Chapter 9
"NO!!!"
The stool crashed to the floor as she scrambled back and away with the panicked haste of a hot-wired cat.
"No! I'm, ah, my name's –"
Mel quickly held up what she hoped was a reassuring hand, rapidly speaking over her. "– Your name's Jamie Swenson. I know. Please don't be alarmed..."
"Who are you?"
"... I'm not a reporter or a ... a Vardian or anything," Mel hurriedly went on, afraid to move, seeing that the other woman was backing up and edging for the far end of the counter towards the front door, poised to bolt. "Really. My name's Mel Porter. I'm..."
Lontoria froze in astonishment.
"You ... You're Daggon's Human friend?"
"Yes. I ... I was his ... friend."
Edgy and uncertain, Lontoria nervously licked her lips and looked her up and down.
"Would it help if I showed you my driver's license?" Mel offered, trying for a little tension-defusing levity.
"Miss Porter!" she finally gasped on a shuddering exhale of relief. "Of course! I should have recognized you from his description! It's just you gave me very a bad scare!"
"I really didn't mean to," Mel apologized.
"But you did anyway!" She shook her head through an uncontrollable series of short, barking chuckles, first beginning to recover her equilibrium. "For a moment there I ... I thought he may have missed a few." Still chuckling to herself she came around the counter. "But of course he wouldn't have."
She walked right up to Mel and placed her hand on her breast, just over her heart.
"I am deeply honored to finally be meeting you, Miss Porter," she said, formally inclining her head in a near bow. "And I want to thank you for looking out for him, for freely opening your House to him, for providing him with safe haven, for easing the loneliness of his troubled soul and giving his heart rest."
Off-balance herself by this unexpected turn of events and now flustered as to how to respond to what was so obviously said as an honest and deeply respectful tribute, Mel's mouth opened and closed a few times in unknowing sync with the lone celestial goldfish in the small aquarium tank beside her.
Although she'd been well aware that Cole had left Lontoria behind, it was still a shock to be meeting up with her – especially here and particularly now. She wasn't at all certain what to make of the coincidence or what think or even how she should behave. Then she unconsciously extended her own hand to return the familiar Cirronian gesture as the simple words of acknowledgement just came.
"I ... I was ... honored to be chosen to make that choice."
Lontoria gave a delighted laugh and nodded her approval, her hand dropping gracefully away, Mel's own hand following suit, if not quite as gracefully.
"You know, Daggon always spoke very highly you and with a great deal of fondness," Lontoria told her as she turned to pull two stools out from beneath the counter and bade that Mel take a seat for their own private little tête-à-tête. "As able and resourceful as he is, I doubt he could've long managed on this world without your help. And mass prison break or not, without you I don't think he would've even had it in him to want to try. He'd set his course in a very different direction."
Mel mulled that over as she made herself as comfortable with this uncomfortable situation as best she could. Intuition had told her that the two Cirronians had seen each other at least a few times since they were reunited during that horrible incident' with Zin, even though Cole had never mentioned it and she'd always respected his privacy too much to ask. Lontoria's words of "always spoke" only provided confirmation. But what she was telling her about him was nonsense.
"You're giving me far too much credit," she politely disagreed, trying to cover her unease. "I may have, um, helped him negotiate the Human world a little quicker than ... than what might've been otherwise, but ... he never really ... needed me. He was very focused on his job, very disciplined. All but obsessed, if you want to know the truth. I think he would've gotten it together just fine on his own."
"Oh, don't sell yourself so short, Miss Porter. Never forget that I know his background and I knew him well on Sar-Top. He'd been lost in the blackest of voids for quite some time before he came here, well beyond the reach of anyone. He could be so formidable and frightening you never would have recognized him. ... And his reputation! Well, if only half of it is true, then it's no wonder that so few of the inmates ever dared give him any trouble. The bridled rage within him was... Well, I honestly don't believe he was entirely sane, although he certainly passed every test they..."
"He's the sanest individual I've ever known!" Mel indignantly protested, automatically rising to Cole's defense as she always had, not wanting to recognize the portrait being painted of her gentle Cirronian yet a part of her recognizing the cold measure of truth in it all the same.
