The Interview

Yan sat at the kitchen table of the dorm apartment that she shared with Sylva, staring down at the three thick pieces of colorful cardstock that she had gotten in the mail. They were arranged out on the table in a spread in front of her, one a deep blue with white text, one a forest green with black text, and one a stark white with red text and gold along the edges of the card. They all said approximately the same thing: her name, Yan BarCarran, and the time and place for her interview.

She kept shuffling the cards around on the table, trying to put them in some sort of order. Though officially they weren't labeled with who they were from, she knew. The blue card was from the Academy itself, offering her the opportunity to eventually become a staff member. Her own mentor, Master Farber, had scrawled a note on the back of it.

"Yan, I know you have at least one other compelling offer (& maybe more!) so I don't expect you to take me up on this, but I had to put in at least a token gesture to keep you in my clutches :) "

The green card was even less of a surprise, though when she had first laid eyes on it, she had almost cried tears of relief. It was the offer from the xenobiology team, exactly as she had been hoping for.

It was the white and red card that troubled her. She picked up the card and flipped it over and over in her hands, feeling the paper and the slight indents that the ink had made-- letterpressed, not just printed. It was a luxe thing, higher quality than the other two. On a whim, she reached out her power to touch the gilt on the edge of the card, investigating it on a molecular level. It had the familiar sensation of real gold, not just ink.

She rearranged the cards again on the table, in a column going down. Green, white, blue.

Yan knew in her heart that she wouldn't take the offer from Master Farber to stay at the Academy. She appreciated the gesture, and the strength of its sentiment was almost enough to make her consider it, or at least feel guilty for not considering it, but she didn't believe that she would make a good teacher.

Looking at the white card with red letters put a sinking feeling in her stomach. She didn't know for sure what it was, but she had a terrible guess. First Sandreas was taking apprentices. The red on the card was the exact same shade as the cape he had been wearing when she caught a glimpse of him in the restaurant. She couldn't imagine who else would send such an elaborate invitation.

Sylva came into the kitchen, turned on the electric kettle, then came up behind Yan and leaned on the back of Yan's chair, putting her elbows on Yan's shoulders and her chin on the top of Yan's head. "Still fiddling with those?"

"You have it easy," Yan said.

Sylva scoffed. "Sure, getting one offer is 'easy', but getting three..." There was a distinct note of jealousy in her voice.

Yan disentangled herself from Sylva's elbows and turned around in her chair to look at her. "Are you mad at me for this?"

"No," Sylva said. "Mostly at myself." She stared past Yan, at the decorative clock on the wall.

"Hey," Yan said, grabbing her arm. "I think you're perfect. I'd give you an apprenticeship any day of the week."

Sylva's laugh was bitter, but she tried to smile through it. "Thanks."

The kettle boiled. Sylva made herself some tea, then slid into the creaky wooden chair next to Yan. She pulled the three cards over to herself and did the same mental calculations that they had both been doing all morning.

"You should take xenobio," Sylva said. "It's not really even a choice. We'd both be in Yora, we could get a place together..." She steadfastly ignored the white card, perhaps because of the air of mystery it held. Sylva was much more into the concrete possibilities than the abstract ones.

"I'll go to all the interviews, at least," Yan said. "I have to know."

Sylva nodded. She pulled her own card out from her cassock pocket, laid it on the table next to Yan's. Hers was a pale blue with black text, slightly battered from all the handling it had taken in her pocket. "IKRB won't be so bad."

"I'm sure you'll love it." IKRB was the Imperial Knowledge Review Board, a branch of the government dedicated to reviewing and approving mostly theological texts. "You've always had an ear for language."

Sylva heaved a sigh into her cup of tea. "I guess. Did you tell your family about this?"

"I told them that I got the two knowns and a mystery. I'm sure they think I'm going to take xenobio. They won't get back to me until they're back at a station though." She glanced at the calendar. "Probably will be a couple days."

"So, not until after interviews."

"Yeah."

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Yan dressed in her nicest uniform for her third and final interview, the mysterious one that had left her painfully distracted. The line between anticipation and fear was a thin one, and she could never tell if she was crossing it; the two emotions jittered her in almost the same way.

The interview was at noon in the nicest building on campus, the one where all the top Academy officials kept their offices. Yan had to sign in and be escorted by a guard into a waiting room.

There were two other students there, sitting in chairs against the wall. She recognized both of them, knew their names and faces, but they weren't anything more than classmates. She probably hadn't had anything more than a passing conversation with either of them in years.

