by Lisa Maxwell
Chapter 19
Is rode Lark. The mare followed behind. She'd put John's saddle and all of his equipment on the mare. His people never wasted anything.
The meadow where she had last seen Ondre's group was empty, hay stacked neatly. The horse droppings were old and cold.
The wagon tracks were easy to follow. At the edge of a bowl overlooking a meadow Is spotted three scouts. They stood with their horses silhouetted against the skyline so she would see them. She let Lark move toward them at his own pace. Only two scouts came down to ride with her. The other had disappeared over the ridge. They could see John's empty saddle. They didn't say anything. Is left it like that.
The next day Ondre met her. His mare looked as if he had ridden all night. He didn't question her, just rode up and dismounted. After a moment Is dismounted too and he took her in his arms and held her. He didn't say a word. When he let her go he stroked Celeste's face. Is saw the tears in his eyes as he remounted his own horse.
She remembered the first time she had seen Ondre, galloping to meet his brother, and how they had hugged and laughed, and the spontaneous, playful teasing. For the first time in what seemed a very long time she thought of Petre.
The people came out of the camp to watch them approach. This time no one ran from the crowd to welcome John. No children cantered out on reluctant brood mares. Is watched as if this were happening to someone else, cataloging the similarities and differences. Even Lark seemed to feel the difference. Although he arched his neck and whinnied a few times, he did not prance and rear. He was tired and underfed. Is stroked his neck, promising him better care now.
Ellie appeared at her side when she dismounted. "I'm so sorry," she said, with her usual warmth and compassion. Is let Ellie hug her. Other people touched her, saying gentle things to her.
"Can we talk now?" she asked Ellie.
"Wouldn't you rather rest first?"
Is shook her head. Rest? Rest was not something that applied to her anymore. There was sleep with its dreams of horror, and painful awakenings. There had been hours of sitting, doing nothing, staring at nothing, and not caring, but not rest. There had been hours of sitting in the saddle, hypnotized by the horse's steady rhythm, thinking nothing, but not rest.
She heard Ellie speak to other people around them. She watched Ondre give the horses to a young man, who led them away to care for them. John's mare would be Ondre's now. Is felt an unexpected tug of pain, but it was gone in an instant. She would never feel anything again. She slipped Lark's saddle off and let him follow the mares. She let Ellie lead her. She drank the water Ellie gave her. She looked at the people who spoke to her. She tried to see them. She tried to respond. She couldn't remember their names. They didn't seem real. She did not seem real.
She realized people were seated, waiting for her to speak.
Is began to talk. She heard her voice as though it were someone else speaking. She listened to herself telling them about finding the Mirror. She told them how she and John had gone inside it and John had used it to fix his speech. She told them what he had wanted to tell them: The Mirror was made by the Alliance for the express purpose of killing the berserkers.
"He had found that out as a spy, what he didn't know was why. What purpose the whole thing had. The knowledge was off-limits to him as a research scholar. He was just supposed to do what he was told. There were people, higher up, who knew what it was all for.
"John got caught trying to find out more. The Alliance probably didn't realize he was a spy from the Hluit. They did what they usually do to people who want to know too much. They made it so he couldn't tell anyone anything he learned. He said it was a refined version of cutting out a person's tongue. They can do it without ruining the person's mind. In some cases the person can keep right on working for them; they haven't ruined their 'tool.'" Is listened to her own expressionless voice and felt none of the anger and horror she knew other people were feeling.
"They didn't try to kill John until he tried to escape. He would never have eaten the poisoned trail rations if he had stayed there and continued to do his job. It was sort of a trial and execution all wrapped up in one."
She found Ondre's face in the group. What his brother had been through should have been enough. John had shown enough courage by getting into the Alliance and spying on them. He had suffered enough. He did not have to go to the Mirror. No one would have blamed him. No one would even have known. But that had not been enough for John. Even after he had repaired the linkage in his brain and could have returned to his people and told them what he knew, he had needed to do more.
