Vinnet Vignette #2c

SPOILERS AHEAD: RIGHTS OF USE

I highly recommend recapping Vinnet Vignette #2a and #2b before reading the conclusion! Most of these will be episodic, but this one grew a bit.

Also, shout out to Zelienople, PA, which is a wonderful and mighty little town. Don’t listen to Vinnet, Zelie; you can change the world!

Gentle Giant Counseling



Sarah Anderson, 2002

“What I want to know,” Hartwin insisted, “is what’s going on
between you two.”

It’s none of his business. I was with Vinnet on this
one. Sure, she was being mean and wrong about the whole
wrong-decision-to-not-kill-Maggie thing, but it was between us. I thought.

Counseling is part of his job.

Something about that screamed that there was a conflict of
interest.

Honesty among us is the only way to live in peace.

But he doesn’t have to be honest with you? I
objected.

He chooses to be. We all must continuously make that
decision. Vinnet tucked my legs up in the chair. “Have you ever returned to
the place where your host experienced trauma?”

He shuddered and nodded.

“Have you ever lived there?”

“Yes.”

Now, he had my undivided attention. At that point, the only
other person I knew who understood was Maggie.

“Vinnet, I love meeting people. You didn’t think I vied for
this role, just to be on the Council, did you? I had other reasons for giving
up going off world.” He smiled sadly. (Knowing him better now, I think he has a
smile for every emotion. I don’t know how he does that.) “Are you still living
there?”

“Not the majority of the time. Speaker Rockefeller convinced
Sarah’s parents to let us attend a boarding school with his daughter—”

“Hold on. Her parents? Let you? Why are they treating you
like a child?”

“They consider Sarah a child.”

“But she’s…” He waved down my body.

The legal age is eighteen! I insisted, trying to
explain.

Your years mean nothing to him, and I don’t want to
convert your nonsense decimal math right now. She raised her voice. “She’s
a child to them. They shelter their children far longer than anywhere else I
know. By their laws, Sarah has three, nine, 108 years remaining.
Approximately.”

“She’ll be free for the next Kings’ Ball.”

“Please don’t joke about that.”

“I’m sorry.”

I thought it was funny.

Hartwin crossed his massive arms. “Vinnet, we’ve been
working out how to accommodate their demands to keep you there. You have a
role. You’re there to teach them and recruit hosts. It’s not a family vacation.”

And it didn’t feel like one. Vinnet’s temper flared with
mine.

“I’m working with them, too. It isn’t a vacation. It’s a
delicate situation. The whole planet thinks they’re the only life in the
galaxy. Sarah’s parents don’t know about me, and by their laws, Sarah belongs
to them. It is a different kind of undercover mission and not one we can dismiss
without ruining our relationship with Project Black Book.”

“Step me through that,” Hartwin asked.

Vinnet sighed. “Project Black Book is Earth’s only effort in
pursuit of defending the planet against the Kemtewet. It’s very small, perhaps
under two hundred people, and its continued existence is contingent on
financial backers who are largely unconvinced of the threat.”

Hartwin’s jaw dropped open.

“Their activities are monitored by blasé superiors and by a
xenophobic task force called NFI-Com that is convinced my ultimate aim is to
launch an attack on the country from within. By cooperating with the government’s
secrecy and accommodating the needs of Sarah’s family and her social
expectations, I have preliminarily established our goodwill toward humans on
their own merit, rather than Earth’s tactical merit. Insisting that I work only
with Black Book and disregard Sarah’s place in society would—” She furrowed her
brow. “—seem to be taken as trying to erase her.”

“She’s—” He fumbled his words. “—old enough. She can
participate and contribute.”

Ha! I told you so!

“Don’t encourage her,” Vinnet grumbled. “Her country has a
prescribed path to social maturity, and if we deviated from it, it would be
seen as a threat.”

Hartwin looked me in the eyes again, as if he expected this
conversation to have three participants. But he had to know I couldn’t speak
with her in control. He hummed and reached back for his own golden bottle. “Hence
your turmoil.”