The first student was Sid Welslak, who was clearly trying to appear nonchalant, with his legs stretched out before him and a wide smile on his face. He was a pale man, shaved completely bald, but with thick eyebrows over a pair of sturdy looking glasses. Yan knew he was deaf, a fact that interested her in a distant kind of way. As a spacer, she had a limited command of sign language, though most of her vocabulary was technical. In order to be allowed to go on spacewalks, she had needed to learn the language well enough to communicate in event of radio failure. Regardless of Yan's proficiency with sign, Sid had some way of understanding when people spoke to him aloud, though Yan didn't know by what mechanism; she hadn't been nosy enough to ask.

Kino Mejia sat next to Sid, twisting a piece of string vigorously between her fingers, some kind of nervous tic. Yan's impression of her was that she was intensely quiet and kept to herself, but came to midnight worship a lot. Yan saw her there basically every time that she decided to go. Kino had tanned skin, and two long braids of straight dark hair hung down past her ears. She stared at Yan as she came in but didn't say anything.

"Hi," Yan said aloud, trying to break the awkward stiffness of the moment.

"Hi you," Sid signed back at her.

"Who's in there?" Yan signed back, struggling for a second to pull the signs from her distant memory. Sid grinned and shrugged.

"You have bad sign," he signed back, deliberately slowly for her. His face was extremely expressive, and he leaned forward in his seat. Yan tried not to be too offended.

"No p-r-a-c-t-i-c-e."

Kino watched this exchange without saying anything, though she was definitely paying attention; her eyes flicked between the two of them, and her fingers twitched along with Yan's when she fingerspelled the last word.

Their short conversation came to an end when Yan felt a wave of someone's power wash over her, cresting and passing through her body. She shivered, and the door at the end of the room swung open.

Immediately, Yan stiffened in her seat, clenching her hands at her sides so hard that her fingers dug little marks into her palm. There, holding the door open, was the man from the restaurant. The pirate. Yan stared at him, and he stared back at her.

Now that she could see him up close in a well lit room, Yan realized that he was rather ugly, with a splotchy face. The corner of his lip twitched in a suppressed smile. He was mocking her. This minute shift in expression made Yan more angry than afraid, suddenly, wiping even the thought of her upcoming interview (and who that would surely be with) almost completely out of her mind.

"Sid Welslak," the pirate said, and jerked his head at Sid. Yan momentarily paused her staring at the pirate and gave Sid a quick and encouraging smile, though he noticed her tension and his eyes traveled between her face and the pirate, hesitating for a fraction of a second.

Sid headed into the office, and the pirate shut the door behind him, leaving Yan, Kino, and himself alone in the antechamber. He leaned against the wall serenely, observing Yan and Kino, but not looking directly at them. Yan decided to do some observation of her own, and she took a few deep breaths and centered herself, trying to calm down enough to really focus on her own power. She took a tendril of it and sent it across the room. When she had seen him the other day, she suspected that he was carrying a gun. She at least wanted to confirm that suspicion, so she pressed the tendril of power past the first layer of his clothes, to see if it was tucked just underneath the hem of his black jacket, accessible through the pocket if necessary.

Her power found its mark, passing through the tingling cold metal, but she overshot slightly in her haste and she brushed against the pirate's skin. The contact buzzed along the line of power Yan had drawn between the two of them, and Yan jumped back as though she had been stung, pulling her power back into herself and looking warily at him. She hadn't known that he was a sensitive. She shouldn't have been surprised by that, but she was.

For his own part, the pirate did not outwardly react to her probing, continuing to lean against the wall nonchalantly, but Yan still felt observed. Every so often, while they waited, she felt him push his power out in a non-directed wave, clearly checking the building, keeping track of who was where and doing what.

It was a stiff and tense wait for Yan, as neither the pirate nor Kino seemed intent on making conversation. The only movement in the room was Kino winding her piece of string over and over through her fingers, a relentless fidget.

Finally, the door opened and Sid came out. He smiled at Yan, knocked the underside of his chin with his knuckles-- chin up-- and headed out of the waiting room.

"Kino Mejia," the pirate said, and Kino went in, leaving Yan alone with the pirate.

She couldn't decide if she wanted to speak to him or not. Now that Kino was out of the room, his amusement at her obvious discomfort showed far more clearly on his face, but he didn't seem inclined to break the silence either. Yan went as far as to narrow her eyes at him, and his smirk grew more pronounced. She looked away.

After a long time, Kino emerged, nodded to Yan, and left. As Yan stood to enter the interview room, the pirate looked at her directly.

