VI: Won't Come Undone

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Edriss was watching my memories again. Since her sentencing, she did it pretty frequently, every night before she put my body to sleep, and surely while my mind was asleep. She reminded me of the way Peter had sat in front of the television for two weeks watching old movies after his mother died. To be honest, it bothered me, but not enough to argue with her about it. If she was going to crouch in my head, despondent, absorbing all my happiest memories, I couldn't fight her anyway, and reminiscing was what I'd be doing with or without her.

In another cycle we'd be taken back to Earth for her public execution. When she finally starved to death, I'd be briefly given over to another Yeerk so my mind could be searched for any posthumous charges they could slap on Edriss, and then probably disposed of. My body was already damaged from torture and unhealed injuries, and probably would only get more battered before her death. I would be useless as a host.

Our days were numbered. In a way, it brought out a strange camaraderie between us, one that hadn't existed when she was safe. Yeerks, when facing certain defeat, don't fight it like humans do. After a while, it made all my gloating deeply unsatisfactory. And I didn't want to die either – I was eager to finally be free of her, but some base human instinct in me recoiled at the idea of death. Edriss had explained to me that very few species are capable of the amount of cognitive dissonance that humans manage on a regular basis. I looked eagerly on to the freedom of death, and wanted nothing more than to live, all at once.

So instead of fighting with each other, we lay in the guarded quarters of the Pool Ship that had once been hers, sifting through my memories until we were both nearly delirious.

I held a newborn child in my arms, a boy, with chubby little fingers and a full head of hair. I knew the numbers. 9:27 a.m. Fourteen hours of labor. Thirty-eight weeks of pregnancy, maybe thirty-two being aware of it. Twenty-nine pounds gained, a number I'd fastidiously kept between the recommended twenty-five and thirty-five. Sixteen inches, six and a half pounds, an inconvenient for my job, but not unhealthy, fifteen days early. Peter told me all the numbers first because hard, concrete facts were so much easier for him to process than the fact that he was a father now.

"Which name did you put on the certificate?" I asked him, not taking my eyes off the foreign little thing in my arms. Peter was not the only one having trouble processing the whole thing.

"I went with Marco. You were right, it's not too Anglo-sounding, not too Spanish. And he looks like a Marco. Don't you?" He gently poked the baby's tiny fingers. Our son didn't yet have the motor control, or maybe the interest, to grasp at the intruding digit.

"I don't know if he looks like much yet. A Conehead, maybe. Look at the shape of that little skull."

"It'll get to normal shape soon. And we're not naming our baby Conehead," Peter said laughingly. "I think we'd know if he traveled here from Remulak."

"Oh, believe me, I would know. I think I know exactly where he was coming from for fourteen hours." The baby began to cry. I'd always assumed that parenting would be instinctive, but it was awkward and new, moving the baby's delicate, squished head into position to breastfeed. "I'm sorry, baby. Marco. Your head doesn't look that much like a cone."

I felt the memory distort. Edriss' mind was bleeding into mine. The images of twin newborns, half-Korean, of Hildy Gervais at my side, of my own arms paler and shorter cradling these babies, overlaid my own memory. A little bit out-of-sync, a little bit more faded on top of the memory of Peter and my single baby Marco in my arms.

The images of Peter and Hildy moved together towards the door. In a strange, overlapped voice, they said "your father's in the waiting room. I'll tell him he can come in."

{Edriss, stop trying to pretend it was your family. You have your own memories of them,} I told her.

{Yours are more clear,} she replied.

{This isn't yours. This is my memory.}

{Eva, my memories are fragmented and deteriorating. Yours are as well, but I can access the forgotten sections of them that even you can't. I can dredge up details you never would have remembered without me. Why shouldn't I be able to relive my happiness in the same vivid color and texture as I'm allowing you to relive yours in?}

{Because,} I growled, {it's not your happiness. It's mine. This is my happiness and my love and my family, not your sick murderous excuse for it. Don't even dare compare your idea of love to mine, murderer.}

{Is it so different from yours? Was it different for me to kill Allison Kim and Essam than it was for your brat to try and kill you?}

{Yes,} I said with complete conviction. {Yes, it was different, because Marco was trying to kill you, not me.}

I expected her to argue back more, almost wanted her to so I could tell her a hundred times why she was wrong. But the inevitability of her death had taken the fight out of her. Instead she just flipped over to a memory of my father teaching me to drive.

There had been times when, despite myself, I had admired Edriss' pragmatism and determination, her all-but-delusional confidence. It was difficult to admire her at all when she had completely given up all hope. She was only a memory of her former self, no acerbic insults or vindictiveness left to her, no ambition, no applied cunning. If an opportunity to escape presented itself, she would seize it, but she had no expectation of any chances showing up. All that was left of her were the faded memories she fixed atop the picture-show of my mind.

I almost felt for her for all the months she had spent sharing a head with me, when I was despairing.

She switched over to a memory of my first promotion, when I was in college managing a gas station, going from cashier to assistant manager. I felt the shadow of sympathetic pride and gratification. There was nothing much I could do if she was trying to use my life to remember her own feelings of joy. I didn't feel motivated to futilely try and start a row with her anyway.

{You know,} I said, neither accusing nor empathizing, {there's a certain irony, that you were sentenced to death partially because you were convicted of sympathy, and yet here you are going through my memories because they remind you of you.}

She didn't answer me. A memory of Peter and me at a university-sponsored classical music recital. Extra irony, there. Peter and Marco's escape from infestation had been presented to the Council as evidence that Edriss, empathizing with her human host and already in communication with the Andalite bandits, had orchestrated their protection. Of course, both of us knew it wasn't true, but she couldn't explain that they'd escaped because Marco was an "Andalite bandit" without admitting that she'd kept vital information from the war effort on Earth – which was, like so many Council rules, punishable by some form of painful death. Not that it mattered much anyway; after Edriss had failed spectacularly as a military leader in the Anati system, the Council had been looking for any little reason to reinstate her original sentence.

Last I'd heard, Visser Three was sending out assassins to kill my family. We hadn't heard news beyond that. I would have prayed for their safety, but I had faith that my son was smarter and better equipped than any thugs Visser Three could assign to him.

I slept while Edriss continued to watch my memories. I woke up hours later and found she hadn't stopped all night. I was opening a letter that was awarding me a scholarship; I was taking a bath Peter had prepared for me; I was intimidating an intern from a rival campaign; I was teaching Marco to read; I was excoriating a disliked co-worker; I was shooting some guy down at a bar; I was ten years old and beaming as my mother tasted my first attempt at cooking a whole meal.

Pride, love, power, satisfaction, affection. My life wasn't flashing before my eyes; it was loping along like a disjointed movie for the two of us, the two doomed viewers.

{Edriss,} I said, no longer expecting an answer from her, {in a few days we'll both be dead.}

{Yes.}

{I'll be free.}

{Yes. You will. You'll be free in death, like you always said. Though I don't see what the freedom is in that.}

{It'll be nice, to die on my home planet. To die and be free of you,} I repeated for the thousandth time since her sentencing, but she had made me, too, doubt the freedom of death.