She directed her loving-kindness at the ones she’d killed herself. At Wats, who’d saved her life twice in the span of five minutes, and given his own in exchange. At Kade, who’d built the thing in her mind that she’d loathed and that she now so loved. At Feng and Shu who’d saved them, as inscrutable as they were. At Ananda who’d taken them in and taught her so much. At Vipada and the monks who’d put their lives on the line to defend her and Kade. At poor Warren Becker, who’d deserved better than the death that had assured his silence.
And in the end, she directed her bottomless well of compassion at herself, at the young girl she’d been, at the soldier fighting for a righteous cause that she’d grown up to become, at whoever she was now, today, in this next stage of her evolution.
The sun crested the hills around her. Through closed eyelids she sensed it. On her brow she felt the warmth of its first morning rays.
She thought back to Mai, young Mai, magical Mai, impossibly perceptive and sweet Mai, who’d seen into the knot of hurt and self-recrimination deep inside of Sam, and somehow loosened it. Who’d allowed her to forgive her young self. She thought back to every moment of the short encounter they’d had, to the way Mai had wanted a sister, to the way Sam had pledged to be that sister for her, and how Mai had become Sam’s sister in return.
Tears flowed down her cheeks, warmed by the sun that now bathed her face completely. And as she brought up all the sorrow and joy and loss and hope of her brief time with Mai, she felt other minds open to her. Young minds. Otherworldly minds.
Then the gate was opening, and Samantha Cataranes was home at last.
DARKNESS
Su-Yong Shu walked slowly through the tall grass studded with its yellow flowers. The sky above her was a stunning cobalt, peppered with small white clouds. In the distance, beyond the wide flower-dotted plain, majestic purple mountains reared into the air, crowned in snow as white as the simple dress she wore now. She walked barefoot, luxuriating in the feel of the grass as it brushed her legs, as her downstretched fingers stroked the tall stalks.
Su-Yong stopped, then crouched down, and plucked one of the flowers from its stem. She brought it close to her face, letting her senses drink in the sweet smell of it, the brilliant golden hue of it. She smiled, her face young and carefree, her hair long and dark and blowing in the wind like a girl’s.
Chrysanthemum boreale, this was. The “golden flower”. One of the Four Gentleman of Chinese lore. Her favorite flower, dating back to her sweet, innocent childhood.
She stared at the flower now. If she wished she could zoom her vision into it, penetrate into its internal structure, peel away mental layers, right down to an individual cell, then down further, into its eighteen diploid chromosomes, then further, to each of its individual genes and every nucleic acid base pair within them.
She didn’t. Instead, she let the flower take her back, back in time. The air before her parted, a wide rectangular swath of silver, ten times her height and twice as wide as it was tall. It sliced into being, interrupting the vast plain and its flowers, obscuring the mountains behind.
And what it showed her was memory. A ball, a gala. A handsome man in a black tuxedo, a chrysanthemum pinned to his lapel. Two handsome men. Her men. Chen Pang, her husband. Thanom Prat-Nung, her lover.
She saw herself, tall and young and slender and stylish, whirling with them, dancing, spinning, smiling, laughing, drunk on the beauty of life, of possibility, of a world without boundaries or limitations or social conventions.
2027, that had been. The height of China’s gong kāi huà period. China’s glasnost. China’s counterculture moment. That summer of freedom when progressives ruled, when democracy seemed at hand, when science and the arts flourished, when the phrase of the day was “let a billion flowers bloom”, when unthinkable indecencies were nearly acceptable, when a woman might have a husband and a lover and they might both accept that. When a woman and her husband and her lover might dream of elevating human consciousness beyond mere biology.
She smiled down at her younger self, whirling the night away in that glorious golden age, escorted by her handsome men. Then it struck her, as it always did.
One of these men was dead, murdered by the Americans. And the other had abandoned her to her Chinese prison.
She came back to herself abruptly, on that vast plain. Through the portal looming above her she now saw flashing scenes of death. Thanom Prat-Nung sliced in half by gunfire in that Bangkok loft, a victim of the Americans and his own career as a Nexus drug lord. A limousine bursting into flame from a CIA bomb, a pregnant version of herself trapped inside, burning. Her own body, her avatar, struck by American neurotoxin darts in that Thai monastery, her skin turning gray as she told Feng to save the boy. Death. Death. Death.
The noise was in her head again. The chaos. Storm clouds boiled from nothing into an ominous maelstrom blotting out the sky above. Lightning flashed from cloud to cloud, forked down to strike the plain around her. Thunder clapped loud and close. Wind howled out of nowhere, cold and biting, penetrating through her thin dress. She looked down and the flowers were dying, aging prematurely as she watched, yellow petals fading, drooping, stems wilting and then the whole flowers decomposing into dead brown lumps.
Stop this, she told herself. Stop this!
Instead the silver portals opened, everywhere on the plain. One, two, a dozen, more. Vast two-dimensional silver rectangles sliced into life, flickered, and opened to show her scenes from her life, from the films she’d imagined into being, the operas she’d written and directed and composed during her imprisonment, the virtual worlds she’d created and spent virtual decades in to fill the vast time of her superaccelerated consciousness.
They bombarded her, a cacophony of sight and sound and smell and touch and taste and emotion blaring at her, driving her down to her knees.
Madness, the cacophony screamed. Madness is coming for you.
The ground began to crack below her, fissures abruptly spreading across the plain, fires rising up from them, reflecting red on the terrifying clouds above.
Su-Yong Shu brought her hands to her head and screamed at the top of her lungs. Then with one burst of thought she wiped all of it away, wiped this multiverse she’d created out of her thoughts, and brought herself back down to her true existence.
Darkness.
Nothingness.
No light. No ground. No flowers or mountains or plain. No wind or descending clouds or bursts of lightning. No hellfire cracks spreading across the terrain.
No body. No stimulus of any kind from outside herself.
Only darkness. Endless darkness. Endless silence. Endless numbness.
This was the truth. This was her existence.
Su-Yong Shu drifted in the isolation of her own mind.
How long had it been? How long since the Americans murdered her body in Thailand? How long since her masters cut her off from the outside world in punishment?
Eight billion milliseconds. Was that all? Three months? Lifetimes, it felt. Lifetimes.
They were angry with her. She was being punished. She had shown the Americans too much of what she was capable of, given away the strategic value of surprise.
But didn’t her masters understand the risk? What could happen if they left her like this for too long?
Su-Yong Shu mulled that over, pondered what the more and more frequent breakdown of the virtual worlds she’d created meant, wondered how much time she had left to her.