Post 17
I’ll tell you this, there are other mutants out there who are far more dangerous. Before we consider using violence, we must try to come to some terms with them and allow them their own corner. If we do not, then we are no better than the old ones who destroyed this world. I for one, refuse to allow fear to dictate my actions. I’d much rather trust empathy and common sense. I consider it our duty to become protectors of the land and all forms of life. Should any of them try to use more than is their due, or should we see they prepare to attack us, we have the right to protect ourselves and life in general. Whatever it costs our comfort, I ask of you that we never be the ones to strike first. Thank you for coming to me my friends and thank you for listening to me.”
Her words were aired and her faith in the people was vindicated by the overwhelming support that gathered around her and in condemnation of the attitudes of people like Haelly Stramgord.
Arthur meant to compliment her, “We’re going to make a politician of you yet.”
“Never! Robert is growing stronger, it is his job to deal with people, he is the one with the empathy that helps him understand them. People just frighten me.”
Robert scowled. “You know I’m no good at handling people. Cherine, if you and I are a couple, then we must see ourselves clearly without fear of knowing who we are, without submitting to stereotypes. My love, I am not like you, you face life, whether it frightens you or not. You do things. I’m more inclined to think about things forever without taking action. You are the protector of the family and if you allow me, I’ll be the dreamer.”
Cherine made time for visiting Bobby every morning at exactly the same time. She no longer tried to outstare him and chatted in a relaxed manner. She had come to measure his distance from her by his body length. She felt it was a positive sign when he reduced it from about fifteen to twelve. He never stayed longer than forty five minutes, but even that was remarkable, if one is to think of him as an animal.
Jon and Sarine visited one morning while Cherine was gone and they saw that Robert was bored. They suggested to him that he finds something different to do so as to break the monotony. Jon suggested he take up art. Robert was certain he would be useless at it, but he decided to give it a try. Over the next few months he learnt how to master a few of the basics, trained his hand and eye, and his imagination supplied him with enough material to keep him busy for years.
Cherine reduced her visits to half an hour and Bobby reduced his distance from her to eight body lengths. He does not seem inclined to move closer as it makes him nervous - unless she achieves some kind of breakthrough. She could not be certain he responds to his name when she calls, as he could be responding to her voice. His hate still found expression in his eyes and in the way he always attacks his meat before eating it.
“I would like to come with you. I think it is time Bobby grows used to more than one person visiting. I won’t sit close to either of you, I’ll stay closer to the house and paint.” He grinned. “I promise I won’t say a word while we’re there.”
“Not near the house, he’s using it again. I was wondering why he does, could it be that he is afraid at night? Robert, he is only a child.”
“Ntchizi can’t sense him?”
She laughed. “With all the hate he broadcasts?”
Bobby was a blur of rage and hate as he darted in and out of rocks to threaten Robert. Once Robert retreated, widening the space between him and Cherine, Bobby settled before her, though he reverted to his original fifteen body lengths and his eyes swivelled to check on Robert often. Over the days he became accustomed to Robert's presence, but remained wary and kept his distance.
One morning Cherine stopped talking as she lost herself in her thoughts. She was brought back by his snarling. As soon as she talked he settled down again. Both of them were jubilant as they reported the new development to Arthur. Not at all calmly sanguine as a Chief of a Department should be, he grew excited and tried to think up what else they can do to test Bobby’s responses.
The next morning Cherine took her place, talked for a few minutes and then coming to her feet walked away from Bobby, turning to gesture to him to follow as she continued walking. He extended himself as high as he could on all four limbs, his face wearing a silent snarl, but he stayed where he was. Cherine turned back a few steps and called to him by voice and gesture for him to join her. As she walked away he took a few tentative steps in her direction and then stopped. He raised his head and ululated. Cherine immediately returned half way and crouched as she talked in a soothing voice. Soon as he quieted she rose to her feet and half turned again, gesturing for him to follow. This time she kept her face turned to him as she cajoled and she noticed his head continually swung as he tried to keep both her and Robert in sight. In a gentle voice, as if talking to Bobby, she told Robert to leave.
