Read Online Alyzon Whitestarr by Isobelle Carmody - Free Book Online
Authors: Isobelle Carmody
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everyone hiding what they felt and trying to guess what the other person was hiding. Add in different motivations and cultural backgrounds and religions, and it was a miracle that we hadn’t all murdered one another eons back.
I might have been depressed by all that, except that the better I got at reading scents, the better I was able to pierce the evasions and pretenses, and my understanding of the people around me deepened.
For instance, there was Jezabel Aster, who was always kidding around. I was drawn to her now, because, like Gilly, her essence scent was delicious: a mixture of fresh straw and hot honey. And the second I started paying attention to her, Inoticed all sorts of things—like she knew the answer to just about anything any teacher asked, although she hardly ever volunteered it and her grades were average. It didn’t take me long to figure out that she was super bright. Of course, my insight didn’t help to explain why she would want to keep her cleverness secret.
Then there was Nathan Wealls. I had thought of him as a complete Neanderthal because he was always messing around and driving the teachers crazy with his antics. But the sweet bath-soap smell he gave off made me look at him more closely, and I soon saw that he was as soft and gentle as a baby underneath. That was why he let himself be persuaded to make trouble. Anyone who was nice to him could get him to do anything. Yelling at him was exactly the wrong way for teachers to make him behave, because he hated being yelled at, so he messed around all the more, trying to make them laugh. There was nothing I could do, because no teacher would listen to me, even if I could explain how I knew what I did about Nathan. Besides, I wasn’t sure it was my business.
My thoughts shifted to numbers, and my growing ability to use them as a screen. The more difficult the mental calculations, the more dense the screen, but it was hard to regulate. It might be possible to build a permanent screen, which I could summon up at any moment. My idea was that the screen would have sections of varying complexity, and that would enable me to use whichever bit of the screen was appropriate, depending on what I had to block. I meant to work out a series of complex calculations and memorize them, then attachsome simpler calculations. Sort of like how you learned lines for a play or the way you created a quilt.
Most aggravating were the things I could perceive that were far harder to pin down than smells. For example, the whispers I would hear in the air—sometimes soft and sometimes loud, but never clearly. I hadn’t the slightest idea what they meant, but I would hear them just as often when no one was around as when I was with other people, and I had the feeling they were like a sort of imprint on the air left behind by people living and speaking in that space. Then there was a distortion that happened to the air around certain people. I could see it as a vague shifting and shimmering, which was visible only because of what was behind it, like the air over a desert.
Despite my frustrations, the one thing I was now sure about was that I didn’t want my senses to go back to normal. Whenever I imagined waking up one morning and finding I was my old self, I remembered a film I saw about a man who had been virtually a vegetable his whole life until a doctor found a way to rouse him using some sort of experimental drug. The guy woke up and was like a child to start with, but he ended up being really brilliant—a genius and also a really good person. The tragedy of the film was that the effect of the drug didn’t last, and so he started to regress—and, worst of all, he realized it was going to happen.
It wouldn’t be that extreme for me to revert to normal, but even so, I wasn’t sure how I could bear it. It would be like living in a world with all the lights switched off, and havingthem suddenly switched on, then off again. You would be used to the dark, but unlike
I might have been depressed by all that, except that the better I got at reading scents, the better I was able to pierce the evasions and pretenses, and my understanding of the people around me deepened.
For instance, there was Jezabel Aster, who was always kidding around. I was drawn to her now, because, like Gilly, her essence scent was delicious: a mixture of fresh straw and hot honey. And the second I started paying attention to her, Inoticed all sorts of things—like she knew the answer to just about anything any teacher asked, although she hardly ever volunteered it and her grades were average. It didn’t take me long to figure out that she was super bright. Of course, my insight didn’t help to explain why she would want to keep her cleverness secret.
Then there was Nathan Wealls. I had thought of him as a complete Neanderthal because he was always messing around and driving the teachers crazy with his antics. But the sweet bath-soap smell he gave off made me look at him more closely, and I soon saw that he was as soft and gentle as a baby underneath. That was why he let himself be persuaded to make trouble. Anyone who was nice to him could get him to do anything. Yelling at him was exactly the wrong way for teachers to make him behave, because he hated being yelled at, so he messed around all the more, trying to make them laugh. There was nothing I could do, because no teacher would listen to me, even if I could explain how I knew what I did about Nathan. Besides, I wasn’t sure it was my business.
My thoughts shifted to numbers, and my growing ability to use them as a screen. The more difficult the mental calculations, the more dense the screen, but it was hard to regulate. It might be possible to build a permanent screen, which I could summon up at any moment. My idea was that the screen would have sections of varying complexity, and that would enable me to use whichever bit of the screen was appropriate, depending on what I had to block. I meant to work out a series of complex calculations and memorize them, then attachsome simpler calculations. Sort of like how you learned lines for a play or the way you created a quilt.
Most aggravating were the things I could perceive that were far harder to pin down than smells. For example, the whispers I would hear in the air—sometimes soft and sometimes loud, but never clearly. I hadn’t the slightest idea what they meant, but I would hear them just as often when no one was around as when I was with other people, and I had the feeling they were like a sort of imprint on the air left behind by people living and speaking in that space. Then there was a distortion that happened to the air around certain people. I could see it as a vague shifting and shimmering, which was visible only because of what was behind it, like the air over a desert.
Despite my frustrations, the one thing I was now sure about was that I didn’t want my senses to go back to normal. Whenever I imagined waking up one morning and finding I was my old self, I remembered a film I saw about a man who had been virtually a vegetable his whole life until a doctor found a way to rouse him using some sort of experimental drug. The guy woke up and was like a child to start with, but he ended up being really brilliant—a genius and also a really good person. The tragedy of the film was that the effect of the drug didn’t last, and so he started to regress—and, worst of all, he realized it was going to happen.
It wouldn’t be that extreme for me to revert to normal, but even so, I wasn’t sure how I could bear it. It would be like living in a world with all the lights switched off, and havingthem suddenly switched on, then off again. You would be used to the dark, but unlike
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