Choices (15 page)

Cassandra sensed that the lesson had gone far
enough. “Look, Amalie,” she said, “you don’t have to do anything
different. Not right away. Think about what we’ve said. Tomorrow
you can try taking a place in the cell. One of us will observe.
We’ll see how it goes.”

“We’ll work in stages,” Tomasz said, “one
step at a time. You tell us when you’re ready for the next step.” I
had looked up at Cassandra’s words, and he claimed my attention,
smiling into my eyes. He was doing something, almost like Dominic,
a feeling of his hand on me, but as soon as I noticed it he
stopped.

I caught my breath. “All right,” I said. My
voice was shaky. “But I’m afraid I’ll be very slow.”

“You won’t be,” Matilda said. “Your mind is
too quick.” She saw how her attempt at gallantry had
unintentionally put more pressure on. “But it doesn’t matter. You
have twenty years of adult life on Terra to unlearn, and years to
master our ways. No matter how slow you are here, it can’t be worse
than that.”

The cell did little work that morning. Most
of the time had been spent on me. In the short period remaining
before dinner I observed as before, thinking all the while of what
it would be like on the other side of the process.

The next day I began to find out. The tension
building up in me had only increased overnight; by the time we’d
gone through the sunrise prayers, noon ceremony and the eclipse, I
was rigid with anxiety. I stood in the group around Matilda while
Raquel took my place as overseer. I held Cassandra’s hand on one
side, Paolo’s on the other, developing a simultaneous communion
with them. There were the protective, friendly feelings they always
showed to me, but now I could sense their other emotions as well.
Paolo had a slightly contemptuous reaction, a belief that I was
making too much fuss over very little. Cassandra was still maternal
but bored, thinking this would have to pass soon, like toilet
training.

I was being exposed to their entire
personalities, not just the considerate side they usually showed.
Before I could begin to extend the communion to Tomasz, my hands
started to pull away involuntarily. Paolo let go; Cassandra clung.
The cell broke up, even before Matilda had unsheathed the
prism.

“Amalie,” Matilda said, “once you have formed
communion, you must stay in it until I release you. You could get
hurt, or hurt one of us.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, for what seemed like the
millionth time since I came to La Sapienza. “Maybe I should just
observe—”

“No, Amalie.” Matilda spoke sharply. “You
have to try. The longer you put it off, the harder it will become,
until you wrap yourself up in barriers that are impenetrable.”

Paolo knew what had caused me to fail. “I
admit it,” he said. “I’m an evil bitch.” He laughed affectedly to
put me at ease. “It is possible to be an empath and still be a
nasty piece of work. You should see—you will see—what I think about
everyone else. Compared to that, what I think of you is highly
complimentary, believe me.”

I began to relax, was able to smile. “My
thoughts aren’t always so nice either,” I said.

“Good!” Cassandra practically shouted. “Now
that our rottenness is thoroughly established, can we try
again?”

This time I maintained the communion,
although it was difficult, like holding my hands in water that was
too hot. I forced myself to stay in the bond, dissociating myself
from the pain, while Matilda unsheathed the dagger with its large
prism and held it up to the light from the window, bending it into
her eyes and bringing us all into the greater entity that was our
five selves, magnified by the light’s power. The increased
brain-wave activity made the pain worse. I gritted my teeth,
shaking uncontrollably with the effort. Raquel, monitoring,
observed my pounding heartbeat and ragged, gasping breaths, and
called a halt.

When my hands were free I jammed them under
my arms, hugging myself protectively, wrapping myself up as best I
could, my body imitating what my mental self was trying to do. Up
until now I had had only partial communion with the people here. I
had encountered their polite, solicitous side, the part of them
that wanted me to succeed, that welcomed me, that made allowance
for my Terran deficiencies.

Full communion means something very
different. I had it with Dominic, but that was a special case. We
loved each other so much that we saw no failings in each other,
nothing to criticize. We had no wrongs to forgive the other, no
faults to overlook, no annoyances to put up with. Obviously that is
not how two human beings feel about each other very often. And with
the people here, there were all the natural human irritants,
characteristics in me they didn’t like, traits of theirs that
bothered me or that made me uncomfortable.

