Calliope sighed. "I'm sorry you've had such a bad time of it, Ms. Anwin."
"It's not like I didn't deserve it," said the young woman. "I wasn't an innocent. An idiot, yes-but not an innocent."
"Nobody deserves John Dread," Calliope said firmly.
"Maybe. But he isn't going to get what he deserves, is he!"
Calliope shrugged, although the same thought had been burning in her own mind for days. "Who ever does? But I've been meaning to ask you something. What exactly were you doing with the pad after I made the emergency call? What were you trying to send?"
The American woman blinked slowly. "A dataphage." She read Calliope's expression. "Something that chews up information. It had eaten half my system a few hours earlier, so I figured it might do him some damage. I wrapped it in his own . . . files. Those horrible images. So he wouldn't know at first what it was."
"Maybe that's what put him in the coma."
"I wanted it to kill him," she said flatly. "Painfully. Anything less was a failure."
They sat for a few moments in silence, but when Calliope at last began to shift her weight, preparing to stand, the woman suddenly spoke. "I . . . I have something on my conscience." Something came into her eyes, a strange mixture of fear and hope that made Calliope uneasy. "It's been . . . bothering me for a long time. It happened in Cartagena. . . ."
Calliope held up her hand. "I'm not a priest, Ms. Anwin. And I don't want to hear anything more about this case from you. I've studied the reports and your interview with Detective Chan. I can read between the lines as well as the next person." She stilled another attempt with a glare. "I'm serious. I represent the law. Think very carefully before you say anything else. Then, if you still need to do something to . . . ease your conscience, well, you can always call the Cartagena police. But I can tell you that the jails in Colombia are not all that nice." She softened her tone. "You've been through a lot. You're going to have a lot more time to think while you heal, then you have to decide what you're going to do with the rest of your life."
"You mean because I won't be able to use my legs, don't you?" There was more than a hint of self-pity; Calliope's anger sparked.
"Yes, without your legs. But you're alive, right? You have a chance to start over. That's more than a lot of people get. That's more than Dread's other women got."
For a moment Dulcie Anwin glared at her with something like fury and Calliope braced for the harsh words, but the American woman stayed silent. After a moment her face sagged. "Yeah," she said.
"You're right. Count my blessings, huh?"
"It'll be easier to do that later," Calliope told her. "Listen, good luck. I mean that. But now I've got to go."
Dulcie nodded and reached for a glass of water on the bedside table, then hesitated. "Is he really gone?"
she asked. "Not coming back? Are you sure?"
"As sure as anyone can be." Calliope tried to keep her voice calmly professional. "He hasn't shown anything for a week-no change, no sign of waking. And he's guarded day and night. Even if he comes out of it, he goes right to prison."
Dulcie didn't say anything. She took the water and held it close to her mouth with trembling hands, but did not drink.
"Sorry, but I really do have to go." Calliope picked up her crutches. "Call me if I can help with anything.
Your visa's been extended, by the way."
"Thanks." Dulcie finally took a drink, then put the glass down. "And thanks for . . . for everything else."
"Just doing my job," said Calliope, and made her way slowly to the door.
The guard recognized her but still made her wave her badge in front of the reader before he would allow her in. Calliope silently approved. The heavy door clunked open and she stepped through into the hallway with the big oneway windows. The guard leaned past her to make sure the door closed again behind her.
"Anything?" she asked.
"Nah. Two more doctors today. Nothing. Reflex tests, pupil dilation, you name it. If he isn't dead, it's a technicality. They might as well bury him."
The idea started a shiver of superstitious horror. I'd have to stand over the grave with silver bullets and a sharpened stake. "He's already been dead once," she told the guard. "Let's not get too cocky." She moved to the window, stared through the crosshatching of tensor-wire. The figure in the pool of light was strapped to the heavy bedframe and festooned with tubes and wires and dermal sensors, which evoked further horror-flick thoughts-the Frankenstein monster rising, crackling with electricity, snapping his restraints. Dread's eyes were open just a tiny fraction, his fingers slightly curled. She tried to fool herself that she could see a twitch of movement here or there, but except for the slow expansion and contraction of his torso, the automatic pumping systems moving breath and blood, there was nothing.
He's not coming back, she told herself. Whatever happened to him, charge, some kind of data-eater, he's somewhere else now-as good as dead, like the man said. You could come here every day for the rest of your life and nothing would change, Skouros. He's not coming back.
Oddly, this did not bring her much relief, let alone the release she was only beginning to realize she badly needed. But that means he's escaped, she thought, and did not realize how her fingers were tightening on the windowsill until she felt the stab of pain in her healing back muscles.
