Chapter 9: Chapter 9 – Afflicted By A Terrible Joy

I stepped out of the Hall of the Thousand into the light of the setting sun.

“Sophie. That—”

I interrupted her by hugging her, arms snaking up her back to feel the sudden tension at her shoulder blades, the moderate expanse of my belly squishing against her. “Kelly,” I announced into her shoulder, “I don’t appreciate you enough. You are beautiful and kind and gracious, and I would be lost without you.”

“I… wow, okay. That’s nice to hear.” Her arms came around me, and I sank into the embrace contentedly. “Did they… speak to you?”

Is this something they told you to do, I understood her as saying, and I giggled. “Did you know,” I said in lieu of answering, “that a single cell of yeast contains tens of millions of molecules of proteins?”

“... no. Sophie, are you okay?”

“It’s a system so incredibly complex we don’t understand it. We can’t even understand the smallest example of a cell, not really. It’s a chaotic soup that exists in this state of dynamic equilibrium, two equilibria, one inside it and one at the membrane that separates it from the outside.” I blinked a few times, smiling so wide my face feels like it’s going to break in two. “I didn’t think Shemmai would have the word for equilibrium. Or membrane.”

“The word for a state of balance is thousands of years old, and ‘membrane’ we know through one of the Gods of Life, I don’t remember which. Sophie, look me in the eyes for a second?”

I lifted my head from its comfortable perch, grinning at her and meeting her gaze. “I have no idea how much of an understanding of any of the fields of natural philosophy you have. Science. That’s another word in Koshe that you don’t have an equivalent of. But that’s more than I’d expected!”

“Sophie.” Kelly grabbed my jaw in one of her hands, moving my head to the left and right. I let her; she was still hugging me with the other arm, and everything was fine. “Sophie, your eyes are forge-flame. Did you—no, obviously you spoke to a God, you’ve got the biggest case of Godtouch I’ve seen in my life, I need to write this down tonight and then check the Library tomorrow. How long did you speak to those Gods of yours?”

“They’re not my Gods, silly.” I thought about that for a moment. “Maybe I’m one of their mortals, though? I’m not sure I’m ready to commit the other way around. I mean, after a few thousand repetitions of Hear, O brethren, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One, it’s a little hard to—I’m babbling. Is this euphoria? What’s Godtouch?”

“Sophie, yes, you’re babbling. How long—”

“I’m so sorry, I’m just so happy and this world is so beautiful—”

“It’s fine, you’re adorable, actually.” She paused after saying that, then nodded briskly. “Yes! That’s exactly what this is. Also worrying!”

“Ah. Um. Um!” I was blushing furiously, and back to burying my face in her shoulder. “I don’t know what you mean by how long. I walked in there, and I took three steps forward surrounded by the mirrors and the music, and then…” She made a circling motion with her hand, which I interpreted as keep talking. She had a smile that had layers and I couldn’t read them, but it was a smile, so things were clearly okay. “I don’t know? I don’t know! It wasn’t words. It was expectations and feelings and they were shadows of their shadows. If you hold a grain of sand, did you touch the beach? Do you have beaches in Shem? I mean, the language—”

“Yes, Sophie, we have beaches in Shem. Two hours. No wonder you’re one with the clouds! Come on, let’s get you to dinner.”

She let me keep an arm around her waist, and I reveled in the feeling of touch. I felt like my body and mind alike were boneless, without a single piece of tension; I felt like I could dance, like I could sing. “I hope I turn out to be iron,” I heard myself saying, not paying much attention to my words, snickering in anticipation of the pun I was about to make. “I don’t like being cut down. I don’t wanna be Procrustes’s guest! Annealing sounds way hotter. Oh! That works in Shemmai! That’s great.”

“I am definitely going to have to spend some time in the Library tomorrow.” Kelly was practically muttering, presumably stupefied by the glory of my sense of humor, a thought which had me giggling all over again. “What was that about iron?”

“He was all sorts of things, one at a time, but not like he was changing. More like I was seeing a different part of him, like he was a… a 3-sphere, a sphere drawn in one more spatial axis of measurement—hey! That’s a word that you’re missing! And Koshe doesn’t have it either!”

“Keep walking, Sophie. You can keep talking, just keep walking.”

I had in fact stopped walking. I started again, putting my arm around her waist once more instead of gesticulating with it. Her hip bumped against mine every few steps, which was fantastic. “I can smell so many things I don’t recognize. I didn’t realize it until now, how many new things I’m smelling! I smelled the forge-fire, kinda, it’s more like feeling the heat but there’s some smell. Not like the glue, not like the paint. They all said different things to me. They? He? He was all of them, they were him. Of him.”

“We call it communing.” Kelly grabbed my shoulder to keep me on the path when I failed to notice it curving, splitting around a patch of vines. “I mean, usually it takes a bunch of getting ready and then a bunch of meditating to connect like that with a God, but maybe usually doesn’t apply to Travelers!”

“Huh.” I blinked a few times, intending to process that and give it careful consideration. “What kind of fruits are those on that tree?”

Kelly didn’t answer for a bit, and when I looked over at her, she was shaking her head slowly, shoulders going up and down in what might have been suppressed laughter. “It’s a triple citrus,” she eventually said. “We have bushes, too, but they’re single-variant. The triples usually have lemons, limes, and oranges.”

“I think the translation is giving me the same word for different fruits,” I complained, beaming in joy. “Those don’t smell like what I expect. Oh! Did you know that most people think the smells are because of—” I paused, groaning. “You don’t have anything close to that word! Well, you do have chirality. But the chiral mirrors aren’t a big enough portion of the smell to make the difference! Instead, the difference is that Earth’s limes have a smell that’s like a kind of tree, lemons have citral—hey! You have that word!”

