A Big Shiny Blue Marble

***I hate having to 'splain stuff because it usually means that I didn't make something clear.

But I hate having to read it in the comments that I've left a reader in the dust over something that is not clear even more, so hopefully without spoiling this for others, there is a small time shift in this chapter.

Small, in that it involves only one character, but it's there, so if you're wondering how this seems to tie in as you read, keep reading and you'll see what I mean. 0_o

----------------

Book of the Forsaken Part 10

While Jerrthi struggled a little over what she felt in Xhan's embrace and whether she wanted it, other little vignettes played themselves out in another system far away.

Off the coast of California, under about four hundred feet of cold Pacific Ocean, Jayne lay on her back with her legs drawn up, smiling as Bronn fucked her slowly.

In a park in Oakland, Monnie looked up a little helplessly at the powerful demon who was doing the same thing to her, but out of vengeance and the way that he drew from her in it.

She wasn't smiling at all, though the large demons who watched it from all around them did.

But it was to the south -- a fair distance - that a different scene entirely played itself out.

-------------------------------

He raised his head wearily and shook it, partly to see if the action would help in getting clear thoughts to come and partly just to get his hair out of his bleary and tired eyes. He needed sleep and that was apparently what he'd been doing for a while now, but lying in ancient filth was no way to get it- in his book, anyway. All of his limbs ached and every little move seemed to be taken by his appendages as some sort of tacit permission to tell him of each little strain and scrape.

He suddenly realized that the unexpected little nap that he'd just awoken from had cost him his hold on the passage of time -- he'd fallen asleep from exhaustion and had no real idea about how long he'd been lying here. The torch lying on the floor in front of him still burned but that was no indicator. He'd seen and used several now in his travels through this ages-old subterranean burial heap and it occurred to him that he hadn't seen one of them sputter out yet. They just seemed to burn on indefinitely. Well they seemed to, as long as you didn't drop them down a shaft accidentally.

He looked around with a groan in response to the aches of his body. The rubble and debris of the cave-in was still there behind him. All that there was for him in terms of travel possibilities was to go forward and that was the trouble.

He could see down the corridor up ahead. It was clear and even better, it was clean. Well, at least it looked to be cleaner than where he was now. But that was on the other side of the mirror -- or membrane there up ahead. It was like looking at something a little like a vertical puddle. There were ripples visible in that surface sometimes.

He told himself that he still didn't know what that meant as he sat back against the wall to take stock. He only knew that it likely wasn't a good thing.

Darji.

He smirked as the sound of it seemed to echo in his mind. Darji Saladin. That was his name, or it had been once. Now? What good was a name anymore? A name was a set of written or printed words or they could be a series of spoken sounds used to indicate the identity of a single person within a group of people. That was when it came to him. That was what he'd lost in all of this. He was no longer one of a group of individuals. He was one. And being only one and aside from the unholy trinity of 'me-myself-and-I', there was no need to have a name anymore, was there?

He pulled out a crust of hardtack bread and began to chew on it a little thoughtfully, trying to make it last, needing to mislead his stomach into thinking that this was a lot of food when it was little more than a crust. He shook his water bottle. Pretty light for what had been a full canteen a few days ago, part of a set of four. He reached for the cargo pocket on his left pant leg. Still one full plastic canteen there, but he didn't want to drink it unless he couldn't find any more good water. He'd filled it up from a stone trough a ways and a few days back. It had looked ok there, though that didn't mean much down here, he supposed.

He pulled it out anyway and opened it. Passing it under his nose told him that it couldn't have been too bad after all since it now smelled like the polyethylene of the canteen. That was why he liked the metal ones, he told himself as he fished in his little kit for the tablet pairs which would purify the water. He'd always thought the term 'purifying' sounded just a little hopeful. They were in blister packs in sets of two; the first tablet was tetraglycine hydroperiodide and the second one was a lot tastier -- even though it was just about as bitter to the tongue.

