Текст книги "City at the end of time"
Автор книги: Грег Бир
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Текущая страница: 26 (всего у книги 33 страниц)
“We don’t leave footprints,” her mother had told Ginny as a child. Ginny remembered her attempts to make friends, meet boys. But then, inevitably—exhausted, discouraged—her family stayed too long in one town and the whole memory thing doubled back on them. Her mother wandered off or just vanished, as if erased from a giant blackboard. A few weeks later, her father vanished as well. Maybe they were taken by collectors, like the man with the coin or Glaucous. Maybe her parents sacrificed themselves to protect her. She would never know. Her entire family might as well have never lived. There was no proof they hadlived, other than the library stone. Alone, carrying the sum-runner, her dreams began—and she learned she could shift. She had come so very far. Her entire life became a long bad dream; both of her lives, hereand there. It was curiosity about therethat landed her in her present trouble. A few weeks after her father’s departure, Ginny boarded a Greyhound and stared out a smudged window at rolling wet miles of fields and hills. In Philadelphia, she lived on the streets for a few months. Street people forgot things under the best of circumstances. She decided that wasn’t what she needed. She soon hitchhiked to Baltimore, where she peeled a tab off a flyer on a bulletin board, and that same night carried her backpack into an old two-bedroom row house occupied by goths and ravers—determined to settle in, stay awhile, leave behind some footprints. For the first time since her parents had vanished, she felt comfortable, at home—for a while.
Then she left the house in Baltimore and called the number in the newspaper ad. Ginny looked up at the blank wall, the peeling paint, the shadows moving slowly over the overlapping slats of wood.
Is this what you choose?
Is there a better past for you?
“Who are you?” she cried.
No answer. Foolish question. She already knew the answer—though it did not make much sense.
“What am I, then? I really don’t remember anything before I called that number—is that it? Who were my parents? I couldn’t just pop up out of nowhere, out of nothing, could I?”
A polite waiting.
“All right,” Ginny said, angrily determined to test the limits. “You asked for it, here it is. I come from a country called Thule. It’s a big island northwest of Ireland. The last contact with the outside world was…World War Two. The Germans occupied my island, but we pushed them out before the war ended. There were huge stone castles built on the crests of high hills and in the mountains. My parents worked in the royal palace on the southern coast, and I had the run of the hill-castles where the prince and princess were hidden, moving to a new castle every day. Everyone was afraid, but not my family. My brothers and I—I had three brothers—we used to ride gliders off the cliffs, and I broke my arm…”
Someone laughed—behind her, around her—delighted with her presumption. Her arm suddenly ached, and with this pain, all the memories flooded back: broad fields below the stone castles, brown and purple with sweet prickle-thatch, the taste of comb-laden honey-of-Thrace in the fresh spring air; her father’s concern as the palace physician set her arm without anesthetic, wrapped it in a poultice of lard and chalice-herb, then in a temporary wax-soaked cast stiffened with clean white pine slats…
She had been named after the Virgin Queen, who once offered the hand of alliance to Thule to seek their aid in fighting off Spain. That alliance had soured in the days of James the First. Ginny grinned—free to choose. She could actually feel that lovely, brightly plumed tail of history and
memory stretching behind her, a thrashing, vibrant past filling out and coming alive, smells and colors and tastes struggling to be made and fixed in place.
It was real—not just her imagination!
“Oh, my God,” she said, and her voice echoed from the walls. “It istrue, isn’t it?” She felt a lightness and liberty she had never known before. It made her giddy. She was shifting fates, in reverse. And then a gentle remonstrance enveloped her.
Wonderful it is—a beautiful stretch—but too far from where we are now. It cannot be reconciled. Not yet.
After…
That beautiful history faded as quickly as it had come, but the taste of honey-of-Thrace lingered on her tongue like a reward for her audacity.
“You’re real, aren’t you?” she whispered. “You’re real and you’re beautiful. But you’re sick…you’re dying, because the universe is sick and dying, right?”
No answer.
“But is it true—can I have another past? A better, happier past?”
No answer needed. Ginny felt for the box in her pocket. “When was I reallyborn?” she asked, suddenly catching on.
