Kherishdar's Exception, Episode 26: Civilization, Listening

“Osulkedi,” He said, gentle. “Take off your boots.”

One obeys Thirukedi, reflexively. I’m not certain even now—especially now—if it’s because of something He does with His voice, or something He is, only that we all respond to it… a little like we respond to Shame, when Kor is acting as Shame. But the interesting part of this command, which I didn’t realize until I was working the second boot off, was that I couldn’t remaining kneeling to do it… and one’s soul is in a very different state, kneeling, than it is when one is sitting cross-legged, tugging at a heel.

No doubt this is why, when He said, “Tell me about your stay,” what came out was far less formal a speech than I might have planned. Nor did I start with what I’d assumed was the most important part.

“Being back on the Gateworld as osulkedi, after having been fathrikedi and disgraced, was very strange.” When His ears and eyes remained fixed on me, I bent my head and finished with the second boot, my skin burning. “I have never been in one place as one thing, and then something so different. People treating me differently. Having to act differently. Having… having the lens by which I was seen so… so different.” I grimaced, wishing I could find a better word. “I didn’t go back to any of the places I lived as a child, when I went from my parents’ home to where I was trained to be fathriked. And my parents were not the kind of people who would have wanted to sustain a fathrikedi. So it wasn’t the same, becoming a Decoration after having been a Merchant daughter. But the people there had known me as fathrikedi, and now they treat me as osulkedi.”

“It distressed you?”

“It… it confused me,” I said. “But Ai-Naidar are too polite to treat me as anything other than I present myself, Thirukedi. The aunera, meanwhile, couldn’t tell how to react to me. Pity, sometimes. Confusion too. They conflated the two mes—there was only one me, undergoing different experiences. To Ai-Naidar, there is no me, there is only my role. I never thought of it, until I was forced to deal with them being confused about it.”

Thirukedi made a gentle noise, understanding. “Did you find you preferred the aunerai way?”

“Maiden, no,” I said. “It was irritating in the extreme. But it doesn’t change that… I’m still the Ai-Naidari who was the flame of the House of Flowers, and now I’m Haraa, and this is new to me.” I dared a glance up at Him. “Is it so for all who are rakadhas, and re-assigned?”

“It is as different for each Ai-Naidari as each Ai-Naidari is from one another,” He said, smiling at me. At my expression, he laughed, quiet. “Did you think otherwise, Haraa?”

“I don’t know,” I said. And then: “No. No matter what the aunera think of us, we aren’t automatons.”

“Do they think this?”

“I think they think very, very differently,” I said, savoring the gestalt of the interactions. “They believe that it is the duty and right of every person to question authority, and to choose against tradition and society if they feel it right. Only I have no idea how they can decide that if every individual person is deciding what’s right and what’s wrong. Who teaches them right and wrong if they don’t trust society to do it?”

“Perhaps you might ask them.”

“I should,” I said. “Next time I see them.” I looked down at my socked toes. “Thirukedi? What is it that You think we should be learning from them?”

I could hear His smile though I didn’t look up at Him. There was a limit to how much I was willing to flout courtesy, even if I craved the sight of His face. “I don’t know, osulkedi… or I would not have sent you.”

We spoke a little further… I told Him about Emma and Lawrence and Ruben, about aunera who serve as lords while walking like Guardians, and aunera who thought it sensible to greet aliens by attacking them verbally, and aunera who accidentally attacked aliens by making ridiculous assumptions about them… though I couldn’t bring myself to explain Emma’s ideas about prostitution. But I soon ran out of words, more out of an inability to express the ideas still frothing in my mind, and He surely knew that there was no use urging me to make sense of it until the storm had passed because He sent me home. At very least, speaking had helped order some of those thoughts. Yes, there’s a word for that: belet, and no, it’s not the same as ‘venting’ despite the entry in Lenore’s lexicon. We have a word for ‘venting’. It’s shunul, and it means ‘emotional pollution.’

I wound my way back through the tranquil night, amid softly glowing lanterns, and breezes that smelled sweet like flowers, and resinous like incense, and the worldweight was soft on my limbs and I was home.

…and then I reached Qevellen, and remembered all the things I had not yet resolved, and my wrists grew tense, and my shoulders, and I sighed.