You’ve got enough in your lap. Trust me for this.”
Duun scowled. “Meaning?”
“Just-let me pile up data. Awhile.”
“The Guild’s another answer. He might make it.”
“Gods. You don’t mean that.”
“We’re very catholic.”
Ellud’s ears sank in dismay.
“I’m working on it,” Duun said. “I tell you that. But he’s not ready yet.”
“You know what that would cause?”
“And prevent.”
There was a long silence. Then: “The tapes, Duun. For the gods’ sakes, start them. Can you do that?”
Duun stared and thought about it. “Yes.”
They sat together, Elanhen and Betan and Sphitti and Cloen: “This is the way it is,” Elanhen said. “We get scored together. All of us. You’re the one they threw into the group. If you don’t learn, we fail together.”
“We get thrown out of our jobs,” Betan said.
“What’s your job?” Thorn asked, because everything they said puzzled him.
Their faces went closed to him then, on secrets they would not share.
* * * *
“You’ve got a problem,” Betan said, leaning over his shoulder while he plied the keyboard in his lap and watched the window across the room become a glowing display. Lines blinked and intersected. “That’s the trajectory. With that acceleration where will you intercept?”
Sometimes the problems made vague sense. And sometimes they did not.
(What in the world comes in two hundred twenty-fours?)
(Stars. Trees. Kinds of grass. The ways of a river. The stubbornness of a child.)
(I can reckon the speed of the wind, name the stars, the cities of the world-)
“… in order, the particles-”
Betan brushed his arm as she bent above him. She smelled of something different. She had no reticence with him. She took no care how she leaned past him. The column of her throat was undefended, her body sleek coated and ripe with musk-
“You got it right,” Sphitti said as they clustered about his desk sitting on its edges. “Here’s an application now. If you were drifting in midair-no friction and no gravity-”
(They’re trying to trip me.) “You can’t.”
“Say that you could.”
Betan flicked an ear at him. Perhaps it was a joke at his expense.
“Write it down,” said Cloen.
“I don’t have to.”
“Let him do it his way,” Sphitti said. Then he had to get it right.
“That’s right,” Elanhen said then, checking what he said.
“Damn hatani arrogance,” Cloen said when he was not quite out of earshot, when he and Elanhen were off together at Cloen’s desk.
It hurt. Thorn was not immune to that.
(Duun, what do I do when people insult me? When they hate me? How do I answer, Duun?)
But he never asked it aloud. The shame of it distressed him. And he thought that he should come up with that answer on his own.
“Just the sounds,” Betan said. “It doesn’t matter what it means. It’s a test of your recall. Listen to the tape and memorize the sound.”
“It’s not words at all!”
“Pretend it is. Just try. Record it. Play it back till there’s no difference.”
Thorn looked at Betan, at Sphitti. At two gray pairs of eyes. He felt indignation at this, as if they had made this one up. But they had never joked with him, not on lessons.
“He put the plug into his ear and listened. Tried to pronounce the babble. (They’ll be laughing. It sounds like water running.) He looked around at them, but they found other things to do, with the computer and with their own studies. He turned back to his work, put his hands over his eyes to shut out the world.
(Remembering days on Sheon’s porch, the hiyi blooms-)
He mouthed the noises. He slowed down the machine and ran it fast and memorized the sequences. It was harder than Sphitti’s physics. The plug gave him an earache.
“I’ve had enough of that,” he said after he had gotten the start of it down and they gathered about to hear it. He would never have said that to Duun, but they accepted such things.
“That’s all you’re supposed to do in the mornings,” Elanhen said. “You keep at that.”
Thorn sat there amid his desk. He thought that he could beat any of them (even Betan, because Duun had made him believe that he was good).