What ‽
How does he know that?

He’s good with people, both hosts and symbionts.
Frowning, Vinnet looked away. “That’s much of it.”

Hartwin shrugged. “Then come back. If they’re not going to
treat you with the respect you deserve, we have other places to deploy you.”

“But Katorin’s intel—”

“—has stepped up every timetable we had,” Hartwin finished. “We
have to find a way to end this before the Kemtewet can assimilate Earth, or we’ll
never weed them back out before we all die of old age. If Earth doesn’t want
you to be effective there, we’ll find better ways to use your talents.”

“After I already failed our best chance?”

“You can’t place that all on yourself, Vinnet. Teresh used
the opening you made.”

Vinnet flung her feet to the floor and sat on the edge of
the seat. “He got in?”

“He did. And soon after, he had to flee, too. We knew it was
a long shot. We had to try. We did. It didn’t pan out. We’re back where we
were: fresh out of workable strategies to actually win. For the time being,
those who aren’t in strictly intelligence gathering roles are back to pursuing
kingdoms.”

Groaning, Vinnet hung her head in her hands.

What’s that mean? I demanded.

Our best plan right now is to have operatives work their
way to becoming lords then from lords to kings. From there, they’ll have the
resources to stage an attack on Sais if they can do so without a mutiny.

Sounds like a plan.

A plan with a 1% success rate and 66% mortality rate. In base eight.

Tell me in real numbers, I insisted.

Those are real numbers.

Base ten.

More than three out of four.

Almost a quarter seemed like it wasn’t terrible odds until I
started thinking names. That’d be like Vinnet surviving but Hartwin, Kitchell,
and Katorin dying. Almost everyone.

There must be another way. Vinnet squeezed her eyes
closed, trying to come up with a plan when the Gertewet’s master strategists
had nothing. If we ally with Earth…

Vinnet, humans—Earth humans—can’t even get to Mars without
Kemtewet tech. What do you think we can actually help with?

You’re not without Kem tech. That’s why it’s an alliance.
Part of why our options are so limited is that there just aren’t many of us.
Earth doesn’t have that problem. You have a real, sustainable population.
She wilted back in the seat. And if we lose the opportunity to work with
Earth, it’s all up to a few thousand Gertewet.

That sounds like a lot.

She sighed again. If we use the current plan, there will
soon be fewer Gertewet left than people in your parents’ town. She winced. There
might already be.

Zelienople had a Main Street. And a few traffic lights.

Could Zelienople alone combat the rest of Earth?

Working together, everyone in Zelienople might be able to
cause some problems in Pittsburgh. But not the state or the country or the
world. It wasn’t big enough to make a difference.

No.

We need a big ally. We need Earth.

I couldn’t roll my eyes with her in control. (She relished
that.) Which means playing by Black Book’s and NFI-Com’s rules. I get it.

Vinnet looked up at Hartwin quietly sipping his booze. “We
need Earth. Ten years of building trust with Project Black Book is no more time
wasted than ten years seeking sponsorship and planning an assassination to
become a lord.”

“I see.” He tilted his bottle at her. “May I speak to Sarah?”

She frowned but nodded and started to give me control.

He didn’t even wait for me. “Sarah, I’d like to hear your
perspective on all of this. You’re one of us now, but you’re still your own
person, too. I’m sure you see different possibilities for your future than
Vinnet does.”

He finished right as I finished gaining control. Neat trick. “Vinnet’s right. Working with the Air Force has to be better than the whole lord thing. And, yeah, the whole school thing sucks, but Vinnet’s right again. That’s what’s keeping everyone thinking she’s a good guy.”

“I’ve heard from Vinnet. What do you think?”

I tucked my knees under my chin. “I spent the entire time
with the Kemtewet wishing I was back home and things were normal. Things will
never go back to the way they were, but I think they’re better. Black Book is
taking us seriously. They’re trying to figure out how to protect the planet.
And…”

The alternative Hartwin offered struck me again. It was either
stay at school, where everyone treated me like nothing happened and I didn’t
have an alien spy in my head, or go back to her life of danger and intrigue and
constant worries that someone was going to find out and kill me, just like I’d
experienced on Sais. As much as I resented how everyone on Earth treated me,
just like Hartwin seemed to resent it, the only other alternative was
everything I wanted to get away from when I’d first started hosting her.

