“I thought the city was a mountain, because I could hear it from so far away. I thought it was singing. The minds of a city are like ocean from a distance, when the wave crashes blend into a hum, a single band of sound. Pleinberg only had a population of a few hundred thousand in those days, but I could hear from fifty klicks out the tenor of the festival we were headed to, raucous and celebratory, political. The local majority party had won the continental parliament. From out there on the plain, coming in by slow ground transport, the sound made me happy. I sang back at this happy, marvelous mountain.

“I wonder what my parents thought was happening. Just an idiot’s song, I suppose.”

“They never told you?” he asked.

Surprise crossed Nara’s face for a moment.

“I haven’t spoken to them since that day,” she said.

Zai blinked, feeling like a blunderer. Senator Oxham’s biography must be well known in political circles, at least the bare facts. But Zai knew her only as the Mad Senator.

The words chilled him, though. Abandonment of a child? Loss of the family line? His Vadan sense of propriety rebelled at the thought. He swallowed, and tried to stifle the reaction, knowing his empathic host would feel it all too well.

“Go ahead, Laurent,” she said, “be appalled. It’s okay.”

“I don’t mean to—”

“I know. But don’t try to control your thoughts around me. Please.”

He sighed, and considered the War Sage’s advice on negotiating with the enemy: When caught dissembling, the best correction is sudden directness.

“How close did you get, before the city drove you mad?” he asked.

“I’m not sure, exactly. I didn’t know it was madness; I thought it was the song inside me, tearing me to pieces.”

She turned away from him to place fresh wood on the fire.

“As the city grew nearer, the mindnoise increased. It follows the inverse square law, like gravity or broadcast radio. But the traffic going into the festival slowed us down, so the ramp up in volume wasn’t exponential, as it could have been.”

“So clinical, Nara.”

“Because I don’t really remember, not sequentially, anyway. I only recall that I loved it. Riding a victory celebration of a quarter million minds, Laurent, who’d won a continental election for the first time in decades. There was so much joy there: success after years of work, redemption for old defeats, the sense that justice would finally be done. I think I fell in love with politics that day.”

“The day you went mad.”

She nodded, smiling.