Afternoon, Fourth of One, Harvest, 236 CR
Gad focused every bit of his attention on the world. The angles of his legs, the straightness of his spine, and the weight on his shoulders was only one thing happening, he told himself. The wind, the smell of the trees, the sounds of school life, these were also part of the moment.
It didn’t help, and in the moment of distraction, he noticed his form slipping and stopped immediately.
“I can’t do this,” he admitted with good humor. “You’re too distracting.”
“Aww.” Altan hopped off of Gad’s shoulders. “I win the bet, then!”
Gad ignored him for a moment to go through the rest of his stretches. Altan copied him, and he paused to enjoy the sight—both of the skinny young man and of the surprise on his face when it turned out that the stretches were hard. It was a fun kind of surprise, though; not the kind of condescending one that so many boys had shown.
Altan was smarter than him by a mile, no matter how hard Gad tried to catch up and keep up, but there was never any condescension on that beautiful, smirking-prone—
“Nadash, Miss Nadash.” Zqar’s voice startled me out of my reading as he walked down the library wing towards me. “It seems your afternoon has, yes, been of contentment, this is good! And joyful for my assistant’s choice of books, mmm.”
I smiled at the Senior Librarian, closing the romance novel I’d been reading. “Gad is such a delight. Which, I want to be clear, I really hadn’t expected, given how much of a jock he is.”
“I might admit to some surprise.”
“At what, the fact that I’m enjoying a gay romance when I’m about zero percent into boys, and also they’re like twenty years younger than me?” I shrugged at Zqar’s amused nod. “I dunno what to say. Dumbass jock gets the hots for the pretty-boy debate-team nerd from the rival school and puts everything into trying to impress him? That’s good shit. The whole genre is great—the library’s got like a hundred of these books, and I’m probably going to read all of them.”
“So busy as you are?”
“Well.” I reddened a little, glancing away from Zqar to the wide window between me and the guardhouse where James had told me, in far more words, to take it easy for a bit. “Maybe I’m going to unwind a little. Read some trashy shit that gives me nostalgia for a time in my life that I’m wildly conflicted about, and explore those emotions with my counselor. Make some friends, learn about other peoples’ interests, maybe even open up about home.”
“Ah.” Zqar hummed thoughtfully. “Safara, I would not say that she is lonely, no, certainly not.”
“But she might be interested in having someone to talk about these books with?” He gave me another one of those amused nods, and I grinned at him. “I’m surprised that you’re not pushing.”
“Mmm. Children can be unkind sometimes.” He winked at me, smiling faintly. “An old man knows when he is being baited, yes?”
“I’m not an asshole.” I sighed, putting the book aside. “I know you wanted me to talk about stories from where I came from. And… I know it doesn’t make any sense for me to not want to, especially since I used to talk about stories all the time; I sure as shit didn’t get into the habit of reading by coincidence.”
“And when do you leave us, then?” His smile grew one notch less faint. “So soon, hm? So soon that I must have the impatience of youth?”
“Yeah, well.”
For some reason, his chiding didn’t rub me the wrong way or get me on edge. Instead, it was just sort of reassuring—he was patient enough to wait for me to share stuff with him, and he wasn’t worried about my leaving before doing so. Which, well, fair; I didn’t have any plans to leave, and I was pretty sure that everyone I knew would be very persuasive about my not moving out of Kibosh before my year was out.
“Hey, Zqar. This reminds me, for absolutely no adequate reason, that I had a question about one of these books. A sort of… social context question?”
“Mmm, ask, ask—old, some of that girl’s choices. Unusually old.”
“In The Civic Weave, they talk about what I think is supposed to be a previous book or something? All they mention is that at one point there was a big argument, one that the teachers for the kid were involved with, about the valid differences between men and women.” I raised an eyebrow at his utterly bland expression. “Was that a real thing?”
“Mmm.”
To my surprise, he sat down—to my surprise, because there wasn’t a chair there. The whisper of magic felt like… copying, maybe, as translated through Spark’s subtle cueing to me, and Zqar settled into what seemed like an invisible version of the chair I was sitting in. He rocked back and forth, thinking, and I gave him all the time he wanted.
“It is a real thing,” he said eventually. “The differences, but also the argument. Men are men, women are women; this we hold, but it is… an expression, yes? The world is wider than the words used to make reference.”
“See, now you’re baiting me.” I gave him my best effort of a grin, but it wasn’t all there—I knew he was in some way or another needling me, but knowing it didn’t make it not work. “Where I came from, men are men was something people said to shut down choices around gender expression and identity, and I know it’s not like that here. Tomas is a man, Farmer doesn’t seem to have a gender, Hitz has some sort of Kandashi thing going on that doesn’t translate, Beyin has two—”
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“Beyin,” Zqar corrected me gently, “has, mmm, more than two, yes? They say, what do they say? They dwell at the balance between them.”
“Okay, sure.” I almost waved that aside, but stopped myself in time. “Thank you,” I said instead, “for the correction about Beyin; noted. But can you explain the valid differences thing?”
“It is a simple matter, but perhaps only obvious to we Shemmai.” Zqar stood from his invisible chair, moving over to the window to peer outside. “It was an argument over… over the provision of resources and care, this is a thing all are familiar with from all worlds, perhaps. The Reformers, they said there is no difference—all of it, it is social, hmm? ‘Man and woman, they both are words which are lies.’ And so, one treats another with the social identity they wish, but the rest is… cosmetic, yes, and so is provided by the Kingdom as other cosmetic matters are.