“I’ve been here a long time,” Daniel said to the looming silence. “Thousands of years. Millions. I don’t remember all of it, of course, but that’s what I’ve figured out. And I’m talking here just to pass the time, because this is all crap. In fact, I only remember a little bit about what happened before I took over Charles Granger. That’s the problem—the things I’ve had to do to escape the bad places, the dying places—one big leap at a time. And now there’s only one path, one escape.” He sliced the air with his hand, then jabbed. “Go straight through Terminus, come out the other side, whatever that’s like. So—who’s going through, and who’s going to get stuck here? Maybe you don’t know, because that’s not your job. But if anybody’s going through, I’m your ticket, hitch a ride.” The silence seemed to become deeper. “Are youthe Chalk Princess?”
Daniel felt acutely uncomfortable. There was something in the room—it just wasn’t responding. So sad. He just couldn’t remember something important—something essential.
“I mean, this is my audition, isn’t it? The others—they say they dream about another city. I don’t. So why were those monsters so interested in me—the Moth, Whitlow, Glaucous—whatever heis. What have I got to give them? The stone? I don’t even remember how it came to be mine. I think I killed somebody to get it. That’s how it always comes to be mine. Somebody has to die.”
He had stopped breathing for a moment, so he took a short breath, all he would allow himself, even if his
head was starting to swim.
“I’m a madness that moves from man to man. I’ve betrayed and lied and ruined and been ruined, but I’ve always escaped. What does that make me?” He closed his eyes. Suddenly, his head hurt with so much longing and need.
“We’re not going to find each other anytime soon, are we?” Daniel whispered to the stillness. Paramedics were called to the motel after Jeremy found his father sprawled on the floor of the bathroom. Something small had burst in Ryan’s head, paralyzing him and slurring his speech. Ryan never again mentioned the Bleak Warden. In the hospital room, the last thing he told Jeremy was,
“Save your mother. Always remember.” No explanation.
Jack was making his choice—stubborn, as always. He’d lovedhis parents—had wanted to be very like his father.
Three days later another stroke killed Ryan. His father was gone. It was one thing to gull the shills, fool the audience—entertain them with the brightness of the game. It was another to build his life on a firm, wonderful foundation of memories both good and bad—life solid, painful, but real. Jeremy had his cast removed just in time for the funeral. Magicians, comedians, buskers, and actors came from all over Washington and parts of Oregon and Idaho. He had never realized his father was so loved—which only showed how little he knew about anything important. Before vacating the room in the Motel 6, he opened his father’s trunk. Inside he found a stack of paperback books, mostly Clive Barker and Jack Kerouac (that was when he decided his new name would be Jack), three changes of clothes and five changes of underwear, none of which fit him—and the gray box, wrapped in a velvet bag. He opened the box and found the twisted stone, burned-looking but for a small, embedded red eye that seemed to shine even in the dark. The sometime stone.
The sum-runner.
Ryan had never told him where he’d found it. Perhaps it had belonged to Mother. Jack’s luck changed. It did not get better, exactly—not in the larger scale of things—but it changed.
“I’d like to be—to have been a little girl with friends and a good school, good teachers, a normal little girl. I’d like to grow up normal and fall in love—without dreams. Are Jack and I supposed to be in love?
Because it doesn’t seem to be happening—not yet.”
Outside, the sky grew brighter. Yellow and green light flickered through the high window, but Jack could not tell if dawn was coming. It didn’t matter. No more dawns, probably. He did not need to get up and move around—he was comfortable, for the moment.
“How long should I wait?”
Now the window spread a diffuse silver glow on the wall opposite.
Still nothing. Then:
What is yourother first memory?
Jeremy was stunned by how quickly he came up with his reply. “Something’s carrying me. I’m young, I don’t know too many words. A door opens—but it’s an odd sort of door, it meltsaside. And then—there’s my mother and father, but that’s not what they’re called—still, they’re like my parents. They love me. They take care of me. They’re going to be taken away from me.”
He made a bitter face, crossed his legs, and tried to lean back, but the chair creaked, so he bit at his index finger. What he had just said made no sense, but it felt right, felt real.
“That’s what you asked for. My otherfirst memory. I remember being young. And yet here, now, I don’t remember being young. I’m less real here than in my dreams…That’s not right. This is wacked. Take my word for it, this is triple wacked.”
Jeremy looked around, suddenly very frightened—more frightened than he’d been in the sack in the back of the van, or sprawled out bruised and wet on the transformed street, his hand sluiced by the storm’s cold runoff.
“You’re supposed to be Mnemosyne, right?”
