Clive is much more perceptive than he knows. That's why he keeps him around, Rolle thinks to himself. “Well, whatever transpired, it looks like we get to enjoy more of her company for a while. Perhaps you should break out some cards. I think it's time she learns about poker.” Clive looks at him and raises an eyebrow? “Don't worry, we'll play for toothpicks, and we'll all keep our clothes on. Although, I have seen how you look at her,” Achi winks at him. “It is remarkable how similar we are…” Achi heads back to the garage to escort their guest to the game room.
∞∞∞
Zaleria enjoyed the evening. Clive is a master at poker and easily depleted her pile of toothpicks time and again, despite her knowing how to play from Achi's memories. She feels she is getting better at “fixing her face,” learning from both Clive and Achi. She could sense how he'd tamp down on his emotions when playing and examine the other players for “tells.” And she couldn't help but broadcast. It isn't in the nature of galanen to hide their emotions, and she is particularly expressive—even by her race's standards. While notionally a game of chance, there is skill that can be applied to it. And she understands from Achi that those lessons can be applied to other, more important situations. But despite all that, it was fun.
Before going to sleep, she wants to re-center herself and connect with her essence. She is concerned about the degree of divergence from the last time she melded. She usually does this at the end of each day, to ensure her permanent memory is as updated as possible, in case her corporeal unit is destroyed. Accidents severe enough to do that are rare but do happen from time to time. She sits on her bed and centers herself. She reaches out for her essence, finds it, and starts to meld. But… She can't.
She walks down the hall. As soon as she gets within local range she reaches out, “Achi, we have a problem.”
He is instantly awake. “What's the matter; what's happened?” As soon as he asks, he knows.
She barges into his bedroom wearing nothing more than one of Achi's old t-shirts she'd found in a dresser. She quickly crosses the room and sits on his bed. “What are we going to do? You know if I reveal you to the collective, reveal what I've done, I don't know what they will do. They may remove them.”
“You might not have any choice!!” She flashes in a moment of anger.
All of them are quiet for a while, thinking. Finally, Achi shares, “Can you invite your mother over for a chat; I've been wanting to meet her.”
Zaleria looks at him like he has lost his mind, but then she knows. He may be on to something. Why did he think of it first?
“I'm not as close to the situation. She's been holding back from you. You've seen it, but you haven't explored the implications. I have.”
Zaleria reaches out through the collective, “Mother, can we chat?”
She waits only a short moment before she hears back from her, “So soon again? And here I was thinking today would be a good day to sever ties with this universe… Don't think such thoughts about your mother, dear. I do find it amusing, but I also know this has been a tough time for you. You've not been following my advice. Where would you like to meet.”
“Here, on Earth.” Zaleria shares.
“Indeed, I haven't been there in ages. I wonder how it's coming along.”
Zaleria is becoming increasingly amazed at her mother's behavior. “Just what does she know? She's playing with me.”
Achi reminds her to not be upset, “She is showing you both humor and love. And yes, she is amused. This is something new in a universe I expect has become deathly boring to her.”
Traemuña's visage materializes in the room with them, sitting on the other side of the bed. Their symbiots convey her presence within their brains as though she was physically there, the effect is vivid, but surreal. She laughs, “Well, this is the last thing I expected, to be called into the middle of an intimate encounter. Enjoying the locals, dear? Isn't it amazing how similar they are to us?” She laughs, clearly not intending to be taken seriously, but trying to lighten the mood. “How very curious. I assume this is the human who stole your symbiots? Wait, that is an assumption—don't tell me.” She thinks for a moment. “You must be Achi, am I right?”
Zaleria's mouth is hanging open.
Achi looks at Traemuña and smiles, “Pleased to meet you. I've been looking forward to chatting with you.”
He regards her visage. The resemblance between mother and daughter is evident, and uncanny given how close they appear in age. Traemuña is closer to Achi's height with raven hair and an angular face with fine features. A very attractive woman, who would not be out of place in Italy. Her eyes are hazel green, and very light. Her lips are a bit thin, regal, and colored to match her eyes. She would look no more than 25 to any human, but her eyes are supernaturally keen. The wisdom and weight of a quarter million years reflected at anyone who looks into them, reflexively commanding great respect.
Traemuña looks at her daughter. “Oh, he is a charmer. Is that his shirt? Looks to be a bit short for you, ahem… But I expect this is all a bit, awkward, isn't it?”
Zaleria recovers enough to share, “Your gift for understatement grows with each passing millennium.”
Traemuña laughs, “Good. You are beginning to learn. Enjoy the Creator's sense of humor. Live, laugh, love.” She looks at Achi as she says the latter. “Embrace the moment, before it becomes nothing more than a memory,” Traemuña sighs wistfully before getting serious. “Achi, please don't take offense dear, but you are a complication.” She turns to Zaleria, “Let me guess, you can't connect to your essence because you've inadvertently commingled your memories? And you are concerned about what might happen to Achi if you go to the collective to unlock your essence?”
Zaleria gapes, “How do you do that? How can you possibly know all that?”
