I try to explain about the delusion of intimacy, and how much was invested in it once. They listen politely, but I can see that it makes no sense to them, because they know full well that they’ve lost nothing. Love in the face of the truth has turned out to be stronger than ever. Happiness never really depended on the old lies.

Not for these children, born without crutches.

In vis home in the dazzling bounteous engineered jungle of Malawi, I’d told Akili I was dying. After you, there was no one. And we’d touched for the last time.

I move on quickly.

“Other people,” I add, “lamented the end of mystery. As if nothing would remain to be discovered, once we understood what lay beneath our feet. And it’s true that there are no more ‘deep’ surprises – there’s nothing left to learn about the reasons for the TOE, or the reasons for our own existence. But there’ll be no end to discovering what the universe can contain; there’ll always be new stories written in the TOE – new systems, new structures, explained into being. There might even be other minds on other worlds, co-creators whose nature we can’t even imagine yet.

“Violet Mosala once said: ‘Reaching the foundations doesn’t mean hitting the ceiling.’ She helped us all touch the foundations; I only wish she could have lived to see you building on them, higher than anyone has built before.”

I take my seat. The children applaud politely – but I feel like a senile fool for telling them that their future is unbounded .

They already knew that, of course.

Author’s Note

Among many works which inspired me in the writing of this novel, I must single out Dreams of a Final Theory by Steven Weinberg, Culture and Imperialism by Edward W. Said, and “Out of the Light, Back Into the Cave” by Andy Robertson ( Interzone 65 , November 1992). The excerpt from the poem Technolibération is modeled on a passage from Aimé Césaire’s Notebook of a Return to the Native Land .