In Which Dee Puts A Suggestion On The Table
Dee’s voice preceding her into the room wasn’t that unusual. The weird thing was that this time, she followed it.
I’d gathered that privacy was mostly a polite fiction among the underelves. Her well-developed elven sense of hearing meant that she could hear everything that was said in our room. Her well-developed elven sense of decorum meant that she would ignore everything she heard, unless and until someone addressed her.
I honestly couldn’t remember the last time she’d bothered to come into our room for a conversation. It was unusual… unnerving, even… to see her of all people come gliding into a room without invitation or apology for the intrusion, her long white hair streaming behind her.
The slip-like garment she wore was technically decent by most standards, though I knew it was actually an undergarment. It would have looked black if it had been hanging up by itself, but against her shining onyx skin you could just make out that it was a very dark green. Typically she would have worn a voluminous, all-concealing robe over it, and then an even more voluminous, even-more-all-concealing cloak over that.
Her standards of modesty had little to do with body insecurity… of all the people I knew who habitually wore clothes, she was the one most comfortable with nudity… and more to do with what she believed was proper. It struck me as unusual for her to have swept into a room containing a man while in her underthing, though.
“Mackenzie, what did this man say to you?” she said. “What exactly?”
“Um… well, I think it was like, ‘You can’t read my mind?’,” I said. “I mean, he didn’t actually say that he thought I could, but he said I couldn’t like it was surprising or confusing to him.”
“Lots of people have weird ideas about demons,” Ian said. “I mean, other than the basic preys-on-humans, hurt-by-holiness stuff, I was way off base in what I thought.”
“Yeah, remember how many people expected you to have horns and wings or something,” Amaranth said. “He probably picked up the idea from a scary story or something.”
“Do you believe this to be the case?” Dee asked me. There was something steely and insistent behind her eyes. “Please, think hard.”
“I don’t have to… he actually said it wasn’t a demon thing,” I said. “But it’s not like we had a long, in-depth conversation about it, you know? I thought it was weird. I didn’t think it was significant.”
“That seems an odd distinction to make,” Dee said. “I cannot believe you would not have pursued clarification following such a remark.”
I was a little unsettled by this remark, though I couldn’t say why. It didn’t exactly sound like an accusation, but somehow it stung like one.
“Well, weird is relative, you know?” I said. “People thinking stupid, baseless, random stuff about me is pretty much the baseline state of my existence, to the point where I have to actively not pay attention to it in order to get through my day. I’m sure you know nothing about that.
“Your point is taken,” Dee said, and she visibly relaxed, then bowed slightly. “I apologize for my outburst.”
“Technically, it was more of an in-burst,” Steff said.
“It’s okay,” I said. “We’ve taken advantage of you being next door often enough… it’s not a big deal that one time you overhear something interesting and decide to chime in. Otherwise we’re just treating you like a complicated magic item waiting to be invoked.”
“Nevertheless, I could have been more respectful in my approach,” Dee said.
“If you’re worried that someone in the building has it in for telepaths, I don’t think he was afraid,” I said. I’d been wracking my brain for a reason she’d been so concerned, and this seemed like the most likely culprit. “Actually, he seemed to treat me not being a mindreader the same way he reacted to me not knowing him. Like he was hurt and slightly disappointed.”
“Why would someone be hurt that you couldn’t read his mind?” Ian said.
“Spoken like someone who hasn’t dated much,” Steff said.
“I see,” Dee said. She kept her composure, but now that the wild alarm had passed, I could tell she was genuinely… and deeply…interested. “You did not remember this boy at all? Possibly from before.”
“No, I really didn’t,” I said. “I told you, my high school wasn’t that big, and people don’t change that much in a year or two.”
“Mack, baby… what about ten years, or more?” Amaranth said. “What about elementary school? Your whole life was uprooted when you turned, and the change from childhood to adolescence, and then to adulthood… I’d think it wouldn’t matter how distinctive someone looks, with that kind of time difference.”
“I guess that could be… the way he was peering at me, it was almost like he didn’t quite recognize me and was looking for something familiar,” I said. “But the thing is, I don’t remember a kid with a kind of weird face, even one who was short and pudgy instead of all gangly. I certainly wasn’t friends with anyone like that, on a level where he’d be disappointed that I don’t know him now. And also: Rowan Hartley. Maybe that name wouldn’t have stuck with me after the change and the move and everything else, but I can’t believe it wouldn’t ring a bell. Can you?”
