Bathed in cold sunlight, beyond the scope of any human viewing apparatus, a domed tower pierced the moon.
Atop her angular throne, Pink Diamond sat surrounded by opulence. Sculptures and paintings depicted her form, the centrepiece a large canvas immortalising the matriarchal gem in oils. The artist had portrayed her with a knowing, almost casual smile, seated behind the same console that she occupied now, and although the portrait was centuries old, Pink Diamond looked no different today than she had done when it was painted.
Right now, however, Pink Diamond was not smiling. She listened with impatience as explanations were relayed to her through a crystalline communications device.
"They've had more than a hundred cycles to come up with a new excuse," she spoke into the receiver. "It's no wonder Yellow didn't contact me directly, if that's the best she could do."
As the small voice on the other end quavered through this new diplomatic minefield, Pink Diamond's limited retinue watched her expression, trying to read the mood.
The Pearl knelt in repose at Pink Diamond's side, looking up at her with silent concern. Across the dome, a human sat among a collection of musical instruments. His skin was an unnatural shade of pink, his hair an unnatural white. He observed the one-sided conversation with detached interest.
"You can tell Yellow Diamond that nothing has changed. I am sticking to the timeline we agreed in the first place, as I have been all along. They're the ones holding things up with the completion of the Habitat. They do not get to blame it on me."
The other participant in the conversation attempted a response, but was swiftly interrupted.
"You forget your position," Pink Diamond snapped. "You're talking to me as if I haven't already had this conversation with your Diamond, which I have. Who are you to waste my time with such nonsense, even on her orders? The specifications of the Habitat were decided upon at the outset. Any reduction in capacity is a betrayal of our agreement. I've heard excuse after excuse, and endured interminable presentations from her insufferable Peridots. I don't care what they imagine they can accomplish with polymeric modification! The population level was decided based on their calculations, so I view any attempt to revise those figures as an admission of incompetence."
Beyond the interlocking triangles of the dome, the Earth hung in the sky, damaged but intact. Swirls of cloud played about its fractured continents.
The voice on the other end of the communicator found the courage to make another muffled point, and instead of flying into a rage, Pink Diamond merely gave a cold smile.
"I've no doubt she would like them back. But if it was really so important, wouldn't she be telling me in person instead of through a lackey?" She barked with laughter. "Not even her own lackey! If Blue wants her Lazulis so badly then she can contact me herself. And I'll tell her the same thing I'm telling you: finish the Habitat and the gems maintaining this colony can be reassigned. In the meantime, they're doing important work and I can't possibly spare them."
A final halting entreaty came through the angular device.
"Of course you'll have to inform Yellow Diamond," Pink bellowed, "I'm telling you so you can tell Yellow Diamond! That's how this works! Tell her what I said, and tell her that I said it!" With a shout of frustration, she threw the communicator across the room, where it ricocheted off an ancient stone mural before clattering to a halt across the cold floor.
"All this time," she complained. "All this time and they still won't take me seriously. When I've proved myself! They just can't bear to admit that it's possible to construct a successful colony while still preserving its organic culture. When I've proved it." Her eyes flashed with anger. "I've proved it!"
Pearl spoke up. "The Earth colony shines as an exemplar for the whole galaxy."
"As it should! And yet what does it matter, as long as my fellow Diamonds continue to deny the value of its cultural resources? When they denigrate my aesthetic contributions to the empire? They accept my gifts with never a word of praise." She laughed bitterly. "I even played a trick on them once. A fresco I'd commissioned, celebrating the might of Homeworld. Oh, of course they were happy to accept it as the token of a flourishing colony. And yet, when I finally told her it was not the work of my gems, but one of my organics? Do you know what Yellow said?"
Her servant, who knew the story forwards and backwards, did not answer directly. "What did she say, my Diamond?" she asked, wide-eyed.
"'Its inferiority was obvious from the first.' And pretended she had only been indulging me!" Pink Diamond clutched her head in her hands. "Even at this remote distance, I am never truly free of them. Just when I start to feel things are going well, I'll receive a single curt message and suddenly it's as if I never left. As if everything I've done is pointless."
"The value of your accomplishments speaks for itself, my Diamond."
