(This is part six of The Bird of Time. Are you looking for part five? It's in the crossover section. — BfB)
On the Wing
If Yeirumis could still sigh in contentment, he would. Both he, and through their datalink, Ashita, were reviewing the thorough and surprisingly personal memoir of Kino the Traveler.
He'd deliberately avoided downloading the information directly, and instead called up a scan of the actual pages of the book. Yeirumis wanted to see the physical relic, and experience vicariously the joy Kino must have felt on seeing her thoughts in print. He also wanted to savor the half-forgotten flavor of the old language, the old thoughts. He paused often, to relish the memories her words awoke.
Until the account of the Kelbright massacre, Hermes had enjoyed a rich nostalgia, remembering his time alongside his rider oh, so achingly long-ago, in a world that had ceased to be.
But then came the massacre, the intervention of the mysterious UFO, and entirely new memories. Yeirumis alone, in all the cosmos, could fully explain that mystery. Only he could remember the less happy timeline, or eigenstate, in which Kino had died a noble death. And being dead, she could not make her speech to the Tatana. It felt strange, a poignant mix of revelation and pining, as he remembered her life after Kelbright — for the first time.
Her lecture had not immediately ended the war, of course. But it grabbed attention, setting the stage for the heart-rending testimony of the Choi children. This came at the exact moment the Tatana offensive culminated. Like a wave charging a beach, it hesitated, then fell back. With this reversal, thousands of the enemy had a change of heart, surrendered to amnesty, and found mercy.
The Tatana attack had been doomed from the start, of course. Yeirumis could not consult the actual figures, as those records never did exist in their current reality. Kino had hastened the end of the war by his estimate six months, and saved countless lives. She made a difference.
But her unwanted fame grew, and her life of safe anonymity was over, and with it, Kino's Journey as they had known it.
As he read, Yeirumis "remembered," to his growing delight, events he'd shared with Kino, even as he still recalled the long, dull period of mourning her. In his grief, he had not taken another mortal consort for decades. It had been Tisiphone who'd intervened, and given him his new companion. The feud with the Kindly Ones was truly over.
Tisiphone died in a great conflict, as can happen even to immortals. Gia, who'd died with her in the fire, found herself transfigured into the role. Now she too plied the stars, and Yeirumis remained on warm terms with the Fury, though he saw her rarely. She did her job well, for her office grew irrelevant as humanity matured, and she'd been called to cultivate another promising young species.
As often observed in such cases, his new, altered history had regained its course — his string of companions remained ultimately unchanged, just as in the full arc of human history, Kino's continued existence had only made life a little better, for a little while. But even that small improvement must be hailed as an astounding and rare accomplishment!
Yeirumis laughed with delight (well, the current equivalent, a less common but more intense emotional state) at the account of Kino's dreamlike experience in Celestia's realm. Humanity would not discover the means to vicariously experience alternate realities for almost a millennia. It made perfect sense though, given how her temporal moorings had been disrupted, that she'd endure such a thing. That it had in turn inspired her speech... in this he sensed a sublime symmetry, even the guiding hand of providence — or perhaps Celestial wisdom? He resolved to ask her (or rather Helios, her manifestation here) when next they met.
("He" briefly paused to appreciate the current lingual protocol that allowed for non-gender-specific states such as theirs.)
The Tatanan government collapsed and, in this case, those who'd given themselves up to the amnesty returned to rehabilitate their nation.
Once Kino no longer needed to fear bounty-hunters, she emerged from her seclusion. She used the gift of song she'd been given, and her unwanted celebrity, and transformed them into a career. Her fears, not least any fear of appearing onstage, had been extinguished by her rite of passage. She reinvented herself as a singer, a traveling troubadour to use an older term, fulfilling at last her childhood ambition.
The zenith of her success was the famous concert in New Relsumia, where the now-prosperous Tatana gave her the welcome of a folk hero.
Yeirumis accessed the data banks, and found the entire performance recorded for posterity. He felt (absurdly in retrospect,) shocked to see Kino as he'd never seen her, well into middle age, her youthful charms faded.
With that triumphant farewell tour, Kino retired from public life, wealthy and happy. She could never again be an anonymous traveler. Being catered-to as a celebrity denied her the joys of seeing a people authentically. Still, at her age, could she really have endured her former ragamuffin lifestyle?
Soon after, Kino could no longer travel, and she knew Hermes was ever-restless. She found a backwards land far from those that knew her, and created a new name and identity for herself. On that wistful but not melancholy day, when she gave up being Kino the Traveler, she also gave away her most precious possession: Hermes.
Kino's only child had put her mother's entire life in the shade in a single day, when the Elevator took her daughter up to a waiting starcraft, and a very different set of adventures. Far from resenting this, the matron beamed with pride.
But because her daughter chose to go where she and Hermes (at least then) could not follow, it fell to Hermes to choose his new rider.
Hermes had been Kino's last tether. Hers was an old soul. Like a tutor guiding a clever student to her final exams, Hermes had successfully guided Kino to her destination. This time, she would "graduate." Just as students never return to their old schools, Kino would never again return to this realm.
She understood. She had awakened, and she had finished her coffee. Time to wash her cup, and put it away.
Yeirumis absorbed all this new knowledge, all this fresh experience, with boundless joy, and felt very pleased with himself. As a gesture, he transmitted with all his considerable power, a portion of Kino's words to the hostiles who'd fired upon them, who'd pursued them even to the very edge of an event horizon. They would easily translate it, and perhaps the message would do still more good. Besides, it made him feel happy knowing that Kino's voice echoed outward in a spherical wave through the endless midnight, a voice once silenced an aeon ago, from a world whose sun had now boiled its seas away — the wisdom of a woman who'd pleaded for decency, and in doing so, had reclaimed her humanity.
I remember someone once said, 'only the unloved hate, the unloved and the unnatural.' If only that were true! Being hurt makes you hate, being made a helpless victim makes you hate. And when hatred consumes you, you can become that which you hate most.
We live in a world of discord. It makes us jaundiced, and disenchanted. The only way out is to forge new, healthy bonds of fraternity, based upon candid truth, loyalty to each other and to our ethics, generosity and kindness for those less fortunate. And for pity's sake, learn to laugh at your own faults. Sometimes by accepting our imperfections, we can turn them into our unique strength.
Only by valuing and cultivating these virtues can we find, or even see, what we've been missing all along — harmony: each of us singing our own notes, in our own voices, together. Only then can we build a better world.
Her ancient plea would echo across the dizzying expanse of time and space, to what effect even he could not predict. Perhaps some primitive species would hear and translate, and think hers the voice of a goddess. Yeirumis in his long ages had seen worse things, and less likely.
He watched as Ashita ruminated upon her words, his internal systems automatically translating in microseconds. The youth expressed his approval, and Yeirumis felt a surge of affection for this, his new rider.
It was time to put Kino away, lest he neglect Ashita. Such an exciting time! What had once been named "Andromeda" was on the verge of colliding with their native galaxy, bringing with it an incalculable wealth of new things to experience, learn, and appreciate.
"Where to?" Yeirumis asked in the old tongue.
Ashita, a youth of intellect and promise even by this era's standards, summoned up a polychronal/dimensional navigational pointer, and linked it to a simple Brownian motion algorithm.
"Shall I spin the stick?" he said.
Ah, my beloved, fill the cup that clears
today of past regrets and future fears.
Tomorrow — why, Tomorrow I may be
myself with Yesterday's sev'n thousand years.
.