The Weapon - Oblivion  - part 20

By Diana the Valkyrie

I am *so* proud of my fireball

Update: 25/08/2003 to valkyrie05





She smiled, and put both her arms round me, and pulled me towards herself.

"Tell me about Wendy," she said. "Tell me everything about Wendy."



So I told her. I told her about how she'd come to this planet fifty years ago,

and some of the great things she'd done. And some of the small things. And as

I told her, I realised that we'd probably never know everything that she'd

done. How many kittens had she rescued from trees? How many hungry people

found a loaf of bread on their table? How many shoes were mysteriously mended?

People don't keep track of the small stuff. How many people had she never even

met, never helped directly, but had inspired via her message of hope, just her

existence. How many people had seen her flying overhead, and tackled their

problems with extra vigour? Or even just read about her, and knowing that she

was here with us, didn't despair, but had another try at dealing with their

own problems? "She told me that she loves us all, but I think it goes both

ways, I think everyone loves her."



And then I told her about the terrible memory disease she'd had in the last

few weeks, and how I'd watched her steadily deteriorate, and how I was awfully

afraid that Wendy, our Weapon, the Guardian of Humanity, was going to die. And

die in such a horrible way, a living death. And even while she was so badly

afflicted, she still flew off to battle, with the odds so badly against her

that anyone else would have just given up. And she didn't go reluctantly, she

went because it is sweet and fitting that you should die for the ones you

love.



There was a silence for a while. I looked up at her face. She was smiling, and

weeping. No, not weeping, there were tears on her cheeks, but that wasn't

unhappiness. "Can you save her?" I whispered. "Please say you can?"



She stroked my hair. "She isn't damaged, she isn't ill. What's happening is

supposed to happen. It's the memory rebuild. Very young People have their

memory organised in a hierarchical system, but that's not good enough for very

long. It has to change to a relational system, which can handle a much larger

amount of data. But each element of memory that changes, becomes inaccessible

to a mind accessing via the hierarchical system. Once all of it is converted,

then the mind switches over to the relational model, and all the memory works

just fine."



"I didn't really understand a word of that," I said, "I'm not very technical."



"OK, let's put it like this. If your teeth started falling out, you'd get very

worried. But if a very young child's teeth start falling out, you aren't

worried, because you know it's supposed to happen. It's a bit inconvenient for

a while, but at the end of the process, you have a set of bigger, stronger

teeth. We have the same thing happening here. Wendy's memory will be bigger

and stronger as a result of these changes. And, by the way, it'll all happen

again in a couple of million years, when she changes to the associative model.

She's done so well here, my little fireball, I am so proud of her."



"She's teething?"



"Yes."



"You mean, this is all just part of her growing up?"



"Yes."



"Oh! So she's going to be OK?"



"She never was in any danger."



I sat of the bed, and just stared at her. I thought I'd been watching Wendy

dying. Actually, I'd been watching her teething. "That's the best news I've

ever had," I said, standing up. She looked up at me. "Yee-har!" I exulted. And

then I looked down at her. "But where is she?"



My visitor looked up and past me, out of the window. "She's just finished

checking the marker I left out there, she's on her way back now. I had to get

her out of the way; at the point of changeover, she remembers nothing, she

could be really quite dangerous unless she's restrained, or out of the way.

She should be back in about twelve hours. Now, let's get some breakfast into

you, and you can tell me more about what she's been doing while she was here.

I want all the details now. Right from the start."



The sun was up, the sky was blue, and I could hear the birds singing about how

glorious it is to be alive, and stay away from *my* part of this tree. We went

to the kitchen, and I started making toast. Wendy wasn't a flickering candle

in the great black void, she was a roaring bright fireball of power, lighting

up our universe.



"Explain to me about sex," she asked. Oh boy.



So I explained about sex, and about the man-woman pair-bond, and how we made

babies, and how sex is for procreation and for recreation, and she sat there

and listened. "I think I see why there's so many of you. And she loves you

all? She's a proper little fireball of love, isn't she! Does Wendy have sex

with you?" she asked. Some coffee went down the wrong way, and I coughed for a

while before I could answer. "We snog a bit," I said. "Is that enough?" she

asked.



