Dance at the Edge
Emma felt guilty for putting Viola’s future in jeopardy—and then crazy, too, for feeling guilty. Her heart pounded in the thick, nauseating silence that made her feel as though she were smothering. “Don’t you realize how terrible your guild’s silence is? It’s nearly ruined my life—making me worry all the time that I might be crazy. I’m sure there are people who do go crazy, never knowing what’s real and what’s not!”
Viola’s lips parted. “Oh,” she said softly. “They told me people were trained to block Seams out of their vision, like the floaters in one’s eyes. They said that only engineers ever saw them at all.” Her eyes darkened in sweet, dewy softness. “I’m sorry, Emma, I’m so very, very sorry. But at least now you do know.”
They resumed walking, and Viola revealed some of what she knew about what the Seams were and what little she had been told about why people were taught not to see them. Since Emma had no idea even what a particle was, Viola’s mini-lecture on tachyon fields meant nothing to her. But when Viola told her about how in earlier times people had made religions and claimed powers of divination from the appearances of particular Seams, Emma listened with rapt attention.
“They were, in effect, used to manipulate large groups of people,” Viola said as they came within sight of the bus, parked at the terminus. “There were terrible wars as a result. And so it was decided that it would be best if people just pretended they weren’t there. Seeing how easily certain persons could use them to manipulate large groups of people. And so everyone did forget them—except the engineers, who swore themselves to secrecy. Well, it stood to reason, you know. It’s not as though we could ignore them. And so they became a sort of trade secret.” Viola fell silent at the sight of the driver leaning against the bus, reading. They greeted her and asked her how long before the bus returned to town.
The driver consulted the digital readout on the cuff of her sleeve. “Three minutes, twenty seconds,” she said.
Viola Knight and Emma Persimmon boarded the bus. Since they could not talk about the forbidden subject in the presence of a non-engineer, Viola asked Emma about her village and guild. Only later did Emma realize that Viola had not asked her why she had followed her out of town, into the woods, in the first place.
6.
In the days following, both the pleasure of Emma’s love and the pain of its being unspoken and unreturned intensified. Emma grew self-conscious in her surveillance of Viola. Instead of being emboldened by the advance in their relationship, Emma grew fearful of causing offense. Her friends, having seen that the two were now acquainted, teased Emma, trying to prod her into open pursuit. “Seduce her,” Letitia Shadows said. “She won’t be able to resist! Not you, Emma.”
Emma began, for the first time, to spend long hours in the library so that she could “brood in peace,” as she thought of it. She assumed that sitting in the Biology section would preserve her from her friends’ scrutiny. But she had not counted on the need of art students to consult biology texts in their search for tropes.
“Emma Persimmon, what on earth is all that?”
Emma was doodling—the usual, of course. She looked up guiltily at Sanctus Geloso, then back down at her screen. She made a jab for the Clear button, but Sanctus caught her wrist and stopped her. “Sanctus,” she whispered in protest, but the name came out little more than a hiss.
Sanctus Geloso’s scowl was fierce. “Why representational drawing?” he asked, though not whispering, keeping his voice low. “Why not thieve a piece of her clothing, or hair, or the damned toothbrush?”
Emma realized that she was getting good at drawing not only Viola Knight’s wrist and pajama sleeve, but her hand holding the toothbrush as well. So good, she thought, looking now at the doodling she usually erased after she’d finished a screenful, that she actually felt like tracing her finger over the screen as a substitute for touching the real thing.
“I love those hands,” Emma Persimmon said. “I just love them. If I could sculpt the way you do, I’d make a pair of them in marble, and it would be wonderful.”
Sanctus Geloso was shocked. He insisted that Emma go with him for coffee, so that they could talk. That’s what he said. But once he got Emma outside the library, out into the cold, frosty air, he began lecturing her like a parent who has discovered his child playing with matches. “How can you be so disrespectful!” he said. “I wouldn’t have thought if of you, Emma.”
Emma was bewildered. “What do you mean,
disrespectful?”
“An image is a map,” Sanctus said. “And we map people and parts of people for only the most concrete, practical reasons. Healers map a specific person’s hand in order to designate an injury. We map generic human bodies and their parts to help us understand how they work. But we don’t map specific persons’ bodies because we desire them, or to make aesthetic objects of them.” Sanctus Geloso’s eyes froze her with disapprobation. “If your parents didn’t teach you manners, surely you had ethics, if not art classes, in your village?”
Though he was a couple of years older, Emma had regarded him as a friend. The sharpness of his attack took her utterly by surprise. Emma’s sight blurred with tears; she swallowed convulsively three or four times. All of that stuff was so dry, and it hadn’t seemed of any concern to her—or indeed to anyone in the village. They weren’t artists, they were all very practical people. Yes, of course she understood about drawing, about how a sketch was a map that highlighted certain kinds of information but never attempted to represent the whole, since the whole of a thing could never be adequately represented in any way shape or form except as aspects of it conformed to classes and subclasses of orders. But drawing Viola Knight’s hand—doodling—hadn’t felt like mapping or attempting a representation, exactly… . She had done it without thinking, compulsively—a response, really, to the way that image was always with her.
