7)

Their happy compatriot was already snug and asleep, and they were able to leave him just as he was, without any accidental perturbation. Zeta led Ro upstream, since he thought going downstream would only prove unwise, and did not want to remind himself or Ro of what fright had happened that afternoon. There was a flat granite rock not far from their camp, and Zeta rested there, and in gentlemanly promptness, helped an ailed Rosalie aboard. She flopped down beside him, and observed the lovely night's exclusive view. The river twinkled in the moonlight, the stars overhead winked at her, the planets bright red and blue threw out commands to the universe, and the moon was three-quarters full, lifted from the southeast, and had just crowned the top of the mountains.
"What mountains are those, Zee?" Ro asked, to bring the tense silence to a close, and she really was curious. She wasn't exactly sure where they were.
"It's called the Cascade Range. There's a cluster of three mountains there called Three Sisters, over three thousand meters high."
Ro cared insignificantly for the details. The thought of sisters reminded her of a conversation last night. "Tell me that story again, the one about the Seven Sisters."
Zeta brushed soot and leaves from beside him on the rock into the river, a faint grin on his face Ro could not see. "Later. It'll be your reward for telling me what happened this afternoon."
Ro cupped her chin to her knees, sighing. She wound herself into a tight, tense ball.
"It's not like you, Ro, to be careless. Something must have happened. What if it'd been Bennett or--someone else?" Zeta faced ample difficulty when Ro did not immediately open up. In fact, he sensed her resistance and anxiety multiply. What other tactic ought he try? It usually didn't take so much effort on his part to get her explain any of her actions. Most frequently, Ro volunteered information, whether Zeta needed to hear it or not. She was a verbally expressive girl: what she felt inside she said, with little regard to the consequences or who would be hurt. "Can I help you in any way, Ro?"
Ro ran her thumb absently over a scratch on the wrist of her opposite hand. She could feel the welt of the scab, and knew there were several just like it various places on her skin, helter-skelter reminders of her mental absence that afternoon. "I am not reckless, Zeta, but you know I get klutzy sometimes. How do you know it wasn't just an accident?"
"You would have said it was."
Ro growled quietly. He had her on that one. She most certainly would've said it was an accident then valiantly blame herself for her own stupidity. But she hadn't, and it was too late to tell a big fib. "You know me too well."
"I'm sorry."
"Oh, don't apologize!" Her hand whipped through her tangled hair.
"I'm worried about you."
"I'm worried about myself."
"Why?"
"I told you."
"That you're losing your mind? That?"
"Yes, that!" she said with scorn.
"Ro, you can keep talking in circles all you want, and trying to confuse me, but it won't work."
"I know. You're one persistent robot."
"Two years," he suddenly said, just as he was running over the memory of his conversation with Jas before supper.
"What?" Ro observed him, her brow knitted in confusion. "I think you got water in your brain."
"No, two years. That's how long we've been together."
Ro nodded and set her hand to pat him on the leg. Her edginess temporarily evaporated. "I knew what you meant. Two years is a long time. Almost as long as my life on the road before you. Even longer than I was with my parents. And, thankfully, almost as far back as I can remember. Except lately."
"Lately?" Zeta leaned back on the boulder, against his elbows, and kicked his feet out before him, then crossed his ankles. He'd grown used to his human hologram, and after so long of studying the way that people moved, he mimicked easily.
Ro swerved to her right, to perceive Zee. He looked a little smug, so sure of himself. She wanted to retaliate and not tell him what had been occurring to upset her, what had thrown her out of herself and into a locked shell. But she knew she would tell him. What else was she to do? The last thing she needed was an argument with the only friend she had in the world. And even that was unlikely to happen. Zeta was no forceful debater, since nothing was capable of firing up any tangible passion.
Ro squinted and licked her lips. "I've been remembering things. I've been seeing things."
"What things?"
"Things that creep me out. Things that make me feel small and childish all over again."
"Like regression?" He realized as soon as he said it that he shouldn't have asked. His self-adjusted program to know everything about human nature had gotten in the way of his ability to be Ro's friend. "Sorry, I won't ask anymore questions."
She just stared anxiously at Zee, frustrated, not at him, really, that would be pointless, but at herself. What was wrong with her?
Zeta lifted a welcoming arm, and Ro leaned into him. She gained the necessary security to feel like herself again. Without his prying, and his assuring patience that she take all the time she need, at length Ro was able to narrate to him what had been happening, the things she'd seen, the things she thought, and exactly how much it'd been haunting her. Zeta listened carefully, storing away every word, and tried to think of the best advice, what any human would give to a girl in Ro's place.
"This," he began, "has been going on for a week? H'mm."
"What's the verdict, Zee? Am I really losing my mind?"
"No, Ro, you're not. It's impossible for a human to lose their mind. It's not something in you that can be stolen or erased, like it is for me. Figuratively, however----"
"You really do think I'm going crazy!" She flung herself hastily from him, and malicious energy poured forth.
Zeta smiled in the face of her dramatic tumult, and he kindly set her head back to his shoulder. "No, Ro. You're obviously channeling some deeper psychological problem."
