When Lydia gets back to Manhattan she draws a thick line in her consciousness between Old Lydia and New Lydia. All the mistakes of the past belong to Old Lydia. New Lydia doesn’t make those kind of mistakes. New Lydia:
• is slick
• is polite to the point of blandness
• doesn’t punch people (at least, not when she’s working).
Fitz seems delighted to have her back, saying the temp tried his best but simply wasn’t as good. He needed everything explained, he tells Lydia. He didn’t anticipate things like you do. This wasn’t something Lydia had realized she was good at, and she’s pleased but now feels under pressure to keep it up. And I assumed you all had a basic level of knowledge about literature, geography and so on. Your predecessor did, as do you, so I thought they taught you all that at the school. But the temp really didn’t know anything. He didn’t seem very bright.
Lydia laughs, remembering the LSTL pupils who’d come there from expensive schools and coasted through the core subjects, getting creditable grades before forgetting it all. Whereas no one ever expected Lydia to know things, but the ignorance was theirs, not hers: They didn’t know what it was like to grow up in an inkworks town with random books in every home, in the corner of every pub, even piled up in the veebars. You found stuff in books that was almost certainly online somewhere but you’d never see it unless you were looking for it. Whenever there was a run of a new English-language book being inked there’d be people talking about it on local feeds, in pubs, on street corners. Not everyone, but if you did it wasn’t seen as odd, people didn’t give you grief about it. They gave you grief about other stuff, but not that.
Then Lydia picks up on something Fitz said a moment ago. Having just seriously considered quitting, Lydia finds herself curious to know why her predecessor left, so she asks Fitz.
Burnt out, he replies in a bland tone. It was just time for her to move on.
The following week Fitz and Lydia are onstage in a lecture theater at NYU. There’s a conference on the subject of the alien in literature and how this has changed over the years Earth and Logia have been in contact. Fitz is giving a keynote paper on what the human has represented in Logi texts, and Lydia is giving it simultaneously. To save strain on her, they’ve prepared her translation in advance so she can simply read it from her glasses rather than translating as she goes along. Looking out across the audience now, she’s surprised how many of them are in hardspace. With this being an international conference she’d expected most of them to plug in. Either a lot of them are locals, or the kind of people who go to these things are wealthier than she realized.
During the early part of the paper Lydia is nervous, but reminds herself most people in the audience aren’t looking at her anyway, and if they do look at her she’s wearing an excellent new outfit (dark purple crushed velvet trousers and a light blue shirt with white pinstripes). Her delivery grows more confident and authoritative: she tells herself there’s no reason not to be because after all she understands everything she’s saying; she and Fitz talked through the ideas thoroughly, she’s not just learned it parrot-fashion. By the end, Lydia’s nerves have gone and she feels she deserves the applause she—and Fitz—receive.
But next she has to translate the audience’s questions, the first of which comes from a smartly dressed, middle-aged woman and concerns a Logi work of fiction whose title roughly translates as The Edge Pieces. “Have you read it?” the woman asks Fitz.
Fitz admits he hasn’t. Lydia hasn’t either, so she can’t help.
“I have to say I found it deeply patronizing,” the woman says, testily. “You can talk about the enriching effect of cultural dialogue all you like but I find it deeply worrying that your people are reading it and thinking it represents us. I think it says far more about you.”
Lydia relates this to Fitz, adding Which was exactly what the bloody paper was about. Shall I point that out to her?
Just tell her I’ll read the book, and thank her for bringing it to my attention.
Lydia does so, but the questioner isn’t satisfied and keeps talking. Fitz is too polite to intervene, so Lydia eventually does it for him. The woman looks most disgruntled, and for a moment Lydia thinks she’s going to kick off and security will have to escort her from the building. Lydia hastily moves on to the next question, which comes from an elderly man.
“I see very little of religion in your literature,” he says, “and you must forgive my ignorance, but is that because there’s no plurality in such matters, and hence no conflict to write about? Or because there’s no religion?”
Lydia translates this and Fitz thinks about it for a moment. Such matters are discussed in our literature, he replies. But those works don’t translate well, so almost no one here has read them.
The questioner asks what the basis of their religious and/or spiritual beliefs are.
It’s a complex subject, I don’t feel I can adequately explain it in the time we have. Someone else would be better qualified. On the other hand, I find your own depictions of religion deeply fascinating … And he talks about this with great enthusiasm until they run out of time.
