The Weapon - Oblivion  - part 2

By Diana the Valkyrie

Good fairies

Update: 20/07/2003 to valkyrie05





David:



I suppose it was inevitable, with a twenty trillion dollar investment, that we

couldn't just walk away and let it handle itself. And since prefabricated

construction is so efficient, and we had our own flying heavy-lifter, it was

equally inevitable that Wendy got involved.



I managed to stay clear of the whole thing. I'm manky at management, pathetic

at PR and flatulent at finance. I'm real good at writing incomprehensible

academic papers on the inner symbolic meaning of the Guardian Mythos, and my

book "The Guardian Returns" was doing blockbuster sales, there was even talk

of a movie. Which was just as well, because somehow, not a penny of that

twenty trillion had come our way. You'd think that Wendy would be at least be

paid for flying crane hire. But Pretty Flamingo wasn't my cup of tea. It was

run perfectly well by three of the usual sort of women that seemed to cluster

around Wendy. You know the sort I mean? Daunting. Intimidating. Dominating.

Makes me feel like a schoolboy. Not the sort of woman you wanted to notice

you. Wendy was supposed to be the Chief Executive, but actually what she

mostly did was manual labour and play with any babies in the creche. The

company was actually run by Sally, Moira and Fiona as heads of Sales, Finance

and Research. Fiona - my god, the woman was over a hundred, and still had all

her wits about her. And she refused to let anyone put her in a wheelchair.

Supposedly, she headed the medical research division, where we were cranking

out cures for the various exotic diseases that were attacking humanity these

days, but actually she'd found herself a blankets-and-bedpans job. "I'm a

nurse, not an executive" was how she put it. And Sally made sure that we got

paid for our remedies. And for the energy we were selling.



Wendy, of course, wanted us to live on Freedonia Island. I wanted to stay near

London, so I could stay a professor at Imperial; there's a campus requirement.

And a couple of times each week, I did lecturing and student study groups. I

was much in demand, they wanted to hear all the inside info about the Guardian

of Humanity, of course, especially the bedroom stuff. Huh, if they only knew.

I disappointed them, there were no juicy titbits about life with one of the

People, it was all about the Mythos of the Guardian, semiological stuff. Wendy

and I compromised; we spent four days in London, then we flew to the Island

for long weekends. Marriage is all about compromise, isn't it.



Marriage. Who am I fooling? Not myself, for sure. Sure, she shared my bed, and

that made me the luckiest man alive. But that was all. At night, she'd hold me

in her arms, and I'd fall asleep. And sometimes when I woke in the middle of

the night, she wasn't there for a moment, and then a fraction of a second

later, she was. I wasn't fooled; I knew how fast she could move. She could

have been on the other side of the planet, for all I knew. I could have asked

her where she went at night, and she would probably have told me. Truth is, I

was scared of what the answer might be. Was she seeing someone else? She isn't

human - she doesn't have the same morals and ethics that we have. Not worse,

possibly better, but definitely different.



No, the big reason I knew that it wasn't a marriage, is that there were no

babies. You might wonder how a human and a non-human could possibly have

babies. The answer is very simple - adoption. And I knew how strong Wendy's

maternal instincts were, she needed babies around her like us humans need

other humans round us. You could see, every time we visited people, Wendy

would be on the floor playing with the kids while us grown-ups talked grown-up

stuff. Wendy just wasn't interested in the things we humans talk about -

sports, cars, money and gossip about who's bonking who. But she seemed to be

able to adapt to being a playmate for kids from newborn babies all the way up

to, well, anyone who was still a kid, me included. She'd play silly baby

games, she'd tell stories, she'd do magic tricks, she'd play chasing games,

she'd show them cats cradle, she'd coach them in football, whatever the kids

were into, so was Wendy. But we didn't have any kids of our own, and that's

how I knew that we weren't a marriage. That, plus the lack of sex.



Please don't think I'm complaining. Hey, how many guys get to sleep with the

Guardian of Humanity each night? And she was a lot of fun to be with. Not just

for the kids; for me too. Although. Come to think of it, I'm just a big kid

myself, so maybe that's why we get on so well?



