The Black Lung Captain - By Chris Wooding Page 0,152
know where to start, do you understand? It's so far beyond me I can't even beginV
Jez was appalled. That had been his plan? She'd suspected that he'd left the crew to deal with the question of Bess, but this sounded like a far-fetched method of doing so, even to her. She began to worry7 that he'd taken leave of his reason altogether.
'You were trying to bring her back from the dead?'
'The dead!' he cried, pointing at her. 'That was my next thought! After all, you walk around without a pulse. Why not my Bess? But what was I to do? Her body's gone, Jez! Dust and worms! Am I supposed to murder someone else to provide her with a form? No, I couldn't. So I tried to find corpses, but when I saw them, I ... I couldn't . . . I . . .'
'Wait, you did what?
'Don't you dare judge me!' he shouted. 'Don't you dare! I'd do anything to get her back. But not that way. Not some stitched-up post-autopsy puppet of cold meat. I'd be exchanging one abomination for another. That wouldn't be my Bess. So I looked for another method, but there isn't one!' He raked his hand through his hair anxiously. 'And after that . . . after that I wondered if I could make her smarter, you know, something closer to what she once was. Spit and blood, at least that'd be something. But I don't have the slightest notion how to do it! I don't even know what I did when I put her in there!' He was pacing back and forth now, making wild gestures, so agitated that he could barely contain himself. 'And then I thought . . . I thought, what if I did rescue her from wherever she went? What if I did restore her, and my beautiful little niece woke up and looked at herself, and held up those metal hands in front of her, and realised what she was? Can you imagine such a horror? Trapped inside an unfeeling metal shell for ever, her only companion the man who put her there? It's . . . it's positively macabre! It's that kind of meddling that led to all of this in the first place!'
He stopped, stared at her, and suddenly the angry expression on his face wavered, his lip trembled and tears shimmered in his eyes. 'I can't bring her back,' he said.
'No,' said Jez. 'You can't.'
She pitied him. Blinded by guilt, desperate to atone for the crimes of his past, he'd wanted to achieve the impossible. But Bess's body was gone. He might have salvaged a part of her, but he'd never get back the girl he'd known and loved. Her skin, her hair, her smile -they'd rotted away in the grave. All he could do was move her essence from the vessel she occupied to another one. And that wasn't any kind of solution.
But he had to try. He had to prove to himself that it couldn't be done, that there was no way to save Bess. He needed to fail before he could be made to see.
'It's not as simple as life and death, Crake,' she said. 'You should know that. I'm technically dead. My heart doesn't beat. But I am Jezibeth Kyte. I'm as much Jezibeth Kyte now as I was the day the Manes caught me.' She looked at Bess: an empty7 shell, her essence departed to wherever it went when Crake sent her to sleep. 'All that you knew of your niece, all the things that made you love her . . . they're gone. Gone for good. And what lives in that suit is not that girl.'
Tears had started to fall. Crake was beginning to sob. He wiped his nose. 'Why are you telling me this, Jez?'
'Because you can't change things, Crake. What you need to realise is that your niece died that night. That golem is just a memory of her. But it's not your niece. Your niece is dead.'
Crake shook his head.
'Say it, Crake!' she urged him. 'It's been killing you every day, and it won't stop killing you until you accept it.'
'She's there!' he insisted, thrusting a finger at the armoured suit. 'I put her in there! It's up to me to get her out!'
'You can't!' said Jez, grabbing him by the shoulders. 'That over there, that's something else. And it loves you and it needs you to take care of it, but it's not your niece.''