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Jenny sat in the sunlight, Chidwi, once again behind her with her hands on her head, directly on the healing wound. It was still sore to the touch, but Freia said that it was already looking much better and much sooner than she would have expected. Freia attributed this to Chidwi, and Jenny felt she was probably right. Who were these Linklings, really?
Their pale green fur and long dark green moustaches combined with their intense blue eyes surrounded by white circles of fur were almost comical. Their lithe monkey-like bodies were small and light, almost as if they had hollow bones like a bird. They crooned and sang, but they could also screech and howl in pain or grief or warning. She had yet to see one angry but had a feeling that might not be something she ever wanted to see.
They had a very advanced understanding of manipulation of matter and the science of the mind. Chidwi’s mental abilities exceeded even those of Liliath. Jenny somehow got the feeling that the Linklings looked upon other beings as not exactly inferior, but very adorable, like a parent watching the first steps of their toddler. Chidwi was never offensive at all, but somehow Jenny felt like she was watching her just like that adoring parent of a small child, proud of her accomplishments and yet knowing how very much farther she had to go.
She could wobble carefully on her own now to the padded wicker chair the Groga had provided for her. They had placed a woven mat in front of it and a small table next to it, to hold small snacks they laid out for her throughout the day, mainly consisting of slices of some kind of amazing citrus type green fruit and a somewhat pungent but tasty cheese, along with a salty crisp cracker bread. She would nibble at it as directed and then had a tasty soup for her other meals with the same cracker bread.
She was beginning to worry that she might gain weight with all this sitting and eating, but both Freia and Chidwi assured her that right now her body needed the extra calories to give it the energy to repair the damage done to her by that rock or paving stone that had been flung at her from behind that fateful day that...no, she wouldn’t think on that. She was now aware of it and the pain was still there, but with Chidwi’s help, she was choosing to not dwell on it.
Burt was dead. He was gone. No weeping or mourning would bring him back. From time to time she still dreamed of the little crystal pond by the Merced River, and that seemed to help somehow. The virtual time she had spent there with Burt had been so pleasant; more than pleasant.
Why hadn’t she ever had the guts to tell him how she felt about him? Perhaps because she hadn’t been completely sure of her feelings until that last crucial moment. “I love you, Jenny. I always will,” still rang in her mind. It was both like a knife to her heart and a joy that made her heart sing.
She had always wondered why her aunt had never married. She should have been more diligent about reading the journals Lizzie had left behind. Had she ever been in love with someone? Had she ever felt the grief and mourning of losing someone like this?
She was feeling a little stronger every day. Each evening a group of villagers gathered in the area in front of Jenny’s sitting place to sing and dance for her and Chidwi. Jenny wasn’t completely sure if she would have received such a reception if it weren’t for Chidwi’s presence.
She was charmed and a bit puzzled by the Groga. How could they be such ferocious and seemingly uncaring soldiers and yet, such a delightful people in their own environment? She knew she would never forget the lessons she learned here. How often had she judged another person or group of people based on only seeing one side of their personality or the action from a single person or small sampling of that community?
Look at her relationship with Sam. She had never even imagined that someone like Engoza had lurked behind her smiling mask and cheerful demeanor. In Jenny’s experience, most people considered themselves a good judge of character. She had. Now she realized that the whole ‘judging’ thing wasn’t quite as simple as it seemed.
She realized Chidwi had removed her hands and now sat crooning, almost as if she didn’t realize she was doing it. Jenny couldn’t decide if it was an instinctual trait or purposeful, but it was pretty soothing, and she frequently did it after a healing session.
She found herself drifting into her breathing patterns without even thinking about it. Now Chidwi’s little hands rested gently on her shoulders. Everything faded and Jenny found herself standing on the drawbridge of her mental fortress. The guard looked at her quizzically, as if not sure who she was and then his face cleared, and he bowed.
“Pardon, your grace. For a moment I didn’t recognize you. Are you well?”
“Well enough to go on with. I’ve just had a bit of a hard time.”
He nodded and saluted, gesturing her through the raised portcullis.
As she walked into the town square before her, it felt a little odd to be here by herself. So much of the time she had spent here had been in the company of Amenia, Elizabeth or Liliath. For a moment she felt a little shiver, as if she stood in a ghost town that should somehow be filled with people, instead of a place she had created for herself to organize her thoughts and learn about her mental abilities.
