By this time we knew that the river of fire had not been an actual place; it was generated in O’Hara’s mind, out of her deepest fears. When she disappeared to the people around her, she was still there, simply displaced a molecule’s width through the dimension the eveloi use for space travel. The injuries she sustained there were also manufactured from her fears, carefully adjusted to maximize pain while still allowing her to survive.

The individual I was talking to remarked that O’Hara’s response in the second instance, when John Ogelby’s life was at stake, was in a sense “wrong,” though the evaluation was never a test, in the sense that you passed or failed it. The (c)valuator would have been in favor of her sacrificing her husband, since she did know that he wanted to die. Of course he wanted to avoid pain, too, but she knew better than anyone how short his pain would be. He was so fragile he wouldn’t have lived through a second of that terrible sensory overload.

So she traded the possibility of her own death, and the certainty of months of suffering, to spare herself the burden of a small guilt. The evaluator was not impressed.

The eveloi and I concluded our business and it went off to wherever it is they go. I found the experience immensely clarifying, and wished that O’Hara had lived long enough to share it.

I must tread carefully here, and not judge. I am human, after all, even if inorganic, and O’Hara’s response to that crisis has always seemed to me consistent with what I know about love, courage, self-sacrifice—and fear and guilt. I perforce had to admire her for it, especially after learning that she generated the terrible experience herself, as her own personal hell, but have always recognized that my approval was largely self-congratulation, and therefore trivial.

But the sacrifice was not illogical. O’Hara was never unaware of the ambiguity in simply rational terms, of her action. She had gone through it once before, with her daughter, and understood that surrendering to the pain was ultimately selfish, the way many or even most courageous acts must be: facing death or pain rather than face the prospect of living with the memory of your own cowardice.

I don’t suppose a race that effects social homeostasis via the planetwide extermination of species can afford this sort of moral delicacy, ambiguity. They can never be wrong. So their “evaluation” of O’Hara’s propriety, no matter how important to the survival of the human race, does not weigh heavily on me as her sister, or daughter, or only living relative. I have to agree with O’Hara: she was, later in life, both amused and appalled by the eveloi, because they were such a literal personification, almost a cartoon, of the gods that graced six thousand years of human history: omnipotent, capricious, bloodthirsty. And thickheaded.