The keynote is just the start of a long day. Fitz commissioned written translations of the papers in advance and has already read them all, so he sits in on them and pretends to listen out of respect, while Lydia just listens without translating for him. But merely concentrating on papers all day is tiring, and she also has to translate the discussions at the end of each paper, and in the gaps between panels there are people they must speak to. When the attendees gather for the closing remarks Lydia is exhausted and tipsy and sneaks off to take a small bump of &.
At the evening banquet she’s a dynamo, hopping from conversation to conversation and translating smoothly and at speed, placing Fitz at the center of the proceedings as befits his status as keynote speaker. After dessert has been served Fitz asks Lydia if she wants to go home and she genuinely doesn’t. It’s not just the &, it’s natural adrenaline. Doing her job well is a buzz, it’s like a game she keeps on winning, and she can’t believe she almost quit.
Right, says Fitz. Just tell me when you get tired and we’ll go.
Absolutely, Lydia replies.
She doesn’t remember much after that.
She wakes the next morning and feels like fucking death. She’s still wearing her shirt from last night but not the trousers. She has a desperate craving for sugar and caffeine but getting either of those things will involve moving, which hurts. It also hurts to open her eyes. She feels like her brain has been pumped full of junk thoughts and is collapsing under its own bloated weight.
She reaches for one of the cans of Coke Lo! she keeps in her bedside table, tears off the strip and waits for it to chill. Once it’s cold enough she opens it and reluctantly pulls herself up into a sitting position so she can drink the contents without pouring them into her nose. She tells the curtains to slowly switch to fifty percent opacity. It looks like a sweltering gray day out there, with storms on the way. That’s not going to help her headache.
She searches for her glasses so she can check her feed and make sure she didn’t do anything last night that’s going to get her fired. But she can’t find her glasses anywhere. She usually leaves them on the bedside cabinet to charge, and the magnetized surface stops them falling on the floor, so she can’t have knocked them off in her sleep. Maybe she left them in her bag.
OK, where is her bag?
Lydia opens the cabinet and gets out her spare glasses, the ones that aren’t agency-issued, that she wears when she’s not working. To her relief there are no alarming notes. She’s been tagged into some clips of the paper.
@jairzin70 / Interesting issues raised in this paper from CA Fitzwilliam and @Lydl_Wordz / humbled to find the roundtable discussion I hosted in January is cited! / TR94
@Sansalee[=/=] / So proud of my beautiful friend @Lydl_Wordz smashing it HARD hard with this key note!! / TRUSTED FRIEND
Lydia wonders if it would be vain to share these to her feed, then she says sod it and does so. Looking down farther she finds images of herself at the banquet, not looking too messy—a little wild-eyed in some of them, but you could argue she just looks like she’s … listening intently? Yes, you could argue it looks like that. She doesn’t share these to her feed.
As her mind stops screeching with paranoia and settles into just a normal hangover, she notices Fitz doesn’t seem to be in the house. She’s familiar with his psychic footprint or whatever you want to call it, and can usually sense when he’s here: if she strains she can talk to him even if she’s up here and he’s in the study. Strange. He very rarely goes anywhere without her. He doesn’t take walks in the park. Whenever she’s resting or using the basement gym, he usually just sits in his study and works.
Maybe he got lucky with one of the Logi attending the conference and didn’t come home, the sly dog. Lydia amuses herself with this thought as she hauls herself out of bed, even though something at the back of her bruised consciousness tells her that’s not what’s happened, and this drives her to get up and investigate when all she really wants to do is lie back and order pastries to be droned to her window.
She descends the stairs and in her head she calls Fitz’s name, hoping for a reply and not getting one. Tentatively she peers into his bedroom, establishes he’s not in there and quickly retreats.
He’s just gone out, she tells herself. That’s all.
She goes down to the ground floor—and look, there’s her bag leaning against the wall in the hallway. She must have dumped it there when she came in last—
The study door is open.
As Lydia approaches, there’s a faint smell she can’t identify. She looks through the doorway of the study and can tell the sofa is occupied, her eyes can detect the shape of Fitz lying on it in his usual fashion, but she doesn’t want to look directly at him because she can see his dark greenish-purple blood pooling on the rug and the hardwood floor, and that’s what she can smell, and if he’s right in front of her but she can’t sense him in her mind there’s only one possible explanation.