On Terra, among the ungifted, the flow had
been all one way, as I read people’s thoughts and felt the
inevitable hurt or discomfort. My own responses had had to be
endured and contained, left unspoken, with no believable way to
account for my knowledge. Here, I encountered full personalities in
a two-way street, a highway of onrushing emotions, reactions and
counter-reactions. I had reached the point in my training where I
must accept people as they are, not expect them to conceal
everything else beneath the outermost artificial layer of good
manners. I must receive their true feelings, and show mine, not to
wound or to try to change people, but simply as a way to relax in
each other’s presence, one adult among others with
crypta
.

Out in the world it would be different. The
shielding I had learned was imperative there, a social lubricant
like answering “Fine,” when people ask how you are, like saying
please and thank you. But inside La Sapienza, where we used our
crypta
constantly and depended on full communion for our
work, we had no such luxury. We must come to grips with each other,
accept each other’s imperfections. It was indeed, as Dominic had
quoted to me, living without skin. And it had burned.

Everyone had experienced my distress just
now, so no one was really angry with me. But there was a sense of
frustration. No Terran had ever joined a
crypta
cell, so
nobody had been prepared for the fact that, while I possessed the
raw power of a sibyl, my flaws were those of an untrained child. I
had the inhibitions of a girl of thirteen just beginning to feel
the strength of her gift, without the background of growing up here
to accustom me to the realities of this world.

“I have a suggestion,” Tomasz said, when
everyone was over the first, retching waves of sickness from the
pain I had radiated out to them. “Why don’t we work with Amalie one
at a time?” He sensed Matilda forming a derisive reply, and quickly
defended himself. “I’ll go last, if that’s what you’re thinking,
but it makes sense, doesn’t it?”

I knew what that partly unspoken exchange had
been about: the Midwinter festival. Full communion encompasses
everything. If there was sexual tension between people, in
communion it would have to be admitted and dealt with. But I could
see, as everyone could, that Tomasz’s suggestion had been made
innocently. He had thought that, by working with just one other
person, I would be able to adjust to the initial pain more easily.
And I agreed with his diagnosis.

“I think that would help me,” I said,
grateful to Tomasz for the idea. It was Matilda, the leader, who
must approve. “Could we try it?” I asked.

Matilda thought it over, staring at me as she
speculated. “Why not? Your guess is as good as mine as to what will
work.” She looked around the room in her challenging way. “Who
wants to go first?”

I was glad when Paolo volunteered. “We’ll
start tomorrow after breakfast. Have a good night’s rest, because
you’ll be in for an exciting morning.”

After the pain and shock of the previous
attempts, communion with Paolo was a relief. We sat on my bed, held
hands, and entered each other’s mind. It did not have the immediacy
of my communion with Dominic; it was more like all-night sessions
at college. Even with plenty of liquor to loosen us up, they had
always begun as conversation, not instant oneness.
You’ll get
there
, Paolo said.
Just let it flow
.

A lot of the communion was simply learning
about Paolo’s life: his position as heir to the di Battistas; his
eventual duty to marry and produce an heir, as Dominic had faced;
his refusal to attend the ‘Graven Military Academy.
Oh,
please
, he said,
what a nightmare. Even being Margrave
Aranyi’s adjutant wouldn’t make up for the tedium of parade
drill
. Coming to La Sapienza had saved Paolo from an
impossible choice, marriage or joining the Royal Guards.
The
longer I stay here, the better off I am. If I become a seer I won’t
have to marry, just father a brat or two, nothing
permanent
.

Despite such feelings, Paolo, like all of
them, was proud of his lineage. Everyone, in addition to
sympathizing with my life as a telepath among the ungifted, had
been appalled to learn I had no family. My mother, who had borne me
late in life, had died shortly before I came to Eclipsis. My father
had been dead for almost twenty years. With birth on Terra so
restricted, I had no sisters or brothers, no aunts or uncles, no
cousins, no living grandparents. It was an isolation, an
abandonment that frightened them all, more than anything else I had
been through. It was unimaginable to them, here where family was
the one sure refuge against the world, and the source of everyone’s
identity.

