The Budding Metalinguist

VII

Lillian stood in the center of the arena. Around her, strewn not across the ground but throughout the air, were a variety of objects from paperclips and notecards to heavy chunks of stone. Kern was watching her in approval.

"Good. You can clearly control a wide variety of objects at once. Can you move different objects at the same time?"

All of the objects in the air shifted from side to side.

"Can you move the objects in different directions?"

Kern was clearly expecting Lillian to move all of the objects radially or tangentially to the circles they defined. Instead, she moved two of the paperclips along skew lines. It clearly required a large amount of concentration. One or two of the other objects fell to the ground.

"More practice," Kern recommended. Lillian nodded in silence, lowering all the objects to the ground, waiting for him to continue. She was eager to learn something else. Something new.

"I'm going to teach you an Idea that will help you," Kern began. "It's complicated, but it will essentially create a traceable thaumaturgical signature for any metalanguage you use which can be accomplished using thaumaturgy. Call it what you will. I usually call it the Idea of Disguise." He paused for a moment and demonstrated. Lillian could feel what the Idea was expressing, even though she couldn't trace the thaumaturgy. The thaumaturgical signature created appeared to belong to someone with an efficacy of around forty percent, lifting a medium-sized object several feet into the air.

"You try," Kern suggested.

Lillian concentrated. She called up the Idea and created a scenario to fit it. Someone with about twenty percent efficacy making a small object circle around their head.

Professor Kern bobbed his head in approval. "Excellent. This Idea will mean that you can use telekinesis in front of people who don't know you have Ryan's." It was clear that he was just shortening the name for Lillian's condition to make it easier to say.

Lillian nearly asked again how he knew that she was unable to use thaumaturgy, but figured it was probably pointless. She doubted that he would answer the question. She suddenly resented how much he had lied to her. And wondered if he would ever stop lying.

☙❧

Dakota felt guiltier about this than Lillian would have thought. He knew that she didn't fully trust him yet, and identified his secrets as the source of the problem. He was already feeling like he should be honest with Lillian, that he shouldn't hide anything from her.

But you're not hiding anything from her.

"She asks about Ashley and I tell her Ashley is a metalinguist. She asks whether I have spies in the DIAO and I don't answer."

You have no choice, the voice in his head argued. You should know from teaching a class. You have to teach her some things before others.

"I don't want to lie to her."

You're not lying, the voice reiterated. You're going to tell her everything. She isn't ready yet. That doesn't mean you're hiding anything and it doesn't mean you're lying. There's so much to explain that it's going to take a long time.

Dakota sighed, but resigned himself to the fact that the voice was right. He had no choice but to temporarily refrain from answering some of Lillian's questions.

"I should at least tell her that I'm not going to hide things from her forever."

You can't tell her that.

Dakota narrowed his eyes, puzzled. "Why not?"

The more she feels you're hiding things from her, the less she'll trust you. And if she realizes just how many secrets you have, she might not listen. She might leave.

"I'll word it so she doesn't know how much I'm hiding."

Don't call it that. How much you're waiting on.

Dakota knew it was the voice's way of relenting. Telling him that he was right.

But it felt like lying. Especially given who she was.

☙❧

Galena was thoughtful.

Only a few days before, Lillian had been trying to convince her that Beanie wasn't using an illusion to mask his appearance. Galena had rejected that idea almost immediately, but now she wasn't so sure. One thing she didn't understand was how Beanie had consistently managed to reproduce the same set of fingerprints on various surfaces. She began to entertain another possibility: that the vagrant hadn't died that night in the cell. That the body had been fake, and there had been some kind of cover-up with the local police, possibly involving a bribe. She already knew that Beanie was not alone in whatever he was trying to do- he was working with, or seemed to be working with, her mother. It was definitely a possibility.

She reminded herself that Beanie didn't look even close to the sixty years that he would be if the vagrant had survived. He looked more like a twenty year old.

He could, Galena supposed, be using an illusion. Maybe he was actually the vagrant- which would explain the fingerprints- and was using an untraceable illusion. Another part of his untraceable thaumaturgy. Lillian had some bizarre explanation about their eyes always twitching when he used this, but Galena wasn't inclined to believe her, especially in light of her recent behavior.

If Beanie was the vagrant, though, there was still the question of who that vagrant was. Who would be so important that their death had to be faked and the police department silenced in order to ostensibly get him out of jail? Was the original vagrant also an illusion? Despite what Galena knew about the Thaumatogenesis being the source of worldwide gene activation, she had to admit that it was possible that Beanie could have been a thaumaturge long before that. The vagrant and the prisoner could just be a slightly aged version of the same illusion that Beanie had been using for the last forty years.

It was definitely a possibility.

☙❧

Beanie, Rolf decided, knew more than he was supposed to. Much more.

Rolf had spent the last day thinking over what he had realized about Beanie's motivations for putting up the sign. Although Rolf didn't want to admit it out loud, much less tell his colleagues, he had already privately decided that Beanie had known the sign would get Rolf fired, and had known that Rolf would subsequently join the DIAO. It seemed outrageous to think of, but Rolf was constantly thinking of new examples for things that Beanie shouldn't know, but did.

When he had knocked Galena unconscious, for instance. (Rolf was already beginning to dislike the name Galena.) Even though Beanie was using Fifth Wheel thaumaturgy, which was independent from barriers, Rolf didn't understand how he would have known exactly how to knock Galena out. Galena hadn't mentioned the feeling of a blow to her head, or not being able to breathe, or being lightheaded before she went unconscious- it had just happened. Suddenly. Something that Beanie should not have been able to do.

Or the time when Beanie returned to the DIAO to steal the key Lillian had given them. He'd simply broken in using thaumaturgy, abstracted the key, and left. No prints, no traces, no fibers, no footsteps. But the thing that worried Rolf was that Beanie had known when to come. It was the same day that the entire DIAO was in Eugene exhuming the vagrant. MLK Day, Rolf seemed to remember.

He rationalized that it wasn't just Beanie. Ashley knew something too. Rolf recalled hearing that Ashley had been seen by her neighbors just the day before the DIAO had come to her apartment. So how had she known that she needed to leave just then?

The question was: did Beanie and Ashley have their own special ways of knowing? Or was the answer simpler?

Was there a spy in the DIAO?