“They’ll forget,” Kaylin said.
“They are not human, Kaylin. They will not forget.”
“And if they do, you’ll remind them?”
Ybelline shook her head, and her hair brushed Kaylin’s face as she lifted it. “No. You are not Tha’alani. But you have touched the Tha’alaan. What you understand might change in time—but they will remember you because they desire it. Not one of them wishes to fear the whole of a race. To fear even the ones who injured them is burden enough.
“And it is my fault and my responsibility. I have worked among your kind for most of my adult life, and I didn’t think before I left the Quarter. I didn’t think about how it would look to people who have so little knowledge. I should have realized—”
“You were trying to save a city. You had a lot on your mind.”
The smile on Ybelline’s face was wry, but the panic was gone. “Have you had a chance to speak at length with Richard Rennick?”
A number of answers came and went. Kaylin said simply, “Not at length.” It was about as polite as she could be, given everything.
“Then you understand what he has been ordered to do?”
“More or less.”
“Can you please explain it to me? No, not the reasoning behind that—believe that given the events of this past week, I understand the reasons perfectly. I don’t, however, understand exactly why this task was given to Rennick. I do not understand how what he produces—which by Imperial mandate must be untrue—will serve the goal of educating the…public, as Mr. Rennick calls people.”
Had this been a normal day, Kaylin’s head would have hurt. And since misery loves company, she said, “Maybe we should answer this question while Rennick is actually there.”
All in all, not her brightest suggestion.
She was escorted—having been parted from Ellis with gods only knew what difficulty—by Ybelline into the main hall whose chief decoration was a large table, with simple chairs, and the occasional flower in a bowl or a vase to add any color that wasn’t provided by faces.
Rennick in particular was an odd shade of gray. He was separated from the rest of the Tha’alani by Severn, and if the seating arrangement was accidental, Kaylin would have eaten her hat. Or her hairpin, given she didn’t own a hat. There were only five other Tha’alani in the room, all in robes very similar to Ybelline’s, which, given the heat and the humidity of the season, made sense.
Sense and clothing seldom went together, in Kaylin’s experience, and she didn’t recall seeing robes like this the last couple of times she’d braved the Quarter, so she assumed they were some sort of formal dress. Whether or not this assumption was right, the dress seemed to be accepted wear for both the three men and the two women. The colors of the dress were basically the same—a creamy gold that was almost white. The shoulders had different embroidery at the height of the seam, which might—although she doubted it, given the Tha’alani—be some sort of symbol for their rank.
Rennick rose when she entered the room. He was quiet, but not for lack of trying; if she’d seen a better imitation of a fish out of water, she couldn’t offhand recall it.
“At ease,” she told him. When this comment appeared to make no sense to him—and given Severn’s expression, it wouldn’t—she said, “Sit down.”
He sat. “Are you sure you shouldn’t be the one sitting?”
“I slept.”
“For three hours,” he added.
She could have told him that three hours after a day like this was a catnap, but didn’t. “I think we have the worst of the difficulties facing the Quarter from the inside in hand,” she told him instead. “The difficulties facing the Quarter from the other side of the guardhouse, not so much. You’ve been talking to the Tha’alani for the last three hours—what have they told you?”
“Nothing.”
She looked across to Severn. He shrugged. “Rennick thought it was relevant to ask them everything they knew about you,” he replied.
“Oh. They don’t know much.”
“She called you here to help, and they don’t know much?” He didn’t trouble to keep the scorn from his voice, but on the other hand, no scorn would probably be no voice, for Rennick.
“They don’t know much they want to share at any rate,” she told him. “And I’m not your job. They are. You saw the casualties,” she added.
He nodded, wincing slightly. “They’re all going to survive. One of the men got up and walked away.”
“He was probably less injured than he looked.”
“Private Neya?”
“Yes?”
“Learn to lie better. Or don’t bother. Bad lies insult the intelligence of the listener, and I believe that you don’t want to insult me.”
This wasn’t exactly true, but Kaylin was too tired to start a fruitless argument, which was generally when she started them. “Humans almost killed those men,” she told him, meeting and holding his gaze. “Humans saved them. We’re done with that now. Move on.”
“And where, exactly, would you like me to move?”
“To the part where you stop humans from wanting to kill any of the Tha’alani ever again. We brought you here because we thought you’d see a bit more of what the Tha’alani are like. Today wasn’t their usual day, so that’s a wash. But none of them want to hurt you and they certainly don’t want to read your mind.
“They just want to be left alone. They tried to save the city, and we’re going to make sure that people understand that.”
One of the Tha’alani men in the room stood. “It is to address this concern that we are here,” he said, in stilted Elantran. He didn’t bow to her, which was good. “But there is some concern.”
“We’re here to address those concerns,” she said, wearing her best Hawk’s face although her head really was throbbing. “Humans have…stories. Those stories aren’t like the Tha’alaan,” she added softly. “They’re not real stories. People don’t experience them as memories, and they certainly don’t live them the way some people can live old memories in the Tha’alaan.”
