The practice was called luminescence documentation, which was a clinical name for a simple thing: someone who could see the glow described what they saw to the person who had produced it. You could not measure your own output. The best you could do was hire someone to measure it for you, and they would tell you, and you would go home and presumably do something with the information.
Keln had been doing this for fifteen years. She had documentation files on four hundred and seventeen subjects. The files were precise: the location and distribution of the light, its quality and intensity, the specific acts that had produced it. The scale ran from trace to extraordinary. She had seen two extraordinaries in fifteen years. An elderly man who had been caring for his sister since they were both children. And a woman, younger, who had been teaching in a school district no one else would take.
What she had never done, in fifteen years, was tell any subject exactly what she saw. She gave them the clinical description, the relative placement on the scale, the basic comparison points. She said things like: considerable output, notable consistency, above average for this cohort. She did not say: you are one of the two brightest people I have assessed in fifteen years. She did not say: when you walk down the street in afternoon light, people stop what they are doing.
She had told herself, over the years, that the full measure was outside the scope of the practice. That it wasn't what clients came for. That they had come for data, not for the kind of information that changed something.
The elderly man was back for his annual session. He sat across from her in the small room, his hands in his lap. The light on his hands was clear and steady, the same quality she had documented for the past six years, no diminishment. He asked her, as he always did at the end of the session, how he was doing this year. She opened her mouth to say what she always said.
She told him the truth instead. All of it. It took longer than usual. He was quiet when she finished. He looked down at his hands.
"I didn't know, " he said.
"No, " she said. "I know you didn't."