Ring. Sister. Piano (Book 4 of The Powder Trail)

Chapter Sixty Three: The Lesser of Two Idiocies

"I have now told all," said Faustus.

"Hardly," Alice retorted – though she had to admit, she had been afraid at one point he would never stop.

She was feeling – as she always did when she heard a story – frustrated by the stupidity of everyone involved. That ridiculous Eve-creature and her poetic punishments! Condemning her sister to love a mortal without a thought for the consequences! How many deaths could have been avoided if she'd just slapped her on the wrists? Or even executed her? Alice had a proper scientist's contempt for capital punishment, but in this case it really seemed to be the lesser of two idiocies.

And Myrrha herself! Alice had an instant antipathy for her. Oh, she understood the need to experiment – she understood the all-consuming desire for everything to be perfect, and the frustration of realizing other people didn't share it. But this was all the understanding she was prepared to do. 

In the name of science, Myrrha had spread stupidity like fertiliser across a field. She had caused the trial and execution of the Eve-creature, which had made relations between humans and new-breeds prickly for the next three hundred years. And she had tried to mould a young boy into a perfect husband, using methods that might have been called evil if they were remotely comprehensible.

Did you really get a strong man from a starved and abused child? Or did you get what Robin Crake undoubtedly was – a child in man's clothing, scratching and screaming when he didn't get his way? In Myrrha's case, the reasoned logic of centuries could have been replaced by the common sense of a village idiot and it would still have yielded better results! Alice felt sickened to have even heard about it.

But, at the same time, she felt... bubbly. Effervescent. And not in a warm way. She wanted to talk a lot and do a lot, and show everybody where they were going wrong. She wanted to chivvy everyone into action. 

Most of all, she believed, she wanted to ride the dragons, because they could move as quickly as her thoughts, and were just as lithe and dazzling.

She and Faustus were alone now. Val had lost interest and skulked off as soon as the story had started to revolve around Robin Crake. Alice had let the old man talk, because it was – in places – quite interesting, but the more light-bearing roots she had eaten, the more often her eyes had turned to the window-shaped opening into the dragons' cave, where they curled around great stalagmites like silver ribbons, occasionally raising their heads to sniff the air. 

Could they sense her eagerness? Her impatience to be off? She didn't have a destination in mind, she was just sure she could make a positive difference if she got out of this cave, where the air was as stale and ponderous as the old man.

She pushed her hair back from her eyes and tried to martial her skepticism. She wasn't sure she disbelieved the old man, but it seemed like the only reasonable place to start.

"Very well," she said. "So Robin Crake found the place where Myrrha was keeping your journal, and read it. Is that supposed to prove something? You ended on that revelation with such a flourish that I'm inclined to think so, and yet I can't for the life of me imagine what you mean."

"Why, that he now knows how Myrrha may be ended," said the old man. "Recall you not that that Eve and I purposed the city to be her executioner? We each of us set a guardian in place to preserve the city 'gainst our return, and to harness the city's power that we might end Myrrha's life – all which was set down in my journal, all which the Kraken hath now read. I'll answer for it, he is our ally. He it is to whom you must turn next."

"I?" said Alice, placing a hand on her chest. "Why should it concern me?"

Faustus frowned. "Know you not why? Truly?"