Ed half-woke, felt the soft inside of the wormhole touch the ship, contract. He smiled loosely, wiped his lips with the back of his hand, slept once more, this time without dreams. Protected by the violent glow of alien engines, cocooned and cosseted by the ironic smile and unknowable motives of the entity at that time calling itself Sandra Shen, he was borne with grace and without incident down a birth canal a million years old. Or more. At the end of which, deep light would explode in upon him, in ways none of us can imagine.

31
I’ve Been Here

After he ran out of the cottage, Michael Kearney was thrown back for a last time into his own memory, where he saw himself, twenty years old, returning from his last innocent train journey to find a short, badly dressed woman walking up and down the taxi rank outside Charing Cross station, where the action of the Tarot cards had stranded him. She was holding up a letter in her right hand and shouting:

“You bloody piece of paper, you bloody piece of paper!”

Greying hair straggled down around a broad face reddened with effort. A maroon woollen coat, thick as carpet, compressed her fat breasts. “You bloody piece of paper!” she cried. As if trying for some final, indisputable delivery, she varied the emphasis on this accusation until it had illuminated briefly every word. She had a duty of expression, you felt, to the forces inside her. It was work for her, work of the hardest sort, hawked up from somewhere deep. Kearney couldn’t repress a shudder. But no one else seemed bothered: instead, they regarded her with a cautious, even affectionate, amusement, especially when her back was to them. When Kearney’s turn came at the head of the queue, she stopped in front of him and caught his eye. She was short, stout. The smell that clung to her reminded him of empty houses, old clothes, mice. Her sense of drama, the intractable rawness of her emotion, left him unnerved.

“Piece of paper!” she shouted at him. He saw that the letter was old, shiny with use, falling apart at the folds. “You bloody piece!” She held it out to him. Kearney stared mutely away, aching with embarrassment. He tapped his foot.

“You bloody written thing!” she said.

He shook his head. He thought perhaps she wanted money. “No,” he said, “I—”