“We are not the things we have not done. We are the things we have made in ourselves, the things we have made between each other,” my mother said, her eyes cool and distant. She was standing in
a forest by a lake with a mist rising all around her. She extended her hand, her long slender hand. I had forgotten how graceful she is. I reached for her; I almost had her in my grasp when suddenly I woke up.
There was a vacuum where my heart had once beat, my stomach was heaving. A headache like a jackhammer thundered up from the back of my skull and exited unceremoniously through the exact center of my forehead into the cool air of the Caves of Waiting.
Shit! It took me a good five minutes to get oriented. I wasn’t naked anymore. I didn’t have a gun in my hand. I … I wasn’t on my knees looking up at an angry
Sheridan!
Fuck, fuck, fuck! Why, how could he be here? But maybe more to the point, what had become of him, of the other humans who had been with him?
I tried to sit up. I found I could actually lift my thundering head off the pillow on which it had been cradled. Solicitous hands reached for me, applied damp cloths to my forehead, my neck, my cheeks. They felt impossibly glacial against the heat in my body. I pushed the relief away, almost screamed,
“Where are they?”
Somewhere off in the distance Xexra asked, “who, my dear, who?”
Suddenly the names of my fellow humans completely evaporated from my brain in the same way the cool comfort the vision of my mother had brought was evaporating from my mind. I stared dumbly at my benefactors as they continued in their attempts to soothe me.
“You must sleep,” a voice crooned.
“Divorce yourself from the pain in your mind,” another counseled.
“Your heart is a battlefield. You must clarify yourself or you will become ill,” Xexra added. “Rall, Shelan, and I will aid you in your clarification, dearest one.” She motioned to the two caregivers beside me. They gazed at me with rapt devotion, concern evident in their eyes.
“Aid me?” I wondered aloud.
“Yes, dear one,” Xexra continued. “Are you strong enough to walk, or shall we bear you?”
I swayed in response. I wasn’t sure I could walk anywhere.
Xexra said, “bear her to the Place of Fire.”
Sheridan’s angry face rose suddenly out of the angry clashing in my chest.
“No,” I almost shouted. “Where are they?” I reiterated. “Where are the humans, the ones from my world?”
“Do not concern yourself little one,” Xexra soothed. “No harm has come to them. They will await your recovery in safety, or they will leave as they choose.”
“You have not harmed them then?” I asked. I had to be sure.
Xexra looked somewhat vexed. “Of course we have not harmed them. A debt of blood is between us. We cannot begin to create balance with them until you are well though. Their arrival here has caused you great turmoil. It has harmed you, though I suspect they had no intention of doing so, just as we had no intention of bringing harm to them. This is an unfortunate turn of circumstance. We will do what we can to make things right, but you are our first concern. They will have to wait!”
“I will not find peace or clarity until I have spoken with them,” I insisted.
“You are out of synch with yourself,” Xexra said firmly. “I counsel against seeing them until you have clarified.”
“Take me to them!” I replied, just as firmly.
Xexra stared down at me, her deep, dark eyes were troubled. I stared back up at her with complete conviction, a conviction that finally won through her reservations.
“I fear you will be sorry you pushed things to this,” she finally replied, “but I will honor your request.” Turning to my keepers, she said, “Rall, bear her to our guests, and be gentle about it. Both of you stay with her as she encounters them. Her safety is paramount.”
They nodded. Rall, lifted me as easily as I might have lifted a child of three. With Shelan pacing behind us, he carried me through the bewildering maze of the Caves of Waiting to a huge cavern. From a fissure in the ceiling 100 feet up, sunlight splashed down onto the floor. A waterfall entered the cavern from this same fissure. The air was moist and smelled of damp earth. In the distance by a pool where the waterfall crashed into the cavern I could see Sheridan. He was pacing to and fro. His tension communicated itself to me. Every muscle in my body grew hard. I felt a shell of impenetrable armor form around me, around my turmoil. I began to feel encased by preternatural calm.
“The calm of battle,” a harsh voice whispered from the base of my spine.
I asked Rall to put me down.
“Can you walk then, Lady?” he asked gently, his concern evident.
“I can walk. I must walk. They must not see weakness!” I commanded, surprised at the sudden strength in my voice.
That strength and the desire to hide weakness were things Rall and Shelan understood completely. I could feel their respect deepen. Rall set me on my feet.
“Help me straighten my hair, my clothes,” I commanded.
They did swiftly and without further question.
“Now, let us go and speak with these people from my world,” I commanded.
