Fifty-three
Basil Whalyk had lived too long to react to the
incredible with disbelief. His entire life had been one long immersion in
the unlikely and the unusual. Einsik's news of Myla's enigmatic
resurrection in the body of the clone Hague had used to deflect Alliance
suspicions brought to mind the alien spacecraft that had haunted the
recent Alliance-Hive conflict. They had departed and so, too, had Myla.
If Myla had been magically returned to them in this mysterious fashion, an
intelligence rivaling the stargods in power had intervened in human
affairs. He could accept that.
When Einsik brought Myla to his office, he found it
difficult to believe the wild stories of an autonomous avatar defeating
Hive armadas. He had known Myla since birth. He had watched her grow and
mature and on a deep emotional level wanted nothing more than an assurance
that she had somehow managed to survive. To see her like this, fully
human as he had always known her to be, touched off a paternal affection
than resulted in an unexpected embrace. Myla seemed bewildered by his
reaction, but pleased, and she took a seat at his side and avoided looking
Einsik in the eye as the scientist recounted his discovery of the girl.
"Khalin is dying," he added as an afterthought. "There is nothing more I
can do for him."
"I must speak with him before he dies." Myla's eyes
were wide with pleading. "Please let me speak with him."
Basil thought the prospect of seeing Overlord Khalin
Nome naked in his own dying body repugnant, but he gave the child a quick
nod of approval, knowing that Khalin held the secrets to her past, secrets
that would be lost forever upon his death. "See to it immediately and
then return her to me," he told Einsik.
Myla felt comforted by Basil's acceptance of her
return to Bolphan. It helped to ease her dreaded final confrontation with
Khalin Nome himself. Following Einsik through the empty corridors of the
besieged city, she suspected that they were all suffering a degree of
dissociation from reality. She kept rubbing her arms in fascination of
the intense sensory experience of residing in a citadel of human flesh and
blood. She had thought herself human, but this is what it felt like to be
human, dependent upon nothing more than her physical senses for her
interface with the universe, but overwhelmed by it. Memory of her avatar
self felt like a wonderful dream too large to be contained in the light of
day. Which would she prefer, given a choice?
This one, she decided, the uniquely human universe of
emotion-laden color and sound and sensation. And yet she felt so isolated
and vulnerable.
She paid no mind to where Einsik led her. She passed
through corridors and whispering doors. A crypt standing in her way
finally brought her up short. She heard her own small gasp of surprise in
a dark and silent chamber and stood staring down at the gleaming
container.
"I will wait outside," Einsik said. "Call me when
you are finished, or if you need my help."
The door sighed closed behind her. Her ears rang
with the stillness. With trembling fingers, she reached out to the
controls and opened the crypt.
She cried out and leaped back from the awful sight
that met her eyes. In a crypt lined in light colored foam, an ancient
corpse lay curled in a ball like a newborn infant, gnarled and shrunken
and physically naked. And yet it breathed still, erratically and with
difficulty. It blinked in the sudden light. Only its eyes moved, looking
wildly about.
He would not have seen her standing over him had she
had not reached down and touched him. The great Khalin Nome was so frail
that she could all but cradle him in her two hands. She turned him onto
his back and grasped his right hand when it flailed up at her in
desperation. His toothless mouth opened in a gasp, and his pale eyes
widened with astonishment.
Myla saw that it was already too late to say
everything she had been saving for this last moment. His chest heaved
several times. He took one deep breath. And then he whispered her secret
name, that strange sequence of syllables she had heard only once or twice
in her entire life.
Myla whimpered. She trembled, and tears filled her
eyes. Only her father knew her name in that language.
"Father? Can it be?"
He smiled. With his last effort, he reached for her
with one hand. He bumped her arm several times before she realized that
he was reaching for the coin she carried at her throat.
"The coin?"
She clutched at her throat.
Her coin was gone! She reeled in confusion, fighting
to adapt to the memory of having had another body. One was dead! The
coin had been around that neck!
She tried not to show her panic. Khalin gave a nod
in response to her question, tears running down his face. He said her
name one last time, unmistakably clear, and then he seemed to pause in
mid-breath. It took a moment for her to realize that he had died.
"Father?"
Khalin had been her father in every important
respect, except that she could not have been the child of a sexual union
between a man and a woman. She could not be the daughter of Khalin Nome
in that sense of the word. But the avatar she had been, the human being
she was now, could easily have been born of the DNA of someone who had
lived centuries ago, someone central to Khalin's existence.
Her fingers fluttered about her bare throat. She
felt naked without her coin. She remembered walking up an incline with
Jeremy at her side, confronted by a man in an Alliance uniform pointing a
gun at her. The coin was there, with Jeremy, with her other body.
