choosing amongst one's thoughts (Tal)

[Anonymous]

That little...  Alesku wouldn't let himself finish the mental sentence.  Anyway, that wasn't how he ought to feel.  He tried to let the frustration stream off in the slow crosscurrent of the indoor wind as he rounded the half-mile shoulder of the track.  Outside, through long, reflective windows, he could make out the shadow of his own body superimposed against the glittering cliffs of Haviah, as it fell away from Upper City to Middle.  Usually Alesku loved the beauty and chaotic order of it, but right now it all struck him wrong.  He hated that, that switch in perspective.  And he was never as clear-headed as he could be when sunk in the Network; he never could keep precisely the proper point of view.  There would always be that dark reflection in the glass he tried to look through.

Blaine Clé.  He needed to speak with him, that was all.  In fact, Alesku told himself, heart pumping, arms moving tensely at his sides as his feet hit in an even clockwork rhythm.  A twinge had crept up his left leg; he ignored it.  In fact, Blaine had every right to feel the way he did.  He questioned and he was honest.  Alesku supposed he could ask no more, even though 'honesty' had so many forms, most of them not in the least honest.  Pilots, who had to attain a sort of equilibrium honesty, always settled somewhat short of integrity.  His thoughts bounced along with his steps.  Right.  He'd have to speak to Clé, sort out his point of view...

The human point of view.

"You do well enough."  And, Calliope offered, she was always there.

"Well enough."  He blew a breath out of rhythm and set, mind half-entwined with Calliope's superior analytic brain, to sorting Blaine's argument and trying to get to the attitude beneath.  He had always been a difficult Candidate, but one Alesku did not dislike.  He was, at least, not avoidant, like Trance or Livos.  

My friend irony.  It hadn't been ironic, Alesku pointed out to himself.  It was an unfortunate truth, and he tried to mitigate people's suggestibility, or ... well, certainly he suggested.  It was unfortunate.  It was also necessary.  What he had said had been true.  

Alesku had never been troubled by the punishment of criminals.  When he had been young, his mother had let him read a very old text, a fanciful embellishment of the first wars.  There had been a character--Pyotr.  In captivity he found the freedom he had never used in the name of itself.  He'd found it profoundly touching.  That was no logical argument for the present practice, but it made sense, he thought, to let criminals work.  What else?  Let them sit in prison?  And as for reading banned books... the books shouldn't exist in the first place.  He had read arrest records, and the percentage of political detainees was dwarfed by violent Lower City criminals.  

He breathed out, flying around a corner into the last half-mile stretch, lit warmly by the last of the day's sun.  

Reform and treason: not mutually exclusive?  What that meant about Clé's comportment... Alesku found it troubling.  He didn't want to punish the boy, but he had to realize there were more productive ways of channeling his energy.  And that the danger was real.  

In the end it was not--it was never--a matter of logical argumentation.  He'd start a dialogue and see where it went.  Mutual honesty was the only...

"Goal."

"Only do what you can," said Calliope.  "Human limitations."

He stumbled to a halt, suddenly aware of the sweat that had collected on his cheeks and in the short hairs of his beard, and, grabbing a towel, went to take a quick shower.  Calliope stayed with him, feeding him information on crime statistics and prison labor.  He wouldn't question the Dragons' system, and, in any case, there was no perfect system.  No perfect system, and lately he'd felt the same growing itch of trepidation he'd felt in the last years of his Candidacy, before the war.

He finished washing, dressed in his usual uniform, and dried his hair hastily.  Skin still pink from exercise, he strode the corridors, headed for Clé's room.  Calliope let him know the Pilot Cardinal had returned there after dinner.  Alesku himself would get something to eat later; he never had an appetite after his runs, and found honest discourse came more easily on an empty stomach.  

He stopped in front of Clé's door and knocked, then reached out to unlock it mentally anyway.  The door slid open.  "Blaine?  It's Alesku.  I'd like to speak for a moment, please."  He wouldn't couch it as a falsely polite request.  It was a command.

A polite command, but a command nonetheless.

[Tally]

Blaine's door stood opposite to his balcony, a modest view compared to what Royals and Nobles got to look out at every day, but still with a glimpse of sky above the building tops.  It was on the balcony that Blaine stood now, his back to the door and Alesku.