She'd seen some of what he was capable of when he'd broken in the door of the motel room and gone after Tevv. She was also well aware that he never had any compunction over threatening a slow and very painful Collection if it suited his purposes – or had any hesitations at all over going through with it. More, her one experience told her that a wholly loving and gentle being could never endure routinely doing what he did, forcibly tearing lifeforces from their bodies and tasting their terror.
"Yes, that's very true," Lontoria conceded with some amusement. "Cole certainly is entirely sane. But I was speaking of Daggon. Him you never knew at all."
"But ... aren't they ... the same?"
"Of course they are. Yet they're also not, Miss Porter. They're really very different. Daggon was the one who followed Rhee to this world to hunt him down and slaughter him. And then to bring an end to his own life. Waiting for the opportunity to do so was the only thing that kept him going. This I know." She raised a surprised brow at Mel's shocked expression. "Weren't you aware of that?"
Still trying to cling to the comfort of denial, Mel shook her head. "No. No, it was his job to see that Rhee stayed locked up and..."
"... And he was the only one who could do that?"
"No!" Mel stubbornly insisted. "You've got it all wrong! He ... he came here to recapture Rhee and..."
"Recapture? Is that what he told you?" She faintly smiled. "Or is that only what you want to believe? ... Didn't it ever strike you as strange that he was set up to be the one guarding the murderer of his own family? Didn't you ever ask why or how that came to be? Or why he was the one to pursue him when he escaped? ... Or even wonder why most of the fugitives were so afraid of him?"
Mel gnawed on her lower lip and looked away as the anchor of her denials began to sink, not knowing what to think anymore. She had sometimes wondered about those very things but she'd never asked, never questioned, simply accepted whatever Cole told her without ever digging too deep, oftentimes without digging at all.
Had she done it again? She'd never questioned Rod about the suspected shady dealings of his business partner or asked him how much he knew or if he might be involved in some way. Instead, she chose to believe that he wasn't a part of it and allowed everything to just slide, an ostrich hiding her head in the sand. Had she behaved the same way with Cole? And if so, then how well did she really know him?
Surely she couldn't possibly know the inner shadows of his soul as well as one of his own kind, especially one he had been "involved" with somehow or other. "Not as you know it here on Earth," Cole had said of their relationship. Whatever that meant. And she'd never asked for clarification about that, either.
"Daggon needed you in many more ways than you could ever know," Lontoria went on, thinking aloud. "In many more ways, I think, than even he could ever know." Her speculative sidelong glance stopped another of Mel's protests, it weakly dying in her throat. "I haven't any idea what you did or how you did it, but it was far more than I or anyone else ever could. Through you he somehow found himself again. If nothing else, believe that."
Once again Mel felt herself flushing, but this time with uncertainty. Lontoria was surely exaggerating. She had to be. And she speaking as if she was some sort of miracle worker while she knew she was nothing of the kind.
"But that's just it," she tried to explain. "I - I didn't do anything! Sometimes I think I was more of a hindrance to him than anything else, one more thing for him to worry about – if only to keep me from worrying!"
Lontoria openly studied her for a moment, her expression curious.
"One of these days, Miss Porter, after I've told you his whole story, maybe you'll be able to see your true part in it. Then perhaps you can tell me all about it. I'd very much like to know."
"Please, Lontoria," she uncomfortably demurred, attempting to change the subject. "My name's Mel."
"Yes, but since I have to play the part of a Human teenager I'd best stay with calling you Miss Porter. If that's okay? And you have to remember to never call me by my given name. I'm Jamie now."
"Yeah, you're right," Mel said, too disconcerted by her own roiling thoughts to do anything but concede to something so minor. "That would probably be best."
"Good. But you must tell me. I last saw Daggon four days ago. He wanted to be sure that I didn't have enough Cirronian energies to register on his sensors ... And he wanted to ... to say good-bye and wish me well..." She wistfully sighed. "I miss him already..."
The way she said it, a haunted echo of regret from their shared past, convinced Mel that there had been far more to their involvement than she could ever know. She stifled the ache of jealousy at the thought, sternly telling herself that it was none of her business, telling herself that her feelings on the matter were totally inappropriate.
