Golden Impermanence

Atomic symbol: Au. From the Latin Aurum.

Atomic number 79, atomic mass 196.966569 daltons, transition metal, solid under standard laboratory conditions. Pure gold: bright, slightly reddish yellow, malleable, ductile. 79 protons.

Gold is useful in medicine, electronics, aerospace. Conductive, alloys easily, can be melted and cast. Can be drawn into wire, hammered thin, molded into highly detailed shapes.

Shira knows all this. Chemistry has always been her best subject. She knows the properties of every element on the periodic table, and most engineering compounds.

Like most pre-Track students, she has never seen gold.

Gold is useful but rare, reserved for top technicians. A Vocation of Technician is Shira’s dream. She longs to make things with her hands, with machines, with elements.

Dreams change, though. Shira knows she should dream of creating useful things, like more efficient nutrition pellet extruders.

She dreams of creating beauty.

She is not supposed to know about beauty.

* * *

Shira glanced out at the balcony. Tikvah was by herself again, the strange girl who understood mathematics but couldn’t seem to write answers. She’d watched Tikvah get better at writing her exercises with relief, theorizing what might happen to someone who failed to progress to Second Algebra. Shira knew she herself could have completed Second and Third already, but she feared advancing too quickly.

During their tenth orbit around the Sun, a boy named Zohar had answered every question in mathematics. Their eleventh orbit, Zohar wasn’t in class anymore. Nobody asked. Now, nobody mentioned him. Shira’s own memory was hazy, and she did not trust herself to speak.

A glint of light drew Shira’s attention back to Tikvah on the balcony. That shining thing she wore around her neck had caught a sunbeam, peeping through yellow clouds on another yellow day. Shira looked at her mathematics exercise and gasped quietly: while her mind wandered, her hand had sketched the symmetrical shape of Tikvah’s…

Shira didn’t have a word for the thing, which nettled her. She was good with words! Why wouldn’t she know the word for this?

She quickly blacked out the outline so no one would notice, then glanced at the timepiece over the professor’s desk: eleven minutes until midday break ended.

Eleven minutes. Long enough to change the world.

* * *

“You’ve had that thing for a while now.”

“About a moon,” Tikvah answered, not turning. Shira stared. Breathed. The smooth, reflective surface could only be gold: slightly reddish yellow, bright, detailed. She had seen pictures of gold wires and circuits. This was different. The way Sol’s light reflected off the gold gave her a feeling she could not name. Perhaps it was irritation at not knowing the word for something, for the second time in eleven minutes, that pushed the whisper past Shira’s lips.

“I feel something when I look at it. I’m not sure what.”

Tikvah glanced quickly around, her eyes bright with both fear and excitement. They were the only two on the cold balcony.

“That’s because it’s beautiful,” she whispered back. “It has beauty.”

“What’s beauty?” Shira asked.

Tikvah smiled. “I’ll show you.”

* * *

The salon was on the Systems Analysis block, below an office complex. The first time Shira followed Tikvah through the unmarked door and downstairs, she felt her heart might explode. She had never heard of someone’s heart exploding, but then, she had never heard of a salon, either.

At the bottom, Tikvah turned. “It’s going to be a lot to take in. Don’t forget to breathe.”

Shira briefly wondered how anyone could forget to breathe. You didn’t have to think about breathing; it was handled by the autonomic nervous system, which controls body processes—

And then she forgot to breathe.

All her senses overloaded at once. She had never seen so many colors, shapes, textures, had never smelled anything other than the neutral smell of the city, had never heard…

What was she hearing? There was no word in her mind again.

“Breathe,” Tikvah reminded her.

Shira breathed, but she breathed in the smell, sharp, bright, she needed more words, why weren’t there words?

Several minutes passed. Shira was sitting against a wall, arms over head, knees under her chin, Tikvah’s hand on her shoulder. She focused on that. She wasn’t used to being touched; people didn’t touch. But Tikvah’s hand was…

Reassuring. Having a word helped more. Shira began to breathe.

* * *

The salon had two levels, both underground. First, the gallery, a word familiar to Shira, though not in this way. The long, narrow room was lined with “art,” with “paintings” and “sculptures” and many words Shira was not ready to learn. People sat in neat, cream-colored chairs or quietly talked in twos and threes. A quiet sound Tikvah called “music” filled the room.

At the north end was a “stage.” Tikvah explained that sometimes there were musicians or actors who might perform (she did not explain those words, and Shira still felt too overloaded to ask).

Shira gawked at paintings with blue skies, too many colors, impossible and unknown things. Then they descended a second staircase. On the lower level were two rooms, library and “studio.” Shira didn’t know the word studio, so she was relieved when Tikvah led her into the library.

The number of books almost shattered her.

There were about fifty books in the world, according to Information. Books had been recycled, so the materials could be put to better use; knowledge was easily accessed using Information Terminals. Ten books resided in the City Library, holding the most quintessential knowledge. “These books,” the City Library Keeper had stated, “contain knowledge passed down to us by the greatest scientists of every age. They tested, measured, and recorded.”

This library had hundreds of books.

“Are you going to faint again?” Shira looked over her shoulder at Tikvah, who was smiling with…

“What’s the word for the look you have on your face right now?”

Tikvah’s grin broadened. “Mischief.”

Shira, breathing carefully, smiled back. “Which of these books will help me understand that word?”

* * *

Words Shira found in the dictionary:

• Mischief: playfulness intended to tease or mock
• Art: expression of human creative skill and imagination, producing works appreciated for beauty or emotional power
• Studio: room where a painter, sculptor, etc. works
• Beauty: a combination of qualities, such as shape, color, or form, that pleases aesthetic senses
• Aesthetic: concerned with beauty or the appreciation of beauty

* * *

“So, wait, that last one doesn’t work, it’s circular reasoning. Beauty pleases the aesthetic, and aesthetic means beauty?”