He dropped the iodine tablet inside and shook it before setting the water bottle down to allow the required thirty minutes for it to work. He sat back a little as he waited, thinking of little more than how miserable he seemed to be able to get these days. When he'd judged the time to have elapsed, he opened the bottle again and added the second part - ascorbic acid -- good old Vitamin C. The iodine killed most of whatever microscopic bugs might have been swimming around in there and the ascorbic acid forced the iodine to settle out as a precipitate. He followed that with the contents of a pouch of drink flavoring.

He didn't like using the stuff but it got rid of both the plastic taste as well as the bitterness of the iodine, plus, it also contained Vitamin C, so he figured that with a bit of luck, he might starve to death lost down here where he was, but at least his teeth wouldn't fall out from scurvy.

He screwed the cap back on tightly and shook the thing half-heartedly to mix things up in there before he slid it back into the cargo pocket. He made a silent promise to himself that if he ever got out of this, he'd never touch the 'Goofy Grape' flavor ever again.

There had been a time, about a year back now, he guessed, when it had been a good thing to be Darji Saladin. He was the sole and very spoiled offspring of a very successful pair of people and he'd grown up with anything and everything that he'd wanted. He realized now that his life had been very jaded and superficial. Cars, clothes, booze, and of course, the women who had just naturally been attracted to him and the trappings of a wealthy young socialite from a rich family.

His father had been a merchant and his lovely mother was a successful and popular author of archeologically-based historical romances. He supposed that his mother was to blame to some extent for the way that he was. Or perhaps he ought to think of what he'd gotten as a gift. He decided that it was a better way to look at it.

He knew that back home, he'd been very attractive to the fairer sex.

He smirked at that thought. To him back then, the fairer sex was about anyone who interested him sexually.

It had been a while, but there had been a time when he'd seemed to go first one way and then the other in his mating selection process, whatever it was. He'd admit nothing to most people, but in his heart, he'd admitted that he was bisexual and he liked that. He'd actually been surprised when he'd found out as an adolescent that there was a name for it. He'd just always either been attracted to someone or not. Mostly, it was 'not' since by his own admission, you can't fuck everybody.

Well, not at the same time.

As far as mating was concerned, he only sought females when the mood was on him and he was presented with one of uncommon beauty. He rarely went after other guys. Most of his liaisons that way had been with men who had obviously been attracted to him. So for one gender, he'd hunted a little half-heartedly and for the other he'd let the hopefuls come to him.

Yessir, he thought with a smile, it had been a good thing to be Darji.

Darji had sometimes gone either way, but on the whole, with another man, he was a top. In fact, the only relationship that he'd ever had that he'd admit to being deep at all had been with a friend of his, and they'd known each other since childhood. Once that had begun, they'd spent days just fucking.

The two of them had drifted apart a little after a while, but they'd gotten together on and off for two years when they could -- even while one of them or sometimes both had been in relationships with women.

He sighed as he remembered the day that Tony had come to him to say that he was getting married and that he and Cindy were moving to the East coast. They'd called each other and texted for a while, but it had finally faded out. He knew Tony so well and wondered how long it would be until the end of that marriage.

Then again, he smirked, who was he to say? Maybe they were going strong and had never looked back. As long as they were happy, he thought.

He thought back to his mother again. His hair was dark and straight like hers and his even white teeth and his ability to reason in a sort of off-beat way had been gifts from her was well. His education at her hands was still a priceless thing to him even now.

Even as a tot, she'd taken him along on her frequent trips to research her novels. Hell, he'd been inside more tombs than most professors working in the field by the time that he'd turned ten. But those days were gone now. Well, other than the oversized tomb that he was presently in, he supposed.

All that he could say that he'd gotten from his father was his ability to take a fair bit of punishment and not show the effects of it too much. He sighed as he remembered. There was that other fine quality that he'd been given by his father's DNA donation. He could be a stubborn, tenacious bastard if the mood was on him.

When he'd hit his older teens, he'd been more interested in getting pleasantly drunk and laid to want to accompany his mother much for a time and his father didn't really give a rat's ass about anything but the rush of the next huge business deal. After he'd come of age, it all turned around. Darji would have said that he'd just grown up a little.

