Daria acknowledged the acclaim graciously, but then gestured for silence; the demonstration was not yet complete. “Light of the correct hue can excite the muscles into action. But is that its only role in the body? I think not.”
The stage dimmed further, finally becoming completely black. The decorative trees unfurled their wan blooms once more, but the petals were just barely visible. From the darkness came the whine of Daria’s spinning blade; when it stopped Yalda heard her take a few steps across the stage.
As Daria moved aside, a patch of shimmering yellow light was revealed behind her. The light throbbed and shifted in waves; Yalda was unpleasantly reminded of the swarm of mites that had feasted on her dying grandfather. But these specks of radiance didn’t flee into the air; no flock of hapless insects was feeding on the arborine. Daria had opened up the creature’s skull, and its last thoughts were playing out in front of them: a sad dance of fading luminescence, like a gust of wind rustling through a dying garden.
When the glow from the arborine’s brain had flickered out completely, the lights came up and Daria spread her arms in a gesture of finality. The crowd made its approval known. Yalda had to admire the woman’s stagecraft, but the whole performance had left her disquieted.
It took even Tullia a while to talk her way backstage, with Yalda in tow. They found Daria relaxing in a luxurious bed of white sand.
“Did you like the show?” she asked them.
“Yalda thinks you should have killed the beast before you cut it,” Tullia volunteered.
“The brain’s light would have been invisible, then, by the time I opened the skull,” Daria replied. “Honestly, we drugged it very heavily. The swallowing is a reflex; I don’t believe it was conscious at all.”
Yalda was not convinced, but she let the matter drop; she had no real evidence either way.
“I promised you some holin,” Daria recalled. She climbed out of her bed and rummaged in a cupboard in a corner of the room, emerging with a small clearstone vial. “Take two scrags with breakfast, daily.” She handed Yalda the vial; the green flaky substance had been prepared in small cubical lumps. “You’ll need to increase the dose in a year or so.”
“How much do I owe you?” Yalda asked.
“Forget it,” Daria replied, slipping back into her sand bed. “Pay me when you’re wealthy.” She turned to Tullia. “Are you off to the Solo?”
“Not tonight.”
“Well, I’m sure I’ll see you both around.”
Yalda thanked her and began to leave. Daria said, “Keep it safe, and never miss a dose. I know you’re still young, but that only means you have all the more to lose.”
“I’ll follow your advice,” Yalda assured her. She slipped the vial into a pocket before they left the room.
On the street, she asked Tullia, “Would you be able to give me that essay on Meconio that you mentioned? I should probably spend some time rewriting it in my own style.”
“Good idea,” Tullia said. “I think I have a version in my apartment.”
As they crossed the Great Bridge, suspended over the city’s deep lesion, Yalda’s thoughts kept returning to the night of her grandfather’s death. Every living thing needed to make light, but like all chemistry it was a dangerous business. There was always a risk that it would go too far.
When Tullia remarked on how distracted she was, Yalda told her the story of the trip into the forest, and how it had ended.
“That’s hard,” Tullia said. “No one so young should have to witness a death.”
“Have you seen people die?”
“Two friends, in the last few years, but I never saw anyone go to light.” Tullia hesitated. “My co died when I was a few stints old, but I don’t remember that at all.”
“That’s terrible.”
Tullia spread her arms; there was no call for sympathy. “I never knew him. Most of the time I might as well have been a solo.”
“Is your family still pushing you to find a co-stead?”
“My father’s dead,” Tullia replied. “My brother and cousins would nag me if they could, but they don’t even know where I’m living now.”
“Oh.” Yalda found it hard to imagine Aurelio or Claudio, let alone little Lucio, taking it upon themselves to tell her how to live. But people changed; once they were adults with children of their own and the neighbors were asking them, “What happened to Yalda?”, perhaps they’d start to see it as their duty to have an acceptable answer.
They reached the tower where Tullia lived. Her apartment was on the eleventh floor—the cheapest location in the building, she explained. Most people didn’t want to climb so many stairs, though they made an exception for the very top floor, which was more expensive thanks to the skylights. Yalda could understand that; she would have loved to sleep beneath the stars again.
Tullia had no lamps in her apartment, just a long shelf of small potted plants, arranged by color. Between the glow of the flowers and the starlight that came through the windows, she could see well enough to search through her stacks of paper.
After a while she said, “It’s not here. I must have given it to someone else then neglected to make a new copy.”
Yalda said, “What would you have copied it from?”
“Oh, I still have it here.” Tullia thumped her chest. “Once I write something, I never forget it. But I don’t have any dye right now, or enough blank paper for that matter. How’s your touch memory?”
“My what?”
Tullia reached over and took her right hand. “Try to remember this without thinking about it. Don’t read it, don’t describe it to yourself, just try to keep the feeling of the shape.”
“All right.”
Tullia pressed her palm against Yalda’s and wrote a short passage on both of their skins. Yalda let her own muscles conform to the pattern of pressure from the curved ridges jutting against them; in a curious reversal of cause and effect, it soon felt as if she’d shaped every line herself. A few symbols drifted into her mind, but she blocked them out, forcing them to remain uninterpreted.
“Now give it back to me.” Tullia released Yalda’s right hand and took the left one. “Don’t think about the details, just bring back the memory of how it felt.”
Yalda summoned the shape, sharply tactile but still unvisualised, and pushed it onto her left palm. Tullia offered a congratulatory chirp. “Perfect!”
Yalda drew her hand back. “Can I read it now?”
“Certainly.”
She didn’t need to examine her palm; she could sense the disposition of every muscle directly. “Meconio,” Yalda read, “was undoubtedly one of the greatest minds of the ninth age.” The text, she realized, was mirror-form compared to her own usual skin style.
“Isn’t it amazing what people can write when they don’t have to think about it?” Tullia marveled. “Let alone believe it.”
“Am I being dishonest?” Yalda wondered. “I know Ludovico is abusing his power, but there’s still a principle at stake. Maybe we should try to get someone else put in charge of the observatory schedules?”
Tullia sagged against the wall, exasperated. “In an ideal world: of course! But you know how long that would take. If you’re serious about gathering your wavelength data before you drop dead—or worse—you’re just going to have to humor Ludo. Life is too short to make everything perfect.”
“I suppose so.”
“Do you want the whole essay?”
Reluctantly, Yalda gave her assent.
“Come closer.”