Recognition (7 page)

The prospect of forming our special communion
in public, for a gloating audience that would know every intimate
detail along with me and Dominic, filled me with horror. I could
not obey the sibyl’s command, but stood immobile, staring at
Dominic’s long tapering fingers with their square-cut nails.

“I think we are all convinced that Ms. Herzog
and Margrave Aranyi are able to do that quite easily,” Lady Ndoko
said in her dry way.

This time everyone laughed out loud, breaking
the tension, as Lady Ndoko had intended, that had built up between
the knowing audience and my indignation. I almost keeled over at
the appalling realization: that we had put not only our actions and
our immediate thoughts, but our emotions on display, too novel and
powerful for us to contain. If we had strapped holocams on our
heads and broadcast a reality show of our developing relationship
over Eclipsis, we could not have been more exposed. In fact, what
we had been doing is called “broadcasting” here.

It was a harsh introduction to life amongst
the gifted. On Terra I had been unique: assailed by other people’s
thoughts, secure in the knowledge that the contents of my own mind
were concealed. I had never had to worry about being subjected to
the same sort of telepathic reception.

How do they do it? I wondered. The psychic
pain seemed, in its way, worse even than the physical pain of Lord
Almirante’s arthritis. At least he had the option of medication to
take the edge off. But nothing would stop this ongoing invasion of
the mind’s innermost recesses. Not sleep, not drugs. Only
isolation, as I had known on Terra, or death, would bring
surcease.

“Living without skin,” Dominic had said
yesterday.
But we need skin
, I argued now.
We need
something to protect ourselves, to separate ourselves from the rest
of the world
…

We become accustomed to it
, Dominic
tried to soothe me.
Let them laugh. It is a small price to pay
for our love. And remember, I know them too, as you will. We are
all revealed in turn; none of us is perfect, believe me
.

I picked up the strange truth underlying his
words, the reason that people were not masking their thoughts here
in ‘Graven Assembly. Surrounded by our gifted peers, we were
stripped of all interior privacy, while at the same time benefiting
from the freedom of our common predicament. Our flaws were of
necessity brought to light; we were tried, judged, and ultimately
pardoned. Improper or shameful thoughts and desires, that if
confessed on Terra would lead to ostracism and forced medical
treatment, were accepted here without condemnation, so long as the
standards of conduct were maintained. People might laugh, but that
was all.

Lady Ertegun took pity on me as I pondered
this new intelligence, unable to alter my behavior so radically as
to perform what felt like a live sex show in front of an avid
studio audience. “I see,” she said, a rare smile pushing her wide
pink cheeks into dimpled mounds. After a moment’s contemplation,
she declared that the communion portion of the test had been
satisfactorily covered. We would move on to the practical
examination.

An acolyte brought a large leather case to
the dais and set it on a table. Lady Ertegun approached the box
reverently, unfastened its many straps in a careful and orderly
process, and raised the lid with bowed head and closed eyes. The
audience appeared to be praying, although there were no words in
their minds, just awed emptiness. I stood with head averted,
sliding my eyes over from under squinting lids.

Inside, nestled into velvet-lined pockets on
three layered trays like an elaborate jewelry box, were dozens of
pieces of clear glass, in geometric shapes—pyramids, rectangles,
cubes, tetrahedrons, as well as many-sided, more complex forms.
Prisms. I bit my lips to keep from laughing out loud at the
anticlimax.

Lady Ertegun shook back the lace-ruffled long
sleeve from her left wrist with a graceful flourish and plucked a
simple triangular prism from the lower tray. Shielding it in her
palm, she handed it to me, visibly relieved that I took it in my
left hand also. She pointed to the shafts of mid-morning sunlight
streaming in through the high windows and striking the dais. “Bend
it. Use the prism to bend the light directly into your eyes.”

I shook my head. “My eyelids will—”

“So we will hope,” the sibyl said, without
her usual sarcasm. The entire Assembly seemed to be holding its
breath.

My heart was racing, worse than when I had
shared Lord Almirante’s arthritic pains. This was madness, to
knowingly and deliberately blind myself.
Wasn’t that the myth,
the blind sibyl, the “seer” who loses outward vision to better
perceive the inner?
“Tripe,” I said the word aloud, without
any attempt at control. “I don’t believe in it.”