He did so, walking towards the hill. As he crossed over the crest Bobby took a few extra looks that way and then concentrated on Cherine. Suddenly he ran in a wide circle around Cherine and stopped about twenty body lengths ahead of her. She gave a laugh of pure joy and told him to go ahead, she’d follow. As she walked, so did he, always wary of her and keeping his distance.
“Arthur, we keep forgetting that Bobby is a child. After leading me for about ten minutes he started running off to examine something or other, he’d look to see if I’d noticed, once even digging a few scoops of earth, and then he’d run back to lead me again. He felt so alive! I think he was happy for the first time since he met us.”
“Cameras recorded what happened by the house and part of your walk, but we did not expect you to go rambling through the hills with him. Try and keep him by the house tomorrow while Robert installs more cameras. I have some news for you Cherine. Bobby is not as old as he looks, from blood samples and other examinations when he slept, they’ve determined his age as being closer to five years. Who knows, if he has the capability, you just might succeed in teaching him to understand you.”
At breakfast Cherine was filled with energy, eager for the hours to pass so that she could be by Bobby. Robert was also filled with exuberance and was in the mood to tease her.
“I think you plan to enslave Bobby so that he cannot live without you - as if having one uxorious male in your life is not enough.”
“I have no intention of enslaving him. Do you truly believe you lose all autonomy by loving? I offer mine without holding back a shadow for myself and from being a part of a love that is gloriously true, I gain far more autonomy than I’ve offered. Only if you cannot believe in the completeness of love are you chained by it.”
He moaned, his jest having gone astray thanks to her earnestness. “It’s too early for a philosophical discussion, let me enjoy my breakfast.”
“I understand my poor benighted love, relax and enjoy your breakfast.” He quickly glanced at her and saw the bubbling laughter in her eyes. She was teasing him! He laughed, his lingering fears gentled by the warmth of the love he sensed between them. Ntchizi smiled to herself as she withdrew, pleased at the emoting she sensed in both of them.
It seemed that Bobby has hundreds of secrets he wants to share with her and she rued her inability to understand what most of them were. As long as she stopped to looked at whatever he dashed to, it did not matter, he seemed happy. As he frolicked, ran to and fro, she and Ntchizi allowed themselves to reach into him to sense what he was feeling and they withdrew, both shaken and puzzled. The hate seemed to seethe unabated. Cherine actually staggered from shock so she sat on a large rock for a moment. A movement by her side startled her. Bobby peered up at her, his head twisted as his hate filled eyes stared into hers. Apparently satisfied, he leaped off the rock, impatiently trying to lead her into what was probably a flash flood river. She followed him for a short way and then insisted on returning home. He did not follow her back to the house, abandoning her as if he were sulking.
Since Ntchizi was just as puzzled as Cherine and neither Robert nor Arthur could find a reasonable answer to the dichotomous facts, Cherine insisted they visit the light beings. They listened and shared from her and Ntchizi and admitted they have never come across any souls like Bobby, so have no answers either.
“I’m convinced we’re misunderstanding him.”
“The emoting is too strong for it to be misunderstood Cherine.” The other POL experts agreed with Arthur.
“That may be the key. Arthur used the word emoting. He’s a boxee, so is Robert. I’m blocked. None of you are. Have any of you sensed him emoting hate?”
“You only have to look at his ice blue eyes to feel the hate.”
“But have you sensed him emoting hate?”
“I think so…I’m not certain. We need to close in within range so that we can sense him.”
Cherine glanced at Robert for support because she felt she was in danger of sounding foolish. He took her hand as she spoke. “I don’t think the hate we feel when we enter his mind reflects what he feels. I haven’t been in a lot of minds, only two but, when I enter, I never feel the entire mind emoting. By mind I’m talking about that space or whatever where I meet the soul. I only feel the emoting emanating from a localised source, the place where I sense or see the soul. The rest of the area is neutral. With Bobby, the entire area is in upheaval, the hate not only an emotion but also a danger, it can shred the intruding mind if you don’t get out quickly. What if his mind has mutated so that what we sense is a protective area, a shield? What if we’ve never met his true mind because it is hidden behind that storm?”
