The Songs of Summer

12. Dandrin plus Kennon plus Jarinne plus Corilann plus n

I think we’ll be able to hold together indefinitely, and so it can be said that the coming of Dugan was an incredible stroke of luck for us. This new blending is infinitely better than trying to make contact over thousands of miles!

Certainly we’ll have to maintain this gestalt (useful word; I found it in Dugan’s mind when I entered) until after Dugan’s death. He’s peacefully dreaming now, dreaming of who knows what conquests and battles and expansions, and I don’t think he’ll come out of it. He may live on in his dream for years, and I’ll have to hold together and sustain the illusion until he dies. I hope we’re making him happy at last. He seems to have been a very unhappy man.

And just after I joined together, it occurred to me that we’d better stay this way indefinitely, just in case any more Dugans get thrown at us from the past. (Could it have been part of a Design? I wonder.) They must all have been like that back then. It’s a fine thing that bomb was dropped.

We’ll keep Dugan’s city, of course. He did make some positive contributions to us—me. His biggest contribution was me; I never would have formed otherwise. I would have been scattered—Kennon on his farm, Dandrin here, Corilann there. I would have maintained some sort of contact among us, the way I always did even before Dugan came, but nothing like this! Nothing at all.

There’s the question of what to do with Dugan’s child. Kennon, Corilann, and Jarinne are all raising him. We don’t need families now that we have me. I think we’ll let Dugan’s child in with us for a while; if he shows any signs of being like his father, we can always put him to sleep and let him share his father’s dream.

I wonder what Dugan is thinking of. Now all his projects will be carried out; his city will grow and cover the world; we will fight and kill and plunder, and he will be measurelessly happy—though all these things take place only within the boundaries of his fertile brain. We will never understand him. But I am happy that all these things will happen only within Dugan’s mind so long as I am together and can maintain the illusion for him.

Our next project is to reclaim Jubilain. I am sad that he cannot be with us yet, for how rare and beautiful I would be if I had a Singer in me! That would surely be the most wonderful of blendings. But that will come. Patiently I will unravel the strands of Jubilain’s tangled mind, patiently I will bring the Singer back to us.

For in a few months it will be summer again, and time for the Singing. It will be different this year, for we will have been together in me all winter, and so the Singing will not be as unusual an event as it has been, when we have come to each other covered with a winter’s strangeness. But this year I will be with us, and we will be I; and the songs of summer will be trebly beautiful in Dugan’s city, while Dugan sleeps through the night and the day, for day and night on night and day.