“Ye—oh! I don’t know that word.”

“That’s okay! I mean, I only know it because I looked it up when I got into an argument about why the different citruses smell different. It turns out it’s weird because food smells and perfume smells are really different!”

“Is this what you’re like when you’re drunk?” We’d gone far enough down the path that there wasn’t any more curving and splitting, so Kelly took her hand off my elbow, which was terrible. “The books say that Godtouch is like being drunk, for some people, but you aren’t unsteady on your feet and your eyes can focus.”

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“Oh, no, no. When I’m drunk I’m a lot more, I can stay, I’m less everywhere, you know?” I gave it some thought, entire seconds of it, managing the titanic feat of not getting distracted. “Not that I ever let myself get more than tipsy, but no. This is more like when I got fucked, like really properly fucked. Oh shit.”

I tried to take my hand away from her waist to bury my face in both my hands, but it wouldn’t move, so I just buried it in just one hand, feeling the embarrassed heat flooding my face. Kelly was giggling, or snickering, or both, and wow she had a nice giggle, but did anyone have a bad laugh?

Okay, first off, yes, Dan had an awful laugh, forced and fake, and second, I can’t believe I just said that. “I’m sorry,” I babbled. “That was too much. I shouldn’t have said that, that’s mortifying, I’m mortified. Totally inappropriate of me, please forget that happened.”

“Hmmm.” Sophie squeezed my hand into her side with her elbow—which explained why I couldn’t reclaim it, for that matter—and made probably performative thinking noises. “Nope! Gonna keep that one for blackmail, or maybe for deciding which guys to introduce you to, not that there’s a whole lot of choice. Mostly just the delvers, actually!”

“Girls, actually.” I flushed even harder at her quirked eyebrow, but it wasn’t… judgey, it was just curious and a little confused. “I don’t do—I’m not attracted to guys. Boys, they’re fine to be friends with, but for sex? The whole masculine thing, just zero interest.

“No, I like girls. Women, isn’t it weird to call girls who are adults girls? But I identify as one? Anyway, I’m gay, gay, homosexuelle, oh wow, that’s Sylvan!” I giggled at that. “It’s like, uh, that other language I used to know! Oh, and fluid is good too, I just don’t like men. I mean, sexually. They can be fine as people. I’m going to shut up now.”

Kelly looked over at me, still not releasing my hand—not that I was making more than a token effort to free myself—and smirked. She didn’t say anything, and I waited a perceptual eternity for her to.

Why isn’t she saying anything?

“Counting the seconds,” she said with an even wider smirk, and I realized belatedly that I’d said that thought out loud.

“This is so embarrassing. I haven’t been this embarrassed since I was a student, wandering in the desert by trying to squeeze hedonism in between classes and research as an Academy aspirant. And you probably don’t have that saying but that’s okay because it comes from a passage in a book where the actual situation is completely different!”

“That doesn’t sound like a very effective way to be hedonistic!”

“You’re giggling at me. I’m being ridiculous! Why are you giggling at me?”

“Because you’re being ridiculous.” She beamed at me, and I had to stop in my tracks to have a fit of giggles right back at her.

She was nice enough to make sure I didn’t fall, which was definitely appropriate, since my giggle fit was all her fault.

“I got high on—on something you don’t have, it was a plant, it made me want—nope nope, no, uh, it had twenty one carbon atoms, thirty of hydrogen, and two of oxy—hey! You have the same elements! You have the periodic table!”

Kelly’s voice went a bit more serious, and she let my hand go. “The Thousand could not have decreed the Edict Against Subatomics otherwise.”

“Ooookay, that’s something for me to ask about later. A lot of somethings for me to ask about later.”

“Yeah.” Her voice lost its seriousness, and I saw her eyes twinkle at me out of the corner of my vision. “And what did it make you want? Just asking for blackmail purposes.”

“I—hey! No fair! That,” I spluttered, “is proprietary information and I am embarrassed enough. And mortified. Did I mention mortified? And embarrassed? But I can’t stop, and everything feels so good, including talking and every emotion in the world, and the sunlight even though it’s fading and all the smells and you. I don’t know how you’re tolerating this! Or me, actually.”

“Sophie.” Her voice was gentle, soothing, and oddly formal. “You are in an altered state of consciousness due to Godtouch, of all things. I would never lie to you, so I will not say that this is an inherently holy state, since we would describe it as a side effect of the divine rather than the purpose, but… we call it Godtouch for a reason. I joke, but nobody will hold what you say tonight against you; or at least, I certainly won’t, because that would be… sacrilege.”

“Wow, that’s really convenient for me personally.” I tried to relax onto her shoulder dramatically, but we were still walking, so instead I almost fell over and she had to catch me again. “You know, there’s a passage in the holy books of the faith I grew up in where someone accuses God of sacrilege? As a bargaining tactic! And God obviously approves, and isn’t that great?”

“Now that,” she said with a more focused curiosity, “is a story you’ll have to tell me some other day.”

“Really?”

“Yeah.” She smiled at me, not a broad grin or anything, just a genuine, honest smile that warmed me down to my toes. “Not tonight. Not in the refectory, even for the second sitting. But I love new stories.”

“Oh fuck.” We’d somehow reached the end of the path, and the refectory was right there; I hadn’t even noticed us passing the quints we’d walked between. I took in a deep breath, the smell of food shooting straight down my spine to make my stomach clench and growl audibly. “Oh fuck I’m hungry, apparently.”

“I’m surprised you’re standing, dear.”

I giggled at that, leaning on Kelly for stability for a moment until my stomach gurgled again. Laughing even harder, I propelled myself off of her, and we walked together towards the smell of the food.

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