SHE slapped his hand away, aware that in removing his touch she was touching him. But it didn’t matter, it wasn’t real, he’d obviously forged another contact with her and appeared in her mindspace, present only as a shared fiction that meant nothing. This abomination with his pallid and scabby flesh, his rheumy red eyes, had no place in her life let alone in Ulmazh, the site of so many of the Caudex’s victories. Almost she was moved to personal violence, even as she wanted to retch at his imagined touch. Both were reasonable reactions.
The wrongness of him tore at her, and strengthened her justification for the meme she’d unleashed. Condemning a child to death violated everything she believed in, but it would break Jorl ben Tral. If she could end the perverse fool who willfully empowered this boy beyond any sanity then every Fant on Barsk would sigh with relief.
All that passed through her in the instant. The creature’s hand pulled back, but a pulsing ball of light remained on her fingers, a meme. Somehow, he had not only learned to Speak but to craft ideas into stable shapes. Jorl hadn’t known how, so who had taught the boy? It didn’t matter. Klarce wanted nothing of him, certainly not any thoughts that had passed through his mind. She sent her intention into the nefshons of his creation intending to sunder it before it could taint her.
She failed.
It wasn’t like any meme she’d encountered, not a simple memory or directive. It cycled upon itself, pulsed like a living thing. Not the idea of life, but life itself.
Klarce stumbled backwards, flailing her arms and trunk at Pizlo. She glared at Jorl. “Is there no limit to your offense, that you would tie an abomination’s threads to this meeting?”
Surrounded by the hovering, gaping councilors trapped in place by the physicist’s discs, only a single instance of Jorl remained, hunched over having folded in upon himself as the other versions presumably tried to save his daughter. He shook his head, ears lifting in surprise. “Pizlo? How … what are you doing here?”
“I came to help. To save you. This is my quest.”
“You didn’t bring him?” Klarce pulled further away from Pizlo. “No … I can see that now. No threads tie him to you. You didn’t summon him. And I didn’t. Then how … No! No, it’s impossible!”
She fell back into the waking world and saw the abomination an ear’s length away. She struck him across the face and sent him tumbling backwards on the desk. He opened his eyes and locked his gaze to hers.
“You’re here!” She shrieked at him, extending one arm in a warding gesture.
Pizlo righted himself on the desk, scooted to the edge and pushed off to stand directly in front of her.
“I am. I came all this way to speak to you. To stop this before anyone is harmed. To save everyone and tell you to listen to Jorl. Please.” He reached out his trunk and curled it around the wrist of her outstretched arm.
She collapsed back into her chair and fled to the mindscape where Jorl still remained. The boy followed her, too far away to touch but she felt his grasp in the real world.
“I WILL NOT BE TOUCHED BY AN ABOMINATION!”
“What? Pizlo, where are you?”
“I’m on Ulmazh. In it. In her office.”
“Jorl ben Tral, is there no limit to your treason against our kind? To send this filth not merely beyond the confines of your island, but past the atmosphere of our world? You empower him to foul me with his touch?”
Pizlo nodded to Jorl. “I won’t let her hurt you. I’ll protect you.”
“There’s nothing to protect me from. I’m fine. It’s Rina who’s in danger.”
She saw confusion on the abomination’s pale face. “Rina?”
“Klarce, stop this.” Jorl pleaded. “She’s an innocent, and no part of any dispute you have with me.”
She shook her hand again but the meme the boy had placed there would not fall free. She glared back at Jorl. “The same can be said of the millions of Fant your own actions put in jeopardy. Now, recall your creature. Or I’ll send the same meme to another person you love.”
“No!” Pizlo shouted and stepped between his mentor and the councilor. “It’s not that actions have consequences. You have it wrong. It’s that all reaction is predetermined. And that’s all you’re doing, reacting. That’s why your future is set. But knowing that means you can change it. That’s the real power you have, that everyone has. Dabni could do it. It’s what Bish understood, indirectly.”
