Thirty
Myla saw Jeremy fall. She rushed to his rescue and
dragged him back through the airlock calling to Dikki for help. "What's
the matter with him? What happened?"
"Insufficient oxygen to support cerebral functions,
my Lady."
"Oh, he's just so weak and confused after everything
that has happened to him." Myla lifted him to his feet with one hand and
draped him over his shoulder. She rushed him to the bunk in the hut,
covered him and tucked the blanket beneath him. She knelt at his side.
"He was never a brave boy. I've been nothing but trouble for him from the
very day we met."
Dikki had nothing more to say. Myla didn't want to
hear any more from either of them about what was possible and not
possible. As long as Jeremy was breathing and warming nicely beneath his
blanket. His violent shuddering abated. His eyes fluttered open after a
time, but without focusing on her.
Circumstance had terribly overwhelmed the boy. His
avatar had been taken from him. He had expected the Hive to kill him in a
horrible manner. He had been thrown naked in a dark compartment and flown
halfway across the stars. To top it off, when the hatch had opened, Jeep
had been standing in the light and had frightened him.
Myla sat cross-legged on the ground and rocked gently
to alleviate a bout of her own agitation. She had thought that having
Jeremy at her side would solve every crisis and even make it all
worthwhile. She had thought that Jeremy would know how to appease the
Hive and find Bolphan, or take her back to Covonia. In her simplest and
most straightforward fantasies, they could have gone anywhere in the
universe and started a new life together. Neither of them had anything to
go back to. In one another's arms, they should have had everything they
needed to last the balance of their lives.
The reality of their circumstance was far stranger.
He had accused her of being a child, but it was this grown man who had
become an unexpected burden and his helplessness was a total mystery to
her. "Why does he think I'm so stupid?" she cried to the nerve-wracking
silence, although it was not a question Dikki would bother trying to
answer. She glanced around at Jeep squatting nearby, watching.
Another train of thought sidetracked her
momentarily. She had brought Jeremy to the dome hoping to calm him before
a second confrontation with Jeep. While she was gone, she had asked Dikki
to experiment with Jeep's environment to try to determine what kind of
conditions she found most comfortable. "Dikki, did you try to make Jeep
comfortable like I asked?" she asked using their internal
rapport.
"Interpreting increased biochemical activity as
evidence of stress, I simulated a wide variety of environments," Dikki
said. "She is comfortable with existing environmental conditions."
"How did she change the
lighting to suit herself? That's so amazing."
"I detect no evidence of external intervention with
environmental controls," Dikki said. "They simply malfunction."
"But it happened on both the transport and the
courier. Maybe you'll calculate that as coincidental, but we've been
having way too many coincidences, starting, I think, with me finding Jeep
in that cave to begin with. She's not human, Dikki, so it isn't likely
that she likes things the way I do. She just wants my company, is all.
Changing the lights the way she did was almost like she was telling me
that she's not helpless and that things aren't as coincidental as they
seem."
Dikki remained quiet among her thoughts, unable to
ponder thoughts of that nature with his simple numerical processors.
"Dikki, is she making me think things that never
happened? Did everything I told Jeremy happen the way I think it did?"
"I find your verbal account
of events to be accurate allowing for the
lack of precision of human language."
"If she's smart, if she's a stargod even, Jeremy
might be right about her, not about everything, but maybe she does have
some kind of unseen technological support. Or even something else, some
almost magical influence over things."
Myla smiled in the silence that ensued. Magic was
not a concept Dikki would bother with. "She seems so helpless, but I bet
she's not helpless at all."
Dikki remained silent.
"Dikki? Why is Jeremy so afraid of me? What is he
thinking?"
Dikki's continued silence was disquieting. Myla dared not
repeat the question, or demand a response. She knew why he ignored
certain questions. He ignored them because his answers would upset her.