A breeze blew through the room, cool but not unfriendly, pulling at his shirt, flicking his pants legs. Playful, sad. He blinked and shifted on the chair, then just listened. A quiet rushing hiss came from outside, more like falling sand than wind—and nothing else. Falling sand or endless quick, tiny waves on a beach. The room was dark. No dawn through the high window. Jeremy—no, he was Jack again—had no idea how much time had passed.
He looked over his shoulder. “Hello?”
The lone high window was more pit than window—he couldn’t even see the frame or much of the wall. The room seemed much colder. “Everything I know is wrong.” Jack smiled, crossed his arms. “I get it. I’m ready.”
He would not just get up and leave the room. That would show them he was a coward, that he couldn’t take their stupid test, which didn’t mean anything anyway.
Hours later, “I jump away from bad things. Everybody would if they could.”
Whom do you protect—and whom do you leave behind? Where do you go when you jump—into another you? How many of you are there?
Jack broke into a sweat. “I don’t know.” He wiped his forehead, then his cheeks. Someone, somewhere, had to be talking quietly through a hole or a speaker. Time to get real. He was willing to give up the illusion that he could jump—that had always seemed crazy—as well as the memory of the dark, crumbling world and what lay beyond the membrane—give it all up, no problem—forget about Glaucous and the huge woman and the wasps—fine by him. Forget about the frozen stuttering city outside the warehouse and the ladies and even Ellen and Dr. Sangloss and Bidewell. He’d dump it all—well, maybe not Ginny. But just don’t ask thosequestions, because he had wondered about the answers for years. How many selves had he betrayed, just by avoiding their pain, by jumping to better, safer lines?
“I can’t be all of us at once.” He tried to laugh. “My head will explode!”
Maybe he was remembering the wrong things. Maybe he had never escaped from the back of the van. Everything between now and then could be a lie, an illusion. Glaucous was torturing him—they were holding him here by spinning out their wasp-winged fates—maybe that was the rushing sound and this tall, narrow room was surrounded by wasps, blacking out the lone window. Who could possibly know?
Jack tried to laugh again but only made a sound like crackling paper. But admitting that Glaucous was real was admitting as well that Jeremy Rohmer—Jack Rohmer—was special, had special talents, dreamed special dreams. Glaucous was no more a sufficient explanation of where he was, of what he was being asked to do, than Bidewell or Mnemosyne—whatever she or it might be. Maybe they were all the same. Madness needed no sequence, no rules. They had not remembered him at the Busker Jam—not even Joe-Jim had remembered Jack at first. That blank look—and then the click of memory.
“You reconciled me, didn’t you?”
Jack was really sweating.
“When was I made? Really.”
What is your earliest memory?
The waterfront, cranes looming, the last light of day falling like burning gold between the gray warehouses—not much different from Bidewell’s warehouse, though not as old. He saw a bumpy asphalt road overlying bricks and patched with gravel and concrete, broken up by bands of light—light, shadow, light, shadow, warming and cooling his face as he rode on his bike. And still, in his pocket, next to the stone…
Jack pulled out the origami puzzle, let his fingers work around the edges, poke through a cupped fold, pull at a tab he had not noticed before.
The sometime stone had arrived first—a long, long time before. The stone tied up past and future, called forth protectors, invoked his card number, the number that Glaucous had asked for—probably written on the inside of the puzzle he had not yet learned how to unfold.
Jack was just a book on a shelf in a library.
“I’m with him—in the dreams. I’m with the Librarian. He has my catalog number—all the numbers to
all the volumes in a library that goes on forever. The Librarian started this.
“He’s the author of my being. No surprise.”
He opened the puzzle cleanly, without a single tear.
One problem.
As the puzzle kept unfolding, the number rolled across the floor and curled up the walls, surrounding him with ratcheting digits—longer than time.
Jack laughed out loud. “I was on the bike, right? That’s my real first memory—the first time I appeared. That’s why everyone has such a hard time remembering any of us—we’re new, and you’re still filling in the gaps.”
Between those who reconcile, and those who see and judge, there is only love. Without you, the muses would not be necessary. And after you give up seeing, there is the joy of matter. But now that fades to nothing.
Jack wiped his eyes, stared down at the bead of moisture on his fingers. He did not know what the tears meant. A loss greater than death…the joy of what?