“We are with you, Lady,” Shelan said.
I turned and headed toward Sheridan. Rall and Shelan paced close behind me.
“He will be a handful,” the harsh voice in my spine counseled.
“Yes, I know,” the rest of my brain replied.
Sheridan spotted me. Several others were behind him. They gathered around him as we approached. I recognized
Adana, Sheridan’s lover, but none of the others.
When I was four paces from him, I stopped. He was pure ice. “Sheridan,” I said! I just managed to keep my voice steady.
“Lora!” he shot back, his voice harsh as stone on stone in the dead of winter.
“I don’t mean to sound foolish, or, or I don’t know what,” I began, “but, what are you doing here?”
He stared at me in shock for three long breaths, then spat, “oh, we just thought you might want a ride home, don’t you know. After all, you are stranded on an alien world.”
“Since the destruction of the Harmonizers, the
Iglendas can no longer travel off-world, can they?” Adana asked.
“I have no idea,” I said. “I really hadn’t given that any thought.”
That statement shocked me as much as it apparently shocked Sheridan. Before
Zygon was killed, I knew I could leave Rathe whenever he did. But, since the destruction of the Harmonzers,
Pon’s murder, and Zygon’s death, I had ceased thinking about Earth at all. I hadn’t once given any serious thought to leaving Rathe. Why?
“You haven’t given even one thought to getting out of the middle of a bloody civil war that is in no way relevant to your life?” Sheridan finally asked.
For some reason that infuriated me to the very core of my being.
“Not important to my life?” I shouted. “Not important?”
Adana put a hand on Sheridan’s right shoulder. An ancient little woman with a bandage on her head who I had not noticed before stepped up beside him on his left. I think she was introduced to me as Kora back on Earth before I came to Rathe to help Pon and Zygon.
“That’s right, these are crazy people. You should know that better than anyone! One of them kidnapped you, led us on a bloody chase throughout space and time looking for you, during which time he apparently instigated a Stockholm syndrome in you, and now look at you – you’ve become a wild-eyed killer among killers! You need help and right now in the worst way!”
Kora sighed, “That won’t help, Sheridan.”
“You understand nothing!” I shouted back at him. “These people have suffered! Pon was trying to save all of them, even those poor deluded slaves to the Harmonizers. He was a fool, an idealistic fool. He has paid with his life. The wild-eyed killers aren’t here. They are out there – the ones we put a stop to in the forest.”
“You are foaming at the mind,” Sheridan shouted back. “Whatever disease is carried in the water here has infected you!”
“Get out!” I shouted. “Go back to Earth. Leave me to what must be done. Zygon understood!”
“Zygon was a megalomanic troublemaker,” Sheridan snorted. “He
experienced the logical consequence of his delusions.”
“That’s enough!” Kora shouted above the both of us.
“Well, he did,” Adana said.
“All of you, shut up!” Kora insisted. “Lora, do you want to return to Earth now?” she asked.
“I have no intention of leaving these people,” I said coldly. “I have to see this through, for him and for Zygon. Trivialize my feelings for Pon and Zygon’s motivations with whatever kind of psychobabble you want. I know what I have seen. I saw Pon and Zygon do things that earned my respect. These people have earned my lifeblood. I will give it to them, you and the rest of eternity be damned!”
Sheridan looked completely stunned.
“Very well,” Kora said. “Sheridan, give me the reorientation device.”
She held out a frail hand, but her manner was so commanding that Sheridan did as she asked.
She walked up to me, and handed me what looked like a plain bracelet. “Take this, child. If at some point you decide you want to come home, put it on. The
Harr and Raynah will sense it, and be able to reorient you back to Earth.”
Then she sighed heavily and searched my eyes with hers. They were deep and immensely kind. For some reason, I felt like sobbing. The feeling from my dream, the feeling of my mother beckoning from within a sea of cool mist, tugged at every nerve I had.
“I fear you will have yourself to answer to before this is all over, but we have done what we could to help you, and we have paid dearly for it,” she sighed. “We will leave you now to your fate.”
She turned and laid her hand on Sheridan’s arm, “it is time to go,” she commanded. “There is nothing left for us to do but take Karellion home and mourn.”
“You aren’t worth his life!” Sheridan spat, contempt in his eyes. Kora sighed again.
“Adana, have the Harr and Raynah get us out of here,” he commanded.
They disappeared. The hole in space where they had stood sucked at my heart.
For the first time since Pon’s death, I could feel its presence in my chest.