"John wanted to learn more," she told Ondre. "He was in the position to learn the most, the fastest. He thought it was very important for all of you. He knew there was a good chance the Mirror would kill him. But he knew I would report everything to you." She could have refused. She could have run away from him. She could have saved his life. Ondre must know that.
But there had been the other thing, the way John had made her feel. What he had done stemmed from a feeling of incredible love for his people and gratitude for all he had been given. It was right. It was more important than his life. In the end he was not afraid. His life was joyously given because of his devotion to his people, his appreciation for what the Hluit had made of their society, and his need to protect that.
While Is had been with him she had been caught up in his feeling of optimism and gratitude. She had experienced love and joy and generosity the way John did. She had understood the rightness of his actions.
Now it was all gone, changed to pain and then to deadness inside her. Even her memory of that feeling no longer made sense.
She had stopped talking. People were waiting.
"I'm sorry." Her lips moved. There was no sound in the words.
Ondre came across the circle to her. He took her hands. She could not bring herself to look away from his eyes.
"You did the right thing for John. I know him. He needed to do what he did. You gave him a great gift by understanding and helping him."
That was how it had seemed.
"You did a great thing for all of us, Is. Forgive yourself." That was Ellie. Is had seen how much Ellie loved John, and she loved John's brother even more. Ondre's pain was her pain.
"Aren't you . . . doesn't it ... ?" Is asked.
"Hurt? Yes," Ondre said. "Many things in life hurt. But you can stand them. You can always stand them, if you stay true in your heart."
Is looked away from them then. She could not let them see that there was nothing left in her heart except pain. Pain and confusion. She didn't have their confidence. She didn't have their broad base of love, or their belief system. They had given her a glimpse of all those things, but they were not "hers." She had seen something bigger and more wonderful than she had ever understood love to be, and now it was gone. Gone with John. Gone from her heart, taken from her forever. She would deliver the rest of John's message, then she would go. She could not stay among the Hluit with her false heart. And she could not stay because the Alliance knew she and Lark were alive. The berserker she had helped had seen her and Lark. He would have "fasted" that back to the Alliance at his death. She listened to her voice resume its story.
She told how she and John had gone into the Mirror a second time and John had forged the link with her. All she said of that unbelievable link was that it worked. She could see and feel what John did while he was inside the Mirror and she was outside.
He'd gotten really clever at accessing its memories, and Is tried to explain about walking through those memories. You could see them, and then you could get inside them as well.
John had done that for five or six days. Is didn't tell them about the nights when he would come back out of the Mirror and they lay together in that link making love. She didn't try to explain how there had been no room for anything but joy in that link even though
the end was so near.
She told the people about downloaded berserkers, about interactive holograms, about death agonies powering "fast" transmissions to the Alliance. She was vaguely amazed that she understood the language she was using.
She explained how the Mirror disassembled the berserkers and reassembled them, and how the Alliance sent continually more complex berserkers.
“The Mirror does not think of itself as killing the berserkers, it thinks of preserving them. That is what the Alliance wants it to do, but not just preserve someone after they're dead; they want it to actually keep them in some living, changing form." She let them think a moment about that. "A few of the very highest people in the Alliance are trying to create eternal life for themselves.
"The Alliance keeps track of the Mirror's progress by what the berserkers “fast” back to them. The Mirror thinks of the Alliance as the Watcher. It wasn't troubled by being watched. It was not programmed to fear, or distrust, or really to question anything about itself or its program.
"But it's a special kind of computer. It can learn, and it can teach itself to learn. It was set up that way because it must be able to learn to do something its makers don't know how to do. They can't teach it. It has to teach itself. They could only give it the program, the desire, to learn this thing.
"That was all fine until the Mirror happened to kill a Hluit. It 'preserved' that man too. In his mind it found more complex things than in any berserker's mind. It found things it wasn't ready to understand. From the Hluit's distrust of the Alliance, it learned distrust. From that man's fear of death - which none of the berserkers had - it learned something about death. Before that it had killed without malice, or anger, or any understanding of what it was doing. It was obeying its program without questions.