We will be your family
, Paolo said,
offering me the most valuable thing I lacked.
We will be your
brothers and sisters, your cousins. And Edwige is your mother
now
. He laughed aloud.
Although you look as if some other
‘Graven lord were your father, not that old hermaphrodite Edwige
married
.

On Terra it had never occurred to me to feel
deprived of what nobody else had. But now, from everybody’s concern
for me, I was developing a strange feeling, a desire for this
enveloping web of connections that any acknowledged child of
‘Graven could claim. Not all children born out of wedlock are
considered illegitimate. A father who claims paternity in a formal
announcement confers the status of
natural
son or
daughter, with full privileges of ‘Graven inheritance after any
children born of his wife. Paolo’s joke made me see that people
were beginning to think of me as one of these natural children, a
comfortable way to explain my gift and my eyelids, although it was
unthinkable for a ‘Graven lord not to have acknowledged any child,
boy or girl, whose looks promised such potential.

I’m not, you know
, I said.
It’s
just a quirk of genetics
.

Most people here had some familiarity with
the laws of heredity. They knew that some of the first settlers on
Eclipsis must have carried the recessive genes for
crypta
and inner eyelids, and that in such a limited population,
individuals had been conceived bearing two sets of the gene,
leading to its physical manifestation. And while my appearance had
been surprising, almost miraculous at first, they understood now
that with literally billions of people on Terra, it was simply a
mathematical probability—remote, but possible—that at least one
Terran could have inherited the rare recessive genes from both
parents.

While people knew this intellectually, they
could not help reacting to me emotionally in a more immediately
comprehensible way, as if I were indeed the natural daughter of
‘Graven. My appearance and my gift led them to believe that I had
assimilated more than I had of their customs. They thought that my
acclimatization to Eclipsian ways would come easily, intuitively.
They assumed, in fact, that comprehension of the Eclipsian outlook
was buried in me, hidden but there, inherited along with my
recessive traits, and that a normal life on Eclipsis, among my own
kind, would bring my knowledge to the surface. It was an
expectation that would lead to disaster.

In the meantime I gained confidence, seeing
that I could show my whole being to Paolo, could receive his
criticism of me or his differing with some of my opinions, and
remain unscathed.
So what?
Paolo kept saying, every time I
discovered some minute point of disagreement. We are all
individuals. We can’t think alike about everything, but only agree
on mutual respect while accepting each other as much as
possible.

Like many people here, Paolo envied me the
freedom I had enjoyed on Terra, to choose among so many kinds of
work. Unlike Eclipsians, I had not been forced to decide between
marriage or, for a man, the military, on one side, and the seminary
on the other, while still a teenager. Surely, over time, I must
have found work that was satisfying. Paolo asked me many questions
about my Terran jobs, confused by my lack of interest in the
subject.
How could they all bore you?

Because I’m lazy
, I said.
I
don’t like work
. I no longer felt such an oppressive sense of
guilt. Unless the work was fascinating, engaging all of my
intellect and imagination, I preferred a life of leisure,
unobtainable as that might be, or at least nothing too
demanding.

“Don’t marry Margrave Aranyi, if that’s how
you feel,” Paolo said, leaning back against the pillows and
stretching as he came out of the communion. “‘Gravina Aranyi would
have a lifetime of hard labor ahead of her, appeasing all those
bereaved families.” He meant the families of the victims of
Dominic’s duels. I laughed dutifully, hoping to acquire the
equanimity to accept gibes, even on this sensitive subject, from my
new “brother.”

In a few days it was Cassandra’s turn at
communion. Cassandra was tougher than Paolo, and she had the
woman’s natural lack of sympathy with her own sex. If I had been
isolated on Terra, she thought, at least I had been free not to
marry, and to choose when and if to have children. I wouldn’t have
had to struggle, as she had, to be accepted at a place like La
Sapienza in order to escape the fate that otherwise awaited her,
and every woman with
crypta
.