“The Traditionalists—the herders, these are who the Traditionalists became, or perhaps they took up that mantle. They said no, men, women, these words have meaning, when a man says he needs his body to be this shape, this is real. And the Empiricists, mmm, they held the day, in the end.”
“And what,” I said eventually, when Zqar paused meaningfully, “did they argue?”
“All words,” he quoted with clear approval, “are lies. People are real, and so is their pain.”
“Huh.” I mulled on that for a bit, then nodded. “That’s a good line, and one that rings true to me. The words themselves have never been all that important to me, but it wasn’t just the social stuff that mattered, however much I like to twirl a skirt; it’s not like Hephaestus reforged my body as it was when I was twenty two, you know?”
“Mmm. No,” Zqar murmured. “I suppose I might not.”
I blinked a couple of times, then wised up to the set of his body and the twinkle in his eye and giggled. “So how does the Kingdom provide cosmetic matters, as opposed to, like, non-cosmetic ones?”
“A budget—set by Clerks, this is Shem, yes? An endless Discourse, we have, upon the subject of how the discretionary budget should be spent. More aggressive loans are a cost upon the people which bears fruits of failure and success for persons, or the Kingdom itself might employ more in a hundred roles and spend on research and infrastructure. Perhaps this fee or that tax might be reduced, reserves of some manner replenished, a God propitiated, yes?”
“There’s never an end to what a nation can spend money on,” I agreed. “And probably there’s a bunch of arguing over which kinds of cosmetic work should be paid for, and priorities and wait times?”
“Mmm, much of this is… settled art, yes, settled art. And of course, the Gods do as they will, and so many speak to the Thousand before the Tower or Writ.”
He lapsed into silence, and I stood to join him at the window, still mulling on what he was saying. It made sense, but it was a lot more… centrally planned than I was used to, and a lot more deliberate.
That’s Shem in a nutshell, I thought to myself wryly.
Endless are the reams of paper, and those who write upon them—and so does the Kingdom revolve around the star. The thought that floated over to me from Spark was affectionate, approving.
And it wasn’t wrong, either.
“Zqar,” I said softly, “I wonder. I know you’ve been here almost as long as James and Meredith, and here is Kibosh, a village that has more than a few people who are a bit more than they seem. It would be pretty rude for me to ask if you’re among them, I figure, but… Meredith told me that informational Edicts don’t apply to anyone who’s already in the know?”
“Mmm.”
The elderly-looking man straightened, back popping audibly. He didn’t look over to me, staring instead southwest-ish into the distance. I gave him all the time he wanted, studying him out of the corner of my eye and trying to read his body language—and eventually, he made up his mind.
“If there are such Edicts which would bind your voice,” the Senior Librarian said without a trace of his usual slow speech patterns, “I am not aware of them. This is not impossible, for the Edict of—”
I blinked, having lost track of the conversation for a moment. Coming back to myself, I raised an eyebrow at him and sort of reached out to Spark. I got back a feeling of discontinuity, the knowledge that we’d both just lost a few seconds, and I shook my head. “I guess not that one,” I said uncomfortably. “That wasn’t pleasant. Can’t even hear the name of that Edict, huh?”
“I believe you will be one such, in time, whose shoulders any Edict lies lightly upon. Too lightly.” He shrugged, eyes moody. “Until that day comes…”
“Still,” I said, turning back away from him and his subtly-glowing eyes, backlit in amber. “There’s a fair number of stories that I just… look, everything takes so much context. The society I’m from is so different, and the technology we had is so different, and we didn’t have magic at all. And the stories aren’t structured to make any of that make sense, they all exist within the context and lenses of the world that wrote them. What value does one of those stories have?”
“Mmm.” I glanced back to see him bent over again, now leaning his side against the glass and giving me a skeptical look. “A story has the value of a story. How might it not?”
“Huh.”
I scratched the back of my neck, flushing with embarrassment as I stared at the titanic trees that rose out of the ground to tower over the buildings of Kibosh. Zqar’s response could easily have been my line, talking to whoever was the latest in a succession of girls going through their second puberty and struggling with self-doubt over their writing.
Not the first time I’ve gotten bapped over the head by the world with my own advice, I thought to myself wryly. Won’t be the last.
“So how do we do this?” I glanced over at Zqar, watching how his body language shifted—surprise, I thought to myself, and delight. “If, say, there’s a story I want to share, but which I don’t remember all of.”
“Come.” He started walking, glancing over his shoulder to make sure I was following along. “We will go up, yes? Up to where you might still look at those wondrous trees of ours, up to where I might have the tools of my trade. And then I will show you some Skills and some magic… Reified Recollection, I think. If we must? We Turn From Shadows To The Flame Which Casts Them.”
“Badass,” I murmured.
“Mmm. And which story will be the first that you offer us?”
It was an obvious question, and one that I had thought I’d have trouble answering. Hadn’t there been books beyond counting, books in their thousands, which had been dear to me? How many nights had I spent reading something far too late into what was technically the next day?
It turned out to be a far easier answer than I’d expected.
“There’s a series of three books that tries to grapple with the question of what makes a life worth living—of what defines a virtuous life,” I said. “It’s a thought experiment, an interrogation and exploration of a civics text written a couple thousand years beforehand. They’re the only books that have ever made me cry just from the sheer beauty of the vision that they were structured around.
“They were by an author named Jo Walton, and the first of the books was called The Just City.”