"But the Hluit had many questions in his mind. From his questions the Mirror learned to question the motivation of the Watcher.
“It also downloaded outlaws it caught. Because the Mirror is capable of teaching itself to learn, and it is not under anyone's guidance when it learns, it draws its own conclusions. With astonishing speed, it put together the concepts of placing one’s self above another, of winning and losing, of lying, of hiding, of war. And of what death means.
"John wasn't able to determine what it really 'thinks' about the Alliance, but we know that it is now hiding its best work from them. It has completed what the Alliance programmed it to do, but the Alliance doesn't know. We think the Mirror understands that the Alliance can 'kill' it, turn it off. We think it's trying to preserve itself by pretending it hasn't completed its program.
"The Alliance believes all the Mirror can do is download berserkers and store them as interactive holos. That isn't good enough. That isn't really life after death. They want the Mirror to take the next step and learn how to capture the living/changing personality. So the Alliance keeps feeding it more complex berserkers in hopes it will create something more suitable for their ambitions of life after death.
"Meanwhile the Mirror has created what the Alliance wanted."
"The Dark Bodies.” Ondre said.
"Yes."
Ellie breathed a curse.
"They're alive. They are the real persons, not just up to the moment they died, but after too. But the Mirror cannot bring them inside itself because it fears the Alliance will be able to find out about them. So it leaves them outside and un-powered. They have no energy except other people's life force. The easiest life force for them to ‘feed’ on is pain or fear.
“The Mirror created the herd fogs, in part, to feed the Dark Bodies with people’s fear. But sometimes some of the Dark Bodies do unexpected things, like rescuing the people the herd fogs have captured. They are alive, after all, and the Mirror either doesn’t care to control them, or it can’t.”
"The Dark Bodies could speak to John, because of the pain he was in, not being able to tell us what he had learned,” Ondre concluded. “And you could hear them, because of what the Alliance has put you through."
"Yes."
Ondre held her gaze for a long moment. "Did it make John into a Dark Body?"
"Not that I . . . could find. He was trying to find out more about the Dark Bodies, then there was a flash. Like . . . I'm not sure if it was bright or loud. I could feel . . . I could feel John’s mind unraveling. I felt his body stop breathing, his heart stop pumping. I don’t think he felt pain, just everything going away, disappearing.” She had lived with the feeling so long it was almost a relief to say the words. “I stayed with that link as long as I could.” She had not cared if the Mirror traced the link to her and killed her too. “I would have felt something if he had become a Dark Body. I know I would have.
“I was with that berserker when he died and became a Dark Body. I know how that felt. I know I would have felt it if John had become a Dark Body.”
No one refuted her.
“After I could no longer hold the link open,” she began, not knowing if that had been minutes, hours, or days, “there was…my brain…was different. I can remember these things, to tell them to you, because I was told, programmed, to do it, by John. But before that, I remember that I could taste memory, and smell sight, and touch…" She stopped because she couldn't tell them how she had touched John.
At last her voice broke. “I couldn’t find his body.”
She should have been able to bury him, she should have at least had that! “When I came out of the link I was in such a dense fog. I could barely see anything. I searched and searched . . .” She had walked slowly, dragging her feet, trying to feel for him with her feet. When that hadn’t worked she had crawled on hands and knees all over that meadow.
“We’ll find him,” Ondre said to soothe her, though he couldn’t know if they would. Some people who had disappeared in herd fogs had never been found.
Ellie was touching her. Outside, distant, incompletely.
"That's enough for now. You need food and sleep." Ellie lifted Is by the shoulders, telling her body to stand up, telling her body to walk. Is watched the interaction, incurious and distant.
Only a few mouthfuls of food would go down. The rest was impossible beyond even Ellie's control of her body. The tea was bitter and it made Is sleep. Her voice told one last thing.
"The Alliance knows I'm here. The berserker saw me before he died. He spoke to me. I touched him. He saw Lark. Troopers must be on their way here.”