Chapter 3: The Edge of Somewhere

We walked in silence for two suns. Never bored. Never hurried. Our destination was unknown, yet I could see him answering a call beyond what could be seen, some pull in his bearing that oriented him the way a compass orients to north. He did not name it. I did not ask. I was learning, in those early days, that the questions I did not ask told me more than the ones I did. He drank from the stream like a creature remembering an old language. The water confused him at first. He knelt and looked at it and I could feel him trying to locate the mechanism, the procedure, the protocol. There was none. You put your mouth to the water and you drink. I did not tell him this. I watched. And when he lowered his face to the surface and the water touched his lips, something happened behind the seal that I could not read but could see: a stillness, brief, as though his body recognized the act even if his mind did not. He drank. He did not thank the stream. He stood and kept walking. I was learning him by observation in those days, because the seal gave me nothing. Centuries of reading the interiors of living things, and now I was reduced to watching hands and faces and the angle of a jaw. What surprised me is how much the watching told me. Empathy reveals what a being feels. Observation reveals what a being does about it. These are different kinds of knowledge, and the second, I was discovering, may be the more important. _He was frustrated by his body, and the frustration never became self-pity. He was hungry, and the hunger never became complaint. He was lost, and the being-lost never became panic.…