Sagot. Both times he had perverted what he knew.
He got up finally, and walked up and sat down in front of Sagot. “You can shout at me, Sagot. Please.”
“I don’t need to.”
(Hit. Deft and killing as Duun’s wit when he was crossed.) Thorn flinched inside. “Forgive me, Sagot. Sagot, don’t hate me.”
“Wicked boy. By guile and redirection. I can tell you’re Duun’s handiwork. Back to the meds, are we?”
“Just don’t tell me they don’t. I can read bodies; I can read eyes, Sagot. They hate me and they’re afraid of me and they made me what I am. Is that reasonable of them?”
“Maybe it’s the hatani they’re afraid of. Did you think of that? People don’t like being read. A hatani stops at your door, you give that hatani food, a place to sleep, and you start thinking over every move you make because you know you’re being read, constantly, every tiny move. It would take a very stupid person or a very innocent one to relax with a hatani under his roof.”
“A hatani doesn’t judge if he’s not asked to. Sometimes not even then. Why should they worry?”
“Guilt. Everyone’s guilty of something. A hatani makes you know what you’re guilty of.”
“Even hatani are guilty, Sagot.”
“But they cover it. They know how not to be read, don’t they? If they really try. Sometimes they don’t.” Sagot got up and came and sat down next to him, put her arm around him. “Sometimes they don’t want to, do they? Come on, lean on me, I won’t tell anyone.”
“Tell me about the test, Sagot.”
“Wicked lad.” Her hand pressed his shoulder, close to his neck, and made him nervous. He shrugged and she slipped it to the middle of his back. “You have a hatani mind, all right. You’re growing up.”
“I hear words, Sagot, sounds run in my head and I hear words in them.”
“What do they say, these words?”
“They tell me hello, they want something, I can’t tell what, they talk about the sun and the earth, they talk about math and chemistry, oxygen, they say, and carbon, over and over, and they talk nonsense, the elements, the reactions inside the sun, the lifecycle of stars-”
Sagot’s arm had gone tense. He turned and looked at her at close range, saw her eyes dilate and contract. “Did I just scare you?” Thorn asked.
“Go on talking.”
“I’m not supposed to talk to you about it. You keep telling me that.”
“You can tell me about this. Go on.”
“There isn’t anything more. I can’t remember anything else. I see that desert place and a place like a space station, I see the earth in space with the sun coming up, and faces-faces like mine, I see the space station full of them, I see people like me coming and going and talking to each other-sometimes they’re mad, and I can read them if I can’t figure out what they’re saying, one wants something and she’s a woman-Duun says I imagine it, but I’d never imagine a thing like that, her mouth is all red and her hair is long and her eyes are all painted round the edges: she wants something very bad and she’s angry with a man but he’s sorry and they go on meeting in this place, these places where people eat and have clothes, clothes for people with no hair, and she’s shaped like-” He shaped the image of fullness of his chest. (White all white, and large and strange-looking.) “And finally-there are a lot of people that come and go-she goes off with this other man and they go into his bedroom and they love each other, but it isn’t love, she doesn’t even like him, and he’s mad about that, maybe about something else; then she leaves and she goes and finds the first man but he’s about to go somewhere and he doesn’t want to talk to her. Her eyes run. He goes away. She goes to this place where people eat and she’s very unhappy. Then he walks through the door and he comes over to sit with her, but not on ordinary furniture, on these legged things, all the furniture’s like that. She’s pretending she’s not glad to see him, she keeps eating. He knows she’s pretending and he says something and they look at each other and say something about going somewhere, and then it stops and I don’t know where they went.”