[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.With sound filling his head he leaped to the floor, spun and looked back at Corona.She was a dot-matrix woman, with only a facsimile of the features she once possessed.Next to her sat a wide expanse of dots in human form, in McMurtrey’s form.The air filled with dots, and in an insect swarm the dots from the bed rejoined him, in delayed reaction.It made him afraid to move.“Did you see that?” he asked.And his words were like the visual dots, with little gaps of nothingness between hard edges of sound.She nodded.McMurtrey felt the deck shudder, saw the compartment screen flex violently.Everything whirled and spun before him, grew dark.He seemed riveted in place, on a spinning carnival ride.But this carnival had no colors.“Our ship entered a spinning knife-edge of parallel white lines,” Corona said calmly, from somewhere.McMurtrey couldn’t see her, couldn’t see or feel anything.He felt like a spinning, whirling, electronic receiver.Corona again, her voice susurrant: “Ahead I saw a limitless plane of parallel lines against unbounded space.The stars were brilliant, blinding, with no rest for my eyes.Light burned through me.I died of pain and was reborn.Appy says the skins are damaged.Big trouble because of that.He’s angry with Shusher, says T.O.will never forgive this.Appy talked to Shusher like a schoolteacher scolding an errant student, said that when we were skinbeating we were pulling the compressed skins of two adjacent universes through Shusher’s drive system.He said Shusher didn’t understand how delicate an operation it was, that the skins had been compressed to microthin wires and we were in two universes at once—half in each—pulling the skins through somehow.Behind us it’s like a damaged bridge the other ships may not be able to pass.They may have to go back, try another way.Skins take a long time healing.”“Appy told us the skins between universes are the fastest path to God,” McMurtrey said, “so I wonder how long it would take traveling to God’s planet conventionally, by spaceship through the universe.”“I don’t know.”“If the skins are severely damaged, we could be forced to take the slower route back.That might take so long that we’d die en route, effectively trapping us out here.”“You’re right.Could be no way back.”A long silence.Presently McMurtrey said, “It’s strange here.I felt it even before this, that I was able to think more lucidly away from the clutter of my life on D’Urth.When it’s all over, Kelly, what really matters about life?”“I dunno.”“I wish I could remember everything that’s happened to me.When I can’t remember something, it’s like part of my life has been stolen from me.Why go through each moment if it’s going to be forgotten? When it’s all over what do we have? What does it all matter if you can’t remember most of it?”Her voice came from blackness: “You’re talking weird.”“No, I’m not.Think about it.Memories are all of consequence that remain at the end of a person’s life.It’s not the things he accumulated, nor which he sought to accumulate.Rather it is the richness and fulfillment of each experience itself.This should be the truest endowment of life.But what is that endowment if time and circumstance pulverize it?“Sure, there are memory enhancement techniques: concentration, review soon afterward, even a policy of trying to experience significant events.This trip is a significant event par excellence, so we’ll remember most all of it.But everything in life can’t be a significant event; we can’t concentrate on everything at the time it’s happening or take the time for a review soon afterward.Life goes on at too rapid a pace.Do you follow what I’m saying?”“Yes, but you needn’t be so gloomy about such losses.It seems to me you’re forgetting about the memories others have of you, the important impression in clay left by your life.”“I suppose that’s true.It matters what God thinks of me, too.”“Sure it does.Even if you’re pulverized to dust with no memories remaining at all, what you were matters, the way you changed lives, the way you graced and improved them.”“I didn’t help everybody.I tricked many of them—my Cosmic Chickenhood prank.Now ironically, the fat chicken society may be meaningful after ail.God as much as suggested that, although I can’t believe it.”“We can do important things by accident, or good things without meaning to do good things, and what we’ve done is still important, still good.”“But lessened by lack of intention.”“Maybe not.Maybe you did what you really meant to do after all.”“Subconsciously?”“Yes,” Corona said.“I don’t think I believe in that stuff.You do?”“I guess.The older I get and the more I think about things, the less certain I am about anything.”“Do you suppose the most important events in life occur by accident?” McMurtrey asked.“Meeting you, I mean, was totally unplanned
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]