He wasn't alone.  Voodoo clung to the side of the building, hind legs braced upon the balcony and long, whip-like tail lashing freely from side to side.  Small for a dragon, his outstretched wings nonetheless blocked the city from sight, and his size did nothing to soften the look of him, all wicked spikes and sharp angles as he hunched over Blaine in what might have looked a protective pose in other dragons, but came off spiteful—predatory even—from Voodoo.  When the door opened, his eyes slid away from Blaine and raked over Alesku.  Black from snout to tip of tail, his blue eyes were the only spark of color on him.

Following the dragon's gaze, Blaine looked over his shoulder and his mouth compressed into a thin line at sight of the other Pilot.  He spoke briefly to Voodoo, dragging the dragon's attention back to him; his words were met with a baring of teeth, but Voodoo didn't linger to press whatever disagreement was made between them.  He flicked a look back at Alesku then kicked off from the building, stirring Blaine's hair and clothes in the sudden gust.

Blaine watched him fly upwards, the rigidity visibly draining from the Pilot's body.

Once back over the threshold into his apartment, Blaine heaved out a sigh and put a hand on his hip.  "Yeah, what?"  Just a little bit snippier than one wanted to get with one's superiors, but it peeved him that Alesku hadn't bothered to wait.  Even if he had the right to open Blaine's door whenever he damn well pleased didn't mean he couldn't have held out for the few seconds it would have taken Blaine to get there.  It didn't put Blaine in an especially cooperative mood, either, and oh boy could he throw down with some passive aggressive bullshit when he wanted to.

"Ehhh, mind the paint."  After talking at a lot of people about it, he'd gone with the Lemon Twist for his living room, but it looked a lot better on the walls than on the carpet, where a puddle of it was drying next to an overturned paint can.  Yellow footprints lead away from it and crisscrossed all over the apartment.  Blaine shifted his feet; not sticky anymore.  This was a bad time for anyone to see his place, half-painted, furniture shifted about to random places, plastic tarps—why hadn't he put one beneath that paint can?—and painting tools left wherever he dropped them at the end of the day.  All that on top of his usual clutter.

Having already been on the receiving end of one of Voodoo's bitchfits, he prepared for yet another.  Pilots rarely popped in to visit him.

[Anonymous]

Alesku stepped inside, and met, to his surprise, with the black glare of Clé's Dragon.  It was no secret that Voodoo didn't particularly like him--he didn't, more to the point, like Calliope.  With a silent snarl and an opaque blue stare, the Dragon winged off.  Alesku felt the whetted edge of Calliope's disapproval.  If he'd been a better Dragon, she implied, Clé might not have remained so far out of the fold.

Of course, there were a few factors in the Pilot Cardinal's history that might've contributed.  Alesku hadn't been pleased with how they'd handled Blaine's training, though at the time he'd had no rank himself.  A perfect example of how and why brutality didn't work.  He kept Blaine's history cued up along his connection to Calliope.  Family history, written work... he had to admit Blaine would be hard to deal with, because it really seemed as though he were, after a fashion, sincere, though his glib tendencies undercut him.  And, like most people, he'd doubtless prove blind to his own prejudices.

Individual responsibility went only so far.  Then you had to push to make it go farther.  Alesku would really prefer just to discuss things rationally.  He skirted a drying yellow puddle, eyed it dubiously, and tried not to judge Blaine for the disaster of his living area.  Paint-speckled tarpaulins failed to catch a scattering of discarded, caked brushes, and he spotted a snowfall of swatches in one corner, a single shoe in another.  The attitude he found a little less excusable, but let it wait--though he had to work not to let his mouth torque down into a frown at the hand-on-hip stance.  He marked Blaine's tension and... footprints?  Really?  Alesku shook his head, almost amused, mostly appalled.  And just a little too curious about how well he could upset the electrostatic adhesion between polyurethane-based paint and carpet fiber.  

"Blaine."  He approached, stepping carefully between yellow prints, and saluted casually.

"I just came by to chat about your post on my blog," he said.  "Just my attempt to avoid hypocrisy.  I know you've had a hard time of it... do you have anywhere to sit that's not covered in paint?"  He scanned the room carefully, trying to keep up a pleasant tenor.

[Tally]

Check your attitude.  Best tell that to himself before Alesku had to.  Insubordination was one of his tools and not something he threw around just anywhere.  Refusal to follow an order he considered unjust and excessive: good.  Getting his undies all a twist over an invasion of privacy: bad.