She paused. “Arthur, do you remember when I said that somebody is soft even though he looks like he is hard? I was told that everyone else sees him as hard because people find ways to hide their true self from the casual snoop. I bet Bobby has just taken that to a different level of efficiency. Perhaps his people are telepathic so they needed defences or else they had or have enemies who are.”
Arthur scowled at his team. “It looks to me like you have some impossible problems to solve.”
That night, as Cherine lay in his arms, Robert reflected, “We must be the only couple of our age that never go to the theatre or to dance. Thank god we have Arthur who forces us to go out to a good restaurant now and then.”
“I know, Bobby has been taking up a lot of my time.”
“Should I be jealous?” She nuzzled, digging in against him as she drifted off to sleep.
The next morning Bobby did not appear. Nor the next.
Cherine grew frantic, imagining Bobby lying somewhere badly wounded. Wildly she teleported to all the areas she’d walked with Bobby, pressing Ntchizi to try and sense him. They were not successful, so she placed his meal on the offering stone and taking her usual place she waited while Robert teleported back to the city to arrange for a jet to fly over with body heat equipment.
Three hours later Robert appeared by her side. “Cherine, they found no traces of Bobby.”
With a fatalistic look in her eyes and tears flowing down her cheeks she said, “He must be dead, that’s why.”
“Don’t give up love. I’ll walk around and you wait here, just in case he comes. He might have a small cave he goes to or else he might have heard the jet and hidden under a rock.”
Cherine was sitting hunched over, tears still flowing, when Ntchizi warned her that Bobby had arrived. She looked up and he was about four body lengths from her, staring at her with his lips contorted in a silent snarl. A fresh bout of weeping took hold of her, but this time it was of relief. Bobby inched closer, staring into her eyes. Suddenly he placed his arms across his face and hunching down rocked his body. Hastily Cherine wiped her face and murmured soothingly until he looked at her again.
“Come on Bobby, let’s go for a walk.” He hesitated until he was certain he’d understood what she wanted and then, unlike his usual scampering and dashing around, he walked almost by her side, just slightly to the fore, leading her. She continued talking, repeating simple phrases and his name. When she laughed he stopped and looked up at her so she laughed again. He dashed around her and back to his position before her, from where he stared at her with his hate-filled eyes. Cherine laughed, “Yes, I love you too Bobby.”
He led her to the same dry river bed and walked along it. This time she followed him. The riverbed contoured around the hills but Cherine mostly ignored everything, only watching Bobby. Luckily the camera pinned to her blouse was recording. Bobby stood on a flat rock and tried to stretch himself upright as he stared before him. He turned to look at her so she drew closer. The riverbed fell away for a drop of about two metres and she saw signs of what must have been a pool in the olden days. Once Bobby saw that she understood, he rushed down the sides, chittering at her to follow him. More carefully than him she used her hands to let herself down.
There were patches of a ground hugging plant, dark purple and bristly with minute flowers of a lilac hue. Bobby was not interested in the plants. He found a patch of soil that met certain conditions only obvious to him and he dug. He pulled out a short fat worm and holding it before him he placed it at her feet.
Cherine picked up the worm, watched it as it slowly wiggled in the palm of her hand, excited by the prospect of giving the POL labs something new to examine, but even more excited by the change in her relationship with Bobby. Bobby was hunched on his back limbs, watching her. He made angry noises.
“You want me to eat it Bobby? I can’t, it’s disgusting.” She could see he was becoming even more upset so she crouched low for him to see and petting the worm with the tip of her finger, she softly repeated over and over, “Bobby, sweet Bobby, thank you Bobby.” He gave up on her and digging found another two worms that he ate with obvious relish.
Robert and Cherine were sitting with Arthur in his office, a man from the laboratory with them. He chuckled as she described to him Bobby’s determined efforts to make her eat the worm.
“Actually, you could have eaten it without any harm to you. It is very nutritious and that probably explains how Bobby has survived. We need to examine the area so that we have a clear idea of the type of environment required by the worms to flourish. If we can create a number of such natural enclaves, Bobby can then survive any absence of the meat you take him.”
