by Alyson Miers
So now he had his answer. He stood between the herb garden and rabbit hutches with Gentiola's story echoing in his mind. The truth circled itself around him like a crowd of monkeys and cackled; even the sun seemed to jeer at him. He had met this woman and liked her immediately; trusted her enough to tell her things he never told anyone else; enjoyed her company so much he lost track of time. The woman he saw as a kindred spirit was a mass-murderer of the highest order. He was enjoying the hospitality of an anthrocidal killer who wiped out her own brothers, her own colleagues, her own neighbors, all because she heard the Earth talking to her.
Did anyone else know what she'd done? Of course not; if she'd told anyone at the time, they'd probably been already on their deathbeds with the virus she'd created. What about the local villagers? They couldn't possibly know; otherwise she wouldn't be safe to go near them. He needed to go somewhere; he needed to get away from this house, and tell people the truth about how the old world had ended. He would get out and tell the villagers the real story of this magical, apparently benevolent woman in their midst. No matter what they decided to do about it, they deserved to know the truth.
But he couldn't talk to them.
He let out a roar just like the one he'd uttered when he'd unfettered himself in the Himalayas and found that Lacey had been dried up.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Questions
So he couldn't talk to anyone except for Gentiola. There was one thing he could do. He found the darkest, remotest corner of her property, sat down in the grass, and closed his eyes to count backwards from seven.
He was pacing across the spirit room when his Anima arrived.
"I see you're agitated today," she said.
"Yes, I'm agitated! Gentiola created the Plague! Of all the things I thought she might tell me..."
"Well, that does explain how she would know anything worth sharing," said the Anima.
"Yeah, this is what she waited to tell me until today! She's responsible for this world where growing to your full adult height is a sign of privilege! She's the reason why we have to work so hard just to keep from starving every winter! Gentiola destroyed the world, and here I am, enjoying my stay at her house!"
"The way she sees it, the world was about to destroy itself, and she saved the part that mattered."
"The way she sees it is freaking insane!" Charlinder responded. "She destroyed everything humanity had built over thousands of years, for the sake of a hunk of rock."
"This hunk of rock is the reason why you can take your gal-pals behind the smokehouse," the Anima replied with a challenging smirk.
"What does that mean? She did the right thing because I'm here to learn about it? Or because she left any survivors at all?"
The Anima shrugged. "In a few hours you're gonna calm down and ask yourself what exactly you're so worked up about."
"Gee, I can't imagine why I'd be worked up about anything!" he railed. "This is what she meant when she said she 'remembered' the Plague and that she'd tell me 'what she knew'. What else did she fail to tell me that day? I'll bet she knows how I got here." His Anima looked at him like he was the crazy person while he continued to vent his spleen. "In fact, she knew I was coming, and she used her powers to make sure I got here."
"Really, now," said his Anima, with a tone somewhere between shutting him down and egging him on.
"That’s why I kept seeing this house in my dreams. Gentiola lured me in here, and she knew what she was doing. She took care of me, she engaged me in all those great conversations, she joined me for an awesome roll in the hay, and then she made my head explode!"
"But she said she didn't know you were coming, and she can't do anything with your mind," his Anima pointed out.
"Yeah, she said that, and why should I believe her? She's evil enough to kill billions of people, and I'm supposed to take her at her word?"
"Why shouldn't you believe her? What does 'evil' really mean, anyway?"
"Is that even a question? We're talking about a person who knowingly created a disease that she knew would cause billions of early deaths, because she heard voices in her head, and you're asking me what does evil really mean?"
"We know she did that much, so now you're suggesting that she deliberately brought you here, and lied about it, just because it would be so much fun to mess with your head," she summed up.
"I think we've established by now that a little lying and head-gaming isn't outside of her range."
"Okay, let's bring out Occam's Razor and see what goes on the chopping block first," she declared. "We've heard Gentiola's story, and there are basically three possibilities here. One, Gentiola is dead on. There really is a goddess in the Earth, and that goddess really did instruct Gentiola to create the Plague of 2010 so that humankind wouldn't kill off everything else along with themselves. In which case, how can you criticize her?" The Anima raised her hands to resemble a pair of scales. "I mean, there's Mother Earth, and then there's you, so...?"
"We're not really considering this, are we?"
"Fine. Possibility number two, Gentiola is delusional. She wasn't really taking instructions from Mother Earth, but she genuinely believed that she was, and she still believes it. If that's it, then what are you really so outraged about? Is she evil because she couldn't ignore the voices in her head?"
Charlinder scoffed at that. "Crazy people usually aren't dangerous."