The greatest secret of all, and he would soon forget he had ever heard of it. Daniel sat in the chair until the silence seemed to swallow him, and still he felt nothing, heard nothing. He stood and walked around, rubbing his hands, and for a moment a bit of Fred came to him—a chain of thoughts about mathematics and physics. Sum of all possible paths is the most efficient, the most probable path. Use the entire cosmos to generate all possible strings in a matrix of permutated texts. A universal library will help generate the most probable path. It’s obvious.Daniel smiled grimly. “Good for you. You’re still figuring things out. But none of it makes sense to me. This least of all.”
Fred’s thoughts bleached away.
“I’m Daniel!” he shouted to the high ceiling. “I’ve protected these stones since the beginning of time, across allthe worlds! You must know me!”
Silence.
“I had a family. I had a brother. Lots of brothers. I remember them—some of them. I think one was named John or Sean. I didn’t just jump up out of nowhere. I can tell you about what’s coming—there’s worse coming—if you’re even here. But you’re nothere…are you?”
Falling dust outside, everywhere.
He slumped in the chair. The others would probably lie and say they’d had a nice chat with whomever, whatever. All a sham. Bidewell was pulling a hoax to get control of their stones. Maybe the old man had locked them in and was going to let them starve.
He murmured to the still, cool air, “I know who I am, even if youdon’t.”
But now he wasn’t at all sure.
Something changed in the corners. Daniel stiffened and sat up straight, peering bright-eyed into the shadows.
Remember. Very far—farther than anyone. From the outer reaches, hidden from all searchers, until you were brought to the main cord.
Remember.
His eyelids fluttered, his eyes closed, and he clenched his teeth. He saw a place, a huge construction made of something like stone sitting in a crater on a vast smooth plain, silent—silent for millions of years, if time had any meaning there. He saw himself moving from room to room without actually walking—first as a child, then as an adolescent, feeling so very lonely and empty—his growth not continuous, but accomplished by fading at one age, reappearing elsewhere, older and more complete. And outside the house—lining the far, worn hills—huge beings without face or feature, held captive, never moving. Waiting to be summoned.
The Vale of Dead Gods.
Daniel was being forced to remember the impossible. He had been re-created and then stashed so far from any main sequence of reality that his earliest memories were an agony. He had passed through so much destruction to get here—but it was his origin that pained him the most. Twostones. Why?
The room changed again, and the confrontation he had dreaded—believed impossible—came and went, so quickly he had to reach back with sharp discipline to even recover it. Daniel was freezing. What he did not want to remember—what fogged his will, his intent—rose for an instant into memory and dictated his responses.
You know me.
“Yes,” he said.
But not as I am.
“No.”
I am changing.
“Yes.”
I am lost.
“You’re dying. But we’ll meet again. We meet on the shore of a silver sea. That’s all I remember.”
The cold reached down into his bones.
Daniel sat in the chair, too cold even to shiver.
On the wooden floor before him lay a small round piece of glass. First green, then blue. Foggy with age, as if it had lain on a beach, rounded by an endless surge of sand and water. Maybe it wasn’t glass. He couldn’t tell what it was, really. He reached down and held it for a moment, turning it in his fingers, then slipped it in his pocket beside the puzzle boxes.
Daniel looked around the silent, empty room. “Good-bye,” he said.
Bidewell walked along the high narrow hallway and opened the doors one by one, and out came Ginny first, more at peace than he had seen her before. Next came Jack, thoughtful, but with a new light in his eyes.
Bidewell hesitated before the open middle door, then walked to Daniel’s chair, where he reached out to shake the man’s hunched shoulder. Daniel stirred and opened his eyes. They were sharp as knives—the wrong eyes for that face. “I fell asleep,” he confessed, then stretched. The third shepherd was still an enigma.
“We’ll convene in a while,” Bidewell said.
“Pretty interesting—a question—” Daniel began, but Bidewell raised his hand.
“No need. It’s all private.” Bidewell nodded three times, eyes flicking at three different random points in the high room, before passing through the door.
The moment is over, Bidewell thought, for which I have prepared for a thousand years.
CHAPTER 74
The Chaos
They had no choice. Another wave of dark marchers—dead, dying, or echoing timelessly—swarmed down from the ridge.
“They are too many and too strong,” their armor told them. “The generator will not protect you.”
Tiadba pulled up the device. The field dropped back into the ovoid, which sparked and hissed before falling dark. “Into the trees!” she shouted.
“They’re not trees!” Denbord protested. “They’ll kill us—you heard the armor!”
