Forty-one
Jeremy Kael waited at the dome airlock as Myla cycled
through. "Those alien ships are moving in."
Myla walked on by. She set Gorlon Hague's urn on the
ground and turned to where Jeep squatted alongside the hut.
"What's this thing?" Jeremy said, touching the urn
with the toe of his boot.
"Please don't tip it over. That's General Hague,
what's left of him.” Myla sat cross-legged before the diminutive alien who
rose to her full height. "I don't know if this is going to accomplish
anything. I can only try."
Jeep stared at her. Myla's intuition had nothing to
say about whether Jeep understood her, but when she held her hand out,
Jeep touched her palm again. On some indecipherable level, contact between them
had been made.
"It’s not going to be possible to communicate with
her,” Jeremy suggested meekly.
"I don't know what to do for her, Jeremy. I can't
let them just take her."
Jeremy squatted at her side.
"What are you going to do?"
She smiled at the boy. "You're not so afraid of me
any more."
"I never had any reason to be afraid of you."
"That’s perfectly true, but you were very much afraid
anyhow."
"And you fear nothing,” he said in a bitterness that
had more to do with what he perceived as his unworthiness than her
superiority. “If you’re thinking what I think you’re thinking, you should
be very afraid."
Myla thought about it and shrugged. "I trust that
the universe knows what it's doing. I guess that means that I'm still a
Nat at heart after all."
"They're coming for you,"
she said to Jeep.
"If we run away, we could end up in some dark place where light has never
shone. If we stay, they'll get you."
Myla looked at Jeremy. "I want you to take a
skiff and return General Hague to Bolphan. I want you to take the mud
dragon back to Covonia.”
Jeremy looked her in the eye so that she could not
mistake the misery he was feeling. "I don't have a life without you. I
never did. Even when we couldn’t be together, I never thought about
anyone else. When I was with other girls, it was always you."
She raised an eyebrow. "But did you ever really know
me?”
“You! Yes! You’re still the same Myla you always
were!" And softer: "Unless you don’t need me anymore.”
She reached for him on hands
and knees and clutched tight, mingling her own tears with his. "How
could you ever think such a thing?"
"It's just you, my little Myla,” he whispered to
her. “Nothing important has changed, has it?"
She shook her head. The coin she carried on the
chain around her neck caught on Jeremy’s collar as she pulled away.
Jeremy reached out and fingered it.
“My mother said it belongs to my real father," Myla
said, "except that if I'm an avatar, I had no father."
She looked back up at him. "I owe it to Jeep. It’s
her only chance to get away."
"How do you owe anything to Jeep?"
Jeremy said. "She’s using you."
"Maybe,” she conceded.
Jeremy shook her gently. "Put it on a skiff and let it go its own way. Don't
bargain with the Hive, or the Alliance. Do what Dalikor started out to
do. It's what Khalin Nome had planned for you."
It sounded so easy. "You want me to assume
too much
authority. Jeremy, the Hive and the Alliance are things people did to
themselves. Jzon Dalikor may not have been a good idea after all."
"But you could unite humanity," Jeremy said softly.
"I can see that now."
Myla thought otherwise. "People have always lived
and died by the choices they've made. The gods they have believed in and
the leaders who have ruled over them have always been their choices. They
appoint them, or they lack courage to defy them. The real stargods keep
their distance from us, Jeremy. Why? Because it's for our own good.
People don't need gods. They didn't need Dalikor. They don't need me.
They need to learn to live their own lives, or how can they ever hope to
live at all?"
"You weren't the first, Myla, and you won't be the
last,” Jeremy said. “The Dalikor technology has been something that has
happened all down through history, the discovery of one kind of power or
another that promises
so much, but that can destroy everything. If we had never used tools, we
would have died in the forests where we evolved."
Myla disconnected the coin from
its chain and flipped it with her thumb. She watched it
spin and drop into the palm of her hand.
"Is that how you're going to decide, by flipping a
coin?"
Myla had Dikki explain to her Jeremy’s archaic
reference. "Heads I go, tails I stay?" Smiling, she flipped the coin.
And then again. Slowly, her smile began to fade.
Over and over, she flipped the coin. She inspected
the backside of the coin to ensure that the memories of a lifetime had not
failed her, but the two sides of the coin had two distinctive patterns.
With each flip, only one side of the coin faced
upwards.
She glanced at Jeep's dark eyes, startled by absolute
and incontrovertible understanding. The field of physics had the answers
to Jeep's strange power. The multiverse of infinite possibility had been
known for centuries on the level of a theory and integrated into
information processing technology for ages. It was known to be the very
purpose of consciousness to sift through probabilities and make choices on
the most fundamental level of being, a thing that people could do and
machines could not in any coherent fashion. This or that probability,
each equal in the eyes of the multiverse, the quantum universe, but only
one to be the destiny for organisms threading histories through infinity itself.
Myla put the coin back on its chain and slipped the
chain back around her neck.
"What's so funny?" Jeremy said, unsettled by her
smile and sudden change in mood.
"My parents were right. It's safe to trust the
unknown after all. We'll send Hague and the mud dragon back to Bolphan
with a ship of their own. You and me and Jeep and Dikki are leaving right
away.”
"Where are we going?" Jeremy asked mildly.
"I think we're going where Jeep wants us to go."
