Chapter 9 #4
I do not bother to get my hopes up. I know he won’t really look for my father. Nobody does. The elders of our community didn’t, and I don’t think Freak did either. It’s my mission, and I’m going to fail it because I can’t get away from anyone long enough to do it.
“Do you know where he was last seen?”
“No.”
“And your owner could not find him?”
I shrug.
“What would it be worth to you, little human, for me to find the father you seek? What would you pay for it?”
“Everything,” I say without thinking.
“Interesting. Everything is a lot,” he says. “You must be truly desperate to find him.”
“Well, yeah. He’s my dad.”
“He should be looking for you, not the other way around. If one of my daughters were missing, I would do anything I could to find her.”
I wonder if Freak would be pleased to know that his enemy shares his opinion. Probably not. He’d be furious. I can only imagine how angry he must be.
“Well, unfortunately for me, I am not one of your daughters,” I say tiredly. “My father is a nice guy. I’m worried something’s happened to him.”
“Either he is dead, imprisoned, or has run off with a woman,” the Lizard King says as if he knows.
“Maybe,” I say. What else is there to say? Am I going to pour my heart out to an evil king who has stolen me from the alien who saved me from certain death in the effort to recapture him?
“I just have to keep going,” I say. “Because if I can’t find him, then I’ll never know what happened, and he’s out there somewhere, maybe suffering, and maybe dead, like you said, and if he is dead, then I need to know, and if he’s not then I have to save him, and…”
“Why save him? Is he weak? Is he elderly?”
“He’s fifty,” I say.
The Lizard King tips his head to the side and regards me with one lizard eye. “I can find him for you, but I don’t think that will help you.”
“I mean, it would. It would literally solve all my problems.”
“Until he goes missing again. The human lifespan ranges into the eighties and much later. Are you going to spend your life chasing him about like a wayward toddler?”
I narrow my eyes. I did not expect this much pushback. I did not expect any, actually.
“I want to find my dad,” I say.
“Do you want to find your dad, or do you want to find the meaning where your father is supposed to be?”
“Fuck’s sake,” I curse under my breath. He’s not only evil, he’s also deeply psychological. No wonder he is such a scourge on the universe.
The Lizard King laughs. “Do not worry, human. As the war escalates, you will probably have to be sacrificed and then the matter of your father’s location will become a complete irrelevance.”
“Well,” I say. “That’s something at least.”
The Lizard King practically giggles.
I get on with evil guys way too well. That’s my problem.
Freak is a good guy who has some bad shit to do sometimes, but this guy is the kind of casual evil that gets me shot into the sun.
Just because he’s pleasant to talk to from time to time doesn’t make him any less dangerous.
These conversations don’t mean anything to him.
I’m pretty sure he is keeping me close to use me as a shield. A human shield. He thinks if I am here, then Freak won’t risk murdering them all with extreme violence.
* * *
Freak
I am going to murder them all with extreme violence.
I am going to unwrite them from the universal ledger. I am going to ensure that their bloodlines turn to dust, that their births never took place.
My enemies are searching for me in the skies.
They are guarding their facilities against me.
They are sending out scouts to try to find me because they do not know where I am and they cannot understand why I have not surrendered myself to them.
Maybe they are wondering if I have abandoned my pet.
Whatever they are doing to her is about to be answered for many times over.
I am, at this time, standing on a proto-planet hundreds of thousands of years before any of them were born. The skies are roiling with carbon dioxide-rich air that makes the place feel perpetually damp. There is dew on everything, including me.
I am at this specific place, in this specific time, because Alara refused to help. She gloated about her lover, she exposed her plan, believing me helpless to end it on my own.
She has forgotten first principles. Silly thing.
I crouch down in the undergrowth, where a little lizard has just laid a particular kind of egg.
I stand, watching it as it squeezes that little white cylinder out.
Nobody realizes what potential is locked away in the contents of that egg; nobody understands that downstream from here, trillions of lives of all kinds spring from this particular little bauble.
If I walk away now, I choose to allow the Datari Composite to continue their expansion across space and time.
I choose to let them continue to develop weapons that evade Psyonic tech, and turn us into captives and worse.
I choose to let them take my pet, and end her at a time of their convenience after doing what they please to her.
I also choose to keep my standing among my people, to maintain my power in the universe.
I choose to follow the codes and laws to which I was born, and to which I have pledged my loyalty.
All I have to do is walk away, and I get to keep it all.
“I think not,” I say to myself.
I pick up the egg. This one fateful egg with the one fateful mutation that will, many generations from now, allow for these lizards to begin to not only grow, but walk upright and develop opposable thumbs. I let it roll on my palm. It is warm. The sun is beating down on me.
There is quiet in this place, far removed in time and space from any of the problems I most wish to solve. I am at risk of taking all this perspective and beginning to think that my little problems do not warrant this level of action. A good Psyon would not be here.
But I am not a good Psyon anymore. I am what is left after everything that can be taken from a man is taken from him. My pride, my dignity, and my pet.
I move to the little campsite I set up earlier. A gas burner is alight under a pot of boiling water.
I drop the egg into the boiling water.
I sit down beside it and I wait for seven meditative minutes. Then I turn the boiler off and drain the water. I reclaim the egg, crack the shell, and eat it whole.
I chew slowly, then I swallow. From here, time ripples out in a long ribbon of cause and effect, myriad uncontrollable changes taking place in times and places I have never gone and will never be.
I cannot feel any of it from this place, but I know the home realm with be awash with temporal distortions.
Alara will be furious. The council will be assembled.
The foundational laws will be enacted against me.
It does not matter.
It is done.