Armiger sat back. His anger was deflated. For some reason, he felt unfulfilled, as if he had lied to her, and not merely told her what she would understand.
Everything was greying out. "Sleep," she said. "My morph."
He lay back, listening to her move about the cabin. Just before he drifted off again, he heard her say, maybe to herself, "And what part of this are you going to keep?"
9
Megan the next evening. "It pleases me to see you enjoying it."
Armiger smiled at her. He stood in the center of the clearing next her cottage. The sun had just set, leaving a rose band across the western horizon. The moon Diadem was rising. The moon received its name from the scattering of brilliant white craters on its surface, which made it a dim oval studded with diamond-bright pinpricks of light. On other nights Armiger had praised or cursed those gleaming points, depending on whether night-visibility was to his army's advantage or not. Tonight, possibly for the first time, he was able to admire the sight for its own sake.
He felt content. He knew it was because he was free from all responsibilities during this convalescence.
"Strange," he murmured.
Megan looked up at the moon, then back at him. "What?"
"I should be dead," he said.
She touched his shoulder. "Your wounds were terrible. But they're healing quickly. Isn't that normal for a morph?"
"I'm not exactly a morph," he said wryly. "Just something like one. But yes, you're right." The lie came easily to his lips. Then he thought about it. Could he explain this to a mortal? He would never have thought he had an obligation to try.
Armiger lowered his eyes from the moon, and studied Megan in the pale light. She was a creature he didn't understand. His plans had rarely included women. But she stood next to him now, easy in the cricket-song and darkness, and played none of the dominance games males played. She took her own obligation to him, the wounded soldier, for granted.
"My link to my higher self," he began, then stopped. "It was more than love. We shared an identity. When... she died, I should have died too. Because there was only one of us. Or at least that's what I believed."
Megan nodded. "We all think that of our life's love. But one carries on."
At first Armiger thought she had simply not understood him. Then he thought of another possibility: Megan knew his experiences were not like hers, but she was making an effort to translate them into terms she could understand.
It surprised him to think that she might be spending her time with him doing such an odd kind of work. For it would be work, finding commonality with a stranger's experience. Armiger himself did so only as a way of anticipating the next move of an opponent.
If she'd kept her conclusions to herself, he might have believed she was doing that too. But she shared them.
"Was she killed in the war?" Megan asked.
He started to say no, since this local brushfire he had been involved in had nothing to do with the interstellar conflict that had resulted in his greater self's demise. But he could play the same game as her: what would make sense to her, on an emotional level? "Yes," he said.
"You won't go back to being a soldier, will you?"
He barely heard her. Why am I alive ? When his Self died, he should have been extinguished, or at least turned back into an aimless machine.
"I thought I knew what I was," he said. Armiger had pretended to be human since arriving on Ventus. Before that, he recalled bright light and deep vacuum, vision encompassing 360 degrees, radio song in his head, and others' thoughts as well. In that existence, there had been no distinguishing his own mind from those of his companions, the other servants of 3340. And the god's will was the same as their own. The part of that vast identity that was Armiger thought of himself as an extension of the greater whole. He had assumed that when he thought, it was 3340 who was thinking, and when he acted, it was the god acting. It had always been that way.
No, not always...
Suddenly the presence of this woman at his side felt threatening. Something ancient, a memory perhaps, made him turn away from her. "I need to be alone now," he said. The harsh tone of his own voice surprised him.
"But" she began. Then she seemed to think better, and turned and walked away quickly.
Armiger glanced back. Humans were biological creaturesmortal animals. For a second there, though, he had touched on some deep-buried feeling within himself. Megan had loomed in the darkness as real as 3340 itself. For an instant, he had... remembered? Remembered standing with someone, a human being, who was every bit his own equal. A creature like himself.
A woman.
And there and then a memory unfolded within Armiger like a long-dormant flower: of himself walking and laughing, a young man with a young woman on his arm, on a world with two moons. On a night like this.
That memory was a thousand years old.
Had he once been human himself? That could explain why 3340 had chosen him for this job. On the other hand, the god could