Except things were different now.

I’d done it once, and I trusted Vinnet’s experience a lot
more now. She’d become a lord several times before. She could do it again. We could
do it.

Or I could stay in school, where it was safe, hang out with Maggie,
and help Black Book defend Earth, which Vinnet thought was the better long-term
plan, anyway.

I watched my fingers pick at cuticles. “I’m glad not to go
back out yet. Is that what Vinnet means by me being too young?”

Hartwin didn’t answer immediately. Was I proving Vinnet
extra right? He hummed. “Maybe. When her past hosts haven’t been emotionally
ready, though, she’s said so. She didn’t tell me anything about you being too
young.”

“She said I’m too young to understand what it means that we
failed the mission as Anjedet.”

He sighed, set down his bottle, and folded his hands. “First,
it’s good to acknowledge that everyone thinks differently at different stages
of life. For humans, there’s a correlation to age, among many other things. For
tewet, it’s more cyclical, as we’re influenced by our hosts.” He shot me a
stern look. “Vinnet, like many of us, doesn’t have much experience with
hosts who are starting into the prime of their lives. It must be a rather destabilizing
experience for her.”

I wondered then, and I wonder now: How could any experience
destabilize Vinnet? It rang true, but I couldn’t quite wrap my head around it.

“Her first host had raised children to adulthood before they
met. She’s never experienced life at your age.”

“Am I… Too young for her to understand me?”

He chuckled. “In some ways, though all our hosts have been
your age. It’s not completely alien.”

I studied him to try to see if he meant the pun, and I pinkie
promise you his eyes twinkled. I couldn’t help smiling back at this
near-stranger eliciting all my secrets.

He picked up his bottle again. “If Vinnet actually called
you too young—”

I nodded emphatically, my cheeks burning as I ratted out my
symbiont.

“—she’s probably looking at the situation from a perspective
of a different stage of life. The way you see things may be strange to her, but
that doesn’t make it invalid.” He hesitated before taking a sip. “How do you
see things?”

“We blew the mission, because I convinced her not to kill my
friend.”

He shrugged and took a sip. “You’re fine.”

“You don’t have to brush it off. She’s been putting herself
through the guilt wringer, thinking that she should have killed my friend.”

“The spare?” he guessed. How did he know?

Hartwin talks to everyone incessantly.

“Yeah. Maggie. She’s my roommate at school now.”

He nodded and looked me in the eye again. “Vinnet, you don’t have to prove anything. You didn’t lose your abilities by sitting out a year. You make good decisions.”

You weren’t there, she answered.

“She says you weren’t there.”

He raised an eyebrow. “Teresh was. He knew about the doppelgänger. Those were long odds.
They probably wouldn’t have worked out.”

“Probably?”

He shrugged. “Everything is a possibility. Nothing is
certain. You’ll get used to it.” He winked. “In a different stage of life.”

When I was older.

I rubbed my face. Symbionts.

Are you just going to let him put words in your mouth?
I asked.

Something in Vinnet’s emotional bass-line resolved. Yes.

How am I supposed to know he’s saying the right things
for you?

You’ll know. And Sarah? I apologize. I shouldn’t have said
that to you.

I wilted against the chair’s arm. Hartwin says you’re
right.

He says you’re right, too, about Maggie. I’m glad I have
you here to make me be better.

The best companions aren’t the ones who never make mistakes.
They’re not the ones who never think of themselves. They’re the ones that learn
from their mistakes and take time to listen.

And that’s my symbiont.

She’s the best.

Previously in Vinnet Vignettes:

Reflections on Becoming a Host Vinnet Vignette #1: Memory Vandalism Vinnet Vignette #2a: Disclaimers and Context Vinnet Vignette #2b: Words You Can’t Take Back