At which point, you’d think the story would end: Zillif left mute, barely alive, waiting for the slacks to fall. The Peacock would Ride her to the end, then pick a new host — human of course, since all the nearby Ooloms were in deplorable Riding condition — and nothing would change. For damned sure, the Peacock wouldn’t intervene.
Except that Zillif was an old old proctor. And in her last three days lying slack, unable to talk, collapsing in on herself… Zillif Zenned out.
Here’s the thing, the crucial thing: Zillif somehow realized the Peacock was there. Maybe she felt the tiny spill of energy from him, maybe there was some burst of mystic intuition, or maybe (anything’s possible) Xe found a way to sneak the truth into Zillif’s brain. For all I know, the old woman may just have gone tico: not cosmic Zen anything, but plain old pre-death delusion. However it happened, Zillif got the idea an advanced alien entity was lurking in the neighborhood; and she began to plead.
She thought she was addressing some emissary from the League of Peoples — some telepathic thing watching from the aether. So she talked to it; she begged; she ranted; asking for a cure, not for herself, but for her people.
The Peacock found himself answering… the same way he talked to me sometimes, mind to mind. And for three days Zillif wrestled with him, angel by the ladder, fighting to break the Peacock away from passive watching, so that he’d goddamned do something.
I can’t tell you what she said; but her whole life had been devoted to speaking with powerful people, putting together common sense and good argument to shift folks away from ill-advised plans. To the last, Zillif was a member of the Vigil… and her silent one-on-one with the Peacock was the most important battle of her life.
The queer thing is I was there through it all, holding her hand, sponging her down, checking her IVs and catheters and monitor cords. I was there, I was with her, but I was pure bliss-ignorant that the war for the Oolom race was raging right in front of me. Zillif vs. the Peacock… doing something vs. staying aloof.
You already know who won.
When Zillif finally persuaded the Peacock to take action, he left her body — snipping off that tiny thread of spilled energy. Zillif died like a light clicking out, blink, like that. In the outside world, young Faye began to cry as her heart withered… not realizing that what looked like pointless defeat was actually the old woman’s greatest triumph.
Because now, the Peacock was flying.
Out of Zillif, into the closest available healer — bonding, fusing with Dr. Henry Smallwood, because the Peacock needed to work through a pair of physical hands. In a way, my father died scant seconds after Zillif herself: he became a two-in-one creature, half man, half Peacock, the old submerged in the new. Not that Dads would consider it a bad deal; I imagine he’d leap at any chance to stomp the Pteromic microbe’s vicious little butt.
It needed a joint effort to construct the cure — not just Dads and the Peacock, but Xe too. Xe knew how the germ factory worked, and she was hooked into all the digital intelligence in the world. It only took a few hours for so much processing power to come up with a medicine… after which, Dads/Peacock/Xe hacked into the recipe database and made the change in olive oil. Epidemic closed.
All that time, the Peacock still believed Xe was tico, nago, wuta; he thought he was just using her, exploiting the way she was bound to the obelisk computer. Poor Peacock never realized Xe was eager to help: that she’d gone sane-sorry-sentient over the years, and was heartsick dismayed how her germ factory was near to pulling off another genocide. If their places had been switched, the Peacock imprisoned, Xe loose, she wouldn’t have needed a marathon debate with Zillif before she took action.
So I tell myself. Maybe Xe would have been just as don’t-get-involved as her mate. Both of them needed to damned well grow up… which they eventually did.
Seven months passed after the cure was tossed out to the world. Dads and the Peacock stayed fused all that time — fused for life. At unguarded moments, they glowed in the dark: my mother saw the flickery peacock colors shining just under my father’s skin.
Then the afternoon shift at Rustico Nickel set off a bomb on the outer defense perimeter of the Greenstrider bunker. Cave-in alarms started clanging, and Dads/Peacock faced a decision. The Peacock could rescue the trapped miners, but only by cutting the connection with my father. That would, of course, be fatal. To save the miners, Henry Smallwood had to die.
The Peacock told me Dads didn’t hesitate an instant.
So the Peacock separated itself, threaded its tube-body through the rockfall, and ferried the miners to safety. Yes, Dads died — energy ripped from his human body like a gusher of blood, leaving him cold, cold, cold. But… the Peacock still held on to a chunk of my father’s memories, motivations, sentiments. Such as a love for his daughter.
Guess who the Peacock caught a Ride with next — a quiet little nonfusion ever-watching Ride. And guess whom the Peacock protected off and on through the next twenty-seven years.
Now we’d come full circle: same crisis, same solution. Peacocks weren’t fitted for getting things done in our human world; not when it meant working hands-on with computers, security interlocks, things like that. The simple ways they could communicate with us (telepathy, link-seed) were too slow-awkward-clumsy to whip up a cure for Pteromic B and C — like shouting instructions through a wall at a not-too-bright child.
That was the Peacock’s analogy, not mine. From my side, the communication seemed fair successful — yes, the Peacock spoke Oolom rather than English because he’d been immersed in the language for nine hundred years… but I’d been immersed in Oolom all my life too, and I understood it just fine. Apparently that wasn’t good enough: mere words were too limiting for a superintelligent pocket universe trying to get life-and-death information across to a half-wit meat-woman.
All right. If the Peacock believed the only way to produce a cure was fusing with someone, how could a meat-woman argue?
"Fusing," I said. "You or Xe — you have to fuse with someone to make the medicine."
Dooloo. Yes.
"No other way."
Po. No.
The Peacock waited, lights dappling the ice and water.
Giving me the choice. You can have this, daughter, if it’s what you want.
God knows, there’d be any number of volunteers if I nellied out. Who wouldn’t want to hook up with something so far beyond yourself? Suddenly being able to hear the thoughts of everybody around you… understanding so much more about the universe… escaping the mumbly, sweaty, witless, gross, ungracious, unlovable, cowardly, lazy, parasitic, not-good-enough self that you hated so goddamned much…
Except at that moment, I didn’t want to lose me. Me. Our wayward Faye. Here I had the chance to become a fused creature, wise, amazing, important… and all of a sudden, I found myself thinking it would be a sorrowful loss.
Queer thing, that. I realized I’d been getting interested in who I might become.
Well. Bad timing, that was all. Even if I wasn’t quite so angry at myself as I’d once been, there was such a thing as responsibility. Duty. The Peacock was giving me a chance to help my world, and I was new-Faye enough that I couldn’t shuck this off on someone else.
"If it has to be done, it has to be done," I said aloud. "Fuse away."
Gentle as snowflakes, the Peacock shimmered down to touch my face.