She passed by the library and the communications room. She didn’t think she was ready for the communications room yet. She knew she had worried and probably frustrated her teammates, and they were undoubtedly none too pleased with her at this point. She knew it to be heartless of her, as she also realized they were probably worried about her. She wasn’t generally a secretive person, although somewhat private in her thoughts and about her life in general. However, she had been pretty sure that if she had told them of her plan, they would have been more than a little vehement about her not doing it.
As Burt used to say, “Do what you need to do and then take the consequences.” That wasn’t usually her modus operandi, but in this case, she had felt so strongly about it that she had to act.
So, she avoided communicating with her team for one more day, confident that by tomorrow she would feel better enough to ‘face the music’ as her dad would have said.
She wasn’t exactly sure even what she was doing here or why she had decided to come here. While it seemed obvious that she needed to be here to finish the healing process, she wasn’t really sure why she had chosen to be here now. Out of the corner of her eye she noticed a building that she hadn’t seen here before. It was white and square of several stories, with a glass and aluminum front.
Out of curiosity she entered. The automatic sliding glass doors opened into what was obviously a hospital waiting room. There were no patients waiting, just a receptionist, a rather chubby lady in a white uniform and wearing a nurse’s cap.
“How may I help you?” she asked in a crisp professional voice.
“Um, I’m not sure. I suppose I have a wound on my head that could use some help.”
At that moment, Jenny didn’t have a clue what this was about. Why a hospital? Both Liliath and Amenia had taught her that the buildings inside her mental fortress always meant something important related to the development of her abilities, but a hospital? How could a hospital that only existed in her mind make a difference in a physical wound on her head?
“The doctor will see you now,” the chubby nurse told her, with a clipboard in her arms. “Follow me, please.”
She turned and Jenny obediently followed. They went down a corridor to an open door. The nurse stopped in front of it, placing a folder off of her clipboard in a file pocket on the wall. “Please have a seat in here. The doctor will be here in a moment.” She turned and left.
Jenny obediently went into the typical patient’s room and sat on a chair. She looked around. There were no windows. The room was equipped with familiar things like the blood pressure monitor and a drainboard and sink laden with various medical instruments. There was an examination table and a rolling stool. All perfectly normal, except that none of it was actually real.
The one thing that both Liliath and Amenia seemed to agree on was that the benefit of the buildings and objects in this place was always real on one level or another. So, Jenny didn’t follow her first impulse to just fade back into reality and get some sleep.
The doctor who entered was tall and skinny with black hair and wire-rimmed spectacles. “I’m Dr. Conrad. I hear you are wounded.”
“Yes, sir. I was hit on the back of the head with something. It is being treated by Freia, a Groga.” That sounded somewhat lame to Jenny’s ears, but the doctor didn’t even blink.
“Ah, yes. She does good work. So why are you here?”
Jenny was flummoxed. Why was she here? Why did this hospital with this imaginary nurse and doctor and her as the only patient even exist in her mental fortress?
“I’m not really sure. Can you tell me?”
“A wise question. Let’s take a look. Hop up onto the examination table, please.”
So, Jenny hopped. He pulled out a curious, very odd instrument with a ball on one end and a handle on the other. He placed it in the bend of her elbow and ran it up and down between there and her wrist on her inner arm. He looked into her mouth and her eyes. He gently pulled on earlobes and wiggled her nose like a doting uncle, all with a completely passive face. Jenny half expected him to grin at her, like he was pulling her leg, which he actually did.
“Hmm. Ah. Yes, I see,” he mumbled as he continued to examine her feet and thump her back from the base of her spine to her shoulder blades. He had her wiggle all of her fingers and stick out her tongue.
“So, doc, will I live?”
He looked at her quizzically. “Live? Of course, you will, even if you don’t. Don’t be silly.”
He opened the folder that the nurse had left on the door and scanned it carefully, then closed it and said, “You have a small blockage. I see it a lot in people who are making great strides forward. It is caused by self-doubt.
This would be difficult for anyone but the patient to cure. Fortunately, it isn’t a fatal case. The blockage is being dissolved by frequently applied poultices of love, patience, forgiveness and understanding. Don’t pick at the scab and you will recover.”
Jenny looked at him in amazement. Which hat had she pulled this guy out of? How was any of this helpful? She looked at his grave face and waited for someone to say, “Gotcha!” She nodded, equally as gravely and asked, “Is this visit covered by my insurance?”
He nodded. “You’re always covered here, Jenny. I thought you knew that.”
At that moment, the kindness of his tone almost undid her. “Why am I here, really?”
