Chapter 4: The Misread

The wrong version walked south. The right version walked north. They would never meet again, and if they did, neither would recognize the other. I have been thinking about what my gift cannot do. This is not a comfortable exercise. For most of my existence I treated my empathy the way a sighted person treats sight: as a complete account of the world. I felt, therefore I knew. The feeling was the knowing. If I could read the weather of a room, I understood the room. I was wrong about this for a very long time. Feeling is a measurement. It tells you the temperature of a thing, the pressure, the density, the quality of what is present and the shape of what is missing. It does not tell you why the temperature is what it is. It does not tell you what caused the pressure. It does not tell you whether the density is the product of truth or the product of a mind that has constructed its own truth so thoroughly that the construction and the reality produce identical readings on every instrument I possess. He arrived at their camp on the ninth day north of the village with the banner. The group had grown. Not significantly. Two more had joined: a husband and wife from a farmstead they had passed on the fifth day, who had watched Hul walk past their fence and had spent three days discussing what they had seen before packing a bag and following the road north until they caught up. Maretti had welcomed them. Hul had not objected. The orbit expanded to accommodate two more bodies the way it had accommodated every addition since the settlement: gradually, without ceremony, with Maretti handling the integration and Hul handling nothing. Nine people now. And…