After a very unsuccessful stint at a college, Darji went to work doing something that he was amazingly adept at -- arranging the logistics and travel for his mother's trips. He handled everything from her book tour appearances to her research ventures, making sure that she was where she needed to be along with everything necessary to allow her to do what she'd come for. Her writing output soared as did their income, since they'd formed a company to be able to do it all.

But there was still some of the closeness of the bond that he'd shared with his mother and they did go on one research trip to Morocco together that spring not long before his National Guard unit went on its summer exercises .

From his present vantage point it was one of his most cherished memories of his beautiful mother. They could and did talk about anything together. He remembered sitting with her on the top of a rocky outcropping to await the sundown together one evening. He had his arm around her, holding a light blanket there against the wind which already carried the warning of the chill that it would hold later on that night and she leaned against him. They were talking about the fact that he didn't seem to be interested in any one girl for very long.

"I'm not saying that you ought to find a steady girl yet," she'd said, "it's just that there seems to be a constant stream of young women in and out of your life. From my viewpoint, it all makes me feel a little uncomfortable to tell you the truth. I never know what to say on the rare occasion when I meet one. Do I just try to look interested when I want to tell her that she shouldn't get too comfortable, or what? Do you see what I mean?"

He nodded, chuckling a little to give her the point, "I dunno, Mom. It's like they're all the same, though they look different. As soon as I really get to know one of them, I can already tell what she's like and they all seem to be reading from the same script. I almost know what they'll say next after a while."

She'd laughed herself then, "Well I do know that you're having a bit of fun and I'm even able to tell myself that you're being careful, at least."

Darji had turned his head then, "Oh yeah? How would you know?"

"Because the maid always complains to me about emptying the wastebaskets in your rooms and the number of condoms that she finds in them, that's how," she'd laughed, "I just tell her to mind her business and do her job.

The stupid thing is that I almost feel a little proud in a slightly naughty way."

She reached around to the far side of his face to hold it against her own as they looked out at the sun sliding lower over the horizon, "It's a hell of a thing for a woman like me to realize that the sexiest man that she's ever seen in her life is her own son. If I was more of an alley cat, I'd entertain delicious thoughts of doing something amazing and highly incestuous with you. By the way, is there anyone among the interns who catches your eye or is that a stupid question? Maybe I ought to ask how many out of the six of them you've bedded."

"Four," he sighed, looking off into the distance, "but then we've only been here a fortnight so far. And hey, fair's fair. See any of the male ones that you like?"

She'd looked at the horizon then and heaved a sigh of her own, "Oh, all of them, but I'm not telling you all of my secrets. We can talk about it when I'm in the retirement home and need some cheering up."

There had been a silence between them for a minute or two and then Darji asked something which had been on his mind for a while.

"Dad's not my father, is he?"

His mother didn't blink. That was the way that she was -- the way that they were, he supposed. "What makes you say that?" she asked him.

"Any number of things," he replied, knowing now that he'd been correct, "There isn't one feature in common between us. I'm not built anything like him. I don't sound like him. He hasn't even got fatty remnants of the muscles of his youth in the places where I've got them. You know, just little things. You've both got brown eyes and mine are blue. You and he are Middle Eastern and I look like a coverboy for Caucasian Ladies Home Journal. Inconsequential stuff, mostly."

"Whenever we get back," she smiled as she ran her fingertips over the ridges of callouses on his muscular hands, "you ought to look up the Sexy Son Syndrome."

He blinked then and turned to her, "They've got a fucking name for it? Holy shit..."

"It's an unconscious part of the selection process for most women," she said, "A woman recognizes the features and traits which attracted her to a particular male in the first place. It's natural that she'd want her child to have those same traits -- to be just as successful a male as that one or just as lovely as their genes can make a girl, if that's the case. Can you see that?"

"Yeah," he nodded, "Go on."

