Chapter 9 Chapter 8: The Mentor
Even the entranceway to this stately building was a testament to a different world, a world of silent, immaculate order. The floor was a rushém board of gleaming, obsidian tiles, so polished I could see the blurred, anxious reflection of my own form staring back from the depths. A single, monumental pot plant stood sentinel next to the elevator, its leaves a waxy, profound green, each one seemingly dusted and tended to by hand. The air was still and cool, smelling faintly of lemon polish and old money.
The elevator arrived with a soft, whispered ping. I stepped inside, the slow, grinding ascent beginning with a jolt. The ride up was an agonizing crawl, each floor passing with a lethargic sigh. In the mirrored walls of the cab, my own eyes looked back at me, wide and shadowed with a mixed mess of dread and desperate hope.
My mind churned. Would he even remember me? It had been almost a year since my last politics seminar, since I’d sat in the back row of his lecture hall, captivated. I was just one face among dozens, a student who had faded into the background after graduation. Would he see the frantic, failing Changeling, or the thoughtful student he’d once praised for an essay on pre-Unification treaties?
And how, by The Mother, would I broach the subject? I couldn’t possibly lead with the truth. The memory of Silver’s horrified face was a fresh brand. I could never speak her name here, in this sanctum of quiet intellect. And what happened in the bar’s grimy garden… that was a shame I would take to my grave, a brutal, animal secret that had no place in Dr. Norton’s world of logic and strategy.
Then there was Joel. How do you talk to someone about the agony of a Trembling that won’t come? How do you describe the intimate, sacred failure of sex with someone who has never, and could never, experience it? My gaze fell on my own reflection, on the body that felt like a traitor. My confidant, my only hope, was a Clam. A word most spat out like a curse, a label for a life half-lived, a body where nothing ever grew. But not Dr. Norton. He wore that identity not as a lack, but as a badge of honour, a symbol of pure, unclouded intellect, free from the messy dictates of biology.
The elevator gave a final, shuddering groan and ground to a halt. The doors slid open with a sigh, revealing a hushed, carpeted hallway. It was time to face the music. The silent, daunting music of a future I couldn't navigate alone.
“Come in… Come in, don’t linger on the threshold.” Dr. Norton stood framed in the open doorway, a portrait of charming, academic dishevelment. A tatty, wine-coloured bathrobe was thrown haphazardly over his usual tweed suit, and on his feet were a pair of impossibly thick, worn slippers that seemed to swallow his ankles whole. He offered a warm, distracted smile, as if my arrival at this hour was the most expected thing in the world.
He led me down a long, dimly lit hallway that was less a corridor and more a private gallery. The walls were a dense tapestry of oil paintings in heavy gilt frames and old, sepia-toned photographs of severe-looking men and women who shared his piercingly intelligent gaze. The air smelled of old paper, beeswax, and a faint, sweet note of pipe tobacco.
Our destination was a small, dusty room dominated by a large bay window that looked out over the glowing grid of the city. The room itself was a sanctuary of knowledge, an old library that seemed to breathe. Books were crammed into every available inch of wall space, stacked in precarious towers on the floor, and piled high on every surface except one. A single, small table stood in the bay of the window, and upon it sat an exquisitely carved rushém board, its segmented pieces poised in mid-game. Two large, heavy armchairs, upholstered in a faded floral fabric, faced each other across this strategic battlefield.
“Sit… sit,” he commanded gently, gesturing to one of the chairs. He moved to a small cabinet. “Would you like a glass of Cher? I always take one at this time. Good for the soul, they say.” He poured two generous measures of the deep red liquid into crystal tumblers without waiting for my answer.
For a while, I was in complete bliss. The warmth of the Cher burned a smooth, comforting path down my throat, unknotting the tension in my chest. We made challenging small talk, our conversation punctuated by the soft click of rushém pieces moving across the board. He was a master, and each move was a lesson in patience and foresight. But after my third consecutive win, a feat that spoke more of his distraction than my skill, Dr. Norton broke the peaceful silence we had built.
He leaned back in his chair, steepling his fingers, his eyes sharp and perceptive over the rim of his glasses. “You were always one of my finest students, Nanda. A strategic mind. But I sense that you want more tonight than to thrash an old Clam at Rushém.” His voice softened. “What is troubling you?”
The question, asked with such direct kindness, shattered my fragile calm. The words tumbled out in a rushed, awkward stammer, stripped of all the eloquence I had practiced on the hopper ride over. “Could I be a er úm… á… a Clam?”
His laughter wasn’t mocking; it was raw and hearty, a sound that seemed to shake dust from the bookshelves. “Why,” he boomed, his eyes crinkling at the corners. “Why would you jest? Why would you think such a thing?”
The dam broke. “My Trembling has not come!” I blurted out, my voice cracking with the force of the confession. “I am two years passed the age, and I have no gender. Everyone else… they know. What’s wrong with me?” I looked down, hot tears of shame and frustration pricking at my eyes.
“Why, nothing!” he said, his tone leaving no room for argument. He leaned forward, his presence filling the space. “Nanda, you have one of the finest political minds I have ever seen. With or without your dieball skills, you are going places. Gender?” He waved a dismissive hand. “Gender is nothing. A biological footnote.”
“But I thought I was going to be a warrior,” I countered, clinging to the last shred of the identity I’d always assumed was mine.
“A warrior?” He scoffed, though not unkindly. “A waste of a fine intellect. We don’t need more warriors for a silly, endless war. We need diplomats to end it. And you, Nanda, you could easily be one of them.”
“But without a gender, I am not an adult. I’m not… anything.”
“Nonsense,” he stated, his voice firm. “You can be whoever you want to be. The body is a vessel. The mind is the captain.”
“But…” I searched for a way to make him understand the profundity of the isolation. “Have you ever met anyone else? Anyone like me, who hasn’t had their Trembling?”
He grew quiet for a moment, then stood up with a soft grunt. He moved to a towering bookcase, his fingers tracing the spines of countless leather-bound volumes with a practiced familiarity. After a moment, he returned with a large, ancient book, its cover made of scuffed leather and its pages edged in gold leaf. He laid it gently on the table between us, sending a small cloud of dust motes dancing in the evening light.
“Now,” he began, his voice taking on the resonant tone of the lecturer he was. “The good, pious people of this world would like to tell you that we all fell out of The Mother’s womb complete on the sixth day. Well, it’s a farce.” He opened the book to a page showing intricate diagrams of DNA helixes and evolutionary trees. “Science. Evolution. Life on this world did not start like that. No, we crawled out of the primordial seas, each race finding the perfect way to survive.”
He turned the page to show a beautifully illustrated world map, marked with strange, ancient names. “The Desttites,” he pointed to a region, “pocket-people with pouches to protect their young. The Ovans,” his finger moved, “that give birth through eggs so that they can work and hunt as their young evolve. Our people… we can change our gender according to what the tribe needs to survive. It is our strength, but you know all this you have studied their languages.”
He paused, his finger hovering over a vast, blank space on the map labelled ‘Pacisque’. “But there is another race. The Pacisquans, a people we don’t talk about. From the lost continent.” He looked at me, his eyes alight with a fierce, scholarly passion. “There, all animals and sentient beings are born with a fixed gender. Evolution… the world makes what is needed.” He closed the book with a soft thud. “And maybe, just maybe, Nanda, you are not a failure. You are not broken. You are the new link.”