by Neil Hetzner
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
Maternal Instincts
A surprised Prissi reached out with both hands to take the soup from the boy.
Each of the teenerz nodded, but neither spoke.
For Prissi, everything still hurt. Even lifting the mug to her lips involved more damaged parts than she could imagine. Prissi sipped and looked into the small coal black eyes and smiled at the boy whose hair reminded her of an osprey’s nest. The boy did something back with his face. Prissi guessed that it might be a smile, too. Prissi paused between sips to say, “This is good. Thank you.” After several seconds, the boy said something back. It took some effort on Prissi’s part to understand that the boy also has said, “Thank you.”
“Where am I?’
“Bury.”
To be sure that she had understood, Prissi repeated, “Bury?”
The boy nodded and Prissi muttered to her soup, “That’s reassuring.”
Twenty minutes later Prissi was unsure whether to blame the fluids dripping into her, the language barrier between herself and the boy, or just to accept what she thinks she has been told. A woman who doesn’t talk. Horses that do. A woman who is a mother, but doesn’t mother. A boy who barely can say his name, but wants to know hers. A place called a bury, but with no prefix like Simsbury or Shrewsbury.
To give herself time to make some sense of what she had heard, Prissi yawned and yawned, then, closed her eyes and evened out her breath until the boy shuffled off.
Prissi was adrift in Africa when moist rough fingers caressing her wrist woke her. As soon as the girl opened her eyes, the boy said, “Your friend is here.”
A startled Prissi blurted, “My friend? Jiffy?”
“Bob.”
“Bob? Who’s Bob?”
“Old Bob. Bird Bob.”
“I don’t know a bird Bob.”
“Bird Bob your friend. You can have him. Mortos said. Olewan fix Mortos. You get Bird Bob.”
Prissi drifted back to an afternoon at the family’s camp in the highlands of eastern Burundi. The winds were blowing so hard the trees were talking. She had a fever. Not malaria. Something else. Her mother cooled her wrists with alcohol. That slightly nauseating smell, the jabber of the trees, the heat burning her cheeks like a sunbeam she couldn’t escape, her mother’s worried sighs sounding like an oscillating fan all floated through her mind, which tried, and failed, to make sense of those disparate threads. Her brain had panicked when it could not bring order to what was going on around and within her. She had felt like the world was fracturing. Her mother sighing like trees. The trees talking like the village elders. Cold wrists. Hot face. Nothing making sense. Not then…and, not now.
Prissi squeezed her eyes tightly shut and used her fingertips to flick away at the illogical words the inarticulate boy was flinging at her.
The next time Prissi woke the room was dark. When the girl took a deep sigh, sharp pain shot through her torso. That pain was followed by a disembodied voice from across the room.
“You have two broken ribs. Your right ulna has a greenstick fracture. You have a concussion. There is blood in your urine, most likely from a bruised kidney. You were very close to dying. First, I hoped, now, I know you will live. You are strong. You are healing much faster than could be expected.”
Olewan stared at the girl, who remained silent. Despite the fact that Olewan assumed the girl’s silence meant fear, rejection or dismissal, she still was happy to be in the room. For too many years, Olewan has been alone—except for the irritating distraction of the boy. For years she has looked at her future, her death and done nothing more than shrug. Now, that indifference has changed. Since her clone has been delivered to her in Mortos’ arms, she has been considering the end of her life with very different insights, regrets and hopes.
The girl definitely is her clone. She has proved that. But to learn why the girl knew to come to the Bury, Olewan has had to wait impatiently until the girl became conscious and coherent. Now, that the girl was alert, Olewan hoped to have her many questions answered.
It took more than two hours—a time filled with long pauses and tears, with both angry and despairing words, and with many answers before Olewan’s questions stop. Despite the girl’s insistence, it made no sense to Olewan that it would be Joshua Fflowers’ trying to harm her. When Prissi tells Olewan how she had come to the Bury through the kind acts of a crippled man named Allen Burgey, who she later learned once was called Glen Laureby, the old woman does not doubt that that seemingly kind act was fathered by a dozen darker motives. When the teener told her about the crystal pendant Laureby had given her and how it matched the one she had found among her mother’s treasures, it made the crone’s heart race with hope. Being given an opportunity to extend her years was a much more beguiling gift now that the girl was in her life.
As the girl watched, Olewan scuffled across the floor and put her spidery hands into Prissi’s pak. It was hard to tell who was more disappointed when the pendants were not to be found. Prissi thought they must have been lost somewhere in the forest where she had crashed. Olewan was sure that Mortos had stolen them.
Not wanting the girl to see how disappointed she was, but also not ready to break off their visit, Olewan said, “While you are quiet, let me tell you a story.”
The old woman paused as if gathering her thoughts.
“You are here because I am here. You were sent here. For a reason. I am an old woman. My name, Olewan, says that. I have been alone so long that I talk poorly and, I am sure, converse worse. If you have questions, and you will, they may not be answered. Because I can’t, or because I won’t.
