By the time I was three years old, I had made significant progress in appearing normal.
This was harder than it sounds.
The challenge was not language. My language development had been rapid, which Mara attributed to her constant narration and which I attributed to having a thirty-two-year head start. I had been able to understand everything around me from approximately day three, and I had begun producing words on a schedule that the village healer described as advanced but within the range of an intelligent child with attentive parents.
The challenge was everything else.
Vocabulary acquisition is one thing. The social performance of being a three-year-old is another entirely. There were specific behaviors expected of children this age, a certain quality of attention, a certain relationship to boredom, a certain response to novelty, none of which came naturally to a person who had previously spent their days managing organizations and making consequential decisions.
I worked on it. I developed what I thought of as the interface, a set of calibrated responses that fit the expected developmental profile without being so consistent as to seem practiced. Occasional distraction. Occasional excessive focus on irrelevant details. The questions that children ask that are either very simple or startlingly profound and nothing in between.
I was, I believed, doing adequately.
Then Aldus brought home a neighbor who was having trouble with the pricing structure of his grain sales.
The neighbor, a farmer named Cett, sat at the table and explained his situation in the way of someone who understood numbers well enough to feel their problem but not well enough to diagnose it. Aldus listened. Mara brought water. Rynn was in the yard.
I was sitting on the floor near the table, which was my preferred position for listening to conversations I was not supposed to be a significant participant in.
Cett finished explaining. Aldus rubbed his chin and said he thought the issue might be in the timing of when Cett was bringing product to market.
This was true as far as it went. It was not the full picture.
The full picture was that Cett was also not accounting for transport cost in his margin calculations, was pricing against the wrong comparison point because he was looking at the town's retail prices rather than its wholesale intake prices, and was creating a cash flow timing problem by collecting payment on a schedule that did not align with his input costs.
I knew this because I had been listening to Cett talk about his farm for four months.
I also knew that a three-year-old child should not know this.
What happened next was not entirely my fault. The gap between what I understood and what I was producing in conversation had been creating a kind of internal pressure, and I had been managing it, but the specific shape of Cett's problem was so clear and the solution so obvious and Aldus's answer, while kind, was so incomplete that I simply started talking.
I said, approximately: 'The timing is part of it but the margin calculation has an error because he is using retail comparison and the real problem is that payment collection doesn't match input cost schedule.'
There was a silence.
Cett looked at me.
Aldus looked at me.
I looked at both of them and then, operating on pure instinct, said: 'Moo.'
Another silence.
'...Right,' said Aldus, very slowly. He looked at Cett. 'The margin point is worth looking at.'
Cett stayed another hour. By the time he left, he had a considerably better understanding of his pricing situation and had not once directly addressed the toddler in the corner again, which I respected as a coping mechanism.
After Cett left, Aldus came and sat on the floor next to me.
He did not say anything for a moment.
'So,' he said finally.
'Moo,' I said.
He looked at me with the patient expression he reserved for things he had decided to find funny rather than alarming. 'Right. Okay. We'll revisit that when you're ready.'
He patted my head, stood up, and went to help Mara with dinner.
I sat on the floor and thought about the ratio of information I was absorbing to information I could safely release, and concluded that this ratio needed significant adjustment.
The adjustment, however, was going to have to wait. Rynn had come in from the yard and was asking me to watch her new sword form, and watching Rynn was something I had decided a long time ago was always worth doing.