"Well," she smiled, "we live in a complicated time. Traits which would be sure indicators of a desirable man in the long ago past don't work so well today. For example, the man who fathered you was hard and lean, shaped that way by his hard life. It might have worked to choose him as a protector when all that was needed in a man was a willingness to work on the land to keep his family fed. But I didn't want to be that farm wife on a dustbowl farm. I wanted better -- a home where I could raise my little boy and where I could express myself in my writings while living comfortably.

So I needed a less masculine male, somebody who would be a good 'dad'. When your father and I began to date, the man who fathered you was already just over the horizon on his way to the next rodeo and looking to make some prize money. As much as I ached to have a man like that, I knew that I'd always be just one of the women that a man like that stops by to see for a place to heal up from his last face-plant in the dust while he fucks me and thinks that it's all that I'd ever need from him.

So I chose life with a man who gets his biggest chubby when he's making money and I'd let him think that he was the greatest stud in the world so that I could have the life that you and I would need. Happy now?"

Darji just sat for a moment, thinking. Then he turned and smiled, "Yeah. Thanks for settling that for me."

"Don't mention it," she said, leaning her head against him, "He got his trophy wife and I got my sexy son and a place to raise him."

His thoughts came back to himself and it caused him to wonder if his mother had known about the side of his sexuality that he'd kept from her. Looking back now, he thought that her question about the interns might well have been a test -- a thin baited line tossed in front of him to either take or let alone. If she'd ever asked him about it as a direct question, he'd have admitted to her that yes, he did sometimes feel attracted to other men and if it was mutual, he'd act on it. She'd never asked him directly and so that time, he'd let it go past when he'd made his remark, but now -- afterward, ...

By the time that they'd prepared to return to the states, Darji had been to bed with all of the girls and three of the six guys. They'd both laughed themselves to their knees in the kitchen at home one Saturday when it had come up and they'd compared notes. It was almost the same score from the other side of things; Bahira Saladin had made out with all of the men and two of the girls. He didn't mention the men that he'd been to bed with. Again, she hadn't asked.

Not long before Darji left for his summer duty, his mother had come home from the post office one day with an artifact -- a little sealed jar that looked more like a fertility charm, carved out of soft stone which seemed to be strangely lightweight if one held it in one's hand. Darji guessed that it had been the huge and garish hips on the thing along with the protruding breasts that had kept him needing to pick it up whenever he saw it. When he'd asked about it his mother had smirked and told him to stop massaging the thing or it would become polished in a rather obscene way.

"It was sent to me from Mexico, from a Toltec ruin known as Tula that's mostly a tourist trap these days but once upon a time, it was a serious archeological site," his mother said, "Of course, there's the tourist's entrances for the guided tours, and then there's the ... well, let's call them the secret entrances around the backs of the temples. They're harder to find, but there is still a religious function to the place and so it's still used in this regard. I think I know the woman who sent this, too. She goes by the name Esma and she's one of the local, um, witches, you might say, though I don't know why she'd have sent it to me specifically."

Darji had hefted the thing once and noted that it seemed to have something inside it which felt to him as though it was partly filled with water or some liquid. He said nothing as he set it back onto her desk and that had been the end of it to his mind.

He'd just gotten home a few weeks later from his summer stint with the state National Guard the day that his world had ended. He was only there because his father had told him that a couple of years of duty would look good on his CV. Darji didn't mind it much; it was usually fun in a way and it offered him a way to challenge his body a little. He knew that the real reason that his father had made the suggestion was so that he'd get off his ass once in a while and have a reason to leave the house for more than the time it took to buy more booze or get blasted over at the houses of his friends.

Darji didn't know if it was what his father had intended, but he'd gotten to know other young people there and most of them didn't come from especially affluent homes or lifestyles. In fact, Darji found that his background made it harder to fit in there and be taken seriously. He'd actually found it more difficult to gain the acceptance of those around him. He struggled with it at first until he realized that he was enjoying how it forced him to strive harder. He was taken far more seriously and made friends a lot more easily if he elected to keep his background something of a secret and the friends that he made there seemed to be worth a lot more to him somehow because of it. To him, it felt as though he'd had to earn the respect that he was accorded and that made it more worthwhile.