Charlinder's Walk

by Alyson Miers

  "So humor me, Laura. What is my religion?"

  "It’s human agency and godless randomness. That is the assumption you make every time you wake up in the morning. You believe in science just as much as Mark believes in God's will."

  "I don't need to 'believe in' science. It is what it is and does what it does no matter what some jumped-up primates have to say about it, and it doesn't 'work in mysterious ways.' It doesn't reserve its benefits for the faithful. You cannot possibly, seriously, expect me to believe there is any comparison between Mark's attitude and mine."

  "There isn't much of a comparison to be made," Laura admitted. "I know you're just going on what'll keep us all fed, and clothed, and sheltered, and maybe even healthy, for as long as possible, and I understand why you have no patience for that fire and brimstone crap. I don't have any time for it, either. It's divisive, and it's dishonest."

  "So why are we having this conversation?" Eileen demanded. "First you tell me I'm doing the same thing as Mark, and now you tell me I have the high ground. What's your point here?"

  Laura took a deep breath. "I've been trying to talk to Mark about this, too. I'm trying to make him see a middle ground, but it's taking some time."

  "And what kind of middle ground might that be? That it was both godless randomness and God's will? Or that it was both human agency and eternal damnation?"

  "Yes, you're very funny, baby. But really. I can't settle on your idea that the Plague just happened out of nowhere, or even on Patricia's suggestion that it came from a terrorist. I'm sure God was in there somewhere, just not for the reasons Mark says."

  "So, God killed all our friends and families for reasons other than our sinful behavior, is what you're saying? What reasons were they, then?"

  "I know you don't believe in God," said Laura.

  "I'm a fanatical agnostic," quipped Eileen.

  "Ha ha," Laura continued. "But really. I'm not even sure that God started the process, just that He allowed it to continue. But He wouldn't have let so many of His children die just for sins of the flesh. It had to be something bigger than that, something bigger than any number of kids not going to Sunday school. It was like...He needed us to regain some perspective, make us see what was really important."

  "For those few of us left, anyway," said Eileen.

  "Well, yes, for those few of us left. If there was any behavior that God needed to stop, it was all the ways we were hurting each other. Including all the abominations people were committing in the name of God."

  "I'll bet Mark just loved hearing that."

  "Mark is not the Inquisition, the Holocaust, or the Crusades," Laura reminded her.

  "You haven't answered my question."

  Laura shrugged helplessly. "He still thinks he's right. We'll just have to give him time."

  "Of course he still thinks he's right. Who needs logic, or fact, or compassion, when you've got Faith?" Eileen spat.

  "The point is, yes I'm trying to reason with him, in a language he's comfortable speaking. I want him to consider other explanations, just like you did when you had that conversation with Patricia the other day. Say what else you want about it, the Plague has been a great equalizer. Those of us who lived through it are learning that there's something much more important in life than how many things we had. I'm asking Mark to consider the significance of that, rather than making it all about Heaven and Hell."

  "Well, you could have told me this without the lecture first."

  "There is something else I want to talk to you about," Laura went on.

  "What now?"

  "It's not just the disagreement in religious beliefs that's getting Mark under your skin."

  "No, it's also the illogical theorizing about the Plague's origin."

  "That disease is not threatening you anymore. There is another reason why this debate with Mark is so important to you, and to him. That reason is in the here and now."

  Eileen put the jug of cream on the ground again. She didn't look at Laura. "You're talking about how we should be having kids."

  "I realize that you're only looking out for the young women's health, and thinking of how we'll feed those children, but you have to admit," Laura explained, "it was kind of funny timing how you started talking about how we should figure out some birth control methods, right after we found out Leann was pregnant."

  "Well, I didn't think I would need to bring it up so soon!" Eileen exclaimed. "Less than three months post-Plague, and we're already making more of ourselves. Now she's about to have that baby, and I'm just relieved no one else is knocked up yet."

  "So what's wrong with that? Don't you want us to keep ourselves going?"

  "Of course I don't want our whole species to go extinct!" Eileen railed. "I'm just worried about how many babies we'll be making in too short a time. Goddammit, there is such a thing as a healthy rate of population growth, and it is possible to go over it!"

  "I agree with you!" Laura shouted over her. "Of course you're right. And you girls should have something other than keeping your knees together to help you out. But right now, with so few of us left, is a very tricky time to start arguing for population control. It will take some time yet before you get everyone on your side about this. Do stick to your guns. But also choose your battles."