But I'm haunted by a ghost. The ghost of Duncan. And it's a real ghost too;

she has an emulation of him permanently running, and although I hardly ever

get to see him, if you follow me, I know he's there all the time, and I know

that he's her one true love, her soul mate, and I can never come close to

that. So you can see how it's kind of a bind to have him hovering around all

the time.



She got home that evening, all sweaty and grubby from all the lifting and

haulage she'd done during the day. I know she doesn't have to sweat, I know

she only does it because it's what we do, and she's emulating being human. And

I also know that one of the high points of the day, is getting under the

shower with her and helping her to wash it all off, soaping her down, then

rinsing her off, and then she rubs me down with a warm towel while I wrestle

with her to try to do the same thing to her.



And she insists on doing the cooking. I think it's her maternal thing again,

she wants to feed me. So she puts on her "Get the fuck out of my kitchen"

apron, and an hour later, I'm trying to wrap myself round another curry, so

hot that it would set fire to the Pacific Ocean.



I'm a coward at heart. No, correction, I'm a coward through and through, when

the chips are down, I'm hiding behind Wendy. But even though I was scared to

know where she went each night, I'd reached the point where I was even more

scared not to know. Maybe I was, er, inadequate for her, not giving her

something she needed? In which case, I'd rather know what it was, because

maybe I could do something about it? But how could I be scared of Wendy, she

was our Guardian. If there's one person I shouldn't be scared of, it's Wendy.

After all, like I said, she's the one I'd hide behind.



We talked over dinner. "Where do you go at night, while I'm asleep?" "If

you're asleep, how do you know I'm not there?" "Because sometimes I wake up

and for a moment you aren't there, and then you are." "Well, yes. I don't

sleep, so there's not really much point in me lying there while you rack up

the zeds. So I go off and do stuff." "Stuff? What stuff?" "Stuff that isn't

sleeping," she said, vaguely. "Wendy, I know what you don't do, I'm wondering

what you do do. "Do do?" "Do do, diddley do." "Just stuff."



I sighed. This was worse than asking a child "Where are you going", you always

get the answer "out". "What sort of stuff?" I continued the interrogation,

wondering if I had any thumbscrews I could use on her. "You know. Kittens in

trees, that sort of thing." So, while I'm asleep in bed, she's getting kittens

out of trees. It doesn't add up. There aren't that many kittens stuck in

trees. "You don't mean that literally, do you. You mean stuff like kittens in

trees, not only kittens in trees, there's not that many kittens in the world."

"There's always another kitten in another tree," she said, grinning, "no,

you're right, I meant that figuratively." "Right. So what do you actually do.

Last night, for example, what exactly did you do last night?"



She sighed. "Well. There was a bit of a storm yesterday, so I helped the folks

at Tremritsar get their crops in, otherwise a lot of them would have rotted."

"Tremritsar?" "A village, it's in the north of India." "Oh." "Then I mended

Mrs Ogotuka's bicycle, she won't be able to get to work without it, and she

can't afford to get it fixed, and it was only a broken chain." "And she lives

where?" "Entebbe, Uganda. And then I got a hamburger and large fries for Mr

Hempstone." "And he is ... ?" "He was hungry, he hadn't eaten for a few days

now, he can't get out, you see, it's difficult for him with his leg like it

is, and he misses his children terribly. And then there were some people who

couldn't get out of a burning building, it was too high up and the stairs were

on fire, and then little Sally Feldstone fell off her bicycle, but I caught

her before she scraped herself on the road, and then I helped Fiona turn a

patient so she could wash him, she find them too heavy these days, so I give

her a hand, she knows it's me, and then I flew over to Brasil ... "



"Do they know that it's you, I mean, apart from Fee?" "No." "Don't you tell

them?" "What's the point?" "Shouldn't you stick around so they can thank you?"

"Why? All that does, is make them feel in debt, and loses me time in which I

could be helping three other people." "Shouldn't they know who their

benefactor is?" "Why? I don't do it for their gratitude, I don't do it for the

recognition. And I definitely don't want people to start up religions with me

as their object of worship" "So why do you do it?" "Because I love you, of

course." "Me?" "All of you, I mean. Well, you especially, baby. So then I ...

