“I don't know what happened on Clematis,” she said quietly. “I never even heard of it before. But I know what's inside you, Alfred. That's why you asked for a transfer to the Navy and medical school, isn't it?”
“I'm too good at killing people,” he said very, very softly. “Too good at it. And if I let the monster out again, what will it do? What if I become the monster? What if that becomes who and what I am? I don't want to live with that. I won't live with that. And that's why I ran away from the Marines, why I'm hiding as a doctor instead of what I really am.”
“What you are is a doctor.” Her soft voice was as unyielding as battle steel. “You may be running from what happened on this Clematis, but what you're running to is what you were always meant to be. It's not just guilt, not just trying to find some safe way to sublimate your ‘monster' and expiate your responsibility for all the people who died. Tell me you don't take joy in it! Tell me you don't know deep at the core of you that this is what you want more than any other possible life's work. Tell me that, Alfred, because you may be able to lie to yourself, but you can't lie to me.”
His lips trembled, and she shook her head.
“Jacques is a historian,” she told him. “More than a historian—at least half our family think he's some kind of nut. He belongs to something called the Society for Creative Anachronisms, and he's got an entire library stuffed with old books and stories that go clear back to pre-space Old Earth. He used to read to me for hours when I was a child, and one of those stories was about a girl who agreed to become a monster's prisoner to save her father. Only the monster wasn't a monster—not really. But he was under a curse, and he couldn't stop being one, couldn't transform himself back into the human being he was meant to be. Not until she realized the truth. That broke the spell, and I thought it was a wonderful story when I was a little girl, but I realize now that it went even deeper than that. He had to believe he was no longer a monster, no longer ‘the beast' he'd allowed himself to become. He needed to care more about her than about anything else in the world and let go of the things that had twisted his outside appearance to match the torment inside him. And when she saw beneath that appearance, she allowed him to see it as well.”
She shook her head, her eyes brimming with tears, and lifted his suddenly lax hand in both of hers. She cradled it against her tear-slick cheek and smiled at him.
“That's us, Alfred. It's us! Me, running away from home because I need to be myself, and you, terrified of your ‘monster,' afraid you're becoming the beast. But you're not. Maybe the beast is inside there, but it isn't you. You control it, and it was the beast that let you save my life. And you didn't come for me because you wanted an excuse to kill other people. You came for me because what you are is a good, caring, decent, gentle man. I know that—I see that—and you know I do. You know it, Alfred, and you've been alone with the beast too long. Trust me. Oh, trust me, my love.”
* * *
Alfred Harrington gazed into those shining, tear-filled eyes, feeling her total certitude, her absolute belief, and something crumbled inside him as she called him “my love.” Something he'd clung to for so long simply turned to smoke in his hands as he realized she was right. She was right. The monster—the beast—was part of him, but so was she, and he could turn away from the exaltation of the Angel of Death and find the monster's silver bullet in her. Not as some sort of talisman, some kind of magic charm, but as the one person in the entire universe who truly knew him for who and what he was . . . and was not.
He reached out a left hand which had never shaken even once in combat on Clematis or here on Beowulf, and its fingers trembled as he touched her face with feather gentleness and leaned towards her.