Chapters (90)
She knew she was a wreck; she allowed she might someday be able to rebuild herself, conduct her own Recovery, perhaps become a whole human being; but for the moment the curtain was down and the stage props were being rearranged. What came before the spotlights next might be a new Karen Farley Lanier, or merely a rewrite of the old; at any rate, she hoped it would be a more successful one. Andia could help her; but until she actually saw her daughter, she would be as unreal and fantastic as the night sky.
The plume seemed to grow longer as the minutes passed. Then she realized the Earth was turning, perhaps bringing Thistledown into view, if it still existed.
She had had no more contact with Garry. She began to wonder if in fact she had been overstrained; but an inner voice reassured her, the experience had been real; it had been Garry.
That alone could give her strength. If the powers behind Mirsky had saved her husband, or given him some alternate existence beyond death, then perhaps all things would turn out right after all; perhaps her life, however trivial in the march of millennia and on a scale of light-centuries, would have some use, be worth continuing.
Though not forever.
Garry, whatever his final doubts, had left her this: that age and death and change were natural, even necessary, if not for citizens of the Hexamon, then for those humans who had not seen the slow evolution of life-extension across the centuries.
Someday, she would allow herself to age and die. She smiled, thinking what Ram Kikura might say.
Something rose in the northeast, at the beginning of the violet plume; a bright, twinkling thing that looked less like Thistledown than some distant, continuous fireworks display.
Suddenly, it became as brilliant as a sun, and cast Melbourne into the light of full summer noon. Cup still hooked to her finger, she flung up her forearm to shield her eyes and gave herself a painful whack on one ear. The cup fell to the concrete porch and shattered.
Cursing in English and Chinese, she lurched out of the chair, through the open sliding glass door and into the bathroom. There, she blinked at herself in the mirror, her face hidden behind a negative blind spot turning green and red at the edges.
The flash had been silent. The hotel was quiet; even the sound of distant riots had died. When her vision recovered, she peered around the bathroom door. The sky outside was dark. Cautiously, she walked to the balcony, holding her hand up near her eyes just in case, and squinted at where the Thistledown had been. The plume still glowed faintly in the blackness; a few degress past the plume’s tip, all that remained of Thistledown was a turbulent, dim red ball the size of her thumbnail.