The mistress and her house guest had arrived.
They waited a few moments inside the shuttle while the landing area cooled. Then two figures emerged to descend the short exit stairs, hurried by the not-quite-freezing summer air. Their breath escaped in tiny puffs, and in the house's vision their self-heated clothing glimmered infrared.
The house was impatient. It had timed its welcome carefully. Inside the main structure, a wood fire was reaching its climax stage, coffee and cooking smells were peaking, and a last few servitors rearranged fresh-cut flowers, pushing stems a few centimeters one way and then the other as some infinitesimal portion of the house's processors found itself caught in an aesthetic loop.
But when the senator-elect and her guest arrived at the door, the house paused a moment before opening, just to create anticipation.
The lieutenant-commander was a tall man, dark and reserved. He walked with a smooth, prosthetic gait, the motion a gliding one, like a creature with more than two legs. He followed the mistress attentively through a tour of the house, noting its relationship to the surrounding mountains as if scouting a defensive position. The man was impressed, the house could tell. Laurent Zai complimented the views and the gardens, asked how they were heated. The house would have loved to explain (in excessive detail) the system of mirrors and heated water in underground channels, but the mistress had warned it not to speak. The man was Vadan, and didn't approve of talking machines.
Receptive to the smells of cooking, Zai and the mistress presently sat down to eat. The house had pulled food from deep in its stores. It had slaved (or rather, had commanded its many slaves) to make everything perfect. It served breasts of the small, sparrowlike birds that flocked in the south forest, each no bigger than a mouthful, baked in goat's butter and thyme. Baby artichokes and carrots had gone into a stew, thickened with a dark reduction of tomatoes and cocoa grown deep underground. Meaty oranges and pears engineered to grow in freezing temperatures, which budded from the tree already filled with icy crystals, had been shaved into sorbets to divide the courses. The main dish was thin slices of salmon pulled from the snowmelt streams, chemically cooked with lemon juice and nanomachines. The table was covered with petals from the black and purple groundcover flowers that kept the gardens warm for a few extra weeks in the fall.
The house spared nothing, even unearthing the decades-old hidden cache of its first owner's coffee, the previous senator's special blend. It served them this magic brew after they were finished eating.
The house watched and waited, anxious to see what would result from all its preparations. It had so often read that well-prepared food was the key to engendering good conversation.
Now would come the test.
LIEUTENANT-COMMANDER
After lunch, Nara Oxham took him to a room with incredible views. Like the food, which had been exquisite to a fault, the vistas here almost overwhelmed Zai: mountainscapes, clear skies, and marvelous, distant waterfalls. Finally, an escape from the crowds of the capital. Best of all, however, was the large fireplace, a hearth such as a Vadan home would have. They built a small pyre of real wood together, and Nara worked with long and skillful fingers to bring it to a blaze.
Zai stole glances at his hostess in the firelight. The senator-elect's eyes were changing. With each hour at the polar estate, they grew less focused, like a woman steadily drinking. Laurent knew that she had stopped taking the drug that maintained her sanity in the city. She was becoming more sensitive. He could almost feel the power of her empathy as it tuned in on him. What would it reveal to her? he wondered.
Zai tried not to think of what might happen between him and his hostess. He knew nothing of the ways of Vasthold; this excursion to the pole might be merely a friendly gesture toward a foreigner, a traditional offer to a decorated hero, even an attempt to compromise a political opponent. But this was Nara's home, and they were very much alone.
These thoughts of intimacy came unbidden and moved creakily, almost a forgotten process. Since his captivity, Zai's broken body had been often a source of pain, sometimes one of despair, and always an engineering problem, but never a locus of desire.
Would Nara detect his thoughts—
half-thoughts,
really—about possible intimacy between them? Zai knew that most synesthetic abilities were exaggerated by the gutter media. How keen were hers?
Zai decided to show his curiosity, which at least would have the advantage of distracting Nara (and himself) from his other thoughts. So he pursued a question he'd pondered since they'd met.
