But it wasn’t my Choice. It’s theirs… they’re stuck with it.
It’s a shame you can’t trade in a Choice after a test run, though, and say to the Powers That Be, “Sorry, the Lone One fooled us, this Choice is defective, we want another chance.”
The silence that fell in Rhiow’s mind in the wake of the idle thought was so profound that it practically rang. It was familiar, that silence: the Whisperer suggesting that you might just have stumbled onto something…
Rhiow’s eyes widened as she reexamined the thought.
The Choice offered to the forefathers and foremothers of the Wise Ones … could it be that it was defective? Flawed, somehow? Incomplete?
Ridiculous. Whoever heard of an incomplete Choice before? There’s a pattern. The Lone One turns up … says, “Would you like to live as the Powers have told you you must, or take a gamble on another way that might work out better?” And you gamble, and falclass="underline" or refuse…
And then Rhiow stopped.
But the saurian Choice had to be incomplete. There had been no wizards there. And there had to be wizards: the whole spectrum of a species’ life, both natural and supranatural, had to be represented for the Choice to be valid.
Or… She stared at the stone between her paws. No. A species’ Choice is its own.
Or was it? If the species was linked to another…
…did the other have to be there, taking part, as well?
Taken together with Ith’s Oath, with the Ailurin words in it…
…the thought shook Rhiow. The People were their own. They were utterly independent. That some other species would have been involved in their Choice was unthinkable … a challenge to their sovereignty over themselves. That they should be ancillary to some other species’ Choice…
That was simply intolerable.
But Rhiow got the cold, no-nonsense feeling in her gut, when she turned to the Whisperer, which suggested that this might indeed be the case.
If this Choice was incomplete. . . it can be completed now. By a saurian wizard… and those intended to help him complete it, to judge by the language in it. His assistants: his people’s supplanters…
Us!
She writhed a little, then cursed, and went over the Whisperer’s head.
Ian, why are you dumping this on me?
You were there, came the answer, definite and instantaneous, its Source unmistakable. Or rather: You were not there. You are there now.
Choose.
And the choice was plain. Choose one way, refuse your species’ help, and drive the serpents out into the cold and the dark, and damn them all. Let life be as it is, unchanged and stable, to be relied upon.
Choose another way and lose your species’ autonomy forever, or whatever illusion of it you have had until now. The People’s whole proud history becomes merely a footnote, a preliminary to the advent of these newborns, unable to make their own way without help; midwives to a race that had its chance and lost it, a million years ago. Nature killed them. Let nature be the arbiter: their time is over for good.
Yet nature is not innocent when the Lone One drives it Or, rather: it remains innocent, not knowing who holds the wheel and uses it as a weapon. Is the storm to blame, or the Lone Power, when the lightning strikes and kills some noble soul about the business of saving life? Do you blame nature or sa’Rrahh when a cab comes too fast around the corner and—
Rhiow’s tail lashed. Devastatrix, Rhiow said inside her, I know your work. You will not fool me twice.
Yet it was not a question of anyone being fooled, anymore. Here was a Choice that had not been completed at the beginning of things. The Lone One—illegally?? Rhiow thought, shuddering at the concept—had convinced another species that its Choice had been made. They had suffered, had died in their millions (billions?) for the Lone Power’s amusement, for the sake of a technicality, an injustice done that the victim-species was incapable of perceiving.
Now someone had come along and perceived the injustice, the incomplete Choice. What do you do?
Pass by on the other side? Rhiow was a New Yorker, she had seen her share of this. Make a stink? Get yourself killed as a result? She had seen this too.
And getting yourself killed would be the least of it You were interfering in the business of gods and demigods, here. What happens, in the human idiom, when you take the Lone Power to court and try to convict It of malfeasance? A slippery business, at best. But the destruction of much more than your body would be fair to expect if you failed.
Oh well, Rhiow thought, what do I need all these lives for, anyway? The thought was bitter. Memories of Hhuha, unbidden, definitely unwanted at the moment, kept shocking through her like static on a rug in winter every minute or so, and the pain they caused Rhiow was beginning to tell. Anything that would stop that pain was beginning to look welcome.
Your hands on the wheel, though, she said inwardly to sa’Rrahh, fluffing up slightly. Not an accident. There are no such things.
Unfair, that at the time when I would most like to die, I must now fight hardest to live longest. And for the sake of these miserable, bad-smelling, cold-skinned snakes. She hissed in fury, causing Urruah to open his eyes a little wider and stare at her. Iau, you rag-eared kitten-eater, I hate this, I hate You, why me?
No answer, but then, when someone was yowling abuse at you, a dignified silence was the preferred response. Rhiow thought of the two Himalayans down the block and growled at herself, at her own bad manners, at life in general. Unfair…
You found it. You fix it.
The universe’s eternal principle. Repair yourself if you can. Spend the least possible energy doing it If you can’t manage it… tough. And Ehef’s succinct comment on Rhiow’s observation long ago that this seemed mean-spirited of the Powers, and hard on Their creation: What do you think this is, a charity?
She sighed. I was right, Rhiow thought, we are certainly all going to die. For during Choice, some of the participants always die: no Choice is valid without that most final commitment. And if even one of the team died, all would be trapped below: all would die together.