Alright Davy. Now that you’re done fooling around, I can get back to work.
Is there any reason for rushing headlong into our destruction? asks Ailann. Can’t we proceed at a reasoned pace – say one word a day for the next five thousand years?
It won’t work, says Tarlach. Tara will get curious before then and read it.
She might do that tomorrow, said Ailann, panicking. She might do that tonight. We need to expurgate the manuscript now.
Or hurry up and finish it, says Cuinn.
But there’s so much more that needs to go into it, I say. About Owen and Wynne. About the prophecy. About how Ailann became Archon. About the Two-day War. About Chase. About Molly and the puppies.
That isn’t what I’d pick at all, said Dermot. I still say the grand jeté. And the first dream she shared with Hurley.
If you think the point of all this is to tell Tara what Molly saw, why not just tell her? asks Whirljack. What’s the point of going through all this?
That isn’t it, I reply. Everyone looks at me in surprise. I’m surprised myself.
I don’t know why, I continue, but I just know it. That’s part of it, but it isn’t all of it. We have to keep going.
I don’t understand, says Ailann.
That’s why you have me, Tarlach replies.
When she wakes up, Suibhne is gone, and Ailann is there. And suddenly she’s in a screaming rage.
“What the fuck, Ash? You tell me, what the fuck? You run out, leaving Suibhne in control, and don’t do anything to stop him when he plans to kill you?”
“We thought you were dead,” says Ailann woodenly. “We thought you were dead.”
“That’s no fucking excuse. What if you had succeeded? What would I have done then? Without the Archon, the whole Domha’vei goes straight to hell.”
“I don’t care,” says Ailann sullenly, even though he does. He knows she’s right. But he can’t bear it. Suibhne was created to bear it, but he couldn’t either, in the end. “It’s Suibhne’s fault,” he says. “Suibhne is mad.”
“And what about Ross?” she screams. “Why didn’t you tell me about Ross?”
“I couldn’t.” That’s all he can say.
“I haven’t seen him since he left for Dumati. Were you planning to keep him from me forever, Ash? Like you’ve kept Daniel and Sloane? Is Ross another one of your failures?”
He knows better than to respond to that. She’s really angry at I and I, but she’s taking it out on him. Ailann’s supposed to be her hero, her savior, so Ailann takes all the shit. And for all that, they aren’t lovers. He’s the Archon. He only appears when he is needed. The rest of the time Prince Charming is there, who looks so damn decorative at state dinners.
Ailann realizes that he is jealous. Not of my success, but that my pleasures do not seem to be allowed to him. He would like one moment of joy with his woman. Or he would like to break into tears, like Evan. But he can’t. He has to hold up the sky.
“I need a drink.”
“Oh, fine. It’s scarcely past sunrise. Half the council is whispering that you’re an alcoholic. A drunk who leaves the state in the hands of a lunatic.”
Ailann slams his glass upon the table. “Don’t talk to me about drinking. How many times have you been drunk in public, oh Sublime Matriarch? And who was it with the taste for Gyre back on Volparnu?”
Tara draws her knees up around her pillow. “On Volparnu, I wanted to die.”
“And for you, it’s a valid excuse.”
“I saw Daniel drown! And you didn’t fucking tell me…”
“We couldn’t. At that time, I and I couldn’t reach as far as Volparnu. The mothman followed your shuttle as far as He could, but He reached the limit of his range and fell back into the tree.”
“Would you have told me? Sloane didn’t.”
Ailann’s words are low and measured. “Sloane was going to. He’d planned his words for a dozen years. He was going to defy the will of the Matriarch and the Archon and the Cantor; he was going to risk ending up like Ashtheresa in that horrible story. But then, when you finally returned, you showed up with Johannon on your arm.”
“Johannon? The only reason I was able to return to Sideria was Johannon. He got Traeger to convince Tenzain Merkht that my infertility was due to the climate of Volparnu. Do you get it? I owed them, Traeger and Johannon.”
“Owing them is one thing. But you loved Johannon.”
