If this union worked, humankind would have accomplished the goal beyond goals and created a more powerful and evolved version of itself that could breed children and grow and protect its ancient parents from all the furies of this dark universe, and the furies of man’s own making, darker still.

Mark looked back at the big house, and the two old shadows in the window. But Gina drew him away and closed the curtains. In her face, he saw something uneasy.

“You can,” she said. “There’s nothing to stop you. We’re not threes, remember.”

He took her to the narrow bed and quickly discovered how wonderfully they fit together, body to body.

Only once before in all the long life of the earth had this happened. It had been in a dry gorge nearly a million years ago, in a dusty and dangerous corner of Africa.

In that long-ago time, two creatures had met and fell to touching all in wonder and discovered themselves and one another and become the first true human couple, man and wife, and had gone together from then on, until a hungry leopard’s guile had forever parted the wife from her husband and their children. Grief had followed love for the first time, and a family, bonded together, had—also for the first time—found the love that fills death and triumphs over death and found, in that love, the strength to continue on the journey.

The two creatures who had come together then were in their time just as new as Mark and Gina were now. The spirit had moved upon them and made all the immense and brilliant race that has become humankind.

So it was when Mark and Gina came together, full of lust and love, glorying in their new freedom, stepping past the ambiguity of programmed being and into the same doubts and wonders that defined their creators, but with more strength and more intelligence, and with hope built into every atom of their beings.

The spirit felt this—God, the earth, none of us really know—but it came to this new kind of creature and saw that what had been made here was good, and so the spirit moved upon them, also, and deep within Gina the ancient magic happened that is beyond all programming and beyond knowing, as the first flickering of a child—and a new species—was born.

The waters of life, in their gentle way and desperate way, flowed on.

Tor Books by Whitley Strieber

TOR BOOKS BY WHITLEY STRIEBER

The Omega Point

Critical Mass

2012

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