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"And what is that?" I asked, raising that beautiful tear- stained face to
mine. Those lovely azure eyes brimming with hot tears of emotion. She is a
very beautiful woman. At first I used to resent her for being so beautiful,
but I do not any more.
"Go-go back in time! Be my mother!" Darlanis sobbed, cling- ing to me. "Oh
Lorraine! Could you do it? Do it for me?" She wasn't making too much sense
here. I knew time travel was possi- ble in the sense that I had traveled from
1988 A.D. to 2565 A. D. by means of one of the "Gateways", but such travel was
completely unpredictable, and Sharon and I could have just as well ended up in
the
Fourteenth Century instead of in the Twenty Sixth instead!
"You have made me into your mother?" I ventured, not knowing what else to say.
Even in my own professional experience, I had never encountered anything like
that before! I have no doubts that
Darlanis didn't really consider me as her mother, but yet at times she had
behaved towards me much like my own child might! I was "older", at least in
appearance, Darlanis appearing to me as a woman in her middle twenties in the
20th Century, although she is actually well over forty years old, and will
soon celebrate her forty fifth birthday in another month or so. Her own mother
was close to a hundred, but still yet looked younger than I did!
"I know that you aren't, but I often dream of what it would have been like had
you been my actual mother." Such fantasies are of course usually not too
"realistic" as had I given birth to Darlanis she wouldn't have looked anything
like she does today!
"Sharon seems to prefer you to me," I pointed out in reply, quickly changing
the subject to something that I was more com- fortable with! Darlanis is a
good mother to Sharon, perhaps bet- ter than me in some respects, although she
"spoils" her a lot.
"Sharon sees only what she wants to see of me," Darlanis an- swered with a
smile. I thought that she was speaking the truth. Sharon tended to some degree
to see Darlanis as a "fantasy" fig- ure, not as a real person. There was just
enough "child" left in Darlanis that their relationship did work as it did.
Sharon did enjoy Darlanis' own sense of humor, Darlanis being a less "sober"
person than me. More like a "big sister" than a "mother" figure.
"Sharon also gives you something you never had," I told her. Sharon was an
"emotional prop" for
Darlanis. She now "depended" on Sharon. Darlanis no doubt at times saw Sharon
as herself! I knew of such things. Of mothers living through their daughters.
Darlanis was raising Sharon as she would have wanted her mother to raise her
at the same age. She was "reliving" her own teenage years now through
Sharon! That was why she seemed to Sharon more as a "sister" than as a
"mother". Why she liked
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Darlanis better! I was "older". Not like Darlanis. Not "playful" like she was!
"You have also made yourself `vulnerable' to Sharon," I pointed out. I had
already seen "evidence"
of that. I wondered how long it would take before Sharon realized the power
that she had over Darlanis.
I prayed that she would not abuse her power.
"She is the girl I wish I could have been," Darlanis said, refilling her
glass. "The girl my own mother never let me be." I saw the hostility, the
hatred flaring once again in those eyes.
"Have you ever written to your mother?" I ventured. It was now nearly thirty
years now since
Darlanis had last seen her.
"Why?" Darlanis snapped back. "Why should I do something stupid like that? She
hates my guts for telling the truth about my brother. That fancy `pet' of hers
that could do `no wrong'! She always `liked'
Darl and Janis a lot better than she did me!"
"What about Janis?" I ventured. Janis had been her older sister. The heir to
the throne once Tulis died or was deposed as now seemed likely from what Jon
had told me. Such could be done I knew by a vote of the Dularnian Assembly,
although it took a four fifths vote to do it. The society had a lot of
defects, but at least there was a way of getting "rid" of a bad Queen if it
became necessary. The only trouble was that there was no Prin- cess of Dularn
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