Recognition

by Ann Herendeen

  Viceroy Zichmni presided from a dais in front, sitting on a sort of throne facing the tiers of seats. Dominic showed me where to stand, at a low railing to one side of the dais, before taking his own seat at the head of the Aranyi section. We were the last arrivals; as soon as Dominic was settled Lord Zichmni, apologizing for the early hour, explained that since these things had been known to take all day he wished to get started.

  I had assumed Lady Ndoko would do the testing, but an imposing middle-aged woman came forward instead. “Edwige, ‘Gravina Ertegun, Sibyl of La Sapienza Seminary.” The herald gave the introduction in an awed voice. Built on solid, heavy lines, Lady Ertegun had a maternal look belied by her brusque manner. Unlike Lady Ndoko, she was not veiled. Her bright strawberry-blonde hair, streaked with gray, was woven into an elegant French braid, held in place with a diamond-studded clasp. Smaller diamonds winked at me from matching combs on either side. Narrow blue-gray eyes assessed me shrewdly; thin lips set in a neutral line, neither smiling nor frowning, reserved judgment.

  Lady Ertegun began without formalities. Reaching for my hands, she made contact with my mind and we slipped smoothly into communion. I could tell she was surprised at the effortless transition. The communion deepened; with the resulting intimacy I sensed her dominant personality, how accustomed she was to command. She made me slightly uneasy.

  The sibyl snorted with laughter. “That’s fine,” she said, breaking the communion with the breathtaking sharpness of a cold scalpel slicing into warm flesh. “Now try to join with some of the others, one at a time.” She indicated the occupants of the front row of seats.

  The first man was older, and visibly unwell. Deep lines had aged his handsome, broad face, and his hair was a dull iron gray. Karl-Philip, Margrave Almirante—even weakened by sickness his identity blazed out from his forceful character—extended his hands to me reluctantly, his fingertips quivering with a physical tremor. As soon as we entered communion I was overcome with pain, every nerve-end protesting. The communion forced me to suffer, for a few seconds, the terrible affliction Lord Almirante endured constantly. Questions spewed from my besieged brain: How do you bear it? What is it? Aren’t there medications? before coherent thought became impossible and I could only cry aloud.

  I am strong. Arthritis. There are drugs, but they dull the communion along with the pain. Lord Almirante answered all my questions in the instant before he reacted protectively, breaking the connection. “There’s no need for this, ‘Gravina,” he said.

  “Yes, Margrave, it is necessary,” the sibyl said. “Now we know she’s an empath, not just a telepath.”

  Shaky from the unforeseen and extreme agony, I stood hunched, clutching the railing for support. This was why I had always hated being touched, but on Terra the effects had been relatively mild, limited by the one-way reception and the good health of my acquaintances. With two gifted individuals, and the resulting communion—I wished I never had to touch anyone again, or be touched, except...

  Dominic leapt up at my unfinished thought and bounded over to the dais in two long steps. His slender arms with their ropes of muscle supported me like a hammock as he half-carried me to his own seat. The contrast between his strength and my weakness alarmed him, like my reaction to communion with Lord Almirante, as these revelations must. Young meeting old, healthy meeting sick, vigorous meeting weary—all create in the newcomer the anxiety that comes from entering foreign and hostile territory. Dominic shook his head clear, responding with generosity once he saw what the trouble was. Beloved, he thought, offering himself to me, here is my strength. Take what you need.

  I helped myself greedily. My total immersion this morning into communion and the ways of crypta made this concept seem entirely natural, the transfer of energy from one person to another, an osmosis through mind and skin. Dominic’s great vitality surged into me, bringing with it returning consciousness and determination.

  Once assured I was recovering, Dominic confronted the sibyl, making a point of using my Terran name. “Ms. Herzog was unprepared for that, ‘Gravina Ertegun.” His voice deepened in complaint. “What are you trying to do—test her or kill her?”

