Charlinder's Walk (41 page)

"I think anyone today who sees a good argument for God's existence will also see a good argument for staying on His better side. Out of fear, if nothing else."

"I guess we all need something to motivate us."

"But either way, I just want you to consider that even someone as...difficult, as Mark was, for example, was only working with the tools he'd been supplied."

"In that case," he pressed on, "how
were
your experiences with religion different from mine?"

"When Eileen and I were young women, there was much more to belief and its adherents than just terrorism and threats of damnation. Religion was a very mixed picture in those days. It
was
used to justify a lot of evil acts and abuses of power, but religious leaders also used their power to encourage countless acts of generosity and compassion. They collected food for the local poor. They provided shelter for the homeless. Worship centers in wealthy places raised money to help people in poorer parts of the world. Religious organizations were often able to help the desperate, depressed, suicidal, drug-addicted and otherwise self-destructive in ways that equivalent secular institutions hadn't yet learned to match. They did all this, not because their religion was true, but because it fulfilled a need. It had the ability to stabilize and organize communities and that power could be used for good."

"Huh. That
is
different," he said. "All the believers I've met just want to use the implication of God to tell people what to do, and not always in ways that make sense."

"That is unfortunate," she admitted. "But it's not the only way that religion can be used."

"I get that," he answered.

"Char, please just hear me out. It would be so simple to say the world would be such a better place if everyone could just give up their irrational ideas in favor of the right ones, but who really knows which ideas are the rational ones?"

Charlinder thought it was a bit rich of Gentiola, of all people, to start going on about rational ideas, but he didn't interrupt.

"You may be right on most questions, but you might be amazed at how much you have yet to learn. We do not live in a world in which all will agree on the answers that really matter once the most tightly reasoned argument is presented. Human beings are a much noisier, messier animal than that. Purity and order are for chemicals and blocks."

"I hear you."

"Do you really?"

"Yes. I need to engage with people who disagree with me, and I need to be prepared to be proven wrong."

Gentiola seemed pleasantly surprised; perhaps she wasn't accustomed to anyone listening to her that way.

"So: thanks for showing me that, it was fascinating," he finished earnestly. He started to stand up to leave.

"Wait, there's something else I want to show you," said Gentiola.

"Okay, then." He sat down again. "Let's see it."

"Right. Once I extracted Eileen's memory, I had a piece of her--a little bit of her essence, shall we say--and then I was able to gather some more information on her." She laid the journal on the rim of the bowl and splayed her fingers over the cover. The air darkened again. A stream of smoke wafted up from the back of her hand and formed a round cloud above the level of their heads.

Colors appeared in the smoke and resolved themselves into the face of Eileen as she appeared as Charlinder's Anima.

"This is Eileen, of course," Gentiola began, "and we know that she ultimately decided not to 'hold out until menopause,' as Laura put it, and eventually had a son."

Gentiola flourished her free hand at the smoke, and Eileen's face changed to that of a dark-haired, olive-skinned young man.

"Who fathered a son."

Another flourish, and the man's face changed to another man, with similar facial structure and slightly darker coloring.

"Who sired a daughter."

Another woman's face appeared, this one eerily familiar.

"Whose second child was a daughter."

The face changed one last time with Gentiola's air of finality, and Charlinder's mouth fell wide open upon the sight of his mother's sweet, smiling face hovering in the smoke.

"And I assume you know who she was," came Gentiola's voice through Charlinder's haze of shock.

"So, so Eileen is my..." he attempted. The smoke faded away and light returned to the room.

"Great-great-great-grandmother," Gentiola counted.

"I never knew that," he breathed.

"Since your home culture is matrilocal and non-monogamous, you couldn't be expected to know," Gentiola responded, "but as I read her accounts, and got to know you, I started to wonder. There's a little bit of her in you, and when she was alive, there was already a little bit of you in her."

"Yeah, I guess you could say there was," said Charlinder, still lost in wonder.

"If she could see you today," Gentiola continued, "and if my impressions of her are accurate, she wouldn't give a flying toss about your genes," she paused while Charlinder released a little involuntary chuckle, "but I think she'd be very happy to see how much you've inherited of her spirit."

"Do you think that's why she's my Anima? Because I'm descended from her?"

"Your Anima takes the form of Eileen because she was someone who would understand you, and she was someone from whom you would willingly accept advice. The spirit guide doesn't have to take the form of a blood relation. Sometimes it isn't fully human."

While Charlinder was left to contemplate Gentiola summoning an Animus with the head of a brown bear, she opened the door to a small closet under the staircase and brought out a flat muslin sack and ribbon. She emptied the herbs from the bowl and into the cloth, tied the ribbon around the open end, and handed the sack and journal over to Charlinder. "Eileen's memory is in the herbs, and I think you should keep it."

"What'll I do with it?"

"You probably won't succeed on your first try. But if you can concentrate hard enough, the recall is straightforward."

"Thank you."

"You're welcome. That's all I wanted to show you for now."

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Surprise

He had to grant her this much; it was a powerful distraction that she'd just given him from the secret she'd recently shared. Not that the distraction was such a surprise; the Paleola village was so small that all of its residents were probably descended from most of its founders, but in all the years that Charlinder had been reading Eileen's writings rather than running hide-and-seek relays with the other boys, he'd never thought of this woman as someone who could be related to him. She was an influence. She was an educator. She'd never before been anything so intimate as an ancestor. Now he'd heard her voice, listened to her speak, seen a piece of her actual behavior first represented in her journal. He now knew what she looked like, and knew that his Anima took the form of his great-great-great-grandmother when she was not much older than he.

