shrugs, but the answer is a definite yes. She wants to know what these things can and can’t do, so she’s not going to stop him from talking anytime soon.
“In the old days—well, they weren’t so much the Old Days as much as the Days on the Other Side, but you get the idea—the only way we could converse with our followers was through a medium.” He puffs on his nails: it’s like he’s discussing the latest news. “Now, this was a person, or something like a person, who had given up their whole life to serve as, well, the conduit for our proclamations. The reeds in our instruments. Mediums were hollowed out—sometimes literally—to become chambers in which our voices could echo, and thus be heard by our adoring congregations. Now, me personally, I don’t prefer this method. Do you?”
“I wouldn’t, no!” says Mona, though she has no experience with such a thing. But a thought strikes her: “Wait. Is that like… how everyone in Wink has those… things in their heads?”
“Aah,” says Kelly coyly. “Aren’t you clever? You’re kind of on the right track. Ugly little things, aren’t they? My brothers and sisters, who use those rather brutal devices to hide so efficiently throughout Wink, do operate similarly to a medium, it’s true. Yet the primary purpose of those devices is not communication, but preservation: we are not truly part of your world, so those who are too big to fit—for now, at least—must maintain a physical representation, or link. Though my family are not, in your terms, physical beings, they must have a physical portion of themselves here. Otherwise they’d blow away like runaway kites, and remain trapped over there, on the other side of things, which is in kind of a bad state right now.”
“But you don’t.” Mona does not comment on the most concerning part of his explanation: for now, at least?
“No. Not me. I’m, I guess you could say, a special case. I don’t need a link or representative at all.”
Suddenly something clicks in Mona’s head—A person, or something like a person, who had given up their whole life…
Before she can think, she says, “Gracie.”
Kelly’s face clears of expression, eyes going dead and dark. The camera rapidly wheels in on Kelly’s face, as if she now has his full attention. The change is abrupt, disturbing: it’s as if First, wherever and whatever he is, just stopped operating all the finer points of the projection. “What?” he says softly.
Mona senses that this is not a subject to be discussed right now. “Nothing.”
A trickle of cunning seeps back into Kelly’s eyes. “You sure?”
She decides to change the conversation. “Don’t you know what I said?”
Kelly screws up his mouth and cocks his head, confused.
“You knew I was going to be here,” says Mona. “So you should probably know what I was going to say just now.”
“Aah,” says Kelly. He smiles and chidingly jabs a finger at her. “You are mighty on the ball, my dear. I take it my temporal nature is a mite troubling to you.”
“Yeah. But you should know that.”
“Temporal awareness,” says Kelly, and he stifles a yawn with the back of his hand, “is not omniscience.”
“Predicting the future seems awful close, to me.”
“Weathermen don’t predict the weather,” says Kelly. “They don’t put on their turbans, touch a corner of an envelope to their foreheads, and pronounce rain or shine. They just have access to things most folks don’t. They perceive more, lots more. And they can measure it, and watch it. They observe and make assumptions. But ask them where one raindrop is, or what shape this wisp of cloud will take, and they’ll be as dumb as any other bum.”
“And weathermen are wrong all the time,” says Mona.
“Oh, sure,” says Kelly. “No one’s perfect. In Moscow they fine their weathermen if they predict the wrong thing. Did you know that?”
“Then tell me what’s going to happen here,” says Mona. “If you know so much, tell me what’s going on, what they want to do. Tell me who they are, at least, or if there is a they.”
“Oh, but my dear,” says Kelly, comically obsequious, “your interests do not really lie with what’s ahead. Or am I sorely mistaken?”
“With what’s ahead?”
“You are not interested in the future, not really. Nor are you interested in the present. You want to know about the past.”
Mona is quiet. For the first time, she takes her eyes off the screen.
Kelly says, “Sister, I know you didn’t come all this