"The string broke for me,
And so
This place does not feel to me
As it used to feel,
Because the string is broken."
What had the unbroken string been? A life? A dream? The cord that held together the universe?
All of those things?
Now she could hear it as though he stood beside her, as he had stood through so many moments of anguish, a stalwart flame in all darknesses.
"This place feels as if it stood open before me
Empty
Because the string has broken
And so
This place is an unhappy place
Because the string is broken."
This place is an unhappy place, she repeated to herself. Because the string is broken. Because I am alone.
This place feels as if it stood open before me, she told the darkness as she drifted and disintegrated, mere flotsam left behind in the flight of a terrified child-thing.
Empty, something whispered to her across the flashing emptiness. Because the string has broken.
For a moment she floated, bemused, trying to remember what it was that had caught her fragmenting attention. A voice. A voice?
The operating system, she thought. It's come back for me. Whatever "back" means. Whatever "me," means. . . . It was growing harder and harder to think.
Because the string has broken.
The chant wafted to her through the void, but it was not a sound, it was both more and less. It was a spattering of tight like a distant explosion in vacuum space, a tiny pulse of heat at the bottom of a frozen, sluggish ocean. It was a whisper from a dream heard on the porch of wakefulness, an idea, a scent, a muffled heartbeat. It was. . . .
!Xabbu?
From the other side of the universe, still, smalclass="underline" Renie. . . ?
Impossible. Impossible! !Xabbu! Jesus Mercy, is that you?
And suddenly diminishment was not a blessing but a horror. Suddenly she wanted back all she had lost even though she knew it must be too late. She was almost gone, reduced to essences and drawn apart into the cloudy impermanence of the sea of stars.
No, she thought. He's out there, somehow. He's out there! She fought, but she scarcely felt real—there was no leverage, nothing to push against. !Xabbu! I'm drowning!
Renie. He was faint, only a voice and barely that. Reach for me.
Where are you?
Beside you. Always beside you.
And she opened herself and felt him there just as he had said, a presence as vague and dispersed as her own but right beside her, as if they were two galaxies rolling down the long night-tides of the universe to meet and pass through each other like ghosts.
I feel you, she said. Don't leave me.
Don't leave me, he might have echoed her, or Believe me.
She believed. She reached for him and willed the string to unbreak.
Touch, she said. I touch.
I feel.
And then they met and embraced—light-years wide but close as the ebb and flow of a single heartbeat, two matrices of naked thought drawn together in the darkness and held tight by the infinite compression of love.
She had a body again. She knew it even with her eyes shut, because she was holding him closer than she had ever held anyone.
"Where are we?" she finally asked. She could hear his heartbeat, fast and strong, hear his breath in his lungs. All else was silence, but she needed nothing else.
"It does not matter," he said. "We are together."
"Did we . . . make love?"
"It does not matter." He sighed, then laughed. "I do not know. I think . . . we were made of love."
She was afraid to open her eyes, she realized. She clutched him more tightly when she had not thought such a thing possible. "It doesn't matter," she agreed, "I thought I would never find you again. . . ."
His fingers touched her face—cool, real. It startled her so that she looked in spite of herself. It really was his face, his dear face, that looked down on her in the cool evening light. There were tears in his eyes. "I . . . I would not believe it . . . could not let myself. . . ." He lowered his forehead until it touched hers. "I was swimming so long . . . in all that light. Drowning. Calling you. Coming apart. . . ."
She was weeping. "We have bodies. We can cry. Are we . . . back? In the real world?"
"No."
Worried by his strange tone, Renie sat up, taking care to keep her arms around him, not trusting him or herself to stay solid. The landscape was alien but oddly familiar, gray in the dying light. For a moment she thought they had returned to the black mountaintop but the outline of a leafless tree, the fuzzy sprung shape of a bush, confused her.
"At first I thought we were in the place where I dived in to search for you," !Xabbu said slowly.
"Dived in. . . ? Where?"
"The Well. But I was wrong." He pointed to the sky. "Look."
She raised her head. The stars were bright. The moon was round and yellow, hanging fat above the horizon like a ripe fruit.
"It is an African moon," he said. "The moon of the Kalahari."
"But . . . but I thought you said we weren't . . . back. . . ." She leaned away from him, staring. He wore a loincloth of animal hide. A bow and a crude quiver of arrows lay on the dirt beside him. And she was also dressed in skins.
"It's your world," she said quietly. "The Bushman simulation you took me to—God that seems like a century ago! Where we danced."
"No." He shook his head again. He had wiped the tears from his cheeks and eyes. "No, Renie, it is something different—something . . . more."
He stood, extending a hand to help her up. The seedpods tied around his ankles rattled as he moved.
"But if this isn't your world. . . ?"
"There is a fire," he said, pointing to a flicker of light that stained the desert sands red and orange. "Just beyond that rise."
They walked across the dry pan, kicking up dust that hid their feet so that it seemed they walked across clouds. The moon touched the dunes, rocks, and thorn bushes with silver.
The campfire was small, made of only a few crossed sticks. Other than the fire itself there was no sign of human life in all the immensity of desert night.
Before Renie could ask again, !Xabbu pointed to a gulley that carved through the cracked earth beside the campfire, the drywash shell of some long-dead stream. "Down there," he said. "I see him. No, I feel him."
Renie could see nothing but the jittering of shadows around the campfire, but !Xabbu's voice made her look to him. His face was solemn but there was something else in it as well, a kind of exalted fire behind the eyes that in anyone else she would have feared was hysteria.
"What is it?" She took his hand, suddenly afraid.
He kept her hand in his and led her down the pan, stopping beside the fire. She could not help noticing that theirs were the only footprints crossing the dust. When they looked down into the gulley, she saw that the stream that had carved it was not entirely dead: a trickle of water ran along the bottom, so narrow that if she climbed down into the hole she could dam it with one foot. Something was moving beside this streamlet—something very, very small.
!Xabbu sat in the dust beside the shallow scrape. His rattles whispered.
"Grandfather," he said.