Another sob overtook him, unexpected, like a sudden breath. But it hurt less. Thorn wiped his face with a swipe of his hand, quick, distasteful. He slid back on the riser and tucked his feet up. There was no choice. Sagot left him none. “I’m listening, Sagot.” (O gods, what has she got to teach?) Sagot teemed with secrets, frightening as Duun. As implacable. As difficult to get around. “Are you sure you’re not hatani?”
Sagot laughed and even that was gentle, a fragility about her voice. “I take that for a compliment. What do you like best, what study?”
“Physics.”
“Physics, then. Show me what you know. I’ll find out where to start.”
“If an object were traveling at the speed of light, and a man traveled on it to the nearest star-what is that star?”
“Goth.”
“And distant-?”
“5 light-years.”
“5.1. Be precise for this. And this man was forty; and he left a sister on earth when he went…”
“There’s a kind of parasite infests the brains of cattle on the Sgoht river. I remember once seeing one-”
“You were there?”
“Child, I lived nine months on the Sgoht, and I had a village magistrate for a lover. He had a ring threaded so, right through the side of his lip, and it looked odd, I’ll tell you, when he smiled. He had been married six times and he had a great notch in his nose where one of his wives took a stick to him, but she was a crazy woman and her daughter was crazier. She took it into her head to sell her mother’s land, that’s right, without owning it-she was going to sell her expectation of inheriting it to this man she was living with so she could get the money to go downriver and get a husband who owned a grocery, don’t ask me why, but I think food was quite all she could think of- she must have weighed two hundred, all of it. Well, the magistrate my lover finally gave her the money to get her out of town, and that fool man she was living with went after my lover with an axe-”
“Gods, Sagot!”
“He did. And chased him round and round the office and out into the street before someone shot this crazy man. Rumor had it the cattle sickness got him, that that woman fed him from diseased animals; but my lover the magistrate said anyone who married that woman was crazy from the start.”
“Watch the monitor. This is a simulation game. This is an instrument panel-there’s your fuel, do you see, there’s your altitude, there’s your compass… You remember your ride to the city, don’t you?”
“Of course I remember.”
“Well, this isn’t a copter. It’s a plane. Use the toggle and the keys-let me show you. Here’s the runway-this is an old-fashioned plane. But we’ll start with that.”
“Can you fly?”
“Oh, well, yes, I used to. My eyesight’s against me now. I stay to the commercial planes.”
“Commercial.”
“Dear lad, planes go back and forth all over the world all the time, how do you think one would go?”
“Rail.”
“Oh, well, it’s all mostly freight, nowadays. Let’s try taking off again; I’m afraid we’ve just crashed.”
At some time the pain stopped. Thorn woke up one morning and realized he was past the sharpness of it; and that it had gotten to a kind of regret in which he did not have to work so hard at self-control; and finally, at breakfast with Duun on still another day, he hurt with a different pain, that he and Duun had had little to say to each other beyond the necessities of two people living with each other, and Duun’s teaching him in the gym. There were no tales in his life but Sagot’s; there was no sound in the house, but sometimes in the long evenings he and sometimes Duun played the dkin with indifferent passion-Duun aimlessly or working out long and vexing compositions that frayed Thorn’s nerves; Thorn playing gloomy hatani songs or the lightest, most trivial ditties he had known from childhood, like accusations hurled at Duun. And Duun would sit and listen, or retreat to his office for peace and (sometimes, for Duun’s side pained him) Duun would take a sedative and close the door of his room.