O’Hara lived for another fourteen Earth years (thirty-one, Epsilon) after this entry, and they were reasonably happy and fruitful years, even after Charlee died. She wrote another volume of autobiography that was popular on several worlds, and for eleven years did an almost daily nostalgia-and-advice column called “Ask O’Hara,” which became a series of books.

It’s ironic that after her death, the income from her publications was willed to Skepsis, an organization devoted to debunking the supernatural—ironic because those same writings formed the basis for what has to be called a religion, Modern Numinism, that is still thriving, no longer modern, after two thousand years. It has several hundred million adherents, less than half of them human.

(Numinism is the reason that I myself faded into cyberspace a thousand years ago, and will disappear again as soon as this story is told. Adherents called me the “discarnation” of O’Hara and took up all my time with silly and embarrassing questions and demands.)

She might not have been too uncomfortable with Numinism, since it doesn’t require belief in gods, or even in her, though it accepts some things as transcendental, including certain aspects of her memory.

Not that she is worshipped, or considered infallible. She was wrong about fundamental things, though Numinists disagree over which things they were, which seems to make for a healthy religion. No one has yet been burned at the stake over a question of doctrine.

Along with everyone else during her lifetime, she was wrong about the basic nature of the eveloi. She had an inkling of the truth when she wrote this:

“The coincidence that the eveloi happened to be the dominant life form on the first planet we came to cannot be a coincidence. They are too central to the commerce/ intercourse/politics of all the hundreds of species in this corner of the Galaxy. It would be like landing on Earth at random and stepping out on the White House lawn or Ngoma Square.

“Epsilon Eridani was one of dozens of targets within range of Newhome. Some of the ones with reasonably comfortable planets, like BD 50, would have been real disasters because of the native life forms. If we had stopped there, we couldn’t have stayed. And we would not have had fuel to go on.

“We were steered here, somehow. The eveloi somehow were able to manipulate the mission planners long before the war, when the first drone probe was sent. When you confront them with that idea, though, they answer with evasive coyness.”