“I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that if Rowan Hartley has a middle name, he went by it,” Steff said.
“I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that if Rowan Hartley doesn’t have a middle name, he still went by it,” Ian said. “True story: in second grade, I was Bruce.”
“Well, I think Ian and Rowan are both lovely names,” Amaranth said.
“Guys, I’m still pretty sure I didn’t know him,” I said. “I mean, I don’t really remember any boys that I was friends with.”
“Mackenzie,” Dee said, her calm, quiet voice cutting right through the general atmosphere of banter. “Do you remember friends from before you turned, of any gender?”
“It… it was a long time ago,” I said.
“If that is your answer, then it does not rule out having known this Rowan Hartley.”
“Well, I was a pretty solitary child,” I said. “I who I went to school with, I just wasn’t friends with anyone. I mean, you know… well, you might not know, but when you go to school as a kid, you’re kind of friends with everyone by default? And then you get older and you start… sorting yourselves off into little groups. I was a group of one.”
“Yes! Weird loner kids, represent!” Steff said, holding out her hand for a high five.
I looked at her in confusion for a moment, more because I had never grown used to people offering me high fives than because of the specific thing she was offering it for. She lowered her hand, and then put it behind her back.
“Can you picture your classmates?” Dee said. “From your school before your change?”
I could… I did. It was a jumble of faces in sweaters, oversized coats, t-shirts, jeans. Backs of heads sitting in desks. Children sitting in circles and semi-circles. School stuff.
“I don’t think I could paint a picture of them or anything, but it’s been awhile,” I said. “Remember, I haven’t seen them in literally a decade at this point.”
“Did you think of them often, in the years following your move? Did you miss them”
“Not really, no,” I said. “I missed my mother. I missed our life together. I guess I missed the town and the school, but… I was a solitary child.”
“Perhaps I should not be judging your experiences against my own,” Dee said. “As a daughter of the line, I was raised in relative isolation from others in my approximate age group, and when I was admitted as an acolyte I was still kept largely apart from others undergoing the same lessons… but even viewing them remotely, I grew accustomed to their presence. There are young women to whom I have never spoken a word outside the dictates of manners and ritual whom I have found myself thinking of during my sojourn on the surface.”
“Yeah, well, I guess it’s different for me,” I said. “People are different. Like I said, I was a…”
“Solitary child,” Dee said. “Mackenzie, can you tell me how your mother died?”
“What the fuck does that have to do with anything?”
“Easy, baby,” Amaranth said, putting her hand on my shoulder.
“I’m not going to fire off here,” I said, though obviously I was angry enough to. “But that’s just… that’s not cool, Dee.”
“Mackenzie, please listen to me very carefully,” Dee said. “Can you tell me how your mother died?”
“You think this Rowan Hartley guy has something to do with that?” I said. “It wasn’t my fault, but I don’t see what that has to do with the mysterious creeper. Especially since I don’t actually know him.”
“Mackenzie, forgive me, I know this is a painful subject, and would be even if what I suspect to be true is not,” Dee said. “But you must understand, I am not asking you how your mother died.”
“Then what the fuck are you doing?”
“I am seeking to ascertain if you have the ability to tell others”
“Tell others what?”
“How your mother died.”
“It wasn’t my fault, okay?” I said. “Fucking kheez, can we drop it?”
“Baby,” Amaranth said. “I’ve never pressed you on this because I don’t need to know, but you know… you never have told me how your mother died. Do you… do you know how she died?”
“It wasn’t my fault,” I said.
“Holy fucking shit,” Steff said. She… and I noticed, now that I wasn’t looking at Dee anymore, everyone else… was staring at me with something kind of like sympathetic horror on their face.
“You think I’m overreacting?” I said.
“Mackenzie…” Ian said.
“What?” I said. “You think I am? Seriously?”
“No, I think… I think… Dee, what do we think?” Ian said. “I want to say ‘geas’, but…”
“I do not believe Mackenzie is under a geas, no,” Dee said. “The ridiculous owl-turtle thing has long been of the opinion that her memory was tampered with at some point in the past, and I believe we may consider this to be confirmation.”