"Anyway, I gather from the news reports that his idea for a remote Collection was successful ... But was he able to make it back to Migar?"
"Oh, yes. He was able to reopen the wormhole and return ... home ... yesterday, taking all of..." She paused a moment, awkward with her wording. "... All but you with him."
"And you don't approve."
"It was never my call to make," Mel neutrally responded, looking away from that steady, all-seeing blue gaze.
Although she had well understood Cole's rationale that Lontoria had been grossly manipulated and never deserved Sar-Top in the first place, and she herself was grateful to the woman for literally sacrificing her Cirronian lifeforce so that he could live, his decision to let her remain free had nearly sparked her having an argument with him. It had been her contention that he was too emotionally involved to see the bigger truth, that beyond the crime of treason, which had landed her on Sar-Top, she had killed a young Human girl.
"It wasn't really his call either, Miss Porter," Jamie simply stated. "But he made it anyway. We all know that I should've been Collected." She closed her eyes, as if she found it easier to talk in her own darkness. "Jamie Swenson was such a sweet, gentle and loving child ... Very brave, very stoic in her pain and fear ... And she so very much wanted to live ... On the 805 train when we ... When I..." She drew in a shaky breath to compose herself, then went on. "Two lifeforces cannot occupy the same body and so I became a murderer, no different than the others ... My possession may have served to heal Jamie Swenson's body, but it annihilated her."
"Your lifeforce needed a Human body to survive," Mel reminded her, repeating Cole's reasoning, now even more uncomfortable because Jamie's words were pretty much what she had said to Cole. "And if you had to claim a body, then since Jamie Swenson was dying of..."
"The primal directive of kill or be killed is hardly an excuse," she said with quiet shame, her anger directed solely at herself. "Daggon may have considered those things adequate reasons, but I don't. Jamie Swenson did die. At least a month before her time. And all because of me. Every Human on that train died ... Dozens of families were destroyed. People lost their mates, children were denied their parents ... Many hundreds of lives were affected."
"You cannot hold yourself accountable for all of them, Jamie," Mel slowly said, moved in spite of herself by the Cirronian's honest assessment. "Only for the one you took."
"I don't and I do. But I can't ... I won't ... whitewash the magnitude of what happened. Or the horror of knowing that I was enough of a monster to allow myself to be a part of it. Now I'll be spending the rest of my life trying to atone for the murder of Jamie Swenson as well as for committing the crime of treason against my own. And it will never be enough. Nothing I ever do ... will ever be ... enough."
"Yes, you were a monster," Mel said after a moment's pause, having to agree. "Is that what you need to hear? But at least you recognize it and accept the responsibility. I'll give you that much. And I know it's much easier said than done, but dwelling on your past crimes and guilts will only get in the way of doing all you can to make what amends you can. Even if it will never be enough, it will be far more than nothing. You can only go on from here, from where you are in the present, and do your best."
"I know," Jamie said, acknowledging Mel's judgement of her with good grace. "But sometimes I ... I don't know if I can."
"But you must. Didn't you tell Cole that by taking Jamie's dying body you gave her mother, a woman who would've spent the rest of her life grieving big time, new life and hope? That has to count for something, certainly for more than if he'd Collected you and locked you away for the rest of your life."
"That's what Daggon said. And that I've gone from a lifetime of imprisonment on Sar-Top to a lifetime of self-imprisonment within a stolen Human body."
Mel shifted uncomfortably in her seat. In many respects what Cole had told her was quite true. Jamie was serving the hardest life sentence of all. "Look, morally, ethically, the whole thing may not be entirely right. Hell, if you want to know the truth, I think it really sucks! But it isn't entirely wrong, either. At least something of good may come of it."
"Daggon kept telling me the same thing," she reflected. "Did he finally learn the truth of that from you?"
"I doubt it," Mel derisively snorted, thinking of the two major guilt trips that defined her life.
"Well, I don't. He had a hard time seeing things in shades of gray before." Jamie then seemed to shake herself out of her mood and abruptly changed the subject. "So! What brings you so far from Chicago?"
