It is unexpected, at least by us. It also isn’t really about us, we realize fairly quickly. Conductor Gallat arrives first, although I see several other high-ranking conductors talking in the house above the garden. He does not look displeased as he calls Kelenli outside and speaks to her in a quiet but intent voice. We all get up, vibrating guilt though we have done nothing wrong, just spent a night lying on a hard floor and listening to the strange sound of others’ breath and occasional movement. I watch Kelenli, fearing for her, wanting to protect her, though this is inchoate; I don’t know what the danger is. She stands straight and tall, like one of them, as she speaks to Gallat. I sess her tension, like a fault line poised to slip.
They are outside of the little garden house, fifteen feet away, but I hear Gallat’s voice rise for a moment. “How much longer do you mean to keep up this foolishness? Sleeping in the shed?”
Kelenli says, calmly, “Is there a problem?”
Gallat is the highest ranked of the conductors. He is also the cruelest. We don’t think he means it. It’s just that he does not seem to understand that cruelty is possible, with us. We are the machine’s tuners; we ourselves must be attuned for the good of the project. That this process sometimes causes pain or fear or decommissioning to the briar patch is … incidental.
We have wondered if Gallat has feelings himself. He does, I see when he draws back now, expression all a-ripple with hurt, as if Kelenli’s words have struck him some sort of blow. “I’ve been good to you,” he says. His voice wavers.
“And I’m grateful.” Kelenli hasn’t shifted the inflection of her voice at all, or a muscle of her face. She looks and sounds, for the first time, like one of us. And as we so often do, she and he are having a conversation that has nothing to do with the words coming from their mouths. I check; there’s nothing in the ambient, save the fading vibrations of their voices. And yet.
Gallat stares at her. Then the hurt and anger fade from his expression, replaced by weariness. He turns away and snaps, “I need you back at the lab today. There are fluctuations in the subgrid again.”
Kelenli’s face finally moves, her brows drawing down. “I was told I had three days.”
“Geoarcanity takes precedence over your leisure plans, Kelenli.” He glances toward the little house where I and the others cluster, and catches me staring at him. I don’t look away, mostly because I’m so fascinated by his anguish that I don’t think to. He looks fleetingly embarrassed, then irritated. He says to her, with his usual air of impatience, “Biomagestry can only do distance scans outside of the compound, but they say they’re actually detecting some interesting flow clarification in the tuners’ network. Whatever you’ve been doing with them obviously isn’t a complete waste of time. I’ll take them, then, to wherever you were planning to go today. Then you can go back to the compound.”
She glances around at us. At me. My thinker.
“It should be an easy enough trip,” she says to him, while looking at me. “They need to see the local engine fragment.”
“The amethyst?” Gallat stares at her. “They live in its shadow. They see it constantly. How does that help?”
“They haven’t seen the socket. They need to fully understand its growth process—more than theoretically.” All at once she turns away from me, and from him, and begins walking toward the big house. “Just show them that, and then you can drop them off at the compound and be done with them.”
I understand precisely why Kelenli has spoken in this dismissive tone, and why she hasn’t bothered to say farewell before leaving. It’s no more than any of us do, when we must watch or sess another of our network punished; we pretend not to care. (Tetlewha. Your song is toneless, but not silent. From where do you sing?) That shortens the punishment for all, and prevents the conductors from focusing on another, in their anger. Understanding this, and feeling nothing as she walks away, are two very different things, however.
Conductor Gallat is in a terrible mood after this. He orders us to get our things so we can go. We have nothing, though some of us need to eliminate waste before we leave, and all of us need food and water. He lets the ones who need it use Kelenli’s small toilet or a pile of leaves out back (I am one of these; it is very strange to squat, but also a profoundly enriching experience), then tells us to ignore our hunger and thirst and come on, so we do. He walks us very fast, even though our legs are shorter than his and still aching from the day before. We are relieved to see the vehimal he’s summoned, when it comes, so that we can sit and be carried back toward the center of town.
The other conductors ride along with us and Gallat. They keep speaking to him and ignoring us; he answers in terse, one-word replies. They ask him mostly about Kelenli—whether she is always so intransigent, whether he believes this is an unforeseen genegineering defect, why he even bothers to allow her input on the project when she is, for all intents and purposes, just an obsolete prototype.
“Because she’s been right in every suggestion she’s made thus far,” he snaps, after the third such question. “Which is the very reason we developed the tuners, after all. The Plutonic Engine would need another seventy years of priming before even a test-firing could be attempted, without them. When a machine’s sensors are capable of telling you exactly what’s wrong and exactly how to make the whole thing work more efficiently, it’s stupid not to pay heed.”
That seems to mollify them, so they leave him alone and resume talking—though to each other, not to him. I am sitting near Conductor Gallat. I notice how the other conductors’ disdain actually increases his tension, making anger radiate off his skin like the residual heat of sunlight from a rock, long after night has fallen. There have always been odd dynamics to the conductors’ relationships; we’ve puzzled them out as best we could, while not really understanding. Now, however, thanks to Kelenli’s explanation, I remember that Gallat has undesirable ancestry. We were made this way, but he was simply born with pale skin and icewhite eyes—traits common among the Niess. He isn’t Niess; the Niess are gone. There are other races, Sylanagistine races, with pale skin. The eyes suggest, however, that somewhere in his family’s history—distant, or he would not have been permitted schooling and medical care and his prestigious current position—someone made children with a Niesperson. Or not; the trait could be a random mutation or happenstance of pigment expression. Apparently no one thinks it is, though.
This is why, though Gallat works harder and spends more hours at the compound than anyone, and is in charge, the other conductors treat him as if he is less than what he is. If he did not pass on the favor in his dealings with us, I would pity him. As it is, I am afraid of him. I always have been afraid of him. But for Kelenli, I decide to be brave.
“Why are you angry with her?” I ask. My voice is soft, and hard to hear over the humming metabolic cycle of the vehimal. Few of the other conductors notice my comment. None of them care. I have timed the asking well.