“No. I never loved him. I was so desperately lonely – and I wanted to insult Merkht by taking a lover the minute I got away from him. If I hadn’t owed Johannon, it could’ve been Sloane. It should’ve been Sloane. Except when I saw him that time in the stables, the sunlight hit his eyes, and…”
Tara stops now. She didn’t mean to say this much. But she might as well finish. “I didn’t understand why, but he reminded me of Daniel. And I never wanted to love anyone like that again. I never wanted to lose anyone like that again.”
Ailann is silent.
“I took the Gyre because the visions I had were so vivid. I lived in waking dreams of a man who would love and protect me. He was so strong, and his eyes were so kind. He was stronger even than my curse, so strong I couldn’t hurt him. I missed Daniel so much, and I just wanted to live in those dreams forever.”
Ailann sits on the side of the bed, his head in his hands. Tara clutches at his arm. “It was you, Ailann…”
“I’m sick,” he murmurs. “I’m so sick, Tara. There’s no strength left. How has it all grown so wrong?”
When Tara returns from the bath, there is a new man there. He looks a bit like Tommy, a bit like Owen, and a bit like Sigmund Freud. He extends his hand. “Tarlach Tadgh,” he says. “I’m a psychologist. The first Cu’endhari psychologist, I believe.”
Tara takes his hand, looks into his eyes. “Ash,” she says. “What gives?”
“We’ve had a number of, let’s say, unfortunate incidents. Daniel, Sloane, Evan, Ailann, Owen, Ross and Suibhne are all suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome.”
“Wait – Evan? What’s wrong with Evan?”
“Evan is the worst.”
Tara looks devastated. “But nothing bad ever happened to Evan.”
Tarlach is stunned. And if Tara doesn’t understand, other humans can’t have the faintest clue. There’s such a gulf between how the Cu’enashti think and how humans think. Tarlach sees that it’s going to become a problem.
He tries to find the words to explain to her. “You left Court Emmere to go to Earth. From the way you spoke, we had no idea if you would ever come back. Not like when you were taken by force to Volparnu. Then we knew you would do everything you could to come back to Dolparessa. But Evan wasn’t murdered, didn’t die saving your life. He just had to watch you leave us, maybe forever. That day was worse than believing you were dead.”
“That’s pretty self-centered.”
Tarlach is taken aback by that comment, too. He wants to say that his self is completely centered on her, but yes, he can see that from her point-of-view, death would be a lot worse than going to university on Earth. He can even see why she thinks he should share that opinion. He has an unpleasant insight: the line between obsessive love and self-absorption is very, very thin.
He’s starting to see that his job will not only be self-analysis, but in explaining that self to her. “If you were dead, we could cling to your memory, build our lives around that. That’s how the grandfathers and grandmothers live. That’s what Ailann tried to do. But if you reject us, what then? There’s no purpose, no perspective, no sense to the universe at all. There is nothing but unending nightmare.”
“Evan might have considered telling me the truth.”
“At that point, we didn’t trust you anymore.”
She looks very sad. We all feel how grossly our priorities have been violated. “And now? Do you trust me now?”
“No,” he says slowly. “But that’s why I and I needs an analyst. We can’t continue like this. I have to figure out how to set it right.”
“Do you have any ideas?”
“Sex.”
She breaks into laughter. “Oh my god, you really are Sigmund Freud.”
“I’m serious. The greater our intimacy with you, the more orderly and rational the universe appears to us. It’s the holy of holies.”
“That’s a great pick up line. You know, by that rationale, Suibhne is a lot saner than Ailann.”
“Suibhne is a lot saner than Ailann.”
“Don’t spare me the honest truth. “ She drops her bathrobe onto the floor. “And how sane are you, Mr. Psychotherapist?”
“Very sane. I was cultivated to be sane,” he says, staring at her breasts.
The thoroughness of Tarlach’s work impresses her. He interviews hundreds of trees. “I can’t possibly define insanity unless I have a baseline for normality.” He finds out that the average Cu’enashti has four major branches. He finds out that other than the Atlas Tree, the largest has eight. Tarlach is the Atlas Tree’s nineteenth branch.