"I went for a drive," Mel wryly replied, relieved that they had moved to the neutral realm of general chitchat. "And it got a little out of hand. And why are you so far from home? Shouldn't you be in school or something?"
"Not any more. Despite her always delicate health, Jamie Swenson was an honor student with nearly perfect grades. This allowed me to take the State exams and receive my high school diploma a semester sooner. I've earned a full college scholarship – much to Mrs. Swenson's joy and relief – and will be starting classes this summer."
Mel tilted her head toward the textbooks. "You'll be going into pre-med, I assume?"
"Yeah. I've always loved the sciences, but I'm not going anywhere near physics this time. Too many bad memories there, far too many destructive – and self-destructive – choices. I've been given the gift of a second chance here and won't waste it. In this life I intend on specializing in the treatment of genetically based diseases and disorders. Meanwhile, Jamie's mother and I are up here visiting with her sister for a few weeks. My' aunt. This is her store."
"Ah ha! And so you're just marking time working for her?"
"No, I'm only helping out for a few days. My' aunt needed emergency oral surgery and her usual help are all down with the flu." As if suddenly seized with shyness she bowed her head. "Um ... you know ... Daggon advised me that if there was anything I ever needed on this world, especially if I was in need of someone I could freely talk to ... someone who would know and understand who and what I really am ... I was to seek out your council."
Mel blinked at that, startled. "He did?"
"Oh, yeah. And I actually planned on doing so, which is why I'm so very glad to see you. He trusted you, Miss Porter. Totally and implicitly. And of course I'll do the same. I would hope it can be ... mutual?"
The word seemed to hang in the air between them, a word imbued with many layers of meaning, then the bell above the front door tinkled as the young counterman from the cafe came in, breaking the spell before Mel had a chance to respond.
Jamie looked over at him and gave a long-suffering groan, then stood. "Would you excuse me a moment, please? This Human male seems to have some difficulties in comprehending the meaning of the word no'."
"Oh, believe me, Jamie," Mel laughed, amused in spite of herself. "He's far from unique."
**** *** **** *** ****
"Well, now," Mel lightly teased after the disappointed young counterman left, stomping off in a huff of male pique. "Seems you have an ardent admirer."
"No, not me," she said in a troubled tone, staring at her shoes. "It's Jamie who has an ardent admirer."
"That is what I meant."
"Yeah, well ... She and Stephen have known each other for years. They began dating a few months before her last illness. He's very nice, but he's just a child. And he's a Human child at that."
"But you're Human now. And you're what? Eighteen now? He's only a year or two older than you are. The two of you would make a very cute couple."
Jamie sadly regarded her. "Can you really think it's that simple, Miss Porter?"
Mel inwardly berated herself for being so flippant, for not seeing the other woman's distress. All outward appearances to the contrary, Jamie was far from being a girl in late adolescence.
"No, you're right," she apologized. "It isn't. And I'd forgotten. I'm sorry. Your Human host may be a teenager, but you're an adult. This whole thing must be very hard for you."
"Actually, I'm almost old enough to be Stephen's mother. But that's hardly the point." She tapped the side of her head. "Up here, where it counts, I'm Cirronian and always will be. Not Human." She mirthlessly chuckled to herself, then went on. "Perhaps ... one day ... I might be integrated enough into this shell and into this world to become Human enough to have such an interest but... Well, I don't think it's likely."
"I ... I'm not sure I follow."
"Don't you? Ask yourself this: how long do you think you would have to live in isolation with a troop of chimpanzees before the males started to appeal to you? A year? Two years? Ten? Or would it never happen at all?"
Mel caught her breath. How could she have been so stupid for so long? How could she not have seen the obvious? Certainly if a sheepherder is horny enough to get it on with his sheep it's considered a gross act of bestiality. Until fairly recently she'd been thinking along much the same lines if a Human got it on with an alien, it never so much as occurring to her that such thinking might work both ways. With the Human being the lower order of life, then wouldn't the alien be inclined to think of it as an unnatural act? And wouldn't it be?
