Gallat starts, then stares at me as if he has never seen me before. “What?”
“Kelenli.” I turn my eyes to meet his, although we have learned over time that the conductors do not like this. They find eye contact challenging. But they also dismiss us more easily when we do not look at them, and I don’t want to be dismissed in this moment. I want him to feel this conversation, even if his weak, primitive sessapinae cannot tell him that my jealousy and resentment have raised the temperature of the city’s water table by two degrees.
He glares at me. I gaze impassively back. I sense tension in the network. The others, who of course have noticed what the conductors ignore, are suddenly afraid for me … but I am almost distracted from their concern by the difference I suddenly perceive in us. Gallat is right: We are changing, complexifying, our ambient influence strengthening, as a result of the things Kelenli has shown us. Is this an improvement? I’m not certain yet. For now, we are confused where before, we were mostly unified. Remwha and Gaewha are angry at me for taking this risk without seeking consensus first—and this recklessness, I suppose, is my own symptom of change. Bimniwha and Salewha are, irrationally, angry at Kelenli for the strange way she is affecting me. Dushwha is done with all of us and just wants to go home. Beneath her anger, Gaewha is afraid for me but she also pities me, because I think she understands that my recklessness is a symptom of something else. I have decided that I am in love, but love is a painful hotspot roil beneath the surface of me in a place where once there was stability, and I do not like it. Once, after all, I believed I was the finest tool ever created by a great civilization. Now, I have learned that I am a mistake cobbled together by paranoid thieves who were terrified of their own mediocrity. I don’t know how to feel, except reckless.
None of them are angry at Gallat for being too dangerous to have a simple conversation with, though. There’s something very wrong with that.
Finally, Gallat says, “What makes you think I’m angry with Kelenli?” I open my mouth to point out the tension in his body, his vocal stress, the look on his face, and he makes an irritated sound. “Never mind. I know how you process information.” He sighs. “And I suppose you’re right.”
I am definitely right, but I know better than to remind him of what he doesn’t want to know. “You want her to live in your house.” I was unsure that it was Gallat’s house until the morning’s conversation. I should have guessed, though; it smelled like him. None of us is good at using senses other than sesuna.
“It’s her house,” he snaps. “She grew up there, same as me.”
Kelenli has told me this. Raised alongside Gallat, thinking she was normal, until someone finally told her why her parents did not love her. “She was part of the project.”
He nods once, tightly, his mouth twisted in bitterness. “So was I. A human child was a necessary control, and I had … useful characteristics for comparison. I thought of her as my sister until we both reached the age of fifteen. Then they told us.”
Such a long time. And yet Kelenli must have suspected that she was different. The silver glimmer of magic flows around us, through us, like water. Everyone can sess it, but we tuners, we live it. It lives in us. She cannot have ever thought herself normal.
Gallat, however, had been completely surprised. Perhaps his view of the world had been as thoroughly upended as mine has been now. Perhaps he floundered—flounders—in the same way, struggling to resolve his feelings with reality. I feel a sudden sympathy for him.
“I never mistreated her.” Gallat’s voice has gone soft, and I’m not certain he’s still speaking to me. He has folded his arms and crossed his legs, closing in on himself as he gazes steadily through one of the vehimal’s windows, seeing nothing. “Never treated her like …” Suddenly he blinks and darts a hooded glance at me. I start to nod to show that I understand, but some instinct warns me against doing this. I just look back at him. He relaxes. I don’t know why.
He doesn’t want you to hear him say “like one of you,” Remwha signals, humming with irritation at my obtuseness. And he doesn’t want you to know what it means, if he says it. He reassures himself that he is not like the people who made his own life harder. It’s a lie, but he needs it, and he needs us to support that lie. She should not have told us that we were Niess.
We aren’t Niess, I gravitic-pulse back. Mostly I’m annoyed that he had to point this out. Gallat’s behavior is obvious, now that Remwha has explained.
To them we are. Gaewha sends this as a single microshake whose reverberations she kills, so that we sess only cold silence afterward. We stop arguing because she’s right.
Gallat continues, oblivious to our identity crisis, “I’ve given her as much freedom as I can. Everyone knows what she is, but I’ve allowed her the same privileges that any normal woman would have. Of course there are restrictions, limitations, but that’s reasonable. I can’t be seen to be lax, if …” He trails off, into his own thoughts. Muscles along his jaw flex in frustration. “She acts as if she can’t understand that. As if I’m the problem, not the world. I’m trying to help her!” And then he lets out a heavy breath of frustration.
We have heard enough, however. Later, when we process all this, I will tell the others, She wants to be a person.
She wants the impossible, Dushwha will say. Gallat thinks it better to own her himself, rather than allow Syl Anagist to do the same. But for her to be a person, she must stop being … ownable. By anyone.
Then Syl Anagist must stop being Syl Anagist, Gaewha will add sadly.
Yes. They will all be right, too, my fellow tuners … but that does not mean Kelenli’s desire to be free is wrong. Or that something is impossible just because it is very, very hard.
The vehimal stops in a part of town that, amazingly, looks familiar. I have seen this area only once and yet I recognize the pattern of the streets, and the vineflowers on one greenstrate wall. The quality of the light through the amethyst, as the sun slants toward setting, stirs a feeling of longing and relief in me that I will one day learn is called homesickness.
The other conductors leave and head back to the compound. Gallat beckons to us. He’s still angry, and wants this over with. So we follow, and fall slowly behind because our legs are shorter and the muscles burn, until finally he notices that we and our guards are ten feet behind him. He stops to let us catch up, but his jaw is tight and one hand taps a brisk pattern on his folded arms.
“Hurry up,” he says. “I want to do start-up trials tonight.”