“You are experiencing mental growing pains. Most people don’t notice them. Your instincts are better than many. You have a great mind and a kindly spirit. Much of this burden you carry must be supported by others, and you have always been self-sufficient and independent. You need to get used to the idea that you aren’t in this alone and allow others to carry their share of the burden.”
He pulled out a prescription pad and began to scribble on it and handed it to her. “Take this daily and don’t pick at the scab.”
And he turned and walked out of the room. Jenny just sat there, stunned. She opened up the folded piece of paper and in a messy scrawl she read just one word: “Forgive”.
When Jenny looked up, through the tears blurring her eyes, she was standing in front of the observatory. The piece of paper fluttered to the ground. She would have no trouble remembering what was on it. As it hit the ground, it disappeared, but the word on it was seared into her mind.
She wondered why she had been transported to the observatory, but she knew that often things she didn’t understand here made sense in retrospect. She entered the room with the huge telescope in the center and looked at the screen. Sprinkled across it were question marks in all colors and of all sizes, in different fonts from plain to decorative.
Questions? Like she didn’t have enough of those. She wished she wasn’t there alone. Then, one by one, the question marks faded from the screen. As the last one faded, one word appeared: “Forgive”.
“Forgive who? For what? I don’t understand. Of all the things going on out there, with everything I hold dear hanging in the balance, why is this important?”
“Forgive Jenny,” was now on the board.
Now tears began to flood her cheeks in earnest.
“That can never happen. I let them all down. I went behind their backs. I’ve ruined everything. And Burt is DEAD! Why didn’t I stop him? Why didn’t I see this coming? What good are all of these awesome and amazing abilities if they can’t protect the people I care about? Who’s next? Tarafau? Bob? Elizabeth? My parents? The entire earth? How could anyone have ever entrusted something this important to someone like me?”
She collapsed on the marble floor of the observatory and just sobbed and sobbed. She had thought she had sobbed before, but it was nothing like this. It wasn’t just her body, but her entire soul shook.
Shook? She realized it wasn’t just her; the entire observatory was shaking, things falling off of shelves, the telescope swaying in its metal brackets.
“Stop it!” she yelled at the top of her mental lungs. She idly wondered if she was also shouting aloud in her little hut, upsetting Freia and Chidwi.
But at her shout, the shaking stopped. She straightened from her heap on the floor, gulping deep breaths of air and shaking as if she had the chills.
What was she doing? She remembered the kindnesses of all of those who had supported her through her first steps in the responsibilities as Gatekeeper. She remembered the acceptance of Chidwi, such a great honor. She remembered the words of Miriha in that dream near the crystal pond, “You have many loving friends and family who will support you and give you the strength you need to complete your part.”
“Forgiven,” the screen now read.
All of the others had forgiven her? Could they?
“Forgive,” the screen said again.
“Forgive myself?”
She pondered this. Could she ever? So many people depended on her. So many people she had let down. How could they forgive that, or she forgive herself?
She wasn’t ever sure how long she had sat in that one place. In this place a second could take forever or the other way around. She sat there, all bunched up, her arms around her knees and her head laying on them, just breathing. As she calmed, she realized that she might be worrying about the wrong thing.
Her mom had been a very practical lady, kind, intelligent and caring and yet, she never seemed to let anything stand in her way. She always said, “There is only one way to fail. You can’t fail unless you quit, so don’t.”
Since when was Jenny a whiny, sniveling quitter? Since when did she hold massive pity parties for herself? Was the death of Burt more of a loss than the lives of those who started this war had already taken? Was it any sadder for her to have lost a dear, a very dear friend than that thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands would live the rest of their lives in slavery to the Insenium? Was this war she was fighting worth the price or not? If it was, how dare she quit just because it had just gotten really, really hard?
Every military person involved in this had emphasized to her that this was going to cost lives, many, many of them. How were her feelings about the loss of Burt any more devastating than those of the Groga, or the slaves, or the Mookookie?
She stood and looked around her. The screen was blank. Forgive? It was blank because there was truly nothing to forgive. She hadn’t failed, yet. She had made some very human mistakes, mistakes that she wouldn’t likely make again. The only way she would fail is if she quit and she wasn’t going to do that.
None of this made her miss Burt less or feel less pain at his passing, especially after that revelatory pledge of love. Her heart would hurt for a long time, but she could manage. Tonight, she would sleep and tomorrow she would begin the fight anew, only this time, she truly understood the price.