“I’m starting to wonder if I have too many emanations to sustain any sort of coherent identity,” he says. “It’s also possible that I’m in the vanguard of what will come to be considered normal. The Cu’endhari have only taken human form for the past 900 years, and with a life expectancy of four thousand, others might well start to have this many sub-trunks.”
“900 years? That’s when the 4th Matriarch made the compact with the Arya Archon.”
He nods. “Until then, our natural imitative ability was used in interacting with the native fauna. Avions. Squirrels. When humans came to Dolparessa, of course it was our instinct to emulate them. Overnight, we became sentient.”
“That has to be the most incredible moment in the entire history of the evolution of species,” she says. “Millions of years of development compressed into an instant.”
“Do you understand why we are so dependent on you? Even for the Cu’enmerengi, human life is the template. They choose to sacrifice their consciousness as trees in exchange for autonomy as humans. We Cu’enashti choose to keep our perceptions, and with them, gain access to incredible power. But in return, we give our lives to the humans we choose as our focal points. It’s a deeply philosophical question whether the Cu’enmerengi or the Cu’enashti have stayed closer to their essential selves.”
“Maybe the Arya have stayed closest to their essential selves. They are content being trees.”
“But where’s the fun in that?” Tarlach says, unfastening his trousers.
Tarlach comes to understand that the Cu’enashti are a people completely devoid of self-examination. They define themselves entirely in relation to the Chosen. When confronted with ideas or beliefs outside of that person’s acumen, they blindly accept what they are told by their leaders. They kept the Great Silence unquestioningly. They believed the story of Theresa and Ashtheresa. Unlike the Cu’enmerengi, they did not form covert communities. Each one of them feels their shame, their pain, their guilt is theirs alone.
Tarlach also realizes that humans are both curious about and mistrustful of the nau’gsh. And it was self-evident, even before the Pretender’s Rebellion, that a mistrustful human is a dangerous human.
He decides the best thing to do is to become a talk show host. He’ll present his research findings and interview various Cu’endhari, and the Cu’endhari will start to understand the patterns of their lives, and the humans will find the dramas of their neighbors roundly entertaining and thus start to feel comfortable with them. A woman confessing that she grew another branch because her first emanation looked too much like her boyfriend’s mother’s much-hated supervisor hardly fits the image of an evil alien about to boil human children alive.
He’s right. His show is insanely popular. He becomes a celebrity; unlike many pop psychologists, he wears it well. It’s because he has all Whirljack’s experience to guide him.
He decides to devote a show to the somber topic of loss and mourning amongst the Cu’enashti. He expects to show humans the depths of the trees’ dependency on the human Chosen. He expects they’ll be shocked by the amount of immolations that occur after the Chosen’s death.
Instead, he is the one who is shocked.
Tarlach eats his meal in silence. Tara gazes at him thoughtfully, but doesn’t press him. After a while, he says, “I need to talk about Ross.”
“It’s about time,” she says. He feels stupid. Of course she wants to talk about it. He remembers what she said to Suibhne. She doesn’t blame Ross. She blames General Panic.
She blames General Panic because General Panic was responsible. Tarlach has never felt so stupid in his entire emanation.
He tries to find a starting point. “I and I has become the most powerful mothman because of His n’aashet n’aaverti – he would literally do anything for you. If it’s impossible, He’ll find a way to make it possible. Laws of the universe be damned. Among humans, that sort of obsession would be considered insanity. But among our people, He is venerated for it. His strength, cunning and intellect are respected, and He is honored for the times His actions have literally saved our people. But the reason our people accept Him as their deity is His absolute, unflinching loyalty to you.”
Tarlach stands, walking over to the picture window. “That tree – that enormous tree – that monstrous tree. It’s that size because it suffered. Every branch is a measure of its suffering. And every time it suffered, it grew stronger.”
