All was quiet. The humans sleep well now. They don’t wake and wail in the small hours. They don’t wander around the corridors, searching for something they never find. They don’t call out for their mothers. We have given them the gift of sleep once again, and even if their dreams trouble them, we can give comfort easily.

Everything is better for them than it was when we first came.

I walked through the silent passageways in deep shadows, and thought of all the ways humans speak of night, and darkness, and their fears.

‘“Men fear death as children fear to go in the dark,”’ they say.

Cecilia didn’t fear it, in the end. She went into it, knowing, it seems, there was light to come after it.

Margaret feared it sometimes. And not at others. What will she find?

Margaret

I am awake, I think.

But lying down.

I feel old again.

My strength has gone.

I want to sleep.

The children. They should be here. I want to hold each of them in my arms.

I can’t. They’re gone.

They grow up. They grow away. The place you made for them with love and care – they leave it. They don’t look behind them. It’s right. Why should they? They need to make their own lives.

When they’re little they give and take love easily. And then suddenly it gets complicated. And the child is no more.

Is it still inside them? Is it still inside me?

I was a child in another world. Our house was so cold in the winter there was ice on the inside of the windows in the morning, feathers on the panes. You could make holes in it by holding your finger there, but then the flesh went numb.

The fire downstairs the only warmth.

I’m home. I can smell food. Bacon. Mummy’s cooking breakfast.

Oh, what a night of dreams I’ve had.

I was an elegant young woman. I met a handsome man. We danced together, and it never ended. We danced for a whole lifetime, and the music only stopped when his heart stopped, and mine broke. I loved him, all the time, even when it was hard to love him.

My mother. I can’t see her face.

I can hear my father laughing somewhere.

And I dreamt I had children – little warm babies – and I knew another kind of love, a love so strong it hurt, and so intense it frightened me, and I knew fear then, too, fear of losing them, the most terrible thing that could ever happen to me. But they didn’t die.

Now I can see them. There you are, all of you.

My lovely little children are waving me goodbye. Goodbye, my darlings. Will I see you again soon?

I don’t know.

I dreamt I was looked after by a beautiful young woman, who turned out to be a robot.