What was this babble? “What is a Bish?”
“It doesn’t matter. If you choose, you could act instead of react. That’s the paradox. That’s why I’m here.”
Jorl wept openly. “Pizlo, no, you have to leave. Please, for Rina—”
Klarce stood taller, sick to her stomach at the price of her victory, but victorious all the same. “There’s nothing on all of Barsk that can save her. Your daughter is beyond hope.”
“She’s not,” insisted Pizlo. “Jorl, only you know what you can do. You’re not limited to Barsk. You can fix her. Go.”
“He can’t leave. He may have control over the others of him he created, but this one I drew here and even were he to disperse the thread I’d summon another before it was gone. His awareness remains with me so I can see him suffer.”
The boy looked at her with an expression that suggested she was the abomination.
“I’m sorry,” he said, and vanished from the illusion of mental space. Remembering he was there in her office, she switched a portion of her awareness back to the real world in time to see and feel his trunk slap her across the face. Startled by the physical attack, she released the threads and Jorl vanished. It didn’t matter, his child was doomed and when she died the father would shatter. Klarce dissolved and fled the mindspace she’d created and stared at Pizlo. The sixteen former councilors vanished from her awareness, the discs that kept their nefshons in place the only sign of them. As if from a dream she became aware of a pounding coming from the other side of her office door.
“Please, I understand. You’re not thinking through any of this. You’re just responding. But there’s another path, one that leads to your goals, if you just choose to take it.”
Klarce marshaled her courage and pushed up from her chair to stand and face him. Her hands trembled, but not from anything of his doing.
“I am a member of the Full Council. I have responsibility for the posterity of our people in a galaxy that has shown itself to be inherently hostile to us. I’ve dedicated my life to this cause, and I am prepared to give everything in pursuit of it. And I will not be dictated to by a disgusting creature that threatens everything I hold dear. You should never have been born!”
Pizlo winced but held his ground. “That’s more reaction. The culture. The stories. That’s not me.”
“You’re all that’s foul and base, our sins made manifest!”
“No,” said Pizlo. “I’m just a young man, a little different, but with more in common with you than not. Please, let me show you.”
With the last bits of koph in his system, he took the choice from her and pressed the echo he’d given to her into her mind.
“What have you done?” An instant later both versions of reality fell away.
* * *
SHE was falling. Leaves and vines, twigs and branches, brushed and scrapped and tore at her on all sides but she felt none of it. She tumbled through the air, reaching out with hand or foot or trunk to touch this spot or that branch or this other bough, each time as if by design that seemed wholly providence, slowed or altered her descent. She hit hard, but not critically, as she plunged into cold water, tumbling ears over ass until, with a sense of delight, one hand tapped a stony bottom and pushed her up up up until she broke the water’s surface and inhaled with joy to be alive. That first simple breath after falling and immersion was like an exaltation. And all around her it seemed the world was more alive than she’d ever noticed before. The water shared her pleasure. She pulled herself to the edge of what turned out to be a very small pool—what if she’d missed it by even an ear’s width in her fall?—and the rock and dirt there sung wordlessly. She pulled herself up and out of the water, acknowledged her body was young, male, pale, bleeding, and full of wonder.
In the next instant she was on a beach, rain pouring down upon her as she communed with the waves and clouds and the moons orbiting high above. There was unity to the world that she’d never heard before, and wisdom, and direction. She tried to frame a question, to engage in dialogue even as she understood this was a conversation long past, a memory. And then she was gone again.
She was in a boat, a pitiful coracle that she rowed with a paddle in each hand, numb from endless hours of it. Her hands weren’t used to such work but had kept at it, not feeling the pain or ruin. Then she was sitting beside a bed telling a story to a child—Jorl’s daughter?—describing impossible concepts for an adolescent to be expected to grapple with, let alone worry down to the understanding of her audience. She lay upon an examination table, groggy but alert, gazing at a younger version of Jorl but seeing someone else behind his eyes.
