The Weapon - Genesis - part 3
By Diana the Valkyrie
First flight


"Honey, I'm home," he called. "Dining room," she replied. He went in, she was
sitting at the table, looking up at him. "Have a good day, honey?" she asked.
"Yeah, honey, not bad. So what's for supper?" "Tongue." "Tongue?" "Yes, it's
already in your mouth" "Yeh, OK. I could go get some Pizza?" "Not just yet.
There's some stuff I want to do while it's still light." "Like what?" "I need
to show you some more stuff, then I can explain a bit more." "OK, I'm game,
what have you got to show me?"

She took his hand, and led him outside into the back garden. Once outside, she
spun and faced him, putting her other hand round his waist. She looked up into
his eyes, and said "We're going to fly." "We?" "You and me. Both of us."
"How?" "I'll explain how later. Right now, I just wanted to warn you that
takeoff is imminent. Three ... two ... one ..." and the two of them rose a few
inches into the air. He looked down.

"Well, I have to admit I'm impressed, but this isn't exactly setting an
altitude record." "I wanted you to get used to the idea first. Going up ... "
and they rose a few inches more. "You OK, Duncan?" "Yeh, fine, fine." "OK,
let's go, then" and they rose a couple of hundred feet. Duncan screamed, and
tried to break her hold. "Duncan, calm down. And don't try to push me away,
it's a long way down." He screamed again, and kicked. "Duncan, stop fighting
me. OK, going down ..." and they returned to the ground. She let go of him,
and he fell to his hands and knees. She hunkered down next to him, and stroked
his hair. "Sorry, honey, I didn't mean to scare you like that. It's perfectly
safe, really it is. In fact, you were probably safer right then than you've
even been in your life." He looked up at her. "It didn't feel safe. You know?
I don't think I've got any abnormal fear of heights, but when you're a couple
of hundred feet up and nothing is keeping you up, it's, well, scary." "But
something was keeping you up." "I suppose." "It's just a question of getting
used to it. Look, let's try again, only this time I won't go so high, OK?" He
swallowed. "OK" he nodded.

This time, they rose just a few feet, and hovered there. He looked down, but
it wasn't too far, he was OK. "Hold on tight to me if you like," she said,
"you'll feel safer that way." "Yeh, I'm OK now," he replied. "You ready for a
bit more?" "Go for it." They rose a couple more feet. "Still OK?" "Look, what
it is, is suppose I can't hang on, and I just fall?" "Won't happen." "But
suppose it did?" "Won't happen," she repeated, "you just have to trust me on
this." "But suppose I lose my grip, it can be a long way down." "Actually,
your grip doesn't matter, that's only to make you feel safer. I've got you,
you can't fall. Really." "OK, maybe a bit more." They rose a few more feet,
now hovering a dozen feet off the ground. "Still OK?" "Er, just about." "OK,
let's travel ..."

They moved horizontally; slowly at first. "You still OK, Duncan?" "Um." She
increased the speed to about 20 mph, and they could feel the wind as they
flew. "Wow," he said. She took him round in a wide circle, flying over several
neighbours fences, across the road, through a park, back across the road, then
landed back at the house. "I'll put the kettle on," she said, walking inside.
He followed her. "Wow."

"Duncan, we need to talk some more." "Wow." "Sit down, listen." "How do you do
that?" "There's loads more I can do, Duncan, but not right now. We need to
talk about the future a bit." "What about?" "Me. And you. Duncan, I'm a
weapon, but I need more." "What?" "Think of a sword, someone has to hack and
fence with it. Think of a gun, someone has to pull the trigger. A weapon needs
a wielder. That's what I need. I'm the Weapon, I need someone to be my
Wielder. And you're my first choice."

"Why me? I'm just nothing, why me?" "Because you're not a failure, but not a
success. Not a saint, but not a sinner. Not some young kid full of ego and
destruction, not some old guy tired of living. You're one of the people who
just want to be left alone to get on with your life. You don't want to conquer
the world, you don't want to hide under a stone. You're anyone, everyone,
everyman, Mr Ordinary. I want you to be my Wielder."

