Involuntarily, Nugget put her hand over Caroline's, as if to defend the design.
"Or you could move 'em around. Get new ones -- it didn't take any time, didn't have to hurt. See? Nothing mattered. I've worn many different sets of tattoos myself. But these are the ones that matter to me, because these are the ones I'll die with. That was the least of it, of course. You could grow a few extra arms, turn yourself into a bat, fly like a bird, whatever you wanted. But why bother?"
"Mother...What happened then?"
"For almost six hundred years, nothing happened worth mentioning. Then, finally, your father and I killed it."
"How? If it was so powerful, how could you kill it?"
"Your father built it, remember. He'd never designed it to run the whole world, only to be a good helper. He knew its weaknesses. So we were able to trick it, and it broke." She swept her hand. "Somehow we ended up here."
Nugget dipped her hand in the hot water and splashed her face. None of this was what she had expected.
"If you will do something else for me, I'll tell you one more thing."
"What, Mother?"
"Promise me that you will give the birch barks to the Eldest Father to be burned with me. Those words belong to the World Before. They may be harmless, but I'd rather not have your father's only memory be those reminders of his worst failure."
"What will you tell me for promising this?"
"I'll tell you the computer's name."
She looked down. "I'll burn them, Mother. There's nothing I can hope to learn from them now, anyway."
"It was called Prime Intellect."
Nugget nodded.
"Now if you value the memory of your father, you will never repeat that or any of your other words to anybody else. Let them die with me."
"As you wish, Mother."
"Then leave me alone to rest."
Nugget didn't have to ask for how long.
Caroline was too thin to float in the hot water, so she let her head fall back on the hard stone fountain wall and looked up at the Sun.
If she could somehow pull it off again, magically rise from the healing waters as a young girl and return to her people, she would do it. They needed her. There were so few of them, and the challenges they faced so great, that their survival was far from certain. One disease or natural disaster could wipe them out.
But that's the way it was with things that mattered; you never got to find out how they came out, if they were really worth anything. Caroline had done her part. She had made her decisions and stood her ground. One day somebody would figure out how to use the fire bow to launch arrows and how to make them fly true. Then someone would shoot one at his brother. Caroline had done what she could to put that day as far as possible in the future.
As a result some of her children would die, because in order to hunt they would have to get close to their prey, close enough for their prey to strike back. This playing God business sure was a pain in the ass, Caroline thought. No wonder Lawrence had gone a little loopy in Cyberspace.
But he had been a good man. He had never approved of Caroline's plan for their family, to act like some kind of snide Prometheus who could have given them the secrets of metalworking and gunpowder and steam power but who didn't bother because it was more amusing to make them struggle in stone-age savagery. Yet he had gone along, because he already knew the other way didn't work. If this way didn't work either, what would it mean?
The doubts and questions circled in her head endlessly, chasing for an answer that would never come. They were still chasing when she slipped beneath the trickling waters and found darkness.
* END
The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect Page 19