"What was it like to be empathic as a child? When did you realize that you could ... read minds?"
Nara laughed at his terminology, as he'd expected.
"The realization was slow," she said. "It almost never came.
"I was raised on the pleinhold. It's very empty there. On Vasthold, there are prefectures with less than one person per hundred square kilometers. Endless plains in the wind belt, broken only by Coriolis mountains, constructs that channel the winds into erosion runnels, which will eventually become canyons. Everywhere on the plains you can hear the mountains singing. The wind resonances are unpredictable; you can't engineer a mountain for a particular sound. They say even a Rix mind couldn't do the math. Each plays its own tune, as slow and moaning as whalesong, some deeper than human hearing, with notes that beat like a drum. Hiking guides can tell the songs apart, can distinguish the different sides of each mountain with their eyes closed. Our house faced Mount Ballimar, whose northern-side song sweeps from thudding beats up to a soprano when the wind shifts, like a siren warning that a storm is coming.
"My parents thought I was an idiot at first."
Zai glanced at her, wondering if the word had a softer meaning on her planet. She shook her head in response.
That
thought had proven easy enough for her to read.
"Out there on the plains, my ability went undetected. I suffered no insanity in the hinterlands; the psychic input from my large but isolated family was manageable. But I had less need of language acquisition than my siblings. To family members I could project emotions as well as empathize. It was so effortless, my communication; my family thought I was a dullard, but a very easy one to get along with. My needs were met, and I knew what was going on around me, but I didn't see the need to chatter constantly."
Zai's eyebrows raised.
"Strange that I became a politician, then. Eh?"
He laughed. "You read my mind."
"I did," she admitted, and leaned forward to poke at the fire. It burned steadily now, and was hot enough to have forced them to a meter's distance.
"I
could
talk, though. And contrary to what my parents thought, I was smart. I could do spoken lessons with an AI, if a reward was coming. But I didn't
need
speech, so the secondary language skills—reading and writing—suffered.
"Then I took my first trip to the city."
Zai saw the muscles of her hand tighten on the poker.
"I thought the city was a mountain, because I could hear it from so far away. I thought it was singing. The minds of a city are like ocean from a distance, when the wave crashes blend into a hum, a single band of sound. Pleinberg only had a population of a few hundred thousand in those days, but I could hear from fifty klicks out the tenor of the festival we were headed to, raucous and celebratory, political. The local majority party had won the continental parliament. From out there on the plain, coming in by slow ground transport, the sound made me happy. I sang back at this happy, marvelous mountain.
"I wonder what my parents thought was happening. Just an idiot's song, I suppose."
"They never told you?" he asked.
Surprise crossed Nara's face for a moment.
"I haven't spoken to them since that day," she said.
Zai blinked, feeling like a blunderer. Senator Oxham's biography must be well known in political circles, at least the bare facts. But Zai knew her only as the Mad Senator.
The words chilled him, though. Abandonment of a child? Loss of the family line? His Vadan sense of propriety rebelled at the thought. He swallowed, and tried to stifle the reaction, knowing his empathic host would feel it all too well.
"Go ahead, Laurent," she said, "be appalled. It's okay."
"I don't mean to—"
"I
know.
But don't try to control your thoughts around me. Please."
He sighed, and considered the War Sage's advice on negotiating with the enemy:
When caught dissembling, the best correction is sudden directness.
"How close did you get, before the city drove you mad?" he asked.
"I'm not sure, exactly. I didn't know it was madness; I thought it was the song inside me, tearing me to pieces."
She turned away from him to place fresh wood on the fire.
"As the city grew nearer, the mindnoise increased. It follows the inverse square law, like gravity or broadcast radio. But the traffic going into the festival slowed us down, so the ramp up in volume wasn't exponential, as it could have been."
"So clinical, Nara."