He's gone out the easy way. After everything he did, he just got away. He should be in hell, screaming.
Instead he's probably just going to sleep out the rest of his life, then slip away quietly.
She pulled her crutches tight against her forearms again, gave a last look at the still, almost handsome face, then made her way slowly back toward the security door.
Life goes on, she told herself. Sometimes it ends this. way. The universe isn't a kid's story, where everybody gets their just desserts at the end.
She sighed and hoped Stan would have found a parking place close to the facility. Her legs hurt and she badly needed a cup of coffee.
He wanted to sleep, ached to sleep, but would not get the chance. It had been days since he had slept, maybe weeks. He couldn't remember. As it was, he had not even regained his breath, which still sawed in his throat, when he smelled the smoke.
Bushfire. They've set a bushfire to drive me out of the trees. For a moment he was so filled with rage and despair that he wanted to stand and shriek at the sky. Why wouldn't they leave him alone? Days, weeks, months-he had lost track. He had no more strength.
But he could not give up-what they would do was too terrible. He could not let his fear overcome him.
He never had and he never would.
The smoke ran past him in tendrils, curling like beckoning fingers. He could hear the noises now, not just behind him but closing in on his left as well, the shrill cries whispering down the flame-hot wind. He stumbled wearily onto his feet and took a few limping steps through the tangle of undergrowth. They were driving him out of the stand of gum trees and back into the empty lands. The light was dim-it was always so dim! Where was the sun? Where was the daylight that would drive these terrible things into hiding in the earth, that would allow him to rest?
It's been twilight forever, he wanted to scream, it's not fair! But even as he raged at the monstrous cruelty of the universe he heard a coughing bark close behind him. He staggered out of the now useless security of the trees and into the open. The field of gray-yellow stone that lay before him promised to cut his bare feet unmercifully, but he had no choice. Sweating, already exhausted and the chase just starting again, he hurried down the salt pan and out into the dead, dusty land.
The cries behind him grew louder now, inhuman voices whooping with glee, screeching like carrion crows. He looked back, although he knew he should not, that it could only weaken him to see them.
Surrounded by the flames of the bushfire, they came loping out of the copse he had just left, laughing and cackling as they spotted him, a crowd of horrid shapes from his mother's stories, some animal, some not, but uniformly monstrous in size and aspect. All of them were female.
His mother ran yipping at the front of the pack, the Dreamtime Bitch herself, first and fiercest as always, her bright dingo eyes glaring, her hairy dingo jaws open to swallow him down into her horrible red insides. Behind her came the Sulaweyo bitch with her sharp spear, as well as the whores Martine and Polly who had somehow grown together into one stone-eyed, blind, remorseless thing. And behind them, through the spreading smoke, hurried all the others-the hungry pack of mopaditi, the nameless, almost faceless dead. But they did not need faces. The dead women had terrible claws and jagged teeth, and legs that could run forever without growing tired.
They had hunted him, hour after hour, day after day, week after week. They would always hunt him.
Weeping like a nightmare-plagued child, whimpering with exhaustion and pain and terror, Johnny Wulgaru ran naked across the dry lands of the Dreamtime, searching desperately for a hiding place that did not exist.
She pulled him into a little park across from the hospital, although she wasn't sure why. The late afternoon light was slanting between the buildings and the thought of taking a taxi back to the rooming house with the harsh light in her eyes depressed her. She wanted to sleep, but she also wanted to talk.
The truth was she didn't know what she wanted anymore.
They sat on a bench beside the path, next to a small but surprisingly well-tended flower bed. A group of children were playing atop a bench on the other side of the park, laughing, pushing each other off. One tumbled onto the cement path, but even as Renie leaned forward in reflexive fear the little girl sprang up again and clambered back onto the bench, determined to regain her place.
"He looked better today, didn't he?" Renie asked !Xabbu. "I mean, the way he smiled-that was a real Stephen-smile."
"He does seem better." !Xabbu watched the children for a moment, nodding. "One day, I would like you to see the place I grew up," he said. "Not just the delta, but the desert, too. It can be very beautiful."
Renie was still worrying about Stephen; it took her a second to catch up. "But I've been there!" she said.
"The one you built, anyway. That was a beautiful place."
He looked at her carefully. "You seem full of worry, Renie."
"Me? Just thinking about Stephen, I guess." She settled back against the bench. The children had now scrambled down to the ground and were running in a circle on the dusty, cracked cement at the middle of the park, using a solitary palm tree as their center pole. "Do you wonder sometimes what it all means?"
she asked suddenly. "I mean now . . . now that we know."
