This can't be the real story.

Thellim indicates, with a wordless tug, that she wants to step back from the Vanyel-Yfandes boundary and go out of the concert-work link.  It doesn't seem especially smart to try what Thellim is about to try while Melody is in the middle of someone's mind.

Melody seems a little confused, but pulls away from Vanyel-and-Yfandes' minds. :- Yes, what?: 

:Melody, what we're seeing can't be the real story, only the tiniest fraction of it.  What we're seeing is not like how brains work inside.  It's too large an edifice of knowledge, I can't start to explain it in order, but maybe I can send over the experience of what it would be like to know, you may not get the knowledge but maybe you'll know what it would feel like to have it:

and Thellim tries to put more power behind her Mindspeech, send more of the contents of her frontal cortex and all its associations, as she thinks in swift review

:light enters retina, preprocessed, edge cells, bar detectors, down the vast neural cable to the lateral geniculate nucleus (the centers of the brain are older evolutionarily than outer parts and form something like a complete system on their own because they're relics of a time when other parts of the system didn't exist), onward to the visual cortex; the visual cortex has different areas for textures and colors even though we experience seeing them both together and at once; this is the hyperbolic mapping between the actual visual field and its representation in the visual cortex that assigns processing power in proportion to how close an object is to the center of vision; an example seen in a neuroscience textbook of what lights up in a monkey's visual cortex when it looks at a grid, the distortion of that grid, the internal coding of brains does not look like what we experience ourselves seeing; spatial locations and forms in the parietal lobe, recognition of objects in the temporal lobe; the brain divides up internal labor along dimensions that are nothing like we experience ourselves when we're dividing up a problem to think about it, based around the dimensions of low-level properties of things rather than their higher-level uses and categories; here is the cerebellum, vast and central to all cognition, the control of realtime motor patterns including the motor patterns of thinking themselves; here is a cerebellar chip, a tiny thing that attends to incoming sequences of neural pulses encoding the vastly reduced-dimensional sense inputs that are relevant to its job alone, sending out one part of motor impulses to be combined with many others; here are the parallel fibers, showing that chip a hundred thousand input lines that might be relevant to it, the synaptic density here is higher than any other known part of the brain; here is the climbing fiber's error signal, to tell the cerebellar chip when the larger system knows a mistake has happened, it is theorized that the cerebellar chip takes the error signal and tries to correlate it with the parallel fibers' inputs to produce a corrected signal using those inputs; if that happens often, the balance of the signaling algorithm will be at the point where the derivative is zero, balancing the net magnitude of pushes in both directions to remain roughly stationary (this is calculus, by the way, but it's not important right now); here's some of my experience writing computer programs as a kid, and what that metaphorically implies about how often the brain must be translating thoughts between one format and another; it's theorized that cortex began as a convergence space for sensory information, frontal cortex is executive in the simplified stories they tell to children, but thinking is a realtime control skill so probably a lot of the real work is done in the cerebellum; the frontal cortex is much larger in humans than in chimpanzees; records of what happens with blindness show that different parts of the cerebral cortex can take on other parts' work; it's theorized that there's a common algorithm that the whole vast cerebral cortex begins from, here's the six-layer structure that appears everywhere, here's the rather informal theory about hierarchical temporal patterns; brain damage is endlessly fascinating but it's like trying to understand a radio by ripping particular circuits out of it; when the hippocampus is destroyed people can't form new memories but they can still retrieve old ones; damage to the brain here can cause people to believe everybody around them has been replaced by impostors, because they see the face but get no sense of recognition; brain damage here can cause people to lose the ability to control their left arm, and also vigorously deny that their arm is paralyzed, but if you squirt cold water in their left ear they may become able to know:

:Brains are complicated, brains were never made by humans, and brains' inner stories don't look like what humans experience or the stories they tell themselves.  What you saw can't be what's really happening.:

Melody goes still, absorbing the tangled flow of information. 