"Because I don't really
remember,
not sequentially, anyway. I only recall that I loved it. Riding a victory celebration of a quarter million minds, Laurent, who'd won a continental election for the first time in
decades.
There was so much joy there: success after years of work, redemption for old defeats, the sense that justice would finally be done. I think I fell in love with politics that day."
"The day you went mad."
She nodded, smiling.
"But by the time we reached the center of town, it was too much for me. I was raw and unprotected, a thousand times more sensitive than I am now. The stray thoughts of passing strangers hit me like revelations, the noise of the city obliterated my own young mind. My reflex was to strike out, I suppose, to physically retaliate. I was brought into the hospital bloody, and it wasn't all my blood. I hurt one of my sisters, I think the story goes.
"They left me in the city."
Zai gaped. There was no point in hiding his reaction.
"Why didn't your parents take you back home?"
She shrugged. "They didn't know. When your child has an unexplained seizure, you don't take them into the hinterland. They had me transferred to the best facility possible, which happened to be in the largest city on Vasthold."
"But you said you haven't seen them since."
"It was in Vasthold's expansion phase. They had ten children, Laurent. And their silent one, their retarded child, had become a dangerous little beast. They couldn't travel across the world to visit me. This was a
colony
world, Laurent."
More protests rose in Zai, but he took a deep breath. No point in battering Nara's parents. It was a different culture, and a long time ago.
"How many years were you ... mad, Nara?"
She looked into his eyes. "From age six to ten ... that's roughly age twelve to nineteen in Absolute years. Puberty, young adulthood. All with eight million voices in my mind."
"Inhuman," he said.
She turned back to the fire, half smiling. "There are only a few of my kind. A lot of synesthetic empaths, but not many survivors of such ignorance. Now they understand that synesthesia implants will cause empathy in a few dozen kids a year. Most live in cities, of course, and the condition is discovered within days of the operation. When the kids blow, they ship them off to the country until they're old enough for apathy treatments. But I was desensitized the old-fashioned way."
"Exposure."
"What was it like in those years, Nara?" No point in hiding his curiosity from an empath.
"I
was
the city, Laurent. Its animal consciousness, anyway. The raging id of desire and need, frustration and anger. The heart of humanity, and yes, of politics. But almost utterly without self. Mad."
Zai narrowed his eyes. He'd never thought of a city that way, as having a mind. It was so close to the Rix perversion.
"Exactly," she said, apparently having plumbed the thought. "That's why I'm anti-Rix, for a Secularist."
"What do you mean?"
"Cities are
beasts,
Laurent. The body politic is nothing but an animal. It needs humans to lead it, personalities to shape the mass. That's why the Rix are such single-minded butchers. They graft a voice onto a slavering beast, then worship it as a god."
"But something, some sort of compound mind is really there, Nara? Even on an Imperial world, with emergence suppressed? Even without the networks."
She nodded. "I heard it every day. Had it in my mind. Whether computers make it apparent or not, humans are a part of something bigger, something distinctly alive. The Rix are right about that."
"Thus the Emperor protects us,"
Zai whispered.
"Yes. Our counter-god," Oxham said sadly. "A necessary ... stopgap."
"But why not, Nara? You said it yourself, we need human personalities. People, who inspire loyalty, give human shape to the mass. So why fight the Emperor so bitterly?"
"Because no one elected him," she said. "And because he's dead."
Zai shook his head, the disloyal words painful.
"But the honored dead chose him at Quorum, sixteen hundred years ago. They can call another Quorum to remove him, if they ever wanted to."
"The dead are
dead,
Laurent. They don't live with us anymore. You've seen the distance in their eyes. They are no more like us than Rix minds. You know it. The living city may be a beast, but at least it's human: what we are."
She leaned toward him, the fire bright in her eyes.
"Humanity is central, Laurent, the only thing that matters.
We are
what puts good and evil in this universe. Not gods or dead people. Not machines. Us."
"The honored dead are our ancestors, Nara," he whispered fiercely, as if silencing a child in church.