Time and place for everything etc.

Blaine smiled and executed a crisp salute, then dropped into a mimed curtsy.  "Come right on in, sir!"  Not a subtle jab, as Alesku was already in.  Hey, he'd still saluted.

Before doing anything else, Blaine retrieved his bucket hat—white and grey striped and never worn before today; it matched his scarf!—from the couch and planted it askew upon his head.  Wear it out on the balcony when Voodoo came calling, and he risked it fluttering off in the wind of the dragon's departure.  He'd lost more hats that way.  There were half a dozen people down in the lower city wearing some very nice designer head gear.

He couldn't have said just when hats had made the transition from a clothing accessory to a psychological shield.  Not just the hats, but his whole made-up, trendy, put-together image.  But especially the hats.  Maybe it was the physical barrier hiding his eyes.  He felt better as soon as he had it on and settled right into his familiar slacker slouch.

"Ah, hmmm.  Sit, sit, where to sit..."  There was the bed, but probably Alesku wouldn't want to sit up there chit chatting like a couple of twelve year old girls.  He turned away to clear a stack of  interior decorating books off a kitchen stool so Alesku wouldn't see the roll of his eyes or the sneer on his mouth.  A hard time of it?  That was so, so not something he ever wanted to hear from another Pilot.  Surface commiseration.  Coming from Alesku, it smacked of condescension.

Not that he had anything personal against the guy.  He didn't know Alesku really.  But he knew he was a Royal.  Maybe an antagonized Royal.  It was enough to put Blaine in a standoffish way.

Eyes obscured by hat and hair, he waved Alesku to the stool.  "There you go.  Yeeeah, good thing you're here.  We wouldn't want to be hypocrites."  He reached over the kitchen bar and clunked a fist onto the switch of an oscillating fan so they both didn't get high off paint fumes.  It whirred from side to side, sighing cool air across each of their faces in turn.

[Anonymous]

Alesku watched the younger Pilot carefully.  He'd taken enough baiting over the years (Gods, when he'd had Sulo as a Candidate) to know it when he saw it, and he ignored the curtsy and the irony.  After long practice, he'd learned to fight down the stab of immediate irritation flippancy dug into his gut.  Instinctively, he related irony and quick, easy answers to flaccid morals.  And while that might've been true, but that didn't entitle him to judge fliply in turn.  

Instead he took another look around the apartment, one hand running over his beard, which still held bits of moisture from his shower.  Alesku knew he came off as a kind of blank to people sometimes.  He was good at expressionlessness.  Well... thanks, Calliope, maybe a little frowny.

For now he stayed out of Blaine's head.  He didn't like to pry psychically unless he felt it really necessary, and the kid's slightly pitiful show of pique meant he'd be able to read his expressions just fine.  Well, those he could see under the hat.  Sulo had his hair and sneer... Clé had his hat, apparently.  Avoidance mechanisms, marks of self-reassurance.  Alesku made it a point never to hide, and to remain open to the world, but it was a complicated ideology at the best of times.  

And, Calliope reminded him silently, he was not without his own defense mechanisms.  She had high hopes for Clé, and might have picked him if she hadn't had Alesku.  Really?  Interesting.

He followed him into the kitchen and took the offered stool, left leg braced, one elbow on the table.  Blaine still moved with spastic rubber-band tension, his body a blunt instrument of avoidance, all ducked head, knees, elbows, and fists.  Alesku looked down briefly, hoping he'd come back to some more sincere sort of pose without the weight of a superior's stare on him.  He looked up again when he heard the hum of the fan.  

"We're all hypocrites sometimes," he said at last, lacing his hands together and touching them lightly to the countertop.  It was a little sticky.  "I worry about it.  I'm sure you worry about it, too.  What do you think of my blog?"  He tried to catch Blaine's eye beneath the brim of his cap.  "I read what you'd written, of course.  You made some good points.  But I'd like to talk it out, and I'd appreciate it if you'd be straight with me."

[Tally]

"Your blog?"  Suddenly, with Alesku's presence, the habitat that Blaine kept every day with nary a shameful thought looked childish and out of control.  Cripes.  Was he some messy teenager, couldn't keep his living space clean?  Having a Royal sitting here looking this all over made him feel like a candidate again.