Her mother looks at her in all seriousness now. “It isn't intuition dear; its experience. I told you the last time we met, the collective forgets what it doesn't want to know. I've done it a time or two, or more, myself. But those events have been dealt with long ago.”
Achi interjects, “Have they?”
Traemuña pauses and eyes him with an unreadable expression. “You're the one that asked Zaleria to reach out to me, aren't you? Call it intuition,” she says in response to his raised eyebrow. “But let's deal with the present, shall we? Zaleria, you have a few options to think through. But first, a demonstration. Achi, share what Zaleria thought about you when you first met, 10,237 Earth years ago.”
Achi realizes Traemuña is pulling from Zaleria's experiences that she shared with the collective following her first mission on Earth but thinks he knows where she is going with this. “She remembers every detail. The crash, her falling down the hill, damaging her knee, chatting with a squirrel, nearly being killed by a kel'taite, and how she wrapped her arms around me to keep me warm, despite how badly I grossed her out because of my sour smell and the animal skins I was wearing at the time.”
Traemuña smiles, “Okay Zaleria, now it’s your turn. What does Achi recall?”
“Well, he remembers watching me. He couldn't tell what I was, he recalled something about stories.” She furrows her brows a bit, concentrating, “He liked my ass when I bent over to talk with the squirrel, my breasts against his back when I held him, but he was upset that I acted like his mother. He was really taken by my eyes.” She looks over at him. “Apparently a lot of his fixation was ph
ysical,” she smiles as she shares it.
“Right, but how vivid are they?”
Zaleria thinks about it. “Not very; they are distant, mostly symbolic, verbal, with baser urges. They are not the same detail as latter memories, not in the least.”
“Right, because he didn't have your symbiots then. So your first option is to acknowledge to the collective that your recent experiences have been too much and that you want to overwrite your symbiots' stored memories to better help you deal with the trauma. That doesn't mean you lose everything, though that is something most galanen who've never done it would believe. You will still maintain your biological memories. Not as sharp, but the important details remain. Once you get your symbiots reprogrammed, you'll recall most facts, just not in perfect detail. And it will stay with you. However, it will cause a lot of concern if you have to keep asking to be restored from your essence. So, if you do that, you'll have to make sure to avoid each other.” She watches their reactions, measuring how willing they are to go their separate ways.
“And what is my other option?” Zaleria asks, without much hesitation.
“Continue to diverge until you're ready to face the collective. I've never known them to take an action that negatively affects a sentient,” she says gesturing at Achi. “But, as your experience with the kel'taite showed you, you risk losing everything after the point of divergence if your corporeal form is completely destroyed. A slight risk, but nontrivial.” She looks over at Achi, “Will you share with me?”
Achi looks at her visage and says, “You realize I may think of you as 'Mother.' Can't help it, what with the shared memories from Zaleria and all. I just don't want you to think me presumptuous.” He winks at her.
Traemuña laughs, “Oh, I think you are very presumptuous, but that has nothing to do with what you call me. Share with me, please,” she says suddenly serious, commanding.
He sighs, “You won't like what you see.” He relaxes his mind and opens his consciousness to Traemuña's probing. But this is not at all like when he shared with Zaleria. Traemuña can only ask him questions while he shares what he will in response. “Why is Zaleria so hesitant to share what she knows about you?”
Well, that's an easy one. “She feels a tremendous amount of guilt. She feels she contaminated the Earth, that she has unwittingly altered our evolution. In addition, my life was very brutal, especially in my younger years. I committed heinous crimes—murder, rape—because I was angry and full of hate, and at times less than sane. She must live with those memories now. She feels tainted by the experiences, contaminated. Ironic, isn’t it? She feels further violated that I know everything she has ever thought. This is all very private to her; she doesn't want to share it with anyone. You're the one person she felt would understand, for what it's worth.”
“That is worth more than you might think and proves more than anything she is her mother's daughter.” She pauses for a moment, unreadable. “Is that all?”
He thinks about it, “I think that about sums it up.” She looks at him closely, judging for herself if he's telling the full truth. He decides it’s time to probe her a bit. “You are looking for something that is not there. Whatever it is that concerns you, she has not found it.”
She smiles at him but doesn't otherwise acknowledge his statement. “What would you do if the collective removes Zaleria's symbiots from you?”
Another easy question, “I would age and die as is normal for humans. I would continue my work and try to pass it on to a worthy heir. The singularity will come regardless, and humanity will either succeed or be destroyed. Or worse, fail. Can you tell me something? Are you afraid she'll find what you don't want to share, or do you want her to find it and are disappointed that she hasn't yet? Or is it both?” Okay, this time he sees a reaction, a brief hesitation, a slight twitch in her lips, a tell. Like daughter, like mother. It is both.
