Oliver found
himself sitting in that office at his desk, which was cluttered with notebooks,
not just his computer, since he happened to come from a time when one still
very much made sense to him, and the other was used mostly for research.
What bothered him, at the moment, wasn’t
so much shattering the worldview of some girl, but the other woman, the Danab,
who had breached the protocols his office had begun to assume must exist, in a society
his office could only imagine, filled with hunches and assumptions, which the
presence of this woman, now, on Earth, and the manner in which even he had
discovered it, now pierced like a flaming arrow…
He didn’t even have a name for her. Some of the agency’s conclusions seemed to
have been confirmed. Physically, she outclassed
anything he’d ever seen, whether in person or out in the strange avenues of
culture, real and fictional. Well, maybe
not fictional. She seemed to embody the
current interpretations of Amazons. In
ancient Greek times, Amazons were women driven to the edges of society, making
all manner of decisions that would’ve made it problematic at best to
reintegrate. No, in the current
parlance, this woman was a god. A truly
perfect physical specimen, taller, more muscled, in no way bulky but lean, useful,
and obviously gifted with an intellect to match…Perfect. Or someone’s idea of perfect,
anyway.
A thousand years in the past, aliens had
visited Earth and took what they thought to be the best of mankind then
available, and then artificially selected, bred, a master race. On Earth it would’ve been called, a century
ago, eugenics, and it was a notion that had led to a world war.
…The only problem with all that being that
when it came right down to it, physical and mental attributes only account for
so much. Humans, as presumably any
species, are riddled with neuroses.
Whoever those aliens had been, they’d had their motivations, probably
trying to compete with some other alien race, and they were probably never even
on the same track. That’s really how
these things tend to go.
Which was why Oliver didn’t worry too much
about this woman’s advantages, her attributes…He needed to know her,
which was the only way he could understand why she’d come to Earth, what she
hoped to accomplish, and…
It struck him. She must’ve been looking for Duende, too,
must have looked at the same facts, from the opposite end, as Sia. Simple as that. They really had converged at the same point
for the same reasons. It gave him a
little comfort to think so.
She must’ve been some kind of rogue agent,
the same kind of figure as Sia, but in the context of her society. Oliver knew something about that himself,
being one in a long line of Oliver Rows.
What he couldn’t bring himself to explain to Sia, what would be impossible
to explain to anyone, was why the line existed in the first place, how
it set him apart, had made, essentially, his whole association with
House Argos meaningless, had exposed House Argos itself as
meaningless, once he’d understood it himself…Tracing the history of the name
(which would be an entirely different story) had been an entirely different mission,
once he'd decided to look into it, putting faces to the lineage, that’d been
the first step. He saw at once how the
whole business had driven his predecessors to distraction, how they’d
been so busy justifying their existence, they’d never stopped to wonder why
they did. At the very beginning
of the line had been a different name, which of course had been Duende.
This was how he himself had become
obsessed with Duende, what had led him to meeting Sia, meeting this mysterious
Danab. Duende had been among those
abducted by the aliens, a Danish raider, a Viking, involved in a war with the
French, who’d been a leader, who must have been important enough that these
Danab kept visiting Earth, obsessively, as if to justify their existence, to
see the fruits of what had happened here, in the line, so that they
might better understand themselves, and…never found what they were
looking for. Eventually they seem to
have given up.
In time, since the origins of Oliver Row,
like Sia, began with Duende, so that they were distantly related, as he had to
assume the mystery woman was, too, a true family affair, someone in the line
had put the pieces together, uniquely motivated, recruited by this point into
House Argos, an otherwise meaningless organization given its true purpose in
ensuring steady resources for the Olivers, and discovered why these alien
visits had never amounted to anything, but in time, as with all patience,
finally running out thanks to the ambitions of some upstart, the details of
which Oliver couldn’t possibly know. But
some facts of history, by any reckoning, will repeat themselves no matter how
much preparation takes part. Chaos takes
no heed of order.
There really wasn’t anything he could do,
now, having reached the culmination of all the work he, his line, and the
agency had been a part of over the centuries.
It had all amounted to so much futility, as had to have been obvious, and
just as obviously suppressed, all that time.
He shuffled through some loose sheets,
meaningless paperwork. He switched on
the computer and found the social media site he’d spent so much time talking
with Sia, before any of them had become aware of what it all meant.
She didn’t respond to his messages. He wondered if she’d been scared away, if she
was considering any one of a thousand rash and equally meaningless
gestures. The world doesn’t listen to
nobodies, or agencies it doesn’t know exists.
Absently, he wondered if the Danab, if the
woman, had ever been a part of the network, if these people had any idea such
things existed, if they could possibly have cared. Meaningless.
He suddenly felt that the only word in existence that mattered, the
meant anything, was meaningless. He had
a strong sense of faith, but sometimes it felt more abstract than most people
would be comfortable understanding. He’d
never suffered a loss of faith. He
figured, now, that it probably felt something like this.
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