“These stories, are they true?”
Kaylin looked to Severn for help. As a rule, she didn’t ask for rescue, having learned early that it was pointless. But when it came to people, Severn was just better. He always had been.
Ybelline, however, lifted a hand. “Scoros,” she said, “sit. The stories that she speaks of are not true in the sense that our stories are true. They change with time, they change with the teller of the tale.”
He frowned.
“Scoros,” Ybelline added to Kaylin, “is a teacher. He teaches the Tha’alanari, and he is respected. He understands what they will face.”
Kaylin nodded.
“It is however very seldom that my kin are exposed to your stories, and some explanation will be required.”
Severn shrugged again. “You were always better at creating stories than I was,” he told her.
“But not better at lying.”
“No. This however is yours.”
She pressed her palms into her closed eyes for a minute. Then she nodded.
“Understand,” she said, addressing all of the Tha’alani present, “that humans don’t have the Tha’alaan. We don’t have access to perfect memories. I can’t remember clearly what I was doing eight years ago—but if you wanted to, you could. I can construct what I was probably doing eight years ago. And if it was utterly necessary, I could ask Ybelline to actually sort through my memories and tell me what I was doing—but without the help of the Tha’alani, if my twelve-year-old self wasn’t doing something in easy reach of Records, there’s no way for me to be certain.”
Scoros nodded; clearly this was nothing new to him.
“This is especially true of people who have had no sleep for a few years.”
Scoros frowned and Ybelline said, “She is not being literal.”
His frown deepened slightly, and then eased. Ybelline was speaking Elantran for their benefit,
but, clearly, was speaking in other ways as well.
“The oldest of our stories are probably religious stories,” Kaylin continued. “Stories about the gods.”
“These are the ones you remember?”
“Me? Not exactly. When I say oldest, I mean, the oldest ones that anyone knows about.” She winced and gave up. “The earliest stories we’re told, we’re told as children, usually by our parents, sometimes by our friends. Children don’t always have enough experience to understand very, very complicated things, and stories are a way of explaining the world to them.”
“But they’re not true.”
“Well, not exactly.”
“We do not understand what you are explaining, then.”
Scoros looked at Ybelline. Ybelline looked at Kaylin. Kaylin looked at the tabletop.
And Rennick stood up with a disgusted snort.
“Rennick, sit down,” Kaylin told him.
Rennick didn’t appear to hear her. Given the color he was turning, it might not have been an act.
“Castelord,” he said, managing somehow to be polite and icy at the same time. “Do you have no art, here?”
She frowned. “Art?”
“Paintings. Sculptures. Tapestries. Art.”
“We have,” Scoros answered. His voice had dropped a few degrees as well.
“If what I’ve heard today is true, the Tha’alani have perfect memory. Anything, at any time, that any of you have experienced, you can recall. True?”
“Rennick—”
“No, Private. If I am to do my job, as you so quaintly call it, I need to understand what I’m working with, or working against. You aren’t even asking the right questions.”
“Rennick—”
“Kaylin, no,” Severn said, his quiet voice still audible over the echoes of Rennick’s much louder tirade. “He’s right. My apologies for the interruption, Mr. Rennick. Please continue.”
“Is it true?”
Scoros was silent for a moment. Kaylin imagined that he was trying to figure out what Rennick’s game was. She could sympathize. “It is as you say,” Scoros said.
“What is the purpose of your art?”
“Pardon?”
“Why do you make it? The sculptures? The paintings? The tapestries?”
“What does this have to do with your stories?”
“Everything.”
“I am not an artist,” Scoros replied. “But I will attempt to answer. We create these things because they are beautiful.”
“Beautiful? More beautiful than life? More beautiful than what’s real?”
Scoros’s silence was longer and quieter. When he spoke again, the chill in the words was gone. “Yes. And no. They are not the same.” The tail end of what might have been a question colored the last word.
“But you could find beautiful things, surely, in the—what did you call it? The Tha’alaan?”
“Yes. That is what it is called.”
“Can you?”
“Yes. But it is not a simple matter of demanding beauty and having it surrendered to us. We are not the same person. No two of us think exactly the same way, although to the deaf—”
“Scoros,” Ybelline said softly.
“To the humans,” Scoros corrected himself. “To your kin, we might seem thus. We do not have the range of…differences. Even so, some memories will strike different Tha’alani as beautiful but not all.”
“Yes, well. You can find beauty, but you choose to create it instead?”
“Some of my kin do so, yes.”
“Imagine, for a moment, what it is like to be my kin.”
“Rennick—”
Scoros, however, stood. The two men faced each other across the length of the table. Severn kicked Kaylin under the same table, motioning for silence.
“He doesn’t understand what they’ve suffered,” she hissed.
“Then allow Scoros to make that clear, if that is their wish.”
Scoros’s antennae were weaving frantically in the air, and Ybelline’s were doing a similar dance. But watching the two, Kaylin could see the differences in their gestures, these antennae that had seemed so much like a threat. Ybelline’s movements were graceful and exact, as if each rise and fall of stalk was perfectly timed and deliberate. Scoros’s looked like whips.