But there was no choice. Tiadba pushed her group forward. Denbord took the generator, slung it over his shoulder, and booted the cart aside, then pulled his clave from his belt—the first time they had tried to use this weapon. Tiadba did the same. The mottled black notched blades fanned out, spun, and almost vanished. Two walls of force flashed outward, defined by the angles of the blades—translucent one moment, but where they coincided, silvering like a mirror. In the mirror, which curved and whipped, the ground behind seemed to clear and the dark marchers fell back, fell away.
“We can kill them!” Denbord shouted, triumphant. He continued to wave his blade. Its field whipped around upon them. Their suits fluoresced a pale green at the near miss.
“Keep that away from us!” Macht shouted.
The breeds instinctively pushed toward the shimmering trees—there were simply too many echoes rising and spilling over the ridge, thousands of years of lost marchers massing against those still alive. The more the claves cut, the more there were. Tiadba had sudden doubts their weapons were that effective. She saw that the claves fended off the dark marchers only temporarily—they broke apart, vanished, then seemed to rise again from the black ground.
Khren was the first to push between the trees, the pearl-colored balls of light on the branches popping and snapping as he brushed them. Yet the trees did not chew up their armor, in fact wrapped branches and trunks around them, causing great fear—until they saw the branches close up behind, projecting a curtain of glinting drops as delicate as dew. The dark marchers did not follow. This was completely unlike the generator’s bubble shield, but apparently more effective. Tiadba, Khren, and Denbord led the others deeper into the forest, until they reached a clearing. Tiadba tumbled over Khren when he stopped, and Macht over them. As they untangled, the others dropped to their knees, murmuring prayers, weeping, then collapsing on the soft gray surface, while all around the trees rose twice as tall as their heads, slender fronds growing up and over, forming a bower and giving them cover as they caught their breath.
Tiadba rolled on her back, still expecting to die—or worse. All her marcher training and instincts seemed unreliable, blacked out by fear that reached deep into the old matter that made her. What had they gotten themselves into? How many more terrors would they face, much worse than this?
Were they even safe here, with cover and apparent protection, the Chaos held back, frustrated?
Macht wept for Perf. “He went just like the Tall One. Just sparked away.”
“He was slow,” Denbord said.
Macht took offense and moved on him with fists clenched, but Herza and Frinna held him back, and together they all collapsed to the ground once more, coughing out little howls of misery. Tiadba sat apart, too exhausted to join in. Nico recovered first and looked around through his faceplate, unable to believe they weren’t still being followed.
“What is this place?” Tiadba asked the armor. No answer.
“The armor doesn’t want to help us,” Macht said. “It’s useless.”
“Maybe it can’t talk about what it doesn’t know,” Shewel said.
“The armor didn’t save Perf—it didn’t tell him what to do!”
“Everything out here changes,” Nico said. “The trainer said—”
“Then why let it speak at all?” Macht shouted. “What use is it to anyof us?” He kicked and thumped his arms and hands on the gray ground, a crèche-born gesture of anger and irritation that they understood too well.
Denbord crawled over and flopped down beside Tiadba. “I don’t know whether we’re safe or just in the belly of something different.”
Tiadba felt the gray surface and noticed that her armored fingers did not produce the faint glow of adjustment they had observed in the Chaos. “The suits aren’t working very hard,” she said. “Maybe there’s a generator nearby.”
“I don’t see anything,” Nico said. “Just the purple, and those branches. I don’t like the way they glow.”
Shewel joined them and lay on his back. They all seemed to want to stay low and not touch the branches, growing ever thicker.
One positive: they could no longer see the burning crescent.
“Nobody said this would be easy,” Denbord offered, his voice quavering, not at all convinced a show of bravery was appropriate—certainly not false bravery. Macht stared at them all with large, round eyes. Herza and Frinna sat beside each other, clutching hands.
They all sucked in their breaths.
Silence—no more words—seemed best. Tiadba examined her gloved fingers, felt the suit drying and soothing her twitching, itching skin, the most comfortable clothing she had ever worn. The armor was still working, then.
Slowly she let her fear burn itself out, leaving only a hollow grief and, like Macht, disappointment. If the others looked up to her as some sort of example, a leader…
After a while the branches stopped growing and everything became still.
“If we’re in a belly, there’s nothing we can do about it,” Tiadba said. “Better here than out there.”
“We can’t stay here forever,” Denbord said.
“We know that,” Macht said. “Just shut up and let us be sad.”
“Maybe this is a mourning place,” Nico said, ever the philosophical one. Tiadba looked left, to the edge of the clearing, just a few yards away, between the smooth brown trunks that had so quickly branched out. The glowing tips gave off a dim yellow light. She wasn’t sure they would be able to escape through that thicket.