Pink Diamond calmed herself a little. "You always know just the right thing to say," she sighed. "Even a Pearl can understand! You can't keep humans in a glass enclosure and tinker with their polymers. It runs counter to the principle of preserving their authentic way of life. That's what was agreed."
"Whatever my Diamond says," Pearl modestly assented. "This servant couldn't begin to understand the complexities involved in cultivating organic life."
Her reward was an indulgent chuckle. "You do yourself a disservice! I could never have got this far without your help and advice. Success is within our grasp, I just know it. I'll hold them to their promises and a part of Earth will be safe forever. And then," Pink Diamond gestured expansively, "we can apply everything we've learned on a whole new colony! Can you imagine? Blue and Yellow could be destroying sentient life forms even as we speak, when Homeworld could so easily benefit from their cultural resources just as well as the material ones!" She sighed. "I've been stuck out here too long. We can preserve these civilisations before it's too late, if I only have my Habitat."
Pearl did not meet her gaze. "I only wish that every colony could be touched by your mercy, my Diamond."
"And I could have the opportunity to apply everything I've learned from this first colony. All the little mistakes I made along the way — no," Pink Diamond put a hand up, pre-empting her servant's protest, "you know that even a Diamond can make errors, though I would never ask you to admit it. If I knew when I started as much as I know now, the whole project could have been completed in a fraction of the time. I suppose Blue and Yellow couldn't believe their luck when I made that deal." She scowled. "When I exchanged one tower for another."
"Think of the future," Pearl suggested. "When the Habitat is ready, the colony can be completed in a few short solar cycles."
Her Diamond slouched back in her chair and gave a measured sigh. "I know they'll finish building it for me," she said to nobody in particular. "I'm wise to their games. In the end, they'll do whatever it takes to avoid causing a fuss. And they're not getting their gems back without a fuss." Her brows knitted as thoughts of her fellow Diamonds continued to stew. "They'd love to keep me here forever," she muttered through gritted teeth. "I can hear their... condescending voices. 'Pink's little project,'" she sneered, clenching a fist. "'Pink's little project!'"
Pearl, observing this monologue with concern, suddenly sprang to her feet. "May I sing for you, my Diamond?"
Startled out of her dark mood, the Diamond stared in surprise. Then, she gave a warm smile. "Better still, Pearl. Wolf will play some music and you can dance for me."
The pale balletic gem gave a strained smile of compliance.
Pink Diamond called out across the room. "Play for me, Wolf. Play me something new! Please, something cheerful, and not so melancholy as your recent works."
With a silent sigh, the temporally-extended composer dragged his chair over to a harpsichord comprised of an alloy unknown to human metallurgy. Without preamble, he struck up a tune and watched as the Pearl pirouetted elegantly among the works of art, to Pink Diamond's visible delight. Then, he allowed himself a glance out of the window at his former home. Shafts of warm light penetrated the darkness of night in the western hemisphere. On the threshold of daylight, a cyclone was gradually breaking up as it approached a hole in the ocean.
Could he really be blamed, he wondered, for indulging in a little melancholia? Faced with such a view, who could deny feeling remote from humanity, and from their own humanity? As this afterlife had increasingly numbed him to the physicality of being, he had retreated into his music.
He observed Pink Diamond clapping with delight, her troubles forgotten. It was strangely easy to placate the gem that had resurrected him. Although she was always delighted by his ability to produce new songs on demand, she never seemed to notice or care that most were simply variations on earlier works by himself or his contemporaries. A cheap parlour trick, serving to keep him in his captor's favour. Even now, the music flowing from his fingertips was not original in anything but the most pedantic sense of the word. It was a simple enough matter to transpose the tune into a major key and introduce some arbitrary tonal juxtapositions, and yet beneath the obfuscation, this was once again the final movement of his Requiem.
During his tenure in Pink Diamond's court, he had carried his compositional work through to its logical conclusions and beyond. Perhaps it was the case that his more recent pieces had become colder and more formal, lacking the dynamism of his earliest work. He had been given the time to explore to his complete satisfaction the intricate universes contained within a musical stave, until finally his curiosity had been exhausted.
Now, it was to the Requiem that he found himself increasingly drawn, as the years added up with no sign of any end.