"Good luck, Ms. BarCarran," he said. She hadn't paid attention to his voice before, but it was low, and softer than she had thought.

She scurried into the interview room.

First Sandreas was sitting behind a wooden desk, with a window overlooking the campus green at his back. The light in the room was dim, and it was bright outside, so Sandreas's face was cast in a dull shadow, obscuring some of his expression. There was a chair in front of the desk, and Yan wasn't sure if she was supposed to sit or not. She had never been face to face with someone this important before.

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"Please, take a seat," Sandreas said, gesturing.

Yan almost stumbled in her rush to obey.

In front of Sandreas on the desk was a manilla folder labeled with her name. He folded his hands on top of it.

"I assume you know who I am," he said. "Or do I need to make a formal introduction?" There was a touch of humor in his voice, but Yan was too nervous to find it funny.

"It's an honor to meet you, First Sandreas," she said.

He smiled at her, his head slightly tilted as though he were considering something. "You come highly recommended by your mentor, Ms. BarCarran," Sandreas said after a second. Between this opening and the pirate outside, the whole process seemed designed to make Yan as uncomfortable as possible. But she put a smile on her face and tried to respond politely.

"I'm glad to hear it," she said.

"And, for my own part, I liked your project very much."

"Thank you."

"I do have a question though," he said. Yan tried to keep still.

"I'd be happy to answer," she said, though she had no idea what he was talking about. Her project was almost purely technical, requiring almost nothing in the way of artistic interpretation.

"What was the punchline of the joke?" he asked.

"I'm sorry, I don't know what you mean." She had an inkling of what he was asking about, and her heart beat faster.

"You clearly found your own project funny. I could feel the spirit in which it was made. I'm just wondering what exactly you intended."

"Was it theologically unsound?" Yan asked. She had created the illusion of life, after all. If the leader of the populated universe thought that was an affront to God...

Sandreas laughed. "If it was truly heretical, I'm sure your mentor would have stopped you somewhere in the planning stages. You took pride and joy in making the work, I could tell. I just want to know what you were personally thinking."

Yan took a deep breath, tried to steady herself before answering, deciding to go ahead and admit to what she had been joking about. "I couldn't really decide what the real joke was. 'It's not alive, but...'" She trailed off for a second, stared above Sandreas's shoulders as she thought of the best way to express the feeling she had while designing her fishbowl. "’That which is not living can never die’, maybe. Or, ‘it's not alive, but nobody can tell the difference.’"

"That isn't really true, though," Sandreas said mildly.

She nodded, feeling slightly bolstered. "That's why it's funny. Of course you can tell it's not alive, if you look at it with the power, and it can be destroyed just like anything else. I thought what was important was that, you know, we're always striving to master what God created at the beginning of time, and we're never going to get there, but it's in the trying that--"

Sandreas held up his hand and Yan fell silent. "I don't need a lecture on theology right this second. Perhaps after you accept my offer for apprenticeship, you can lecture me at length."

Yan didn't have a response ready, so she floundered for a second. "Should I?"

"Should you accept?" Sandreas leaned back in his seat, the light from the window illuminating the fine strands of the top of his hair. "That depends on a lot of things, I suppose."

Yan nodded. Of course it did.

"I understand that you have other offers?"

"One from xenobiology, one from the Academy staff."

"Good, good." He seemed sincere when he said this. "I do want you to make a real consideration of which you pick. This is not an easy job. I don't live a life that I would force upon the unwilling."

"What would the apprenticeship involve?" Yan asked.

Sandreas laughed. "You weren't even born back when I was Second or apprentice to First Herrault, so I suppose I can't point you to the granular details of that ancient history." He paused for a second, then launched into a speech that he had probably already given twice today.

"You'd be training to take my place, just like most other apprenticeships. The fine details of what you'd be doing on a day to day basis aren't something that I can give to you, because it changes depending on what's happening. Generally speaking, though, you'll learn the ins and outs of power around the Empire, you'll travel, you'll speak to people, you'll learn how to be a ruler. When you know enough of how to comport yourself, I'll send you out as my emissary in places where that's needed.

"I'll teach you what I can. You'll learn a lot more on your own, as I did, and you'll try hard not to make mistakes that ruin people's lives. It's a lot of responsibility.

"It's difficult, often lonely work. You will have access to information that almost no one else has. You will make decisions that can change the lives of entire planets full of people. You will see things that you can't un-see, learn things you can't un-learn, and do things that you can't undo.