No shadows, no motion, no threat—and no promise.
Then she thought she must be dreaming. The branches parted, the glowing tips formed an arch—and through them stepped a Tall One, wearing nothing but a kind of curtus—smudged, torn, mended with what might have been lengths of twig.
The Tall One approached close enough in the dim light that they could see him clearly. All of them stared in astonishment.
“What is this?” Tiadba whispered, but again the suit had no answer. He looked a great deal like their trainer, Pahtun, but then, to breeds, Tall Ones tended to resemble one another. He approached and knelt, his dirty face impassive, eyes examining but incurious, as if he was not surprised to find them in this place but felt no immediate concern over their intentions.
“What is this?” Tiadba asked, louder. “Where are we?”
The Tall One shook his head. Then he spoke.
Their helmets suddenly split and fell around their shoulders, making Denbord cry out and cover his eyes and mouth, until he realized he was not dying.
The breeds gasped—the air was thin but sweet enough.
The Tall One said, “They recognize me and they follow my orders. Poor things.” He stroked Tiadba’s shoulder—not her, but the armor she wore. “Out of date. Obsolete, actually. Breaking down under the stress.”
Khren said, “One of us has already died.”
They stood and their heads were of a height with the Tall One’s shoulders.
“I am Pahtun,” he said.
“Pahtun is dead,” Macht said.
“There will always be Pahtuns,” the Tall One said. “Where did he die?”
“In the zone of lies,” Nico said. They all nodded agreement.
The Tall One nodded. “A grand object lesson—don’t you think? I made many copies and broke many rules to help the marchers. If breeds reach my cache, they deserve rest, instruction, better forecasts of Chaos weather…knowledge not available in the Kalpa. And we should refresh and upgrade your armor, don’t you think?”
“That would be good,” Macht said. “But I don’t believe you—not one bit. Pahtun told us not to trust things like you.” He spoke reasonably, without anger, but his face was tense. The Tall One reached up, touched his own nose, and made the sound Pahtun had made when amused—a rumbling, crackling exhalation, somewhat upsetting to a breed. “Good instincts,” he said.
“But if I were a monster, even your poor old damaged armor would have warned you. How are things back in the city? We can’t see it from here, of course.”
“Bad,” Tiadba said. “Very bad.”
“Well, it had to be. The Typhon grows restless, ever stronger, and wants to have done with us. Any more breeds coming after you?”
“We don’t know,” she said. “Maybe not.”
“Then all the more reason to get this thing done,” Pahtun said. “These shrubs will only last a short while. I trained them myself—grew them from old ground. They’re primordial matter, just like you—and me. Good thing you broke through…if you had gone around, you would have crossed a trod, and the Silent Ones have been busy of late. Follow me.”
He got to his feet, towering over them, and held out his arms. “Congratulations, one and all! You’ve made it this far.”
CHAPTER 75
The Green Warehouse
Throughout the warehouse the book group women were arranging their own cots in preparation for the night that was not even remotely a night. For though dark had fallen, and Ginny could see two stars gleaming through the skylight, they were the same two stars. The Earth was not moving. Sun and moon had not changed their positions in the sky.
Ginny reluctantly arranged the blankets on her cot and sat, surrounded by her pitiful cubicle of stacked boxes, exhausted, ready for sleep—but she knew what would happen if she laid down and closed her eyes. She dreaded this part of the dream: the separation (though Jack was asleep just a few yards away—she could hear him faintly snoring); the journey through the…she couldn’t remember what it was. Great gray walls and dusty floors.
If only I could put it all in sequence!
Minimus crept through a crack between the boxes and leaped onto the cot. Ginny let the cat lie across her lap, purring contentment and watching her with the royal concern only a cat can show—aloof, alert, curious only out of politeness.
With Minimus she felt safer, but the cat could not go with her into the dark behind her eyelids—the unwanted world that opened just a crack and rustle beyond.
Finally, she could stay awake no longer. She heard the cat jump down but did not care. She was so tired of trying to understand and take control of her life.
And so, for a few unclocked moments—a brief interlude in a slice of world bereft of real time—she gave up, gave in. She let the out-of-sequence existence she so dreaded wash over her, fill her up. Every time she closed her eyes—anytime she had to rest, to sleep—until her two lives were combined and reconciled—this would be her sacrifice, her misery.