He looked at her again, then back to the shrieking children. "What it all means. . . ?"
"I mean, well, you saw those creatures. Those . . . information people. If they're what comes next, then what about us?"
"I don't understand, Renie."
"What about us? What . . . purpose is there for us? All of us. Everyone on Earth, still living, breeding, dying. Making things. Having arguments. But those information creatures are what comes next, and they've gone on without us."
He nodded slowly. "And parents, when their children are born, do they need to die? Are their lives ended?"
"Well, no-but this is different. Parents take care of their children. They raise them. They help them." She sighed. "Sorry, I'm just . . . I don't know, sad. I don't know why."
He took her hand.
"I just wonder what it all means now," she said, laughing a little. "I suppose it's just that so many things have happened. The world almost came to an end. We're getting a place together. We have money! But I'm still not certain I want to accept it."
"Stephen will need a wheelchair and a special bed," !Xabbu said gently. "For a while, anyway. And you liked that house in the hills."
"Yes, but I'm not sure I belong in that house." She laughed again, shook her head. "Sorry. I'm just being difficult."
He smiled, a small, secret smile. "Besides, I have something I wish to spend some of my share of the money on. In fact, I have already done it."
"What? You look very mysterious."
"I have bought some land. In the Okavango Delta. One of the treaties lapsed and it was being sold."
"That's where you grew up. What . . . what are you going to do with it?"
"Spend some time there." He saw her expression and his eyes widened. "Not by myself! With you, I hope. And with Stephen, when he is strong enough, and perhaps even someday with children that you and I might have. Just because they will live in the city world should not mean they never know anything else."
She settled back, her sense of alarm fading. "For a moment there I thought you'd changed your mind . . .
about us." She couldn't help frowning. "You could have told me, you know. I wouldn't have tried to stop you."
"I am telling you. I had to make the decision very quickly on the way to meet you at the hospital." He smiled again. "You see what your city life is doing to me? I promise not to hurry again for a year."
She smiled back, a little wearily, and squeezed his hand. "I really am sorry I'm such bad company. All these things to think about, everything is so big and important and . . . and for some reason I'm still wondering if any of it matters."
He looked at her for a moment. "So because the new people took my people's stories on some strange voyage we cannot imagine, does that mean that my people themselves no longer matter?"
"Does it. . . ? Of course not!"
"And because you have seen a version of my desert world-one that I built from my own particular memory-does that mean there would be nothing to gain from seeing its true shape and color? Nothing to gain from taking Stephen and our children there to sleep under the real and living stars?"
"No."
He let go of her hand and reached down beside the bench. When he straightened up he held a small red blossom in his hand. "Do you remember the flower I made for you? The first day you showed me how your virtual world worked?"
"Of course." She could not help staring at the petals, slightly ragged along one edge where something small had chewed them, at their rich, red, velvety color, even at the golden pollen smudged against !Xabbu's brown wrist. "It was very nice."
"I did not make this one," he said. "It is real and it will die. But we can still look at it together, in this moment. That is something, is it not?"
He handed it to her. She raised it to her nose and sniffed it.
"You're right." She took his hand again. Something within her that had been pinched and confined since she had stepped out of the tank at last began to open-to unfurl its wings inside her heart. "Yes. Oh, yes.
That is definitely something."
The streetlights were coming on, but across the park the children played on as night fell, oblivious.
Afterword.
Even the sounds of the battle had almost vanished now, the pounding roar of the German heavy guns reduced to bass notes that throbbed but no longer had the power to inspire terror. He was swimming up through something, caught and carried toward a light like a dawning sky, and as he rose he could hear her voice again, the dream-voice that had spoken to him for so long.
"Paul! Don't leave us!"
But there was something different about it now-something different about everything. He had heard her so many times, felt her, almost, a presence with wings, with pleading eyes, but now in the confusion and the growing light he saw her whole. She floated before him, her arms spread. Her wings, he realized, were a network of cracks that radiated light. Her face was sad, infinitely sad, but somehow not quite real, like an icon that had been painted and repainted until the original face was almost gone.
"Don't leave, Paul," she begged. For the first time there was something more than sadness in her words-a demanding note, a hopeless, harsh command.
He tried to answer her but found he could not speak. He finally recognized her. It all came flooding back-the tower, the lies, the terrible last moments. And her name came back, too.
"Ava!" But as he said it, as he finally found his voice, she was gone. And then he woke up.