  "I know I should choose my battles. And I am aware of how few of us are left, but I am also aware of how little there is left to feed and protect us, and we won't suddenly get any more of it just because we're having children. That'll take a lot of hard work. Thank goodness Leann made it through the winter, at least."

  "Losing those three was hard on everyone, baby," said Laura. Charlinder remembered reading about how Peter, Christine and Theresa had died in the cold between December and January, and how Eileen had been more determined than ever to make sure their farm could produce more than enough to keep the survivors fed and warm. "And it only leaves six women here young enough to have kids."

  "You're counting me in that," Eileen said skeptically.

  "Yes, I am counting you in that," Laura answered.

  "Do you honestly think I'm going to have babies?"

  "Eventually, yes, I think you will."

  This time Eileen didn't bother to stop herself from rolling her eyes.

  "I know you have time yet to wait, but even you're not perverse enough to hold out until menopause."

  "So it would be perverse of me to stay childless?"

  "To stay childless forever, yes, it would be. There were twenty of us left over an area from eight miles north to twenty miles south of a major city. It's not fair that three of those twenty died the next winter, and it's really not fair that two of those three had to be women of childbearing age, but we should have figured out by now that what's fair to us isn't what'll happen."

  "Yes, I know life isn't fair. I got that talk from my mother when she was alive, thank you."

  "So in order to get the next generation to at least twenty people, each of you girls will need to have at least three or four children. If you insist on holding out until menopause, the other five girls will need to have at least four children each. And that's not full-term pregnancies, that's healthy offspring who survive to adulthood. And I think you know the dangers of letting a gene pool get narrowed down to too few people. Ours is small enough already."

  "If we don't find another community, our descendants will be inbreeding in a few generations anyway."

  "So how much of a burden do you want to place on the other girls?"

  Eileen didn't say anything, just looked at the sun setting over the river.

  "Honey, why is this so hard for you? You're not living in the same world anymore. What are you afraid of?"

  "Can you imagine me trying to raise a child? Much less three or four of them?"

  "I think you'd be great at it."

  Eileen put her head down in her hands.

  "Honey, you're practically a mother to all of us already, even with half of us older than you."

  "And i
sn't that enough?"

  "Of course it is," said Laura. Eileen looked at her again. "Except of course it isn't," she said more quietly.

  "I guess you're lucky to be too old to be under this kind of pressure," said Eileen.

  "I don’t see it as being lucky," Laura said. "And I wish I could’ve protected my daughter from getting sick. This is the world we’re living in."

  The picture froze; the colors faded to gray and blurred to nothing, and the light soon receded back into the herbs beneath Gentiola's hands.

  "I can't believe you can actually do that," Charlinder said when the image faded.

  "But you never told me before what your Anima looked like," she pointed out.

  "No, I didn't," he conceded, and gave himself over to wrapping his brain around the power she'd just demonstrated.

  "So that was Laura, talking to Eileen," he said after a while.

  "And that was how their conversation really went."

  "So Eileen actually stored her memory in paper," he muttered, more to acclimate himself than to discuss anything with Gentiola.

  "I'm sure she didn't realize it," she responded, "but, yes, she did. I decided to show you this memory of hers because your experiences with religion don't seem to be comparable to Eileen's, or to mine. Laura was an ordained Protestant minister, correct?"

  "Yeah, she was. And if the Faithful of today were more like her, we’d get along a lot better."

  Gentiola shrugged. "Your Faithful are descended from a different society than Eileen and Laura. Does your home village possess a copy of the Bible?"

  "No. Our nearest neighboring community has at least one still in readable condition, but that's sort of odd because I'm not sure if any of them can read."

  "Then, have any of your community read very much of the Bible or other religious texts?"

  "I don't think so. Not most of them, and not more than a few chapters if they did."

  "So they don't have any...guidance, shall we say, for their belief system, except for the ideas passed down from people like Mark and Laura."

  "That makes sense, except it looks like we didn’t inherit much of Laura. And even Mark eventually admitted he didn't know everything."

  "I won't deny that the more...unfortunate, aspects of religious practice appear to have outlived the more positive ones, but..." she paused, and rolled her eyes with the air of preparing herself for an argument, "try and picture yourself as a Christian before the Plague."

  That was something he would rather not picture.

  "You've grown up with the teaching that your destiny is under the power of both God's love and God's wrath. Then the Plague happens, and you live through it, but you don't know where it came from. It leaves you, ultimately, with a far, far more powerful impression of God's wrath than anything in your lifetime that could have sprung from His love. Furthermore, since you've survived the Plague, you now have to live under very different conditions from your previous life. You have to work much harder to meet much more basic needs. Survival is not as simple and secure as it once was, especially if you grew up in a country as wealthy and organized as America used to be. It's entirely too easy to focus on the idea of God's anger and forget about His compassion and mercy. You come to think of God as a punitive, vengeful being more than a redeeming spirit, and that is the version of God that you teach to the next generation, so that is the only version they know to pass onto their children."

