"I tried sending you a message," Thrr-gilag said, eying his mother closely. "The communicator said you wouldn't accept it."
"Oh, I don't talk to Elders much anymore," Thrr-pifix-a said equably. "Have you eaten?"
"Ah—no, not recently," Thrr-gilag said, frowning down at her. "Is there some reason you don't talk to Elders?"
"Well, as long as your timing has worked out so well, we might as well put you to work," Thrr-pifix-a said. "I'll get you started on dinner while I go clean up. Come, I'll show you to the kitchen."
The meal was, for Thrr-gilag, a strange and rather discomfiting experience. On the one side, it was a warm, comfortable reunion with his mother, a time for food and conversation after too many cyclics of hurried neglect as he flew back and forth across Zhirrzh space studying alien races and artifacts. But even as he tried to relax in the warmth of family love, he couldn't ignore the taste of apprehension at the back of his tongue. Thrr-pifix-a was his mother; and yet, somehow, she wasn't. She had changed, in a way Thrr-gilag couldn't seem to get a grip on.
And she wouldn't talk about it. That was the most disturbing part of it. Every attempt he made during dinner to reintroduce her comment about Elders—every delicate probe he floated as to why she'd left home and come out here to the edge of a tiny Frr village—all were deftly deflected and instantly buried under a new flurry of news about distant cousins or friends.
So they sat and ate and talked... and it was only as the meal drew to an end that Thrr-gilag caught the new look on his mother's face and realized that she hadn't been ignoring the issue at all. She had, instead, been postponing it.
Until now.
"Well," Thrr-pifix-a said, setting down her utensils and getting carefully up from her meal couch. "That was excellent, Thrr-gilag; thank you. You must be getting a lot of practice in cooking out there on all those study worlds."
"Actually, you'd be surprised at how little cooking we try to get by with out in the field," Thrr-gilag confessed, stepping around the table and taking her arm. "And the meals out there certainly suffer for it. Why don't you go sit down in the conversation room while I get the dishware cleared away?"
"The dishware can wait," Thrr-pifix-a said, her voice quiet and serious. "Let's go sit down together, my son. We need to talk."
The conversation room was tiny, less than half the size of the one in their old house. "Small, isn't it?" Thrr-pifix-a commented, looking around her as she eased down onto one of the couches. "Nothing like the house I raised you and your brother in. Or the house I was raised in myself, for that matter."
"The size of the house isn't important," Thrr-gilag said. "As long as you're happy."
"Happy." Thrr-pifix-a looked down at her hands. "Well. I'm sure you've talked with your brother. And... others. What have they told you?"
"Absolutely nothing," Thrr-gilag said. "I didn't even know you'd moved until a few fullarcs ago."
She looked up at him again, and he felt his tongue stiffen against the side of his mouth. Here it came. "It's really very simple, Thrr-gilag," she said softly. "I've come to the conclusion—and the decision—that I don't wish to become an Elder."
Thrr-gilag stared at her, his heart thudding out the beats as an unreal sort of silence filled the room. Had she really said what he thought he'd heard her say? His own mother? "I don't understand," he managed at last.
She smiled slightly. "Which part don't you understand? Eldership, or my not wanting it?"
"I'm glad you're not taking this lightly or anything," Thrr-gilag shot back with a force that startled him. "Mother, what in the eighteen worlds are you thinking of?"
"Please." Thrr-pifix-a held up a hand. "Please. This isn't some bright new idea I dreamed up last latearc and haven't properly thought through. Nor is it the product of insanity or a broken mind. This decision has grown gradually, with a great deal of thought and study and meditation behind it. The least you can do is hear me out."
Thrr-gilag took a slow breath, willing his tail to calm its dizzying spin. No wonder Thrr-mezaz hadn't wanted to talk about this through a communicator pathway. "I'm listening."
Thrr-pifix-a looked around the room again. "I know it's rather a cliché, my son, but the older I get, the more I've begun to realize that it really is the smaller things in life that make that life worth living. The taste of one's food; the delicate smell of flowers or rainfall or the sea; the touch of a loved one's hand. Things we all too often seem to take for granted. I know I did when I was your age. But not anymore. My senses are fading—have been fading slowly for a long time now. I can't see or hear nearly as well as I used to, or taste or smell."
She lowered her gaze to her hands again. "I can still touch. But with all too many of my old friends, touch is no longer possible."
She looked up at him. "Eldership isn't life, Thrr-gilag. That's the long and the short of it. It may be a shadowy illusion of life—a wonderfully clever imitation, even. But it's not real life. And I've enjoyed life too much to settle for an imitation."
Thrr-gilag seemed to be having trouble breathing. "But there's no alternative, Mother. Without Eldership there's nothing afterward but..."
"Death?" Thrr-pifix-a said gently. "It's all right, you can say it."
"But you can't do that."
"Why not?" she asked. "Zhirrzh did it all the time, you know, until we learned how to remove and preserve fsss organs. Millions of Elders were summarily thrown into the great unknown during the various Eldership Wars. Even now some are lost each cyclic to accidents or the simple weight of age of their fsss organs. Eventually, we'll all have to face death."
"Eventually, maybe," Thrr-gilag said. "But not now. Not while you're still—" He broke off.
"While I'm still what?" Thrr-pifix-a asked. "Young? Capable? Able to impart the wisdom of my cyclics to my descendants?"
"All of those," Thrr-gilag insisted. "And more. We need you, Mother. More than that, we want you. How can you think of taking yourself away from us?"
She looked him straight in the eye. "How can you think of demanding that I stay?"
There was no answer to that. Only an ache deep within Thrr-gilag, an ache that had no words. "Couldn't you at least give it a try?" he asked at last. "Perhaps it's not as frightening as you think."
Thrr-pifix-a flicked her tongue in a negative. "I'm not frightened, Thrr-gilag. You've missed the point entirely if you think that. I know what the grayworld is like—I've heard all the descriptions and talked to many Elders. If anything, all the fear lies on the other side, with the unknowns and uncertainties of death. It's simply a matter of not wanting to live the way an Elder must."
"But you can't make that kind of decision without giving it a try," Thrr-gilag persisted. "You can't."
"But I have to," Thrr-pifix-a said. "Don't you see? If I wait until I've been raised to Eldership, I'll have lost my chance to decide otherwise."
Thrr-gilag stared at her, sudden realization sending a jolt from his tongue straight through to his tail. "Mother, what are you talking about?" he asked carefully.
"I'm sure it's obvious," she said. "The only way I can avoid Eldership is to go retrieve my fsss organ from its niche at the family shrine. And to destroy it."
Thrr-gilag took a careful breath, the room seeming to tilt around him. "Mother, you can't do that," he said, hearing in his voice the tone of one explaining something to a very young child. "Tampering with a fsss organ is a grand-first felony."
"But it's my own fsss," she pointed out. "Taken from my own body. Why shouldn't I be able to do what I want with it?"