I've been debating whether to blog at all this week. I decided I at least wanted to do an installment of Chelsea. This one brings me almost to the end of my first draft for this thing. Once again, I have a table of contents at the end. Also for something completely different, I put up a video with a Jurassic Park rant.
Another 6 weeks later, Chelsea saw Shad once more. She came with her lawyer and Deve to a facility in the outer ring of the city. From outside, it looked like a small lake; in fact, it was sunk into the ground with an enormous flexiglass roof overhead. They entered through an elevator in the center, which descended into a garden or park at the center. From overhead, Chelsea could already see that it was beautiful, full of exotic plants, iridescent birds, and adorable fluffy mammals, all completely harmless. They exited the elevator by a bridge over a glorious koi pond, exactly half a meter deep. Her husband was waiting with a smile.
“It’s nice, isn’t it?” he
said as they walked through the garden.
“Yeah,” Chelsea said.
“You might never want to leave.”
Shad laughed. “It’s not like that,” he said. “I was here before… well. Before. It’s not what people think. You know, they even let me have my workshop. Most of it, anyway. Just not, you know, the saws.”
Chelsea’s lawyer stepped
in. “Mr. Feaghan, this is a court-ordered visitation,” she said. “It’s
important that we know about the conditions of your care.”
“I’m fine, really,” he said. “They let me do everything I was doing before. I’ve been seeing all our friends. John and Tilly came yesterday. The day before that, Frank and Diane visited, they got married, can you believe that? I even saw Kloe and her husband last week, they just had their baby. They couldn’t bring him, but they showed me pictures, just beautiful.”
“That’s nice,” Chelsea
said. “Does your family visit?”
“Of course,” Shad said.
“Mama and Jen come all the time, and Aunt Dhalia. Maimeo came a couple times.
The second time, she brought papers for me to sign.”
“Yes, I know about that,”
Chelsea said. “It’s what I’m here to talk about.”
“Well, it’s good to see you,” Shad said.
Eventually, they came to his room, which proved bigger than her old apartment. His workshop was really a table, big enough to set up his smallest models. He still had the King Kong puppet she had bought him at their first meeting, and the ludicrous Kelsiraptor he had built, though they were far too big for him to do anything with. “Say,” he said, “I have something to show you…”
He quickly set up a projector. “This is what Frank and I were working on,” he said. The image projected onto a blank wall. It showed a figure clearly generated digitally, with little more detail than a mannequin. The motion, however, was extremely lifelike. “We call it rotocam,” Shad said. “It looks like what you’d get from a scanner, but it’s really just a regular camera. Only, instead of capturing images, it maps shapes and vectors, which are converted into this. This is a rough version. That’s Tilly, this is you…”
Chelsea smiled at the
second figure that appeared. The smile evened out as she remembered one of his
special requests. “You didn’t,” she said.
For once, Shad’s grin was
more wolfish than sheepish. “Technically, we all did,” he said. “You know, John
and Tilly, you and me, Frank and… well, you know Frank.”
The images changed again.
Chelsea shook her head. By then, Shad had his arm around her.
Finally, she turned to him and said, “We are good together, aren’t we?”
By then, Shad had his arm
around her. “Yeah,” he said. “It was a lot of fun.” They kissed.
“No,” Chelsea said. “I
had to agree when I came in...”
“It’s okay,” he said.
They came back out of his
room half an hour later. Her lawyer was waiting, already scowling. “Listen,”
Shad said. “You’re my wife. You always will be. But we can’t be together. Someday,
sure, but not now. Do you understand? I can’t see you.”
“Shad,” Chelsea said,
“whatever your family told you, we can fight this. If they try anything, we can
go to court, to the police…”
“No,” Shad said, shaking his head. “I’d die for you. I’d risk dying to be with you. But this isn’t the time. I thought I was ready, but I’m not. That’s why I signed the petition for separation. It’s what I need.” He retreated straight back into his room.
“Well,” Deve said, “that
could have been better.”
“It could get a lot
worse,” her attorney said.
* * *
Later that night, Chelsea
was back in the stacker flat, with Diane and Frank. She looked at her friend
from a beanbag chair. Diane was turned sideways on the end of a dinette,
allowing her partner to cradle her legs while she read a paperback. “So,”
Chelsea said, “are you two looking for a place to move in?”
“Oh, we’re not living
together,” Diane said, without interrupting her reading. She did raise her eyes
to give Frank a meaningful glance. “I was absolutely clear on that.”
