Wither, Ch24

Last time on Wither, they went to another party.



Rhine comes back to find Jenna's room has been cleaned up of all traces of her, but she goes to sleep in Jenna's bed anyway and thinks of Jenna telling her she'd escape.

She starts having nightmares over the next few days and keeps dreaming about Gabriel in the basement.

I have a horrible dream one night. Bowen, tall and willowy like his father, pressing his lips to the mouth of some hesitant bride who lives in what was once his mother’s bedroom. He tells her that he loves her, and she holds a knife behind her back, spiteful and beautiful, waiting for the right moment
to end him. There is nobody to warn him. No mother to love him.

Oh, those kidnapped rape victims. So spiteful. So deceitful. So prone to completely unjustified harm. If only he had someone to warn him that they're all heartless bitches so they wouldn't be able to hurt him.

Truly, isn't this the real tragedy of the story?

Then she dreams she's long dead, frozen and perfectly preserved with my sister wives and wakes up desperate to be out of Vaughn’s basement because corpse feelings are so important. Almost as important as men's.

Anyway, she's woken up by the rapist.

“Come here,” he says, and draws me to him. I don’t resist.

As always. He's so comforting, the rapist.

The baby wakes up, and Cecily stumbles out of bed but the kid won't nurse. The rapist says that babies don't nurse well. Cecily says he used to nurse. He just falls back asleep. Rhine wonders if Cecily has nightmares like hers a world in which her son has grown into a motherless young man with unwitting brides of his own and I have no idea what the "unwitting" is doing there or why the only thing Rhine seems to be concerned with is that the kid won't have a mom and not that he'll be continuing the whole kidnap/murder/rape thing on new people.

Rhine says that her parents' lab had a nursery for orphans. A huge nursery, so they could barely care for the kids.

So it seems Rhine's model is the usual one, by the sound of it. I guess we're looking at a social system where girls don't want to have kids at first, but then when their death is approaching they change their mind. That's about as bad a setup as you can get, but I suppose it's possible - they likely can't afford to have kids until late in life when they're able to get better work, and approaching mortality does make people make screwy decisions.

Also, why were they so concerned about saving babies when they're letting them freeze on the streets as soon as they're ambulatory?

Also also, this is an asspull. If the lab was full of babies, it'd have been mentioned that they blew up babies along with the lab.

the technicians played a recording of a lullaby to soothe their crying. But the ones who were held always seemed more alert. Those were the ones who laughed and learned to reach for things sooner than the others.”
Cecily was staring into the crib as I spoke, but now she raises her head toward me. “What does that mean?”
“I guess it means babies understand human contact. They know when they’re being cared for.”

God fucking - we already did the studies! There are fucking piles of paper on the subject! No one is going to be shocked and amazed by the idea interacting with babies makes them do better! What the fuck happened to this world if they can rewrite the human genome but they don't even know basic psychological studies? Huge chunks of that genome govern how human growth and development is connected to the environment, they wouldn't be able to alter the genome if they didn't even know that the genes do! It's tied to immune response! It's tied to everything!

…

Also given they're housing lots of pregnant girls, why not have them care for the babies in the months up until giving birth? Or hire anyone so that it isn't trained, useful technicians doing the work? The book keeps insisting there's a labor shortage. It makes no sense.

So, Rhine's successfully navigated Cecily's breakdown and convinces her to go back to bed because her baby knows she's there. She mentions that she's the main comforter and wonders what'll happen when she's gone and Cecily has only the rapist for reassurance. She doesn't even think about taking Cecily with her, though.

I turn for the door and realize that Linden is gone. He probably slipped away while I was trying to console Cecily, afraid he might make things worse.

Yes surely he did it of the noblest motives, for is he not a wealthy nobleman and therefore by definition perfect?

Rhine then thinks about how everyone's going to die. It doesn’t matter how much his mother loves him; love is not enough to keep any of us alive.

Rhine, don't know if anyone's told you this, but you do understand it was always like this, right? It's not like pre-"Virus" people lived forever in a deathless paradise.



Anyway, we're nearly done with this horrible book.

Next up we're doing the first book of the original Exalted trilogy, Chosen of the Sun, unless someone can be very convincing very fast, because I demand a break. I was going to apologize for picking the book, which to my understanding was extremely hard to find (I've only ever seen it listed in one Exalted bundle on Demonoid) but apparently it's on sale for four dollars on the standard site and it's been available there for six years, so I guess its near nonexistence on the internet is just an artifact of how much the fanbase loathes it. It's worth about that much, maybe a bit less. You can also get the first book of the second series for free, which is a whole dollar less than it's worth! Two dollars if you don't care about writing quality and just want to read about Exalted-related stuff.