The sibyl shrugged and stood with hands on
hips. “You were right, Margrave,” she said to Dominic. “I should
not have wasted my time.”

I looked over to Dominic and saw, through a
wavering film of tears, that he was—
Oh,
sorrow!
—disappointed. The first and only time, thank all the
Tripe Gods I don’t believe in but he does, that that has ever
happened.

What could I do? Even blindness was better
than this. I held the prism between thumb and forefinger, my arm
outstretched as far as possible, as if that would protect me, and I
aimed it up to catch a ray of light: the one slanting down between
the Aranyi section and the empty seats of those sensible rebels.
We who are about to die salute you
, I thought to Dominic
as I clenched my teeth and angled the nasty little sharp-edged
piece of glass to smear the full spectrum clear across my
eyeballs.

I had expected stabbing pain, maybe even
wetness as the sclera ruptured before the inner lids had a chance
to lower into place. Instead there was a silent click, like a
switch being turned inside my head, and I saw those starbursts and
fireworks that flash on your retinas when you rub your eyes in the
dark. My stomach lurched and I doubled over, retching with the dry
heaves. When I caught my breath at last, I wound my arm up like a
pitcher throwing for the third strike of the ninth inning, and
hurled the prism across the room where it shattered against the
wall of the balcony, spraying glass fragments.

Everybody cheered. The people sitting under
the balcony brushed splinters of glass from their clothes and shook
them out of their hair with the good humor of spectators at a
gladiatorial contest who accept spilled beer and thrown popcorn as
part of the fun. Even Lady Ertegun was moved. “Excellent,” she
said. She studied her case of torture implements, selected a
rectangular prism and held it out to me.

When I didn’t take it immediately she said,
“Your shields are in place now. It won’t affect you as before.”

I hadn’t even felt my third eyelids descend,
but there they were, casting the room into soothing shadow.
Swallowing my gorge and clamping my lips tight against the rising
nausea, I forced myself to hold the new prism up to the light. When
the spectrum unfolded onto my eyes, whatever had switched on inside
my head was showing me images I had never seen before, lines and
patterns beyond the visible. I recognized it from biology classes
and nature holograms: ultra-violet, infrared; the way insects and
birds and fishes see.

Lady Ertegun stood beside me, positioning my
hand with the prism as I looked at the world through new eyes. In
what felt like a dream, I brought distant objects into close focus
and projected near objects to the outer edges of space. I perceived
the world as a speck of rock orbiting a flaming ball of gas, and
enlarged the microscopic creatures inhabiting our eyelashes into
lumbering mammoths. Not good. I tilted my head back to examine the
walls of the Sanctum. The individual molecules of the granite,
locked in their rigid chemical structure, were revealed to me, as
readable as color and form. If I had wanted to, I could have taken
the stones apart cube by cube, brought down the entire room without
disturbing so much as a grain of sand.

“Very nice,” Lady Ertegun said. She snapped
her fingers in my face, breaking my concentration. “Please don’t
get carried away. I want you to try something simple.”

Coached by the sibyl, copying each step as
she performed it, I lifted and moved small objects through
telekinesis, and observed and analyzed the composition of various
substances. It is a betrayal of trust to disclose the particulars
of a
crypta
test; no two tests are exactly alike, as no
two people have the same abilities. Some can barely form communion;
others are adept at things I will never master, like teleportation
or clairvoyance. My gift is primarily physical. Untrained, and
coming to it late in life, I did nothing now that the ‘Graven
Assembly had not seen before.

For my last task, Lady Ertegun produced a
lamp consisting of a wick in a shallow bowl of oil. “Light the lamp
without touching it,” she said.

I was momentarily flummoxed, my mind spinning
in a void, unsettled by the expectant audience and the archaic
object. I stood stupidly, my left arm, tired from being raised
above my head, slowly drooping. The light from the window, no
longer splayed by the prism into a rainbow, fell in its ordinary
white form across the worn boards of the wooden dais. One ray hit
my foot, warming it through the vinyl of my boot. So obvious to
every child that’s incinerated ants with a magnifying glass. I held
the prism in the narrowest of angles, directing a concentrated beam
of light—and heat—at the exposed end of wick until it caught fire
with a whoosh and a high flame, then settled into a steady
burn.