I looked down at my toast. "It's what she wants." "I didn't ask you what she

wanted. I asked you, is it enough?" "No, dammit, of course it isn't." "So tell

her, dammit. Now tell me about the Depression she fixed."



So I told her about how Wendy sprouted wings and made herself look like an

angel, and then I had to explain about angels, and then I had to explain about

religion, and then I had to explain about economics, and then I had to explain

about money. "You're a weird lot, aren't you?" she said.



I sniffed. It's hard to argue with that, especially with someone who is four

black holes pretending to be a sexy woman. "Point taken," she said. "Are you

getting inside my head?" I asked her, point blank. She smiled. "It's just an

electrochemical stew-pot," she said. "Could Wendy do that?" I asked, because I

had half a suspicion that she did. "No," said my visitor, "she can't. Not in

detail. Probably." Which made me feel a bit better, sometimes you think things

that you really don't want anyone else to know you're thinking. "But she will

when she gets older."



"What else will she be able to do when she grows up," I asked, wondering. "Why

should you be concerned about what happens a few hundred million years from

now?" she asked me, "now tell me about Wendy and Duncan."



So I told her everything I knew about Wendy's first love. Wendy's only love?

No, she loved us all, he was her first love. My visitor kept asking me

questions, pushing for more detail, it seemed like she wanted to scrape every

bit of information about Wendy off my brain. And since I was talking about my

favourite subject (I am, after all, the Chair of Guardian Studies at Imperial

University) I have to admit that I didn't need much encouragement. And I had a

lot to tell, it's been a long time since I had such an interested and

attentive audience. I talked through breakfast, during lunch and over dinner.

Almost non-stop, with the occasional interruption from my visitor to clarify

some point, or to ask about some peripheral matter. And she was interested,

she really was. I can tell the difference between someone who is listening,

and someone whose eyes are glazing over from boredom. "I am *so* proud of my

fireball, she's been such a good little fireball," she said. "No," I said. She

looked at me, questioning. "She's our fireball." She smiled. "Yes, she is."



"Heads up," she said. I looked out of the window. The sun had set. Night had

fallen. "What?" I asked. "Incoming," she said.



There was a whooshing sound, and the room was filled with feathery flapping,

and someone was all over me. And then my visitor said, "Little Fireball?"



Wendy stopped kissing me, and looked over her shoulder. "Momma? Momma!

MOMMA!!" I think it was the loudest sound I ever heard, I was deafened by the

decibels.



They whirled around each other, around the room, in a blaze of light and fire,

in a dance that was complex in its movements and pirouettes, but very simple

in its meaning. It was "Hello", and "Welcome", and "I love you". I cowered in

my chair, my arms over my head, terrified that they'd accidentally ... but no,

she wouldn't let me get hurt. The light got brighter, I shut my eyes and put

my hands over them, but then there was a flash of light that penetrated my

hands and eyelids, brighter than a thousand suns, even with my eyes closed I

saw lights dancing in front of me.



And then there was darkness. Silence and darkness.



Cautiously, I took my hands from my eyes, and peeked. I could see nothing, I

was blind. I could hear nothing, maybe I was deaf too. I struggled out of the

chair, moved forward, feeling my way with my hands waving in the air in front

of me. There was nothing there. They'd gone.



Slowly, over the next hour or so, my vision began to return. It was blotchy at

first, but you cannot begin to imagine how relieved I was that I hadn't been

permanently blinded. And I hadn't been deafened, I could hear just fine.



So, that was Wendy's mother. I should have guessed. Thinking about it now -

Wendy had told me that the nearest one of the People was a few thousand light

years away, but my visitor had come from a hundred times that distance. Why

wouldn't the nearest one come? Because no matter how far away your baby is,

you'll go to her when she needs you. And, thinking more about Wendy's attitude

to babies, there was no way that one of the People would abandon one of their

babies. I felt sure that Wendy's mother had been watching the whole thing,

right from the start, keeping an eye on her, this quantum entanglement thing,

whatever that was. And she'd come at the critical moment.



But it had been a long day. I made myself a cup of cocoa, and went to bed. I

was pretty sure that Wendy and her mother had gone someplace to do the

mother-daughter thing, and I could even guess where they'd go. My money was

that they were right in the middle of the nearest fireball, in Wendy's

favourite place. In the middle of the sun.