admit she was right.
.....
The pearl regenerated in the next room, where Sodalite and Sapphire had been trying to engage a sullen Rose in small talk while they waited. She sat crouched on the end of the table where they had placed her, utterly still but for her eyes, freakishly wide, darting around the room.
“Well, no tears,” Sodalite said. “And no screaming. That’s already an improvement.”
Sapphire hummed her agreement.
The pearl flickered with movement as Rose watched intently, looking for differences. She raised her hand in front of her face and stared, gently moving her fingers. Her mouth moved though no words issued forth. Sodalite stood, and this action tore a little shriek from the pearl as she scrambled away and fell off of the table.
“Whoa now,” Sodalite said, raising her hands in a placating manner. “I just want to look at you, that’s all.”
“I’ll do it,” Rose informed her, and gracefully she rose to stand and then sank with one fluid motion to kneel on the floor beside her pearl, who was trembling and digging her fingers into the ground.
“How do you feel?” she asked in her gentlest possible tone.
Hearing Rose speak, suddenly much of the tension that was holding the pearl together drained away. She sank slightly and rubbed curiously, almost wearily at her gem.
“Different,” she mumbled.
Sodalite’s barking laugh made her jump and pull back into a stress position, arms clasped over her head.
“Different, she says,” Sodalite laughed. “She can talk normally. This is great!”
“I’ll take her home,” Rose said quietly, offering her hand for the pearl to take. She took it without even looking up.
“I had hoped you’d leave her here. We need to make notes,” Sodalite said, draping herself across the couch.
“I’ve been away for almost two cycles, gems will be suspicious,” Rose told her. “And I think it would be best for her to find her bearings at home, where it’s familiar. I’ll make the notes on what’s normal or new.”
“Spoken like a true politician,” Sodalite said neutrally, though there was a hint of irritation concealed in her tone.
.....
There was no luger to be hired so they took a tracer home. In first class, the gems bowed low to the venerated Pink Diamond and offered her the best seat and she graciously took it, seating her pearl to the left.
The pearl had been asked to try and hold herself together like a normal pearl until they got home, and she agreed to this. Any odd behaviour could be explained away with a nod to the small but visible hole in her gem.
But slipping back into the mask of a regular, standard edition pearl seemed to come more naturally to her than her newly discovered instinctual behaviour, and she sat perfectly still staring at nothing. Rose watched her carefully for anything new, and saw nothing besides an odd glimmer in her eyes.
At one stop, a Topaz entered their carriage and sat on Rose’s far side, while her pearl sat beside Rose’s pearl. Absently she admired this new pearl (yellow-skinned and pink braided, a stiff cottony dress with a pleated skirt, a bit cutesy for her liking but nice to look at all the same) and wondered what series it came from.
But her sharp eyes suddenly caught a movement from her own pearl. Under her own billowing white skirt (to match Rose’s own) her pearl manouvered her hand to gently brush the hand of the other pearl. The contact was miniscule, almost invisible to the bare eye, but it was there.
The other pearl’s mouth fell open and it gasped softly, imperceptively. They did not look at each other, and their faces did not display anything other than bland nothingness, but their eyes...
Rose’s pearl’s were steely determination. The other’s were shock and awe.
Rose watched the exchange as other gems around her chattered and gossiped, and their pearls maintained a stoic silence. She felt a creeping almost-dread that something had been put in motion that could not be undone.
The Topaz left, and on her way out Rose watched the braided pearl brush against three others. Their eyes swivelled to meet her pearl’s, and something seemed to be confirmed between them. One even smiled, a tiny lift of the corner of its mouth, unseen unless you were looking hard.
With a hard swallow, Rose pulled her pearl to her feet and off of the train, to lock her away safely in their home.