“I’m sorry, I can’t take anyone to the worm place, Bobby would smell that they’ve visited and maybe stop going there - he’ll probably think it is dangerous. If your assistants can stay at a distance and give me instructions by radio, I’ll take whatever samples you need.”
“We’d also like some samples of the dead bushes in the riverbed. We have a suspicion they might not be as dead as they look. That suggests occasional rainfall in the area or else the underground water levels are close to the surface.”
“Bobby dislikes the plants I surrounded his home with. He uproots them despite my efforts to stop him.”
“That could be an instinct from the past. The poisons that caused so many mutations and killed the land must have originally been absorbed into plants and humans learnt that by eating the plants they were damaged or had children that were mutated.”
Arthur nodded. “That means we must exclude a large area from the healing of our teams.”
Cherine nodded eagerly, “Where we heal land that any species has adapted to, we will not be healing the land, we’ll be poisoning it for the life that evolved there. We need to be very careful that we don’t become arrogant in the belief that we have the right to change everything to the way it was before we poisoned the land.”
Robert agreed. “There is no natural state within nature. Any definition of the word must include evolution.”
It was as if Cherine was infused by a new knot of energy that tangled within her soul as love can within a heart. She did all that was asked of her without sacrificing one second of her time with Bobby and when she’d return to Robert he reaped the benefits of her feelings as she delighted him with her love and passion. Her face was sweetened by the laughter that barely hid itself within her eyes and Ntchizi spoke of her as being a world of light.
It had needed but the breakthroughs achieved for Bobby to show trust - despite his snarling and looks still filled with hate. Sometimes, Cherine thought to herself, that even with him filthy as he was and stinking to high heaven, if he’d let her, she’d hold him tightly to her.
She remained careful of his personal space and allowed him to be the determiner of their proximity. Sometimes he seemed to forget himself as he childishly dashed around, investigating his world that had become a place of marvels, gambolled, tumbled and caracoled, almost coming within touching distance and Cherine would then feel that the day was approaching when he’d allow her to actually touch him.
Arthur saw the potential of the recordings and had professionals splice together a film about Bobby. People throughout the land became obsessed with Bobby, a Bobby fever gripping them. They wanted every detail, they demanded each day the recordings of Cherine’s last visit. They pleaded with her for her thoughts and dreams about Bobby.
Cherine reminded them that one of the processes that brought about the changes that created their people and saved them from extinction, was the fight by the young for all of life. She gave them web sites from the olden days where they would see the young wearing shirts with the slogan, ‘I don’t want to kill all other animals, do you?’ Within a day hundreds wore the slogan ‘this is also Bobby’s world’.
Cherine sat on a slab of rock heated by the sun, her feet dangling in the air as she spoke to Bobby. She had a boiled sweet in her mouth and she could see he was intrigued. He searched for a pebble and placed it in his mouth. Cherine laughed and took the sweet out and showed it to him. He stretched his hand as if to snatch it from her, but then hesitated, his fingers within inches of hers. For a second she worried whether sweets might cause him problems and then she offered it to him. He placed her wet and half dissolved sweet in his mouth and his taste buds were inundated.
He froze, his eyes widened in surprise and with a cry he leapt in the air, unable to contain himself. At the same time, a shot rang out and the bullet sped by the place his head had been.
Without thinking, Cherine threw herself over Bobby and the next bullet hit her in the back and ripped its way through her. With a savage yowl Bobby pulled away, affronted by her touching him. When she collapsed and he saw the blood he screamed. He climbed over her and another bullet exploded his head.
Cherine’s healer, with Ntchizi helping, had instantly begun healing her, preserving her life. As she heard another shot and felt Bobby fall off her, she spun to catch him. She held his body in her arms, her eyes unable to comprehend the sight of his exploded head and then she screamed as she held him to her, urgently calling to her healer to save him. She screamed without end, hardly aware of herself anymore as grief too potent for her tore at her sanity. Robert arrived and teleporting her with Bobby locked in her arms she was injected with drugs to force her into a deep sleep.