“Dee, are you listening to yourself?” I said. “You are quoting something called the ridiculous owl-turtle thing. You’re literally talking about a figment of your imagination.”
“In point of fact, I am literally talking about a figment of Two’s imagination,” she said. “Given structure and weight by her unusually orderly and rigid mind, and presence in the world by my own telepathic abilities and possibly the unknown influence of an extradimensional mind of great power in the form of what you termed the fish-beast. The owl-turtle thing is an anomaly. It is irritating at almost a fundamental level, but it is not a thing to be written off lightly. Yet it reports you were singularly disinclined to take its advice regarding the state of your memories, even when you were otherwise seeking aid from it.”
“Yeah, well, it had some dire hints about something or other hinky going on, but there were more important things going on at the time,” I said. “And anyway, that’s how it works, isn’t it? It needs a living mind to dwell in, so it’s always got to dangle some carrot or another to keep you interested.”
“You… may not be wrong about that,” Dee said. “Nevertheless, its unusual habitat gives it a unique vantage point.”
“Like fish have a unique vantage point of water?” I said.
“Babe,” Ian said. “The fact that you’re so dismissive of this is kind of scary… if someone suggested to me that my brain had been tampered with…”
“Mind, not brain,” I said. “I sat through enough lectures about the difference. And anyway, what are you saying? The fact that I recognize it as ridiculous is proof that it’s not? So if I thought it made perfect sense, would you decide my mind hadn’t been tampered with? Or is this a case where no matter what I say, it proves Dee’s stupid theory right?”
“Language!” Amaranth said. The word stupid was a pretty hard no for her, and I blanched at having forgotten it.
“Sorry, ma’am,” I said, ducking my head.
“A person who feels certain of a thing because the idea was implanted in her mind that she should feel certain of it is not distinguishable at the surface level from a person who feels certain of a thing for any other reason,” Dee said. “This is not a question we will answer through verbally sifting through the qualia of one person’s existence.”
“Yeah? So how exactly do you propose to sift through my ‘qualia’?” I said. “You can’t touch my mind safely, Dee. No telepath from this plane of existence can. That kind of direct connection would fry you… the last person who tried wound up in the infirmary with memories surgically excised for her own protection. And if you think I’m going to take the owl-turtle thing as an objective judge…”
“I do not propose we seek the answers within your mind at all,” Dee said. “By your own accounts, you seem to take this Rowan Hartley at his word that he knows you, or knew you.”
“That’s going a bit far,” I said. “I mean, it seems more likely that he knows of me, from somewhere, and is just… I don’t know, projecting something on me.”
“That is the conclusion you come to, based on your own certainty that you do not know him,” Dee said. “But I hear it plainly in your voice. You know that he knows you, and this is what has you so rattled.”
“Okay, I take it as given that he thinks he knows me, and that bothers me,” I said.
“He thinks you should know him.”
“However you want to say it, I accept that he believes it should be the case,” I said.
“Very well. You were already intent upon reaching out to him and learning the truth of the matter,” Dee said. “I do not propose you do anything different.”
“Then why was this worth kicking the door down and busting in?”
“That’s a bit of an exaggeration, baby,” Amaranth said.
“Because,” Dee said, “based on what the owl-turtle thing has said to me and what I have surmised from hearing the conversation before I entered, I expect the results will be quite inexplicable and even upsetting if you do not have an explanation. Therefore, I am proposing one to you: your memory has been altered.”
“That’s kind of a stretch,” I said.
“Understand, I am not saying the expected results would prove my supposition to be true, merely that my supposition would provide an explanation for the expected results,” Dee said.
“And then what?” I said. “Dee, you understand what you’re saying? If you think my memory was altered, and my memory tells me it wasn’t my fault…”
“This does not necessarily mean that it was your fault,” Dee said.
“No? You’re saying it’s an implanted memory. Why would someone bother to implant a true memory?”
“First, I would not say that it is an implanted memory. It is an implanted suggestion,” Dee said. “I believe the true memory has been obliterated or blocked, and the idea that it wasn’t your fault… along with a corollary idea that you shouldn’t think about it… was left behind.”
“False memory, suggestion… the point is, why would anybody have bothered to leave it there if it was true?”
“For one very simple reason: to make certain you would always believe it.”