"I mean no offense, Miss Porter," she quickly continued, as though she thought she'd done just that. "And I certainly don't mean for you to think that I'm equating your people with the other primates of your world. I don't find Humans unpleasant or anything, surely not repulsive, only very ... um ... uh..."
"Physiologically primitive?" Mel supplied, repeating a description Cole once used.
"Well, there's that, since you mention it," Jamie readily admitted. "But beyond just the physically primitive, there's little about a Human male that would ... push the buttons' shall I say? ... for a female of my species. For one thing, they behave very differently and have very different attitudes and expectations. For another, fur and mammalian signatures hold no appeal at all for a Cirronian. And why would they? We're not even mammals."
Mel digested that with thoughts of Nestov forever behaving like a dog in heat, eagerly sniffing around every reasonably attractive Human female he came across. But even he had all but admitted that he'd simply allowed his own psyche to be subsumed by that his Human host in that regard, never realizing until he'd met Bunny that Humans had so much "activity below the waist," as he had put it.
And hadn't much the same thing had been true of Cole? He'd backed off from having a relationship with her, nowhere near Human enough to be comfortable with the idea or with what his body was feeling, his excuse being that he couldn't allow himself to "get distracted" from his work.
And it was only an excuse. She'd known it from the moment he'd uttered it but found herself powerless to offer any objections, unwilling to push him in a direction he clearly didn't want to go. Yet from that point on until the moment he went home, the both of them had been almost constantly distracted by the simple presence of the other...
What utter madness these last few months had been! He had been becoming more Human every day and she had ceased caring that he wasn't...
Had it only been her imagination or had he seemed to be viewing her in a much different light once it was found out that they shared a heritage? And would that have been enough? Would anything have happened between them, could anything have happened between them, had he stayed and she had the time to come to terms with it all?
Great, she thought. Now she had several more things to obsess about that didn't matter anymore.
Jamie was chuckling to herself, again without any mirth. "It's just that I still feel so ... Oh, I don't know. Alien, I guess. I look in a mirror and the reflection I see isn't me, isn't even anyone I know. I know it's selfish of me, but it's all so ... so schizoid. This body sometimes reacts in ways that I do not, the memories it harbors aren't my memories or experiences and I just ... Too often I feel so completely estranged from myself, not knowing who or what I am anymore, not even knowing if I can continue to function ... Does this make any sense to you?"
More than you know, Mel admitted to herself.
"Yes, it does," she told her. "But that body has also supplied you with knowledge and guidance to work from to allow you to do what you must. That's quite an advantage. Cole had to begin from scratch and permit himself to go blank slate like a newborn just to take it all in."
"But is what I have really such an advantage? He, at least, was always entirely himself, just morphed into another form..." She rubbed at her arms as if suddenly chilled. "Nothing about this body, this life, this world is even me..."
What must such a thing be like, Mel wondered, not for the first time: to still be exactly who and what you are but occupying the body of an entirely alien species? Surely it couldn't be as simple as changing one's clothes or putting on a new pair of shoes. What would such a thing do to one's self-image, to one's feelings of self-worth, to one's very sense of identity? How would it be if she woke up one morning to find herself in the body of something else – a gazelle, a giraffe, a tortoise, a dolphin – and having no choice but to live out the rest of her life that way?
And then the obvious hit her. Jamie was in mourning, now truly alone and destabilized because of it, just as she herself was. For the both of them, the closest connection to who and what they are was gone.
"Then I'll throw it right back to you, Jamie," she said, not without sympathy. "What's your option?"
Jamie gave a self-deprecating grimace. "Touché, Miss Porter."
"I can't say if one can one ever fully adjust to living as what one isn't, to pretending to be what one isn't," Mel opined, her thoughts drifting from the existential who am I?' to Jamie's circumstances and then to her own. She impulsively reached over and squeezed the other woman's forearm, feeling the need to offer what little solace she could. "But if it's any help, I do know that Cole ... Daggon ... was becoming more and more Human all the time in both his manners and feelings. Even in his understandings. And as time went on he seemed to be becoming more at ease with all of it and settling in. Don't you find that to be true with yourself? Even just a little?"