"And bright young men don't usually walk 20,000 miles in under three years just to answer a question," she said. Charlinder gaped at her; did she really just draw that parallel? "So, now that I have your attention, possibility number three: Gentiola is deceitful. Now, she just told you that she created the Plague, all by her lonesome, while fully aware of what would happen. There's no reason why she needed to tell you this, or anything else. You don't have any power over her. If she's lying about that, then what could she possibly be covering up? And if she's willing to tell you, of all things, that she single-handedly brought about the end of the world, then why would she lie to you about something stupid like how you ended up at her house? She doesn't need you for anything. And here's something else to ask yourself: how has she benefited from all this? It sounds like she had a rather cushy life in the early twenty-first century, so what did she have to gain from killing everyone around her?"
"What does it matter how she's benefited?"
"Just humor your imaginary friend here, Char, and give it some thought. Or better yet, you're finished asking questions, you got what you came for, so why not just pack up your nothing and leave this place?"
"I can't do that," he said.
"Really."
"If Gentiola's just as sane now as she was then, I'm not finished asking questions."
Charlinder stayed outside until Gentiola called him in for dinner. He still didn't talk to her at first. He spent the first few minutes of the meal ignoring the hunger grumbling in his stomach, instead staring and vaguely poking at his plate.
"I understand if you don’t care for my cooking," remarked Gentiola, "but a person as malnourished as you are really ought to have more of an appetite."
So he ate. His hostess didn't ask anything else of him for a while, and then he spoke to her.
"There's one other thing I'd like to know," he began, "and even Eileen had some trouble with this. She knew when the Plague was over. Everyone she met that day knew it was safe to come out, and they all knew it at the same time. Did you make that happen, too?"
"Yes," Gentiola exhaled, perhaps relieved. "I tracked the virus's progress for those two years that it circulated, and when I found that the pathogen had died out, I spent a couple of days sending a message to all the survivors. I told them it was all over, and it was safe to come outside."
Charlinder nodded. Her explanation made sense for what Eileen had described.
"Would you do it again?" he asked a few minutes later.
"Pardon me?"
"If the Earth were suffering under a bloated human population and th
eir poisonous machinery again, and She asked you to kill everyone a second time to make it stop, would you do it?"
"I don't think I'll be in that position again," she replied, avoiding Charlinder's eyes.
"How so?"
"I didn't expect to avoid the disease I created," she said. "I thought there wouldn't be any survivors at all, and I'd die along with everyone else."
"But since you didn't die with everyone else, and there were other survivors, would you do it again?" he repeated.
"Things aren't the same now," she repeated. "It'll take centuries, maybe millennia, for human beings to work up to their old numbers. They probably will do the same damage to the Earth as before, but I don't intend to be alive that long."
"You're not answering my question," Charlinder observed, looking at Gentiola as if seeing her for the first time.
He went to bed that night in the guest room, racking his brain over what to do next. He could not bring himself to walk out of her house without her answering the question. Would humanity work its way back up to civilization only to have this fanatical woman in southern Europe take them back to the starting point again?
The part of the confession that Charlinder found most disturbing of all was how she could explain so plainly how she'd brought about the end of the world and then failed to answer another, simple question. Perhaps she'd grown up in a culture in which a lot of circumlocution was considered an acceptable response, but Charlinder had not.
The great irony just then was that he was in such a bind partly because Gentiola had chosen to tell him the truth. He accepted that much; Possibility Number Three as his Anima had suggested was out of the question. It was much more complicated to explain why Gentiola would tell such a story as a lie. For all her madness, he had no reason to suspect that she had yet told him anything which was not entirely sincere.
If she had given him an answer that didn't implicate her, then he would have probably been on his way home by then with a story that wasn't true but which he could just as easily share with his village. He had his answer for the Plague; his journey had achieved its desired purpose. He now had a story to tell about why their ancestors had watched all their loved ones die. It was only because Gentiola was honest, but not totally candid, that he wasn't ready to leave her. Then again, it was entirely possible that she would tell him the next morning to pack his belongings and get off her property, and in that case, he would have no choice but to move on without a yes or no. If she steadfastly did not want to answer the question of whether she would do it again, then she would not answer. If he couldn't tell his neighbors whether it would happen again, then he didn't really have a complete story to tell.
He fell asleep and spent the rest of the night with images from the last two years of his life playing in reverse through his dreams.
When he woke up, Gentiola was nowhere in sight. He heard her voice calling to him briefly later. "Char, come downstairs, I want to show you something," she beckoned.
"Might as well give it a look-see," he muttered to himself, still remembering in incandescent detail how he'd witnessed Kenny's beating.
He found her in a basement room he hadn't previously seen, but his eye was drawn first, inexorably, to the globe taking up the far half of the room.
"Ah, yes, that's my globe," she said unnecessarily as Charlinder gravitated towards it.