He coughed. "What do I have to do, what's involved?" "Same as with any weapon,
Duncan. You have to learn what I can do and what I can't do, you have to learn
how to aim me, and how to trigger me." "Trigger? What, you blow up or
something?" "If necessary, yes. Sort of. Details later, please? Not everything
at once?" "OK, so with a weapon like you, we can try to stay neutral in this
Mazda/Ahriman bunfight? Make it not worth the while of either side to annex
us?" "Right." "So which side are you on?"

"Neither. Obviously." "So there's actually three sides?" "Well, no. Or maybe
yes." "Thanks for the precise answer. And you're one of the people from the
third side?" "No. First of all, I'm not a person. Let me try to explain about
that. I came out a couple of days ago ... " "Came out?" She sighed, and
knuckled her eyes. "Duncan, order the pizza, and I'll tell you another story,
OK?"

He came back from ordering supper, and she was sitting on the couch. He joined
her there, and she scooted up close to him. "Kiss?" He kissed her, she
returned the kiss enthusiastically. "Hold me, Duncan." He hugged her, hard.
Her hair tickled his face; her face was close to his chest. "A couple of
billion years ago, a bunch of amino acids got together and make a
self-replicating thing. A thing that could make copies of itself. Some of the
copies weren't exactly right. Some of those were better at copying than the
originals, others were worse. The better ones made more copies, and the
process continued. It's called "evolution" and that's how come you're sitting
on this couch waiting for a pizza delivery." "OK, I knew all that already.
Where do you come into this?"

"In a moment. This self-replicating trick isn't actually that big a deal.
It'll happen anywhere that there's the possibility of it happening, sooner or
later. And once the self-replication thing happens, evolution is inevitable.
You almost always wind up with intelligent life, because intelligence is the
biggest advantage the self-replicator can have. So that's why there's so many
planets with life, that's where the Ahriman Empire and Mazda Empire came
from." "So what's the fight about?" "What was the Hitler/Stalin fight about?"
"Ultimately, I guess it was about territory." "Right, same here. They talk
about ideology, about right and wrong, good and evil, but actually it's about
territory. Which is why they'll each want this planet, when they get around to
it." "So that's where you came from?" "No. There's a whole different ball
game. Listen." "Kiss?" "Mmm." "Mmm, OK." "Now, listen."

"Several billion years ago, there was an explosion, you call it the "Big
Bang". All the matter in the universe expanded from one small area." "How did
it get there?" "Defer that one till later, Duncan" "OK." "But it wasn't like a
sponge cake, all even and fluffy. It was more like a plum pudding, with thin
areas, and thick areas, and clots. Plums. And small plums. Also sultanas and
currants." "The Fruitcake theory of cosmology?" "Yeah, right, good one. But
it's a good analogy." "The clots are the stars?" "No, they came later, when
things started to condense a bit. No - the clots were black holes. You know
what a black hole is?" "Yes, but I'm not really sure that I know what you mean
by that."

"If you have a lump of stuff that's very compressed, so that the escape
velocity is greater than the speed of light, then because nothing can travel
that fast, nothing can get out. Things can fall in, and when they do, they
generate a *lot* of energy in falling, but nothing can ever get out. It's
almost like a crinkle in the universe. So, in the very early stages of the Big
Bang, there were black holes formed of all sizes, plums, sultanas and
currants. And since then, other black holes have formed. If the sun were to
collapse until it was only a couple of miles across, then it would be a black
hole. But the important black holes, are the mini-holes, with only a million
tons of mass, plus or minus a couple of orders of magnitude." "Why are they
important?"

"They've been around for a couple of dozen billion years. Lots of mini-holes,
and lots of time. Some are positively charged, some negative. They have
angular momentum; some have spin up, some have spin down. Four possibilities.
Put them together, and you don't have a gravitational monopole like a star or
a planet, you have a quadrupole, with far more complex field possibilities,
the field of interactions between the four mini-holes And over time,
near-collisions have produced quadrupoles. But once you have a quadrupole, it
will attract other monopoles. Until there's eight mini-holes. Then it becomes
unstable, and fissions into two quadrupoles. You see where this is going?"
"Self-replication!" "Right. And self replication means ... ?" "Evolution."
"And evolution leads to ...?" "Intelligence?" "Right." Duncan looked at her.
"What does this have to do with you? You're not four black holes." "No? The
population of what you might call "Black Hole Folk" is pretty small, nothing
like the population of even a small planet. And they don't have much to do
with people like you, for obvious reasons. Not much in common, really. Or with
the Ahrimans or Mazdas. But they see what's happening, they see the war
spreading like a cancer, and they feel ethically obliged to help. But also
ethically obliged not to interfere. It's a dilemma."