Jamie shrugged abstractedly. "There are many things that transcend species lines and Mrs. Swenson is a great help without even realizing it. Her love for her daughter is so selflessly pure and genuine she could almost be Cirronian. And I've come to truly love her. Yet still I so miss my own world and the company of my own ... Although you'd think with nearly two years imprisoned on Sar-Top I'd be well used to it by now..." She bitterly sighed, resigned. "There were only fourteen of us there, you see. I was the sole Cirronian female. And Daggon, of course, was the only Cirronian guard. He always looked out for me, was there to ease my pain, and now that he's gone..."
She stared off into space, lost in the private landscape of memory, then she turned, the dawning of surprised realization on her face.
"Was it very difficult for you, Miss Porter? I mean, him looking so Human and then seeming to become so? Is that what some of this is about for you?"
"Yeah, that's part of it," Mel hesitantly admitted after a few beats, Jamie's open trust starting to inspire her own. "A major part of it," she said more firmly. "I ... I allowed myself to care too much, to get too attached. If you can believe it, for a time I even deluded myself into thinking that..." She nervously cleared her throat and thickly swallowed, only to feel the lump quickly reforming itself. "Never mind. It doesn't matter anymore ... If it ever did..."
"You fell in love with him," Jamie said with quiet wonder. It was a statement, not a question.
Mel shook her head. If she wasn't careful, she was going to start crying again and she really didn't want to do that. "I - I don't know what I feel anymore. And I'm not sure I want to. All I know is that he was ... is ... the most amazing..." Her throat seized and she allowed herself to trail off, unwilling to finish the thought, unwilling to give it the full reality of the spoken word.
"I'm sorry for all the confusion he must have inadvertently brought you, Miss Porter. I truly am. I know it's of little comfort, but surely you must realize that regardless of what he looked like, regardless of how much empathy and understanding he developed or how he schooled himself to behave, beneath it all he was even less Human than I am."
"Yeah, I know." Mel began to laugh as the full truth of that washed over her, but tried to rein it in. Even to her own ears her voice had a slightly hysterical edge. "What is, is. Right? I've always known. But now I've found out that the same is true of me."
"Excuse me? The same what is true of you?"
Jamie quizzically tilted her head and Mel had to look away. Her attitude, her gesture and her expression were all too reminiscent of Cole when he was puzzled about something.
"Um ... How much did he tell you about ... his last few weeks here, the things that happened?"
"Not much. Only that I wouldn't have to concern myself about Zin anymore ... He said that he'd locked him away ... I wasn't sure what he meant by that, but he seemed so distant and distracted that I didn't ask for any details."
So Cole hadn't shared everything with her, Mel thought. Then again, she was just beginning to understand that despite his apparent openness he likely kept a great deal to himself, perhaps more than she could even guess at.
"Then he didn't tell you about me?" she pressed.
"I'm sorry, Miss Porter, but I honestly have no idea what you're talking about."
"Okay. Um ... have you..." She took a deep breath and tried to order her thoughts. "Have you ever heard of the Keepers of a Dark Secret?"
"The Gatekeepers? Sure. What Cirronian hasn't? They've been an inspiration for a good many of our art forms, music and writings for a long time now. Sort of like your various religious and cultural mythologies are. Why do you ask?"
"Gatekeepers?" Mel repeated. "Cole didn't tell me anything about any kind of gate. What gate?"
Jamie chuckled indulgently at Mel's befuddlement. "Well, like the Dark Secret itself, that kind of depends on the artist. They've come up with all sorts of ideas, some of epic proportions."
Mel steadied herself. She wasn't about to let a new word derail her now. She'd worry about it later. "Okay ... So are any of those ideas about the creation of bloodlines?"
"Yeah, some of the stories are about things like that. Why do you want to know?"
"Well, it seems that I ... I'm ... part Cirronian."
Jamie was looking at her with blank perplexity, so Mel elaborated, "Apparently, my ancestors were part of a Migar breeding program of some kind and I'm of a created bloodline. A so-called Keeper ... Gatekeeper ... Whatever."
Jamie's expression turned frankly incredulous.
"Where did you ever get such an idea?"