"Obviously," she scoffed. "But what do I do about it?"
"Right now we have to take Jas home."
"After that?"
"I don't know. My foresight is not so good. You can't rely on anything in this world to actually take place. What is the point of planning?"
"You are learning to be human." Ro tucked herself closer to Zeta, refusing to think unhappy thoughts about her future. "This wasn't a very good time for me to have a nervous breakdown, was it?"
"There is never a good time for that."
"But, I mean, it's awfully selfish of me."
"No, it's not. You can't help it."
"You have your own worries, Zee. They're also my worries. I don't need to be another." She was quiet for a moment, and studied acutely Zeta's face. He stared blankly into the dark forest ahead. "What about Dr. Selig?"
Zeta twitched at the mention of his creator's sacred name, and his arm inadvertently tightened around Ro's shoulders. "Dr. Selig is dead."
"What if he isn't, though?"
Miserably, Zeta looked down at her.
"Well, stranger things have happened."
"No, Ro. We saw his ship blow up. We saw him go under, in the water. They blew him up, Ro! My one chance . . . gone."
Ro refused to listen to his pessimism. "But just imagine for a moment, Zee, that he isn't dead. We don't really know for sure that he is, do we? Think about it. Process that, mister."
Zeta tried to think about it. All he could think about, though, was poor Dr. Eli Selig, and how harmless of a man he'd always seemed to be. Zeta had had great hopes that Dr. Selig would be the one to release the synthoid from doom and restore his freedom. "I don't know, Ro." But he replayed the memory of Dr. Selig's death, and found a suitable conclusion. "We never did see his body."
"That's right. We didn't."
"I don't know if I can do it, Ro."
"Do what? Find the good doc again? It won't be that hard. He's sure to go back----"
"No, I don't mean that. We could always find him before, it wouldn't be hard to find him again. I mean I don't know if I can handle it. Being so close to freedom, then letting it all slip away again. It's . . . It's, well, disappointing."
Ro had never seen him so upset, and found his emotions an illusive oddity that mystified her. "You pick now to start acting human? Come on, Zee. I know you haven't really been the same since . . . since Nosis."
Zee curiously stared into Ro's eyes, attempting to find the source of something he sensed within her. The big blue eyes were the only unlocked doors to see inside of Rosalie Rowen. Some people were so easily read, but not Ro. A person--or a synthoid--had to dig a little deeper to find Ro. "How do you manage it, Ro?"
"Huh?"
"All this energy, this optimism. Where's it come from?"
"I don't know," she said, and tried to think of an expanded answer to satiate his need to know 'why' to everything in the world he found puzzling. "Humans are kinda built like robots, too, Zee. We come from different DNA components, different RNA, our genes are all different, like different parts and modules in synthoids, like you. We're a mix of this and that from our parents. You're a mix of this and that from metal supply companies and laboratories and the minds of great people, like Dr. Selig."
"That isn't it." Zeta waited, thinking through DNA and the birth of a child, development of early personality, and realized that something else was in a human. "Your optimism is something that you don't get from a cell. It comes from the other parts of you."
"You mean my--" she lifted an eyebrow, "my soul?"
"Yes, that's it. Your soul. But where does the soul come from? And why does your soul have more optimism than other souls?"
"It comes from somewhere inside. I don't know the exact location, but maybe in my heart. I owe a lot to optimism and my soul, that's for sure."
"I'm losing it, whatever it is. I don't mean my soul, if I have one. What is it in you that optimism creates and keeps you going so courageously?"
"It's faith, Zee. It's hope. You don't need a soul, or much of one, to know faith and hope."
Zeta was somber, his voice bleak. "Then I'm losing my faith, my hope."
Ro hugged him around his middle. He had a way of tapping directly into her thin vein of sympathy. "It's probably a good thing I'm still here. You really can make a girl feel needed."
Zeta was grateful, aware that Ro did not give her sympathy with simple ease. He patted her hair, silent in thought. If there was something he could do to help Ro as she helped him, he wished he could think of it. What did she need that he could provide? There was nothing. "I think you should rest, Ro," Zeta said.
"That's all I've been doing today."
"No," he shook his head gently, "I mean a real rest."
"Oh, you mean a convalescence type thing. I see."
"It would be good for you."
"Well, this chicken girl probably could stand to have her feathers straightened out." She watched as Zeta tried futilely to decipher the correlation between herself and a chicken. "Never mind, Zee. Sometimes you think about something too hard and it gets your gears smoking. I refuse to do anything about a convalescence right now. We need to get Jasper home. And there's something," she uttered languidly, "--there's something I think I need to do."
Zeta's audio detector picked up a certain quality in her tone that gave him a warning. "What?"
"These visions of mine have got to stop, and I think I might've discovered a way to do it."
He knew that asking for an explanation would yield no promising result. "It isn't a coincidence, is it, that we've run into Jas. You were right about what you told him tonight; you are meant to take him home. You were meant to guide him back to his family."