Tikvah nodded understandingly. “Feya is better at this than me; it’s still new for me, too.” She took a shaky breath. “Are you angry?”

“Angry?” Shira, surprised, looked around in wonder. “I’m not displeased at all. Just … overwhelmed. You must be more…”

“More what?”

Shira laughed. “I don’t know! Help me look for a word that means you’re good at considering new ideas.”

* * *

Shira attended the salon for three moons before she was brave enough to discover the studio. It amazed her more than anything she had seen so far, even the scent, which turned out to be “spicy” and “pungent.”

Only two people worked in the studio on the day she quietly investigated, hoping no one would notice her. One glanced briefly at her, but returned to molding his clay. Where did he get clay? Shira wondered, glad she knew words for clay and molding from the dictionary.

The other artist painted under a magnifier, making a tiny work of art Tikvah would adore: green “trees” and “plants” and that ridiculous blue sky Tikvah went on and on about. Shira still couldn’t conceptualize a sky that wasn’t colored by sulfur’s yellow.

“Watch closer if you’d like.” Shira couldn’t speak. She nodded, gawking again, but she didn’t care. She’d never watched someone create before.

* * *

Shira’s first creation was a miniature. She chose pencil, thinking that pencils had erasers for mistakes. Once she began her tiny sketch, she forgot to consider whether any of it was wrong. Her hand understood how to move the pencil. Lines to show where light reflected, where it was absorbed into shadow, took shape naturally. An outline came easily.

Over several days, one hour at a time, she added details. Tikvah begged to look at it, but Shira kept putting her off. “Not until it’s finished.”

* * *

Tikvah and Feya were reading poetry the day the miniature was done. Heart pounding, Shira listened for a while, still afraid to show them her creation, still uncertain of its worth.

“Robert Frost,” Tikvah said, pointing into a book. “He wrote the one about the roads.”

“Right,” Feya said, smiling. She read aloud, as Tikvah preferred:

Nature’s first green is gold,

Her hardest hue to hold.

Her early leaf’s a flower;

But only so an hour.

Then leaf subsides to leaf.

So Eden sank to grief,

So dawn goes down to day.

Nothing gold can stay.

As usual, Tikvah was thoughtful. “It’s not really about gold,” she said finally. “It’s about impermanence—transience—like, when there used to be trees, but they didn’t last. And flowers. Flowers were beautiful, but lasted such a short time. Actually, I think that’s part of what made them beautiful.”

“What do you think is transient in this one?”

Tikvah thought again. “Not the actual gold. Gold, the element, it’s always gold. Innocence, I think. Isn’t that the word for being pure and faultless? Like, when you’re young?”

“Gold,” Shira breathed. “Not the actual metal. Something shining and perfect. Something so beautiful, it can never last.”

“You finished it?” Tikvah asked, glancing at the miniature.

Shira started. “Oh! Yes. I came in to show you. I’m still panicking about it, though.” She was glad of the word panic. She used to have such a hard time expressing the feeling that her heart would explode. Panic and anxiety weren't things people talked about--how could you measure them? And nothing we cannot measure is real. But, now that she knew the words, she knew she wasn't alone; others had felt those things too. They had names.

Tikvah just touched Shira’s shoulder, as always.

* * *

The miniature:

Tikvah’s face, about two centimeters tall, eyes dark, the corners bright: mischief. Her mouth quirks into a smile. A few strands of dark hair escape her careful student’s braids, fall around her face, make her look soft, gentle.

* * *

“You’ve forgotten the worry lines between my eyebrows. I should look terrified or confused or uncertain —”

“You never look uncertain,” Shira interrupted. “You look…” Poised, Shira thought, but the word wasn’t right. She wanted something that was unique to her friend. She paused, thought, tried a new word. “Hopeful.”

Tikvah grinned. “I told you she was ready, Feya.”

Feya smiled too. “Go ahead.”

Uncertainly, Shira looked from one to the other. “What am I ready for?”

Tikvah’s mischief was back. “Close your eyes. It’s a surprise.”

* * *

Surprise: an unexpected or astonishing event, fact, or thing

* * *

The locket was gold, like Tikvah’s, but instead of heart-shaped (constructed nothing like a human heart, Shira had thought when she learned the shape's name), it was a smooth oval, with a rose on its face. It had a seam like Tikvah’s; Shira remembered the animation in her friend’s voice when she described the secret inside her locket. The six-pointed star wasn’t just a star, it was a symbol, representing something more. “Faith,” it meant. “Hope.”

The oval of Shira’s locket opened: empty. “Put your miniature in it,” Tikvah explained. “Beauty, everywhere you go. Your secret will be beauty.”

Chills traced Shira’s arms.

“I want to make beauty,” she whispered.

* * *

Nothing gold can stay, Shira thinks as she dresses for Graduation. Innocence doesn’t last.

When she hadn’t known beauty, gold hadn’t made her pulse race. But when she imagines going back, never asking Tikvah about her locket, never learning about creation, she cannot imagine it. She loves the flutter in her heart when she looks at her friend.

Friend, she thinks. A person whom one knows and with whom one has a bond of mutual affection. The definition doesn't explain friendship. “When we go to the Moon,” Tikvah says, and Shira understands why they don’t teach friendship in Academy.

Friendship can’t be measured or explained or tested, but it feels very real when Shira says, “When beauty doesn’t have to be secret.”