"Your blog.  Right."  With his forearms he shoved space clear on the countertops.  Maybe if he could get all this junk into piles the rest of the place would look clean by comparison.  "Weeeeell I just loved that font you used.  It's really, uh, readable.  Always better with sans serif I say."  On his way past the rest of the kitchen stools, he straightened them up and pushed them all in and kicked a cardboard box of—were those broken datapads? Why did he even have those?—out of Alesku's sight.  There, that was better.  Sort of.  "And uh, oh yeah!  The colors.  Tasteful, chic, with just the right about of contrast to make it easy on the eyes.  Propers on the colors."

Blaine disappeared into the hall leading out from the living room but kept on talking, voice carrying all the way from the other side of the apartment.  "And your grammar!  I mean it was just so...grammatical!  The commas!  Placed so efficiently!  Your paragraphs so balanced.  Not too long, not too short."

He emerged again, holding a clear plastic ball in which crawled Commando, his hamster.  He always let the little guy run around when he was in for the evening.  It was the sound he liked, the comforting cycle of roll, roll, bump!...roll, roll, bump! while he had his head buried in complaint forms and petitions.  He put the ball on the floor and Commando took off.

"No wonder you're a Royal.  That kind of dedication to the status quo?  Why, it's magical."  Blaine nudged a few boxes and paint cans and a couple of books around the edge of the paint puddle so Commando didn't roll right into it then, finally, looked at Alesku straight on.

"Your blog is a treasure, sir—nay, a genuine cultural keystone!  It touched me."  He laid a hand over his heart.  "Here."

His face blanked out for a second.  Perception, broken images and then, certainty.  He refocused back on Alesku.  "Don't eat those meatballs tonight.  They'll give you indigestion."

[Anonymous]

'Straight with me' hadn't worked. At least he hadn't made a pun about it.  Small blessings.  Alesku tipped himself back off the stool and rubbed his hands against his pants, getting out whatever that faint stickiness on the table had been.  Blaine had gone on a sudden whirlwind of tidying, amidst tossed-off compliments on the page layout, the grammar, the structure...  Admittedly, he did work hard on his rhetorical--

Calliope chuckled at him mentally, and Alesku shook his head at his sudden spike of hubris.  The blog was something he, well, he tried.  It all became complicated mix of service to the Citadel and the sorting-through of all of his ideas and ideals.  Things most of the Pilots didn't hear often enough.  No one thought about morality these days, really thought.  Really thought at all.  It was all about pleasure, which, while fine for the ordinary citizen, couldn't sustain a Pilot.  The ones who didn't understand that--that's why Blaine's untidiness and flippancy bothered him.  Messiness, chaos, isn't freedom.

He took a few steps over to the kitchen doorway and leaned out, trying to bring Blaine back into his field of vision and out of his nervous fiddling.  The kid had gone and gotten some sort of little squirmy creature.  It skittered around on the floor inside its little invisible ball, seemingly frantic, but unable to get out of the tight enclosure.  Alesku had to stop himself from thinking typical, or that there might be some symbology there (but what kind?).  Matter at hand, matter at hand.  He leaned against the kitchen doorframe and stared Blaine down, trying to raise one eyebrow.  It didn't quite work, but if you just stayed quiet eventually they calmed down.  

He hated to deal with sarcasm.  Misology disgusted him, misology and avoidance.  At least Blaine hadn't done the Sulo thing and started leaning in very close and punning about sex.

Cultural keystone?  He'd actually begun blushing at that one, and not out of pleasure.  Blaine's comments painted him in all shades of propagandist hypocrisy, and he was honest enough to consider the criticism.  He shook off the unease while the blond hatted Pilot went rigid.  

"Thanks.  I guess it's pizza, then.  Look, Blaine..."  Alesku took him by the shoulders and held him in place, hoping he'd settle down, then carefully let go, making a faint stay-there motion with his flat hands.  "Stay with me here.  I'm not anti-reform, that's why I came by, but I'm starting to think you just want to play games and shoot out sarcasm, and that's not..."  Acceptable?  No, bad word choice.  "... something I respect."

[Tally]

Roll, roll, bump!