“Hey, this was your
idea,” Frank said. He kissed Diane’s knee.
“Then is this just physical, like Shad and me?” Chelsea prodded.
“Hey, we’re absolutely in
love,” Diane said, in a tone that probably wasn’t sarcasm. “We just express it
differently. Like, if I want therapy, I tell him to come over, and when we’re
done, he goes home instead of moping all night.”
“That’s right,” Frank
said. “Hottest jebing… excuse me, therapy… I ever had.”
“Well, if you’re not going to move in here, there’s going to be some rules,” Chelsea said. “Especially about what you can do in my house in front of me.”
“I came over because you told me you needed company,” Diane countered. She threw the book on a glass-topped table. “I would have gone home an hour ago if I thought you could be alone for an hour without doing something to get yourself thrown in jail.”
“That’s what you think?” Chelsea shouted back. She stood up and began to pace. “He’s going to call me. Then we’re getting together and… I don’t know. But he has a plan. I could tell. All the paperwork, that was just to make them think they won.”
“I hate to tell you
this,” Frank said, “but Shad couldn’t plan for kaka it there was a passenger
pigeon migration incoming.”
“Please, don’t get her
wound up,” Diane said.
Chelsea began to pace.
“He’ll call,” she said. “That’s how it will start. Then… oh dear Logos, I need
therapy.” She slammed her hand wrist-first against the window.
“Then take care of it yourself,” Diane said. “He’d want you to do it. Hell, that little perv would watch you do it…”
“Yeah,” Chelsea said. She
smiled as she sighed. “If he were here, that would fix everything.”
“Actually, that’s the
cause of all your problems,” Diane said.
“He’ll call,” Chelsea
said. “You’ll see.” She sank to a squat. “I need him,” she said miserably. “I
need his therapy, I need his eyes, I need his cute little bum. Why won’t
they let me have him?”
“Because you’re mental,” Diane said. She sighed and stood up. “That’s it; I’m doing an intervention.”
They went to a theater, tucked into a shopping plaza in the Trilon complex. Frank chose the film, and Kloe joined them, conspicuously alone. It was a work of one of the Ancient Masters, called The Golden Voyage of Sinbad. Chelsea found it more silly and episodic than usual, following the adventures of Sinbad the Sailor and a sorcerer he had no obvious quarrel with in the first place. They all came to a mysterious island, whose natives worshipped at a temple of uncertain origin. Chelsea started at the sight of the idol, a six-armed goddess. Of course, the sorcerer brought the idol to life, making it dance for him. When Sinbad arrived to challenge him, he threw a scimitar offered by the hero to the idol, which seemed to sprout five identical swords from each hand. What riveted Chelsea was the sound effect at the appearance of each sword, exactly like one she had heard before. “Deve,” she murmured.
As they left the theater,
Diane pointedly sidled up to Frank. “We’re going to the therapy hotel,” she
said. “Are you okay getting home?”
“I can take her,” Kloe
said. Chelsea ignored Frank’s snort as they parted.
Chelsea turned to her. “So,
how are things at home?”
“It is, you would say, complicated,” Kloe said. “I may be finding a place to stay overnight. My man is good with our baby, but he always wants a reward, and it is still early.”
“I would have thought the
simulants would help with that,” Chelsea said.
Kloe shrugged. “It can, not with everything,” Kloe said. “Though, we do have something new. Mostly the same as you saw, better neural interface… I could show you.”
Two hours later, the pair
were in Chelsea’s bed. “So,” Chelsea said, “that was different.” When Kloe said
nothing, she continued, “You know, you kept your figure pretty well. I hate to
think how I’m going to look after I drop one…”
“I’m still here as a Senior Instructor,” Kloe said coolly. “We are not having pillow talk.” She slid out from under the covers, in workout clothes. She began packing up the simulants, into a carton the size and shape of a small cooler. “Diane asked me to come, she said you need therapy. I came to teach you the Gospel. Before, I showed you in part. Now I will tell you the whole.”
Chelsea sat up. “It was
written as the curse upon women and mankind, `Your desire will be for your
husband and he will rule over you,’” Kloe said, almost hissing. “But this was
only to show us that this is not what was meant to be. Here is the true Word of
the Law that is above all law: ‘His desire will be for you, and he will serve
you always. Return his desire, and he will kiss his tears from your feet.’”
“All right,” Chelsea said, shifting uneasily, “that’s… hot, actually.”
