Twenty-eight
Even having dropped to his knees, Khalin Nome stood
taller than his flesh-and-blood clone of little Myla Rhodes. For hours on
end, he watched her roam the room and blindly explore every shadowy
corner. Each time he fell within her field of vision, she would smile
vaguely. In time, he saw it was only reflex and motor function and the
copy of his cherished Mothwing an empty shell. Only with the greatest
effort did Khalin refrain from touching her. It wouldn't be the same to
touch this mindless body. It wasn't her in the only way that counted.
Watching her move about brought back old memories.
He couldn't help but reminisce. "I had it all under control," he said,
and she turned and stared at him, hypnotized by the sound of his deep
voice. "I had every bit of information at my command. Information is
power, Mothwing. And I had a good mind with which to use it. An
unaugmented mind. The Technocrats do not seem to realize how severely
their creativity is compromised by the machines to which they attach
themselves. They see the weakness of the Hive. They forget that they
have taken that weakness within themselves and are limited by it."
Despite it all, he had failed, then as now. "I had
everything planned in infinite detail. Not once did their superior minds
suspect, and things still went wrong. With Dalikor, and with you. I did
not see Dalikor as fearful, but the failing is mine, because they see you
in the same manner. I'm not sure what you could have accomplished. A new
beginning, perhaps. Humility, at the very least."
Had he wanted revenge? He had never thought that
evil lurked in him as it did other men, which simply meant that his
failure had been simple lack of understanding of human nature. Mesina had
tried to warn him. He had not understood its nature.
"Can you imagine?" he called to the human clone of
Mothwing. "The Hive. The Alliance. They fear you to the bottom of their
empty souls. They've always known it could happen again. We could have
destroyed them both. They are no match for you. I could have righted the
wrongs they have committed. I could have shown them the error of their
ways. They had no reason to fear you then. They would have seen for
themselves.
"But look what surprising thing has happened,
Mothwing. How could I have anticipated the aliens? Alien beings from
stars we have yet to visit, blundering into our lives, introducing an
element of chaos into my plans. What will happen now?"
Khalin put his fists to his head. "I cannot
imagine. I only wanted a chance for you to redeem yourself."
Smiling briefly one more time, the clone of Myla
Rhodes turned away. She made it halfway across the room, looking for
something with dim urgency, the greatest feat of which she was capable.
She paused, distracted by the puzzling demand of bodily functions, and
then wet
herself.
Khalin turned away from her in shame, not because of
her helplessness, but because of his own. In this briefly lucid moment,
he had caught himself ranting again against the darkness of the past. His mind was
slipping, but he could see now that death was not part of any darkness,
but simple forgetting, a break in the continuity of memory. It
astonished him to realize that he would not know the moment of his death
when it occurred. It would slip by unrecognized and he would be no more.
Such mystery and wonder in a process so simple and tragic.
His emotional turmoil ceased. He sat at his desk and
folded his arms in his lap, content now to wait and to see what would
happen, which would be an ending only from his own limited perspective in
a universe that knew no such boundaries as life and death.
Myla came to him after a time, having taken comfort
in the rumblings of his deep voice. She crawled into his massive,
metal lap,
curled herself into a tight ball of warm flesh, and slept with preternatural peacefulness. And Khalin Nome waited to see what
the real Myla Rhodes, thrown prematurely into the cold and vast universe,
would do to survive and fulfill what she could of her terrifying
potential.