"You'll be in danger much of the time. Especially early on, you'll probably look like an easy target for assassination." Though his face was still shadowed, a pained look flashed across it, an unpleasant memory, maybe. Yan recalled that there had been at least one attempt on Sandreas's life, several years ago. Perhaps there had been even more that she didn't know about.

"You'll stop being like just everyone else. You'll have to give your whole self to this apprenticeship." He stopped speaking and looked across at her. Yan, who had been taking it all in, hadn't expected him to stop, and fumbled her next sentence out.

"Is it worth it?"

"Are you asking me, or are you asking for yourself?"

"You," she said. It wasn't as though Sandreas knew enough about her to judge.

He smiled, a distant look. "Yes." As he said this, Yan felt that wave of power from the pirate outside pass through her again, another check. She shifted uncomfortably in her seat. "It's brought me greater joy and greater pain than I could have ever imagined when I sat where you sit now. I can't imagine living a different life, and I wouldn't want to."

Yan nodded.

"Do you have any other questions? This is your chance to ask. Speak as freely as you like."

"Why did you pick me?" she asked. Some of the panic and anxiety had faded, and she was able to ask with a clear, contemplative voice.

"Can anyone explain the whims of God?" Sandreas asked, then shook his head. "Something in your project, something in your being, called to me. It's not something that can be put into words. I'm sure if you were to go out into the exhibition hall and look at the projects, you'd find someone whose spirit called to you in the same way. I don't recommend you do that, though."

"Why not?"

"Because then you'd be forced to confront the fact that you've spent ten years going to school with someone with whom you could have worked perfectly, but you didn't." He shrugged.

"Did you look through the projects when you were a student?"

"God, no. Not in the same way. I looked at them as spectacle only," he said. "And I'm glad I didn't look at them in the power, for the reasons previously discussed."

Yan wanted to continue prying on this point, because she felt fairly certain that if she searched through the projects in the hall, the only one she would find that would call to her was Sylva's. Or, maybe Sandreas was right, and the same thing that called to him in Sid and Kino would also call to Yan. She tried to clear this train of thought from her head, nodded, and focused back on asking a different question.

"What's the salary?" she asked.

Sandreas laughed at that. "I'm always surprised by spacer practicality. Two hundred thousand charges a year, as an apprentice."

Yan flinched at the number. It was more than four times the salary of an unattached spacer-- someone who contracted aboard a ship that didn't belong to their family. It was a large sum of money.

"But money is not really an object, of course," Sandreas continued, waving his hand. "You probably won't need to think about it much."

Yan nodded slowly. "How long do I have to make a decision?"

"I'd prefer you tell me within the week." He reached into his pocket and pulled out a card, much like the one that Yan had received inviting her here, though this was smaller. "That's my personal contact information," he said. "I trust you will not abuse it. You can contact me and let me know your decision."

"Are, uh, Kino and Sid going to be your apprentices?"

"They have the same time to decide that you do, and even if they had already told me, I would hardly be at liberty to divulge that information now. Do you know them?"

"Not really, just classes together sometimes."

There was a moment of silence, and Sandreas seemed ready to dismiss her, but Yan had one more question, even though it felt impertinent.

"You said that something in me called to you. Would we actually work well together?"

"Would you like to find out?"

Yan wasn't sure what he meant by this, so she cautiously nodded.

"Very well. Your file here says you enjoy meditation, much more than the average student. Is that correct?"

Yan hadn't realized the file went into that level of personal detail, and her face heated up in embarrassment, her eyes landing on the manilla folder as if staring at it could tell her what other things Sandreas knew about her. "Yeah, I do," she said.

"Would you like to meditate with me? It might give you a better idea of who I am, as more than just a person from the news." When Yan didn't respond after a fraction of a second, he said, "You can say no. This isn't a test."

Yan wasn't opposed, just truly shocked. It was an intimate thing, to meditate with someone, and she had never expected the leader of the Empire to open himself up like that. "I'll do it," Yan said. "Yes."

He smiled and laid his hands on the desk, palm up. Yan scooted forward in her chair and laid her hands on top of his, palm to palm. She could feel the faintest pulse of his heartbeat with her fingertip over the delicate skin of his wrist, and his hands were warm and dry. Soft, too.

"I won't make a racket with my singing," he said with a half laugh, then his face stilled and he closed his eyes, beginning to say a simple prayer out loud. "Oh God, may these things be true: that we may seek You, that we may find You in each wonder of the universe, and that we may be part of Your glory..."

Yan closed her eyes and joined in, the mantra a familiar one. "Oh God..."

They said it several times, focusing only on the words and the feeling of hand-on-hand, until, in a moment of lightness, a dizzy rush, their minds joined together.