He turns back to her. “And Ross failed to stop himself from being raped. He failed. The purity of our purpose is tainted. We tried to compensate, to atone somehow, but it wasn’t enough.”
“Atone,” she says. She understands, and she doesn’t like it. “You mean Callum. Why Callum wants me to hurt him.”
He nods. “Callum needs to prove that he will do anything you want him to, no matter how painful or humiliating. He’s making up for Ross’ infidelity.”
“But it’s a lie. It’s a fucking lie. Ross wasn’t unfaithful – he was forced. Have any of you ever for a moment been less than faithful in your devotion to me? Have you ever swerved from your priorities?”
He shakes his head.
“Tarlach, here’s what it means to be an animal – you run around wearing a hunk of meat which gradually rots over the course of a dozen or so decades. The meat gets diseased. Beaten up. Broken. Pieces fall off. Whether they get reattached depends on the quality of medical care in your area. And the meat is you, but it isn’t all that is you. There’s something underneath that outlasts it. In that eternal flame is where fidelity lies, not in the rotting hunk of meat. If Ross betrayed me, then I betrayed Ash with Merkht. But I didn’t even class what happened with Merkht in the same category as what I had done with Daniel. Merkht’s actions were the motions of a rutting beast, and I refused to even let it touch me. And as soon as I could, I flushed his spawn from my womb.”
She pauses for a moment. “Of course, the Gyre took the edge off a bit,” she says.
“I completely agree with the point that the victim should never be blamed. But no Cu’enashti is going to blame you anyway. We don’t expect fidelity from a human.”
“Talk about a double standard of morality!”
“It has nothing to do with morality. It’s simple evolutionary biology. Look – Cu’enmerengi don’t form attachments at all. They don’t have to. They wind-pollinate.”
“And you guys get all judgey on them, don’t you?” says Tara.
“Cu’enashti, on the other hand, are absolutely faithful. We have to be. The human partner we choose is the axis, the anchor point that allows us to successfully negotiate our fragmented existence. Human sexual behavior is far more complex. Your young take up a remarkably inconvenient portion of your lives in order to become self-sufficient. For short-term survival, it’s advantageous for the biological parents to protect them. But for long-term survival of the species, genetic diversity is paramount. So you play at fidelity, and constantly stray into covert attachments.”
“That’s a horrible stereotype. From the day I broke up with Clive, I’ve never been unfaithful to you.”
“You now have nineteen lovers to choose from. Why inconvenience yourself by looking for another?”
“You’re saying…”
“There’s no absolute necessity for the growth of multiple trunks. When a Cu’enmerengi is injured, of course there’s root regeneration, but the collateral upward growth is added to the main trunk. They change their human forms at will, but keep more-or-less the same single personality. Cu’enashti, on the other hand, develop multiple trunks each with its own fixed personality and appearance. It’s a perfect solution to the problem of human fidelity, aligning the need for stability with the need for variety.”
“You know, I’m not sure, but I think I should feel insulted.”
“In any case, I’ve reached a decision. I have to discuss this issue on my show. I have to talk about my personal experience. Of course, I won’t mention Ross by name. But if I admit that one of my emanations was raped, maybe my people will start to realize that they don’t have to suffer in silence. If one branch somewhere is saved, it’s worth it.”
“Are you certain? It’s a brave thing to do, but there could be a backlash. Your people might not accept it. You’re opening yourself up for a lot of trauma.”
“All the trees know who I am. It’s just the humans who don’t. If a respected figure – a cultural icon like the Atlas Tree – brings the issue to the fore…”
“Or the Archon could end up taking a lot of shit for it on a political level. How does Ailann feel about this? And how do you think the Cantor will react?”
His voice drops until it’s almost inaudible. “Listen, Tara. I talked to a human whose wife had burned her tree. He couldn’t understand why the woman he loved would suddenly commit suicide. He’ll live with that his whole life. He’ll never forgive her. And I know what she was thinking. But he didn’t blame her for being raped. He wanted to kill the man who did it.”
“I’m not done with General Panic,” Tara says.