:I...I mean, I think that's right - that I'm only seeing a tiny part of the story here, I mean, what I'm capable of understanding, what I have words to describe. I -: 

She shakes her head a little, wonderingly. 

:If all that's true, then I don't have the faintest idea how Thoughtsensing can possibly work. Let alone Mindhealing Sight. It's definitely kind of inscrutable at first, for a beginner - but if it were that opaque then no one could possibly learn to control the Gift even in an entire lifetime: 

:Among the very first things I thought after I got here and found out about Mindspeech,: when it comes to concealing how far away Thellim is from, the cat is now out of the bag, out of the house, and well on its way out of the atmosphere, :was that it had to be much more complicated than it looked.  Vanyel can think 'sapling' and somehow that concept makes it from his mind into my mind even though we'll have our memories and concepts of trees stored in different networks of our brain, possibly even in different formats that our brains invented for themselves.  There would be shared points that pinned down the meaning and let somebody looking at both brains in enough detail figure out the codes, if you can load enough of the shape of a tree from his visual cortex into my visual cortex you could probably get started on following the associations into my temporal lobe.  But Mindspeech can't be like - pressing a sheet of paper onto another sheet of paper with wet ink, and the ink just naturally and easily soaks into the other sheet of paper.  It's dangerous to make up theories too fast, I'm in danger of far overrunning my data, but the obvious guess is that there's a Mindspeech organ, or maybe even a Mindspeech tool that connects to a Mindspeech server somewhere maintained by gods.  Whatever Mindspeech is, it extremely likely uses - aspects of this universe that my own universe doesn't have, like 'magic' - which is why my universe doesn't have it - and I have no idea at all what's easy to do with that.  Whatever Mindspeech is, it's doing an enormous amount of work in the background to enable different people to think at each other and convey sense impressions at each other despite all of the formatting-complexity and different associations to different memories that must differ between their brains.:

:Extending my wild guessing even further, my wild guess is that either your Mindhealing is only showing you things that you - expect to see, that you understand - or that your sense of meaning is picking up on one out of a thousand threads in the tapestry, or one tiny aspect of the meaning of the cloth, and it feels to you like that's what the whole section of fabric is doing.:

:And how this matters to Vanyel is that I suspect his broken lifebond has damaged things that aren't in the easy-to-understand class.  I'm far overreaching my evidence but still, guessing so as to organize investigation, when I hear about lifebonds I imagine two sufficiently similar minds, with some of the Thing that powers Gifts, can meld and start sharing cognitive work.  Then half the lifebond gets ripped away, and there are thoughts that - start, and can't complete themselves, like those threads reaching in towards the void and disintegrating.  A form of brain damage that the brain doesn't know how to correct from the inside; the brain can route around some forms of damage but others it can't.  Even people who've been through horrendously painful experiences, I'm guessing, wouldn't end up looking like Vanyel does inside - I don't know if you've seen people like that, Melody, and you should correct me if I'm wrong and they do look like Vanyel.  But my wild guess is that Vanyel has a form of brain damage that my world has never seen before and it's mixed in with the trauma.  When he thinks about Tylendel, he doesn't just remember losing something very precious to him or the pain of the bond breaking, his thoughts literally malfunction.:

:When you're ready, Melody, I want to look at Vanyel again, and look very narrowly at a single one of those threads that was in the process of reaching towards the void and disintegrating.  I'm going to try to - lean in closer - to see if I can recognize anything, or load my thoughts and expectations into your own mindspace through Mindspeech - if I can close the gap between my own knowledge and your Gift's power to interpret what it sees.  And I'd like you to stop me from changing anything - to not let your Gift do any manipulations, even if you cede control of perceptions to me - because I am not an experienced Mindhealer and we do not have a backup Vanyel.:

Melody listens attentively through her explanation. 