I looked up triumphantly, my focus returning
to the larger world of human beings, of solid matter and emotion.
My hand closed tightly around the prism, locking its dangerous
separation of light beams behind the safety of darkness.

Lady Ertegun shook her head. “No. That’s
simple mechanics—you did not use your gift.” She studied me
internally for a few moments, before concluding I had no other
ideas and she might as well disclose the answer. “The usual way is
with the
inner flame
.”

“Be fair,” a young man wearing the uniform of
a junior officer in the Royal Guards protested from farther along
the front row. “How could Ms. Herzog know about the inner flame?”
Lord Roger Zichmni, the Viceroy’s grandson and heir, was the only
person here besides the Viceroy himself who could contradict the
Sibyl of La Sapienza.

Lady Ertegun bowed her head slightly. “Lord
Roger,” she said, “this is strange for all of us. I am being as
objective as I can.”
Sacred Iris help me
, the exasperated
thought came into my head from the sibyl, unused to finding herself
on the defensive. Her usual candidates grew up in the Eclipsian
culture; she had no other method but the traditional one by which
to evaluate me.

By now I was near to collapsing from
exhaustion. Nobody had warned me how draining it is to actively
use
crypta
, as opposed to simply receiving
thoughts. The prisms I had manipulated amplify the gift, but the
necessary energy comes from the body. Physical training helps; my
sedentary Terran lifestyle only made things worse. A neophyte
should build up endurance gradually, like an athlete, but I had
just run a marathon while still learning to walk.

In truth, nobody, not even Dominic, had been
certain how much
crypta
I possessed. The communion Dominic
and I shared was so natural for us that I think we overlooked its
significance. Lady Ertegun, her phlegmatic exterior disguising her
excitement at my abilities, had led me to overreach.

Not caring any longer what people thought, I
staggered over to Dominic and slumped off-center into his lap
before he had time to make room.
By Hecate’s tits, Amalie! Be
careful
! he swore into my mind as he shifted me gently onto
the seat beside him. I felt the sudden flare of communion like a
stab of pleasure, the beginning of erection I had set off with my
hasty landing. He gave me a quick smile to show he was not angry,
merely, at last, embarrassed, as his warmth and strength seeped
into me. His hand clasped mine, hidden between our bodies, and the
swirling buffer of communion blocked whatever reaction my
awkwardness might have caused in the keen-eyed spectators.

Viceroy Zichmni came to my rescue before I
dared look up. “Perhaps we should recess for dinner,” he decided.
My stomach growled hopefully at the suggestion. It was, indeed,
well past time for the midday meal. Just as it had absorbed a
surprising amount of energy, the
crypta
work had consumed
a great chunk of time, while it seemed as if only a few minutes had
gone by.

The ‘Graven conferred and discussed noisily.
The Eclipsian tradition of hospitality is ingrained and bound by
many rules. Where I should eat and with whom was evidently
something that philosophers could happily debate for a week. “Lord
Zichmni,” Dominic’s voice cut through the babble of thoughts and
raised voices, “the lady will faint from hunger while everyone puts
forward his claim. Since I maintain my residence here while
Assembly is in session, it seems logical to take Ms. Herzog where
she will be able to get some ready food.”

Without waiting for the Viceroy’s reply,
Dominic stepped into the corridor and sent a message recalling the
guards who had escorted me here.
Shall I carry you,
beloved?
he asked on his return.

Dominic’s offer was most attractive until I
thought of how undignified it would be, how much legitimate scope
it would give the already mocking audience, and regretfully
declined.

You must not let those insensitive
assholes control your life
, Dominic scolded me affectionately
in my own Terran idiom, but acquiesced in my decision. I was led on
another circuitous route, arriving at last in a large apartment,
Dominic’s private living quarters. The rooms were dark, with an
elegant martial decorative motif, much like their occupant.