" "Wait wait wait. I get the idea. How long did it take you, all the stuff

you've told me so far?" "A couple of minutes. Don't you want to hear the

rest?"



There are legends about this. Good fairies, mending your boots while you

sleep, that sort of thing. Except she was doing it on a much bigger scale. Mrs

Ogotuka probably wondered how her chain got fixed, couldn't work it out,

shrugged her shoulders and accepted her good luck. Sally Feldstone never even

knew that she avoided getting a scraped knee.



This isn't our sort of romantic love, which is one-to-one, and is all tied up

with sex. This is more the parent-child sort of love, which is one-to-many,

and doesn't want or expect to be thanked. That fits in with what I know about

the People, from what Wendy has told me about how she thinks.



"You try to fix everything?" "No, of course not, there's too much to do. But

at least I can do some stuff, make a difference here and there. And it beats

listening to you snore." "I do not snore" "Do too." "Do not." "Well, only

slightly. But you know, when you've heard one snore, you've heard them all."

"And you go all over the world?" "Well, it isn't like it's a really big

planet, you know?" "How do you decide what to do and what to leave?" "I don't

think about it, baby, if I did, I'd trip over my brain. I just do stuff, like.

I see, I do, you know? And I keep a special eye on Fiona, and on you, my baby,

you get priority. I get back when I hear your heartbeat change into the

wake-up rhythm."



"You can hear my heartbeat from the other side of the planet? What about the

speed of sound, it couldn't get that far even if it could carry." "No, I

didn't explain that very well. I don't actually listen to the sound, I look at

the movements, I feel the accelerations of the air, it makes a little

gravity-ripple, you know?"



I'm not a physicist. But a long time ago, I learned that when Wendy says she

can do something, then she can, and if I can't understand how, that doesn't

really make any difference, I can't understand most of this stuff. But I

hadn't realised before just how much she did. Kittens in trees. It won't get

reported in the newspapers, most of the people she helped won't even know it.

They'll think they just had some really good luck.



So then we went to bed; her hair knotted itself loosely around my upper arm,

she put her arms round me, and she wrapped her cape around both of us, and I

fell asleep with her all around me.



"David," she whispered.



"Mmm?"



"I need to talk to you."



"Mmm?"



"Duncan asked me about the first time we made love."



Ah, the Rite of Binding, yes I knew about this. It's what binds the Wielder

and the Weapon into a team. The Weapon isn't human, so cannot understand human

motivations, really can't fathom what we want and need. She has the power, but

not the understanding. Whereas the Wielder is human, and has the

understanding, but obviously not the power. So, the same pair-bonding

mechanism that is used to ensure the survival of the human species, is used to

bind the Weapon and Wielder together, into a team that combines understanding

and power. Sex. And the Oath.



What about it?" I asked.



"I can't remember it," she said.



"Well," I said, "I'm pretty surprised that a thing like that would escape your

memory. I remember my first time with Betty Hargreaves." Or do I? I mean, I

don't remember the details, but I do remember the place. I don't remember the

date or time, but, well, I suppose I really don't remember much about it at

all. After all, that was over thirty years ago. Shit, I haven't thought about

old Betty for ages, I wonder what she's doing now. Betty Hargreaves. So Wendy

doesn't remember ...



Then it hit me. She has a digital memory. She doesn't forget things. Not

anything, not ever.



I looked up at her. "Not at all?"



"No," she whispered, "not at all. Oh, I know it must have happened, there had

to have been a first time. But I don't remember it. David, I'm ... I'm ...

scared."



And that was new, too. I've never seen her scared. She doesn't have anything

to be scared about, as far as I can make out, there's nothing that can damage

her physically, so the survival instinct that we call "fear" just isn't part

of her repertoire of feelings.



"You don't remember anything about it? How about when it was, do you remember

that?"



"I can work out when it was, so I do actually know. But I don't remember when

it was, do you see what I mean?"



"Mmm."



"David?"



"Wendy?"



"I'm scared."



I put my arms round her. Usually, she held me, and I had my hands on her

sides, or other places, never mind where, but now I hugged her, she needed it.



I fell asleep, listening to her heart beating. Or rather, an emulation ... no,

stop that. It's her heart beating.