She looks at him, seemingly reading his mind, aware that she has divulged more than she intended. “Yes, she gets her expressive face from me. It took me a long time to control it, and yet I still struggle. You are more dangerous than you know, so like a galan, but with the guile of a primitive who has had to survive what no galanen has had to deal with. A predator in a host of innocents. For what it is worth, I like you, but I'm not sure how the collective would deal with you, if you are discovered. You should not be allowed to exist; it is an unforgivable interference in the development of this world. But you are evolved, now. They can't help but see this. That doesn't mean they won't remove you from Earth, to eliminate your influence. Perhaps some isolated world you could call your own. After all, you now know entirely too much about how the galanen overcame our crisis, don't you? A fact you didn't share with me, but an obvious implication.” It is her turn to read the tells on his face. “I doubt that would sit well with you, would it?”
He shakes his head, “No, mother.”
She scoffs a bit, at his good-natured jest. “I didn't think so. Perhaps you should think about such things before teasing a being who was around while your distant ancestors were still trying to figure out which orifice to put food into and which one the shit comes out of.” She softens her face, “And no, as I'm sure you suspect, I wouldn't tell the collective what I know. It amuses me to let them figure it out for themselves.”
Traemuña purses her lips in thought, “So you tell me, what would you recommend? You know how this is affecting Zaleria and her relationship with her essence and the collective. And if I have any intuition at all, I think you care about this, yes?”
And that is the one question he was afraid she'd ask. He'd been waiting for it. “No matter what I would recommend, it will hurt her. I don't want that to happen, but there is no avoiding it. She knows all this, so all I can do is provide support until she figures out what she wants to do.”
She nods approvingly. “I think that about sums it up,” she echoes his words back to him, “And for what it is worth, you seem like a good man, now.” She turns her attention back to her daughter, “Zaleria, I cannot tell you what to do. Those are your options, and I'm afraid neither will provide you comfort. But do not despair, I find great trouble often provides great reward when all is said and done. Have faith that a solution will present itself in due time.”
Zaleria frowns, “A quarter million years of life, and that is all you have to offer?”
Traemuña replies, “Don't underestimate faith. That's about all I have going for me these days. I'm sorry dear; you were always very proficient at getting into trouble. But if you trust my intuition, then believe me when I say I think it'll turn out all right in the end. I know this is hard, but don't magnify your troubles. The collective has dealt with far worse; this is merely a small excursion from normality, completely unintended, and even so the foreseeable outcomes are not that terrible.” And she nods towards Achi, “At least your 'partner' isn't completely disagreeable. He has, after all, at least learned good grooming habits at some point.” She laughs as she fades away, leaving perhaps more mysteries than when she arrived.
Achi looks at Zaleria, “I like your mother. Keeps you on your toes.”
She is not willing to be cheered up, though. “I was hoping she would help. She didn't tell us anything I didn't already know.”
“But she did,” Achi corrects her, “She let you know that this kind of thing has happened before, that it isn't rare, and that she has gone through something similar—probably a few times. In fact, I believe one of these events may be related to Earth and could be what is holding her back from crossing over.”
Zaleria looks at him like she doesn't know him at all, despite their shared memories. But then she starts reflecting on his recollection of the encounter, and her eyes widen. “What is she hiding from me? She does know something.”
“That is one of the things I think we need to find out,” he responds.
Chapter Eight
Sweet Sorrow
Zaleria, disguised as a nurse complete with an authentic Salt Lake Regi
onal Medical Center ID—courtesy of Clive's talented minions—heads for ICU room 113, whose solitary occupant is one Tanesha Brown, sole survivor of a recent terrorist attack in Park City. Survivor is an exaggeration, Zaleria thinks to herself, because she is barely alive, suffering multiple internal injuries as well as a traumatic brain injury. She should be dead, but as luck would have it, she found a small area where the over-pressure caused by the explosion was just below lethal levels. Just. Zaleria's task is to see if there is enough left within Ms. Brown's mind to make contact with using the emergency first aid kit—just as she'd done with Achi all those years ago. That is, if there is anyone left to connect with.
Zaleria has dyed her hair auburn and is using hazel brown contacts; this time she took a few days to alter her facial features to better elude recognition. Achi is outside, with similarly obscured features—brown hair, darker skin, rounder face—pretending to be a worried visitor, sitting in a waiting area with visibility into the ICU ward, acting as lookout. Clive is standing by in Elk's Grove security center, in case ad hoc support is warranted. This is meant to be a low profile, quick fact-finding mission; does Ms. Brown have any information they can use?
Zaleria enters room 113. Tanesha Brown is hard to see, buried in thick covers to keep her body warm, face obscured by a ventilator, wires and tubing everywhere, monitoring her fading health, and preserving the spark of life that remains within her broken body. Zaleria is once again taken aback by the brutality of the assault; she doubts there is much Ms. Brown could have done in this life to deserve such a fate. She finds the back of her left hand, which currently lacks any IV lines, and touches the emergency first aid kit to it.
The kit injects a multitude of nanites into her blood stream. These are not designed to act as symbiots but only to perform rapid diagnosis and treatment of major injuries—as directed by the person operating the kit. The goal is quick stabilization to enable more rapid healing by a galan's symbiots. It also can be outfitted to work on different races of primitives, but given the similarities between humans and galanen, that hasn't been necessary for Earth's inhabitants.
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