It was such a fascinating display that, for the next several hours, the fact of Gentiola's having made the Plague didn't feel like such a pressing issue. He let that go while he thought about Eileen's exchange with Laura. It was a curious sensation to be reminded that, absent the true answer, there were more than two viewpoints that could possibly explain the Plague. Laura's insight was fascinating, for imagining that God wanted to cull His people for problems other than non-belief and sexual indulgence; in fact her reasoning bore some vital similarities to Gentiola's rationale, only she still depended on belief in God, and Charlinder was still of the mind that if a theory was useful, it would be defensible without faith. Even more intriguing to him was how Patricia's theory of a terrorist act gone out of control came factually closest to the actual event. It was neither the will of God nor a random enactment of nature: all that damage came from the work of a human being. She'd been mistaken in thinking the virus's progress had spun out of control. It had actually fallen short.

Which brought him back to Gentiola. She wasn't trying to make Charlinder forget what she'd done, but she also hadn’t answered whether she might do it again.

He continued to bring that question back to her over the next several days. First, she responded with, "Haven't I answered that already?" The second time, she pointedly changed the subject and kept Charlinder admirably occupied with a discussion on how the atheist Communist states hadn't really been secular societies because they turned the state into the new God.

"...and you see, a secular culture is not one that has no religion, but that doesn't
need
it. The atheist totalitarian regimes did not encourage their subjects to think logically, or critically, or independently--only to parrot the party's dogma, which meant that the removal of theistic religion did more harm than good to the people's psychology..."

Though it was a fascinating, stimulating talk, Charlinder was something short of deterred, and when he asked her for the third time in two days, she came the closest he'd yet seen to losing her temper.

"Char, haven't I done enough for you?!" she retorted at the foot of a staircase.

"If you don't want to extend your hospitality to me any longer, I'll leave."

"That's ridiculous," she replied. "I don't have time to play games with you over a question I've already answered, as I have work to do."

"What kind of work?"

"I don't grow my whole life on this property, in case you haven't noticed. I depend on the villages for some things, which means I need to do magic for them. Let me know when you're ready to stop being difficult." And with that, she stormed off up the stairs.

Since that approach was getting him nowhere, he resolved to think of a new one. Gentiola was noticeably frosty with him for the rest of that day. Thinking over it that night, he figured that he'd made it clear to her that he still wanted to know, so he could wait for her to bring him around to the subject when she was ready.

She returned to her usual pleasant self the next morning, but over the next two days, appeared to have caught onto Charlinder's intention. She showed him some of the magic she performed for the nearby villagers. She engaged him in many more invigorating talks, but never brought the subject near the Plague. She showed him how she took care of her rabbits, but she did not encourage him to ask any more questions.

"Your aura is different today, Char," Gentiola remarked on the third morning of this stage. He was starting to think that the question he posed didn't really have an answer. Perhaps it was comparable to asking a small child why she'd just done something naughty; that it was really just an accusation posing as a question. It was possible that Gentiola had shared with him the extent of her thoughts relating to the Plague, and there was nothing left to do but enjoy her company, until...when? If she would not give him a yes or no, then he had no reason left to stay. She gave no sign that he was about to wear out his welcome, but he would make no assumptions. While he didn’t like to admit as much, he had grown very comfortable with her hospitality and was in no rush to head back out to the wilderness. It was a bridge he would eventually have to cross.

"Sorry, what's my 'aura'?"

"It's a band of colored light around your body; I have one, too, in fact every living thing generates one," she explained. Her eyes were focused, while sipping her breakfast tea, at an area just above his head.

"And what does this aura do?"

"It doesn't
make
anything happen, precisely, but it carries some information. It describes your personality and talents, your health, your emotional state, it's all descriptive."

"So, if the aura shows one's emotional state, then it's supposed to fluctuate from day to day?"

"It is. Yours has been fluctuating since you arrived here, which is normal, but an aura doesn't normally change
this
much in one day."

"What's so different about mine today?"

"The biggest change is that all the red has disappeared." She took another slurp of tea. "That means all your anger's dissipated, which would be a good thing, except you don't even have a sliver of pink left, and that's worrisome."

"I take it we all need a little bit of pink in our auras?"

"In fact, is that...?" Gentiola peered quizzically at something around his ears, oblivious to his remark.

"What do you see?"

"I'm not sure. Probably nothing dangerous."

Charlinder thought he probably should have seen something vaguely sinister about the fact that Gentiola could see something on him that illuminated such complex details about his mood. The worry was all cognitive, however; perhaps because he had already seen so many examples of Gentiola's abilities to see things and know things that mere mortals couldn't, that Charlinder didn't feel any alarm. In fact at that point he felt as though he was well beyond alarm at anything.

Much of the day gave way to a near-forgotten emotion. He and Gentiola had seemingly run out of things to talk about. There was nothing to do on the estate in which Gentiola needed his help in the slightest. She showed no sign of tiring of his company, in fact she gave every impression that her hospitality could continue into the infinite. Yet, for the first time arguably since leaving home, he was at once comfortable, relaxed and
bored
.

Gentiola spent much of the morning at work. Her services to her nearest neighbors were primarily weather-working and disaster-averting. She did magic to ensure that the local villagers' crops grew appropriately, that destructive weather and pests steered clear of them, that their men didn't get killed in hunting accidents and their women didn't die in childbirth. They, in return, supplied her with fabric, whatever food she didn't grow at home, and livestock when she needed it. Most of her pottery was bartered for magic, for example. She'd offered to let Charlinder watch her work, understanding there was nothing for him to do, but he declined; he didn't learn anything from watching her work except that he would never learn to do what she did. She understood. He enjoyed the sunshine in the garden while grooming her rabbits, trying to convince himself he was being of some use.