  Lady Ertegun stared up at Dominic’s stormy face—she is not much taller than me—and raised one eyebrow in a practiced gesture. “If Ms. Herzog were prepared, there would be little point in testing, Margrave. To my knowledge,” she added, in what was meant to be a conciliatory judgment, “no one has ever died from a few seconds of empathetic communion.” She let a long theatrical pause go by before turning her attention back to me. “Anytime you’re ready,” she said, clearly expecting immediate compliance. I sincerely doubted she was an empath.

  There was the sound of laughter in my head, sensed, not through the ears, but directly in my mind—the silent amusement of the audience, who apparently found Dominic’s solicitous care of me immensely entertaining. “I’m ready now,” I said, standing up and hoping to spare Dominic from the audience’s ridicule, although he appeared unperturbed.

  Only Lady Ertegun hadn’t cracked a smile. “Thank you,” she said drily. “Please continue to form communion.”

  Dominic had resumed his seat as I vacated it; he was next in the front row. He held his hands out to me, his hard face softening with the anticipated pleasure.

  The audience’s scorn continued to cascade into my brain, a current of disparagement of my lover that flowed too rapidly to assimilate. In contrast to yesterday’s civility, people made no attempt to conceal their thinking, from me, from Dominic or from each other. Everything I had learned of Dominic in my short time on Eclipsis—his past, his preferences, his very nature—was familiar to his peers, and they found a malicious delight in today’s contrast. People recalled his pursuit of young cadets, abuse of his command at the ‘Graven Military Academy. To see Dominic openly attracted to a woman was a novelty; that I was closer to his age by twenty years than his usual choices added an element of wonder.

  The prospect of forming our special communion in public, for a gloating audience that would know every intimate detail along with me and Dominic, filled me with horror. I could not obey the sibyl’s command, but stood immobile, staring at Dominic’s long tapering fingers with their square-cut nails.

  “I think we are all convinced that Ms. Herzog and Margrave Aranyi are able to do that quite easily,” Lady Ndoko said in her dry way.

  This time everyone laughed out loud, breaking the tension, as Lady Ndoko had intended, that had built up between the knowing audience and my indignation. I almost keeled over at the appalling realization: that we had put not only our actions and our immediate thoughts, but our emotions on display, too novel and powerful for us to contain. If we had strapped holocams on our heads and broadcast a reality show of our developing relationship over Eclipsis, we could not have been more exposed. In fact, what we had been doing is called “broadcasting” here.

  It was a harsh introduction to life amongst the gifted. On Terra I had been unique: assailed by other people’s thoughts, secure in the knowledge that the contents of my own mind were concealed. I had never had to worry about being subjected to the same sort of telepathic reception.

  How do they do it? I wondered. The psychic pain seemed, in its way, worse even than the physical pain of Lord Almirante’s arthritis. At least he had the option of medication to take the edge off. But nothing would stop this ongoing invasion of the mind’s innermost recesses. Not sleep, not drugs. Only isolation, as I had known on Terra, or death, would bring surcease.

  “Living without skin,” Dominic had said yesterday. But we need skin, I argued now. We need something to protect ourselves, to separate ourselves from the rest of the world…

  We become accustomed to it, Dominic tried to soothe me. Let them laugh. It is a small price to pay for our love. And remember, I know them too, as you will. We are all revealed in turn; none of us is perfect, believe me.

  I picked up the strange truth underlying his words, the reason that people were not masking their thoughts
here in ‘Graven Assembly. Surrounded by our gifted peers, we were stripped of all interior privacy, while at the same time benefiting from the freedom of our common predicament. Our flaws were of necessity brought to light; we were tried, judged, and ultimately pardoned. Improper or shameful thoughts and desires, that if confessed on Terra would lead to ostracism and forced medical treatment, were accepted here without condemnation, so long as the standards of conduct were maintained. People might laugh, but that was all.

  Lady Ertegun took pity on me as I pondered this new intelligence, unable to alter my behavior so radically as to perform what felt like a live sex show in front of an avid studio audience. “I see,” she said, a rare smile pushing her wide pink cheeks into dimpled mounds. After a moment’s contemplation, she declared that the communion portion of the test had been satisfactorily covered. We would move on to the practical examination.

