Cordelia 11

    Poor Constance.  She cares so much.  I wonder what the connection was between her and Robert.  Maybe someone will tell me eventually.  I'll have to check on her tomorrow to see how she's doing.  I'm not sure if anyone else will be thinking about it in all the fuss unless they want to question her again.
    I don't know who I really care that much about.  I mean, I'm trying to learn.  I'm not used to being in a position to afford to care.  The whole thing seems so terrible even in the abstract which is all it really is to me.  I barely knew Robert although he was kind to me.  I think I was hoping that death didn't happen here, at least not this way.  Merlin did try to tell me the history, but it all seemed so distant.  Hundreds of years...  I've got more immediate things going on in my own head that I'm working hard to get a handle on.
    I definitely have to do something about these memories.  I'm not sure I can reach an accommodation with them on my own.  I've isolated two other distinct sets of memories, personalities really, besides me and Linette.  I know there's at least one more in there, but it's hard to be sure with all the fragmentation.  There are bits and pieces, images and impressions, that could fit anywhere.
    I've named the two that I've distinguished.  We're all B932 except for Linette, and I need some way to tell us apart.  We've always thought of ourselves as B932, but we're not the same person.  It's linguistically confusing to say the least.  I'm calling them Eurydice and Philomena.  I don't know that they'd have picked names like that.  They're not quite clear enough yet for me to know, but...  They're enough there to cause me trouble.
    I think Eurydice comes first chronologically.  It's hard to be sure though.  I think that memories of seeing the men who bought Linette fit into Eurydice's time, but I can't be sure.  There are also a couple of events in Evaran history that were big enough for her to hear about that I think relate to things Linette had heard about.
    Eurydice's the biggest problem right now.  She seems to have been heavily programmed for loyalty to one man and his family.  She keeps insisting that we ought to go "home" to the "master."  She's not really very bright, so she's distractible, but I can't get it through to her that the man's probably dead or that we're better off in Amber.  I don't think she was a very good artist either, probably relates to the intellectual limitations.  She lived with the family and did whatever they ordered.  I get the impression that they lent her out a bit.  The Trumps she drew did work after all.
    I don't think that Eurydice lasted very long though.  Long--  It's kind of a relative term.  Given how long it's been since Linette was born (and I don't even know that for sure), a decade or two is a short time.
    I'm not sure, but I think that the loyalty modifications and decreased intelligence made Eurydice less than ideal as a Trump artist.  I don't have anything of the sort, and Philomena doesn't either.  We're both considerably better artists than Eurydice could ever hope to be.  I think they must have been experimenting.  Of course, it's possible that they were trying to put controls on in reaction to something else.  The controls on me are a lot more subtle.
    Philomena makes me nervous.  She's a nasty piece of work.  A snitch at best, at worst...  Well, I'm not really sure what to say.  She lasted though.  She had a series of patrons, kept trading one in for the next.  She doesn't have friends or even allies, and she thinks I'm wasting my time with Russell and Rebecca since they can't give me anything where we are now.  She wants to use me as a front for her activities since I seem to be Amber acceptable.  I've met her kind before and always steered clear.
    How can I avoid someone who's in my own head?  At least she's not complete yet or very strong.  I think it's her sneakiness that scares me.  If I'm not careful, she'll have me doing things I don't even realize.  She's good at what she does; she lasted a long time.
    I suspect that Philomena explains some other things about my own experiences.  She's probably why I never got to stay in one place for very long, why all my early sexual experiences were so bad.  They wanted something that wasn't Eurydice or Philomena.
    I can't connect any reprogramming memories to either Eurydice or Philomena.  That doesn't mean they don't belong, but...  I think Linette has appropriated them all, assuming that they're part of her own particular nightmare.
 

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