:I - sorry - I think all the pieces of what you said made sense by themselves? But this is - kind of a lot of information really fast and I think I'm running out of space to put it in my head and... I'm fine, I do think I followed most of that and I'm used to things happening way too fast all the time constantly, wars are like that, but I just want to apologize if I seem to have forgotten or not even heard things you said: 

A pause. 

:You're right that I don't understand all the things wrong with his mind. And - I've never seen anything like this before, not even with horrific trauma, there's clearly something different going on. And I have no idea how to help him, right now, aside from - really surface-level patches that won't fix any of his real problems, or - telling King Randale to never ever send him to a war zone again, which I CAN'T DO because he's about half of Valdemar's military firepower–:

A pause, while Melody contains and damps down the sudden surge of intense frustration at not being able to get Vanyel the hell away from an environment which is, very predictably, making all of his existing problems worse. 

:All right, let's try your idea and have a very close-up look. I've never done this before - I think I can give you access to directing my Sight around, without letting you actually manipulate his mind...? And I'm very sure I can stop you and kick you out of rapport if I'm wrong and you're about to do that, but I hope that doesn't happen because it would be very jarring for you:

She takes a deep breath. :...And did that tea ever arrive? I think I need more tea before I try this and, er, I've been a little absorbed: 

(It looks like, at some point, a tray with a teapot and some cups and a little pitcher of milk and bowl of sugar were brought and left on the table while both of them were fully absorbed in Mindhealing senses.) 

Thellim beams an aside to Lissa and Yfandes while Melody gets acquainted with tea.  :General situational update, Vanyel does not look... worse than I think either of you already knew about, but looks pretty bad, and we are still in a figure-out-exactly-what's-happening phase rather than a treatment-planning phase.  Do not plan on this all being resolved in the next three minutes if either of you needs to, say, eat something, or otherwise continue to live your own life as reality goes on happening around you.:

:Thank you: 

Yfandes still seems tense, but mostly in a way related to normal anxiety, not the edge-of-freezing-up that she was riding before. 

Lissa just nods, and goes on hugging her brother and petting his hair, which he seems oblivious to. 

Melody pours tea, dilutes it with a little milk, and gulps it at what looks like a somewhat painful speed, then fills a second cup and holds it loosely. 

:All right. Let's do this: 

She pulls Thellim back into rapport - and then even more deeply and tightly than before, except that she's cautiously shielding out part of her Gift this time - and then they refocus on Vanyel's mind. 

Onto specifically the torn-out emptiness in the center of it. 

Onto the edge of that, ragged, barely held together against the threat of unraveling. 

Onto a single trailing thread, one not held by Yfandes' silver scaffold or knotted back into the pattern or otherwise dealt with. 

And deeper, deeper, onward and inward, falling, focusing solely on the dangling, fraying tip of that thread - 

At some point, it stops being a thread of cloth at all... 

. . _ . __ . . . . __ .

. . _ . __ . . . . __ .

    =>

. . _ . __ . . . . __ .

    =>

. . _ . __ . . . . __ .

    =>

XXXXXXXXXXXXXX

That can't be just one neuron, can it?  Its relative size is too large for it to be a neuron.  It feels spike-trainy but no, they shouldn't be getting activity from one neuron, this isn't Mindspeech.  It ought to be some aspect of Vanyel's static brain-state that has something to do with this spike-train pattern, which is going to be one of the very few concepts in neural coding that Thellim's Civilization is advanced enough to know about at all, which is why Thellim is seeing it.

Okay, what are you, tiny thing near the broken place?  You're big enough to see at the end of a thread, so you're not a neuron.  You're small enough that a particular spike-train is a key part of your state.  You look to Melody like a disintegrating thread leading into the big void, and to the extent Mindhealing shows state in terms of how it affects activity, you are what happens to a thought just before it goes perbluckit.  You have structure besides that spike train; but it is not something so blatantly obvious to a Civilization-trained amateur who's taken a few neuroscience courses, as the concept of a particular temporal pattern of neural spikes...

Thellim echoes some of this questioning to Melody, in case Melody's Gift is telling her more.