Commando rolled his ball right into Alesku's foot, sniffed around in each direction for a second, then rolled off in the other direction to navigate through the legs of the kitchen stools.  He got stuck in things sometimes, what with all the crap on the floor—not that Blaine's place was always like this.  At any given time it might be found beneath a varying degree of clutter, and even sometimes under hardly any at all!  Like when he wasn't painting and the cleaning crews could actually get in here!  Ooh, the cleaning crews...he should let them get in there sometime soon so they could maybe see about the paint in the carpet and organize some of the clutter or at least get it all shoved into a corner somewhere...

But anyway!  Alesku!  Right!

Blaine, at last, had stilled himself and now tried to keep his attention on Alesku instead of it splintering off into a dozen simultaneous thought trails.  He stopped shuffling around and mimicked Alesku's stay-there motion to show he was going to stick to one spot.

"Ooookay.  Yeah."  Hand on the hip again, other one in the air, gesturing.  "First of all, what sarcasm?  Who's being sarcastic?  Eeeverything I said about your blog was exactly true.  I meant every word!  You really do have good grammar!  So don't you worry your pretty head about that, 'kay?"

Now in the early days of Blaine's candidacy, he'd had a little problem with brain-to-mouth control.  Not too uncommon, lots of candidates suffered from the same affliction at first, and like most of them, Blaine had overcome the lack of impulse control.

Mostly.

"Oho respect, huh? Ahaha, riiiight, because I care sooo much about earning your respect."  Commando had gotten his ball wedged between Blaine's feet so he shuffled aside to let the hamster roll on, and when he looked back up he added with a smile, "Now that was sarcasm."

Yay!  Awesome!  Way to smooth things over.  Good job, Blaine.

[Anonymous]

Right.

The hamster skittered inside its plastic enclosure, wheeling past Blaine and toward Alesku; he lifted his foot and set it down on the hamster ball, stopping it.  The little claws kept scrabbling, but it wasn't going anywhere.  He didn't press down hard enough to break the cage, but he'd performed the action quite deliberately, to show Blaine that the avoidance games were at an end.

It was almost a relief.

"Fine.  I regret I'll have to treat you as though you were incapable of truthful communication.  Hold still, Pilot."  The look he gave Blaine sealed off any possibility of further argument.  It was his Pilot Royal look.  Carefully, he lifted both hands and set his fingertips at the young Pilot's temples, marshaling his mental energy.  "Remove your mental shields."

Alesku had developed a methodology for psychic interrogation.  It was useless to sort through every available memory, so he aimed for those tied to particularly strong feeling or impulse.  The tactic turned up a person's most affecting memories, those linked to fear, anger, and what he supposed you could call shame, matters of conscience.  Pinpointing that juncture had taken him a very long time, but Alesku specialized particularly in finding what he called lies.  These were spots of cognitive dissonance, pieces of their own minds people avoided.  

Alesku first encountered surface feelings, practically useless: Blaine was irritated.  He continued, reaching into the realm he could only designate as opinion.  Blaine had strong and conflicting feelings around what he referred to, seemed to refer to, as 'the system.'  He felt hypocritical for taking part in something he didn't agree with... and resentful that he wasn't trusted.  He had a faith in his own honesty that seemed almost defiant.  Alesku pondered that and then investigated Blaine's subconscious mental response to the set of associations that evoked 'Gospel.'  He was surprised to find Blaine was unequivocally with him on the matter; their opinions nearly precisely accorded.  He believed they were unuseful.  He had a kind of basic optimism, Alesku noted: he believed he could bring about positive change in the system.  The frame of mind echoed one Alesku found very familiar.  He'd felt similarly as a new Pilot, though he had never found the Dragons' decisions as problematic as Blaine seemed to.

Dragon.  What did he think about the Dragons?  

He hit a wave of disappointment, powerful enough that he believed it.  Alesku was surprised and troubled.

He wanted to follow the train of the interrogation one step further, though.  It was quite possible for psychics to bury secrets beneath layers of slyly half-true thoughts; he aimed at the center of Blaine's most absolutely hidden and controlled thoughts, whose position was, paradoxically, marked precisely by the exertion he used to hide them.  If he had to label the emotional tone surrounding these, he supposed shame would be the word for it.

It made him recoil.  His fingers fell from Blaine's temples to his sides.  He took a step back and blinked, the spots of psychic connection clearing; he looked at the younger Pilot.  He felt... not anger.  He felt...

Sad.