It was a construct of pure light hovering between floor and ceiling, sparkling in blue oceans, green forests, beige deserts and gray mountains with white clouds. It was a perfect scale model of the Earth, tilted slightly on its axis and rotating slowly in place.
"This is what you used to track the virus's progress," he said.
"I do a lot of magic with that globe," Gentiola pointed out, "including how I contacted the survivors, but, yes, I did track the virus's progress over it, too. That wasn't what I wanted to show you, though."
Charlinder tore his eyes away from the glowing planet model and sat down in front of Gentiola. Between them was a small ceramic bowl filled with a faintly fragrant mixture of dried herbs, and beside the bowl was one of Eileen's journals.
Now adequately distracted from the globe, he looked up at Gentiola.
"There was an entry of Eileen's--in fact there were quite a number of them, that I found especially intriguing, so I decided to open it up," she explained.
"'Open it up'?"
"I've accessed the memory behind the writing," she clarified. "Not just her words on the pages, but the actual event that Eileen was thinking about when she wrote."
"You can do that?"
"Yes, I can. It's a task that takes several hours of concentration, but it's doable. It's the memory that I want to show you."
"Okay, then, I'd love to see it."
She didn't do anything with the journal; it was left sitting closed and inert on the floor. She placed her hands, with palms parallel, perpendicular to the floor and above the herbs. She closed her eyes and began moving her hands in circles as if agitating the air between them. The air around her and Charlinder darkened; that was the only way he could describe it. The light from the magical globe dimmed, while everything else in the room was veiled and blurred. In the darkness, Charlinder could see a thin bulb of light grow out of the herbs. The light elongated to a vein that spun between her hands and extended upwards until it bloomed into a life-size image of a young woman holding a clay pot.
He recognized the motion of her stirring the contents of the pot as churning butter. More than that, he recognized the woman. She was dirty, unkempt, and strangely dressed, but her face was familiar.
"I know that woman," he blurted out, without considering that he shouldn't interrupt Gentiola in her work. She dropped her hands and relaxed, but the image did not fade or freeze. "She's my Anima," he finished.
"That's Eileen," said Gentiola, "a worthy choice."
She was sitting on one of the tree-trunk benches along the gravel road through the Paleola village, and an older black woman came into the picture and approached her.
"Honey, are you busy?" she asked. Eileen looked around and saw her. "Do you have time to talk?"
"Sure, I'm not going anywhere," she replied.
Laura sat down beside Eileen on the bench. No one else was in sight.
"How are you today?"
"Trying to get stuff done, as always," Eileen answered.
Silence for a moment. Laura seemed content, for the moment, to sit and enjoy Eileen's company as she whipped a jug-full of fatty milk with a tripod of polished pine. Still, Charlinder was left to wonder why Laura had sought her out.
"Have you fought with Mark today?" she asked, finally.
Eileen let out a breath, restraining the urge to roll her eyes. "Not since yesterday."
"What is it with you two?" Laura asked. "I see you two working together all the time, and not making any trouble. Ryan says you usually even share the same floor of that house without having any fights. So how is it you keep getting at each other's throats?"
"Don't ask me!" Eileen said defensively. "I could just let him be with his beliefs if he'd shut up with the fire and brimstone garbage, except he's always picking fights with me. Not the other way around."
"I know you don't want to be having these arguments with him," Laura said placatingly. "But, honey, what was that business yesterday about the 'Great Big Grampa Up in the Sky'?"
"He decided to act like a dick while I was trying to have an honest discussion with Patricia, and I gave him a piece of my mind. He should have thought about that before he went and butted in."
"So you're playing the 'he started it' card?"
"Yes, that's exactly what I'm doing!" said Eileen, putting down the jug. "I don't see why we're having this conversation, unless you and Mark are ganging up on me! Don't you fucking ask me to look at where he's coming from. I'm not the one telling everyone what to do because God says so. If Mark didn't insist on projecting his religion onto everything we do, there would be no problem!"
"I'm
not doing anything in league with Mark," Laura said. Eileen picked up the jug and started churning again. "And what you're saying isn't really true. You do tell the rest of us what to do, and you do bring your religion into it."
"What in the hell?" Eileen objected. "What kind of belief system have I ever brought into my teaching the rest of you lot how to survive?"
"One's religion is not the name of the church you visit, or the book you quote. It is the way you conduct yourself to others," Laura explained. Eileen opened her mouth to start up again. "And there is nothing wrong with what you've been doing for us since we came together," she continued, before Eileen could say anything. "But you are always, just as much as Mark does, applying your religion to the rest of us. We all do it, of course, but everything you do, and tell the rest of us, is founded on the assumptions you make about the way the world works, just as much as Mark with his God's wrath and eternal damnation nonsense. Your religion is always behind it."