.....Melody is incredibly confused. This is completely different than what her Sight usually shows her! It's - almost purely abstract - there's barely anything to it she can use to interpret the context... 

:There's...the pattern you see...: she muses, vaguely, half to herself. :And it repeats - there's more of it - but - then it stops, then there isn't any more... it should go somewhere but somewhere doesn't exist...: 

All of that is emotionally tagged with uncertainty; Melody had no idea this layer of a mind even existed, not until now. 

:There's a theory about how information spreads through cerebral cortex, in which one cortical column: mental image of a tightly woven collection of a hundred tiny objects, each a blob at the center of branching threads :starts firing in a pattern, and if another cortical column a certain distance from it also starts broadcasting the same pattern: mental image of two circles each centered on a column :where the two circles intersect, a third column hears two identical spike trains arriving in synchrony: mental image of the two circles intersecting on a third column, forming an equilateral triangle :and that third column picks up the pattern and starts broadcasting it itself, recruiting more columns at the same key distance and forming a synchronized computing network spanning an area of cortex.:  The image that goes along with this is a triangular grid of columns, spanning a plane, all broadcasting in synchrony.  :Did that - help make sense of it at all?:

:- Maybe? I'm not sure... A little. I don't think I follow at all why it does that, what the triangles are good for - how any of this eventually turns into habits-of-thought at the level I normally see them...: 

A long pause. 

:You're saying...something should be synchronized, should spread itself further - but for that to happen, all the links need to be there, and they're not, in this case - like a bridge being blasted, or something, blocking a transport route...?: 

:It's premature theorizing, but yeah, I had a very crude and absurdly oversimplified hypothesis slash metaphor about how a lifebond is like their cerebral cortex being set up to share propagation, and then the lifebond breaks and the thoughts try to propagate but they don't go anywhere.  It doesn't have to be - the answer - but it's the sort of thing that brains actually do and trying to use organizing theories like that might help us understand the lifebond damage on a deeper level.:

:The equilateral triangle pattern is for synchrony - we do have a good idea that the patterns of neural activity flashing matter, the timing of the spike trains - you could See that part, right? I could - and a column that's the same distance from two other patterns would get the messages from them in synchrony because they'd have traveled the same distance.  Imagine three cities in an equilateral triangle, all equally distant from each other, connected by roads and by messengers that all travel at the same speeds.  Any two cities can send messages to the third city, and if the messengers start on the same day, they'll arrive on the same day at the third city.  When information is encoded not by any messages the messengers carry, but by the pattern of messengers and how long it takes for the next messenger to arrive after the previous one, synchronizing the initial arrival time of messenger retinues from different cities could be important to combining and - computing, doing thinking with - the messages encoded in the timed retinues.  So the cities that combine their powers end up arranged in a tiling of equilateral triangles.:

:Oh! That's - yes, I think I understood that - that's really clever. Fascinating! Scholars in your world discovered this, and without even having Mindhealing Sight?:

Also her head is kind of starting to hurt, from information overload as much as from overusing her Gift.

:...I think that probably hits some of it? I - this feels incomplete - I think there might be other angles we're not looking from, maybe we focused in on this one because of what you know... But I think it's not wrong: 

Another very long pause. 

:....Well. If your theory's true, then - what do we do about it?: 

:Well, if this was a comic book, we'd figure out exactly the change we needed to make to all the broken threads leading into the void, which would reconnect them into a living part of Vanyel's computing fabric.:

