John and Sarah threw on warmer clothes and rushed to see Gabriela, the T-800 following close by. Gabriela called to Carlo, and soon there was a minor war council, working out who would go. Carlo had turned out even taller than his father, but heavier built. In his urban camouflage, he stood like a sheer, gray cliff, hard and immovable. 'Let me do it,' he said.
It was potentially dangerous driving into a rival camp, but John liked to be directly involved. They soon sorted out that he and Carlo would go together, with the T-800 and half a dozen supporting Humvees, just in case.
They drove quickly on the icy road, the T-800 at the wheel of John's vehicle. John wore body armor, a woolen coat, and webbing crammed with grenades and ammunition. He had an M-16 rifle and wore a 9mm. pistol in a shoulder holster. If there was trouble he was ready for it, but what happened surprised him. As they parked outside the camp, flying their own white flag from John's Humvee, a group of four, all dressed in U.S. military camouflage, stepped out to meet them, covered by others with assault rifles. One of the group was a middle-aged Caucasian with harsh features and a nose that looked like it had been broken and reset regularly over a tough lifetime. With him was a cocky-looking young man, Hispanic, with long hair and a goatee beard. But they both deferred to a black woman in her forties and a young man, maybe seventeen or eighteen.
'My name's Tarissa Dyson,' the woman said. 'This is my son, Danny.'
The name 'Dyson' was familiar, though at first John couldn't place it. He glanced at the T-800, which said, with no particular feeling, 'Miles Dyson's family.'
She nodded sadly. 'Miles was my husband. Skynet killed him, like everyone else—at least that's what I think. He disappeared on Judgment Day. If you're John Connor, we want to join you. I'm glad to meet you at last. I wish we'd all listened to you before this happened.'
John stepped from the Humvee, the T-800 following, holding an M-16 in one hand. 'I guess we'd better talk,' John said.
Danny Dyson pointed to an olive drab tent. 'You're very welcome. Come inside. This isn't some kind of ambush. You're not in any danger.'
'Correct,' the T-800 said menacingly.
They sat in folding chairs around a card table, drinking scalding hot coffee. 'When Judgment Day came,' Tarissa said, 'Miles was in Colorado, working on the Skynet project. We were living in L.A., but Danny and I had a vacation in Mexico. If not for that, we wouldn't be here. L.A.'s virtually gone.'
'I'm sorry,' John said. 'I can't begin to understand how you must feel.'
'What, because of Miles? I can't blame him. How could he have known? We knew about your predictions of Judgment Day, of course, but we couldn't believe them. The story about robots from the future was just too much. But it shook Miles all the same, even though he said it was irrational. He made us go on that vacation. Indirectly, you saved our lives.'
'I wish we could have done more.'
Her eyes filled with tears, and she shook her head. 'Of course, when the warheads fell, we knew what had happened. I wanted to go back and find Miles, but we had to make a choice. Skynet must have known what it was doing—it wouldn't have left anyone alive who could shut it down.'
'There's a lot I still don't understand,' John said. 'Why would they give all the control to Skynet in the first place?' He looked at the Terminator. 'Do you know anything about that?'
'No. I do not have detailed files.'
Tarissa looked back and forth between them, the young man and his bodyguard. 'You're the robot from the future?'
'I am a Terminator: Cyberdyne T-800 series, model 101. I am a cyborg construction: human biology on an endoskeletal combat chassis.'
'This is for real, isn't it?' Danny said.
'Yes,' John said. 'It always was.'
Tarissa nodded sadly, and poured herself more coffee. 'I'm confused about one thing.'
'Only one? Well, try me.'
'Your messages said that all human decisions were being removed and given to Skynet. But it wasn't supposed to work that way. The final decision was still supposed to be with the President. Skynet shouldn't have been able to launch the missiles by itself.'
'I suppose we'll never know,' John said.
The T-800 was silent.
'No,' Tarissa said. 'I wish Miles was here to explain it all to us. I miss him...' She lost control for a moment, putting down her coffee cup, and weeping openly. But then she managed to speak through the tears. 'When we heard about you and your mother, down here in Argentina, we knew we had to join you. Your reputation's growing.'
'As long as Skynet doesn't hear about it,' John said. 'We're not ready yet.'
'Do you know what happens next?'
'Skynet is preparing war machines,' the T-800 said. 'I don't have the details.'
'Maybe I should have taken more time and programmed it into you, before I sent you back to '94,' John said. 'Still, you've done what you had to do. I might even be better off not knowing everything. It gives me room to make decisions.'
'Correct'
'It's still weird,' Danny said.
He seemed like a confident sort of guy, probably a genius like his father. 'What's so weird?' John said.
'This whole time travel thing.'
'What about it? Sounds pretty normal to me.' He grinned, and glanced at the Terminator.
'Can't you see how it's full of paradoxes?'
'All right. I know that. Look, my mother and I have never tried to explain the whole story. It would only have hurt our credibility.' John took them through it all. How he was destined to defeat Skynet. How Skynet had tried to change the past by killing him or his mother— before she could bear him. :
Infuriatingly, Danny shook his head. 'It just can't work that way. Say Skynet sends back a Terminator to kill you. It can't change the past. Time has already taken it into account, can't you see that? And if you can, so would Skynet—it can't be stupid.'
'Maybe it's got a few blind spots,' John said.
'Maybe. Or maybe things happen differently. Say one of those Terminators had managed to kill you, right? It couldn't help Skynet anyway.'
John hadn't thought of that. 'What? Why not?'
'Because Skynet has grown up in a world where you exist. If there's a world where you don't exist, it's a different world See my point? It may also have a Skynet, but it's a different Skynet. Nothing it experiences is known to the Skynet who sent back the Terminator. All that happens is that time splits. One way or another, you can't use time travel as a weapon. At least not like that.'
'But that's how it happened. You can't quarrel with reality, Danny.'
Danny shook his head. 'I don't think so.'
'Unknown, right?' John said to the Terminator.
'Unknown.'
'Great. Another mystery. Listen, Tarissa .. Danny... You and your people are welcome. Thanks for trusting us. Please come with us to the estancia'
Tarissa nodded. 'Thank you.'
John wondered how Sarah would respond to the Dysons. For years she'd lived with her hatred of Miles Dyson. Often she'd said that she wished they'd killed him back in 1994, before they left the U.S. They'd even argued about it, about what would have happened if they'd tried, whether the T-1000 would have been watching out for them to make that very move. Here they were, now, confronted by the human aspect of his life, the fact that he'd left behind a family.
An hour later, the Dysons and their people had packed up, and a whole convoy returned to the casco. Sarah and Gabriela came to meet them. John could imagine the tears when they met Tarissa Dyson. So be it. They were all in this together. Apart from the T-800, they were all human.
There would be many more tears ahead.