A bowl of the most delicious paella she’d ever smelled lay before her and she devoured it with spoons held in one hand and her trunk while a woman watched over her with a motherly but haunted gaze. Before she could eat her fill, she was elsewhere, in a room with the feel of generated gravity; she climbed an adult Bos like a tree, reaching within his robes to steal something and run away. She spoke for hours with an ancient machine that had never known a Fant but told tales that moved her at her very core. She ran along the boardways of a Civilized Wood, seeing people flinch and turn from her, feeling sad for her isolation and pity for their helpless reaction to her. She sat with an even younger Jorl, learning to read and to write, glorying at the realization of print and the worlds opening to her by the wall of books in his home.
Kneeling on a pier in a heavy downpour she held a malformed infant in her arms, knew it for an abomination, and trembled with an ache greater than any she had ever known that it had died and she had been powerless to save it. She stood in front of Dabni, a Caudex field agent who nonetheless spoke to her, and held the index and understood all that it contained. She stared out the observation port in the Alliance’s space station in orbit above Barsk, saw the rising of Telko and felt several lifetimes of knowledge and wisdom pour from it into her every cell. She felt rejection and hate and loathing but never pain. And from a handful, a meager few, she felt love and understanding and acceptance.
* * *
KLARCE came back to herself. She was on the floor behind her desk. Pizlo stood over her, concern on his face, weak eyes strained with worry. She ached, and while she’d felt that soreness before it felt new and fresh and oddly exciting. Her hands trembled, spasmed, and a part of her wondered if Temmel might be near with her meds and, too, if she was beyond their ability to help. She opened her mouth to speak and paused, tasting the scent of urine on the air, feeling the wetness of her clothes. She’d pissed herself, but it didn’t matter. She tried to sit up and discovered the left half of her body had stopped working. Had she had a stroke? It didn’t matter. None of it did, she knew that now. She raised her trunk up to reach out to the young man before her, wronged by her and by so many others. A gentle and gifted spirit vilified by folklore and ignorance.
“I’m sorry, Pizlo. I … I didn’t know. I couldn’t … but no, no excuses.”
“It’s okay,” he said, and his easy forgiveness burned her more than any epithet he might have righteously thrown at her.
“It’s not, but it will be. I cannot change the past, but I will write you a new future.”
“No, really. It’s fine. Are you okay? You were having some kind of seizure. I’ve never given my echo to a stranger before. I didn’t know it would do that to you. I’m really sorry. I just wanted you to understand me so you would maybe understand Jorl better and realize you’re on the same side. So you could choose for yourself.”
She pulled herself upright using her trunk and her right arm, ignoring her sodden clothes. “Yes, I suppose I see that, but Jorl doesn’t matter. I have to fix the wrong I’ve done to you—”
“No, really, I’m fine. Don’t—”
“—that we’ve all done to you.”
Klarce slipped back into the mindspace of her office, and sent a call out to a former classmate who now held responsibility for the teams of Speakers distributing the Death meme throughout Barsk.
“I have a meme for you. In a moment, I will pass it to you, and after I have, I need you to pass it on. Share it with each of your assistants to pass on to each member of their squads. Spread it to everyone, every man, woman, and child on Barsk. Do it now. Nothing is more important.”
She passed along the meme Pizlo had given her that he called his echo, and let her connection slip. Back in the real world she slumped back beyond exhaustion.
“What did you do?”
She rubbed at her eyes with the nubs of her trunk. Was he upset? No, no, she had to reassure him.
“I love you, Pizlo. I’m sorry about before. But I’ve fixed it. I’ve set it in motion. Your echo is going out to everyone. Before the day is done, everyone will know you as the person you are, not an abomination. I’ve set you free.”
She slumped backwards. Her vision blurred and unconsciousness beckoned. Why did Pizlo still look unhappy, horrified even.
“Free,” he said. “At the expense of everyone’s choice.”
That made no sense. He’d understand. She’d explain it, later, after she’d slept and recovered. Was someone pounding on her door?