Serial, Kherishdar's Exception, Episode 24: Poison (Patreon)

I know a little more of your mind now, aunera, enough to have guessed what you’re thinking now… so possibly it will disappoint you that I am not interested in recording, at length, all the conversations that followed in the next three days. I had many of them, certainly, because I woke in the morning and went immediately after breakfast to Lenore’s office to further my attempts to put myself in possession—as much as possible—of her thoughts and notes. When I tired of the effort, I welcomed distraction in the form of Emma, or occasionally Ruben. Laurence did not trouble me again, and I wondered if he’d been schooled by his not-a-lord. I wanted badly to ask how that worked, but even guessing the aunera would not find my inquiry offensive, still I thought… no, an instinct based on my observation of their bodyspeech. I was used to the subtleties of Ai-Naidar, but I thought maybe I’d been precipitous, assuming all alien bodyspeech was coarse and obvious because so much of it was. But when I witnessed the interactions between the aunera in that main building, there were nuances there. I wondered if they were aware of them themselves.

You must understand that we are trained from our childhoods to attend to these things consciously. One’s body is a reflection of one’s hasmera, and we polish that window so that the truth of our position in society is clear in even the most innocuous of interactions. This is important because it reduces friction; like a good lubricant, it leaves you able to concentrate on the meaningful things, and not so much the mechanics that support them.

(Was that too crude? Not all my conversations thus far have made it any clearer to me how you feel about sex, and until recently sex was one of my more important tools.)

Anyway, I digress. On that last day, when I mentioned I was going back, Emma tried to send the device home with me.

“Don’t forget this,” was how she put it. As if I would, if it had been my intention to take it…?

“I didn’t,” I said. “It stays here.”

She eyed it. “We have more than one, it’s really no bother?”

“I didn’t think it would be,” I said. “Not being stupid. I’ve seen how many devices you have.”

“I know,” Emma said with a heavy sigh. “Some of us have more than two. Or four… or a thousand…”

Which I’d also noticed, and found bizarre. How could you concentrate with so many things pulling at your attention? We have a word for something we call ‘eye-skipping’, when someone’s eyes are constantly moving away from yours to focus on other things: shipele. It’s rude, and yet so many of you do it to everyone. It’s as if you’re afraid to look at one another.

More baffling yet, Emma had continued. “So it really isn’t a problem if you take it with you. You should tell Ruben, maybe, just so he won’t decide it’s been lost, but otherwise… it’s got a good battery, it should last you until you get back. You are coming back, aren’t you? Soon?”

“Yes,” I said. “I am.” How soon was soon, though? I found the puzzle of aunerai culture fascinating, but I was agitated. Even as new as Qevellen was, and my ishas work, they were still more familiar than anything here other than the fascination for languages I shared with a woman who’d taken my place in my lord’s heart.

“Is this one of those things where I have to offer something, and you say no to show you’re being polite, and then I have to offer again to show I was sincere about you wanting it before you take it because it saves face or establishes something?” Emma asked, drawing me again from my thoughts, and the statement was so outlandish I was reduced to staring at her.

“I… guess not,” Emma said. “Serves me right for trying to map the description of some random Asian culture I can’t remember onto you….”

“I am not,” I said, “human. I am Ai-Naidari.” 

“And don’t I know it!”

“And I’m not taking your device with me because such devices are proscribed in Kherishdar.”

“Because they’re alien,” Emma said, her voice heavy with… something. Offense? Sarcasm? I couldn’t tell.

“Because they’re proscribed,” I said, perplexed. “Devices of any kind are reserved to whatever job requires them.”

“Wait, you have…” Emma paused. “You can’t possibly have technology like this or you’d be using it more ubiquitously.”

The device translated that last word magnificently, and didn’t have to, because her incredulity made the content of her statement obvious. “Just because we are capable of a thing doesn’t mean we must do it,” I said. “And in our case, we don’t.”

Emma started to speak, as if she wanted to fight with me, and then she stopped herself with an expression comically like she’d swallowed something acrid. “Then again, I guess we’d be a lot happier without so many of our ‘things’… even though they give us too much to give them up.” She sighed. “Will you at least take the notebooks? I assume paper and ink is acceptable technology for the general populace.”

“It is,” I said. “And I will. Thank you.”

“Thank you,” Emma said. “For not treating everything about us as poison.”

I thought about that, packing to leave. That she’d thanked me for the decision, as if it had been my own. It hadn’t been, any more than the decision to leave the device behind had been. These were the rules of Kherishdar—what good rules, if they could be broken or modified by individual choice?

That felt like an important revelation, and I thought about it all the way through the Gate, and on the long ride back to the city.