"So how did they resolve the dilemma?" "Well, of course, there is no really
good resolution, you're damned if you do and you're damned if you don't. So
what they did was a compromise. They built a weapon, so that the civilisations
not involved can try to keep neutral while the two empires at war destroy each
other. But they can't use the weapon, because that's direct interference, and
you just wind up with a third empire. So they give the weapon to someone on
the neutral planet, one of the natives has to wield it. One of the natives has
to make all the important decisions about using the weapon." "And you're the
weapon." "Yes, and you're the Wielder. If you'll accept me"

"You don't look like a weapon." "I bet a pistol doesn't look like a weapon to
a Roman legionnaire." "Fair enough." "Duncan, just believe me for now. I'm the
most dangerous weapon ever made." "Give us a kiss, then" "Mmm." "Mmmmm." He
pushed her down on the couch, and wrestled her underneath him. His tongue
found hers, her arms around his neck, his arms on her shoulders. "Some weapon
you are. I can pin you, easy." "Can you?" she asked, as her body floated
upwards with his still on top. "Can you?" she repeated, as she rotated them so
that he was now underneath and in danger of being dropped on the couch. "Maybe
not," he admitted, and they kissed again. She lowered them back to the couch,
now with her on top, and her hands moved down to his back. The doorbell rang,
shattering the moment. "Damn."

He answered the door, and soon they were mouth-deep in pizza. "So," she said,
"will you?" "Will I what?" "Will you be my Wielder?" He thought about this.
"Do I have to decide now? Isn't this like the other stuff you were talking
about, no need to decide just yet?" "No, Duncan. Look. Either I'm talking a
load of bunk, or else I'm the weapon and I need a Wielder. If it's all bunk,
then it doesn't actually matter what you say, we get to play some games and
it's all good fun. If it isn't all bunk, then I need a decision now, because I
need a Wielder, I need someone to tell me what to do. And if that isn't you,
then I need to find someone else. I can't spend a month here while you
decide." "Why do you need someone to tell you what to do, you seem to me to be
pretty capable of deciding things for yourself." "That's part of the deal,
Duncan. If the Black Hole Folk just dropped weapons on all the neutral
planets, and let the weapons make the decisions, then you just have a third
empire, run by the weapons, as a proxy for the Black Hole Folk. But instead,
you natives have to make the decisions about who to fight and how, how far to
go and where, so there's no third empire, just a bunch of independent neutrals
who have the teeth and claws to make that neutrality stick. Like the Swiss
Army." "And you're the Swiss Army Knife." "Yes. Yes, I am, that's a very good
analogy. So. Will you?"

He thought about the two alternatives. Maybe it was all bunk, but if it was,
it wouldn't matter, so he assumed she was telling it like it is. A "yes" put
him in the hottest seat on the planet, probably dangerous, certainly exciting,
and with the capability of messing up worse than any human had the chance to
mess up before. On the other hand, a "no" would mean that she'd walk out of
his life, and find someone else to be her Wielder. And once you've tasted
chocolate, you want more. She was definitely chocolate. With a toffee centre.
He took a deep breath and closed his eyes. He opened them again, she was still
sitting on the other side of the table, waiting for his answer. Waiting ...
and, he thought, hoping. He breathed out. "Yes." "Yayyy ..." she cried, and
she dived across the table at him. His chair went over backwards as her body
hit his, he flailed his arms and legs trying desperately to avoid the crashing
fall that he knew would smash his head against the hard wooden floor. But the
chair kept tilting, he was going over, and then he landed. But she was
underneath him, cushioning the impact, the impact was his body on hers, and
instead of the blinding pain he was expecting, it was very nice. Very nice
indeed. "You didn't think I'd let you get hurt, did you?" she whispered in his
ear. "Shut up and kiss me" he said. So she did.