Mae Albert
Mae Albert Born Year 301 Spouse Rad Albert Species Homo Sapiens (Cavernous Adaptation / Hematic Variant) First appearance The Glass House, chapter 6 |
Mae Albert (born 301) is a figure of the C9 universe, the guide who brought the House of Confidence through the cave systems beneath the Great Plateau, and the keeper of the deep shelters afterwards. She navigates by echolocation. She has no eyes and never has had them; her face is smooth where they would be.
She is married to Rad Albert, and their son is Matthew Albert. She was twenty-nine in year 330, when the Klak Grove fell and the survivors came down into her caves. Samantha Grace Albert-Nakayama is her niece by marriage.
Early life
Mae was born in year 301 in the Red Desert and the subterranean systems under it, and is adapted to them: tall, pale, built for reception rather than force. Her dermis is photosensitive and she keeps out of hard light, and she is at ease in damp and cold that would drive most people up. Her hearing does the work her eyes would. She wears her silver hair long and often across her face, her ears move when she listens, and the fangs show when she smiles.
Asked how long her way of moving through the dark took her to learn, she said it took a while, and then, when that was not enough of an answer, that she was small and the world was loud.
Ian
She travels on Ian, an underground bovirlia native to the cave systems: wider across than three people standing shoulder to shoulder, hovering a foot off the floor on four round inflators, the holes in his thorax cycling in the patient rhythm that means calm. The glow comes from inside the inflators and does not reach the walls. Mae rides the broad flat of his back with both hands on the ridge of his housing, and the bond between them is one of complete trust[1].
Through the caves
She led the group down in the dark with a tongue click, deliberate and precisely aimed, at a wall seven feet ahead, then another at a different angle, and the House followed the light and the sound with their hands on walls where walls were available[1].
She reads more than distance. She knew a lever had been pulled recently because the dust was disturbed[1]. When she went still, the stillness was itself the warning, and the footsteps came a moment later through the lattice of the upper shelves, trying not to sound like footsteps and failing only slightly[1]. She clicked once at the ceiling, found one long crack running from the east wall to the centre, and did not say what she was thinking[1].
At the abandoned settlement she said there was not one soul in it, then went still in the way she goes still when she is reading the air, which is not smell and which she has never satisfactorily explained, and pointed at a small house between two larger ones: that one, three of us, everyone else on guard[2]. She found the trapdoor under the carpet, its handle folded flat into the wood, and opened it on a smell that arrives at the back of the throat and stays[2].
Afterwards she crouched over the ash and put the creature at five orders, maybe six, and said it was worth celebrating, and noted that the shift it had performed was not available below Order Two[2].
She has felt the cold three times, the one that is not temperature: the heartbeat too slow, the breath too shallow, iceberry hour arriving in the chest like something that had been planning to arrive and finally chose its moment. Each time it cost her something[2].
Physiology
Mae maps by sound. Passive listening tells her what is approaching; an active ping, sent with her voice, with a tool, or through Ian, returns the shape of what is ahead, out to travellers several kilometres off. Density and heartbeat register, so a thing that has made itself invisible is not hidden from her.
Her physiology is hematic as well as cavernous, and the Albert line runs through it: the fangs, and the turn toward ferocity under pressure that she shares with her husband's family. As her hearing dims with age she leans on the blood side of it to hold her vitality and her reach.
Later years
In the years after the plateau she became combat-active in the raids rather than only a guide, and stood as steady ground for the younger Alberts. In age her silver goes white, she rarely leaves the deep caves and prefers the silence there, and she can hear visitors coming from miles out. What she teaches the children is how to see without eyes.
Family
Mae is married to Rad Albert. Their son is Matthew Albert. Samantha Grace Albert-Nakayama is her niece by marriage.