Yan could feel Sandreas's body as if it were her own, and she understood his thoughts as they flitted past her, somehow faster than words but clear and full of meaning nonetheless. She could perceive herself as Sandreas understood her: a gangly girl, taller than he was, who had made such a positive impression on... and there was a warm feeling that couldn't be contained or explained... competent, nervous, practical. Perhaps too self reflective for her own good , he thought as he noticed her observing herself through his own lens. He pulled that train of thought away from her grasp.

I don't know you well enough for my thoughts to reflect you as you are , Sandreas thought. And then he waited for Yan to make her move.

She had to think for a second about what to do. What was the best way to figure out how well they would get along? Sandreas followed this line of thinking with a patient amusement, but did not intervene.

Yan called to the surface of her mind a few memories, moments from her life, and they travelled through them together, Yan watching as Sandreas experienced them, feeling how he processed the experience of--

Yan, so small, stepping onto a planet for the first time in her life. The sun above a tempered bronze-- how had she never intimately known that there was a connection between Light and Heat? And suddenly, suddenly, no walls around her. No walls, no suit, nothing but the vastness of the dusty blue sky, the endless sandy horizon, the wind whipping in her face so hard that she felt she couldn't breathe through it. Yan couldn't hold her own emotions at bay as she showed this scene to Sandreas, though she did manage to keep it an instant, frozen in time, waiting to see what he would do next.

He took in the feeling of being in Yan's small body, the overwhelming sensations of being in the world, and he responded as though drawing upon his own memories.

What had he provided, so many years ago, to someone else feeling this lost? What did this small Yan want in this moment? Stability. Direction.

The curiosity would come later, but right now it was reassurance that was needed. Sandreas took control of the memory, more like a dream, and turned Yan around, looking for the adult sure to be behind her. There--

It had been her mother who had taken her down to Terlin, that first time, though only the once. After that, it had always been her uncle Maxes. But here in this memory, Yan clung to her mother's legs as though they could stop her from drowning in the air of this wide open world, and her mother had stroked her braided hair, even as Yan squeezed her eyes closed.

Stability, direction.

It was one of the most powerful memories she had, and Yan was lost in it. Sandreas allowed this to continue, letting Yan's mind drift as it may. His curiosity was a muted undercurrent to their shared thoughts.

Yan thought about her mother for a fraction of a second too long, and, as it always did when that happened, was spun to a different point in her memory. Before she opened her eyes, she could feel in this memory how old she was, how her baby teeth had left holes in her mouth, and how she was up in space again, her hand pressed to a cold window. She was floating there, in a viewing area aboard the Iron Dreams , watching the adults work outside, loading great shipping containers from the station into the bays.

Although Yan knew exactly what was about to happen in this memory, she was powerless to stop it running its course through her brain.

One of the adults outside the ship flew past the window, firing their suit jets to stop when they saw Yan looking out at them. Yan knew it was her mother, though she couldn't see her face through the suit helmet. Yan waved, and her mother signed through the window, "Go to bed."

Tiny Yan stuck out her tongue, and her mother made a shooing motion, then flew away. Yan would have obeyed the instruction to leave, but she stayed to watch her mother work for just one more minute.

One of the jets aboard the shipping containers, the ones that were supposed to send them drifting into the bays, misfired, sending the box that must have massed thousands of tons into a wild and silent spin. Most of the adults scattered out of the way, but Yan's mother was not so lucky.

Yan was as helpless to stop watching as she was to stop the box from crashing into her mother, in a sequence that seemed to stretch and warp and slow, neverending--

Sandreas had the ability to pull out of the memory, though, and he did, dragging both their minds loose from the meditation with an almost physical snap. When they came back to their own bodies, they were both breathing heavily, shaken.

Yan snatched her hands back from his as though she had been burned. She wanted nothing more than to run away.

"Be careful with meditation," Sandreas said to her. "It's a dangerous tool. I hope you found what you were looking for."

Yan was frozen for a second, then she stood rapidly, almost knocking the chair over behind her in her haste. "Thank you for the interview; thank you for paying for dinner," she said, the words tumbling out of her far too quickly in her urge to make a quick exit.

"Dinner?" Sandreas asked, looking confused. Then a spark of recognition lit his face. "Oh, you should thank Halen for that."

"I'll let you know my answer," Yan said, which was as much of a goodbye as she could muster. It was all she could do to walk, rather than run, out of the room. Sandreas’s impression of her was probably irreparably damaged, and she didn't care at all who Halen was; she just wanted to get away as fast as possible.