Chapter 2: The Taste of Other People's Food
Yallin's house was small. Two chambers, a communal kitchen shared with three other families, a garden of edible fungi she cultivated with her hands, without auxiliary symbiotes.
- "I like to feel the texture - she explained," when Kael asked why she didn't use the automatic conduits. - "The mycelium responds differently when you touch it. You can tell if it's healthy before any sensor does."
Kael observed her hands. They were working hands: calloused fingers, small burn scars from spores, short nails dirty with living soil. Hands that had never held a living weapon, never crossed a dimensional rift, never touched the Reverse Heart.
Hands that sustained a family.
- "You look tired - said Yallin, placing a plate before him." The food was simple: a fermented mass of protein fungus, steamed vegetables, a thin but aromatic broth. - "Not tired from lack of sleep. Tired from something else."
Kael ate before answering. The taste was good. He hadn't expected it to be good.
- "I spent a long time looking at the whole - he said, finally. - At patterns. Metrics. Big decisions."
Yallin sat across from him, resting her elbows on the worn table. Sari was in a corner, pretending to read a symbiotic record but clearly listening.
- "And now? - asked Yallin."
- "Now the whole no longer needs me."
Yallin laughed. Not mockingly, but with recognition.
- "Do you know how many times the whole needed me? None. I just fixed conduits. Planted fungi. Raised Sari. The whole never consulted me about anything."
- "But you made a difference - said Kael."
- "I did. For the people who drank the water I cleaned. For Sari. For the neighbors. That's difference enough."
Kael chewed slowly. Threnaal pulsed in a rhythm he didn't recognize. Not alert, not pain. Something closer to... learning.
- "I don't know how to do that - he admitted."
- "Do what?"
- "Live small."
Yallin rested her chin on her hand and looked at him with an expression that mixed pity and respect.
- "Nobody starts knowing how. Not even the Navigator of Contraduality."
Sari let out a muffled giggle in the corner. Kael-Zhur, the man who had negotiated with the Rejected Core, who had faced Shuun-Vo in the Sterile Fields, who had witnessed the renunciation of the Axis, felt his ears grow warm.
It was embarrassment.
It was the first time in cycles he had felt something so simple.