  An acolyte brought a large leather case to the dais and set it on a table. Lady Ertegun approached the box reverently, unfastened its many straps in a careful and orderly process, and raised the lid with bowed head and closed eyes. The audience appeared to be praying, although there were no words in their minds, just awed emptiness. I stood with head averted, sliding my eyes over from under squinting lids.

  Inside, nestled into velvet-lined pockets on three layered trays like an elaborate jewelry box, were dozens of pieces of clear glass, in geometric shapes—pyramids, rectangles, cubes, tetrahedrons, as well as many-sided, more complex forms. Prisms. I bit my lips to keep from laughing out loud at the anticlimax.

  Lady Ertegun shook back the lace-ruffled long sleeve from her left wrist with a graceful flourish and plucked a simple triangular prism from the lower tray. Shielding it in her palm, she handed it to me, visibly relieved that I took it in my left hand also. She pointed to the shafts of mid-morning sunlight streaming in through the high windows and striking the dais. “Bend it. Use the prism to bend the light directly into your eyes.”

  I shook my head. “My eyelids will—”

  “So we will hope,” the sibyl said, without her usual sarcasm. The entire Assembly seemed to be holding its breath.

  My heart was racing, worse than when I had shared Lord Almirante’s arthritic pains. This was madness, to knowingly and deliberately blind myself. Wasn’t that the myth, the blind sibyl, the “seer” who loses outward vision to better perceive the inner? “Tripe,” I said the word aloud, without any attempt at control. “I don’t believe in it.”

  The sibyl shrugged and stood with hands on hips. “You were right, Margrave,” she said to Dominic. “I should not have wasted my time.”

  I looked over to Dominic and saw, through a wavering film of tears, that he was—Oh, sorrow!—disappointed. The first and only time, thank all the Tripe Gods I don’t believe in but he does, that that has ever happened.

  What could I do? Even blindness was better than this. I held the prism between thumb and forefinger, my arm outstretched as far as possible, as if that would protect me, and I aimed it up to catch a ray of light: the one slanting down between the Aranyi section and the empty seats of those sensible rebels. We who are about to die salute you, I thought to Dominic as I clenched my teeth and angled the nasty little sharp-edged piece of glass to smear the full spectrum clear across my eyeballs.

  I had expected stabbing pain, maybe even wetness as the sclera ruptured before the inner lids had a chance to lower into place. Instead there was a silent click, like a switch being turned inside my head, and I saw those starbursts and fireworks that flash on your retinas when you rub your eyes in the dark. My stomach lurched and I doubled over, retching with the dry heaves. When I caught my breath at last, I wound my arm up like a pitcher throwing for the third strike of the ninth inning, and hurled the prism across the room where it shattered against the wall of the balcony, spraying glass fragments.

  Everybody cheered. The people sitting under the balcony brushed splinters of glass from their clothes and shook them out of their hair with the good humor of spectators at a gladiatorial contest who accept spilled beer and thrown popcorn as part of the fun. Even Lady Ertegun was moved. “Excellent,” she said. She studied her case of torture implements, selected a rectangular prism and held it out to me.

  When I didn’t take it immediately she said, “Your shields are in place now. It won’t affect you as before.”

  I hadn’t even felt my third eyelids descend, but there they were, casting the room into soothing shadow. Swallowing my gorge and clamping my lips tight against the rising nausea, I forced myself to hold the new prism up to the light. When the spectrum unfolded onto my eyes, whatever had switched on inside my head was showing me images I had never seen before, lines and patterns beyond the visible. I recognized it from biology classes and nature holograms: ultra-violet, infrared; the way insects and birds and fishes see.

  Lady Ertegun stood beside me, positioning my hand with the prism as I looked at the world through new eyes. In what felt like a dream, I brought distant objects into close focus and projected near objects to the outer edges of space. I perceived the world as a speck of rock orbiting a flaming ball of gas, and enlarged the microscopic creatures inhabiting our eyelashes into lumbering mammoths. Not good. I tilted my head back to examine the walls of the Sanctum. The individual molecules of the granite, locked in their rigid chemical structure, were revealed to me, as readable as color and form. If I had wanted to, I could have taken the stones apart cube by cube, brought down the entire room without disturbing so much as a grain of sand.

