Kora is dying.
The injuries she received on Rathe will prove too much for her ancient body. It isn’t just the blow to her skull that bruised her brain. It is the bruises to her heart caused by Karellion’s death, and perhaps more deeply, whatever it was she saw in
Lora’s eyes during their last conversation.
All the stories of our lives are written in our flesh. The molecular pathways that are the maps of who we are, are always being built between our nerves, even as we sleep. For all the days of our lives we are written, inscribed, constructed, made of whatever intersects with the shapes, colors, tones inherent in that of which we are an instrument – Life as archived in our DNA constantly being transcribed.
How delicate, unique, and irreplaceable is each embodied life?
Completely!
So terrible and immense is this simple, single fact, that all of human history is an attempt to avoid it.
The Iglendas don’t avoid the knowledge of the immense value of each unique life, yet they do not embrace it either. They fight each other over the right to be written upon by experience in a particular way. The
Harr say, in the end, they will find the entire Universe must be manipulated if only certain experiences are to be permitted to inscribe reality within them. They say it is a fool’s errand, this striving against intersection with the Universe. They say the Universe cannot be controlled in this way, indeed, It cannot be controlled at all. At the very least,
Zygons, Pons and Loras will always intrude. They feel it is more reasonable to ask why sentience has the form it does than to try to control experience’s intersection with our sentience.
On the other hand, I think it pays to try to get your way to some extent, because our lives are so short. We can only live here in the moment, not in some transcendent place where the good of all comes out in the wash. For instance, maybe
Sheridan should have killed that guy back in the forest on Rathe. I keep thinking maybe he should have. The Harr who live for millennia as individuals think I’m nuts, maybe as big a fool as the Iglendas, but I won’t live for millennia and neither will Lora or the Iglendas.
Perspective is probably everything. That’s what I’m thinking.
Maybe someone like me who has no choice but to live and die within a very short span of years is more qualified in some ways to understand Lora and the Iglendas than the Harr or even
Raynah. Maybe the problem with the Purics on Rathe putting so much faith in their Harmonizers was because no being that lives for millennia can ever really understand what short-lived beings need or feel or should do. Maybe that is why we can’t understand the
Beni. According to the Morah with whom I’ve interfaced, Beni wink in and out of existence as individuals in milliseconds. The Beni had its birth as a being in a distant galaxy within an energy field that retained the shape of the winking into and out of existence of subatomic particles. Over time, those shapes became the energy analogs of biomolecules. Some strange concatenation of energy and matter events occurred such that these shapes were able to unite and eventually self-replicate. The Beni as a group is a turbulent, short-spanned form of sentience, which is why it can’t understand us and we can’t understand it, but there you are – the quintessential, time and perspective-bound nature of sentience writ for all to see.
So maybe, irreplaceable as we all are, our commitment to what must be done in the face of the intersection of events in the Universe is the greatest good to which we can aspire.
Is that what this all adds up to, because I can’t help but see something in Kora’s eyes as she is dying right here by my side. She can see it all – the folly, the tragedy, and the heroism. She can’t add it all up though. She can’t make it balance with her own conviction that life is simply not to be taken. I can see it in her. It is like dividing by zero, it is out of bounds, more than her body can calculate, so it is dying. Maybe that’s the easy way out. Maybe it is her only option.
In the end here it is again – life passing, irreplaceable, unique, precious life passing. When she has gone, and I can tell she has maybe six breaths left now, not even enough for a word to pass through her larynx out into our straining ears – I will be left alone here with my own ideas about all this, because I know Sheridan, Malcolm, Thais, the Harr, and Raynah will never see things my way. They’ll say I’m not myself, not the old me before I was emptied – and they are right. Same DNA palette, but new experiences have made a person of me even I don’t really know. I haven’t lived long enough as this person to have that kind of self-knowledge. But, this is all I have to work with right now.
Who is to say there isn’t some force of event working through me that needs to be expressed in the way I’m about to express it, because I think the Morah and the Beni might be persuaded to see things my way. I think I’m about to find out because, I guess what I’m saying is I think I should go back to Rathe and help Lora. In fact, I mean to do just that, no matter what.