“You are interested in me as I am interested in you. I am not yours, but you are mine.
“Before I was Olewan, I was Elena. When I was Elena, I was bright, but not wise. Much like you, I fear. Now, I am neither. But, I am alive.
“Is that a worthy goal? To be alive? Aren’t all stories about being alive? Alive with love. Alive and alone. Alive with loss. Alive with Death stretching out its dark eager hand…to pull you across the river.
“You have met Joshua Fflowers. He, like me, also confused knowledge for wisdom. Many years ago, I was married to Joshua Fflowers. That was a mistake, but a worse mistake was that I was wedded to Joshua Fflower’s ideas even more than I was wedded to the man himself. His idea of winging humans. His idea of creating a bestiary. His idea of extending life. I helped all of his ideas become real. We grew wings and centaurs and centuries of extra life.”
Prissi was having a very hard time making sense of what the woman was saying. With each of the woman’s words, Prissi’s mind went off if a different direction. The sense of mental anarchy she had had with the boy and bird Bob returned with a vengeance.
“You said you were interested in a small company called Centsurety. That is what we did there. We altered wings and lives and life. We assured that there would be centaurs and we insured that a human life could be two centuries longer than it had been. That was our intelligence at play—mine and Vartan Smarkzy with the centaurs and Roan Winslow, Glen Laureby and my own with the longevity. It wasn’t until we had accomplished what Joshua Fflowers had dreamed that we looked up and around long enough to realize that they weren’t dreams at all, but fevered musings, nightmares, not that different from those that have been holding you.”
Olewan’s last words made Prissi catch her breath. That sound held up Olewan’s tale for a moment and allowed Prissi to realize that the old woman’s words and sentences have changed. The girl understands that there is more than a simple old woman before her.
“In the same way that a virulent disease grows into a pandemic, so, too, grew Joshua Fflowers’ ego. What happened to him went beyond hubris into megalomania. My colleagues and I decided that things had to change, radically change. We decided to destroy our work even though we knew that after we did that we would have to hide from Fflowers’ wrath for the rest of our lives. So we did, and so we have. We destroyed Centsurety with fire, faked deaths, an
d fled.
“I came here. Glen Laureby first went to India. The woman who raised you went to Africa.”
Prissi’s muscles went rigid.
“Why do I say it that way? Because it is true. If you were to see a picture of me at sixteen, you would know that you came from me and not Roan Winslow. You are my clone. My child. Mine.”
Although it was easier to stay small and silent, Prissi pushed the words out past the raw burn at the back of her throat.
“How can that be?”
“It can be because your mother was the smartest of all of us. I had ovarian cancer when I was in my thirties. Before my surgery, my eggs were harvested so that Joshua Fflowers and I could have children, or, in his mind, geniuses, when it was convenient. When we, the others at Centsurety called us Trinity, decided to run away from our successes, I took my eggs and left others in their place. Now, what is obvious is that before I had that vengeful idea, Roan Winslow already had understood that if she were to have some of my eggs, it might act as life insurance, or at least a bargaining tool, if Joshua Fflowers found her…or if I decided to betray her.”
The old woman’s story didn’t make sense to Prissi.
“If she wanted children, why wouldn’t she have had her own rather than cloning you.”
“I don’t know. Perhaps, she was infertile. Perhaps, she may have wanted a child who could double as a pawn.”
In spite of the pain it brought to her neck muscles, Prissi shook her head in denial.
The old woman shook her head in imitation of Prissi.
“No? Impossible? Well, perhaps, she adored me above all others.”
The woman’s snort reminded a horrified Prissi of herself.
Prissi rasped, “I don’t believe you.”
“I’ve often had the same feeling. One of the drawbacks of being a scientist is that it makes living our personal lives more complicated because we are so adept at generating alternative hypotheses for how and why things are.”
To give herself time to think, Prissi looked across the room to the tale teller and asked, “Who is bird Bob?”
“Do you play chess?”
“Not very often.”
“I used to decades ago. With some intensity. Sometimes, I found it restored me. Now, I feel like I might be playing on multiple boards again. If that feeling is true, then, Bird Bob is a piece in a game. My opponent seems to think that Bird Bob is powerful enough to checkmate me. My inclination is to treat him as a pawn. My understanding is that Bird Bob seems to consider himself a knight of some sort. Errant.”
Prissi, who had been staring at the gray glazed ceiling above her, turned her head when she heard a shuffling noise.
“I’ve said too much. You have much to consider. You’re agitated.”
Prissi watched the old woman’s fingers adjust the IV line attached to her. For some reason, it reminded her of someone tuning a guitar.
“Sleep…daughter.”
Despite her best efforts to resist the medicine and the madness flowing in her, within minutes Prissi’s mind was back in the hot red dust of Africa. Olewan, too, was wandering in memories from the past, however, knowing that she had much work to do, she didn’t linger there for long. Instead, she began to construct a story that would make the girl want to stay with her. A story that would tell of maternal safety within the Bury and mortal danger without.
