“I could not choose between them,” I said amid the ringing I now heard in my head, surely the tolling of my life-bell in Mida’s sacred Realm. “In no matter might I have chosen between them, and now they both shall live. They will not face one another for there is naught to be won, therefore shall they both live on. And I—I shall find the rest promised me by Chaldrin.”
The lips of the male parted to add words to the look of devastation he wore, yet were those words not to be uttered. Suddenly before me were Mehrayn and Ceralt, and how pleased I was to see them a final time. My vision had begun blurring with the advance of the lethargy, yet was I still able to see them, although the strength to raise caressing fingers to each of their faces was no longer present. I looked upon them with all the love I felt for them, able to hear no more than a combined mutter made up of the words they spoke, and then were they suddenly gone from before me.
In their place was the visage of S’Heernoh, the gray-haired male I had come to be so fond of. Grief twisted his features till they were nearly unrecognizable, his hands took my arms in a grip which would have been painful had I been able to feel it, and his lips parted to shout the single, strangled word, “No!”
Yet was it past time for all denial, all hearing and speaking and feeling. The lethargy rose up to cover me with darkness, and Jalav was done with the world.
14
S’Heernoh—and a final solution
“Jalav. Hear me. Jalav.”
The words, repeated over and over, drew me toward a consciousness I had no desire for. Much of an unreasonable invasion did the words seem, and I felt no hesitation in speaking of it.
“Jalav goes elsewhere, male,” I said with words which seemed to have no substance to them. “Leave me be, now, for all my tasks have been seen to and I wish to rest.”
“You shall indeed be allowed a time of rest, yet not the one you mistakenly seek, girl,” said the voice, drawing me yet farther from the journey I had barely begun. “You must open your eyes and hear me, for there are matters to be settled before you begin your rest.”
In growing annoyance I attempted to open my eyes as had been demanded of me, yet found some difficulty in the doing. It came to me then that I had no sense of bodily presence, that spirit alone resided in that place where I was, much as though I had gone to walk the Snows without having been aware of it. With that in mind I ceased attempting to open eyes and merely intended their opening, and sight came immediately, accompanied by confusion and a great lack of understanding.
I found I sat in a world all of gray, a world composed solely of mist. Even below my folded legs was there mist of gray, no more solidity in it than to myself. Perhaps a pace before me sat S’Heernoh, the sight of him confirming that it had indeed been his voice which I had heard. To his right and a bit before him sat Ceralt, to his left and also before, Mehrayn, all three entirely without coverings and weapons, as was I.
Somewhat disturbed did the Belsayah and the Sigurri seem, yet did they seem equally determined. I knew not what occurred about me, and the stares of the three males added to my confusion.
“What place is this?” I asked, finding that I spoke with something of a soundless echo, true speech when compared to what was done upon the Snows, more than odd in any other context. “Is this the Gray Place, where souls denied entry to Mida’s Realm must wander forever?”
“No, no, nothing like that,” S’Heernoh hastened to assure me, his gesture comforting. I saw then a portion of the oddness of speech there, for I heard the male’s words with both ears and mind—the echo I had noted. Surely was there a link between that place and the Snows, yet I knew not what it might be—
“This is a place where life has never been, where even the worlds have not yet formed,” said S’Heernoh, his gaze unmoving from my face. “Time moves so slowly here that it can’t even be measured, so slowly that to spend a lifetime here is to pass a blink of an eye in your own world. When we return there, no time at all will have passed.”
I stared upon the male with growing upset, and not for the words he had spoken, which I had scarcely understood. His manner of speech was not what it had been, a thing I had at first failed to note by cause of the strangeness of that place. Much did that manner of speech seem familiar . . . .
“Yes, you’re right,” said he, the wry look about him greatly aware of the manner in which I had stiffened. “My speech patterns are not what they were, and they sound like those used by the Feridani because—I am one of them. ”
Ceralt and Mehrayn had turned to stare upon the male as I did, the shock clanging in all of our minds, yet did the male we had known as S’Heernoh wave a hand in impatience.
“I think I should have said, ‘we come from the same culture,’ ” S’Heernoh corrected himself, and then did his face twist in disgust. “I’ve lived a long time and intend living a considerable time longer, but I’d cut my own throat right now if I ever thought I’d become like those—sickeningly warped pretenders to humanity.”
With a headshake and a sigh the male shifted his place upon the gray mist, and then did he return his eyes to me.
“It’s painful to admit, but the fault for those—monsters can be lain at the feet of no one but my people,” said he, and indeed did the admission seem painful. “We had discovered a brand-new source of energy, trans-continuum in nature—Well, let’s just say we found something new, and set up a place to study it called a pilot plant. All of the studying we’d done till then assured us that the new thing we’d found was safe to handle, but what we were doing was groping blindly around the hilt of a sword, finding it easy to hold, and assuming the rest of the weapon would be the same. We were fine as long as the hilt was all we touched—but the pilot plant wrapped a firm hand around the blade we hadn’t been able to see.
“There was a minor—explosion,” said the male, groping for the words he required. “Even the people right near the explosion weren’t seriously hurt, and we laughed with relief and congratulated ourselves, because we’d found such a safe source of energy. We didn’t know how much of a disaster we’d created until some months later, when crippled and terribly mutated babies started to be born, all within a radius of seventy-five miles of the pilot plant. The energy burst of the explosion had been less than a minute in duration—the storm flowing from our new creation had lasted less than a reckid—and yet people as far away as from Bellinard to half way to Ranistard had been hurt by it. Not so much the people themselves, but their offspring, their babies. Some were so badly twisted by the storm that they were born dead, and they were surely the lucky ones. Some were born to constant, unending agony, some to be violently allergic to the very air they needed to live—and some were born with nothing visibly wrong with them at all.
“Although we didn’t know it at first, these were the worst mutants of them all,” said the male with a sigh for remembered grief. “They seemed to be fine and they grew up just like any child, but the older they got, the more—different—they became. No very young child has a conscience, that’s something that has to be taught them, but these children were impossible to teach. No matter how old they got and what they were taught, they considered no one but themselves. It was always their comforts and their likes and their wishes which concerned them, and causing others pain and difficulty didn’t bother them in the least. When their difference was noticed and they were gathered in and studied, it was discovered that they were entirely without social awareness. What benefited them was good, what interfered with their desires wrong, and nothing we were capable of could cause them to change from so socially disastrous an outlook. In our society, just as among the clans, the one who thinks of himself or herself to the exclusion of everyone else around is a danger to that society. If there’s a fire and everyone cooperates, everyone gets out alive; if everyone were to try to save themselves alone, most if not all, would die.”