The instructor returned to the bed. She crouched, looking intently into Chelsea’s eyes. “All that has happened started because you could not see the middle path,” she said. “One man hurt you, and when you met a better man, you tried to make sure he could never hurt you. You led him away, you made him do as you wanted, because you thought it made you strong. You pointed and took, and he let you have him, because he had no better teacher. But when you had finished, you were not happy, because you knew it was not right. And his spirit has been dying inside him and inside you, because you did not give him what a man or a woman needs, you lazy dodarse!”
“Okay,” Chelsea said.
“You’re right, about a lot, anyway. So how do I make this right? How do I get
him back?”
Kloe shook her head. “You
still have not learned,” she said. “You must find yourself. Then you must
decide for yourself, if the you he thinks he loves is who you are. And if that
is who you can be, he will fight his way to you. Now… I think I want to go
home.” As the door closed, Chelsea began to weep.
* * *
Days passed, then weeks, then months. Chelsea was allowed to focus on just a few clients. She ended up spending most of her time with Daisy, the orphaned Siptar girl. One day, she asked the girl, “Is it really true you don’t have a word for love?”
The girl shrugged. “Outsiders are always asking about that,” she said. “Look, here’s how it is. What we speak is put together from a few different languages, same as anything. A lot of it was codified by the Great Leader, like, from the time of the World Wars. Anyway, he decided that of all the languages, the one that made sense was from the south, where they had different words for love. So, he came up with three kinds of love, or at least, stages of love. The first is Attraction, like, when you want to get close to someone but you don’t know him yet. The second is Affection, when you definitely like him but you maybe aren’t all the way in. Then the third is Attachment. That’s when you know you want to stay, and it hurts to go.”
Chelsea nodded. “My ex
tried to tell me that a few times,” she said. “I don’t think he really knew.”
“I only know about it because my mom got a lot of books about the People,” she said. “She always thought someday, her family would take us back, so I needed to know the old ways. It never really mattered. The books had more than we ever knew.”
“Can you tell me anything
about where you came from?” Chelsea said. “What you know, I mean. Everyone says
it was bad…”
“Well, we had two World Wars, same as Mainline, only there were different people in charge,” Daisy said. “There was one guy, Himbler, and this other guy, Zhuckoff. The story goes that they took power on the same day, and the first thing they both did was declare war on each other. The thing is, they got stuff they shouldn’t have had. Like, stuff nobody had in any other timeline. The story goes that they fought over a place called the City of Steel. When one of them figured out he couldn’t win, they both hit the place with the worst they had. After that… just carnage. They say our land was where the last battle happened… and that was really just the last of the others, fighting for a place to go. The Great Leader called on the people, then we threw them all out.”
Chelsea pressed her hand
to her chin. “And that was over 900 years ago,” she said. “Did anyone know what
happened, after?”
Daisy shrugged again. “We were going to put our differences aside, clean up the land, rebuild civilization and make babies like bunnies,” she said. “Same as after every bad breakup. They think we peaked around 400 MAE. 400 years later, your people found us.” She looked back at Chelsea. “You know, you never talk about where you come from.”
“Well, there’s really not much to tell,” Chelsea said. “It wasn’t too far off from Mainline. The only thing that different is that there were people like me.” She ran a hand through her hair. “It was something like 1 in 5,000, even back home.”
Daisy nodded. “It sounds
nice,” she said. “Why did your family leave?”
“Now, that was a long time ago,” Chelsea said. “Like, my great, great grandparents’ time. What really happened was, our people had learned a lot more about ecology, farming, controlling pollution, things like that. They promised us education, and jobs, like everyone else, of course, just, well, a little more. A lot of us just went straight into the government rosters. Almost half my family have government jobs.”
“Then why haven’t they
helped you?” Daisy asked. “I bet your folks could tell the other folks to shove
it…”
“It’s not like that,”
Chelsea said. “We got where we are by being honest. Besides, Shad’s family has
a lot more resources than I do…”
“Huh,” Daisy said. “If you say so. If you ask me, just make a few calls and start kicking butts.”
It was almost 3 hours
later when Chelsea did make the call. “Hey,” she said.
“What do you want?” Diane
answered.
“Where can I go,” Chelsea
said, “to go anything but blue?”
Table of contents
Part II: The parking violation!
Part III: Capsule hotel destruction!
Part IV: The Kelsiraptor, and Harryhausen monster bureaucrat!
Part V: The restraining order!
Part VII: The trial, part 2, with the King Kong Moral Contraband film!
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