The conversation receded, only to be replaced by the patternless noise of the forest: squawking, buzzing, dripping. Shrieks and whistled arpeggios; snuffling, rustling. Nearly as bad as the village. The forest, at least, had no baffling jumble of talk and intonation, no half-grasped meaning shrouded by the next words.
Impasto, Isaac thought. This is worse than red. The village is an impasto of words. The forest is an impasto of sounds. There is no clarity!
He had found the word «impasto» in one of Marc Robichaux’s files. He looked it up in the dictionary and saw a naked hand with five fingers applying dabs of molten color in many layers, each one almost concealing the others beneath it. For a long time now, «clarity» had been his best word, but he liked «impasto» very much. He appreciated the nicety of its meaning, how neatly it fit his desire to label a perception. When he could focus on one word at a time, the meaning of things could come clear for him, like a high note rising out of a choir, and there was joy in that. But there was no clarity in the village and it was difficult to make the distractions go away long enough—
Ha’anala stopped and sat just outside his little rectangular shelter. Isaac, too, stopped and rethought his thought about impasto from beginning to end. Then he handed Ha’anala his tablet without meeting her eyes and said, "Be careful with it." He told her that every time, just as Sofia had told him that over and over, when she first let him have the computer. For a while, he thought becarefulwithit was the name of the computer. There were very few of these tablets in the world, he found out eventually, although the people had made other things they sloppily labeled computer even though such things were clearly different from his tablet and couldn’t be carried around; so this one was still precious, and not only to Isaac.
He waited until Ha’anala said, "Someone will be careful," and then he smiled, face lifted to the suns. She said that every time. Ha’anala had clarity. "The rule is: No Runa," he said loudly.
"Except Imantat," Ha’anala replied dutifully. Imantat was a relatively quiet Runao who kept the rainroof thatched. Ha’anala herself stayed out of Isaac’s line of sight as he went to work removing all the detritus that had blown or fallen or grown into his little fortress since his last visit. It took some time. When everything was properly squared up, all the curves and mess done away with, he held out his hand and the tablet appeared in it without anyone having to say anything.
It weighed less than before. Once it had taken all his thin-boned, six-year-old strength to heft it, but now it was so light he could grasp it easily with one hand. This gradual loss of weight was a sly betrayal that Isaac had not overlooked; he always inspected the tablet minutely, vigilant for other changes. Satisfied, he placed the computer tablet on a flat rock he’d brought here from the river, to keep the tablet out of the mud. Rain was no threat, but his mother had always told him to keep the tablet clean. With a special stick he kept for this purpose, he measured off the distance from each edge of the tablet to the shelter’s walls, so that it was perfectly centered.
He held out his hand and this time the blue cloth appeared. Pulling this over his head, he sat down on the western side of the shelter and draped the shawl over the tablet as well. Oblivious now to the slanting shafts of three-toned light filtering through the canopy’s breeze-driven movement, he began to relax. Then: the feel of the latch against his thumb, the soft snick of the mechanism, the lovely arc of hinged movement describing in a single sweep—acute to obtuse—the unchanging geometry of the cover. The simultaneous whirr of power-on, the brightening of the screen, the familiar keyboard with its serried ranks.
"Sipaj, Isaac," Ha’anala said. "What shall we listen to?"
She knew how long to wait before asking this question, and she always asked the same way, and he always chose the same piece: Supaari’s voice, the evening chant. First Isaac listened silently. Then again, singing harmony. Then again, with his own harmony and with Ha’anala joining in to double Supaari’s part. He followed the same pattern with the Sh’ma, Sofia’s voice solo, replayed so he could harmonize, and a third time with Ha’anala doubling Sofia.
Finally he could move on, choosing from the Magellan’s stored collection of songs, symphonies, cantatas and chants; the quartets and trios, the concertos and rondos; Gaelic jigs and Viennese waltzes; the lush four-part harmonies of a cappella Brooklyn doo-wop and the whining dissonance of Chinese opera; the modal and rhythmic shifts of an Arabic taqasim. Music entered Isaac’s heart directly and effortlessly. It slipped into his soul like a leaf settling into clear, still water, sinking silkily beneath the shining surface.
Having purged the noise and confusion of the village and the forest, Isaac’s mind became as orderly and precise as the keyboard. He could begin again to explore the Magellan’s vast on-line library, reading steadily with emotionless concentration every item found in the Magellan catalog on whatever subject had snared his interest.
"Clarity," he sighed, and began to study.
THE WHOLE VILLAGE WAS HAPPY TO SEE HA’ANALA LEAD ISAAC OFF when he became disruptive; they praised her for being so kind to him, for watching over him. "Ha’anala is a good father," the people said, smiling a little at that. Even Sofia was grateful. But it was no sacrifice to accompany Isaac to this refuge, for if her brother craved clarity, Ha’anala was starved for privacy. It amounted to the same thing, she supposed.
For years, Isaac had mostly echoed others and even Sofia had come to believe that he was all but incapable of direct speech. Then one day, wearied by the village noise, feeling fragmented and exasperated herself, Ha’anala had simply acted on an impulse. She was younger than Isaac, but far stronger if not taller, so when he began to spin and hum, she simply grabbed his ankle and marched him off to a place in the forest where it was quiet. She had expected silence from him, or at worst some meaningless phrase repeated over and over until it meant even less. Only later did Ha’anala realize that her own exhausted, petulant silence had permitted Isaac to complete a thought and then to repeat it aloud. And such a thought!
"How can you hear your soul if everyone is talking?"
He said nothing more that day, but Ha’anala spent hours considering his words. A soul, she decided, was the most real part of a person, and to discover what is real requires privacy.
In the village, every act, every word, every decision or desire was examined and commented on and compared, debated, evaluated and reconsidered—participated in! How could she tell who she was, when everything she did acquired a council of 150 people? If she so much as hid her eyes behind her hands or clamped her ears shut for a moment, a solicitous Runao would approach and inquire, "Sipaj, Ha’anala, are you not well?" And then everyone would discuss her recent meals, her stools, the condition of her coat, whether her eyes were hurting her, and if that might be because there had lately been more sunlight and less rain than usual, and if that meant the dji’ll harvest would be late this year, and how would that affect the market for k’jip, which was always combined with dji’ll…
So Ha’anala thanked God that Isaac’s ability to tolerate the village commotion was even more limited than her own. She had never told Sofia about the things Isaac said during their times alone. This was a source of guilt. Ha’anala sometimes felt as though she had stolen something from Sofia, who wanted so much for Isaac to speak to her.
Once, when Ha’anala heard Isaac yawn underneath his head covering, and knew that he was done reading and could tolerate a question, she had asked, "Sipaj, Isaac, why do you not speak to our mother?"