Kezia had designed the intake assessment in 1999 and had never written it down. This was not oversight. She had tried, in the early years, and the written versions produced carriers who had the criteria's surface characteristics without the underlying quality the criteria were attempting to identify. She had stopped writing them down and started trusting herself. For 26 years this had worked.
Vren had been trying to extract the criteria for seven weeks. He had four transcripts of their conversations, each labeled in his own handwriting: approximately it, but not.
Today Kezia was more tired than last week. She was still lucid. The distinction between those two states would not hold indefinitely and they both knew it.
He asked her again about the last three candidates she'd assessed. She described them, one at a time, in the same way she always described candidates: not as evaluations but as observations. The way this one moved through a room. The way that one held a silence. The quality of how the third one asked a question she didn't know the answer to.
Vren listened and wrote. He had stopped trying to extract the principle and was writing the descriptions now, exactly as she gave them, in her words. He had twenty-two descriptions from the last seven weeks.
"The third one," he said. "The way she asked the question. There's something in that."
"There is," Kezia said.
"It's something about being genuinely uncertain. Not performed uncertainty."
Kezia considered this. "That's part of it. But lots of people are genuinely uncertain."
"She was uncertain and she stayed in it. Without needing to resolve it."
Kezia looked at him for a moment with an expression he couldn't read. "That's the closest anyone has come," she said.
He looked at his notebook. It was not enough to write an assessment protocol. They both knew that too.
She closed her eyes. He sat next to her with the twenty-two descriptions in his lap, each one a different angle on the same thing, none of them the thing itself.