"Hey, I don't believe in predestination--or fate--whatever the kids are calling it these days. But in some way I know I was meant to be Jasper's guardian right now. Not so much for him but for me. I was that kid once. I know how he feels. I'm supposed to remember. I'm supposed to do these things. I'm supposed to--to go home."
"But, Ro--"
She waved her hand at him, and he shut up fast. "Don't ask me about it now. I don't know what I'm going to do. Something. You'll see." Ro flipped around, and laid her back upon the rock, her head resting above Zeta's knee. Her hands took hold of his tense arm, and she held onto it tightly. He provided the security of a parent and the tame affection of a more intimate relationship, just the things she needed then to stave off her fears. She stared up at the stars, the thick blanket of black atmosphere above. There was something so negative about the universe. Maybe it was all that space, and space is negative, the infinity of it all just going to waste. The glorious stars so brilliant but far away, somehow so mocking and narcissistic, knowing their beauty and flaunting it to a heart-weakened Ro.
"They have a way of making a person feel insignificant, you know?"
"Yes, they do."
Ro closed the lids over her eyes to welcome the feeling of tiredness. Her bruises ached, her shoulder was sore, and her left ankle was tender following a twist she'd suffered while being tossed among the rapids. She wouldn't complain. Who'd been the fool who'd let an apparition lead her off a rock in the first place? But if she was asleep she'd feel no pain, and she was determined that tomorrow would be a good day, completely absent of life-threatening moments. "Tell me that bedtime story you promised, Zee."
Zeta was quiet while Ro waited for her fairytale.
"Zee?" she asked, and lifted her hand to poke him in the shin. "You alive?" She tugged back her hand as soon as he quickly spoke his heartfelt quandary.
"Are you going to leave, Ro?"
"Wha . . . what?" Ro was suddenly up and awake and staring at her friend. "Why do you have this ability to ask me the toughest questions at the most random moments?"
Zeta had to look at every possibility as a responsibility to himself. The idea was not without some foundation, for she had said there was something she must do.
Ro was getting uncomfortable, and decided she should explain to him in simple terms. "Do you see me, Zeta?"
Zeta looked with shifty eyes, then glanced away behind her. Ro grabbed his chin in her fingers and made him look at her.
"You see me?"
He nodded.
"This is Ro. Your Ro. This is the Ro who is not leaving her little robot friend in the middle of his very important quest. This is the Ro that has no one else to go to, and even if she did she wouldn't care." She hadn't meant to sound so condescending, only caring. With a huff, she wondered how she could ever mix censure with affection. "Me. Ro. Not. Leave. You. Zeta." She tapped his chest with a fist as she said the words in harsh staccato. "Understand?"
When he said nothing, but she felt he did understand and was amply reassured by her demonstrative outburst, she resumed her comfortable spot beside him. The stars were still there and hadn't moved, their distance as equally foreboding to her as before, so she felt far away, immaterial, unsure of herself. Poor Zeta! she thought. What he must think of her!
Zeta gaped into the dark forest, amid the vertical tree trunks and horizontal undergrowth, between listening to the tree frogs and the fish that came to the surface of the river to snatch an insect. He thought about time, about his last two years. Time was a funny thing, a messy thing. Time was something a mortal could not beat. He glanced at Ro, her eyes closed, her chin resting on his forearm, and her frame seemed so small in his oversized jacket. She would age, and he would not. Peculiar, the things that a robot pondered, sitting in the dark somewhere near the High Desert of Oregon. A glance he casted at the stars filled a sense of kindred in him, like he was negative space. "Ro, how do you think this is going to end?"
Ro wanted to pretend he hadn't just asked her that. But she couldn't. There it was, out there, filling her brain with possible scenarios. All her previous happiness was corroding. She resented it, though she kept the contemptuous barb from her intonation. "I don't know, Zee. Let's not think of endings just yet. I've had enough endings in my life to suit me awhile." She tightened her hold on his arm. "Endings are terrible things, especially between friends."
"I won't think of endings until you tell me to."
The promise was not at all a comfort. To Ro, it actually screamed of sorrow. But at least it was something she could, for the present, ignore. "Tell me the story, Zee. I like your stories."
He fluffed her hair with his fingers, relaxing her, so she could easily drift off into sleep. "There was a Greek titan--"
"That's not right, Zee!" Ro rudely interrupted, dismayed at his fairytale blunder, ingenuous as it was. "A fairytale starts off with the words 'once upon a time.'"
"That's right. I'll start over." It wasn't really a classic fairytale, only a myth, but he didn't want to disappoint her. "Close your eyes. Go to sleep."
Ro did as she was told, even though her lashes were so heavy she could hardly keep them lifted by her own exhausted will any longer.
"Once upon a time," Zeta began, finally finding the right introductory phrase, "there was a famous and powerful Greek titan named Atlas. With his wife Pleione, they had seven equally beautiful daughters, who their father and mother loved deeply, and who they loved in return . . . ."
Someplace in myth, at some time, a family had been born, and a family had been happy. That was all Ro needed to hear.