She told me how sometimes her pulse pounded in her ears just afterwards. How from behind that percussive whoosh a ringing rose up and drowned out the world.
There was what I saw, and there was what she saw. Crossing the gulf between them demanded my patience and my imagination.
What I saw: her shivering body pressed against mine. She was real. She was next to me. Her eyes were looking right at me.
What she saw: she was no one, adrift in a noisy sea of stars.
Beautiful world, seen and unseen!
That reminds me.
I said "I'm sorry" once to a ball of light hovering over her shoulder, at just one of those moments when her hearing had gone. Long ago someone had told me that at least some of those disembodied bundles of data were the spirits of dead reploids. I'd been saying "I'm sorry" to them ever since.
"I'm sorry."
"What, Andrew?"
It turns out the vast majority of humans can't see the spirits of dead reploids, or even the spirits of dead humans.
Imagine that.
That reminds me.
She told me how a man from out of town once paid for her to join him on an expedition to the interior to scavenge for valuables. By day she bore his packs and his water canteens. By night, poor girl, she bore burdens of another sort.
It was her first time to see the ruins up close. She took in all she saw with an apathy borne of lifelong humiliation. Well, almost all. Half-collapsed buildings, burned-out cars, mangled human skeletons: she was nonplussed, especially by the skeletons. She'd seen plenty of corpses before.
And then they came to a field dotted with grassy mounds of various sizes on the outskirts of the city.
The grassy mounds were the remains of reploids who had perished in the last days of the Elf Wars. Unlike the dead humans, they hadn't rotted away. They had rusted and been buried by the creep of returning Nature. Here and there she saw an eye, or a finger, peeking out through the weeds.
"Damn things finally stopped killing us and started killing each other," the man explained. As a boy, he'd heard the story from his father and the whys and hows were hazy. "That's how the war ended. And there you have it. Good riddance."
She ran to one of the mounds and kicked it. She kicked it again. And again. All her hatred coalesced in her right foot, as if the particular lump of grass at her feet were responsible for everything wrong in her life.
If not for these reploids, the city behind her would be thriving still. She'd be living in it. There would be food, stability. Her father would never have fallen ill and died. Her mother in desperation would never have sold her.
The man stood against a wall, in the shade, laughing. She looked back. She knew he understood. In a show of magnanimity he let her have her fit. Or perhaps he thought it was entertaining. And then, when he grew bored he called her over, slapped her on the buttocks, and placed the loaded pack back onto her shoulders.
"Did you enjoy your revenge, little missy?" he said. Another laugh. "Well, better him than me."
"I never pitied them at all, Andrew," she said, referring to those mounds. "The thought of it never even crossed my mind. But now, after having known you..." She held me, and she cried real tears.
You see, time moves in one direction only, but the heart...
Oh? I've already told you that? Well, it's true, you know.
A ball of light was hovering over her shoulder. I told her so.
She turned toward the light without seeing and said, "I'm sorry."
I'm glad she didn't live long enough to see the latter days of the crisis and X's transfiguration, when those little bundles of data newly extracted from their bodies began to light up the night sky by the hundreds and thousands.
I'm glad, but only for her sake.
God knows I would have appreciated the company.