Two conversations. Two arguments.
Scoros turned to Rennick. “I spend little time imagining anything else,” he told the playwright. Ice was gone; fire was present. He was angry. “My job—my duty—is to prepare our young for life in your world. And it is a life that they are not suited to live. They do not lie, they do not fear, they do not hoard. Nor do they steal or kill.
“Imagine what it is like to be you? What is it, exactly, that you do that allows you to come here and speak thus to us? You create these—these lies—and you spread them. And you are proud of this. Do you think we want to serve—”
“Scoros.” If Kaylin had ever wondered whether or not Ybelline’s kindness was based in strength, she had her answer. There was steel there.
“What do you value?” Scoros snapped, retreating from the previous sentence as if it were death. “Gold. Precious gems. Fine cloth—things. How do you reassure yourself of your own worth? By soliciting the admiration of people who value only that much. You spoke of love, in your travesty of—of—disinformation. What do you know about love? Your love is little better than base greed and insecurity! You want the regard of your peers, but you allow none to be peers. You want impossible, stupid things.
“You kill each other, rape each other, steal from each other—how are you to speak our truths? How are you to decide what beauty means?”
“Because it doesn’t matter what it means to you, or your kin. It only matters what it means to mine.” Rennick folded his arms across his chest. He appeared to be entirely unfazed by the fury that he had provoked. Kaylin, head pounding, couldn’t say the same. “I don’t demand that you like us. I don’t care if you respect us.” He shrugged. “You wouldn’t be the first race to look down on us, you certainly won’t be the last.
“And you interrupted me,” he added quietly.
Scoros’s eyes rounded. He was actually shocked.
“So, clearly you’ve thought about some of what it means to be us. Let me direct your thoughts to other aspects. You speak of fear—how do you recognize it if you don’t feel it yourself?”
“A fair question, Scoros,” Ybelline said pointedly. “Please answer it.”
“We understand fear,” he replied stiffly. “Nothing that lives is without fear. We fear for our sick, when the doctors have done all they can. We fear for our children. We fear—”
“Do you fear death?”
“No. Pain, perhaps, but not death.”
“Do you fear to be forgotten?”
“We will never be forgotten, while even one of us lives.”
Rennick lifted a hand. “And the rest?”
“The rest?”
“Greed. What you call human love. You don’t feel it?”
“We’ve all felt greed,” was the equally stiff reply. “We were all children once.”
“And love?”
“We do not mean the same thing by that word.”
“Very well. Speak of your meaning, mine is no longer an issue here.”
Scoros’s antennae waved again in the air, and Ybelline’s snapped back.
Grudging every word, and speaking in the stilted way of Tha’alani who are using language they are not familiar with, Scoros said. “It is joy, to us.”
“And what do you love?”
“My people. Our children,” he added. “Their lives. Our parents. Our siblings. Our…husbands, if we have them, or our wives, if we have them.”
“Plural?”
“No one person can be all things to all people. Some have tried, and some try—but it is youthful, and experience teaches much.”
“I…see.” Rennick was silent for a moment, gathering his thoughts. Kaylin highly do
ubted that he would stay that way, but she was fascinated in spite of herself. She was also grateful, because if there was a diplomatic incident today, it wouldn’t be her fault.
“Imagine lives without that love,” Rennick finally said. It was not what she expected. “Without the certainty of kin. We create art, and not all of it is beautiful to all people—but you have said that this is true of your kin as well.
“We don’t have perfect memory. We don’t have any faith that we’ll be remembered when we’re dead, and yes, I know it makes no sense, but we do care. When we talk of making our mark on the world, we simply mean we want to be remembered. Remembered fondly,” he added.
“Because we don’t have perfect memory, and we also lack the Tha’alaan, we have no way of truly understanding each other’s lives. We don’t even understand our own parents or the decisions they made.” This last sentence was accompanied by a twisted, bitter smile that spoke of experience. “What we want, we sometimes can’t explain to ourselves, let alone others. But some of us try anyway, and the best way to do that, for many of us, is with words.
“My art,” he said, “if you can call it that, is just such an attempt. People will take the words you’ve read—my people—and they will speak them in front of an audience, and they’ll speak them as if they were their own words. They’ll lend the words emotion, strength, that you can’t see.”
“But they’ll be lies.”
“Yes. And no. They will be like your paintings, or like your sculptures—they will be true, in some fashion. They will evoke something that the reality itself can’t evoke as cleanly or as easily. We don’t consider them lies, just a different way at getting at a truth that might be too big—or too small—to be seen.
“People are busy. They know their own problems and their own fears and they have no easy way of letting everyone else know what they are. And if I’m being truthful—which you seem to prize—most of us simply don’t care what other people’s fears are. Ours take up too much of our time. But when someone watches one of my plays, they leave those problems behind. They signal, by being in the audience, that they’re willing to be lifted out of their own lives, and concerns.