:I suspect that in practice you do some of the same kind of work the last Mindhealer did and see if that renders Vanyel immediately functional, and not do more pending taking a Look at somebody with a functioning lifebond, doing some experiments on nonsapient animals, and - and I'm not even going to try to make up this part as we go along, we can think of a research agenda at somewhat more leisure than this.  It's possible you can do better than the last Mindhealer because you've realized that you are not just trying to steer Vanyel's thoughts away from an emotional trauma, you are trying to steer away tiny cognitions embodied in neural patterns from a responding factor that tries to rebroadcast the signal but ends up breaking it up instead.  But if I were you, I do not think I would be trying to mess around with, like, reversing the spike train encoded in this microthread in hopes that it stops binding to thoughts and steering them into the damaged area.  I mean, even taking into account that 'reverse' is a lossless transformation and that might mean you could put it back afterward if needed, which is why I said 'reverse' rather than 'erase', I still do not think you should try it just yet.  I think you should stick to things that feel intuitive to you and your Gift, and maybe slightly try to use some of the new knowledge if the cost-benefit ratio seems very good.  Unless Vanyel still hasn't recovered after a time, and then we speed up our experimentation plans.:

:And before you do THAT you are going to stand up, walk around, have some more tea, and possibly even eat something tasty that I will tell Lissa to get you.:  Thellim has started to catch on to Valdemar Syndrome at this point.

Melody is quiet for a long moment, clearly deep in thought. 

:...Thank you. This - was informative, even though I don't think I've got anywhere near the level of control I'd need to manipulate structures that small - er, imagine if you were using a glass lens to look at individual...hairs, or threads of spider-silk...but still all you had to sew or weave them was your fat fingers: 

Her lips twitch into a brief, fierce smile. :Well. I don't have that kind of control yet. Though I reckon I'm better than whoever I saw last... Before, I'd been wondering if the best I could do would be a wide-range block - flipping back enough of the main pathways to just sort of bounce all the associations back before they hit the gap - but that would distort his overall thinking and emotions a lot and now I have better ideas. My thought for now is, I back up, get a big-picture view of where he's most - wobbly, unstable - and then I can use the really close-in peeks to make sure the fixes I'm putting in go with the grain of his mind as much as possible: 

She pulls back from Vanyel's mind and out of the close Sight-sharing rapport, and scoots her stool back. :And for now, yes, I could use some walking around and something to eat. How about Vanyel - when did he last eat or drink?: 

:I'd like to say something scathing like NEVER but in fact Vanyel ate some dried cheese and dried meat this morning, and then had some bread and butter in this tent just before his system crashed.  I, too, wish that we'd been able to get more of a meal into him first.  If it didn't violate the obvious standard-professional-ethical-code, I'd tell you to install Eating Software as long as you were in there.:

:- I can't tell if that's supposed to be a joke or you mean it seriously: Melody stands up and stretches. :Anyway I don't think that's the sort of thing I know how to do, though I do hope to have some future opportunities to help him get some better habits:

She tugs at her bun, eyes darting restlessly around the room. :- Er, I'm...not really in the headspace for talking to people right now - not sure if you ever get the thing where if you do a repetitive task like cleaning floor tiles for candlemarks then your mind sort of replays it when you're trying to fall asleep? My mind is doing that except with those damned abstract line-dot-triangle patterns. Anyway do you think you can explain the plan to him, or at least to Yfandes if he won't engage, and then try to at least coax him to drink something? We've been at this for a long time: 

:Rogerroger: Thellim thinks back at her.  Then, in a flash of self-awareness, stands up and stretches herself.

They might have been at this for longer than Thellim realized.  But she's already in great shape, right?  She doesn't need to take a break herself, not when people need her.

Thellim strikes her hip briefly in a gesture that's the dath ilani equivalent of a headshake and humorous snort.  She gives the tea a dubious look, then tries pouring herself some milk and sugar.  Other people may be waiting on her, and even be worried, but Thellim has just come out of some rather intense concert-work and thinking.  The others can afford another worried minute while Thellim shakes out her thoughts and figures out what to say next.  She might not have thought that yesterday, but something about being put into contact with this much Valdemar Syndrome has helped her generalize the mistake.

The others don't seem especially impatient. Vanyel is resting his head on his sister's shoulder, now; they seem to be talking quietly to each other, though not in Mindspeech so of course Thellim can't understand them.