She had to have it back.
"Einsik?"
He came to her immediately and only glanced at
Khalin's corpse to confirm its lifelessness. But she saw hurt in his
eyes, and the subtle way he seemed to cave in on himself. In his own prim
fashion, he would grieve. "Let's get back to Basil," he said.
Basil grilled her about her experiences from the time
she had run away from Khalin to her awakening in his presence a few short
hours ago. She had trouble answering his questions with any precision and
clarity. A veil had fallen across her memory. Einsik explained that a
human memory could hold but a fraction of that which had been contained in
the avatar brain. He still did not understand how a mind, a personality
complete with its store of memories could be transferred from one brain to
another. Myla thought the question moot. "I've got to get my coin back,"
she kept repeating, and Basil eyed her with sad and helpless compassion,
exchanging knowing looks with Einsik.
"I've got to get my coin back!" she cried in anger,
not caring how irrational she sounded, or how impossible her demands. "I
want Jeremy!"
"Myla, the Alliance is trying to destroy us all,"
Basil said quietly. "Only Gorlon Hague stands between us and the Alliance
fleet, and I don't think his threats to attack the Home Worlds will sway
the Alliance for long. From what you tell me, I suspect Jeremy and your
coin are aboard one of the Alliance warcraft attending our execution.
There's nothing we can do."
Myla refused to accept Basil's bleak outlook. "Jeep
didn't send me back to die. Not after everything that has happened."
"Child, what can we do?"
And she was, after all, just a child and no match for
the knowledge and intellectual power of these two men. As helpless as
they were, she had to keep in mind that even her vastly more powerful
avatar had blundered into its own destruction. Very little had been left
in its wake, but she was alive for a reason. Of that elemental fact, she
was certain, and she had to stay alive for as long as possible. Something
else would happen soon. She felt certain of it.
"They thought they killed me, but they didn't," she
said to the two men. "That man with the gun wouldn't be too happy to see
me again."
"Lee Wokan?" Basil chuckled. "No, I don't think he
would be too happy to hear from you again."
"We should let Gorlon know that I am still alive."
"What would you say to him?" Basil asked gently,
perhaps even condescendingly.
"I will beg General Hague not to use the terrible
weapon I left in his charge." She studied the two men in search of a
reaction to her idea. "There is no terrible weapon. He'll know it's just
a trick."
"But the Alliance will panic," Basil said with a grim
smile. “They’ll think it a part of the threat he made to attack the Home
Worlds.”
"It would accomplish nothing," Einsik said,
but without conviction.
Basil gazed at Einsik calmly. "I once saw a man
defeated in combat. His opponent was wounded and helpless, but he fought
like an animal, and he survived against overwhelming odds."
Einsik spat unexpected laughter. "He did at that. I
had forgotten."
"We were strangers that day," Basil said.
"But not since."
“I was impressed with your performance then. My
admiration for your skills has never diminished. You do understand that
our blood must be on their hands. A war is not won by running ourselves
upon the blade of our enemy, and there is no dignity in resignation. We
buy every moment of time that avails itself to us. We grasp at every
opportunity to strike back, no matter how feeble the blow. "
Einsik beamed a strained smile at Myla. "Very well.
If we can disturb the sleep of the Alliance for a night or two, so be it."
Basil and Einsik drafted a brief statement, and Myla
rehearsed her role for the next few hours. Her initial efforts were
self-conscious and unconvincing. Watching recordings of herself fueled
her anger. She grew physically weary for the first time in memory, and
suffered pangs of hunger and thirst.
But her final performance astonished even herself.
To all outward appearances, the Alliance had reaped the wrath of a being
who had defeated the Hive, returned from the dead, and who now threatened
to swallow the core worlds of the Alliance alive. Gorlon's shock at
Myla's return was apparent, but tempered by his conviction of the
omnipotence of the Dalikor technology. It didn't matter how Myla had
survived, only that she had.
"We've bought time," Einsik said when Myla's
communiqué ended.
"We've struck a powerful psychological blow to the
Alliance's over confidence in its rule," Basil added.
Einsik shrugged. "Now all we need is a miracle to
keep us alive."
Basil smiled and put his hand on the head of the
child seated between them.
"A second miracle, then."
Myla looked up at the two, little of her own misery
abated. "I want Jeremy. I want my coin back."
She sighed wearily. "And I'm hungry."
Basil took an incoming call, raising his right hand
as the traditional gesture to spare him a moment of privacy. His gaze
unfocused. He gave an absent-minded nod, and then looked around at Myla.
His dark eyes flashed with sudden excitement.
"I've just been informed. Jeremy Kael has been
released to our custody by the Alliance. He's on his way now."
Myla smiled. "Now I'm just hungry."