  "And yet they still worship Him."

  "I think anyone today who sees a good argument for God's existence will also see a good argument for staying on His better side. Out of fear, if nothing else."

  "I guess we all need something to motivate us."

  "But either way, I just want you to consider that even someone as...difficult, as Mark was, for example, was only working with the tools he'd been supplied."

  "In that case," he pressed on, "how were your experiences with religion different from mine?"

  "When Eileen and I were young women, there was much more to belief and its adherents than just terrorism and threats of damnation. Religion was a very mixed picture in those days. It was used to justify a lot of evil acts and abuses of power, but religious leaders also used their power to encourage countless acts of generosity and compassion. They collected food for the local poor. They provided shelter for the homeless. Worship centers in wealthy places raised money to help people in poorer parts of the world. Religious organizations were often able to help the desperate, depressed, suicidal, drug-addicted and otherwise self-destructive in ways that equivalent secular institutions hadn't yet learned to match. They did all this, not because their religion was true, but because it fulfilled a need. It had the ability to stabilize and organize communities and that power could be used for good."

  "Huh. That is different," he said. "All the believers I've met just want to use the implication of God to tell people what to do, and not always in ways that make sense."

  "That is unfortunate," she admitted. "But it's not the only way that religion can be used."

  "I get that," he answered.

  "Char, please just hear me out. It would be so simple to say the world would be such a better place if everyone could just give up their irrational ideas in favor of the right ones, but who really knows which ideas are the rational ones?"

  Charlinder thought it was a bit rich of Gentiola, of all people, to start going on about rational ideas, but he didn't interrupt.

  "You may be right on most questions, but you might be amazed at how much you have yet to learn. We do not live in a world in which all will agree on the answers that really matter once the most tightly reasoned argument is presented. Human beings are a much noisier, messier animal than that. Purity and order are for chemicals and blocks."

  "I hear you."

  "Do you really?"

  "Yes. I need to engage with people who disagree with me, and I need to be prepared to be proven wrong."

  Gentiola seemed pleasantly surprised; perhaps she wasn't accustomed to anyone listening to her that way.

  "So: thanks for showing me that, it was fascinating," he finished earnestly. He started to stand up to leave.

  "Wait, there's something else I want to show you," said Gentiola.

  "Okay, then." He sat down again. "Let's see it."

  "Right. Once I extracted Eileen's memory, I had a piece of her--a little bit of her essence, shall we say--and then I was able to gather some more information on her." She laid the journal on the rim of the bowl and splayed her fingers over the cover. The air darkened again. A stream of smoke wafted up from the back of her hand and formed a round cloud above the level of their heads.

  Colors appeared in the smoke and resolved themselves into the face of Eileen as she appeared as Charlinder's Anima.

  "This is Eileen, of course," Gentiola began, "and we know that she ultimately decided not to 'hold out until menopause,' as Laura put it, and eventually had a son."

  Gentiola flourished her free hand at the smoke, and Eileen's face changed to that of a dark-haired, olive-skinned young man.

  "Who fathered a son."

  Another flourish, and the man's face changed to another man, with similar facial structure and slightly darker coloring.

  "Who sired a daughter."

  Another woman's face appeared, this one eerily familiar.

  "Whose second child was a daughter."

  The face changed one last time with Gentiola's air of finality, and Charlinder's mouth fell wide open upon the sight of his mother's sweet, smiling face hovering in the smoke.

  "And I assume you know who she was," came Gentiola's voice through Charlinder's haze of shock.

  "So, so Eileen is my..." he attempted. The smoke faded away and light returned to the room.

  "Great-great-great-grandmother," Gentiola counted.

  "I never knew that," he breathed.

  "Since your home culture is matrilocal and non-monogamous, you couldn't be expected to know," Gentiola responded, "but as I read her acc
ounts, and got to know you, I started to wonder. There's a little bit of her in you, and when she was alive, there was already a little bit of you in her."

  "Yeah, I guess you could say there was," said Charlinder, still lost in wonder.

  "If she could see you today," Gentiola continued, "and if my impressions of her are accurate, she wouldn't give a flying toss about your genes," she paused while Charlinder released a little involuntary chuckle, "but I think she'd be very happy to see how much you've inherited of her spirit."