  “Very nice,” Lady Ertegun said. She snapped her fingers in my face, breaking my concentration. “Please don’t get carried away. I want you to try something simple.”

  Coached by the sibyl, copying each step as she performed it, I lifted and moved small objects through telekinesis, and observed and analyzed the composition of various substances. It is a betrayal of trust to disclose the particulars of a crypta test; no two tests are exactly alike, as no two people have the same abilities. Some can barely form communion; others are adept at things I will never master, like teleportation or clairvoyance. My gift is primarily physical. Untrained, and coming to it late in life, I did nothing now that the ‘Graven Assembly had not seen before.

  For my last task, Lady Ertegun produced a lamp consisting of a wick in a shallow bowl of oil. “Light the lamp without touching it,” she said.

  I was momentarily flummoxed, my mind spinning in a void, unsettled by the expectant audience and the archaic object. I stood stupidly, my left arm, tired from being raised above my head, slowly drooping. The light from the window, no longer splayed by the prism into a rainbow, fell in its ordinary white form across the worn boards of the wooden dais. One ray hit my foot, warming it through the vinyl of my boot. So obvious to every child that’s incinerated ants with a magnifying glass. I held the prism in the narrowest of angles, directing a concentrated beam of light—and heat—at the exposed end of wick until it caught fire with a whoosh and a high flame, then settled into a steady burn.

  I looked up triumphantly, my focus returning to the larger world of human beings, of solid matter and emotion. My hand closed tightly around the prism, locking its dangerous separation of light beams behind the safety of darkness.

  Lady Ertegun shook her head. “No. That’s simple mechanics—you did not use your gift.” She studied me internally for a few moments, before concluding I had no other ideas and she might as well disclose the answer. “The usual way is with the inner flame.”

  “Be fair,” a young man wearing the uniform of a junior officer in the Royal Guards protested from farther along the front row. “How could Ms. Herzog know about the inner flame?” Lord Roger Zichmni, the Viceroy’s grandson and heir, was the only person here besides the Viceroy himself who could contradict the Sibyl of La Sapienza.

  Lady Ertegun bowed her head slightly. “Lord Roger,” she said, “this is strange for all of us. I am being as objective as I can.” Sacred Iris help me, the exasperated thought came into my
head from the sibyl, unused to finding herself on the defensive. Her usual candidates grew up in the Eclipsian culture; she had no other method but the traditional one by which to evaluate me.

  By now I was near to collapsing from exhaustion. Nobody had warned me how draining it is to actively use crypta, as opposed to simply receiving thoughts. The prisms I had manipulated amplify the gift, but the necessary energy comes from the body. Physical training helps; my sedentary Terran lifestyle only made things worse. A neophyte should build up endurance gradually, like an athlete, but I had just run a marathon while still learning to walk.

  In truth, nobody, not even Dominic, had been certain how much crypta I possessed. The communion Dominic and I shared was so natural for us that I think we overlooked its significance. Lady Ertegun, her phlegmatic exterior disguising her excitement at my abilities, had led me to overreach.

  Not caring any longer what people thought, I staggered over to Dominic and slumped off-center into his lap before he had time to make room. By Hecate’s tits, Amalie! Be careful! he swore into my mind as he shifted me gently onto the seat beside him. I felt the sudden flare of communion like a stab of pleasure, the beginning of erection I had set off with my hasty landing. He gave me a quick smile to show he was not angry, merely, at last, embarrassed, as his warmth and strength seeped into me. His hand clasped mine, hidden between our bodies, and the swirling buffer of communion blocked whatever reaction my awkwardness might have caused in the keen-eyed spectators.

  Viceroy Zichmni came to my rescue before I dared look up. “Perhaps we should recess for dinner,” he decided. My stomach growled hopefully at the suggestion. It was, indeed, well past time for the midday meal. Just as it had absorbed a surprising amount of energy, the crypta work had consumed a great chunk of time, while it seemed as if only a few minutes had gone by.