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already agreed. If you tell them they have a choice when they really don't, they'll only hate you for it. And so on, and so on.
Oykib had been hearing scraps of conversation like this since earliest childhood. He couldn't remember a time without it. At first, though, it was like music, like wind, like the sound of waves for a child who grows up by the sea. He thought nothing of it, did not search for meaning in it. But gradually, by the time he was four or five, he began to realize that this background noise contained names; that there were ideas in it, ideas that later showed up in discussions among the adults.
Though the voices were all in his mind, and therefore soundless, he began to associate certain ways of thinking with certain people. He began to notice that sometimes, when he was with Mother or Father, Nafai or Issib, Luet or Hushidh, the conversation that he heard most clearly was one that seemed appropriate to what they were talking about with someone else. He would see Luet trying to deal with a quarrel between Chveya and Dazya, for instance, and hear someone saying: Why won't she hold her own with Dazya? Why does she back off like this? And someone else-the most constant voice, the strongest voice-saying, She's holding her own, she's doing fine, have patience, she doesn't need to win openly as long as you assure her of your respect for her. Thus he knew that a particular passionate, intimate manner meant that he was hearing Luet; a cooler, calmer, but more uncertain way of thought belonged to Hushidh. The most matter-of-fact, impatient, argumentative voice was Nafai's.
Yet even so, he was young enough that he didn't realize that he wasn't supposed to be hearing these things. It first became clear to him because of the dreams, for that was one of the Oversoul's most powerful ways of talking to people. One time when Oykib was a very little boy, Luet had come to the house to talk to Mother about a dream she had had. When she finished, Oykib had piped up and said, "I had that dream, too," and then repeated the things that Luet had seen.
Mother answered him then with a smile, but he knew that she didn't believe that he had seen the same dream. The second time it happened, with a dream of Father's, Mother took Oykib aside and gently explained to him that there was no need to pretend to have the same dreams as other people. It was better to tell only his own dreams.
Oykib was bothered by not being believed, and the older he got, the more it bothered him. Why, with so much communication between these adults and the Oversoul, did they all assume that he, as a three-year-old, as a four-year-old, could not have had the same communication? Eventually he decided that the problem was that the dream really was sent to someone else-it was appropriate for their situation, and not at all appropriate for Oykib. Therefore, the adults knew that the Oversoul would never have sent such a dream to him, because it had nothing to do with his life. And in fact the Oversoul hadn't sent the dream to him. The dreams and the background conversations were all real enough, but they were also not his own.
He wondered: Why doesn't the Oversoul have anything to say to me?
By the time Oykib turned eight, he had long since learned to keep what he overheard to himself. He was naturally quiet and reserved, preferring to be silent in a large group, listening to everything, helping when he was needed. He understood far more than anyone thought he did, partly because he had grown up overhearing adult problems being discussed with an adult vocabulary, and partly because he could hear, along with the vocal conversation, scraps and snatches of internal dialogues as the Oversoul made suggestions, tried to influence mood, and occasionally attempted to distract someone from what they were thinking or doing. The trouble was that it always distracted Oykib, so that he could hardly have any thoughts of his own, so busy was his mind in trying to follow all that was going on around him. When he did open his mouth to speak, he could never be sure if he was responding to what had been said aloud, or to things that he understood only because of overhearing that which he really shouldn't have been