Beth woke up groggy the next morning—groggy but well. There was only a pucker of healthy skin where the bullet had entered her chest.
She asked about Joey and Colonel Tyler. Matt explained, not gently because there was no gentle way to say this, what had happened.
She listened carefully but didn’t speak much after that.
She sat at the evening fire hugging herself and drinking coffee. The talk flowed around her silence like a river around a stone.
Periodically, her hand strayed to her right shoulder and touched her jacket above the place where her tattoo had been—where it remained, Matt corrected himself; the Helper had not taken it away. He supposed some wounds were easier to heal than others.
She slept that night curled around herself on a mattress on the floor of the camper.
In the morning they began the journey east, across the border from Wyoming into Nebraska.
Tom Kindle said he would ride along for a while. But only a while.
Nebraska was a half-and-half state—arid in the west, wetter in the agricultural east. Interstate 80 joined the Platte River east of the Kingsley Dam, and the Platte fed a valley of rich alluvial soil where acre upon acre of corn, beets, potatoes, and beans had grown wild and high in an empty springtime.
Matt drove most of the time. Tom Kindle’s leg was still bothering him; it tended to cramp after a time behind the wheel. So Matt drove through these empty agricultural towns, pretty little towns made ragged by a hard, windy winter: Brady, Gothenburg, Lexington, Kearny. Sometimes Kindle rode in the cab beside him; mostly it was Beth.
Out of Kindle’s earshot, Beth talked a little more about what had happened—and what might happen.
“They’re still inside us,” she said. “The—what are they called? Neocytes.”
He nodded.
“They’ll be with us for a long time.” He nodded again.
She said, “You know about this, too?”
“Yes.”
“Same as me? I mean… nobody told you, you just know it, right?”
“Right.”
“They’re inside us. But dormant. Not doing anything. Until…”
“You can say it,” Matt told her. There was a potent magic in saying things out loud.
“Until we die,” Beth said. “And then they’ll give us another chance to say yes. To go with them.” He nodded.
“Like heaven,” she said. “A little like.”
“And not just us. Everybody in that town on the river, that town in Ohio.”
Everybody in Eden, Matt thought.
They did some night driving.
It was Kindle who pointed out the line of division that had appeared on the orbiting Artifact, a dark equator on that bright circle.
“It’s dividing,” said Kindle, who had been talking on the radio again. “That’s what Ohio tells me. It’ll be two Artifacts, not one. One to go roving among the stars. One to stay here.”
“Like a custodian,” Matt said.
“Or a local god.” He gave Matt a long look. “You don’t seem surprised.”
He admitted, “I’m not.”
“You knew about it?”
“Yes.”
“How?”
He shrugged.
Kindle turned away. He watched the road pass. He said, “You’re not what you used to be.”
“Not entirely.”
“God damn,” Kindle said. It was not a particular lament. It wasn’t aimed at Matt. It was just a sad curse to rattle away in the chilly night air. “God damn.”
Epilogue
As wise as they were, the Travellers had come to the Earth with their own assumptions and for their own reasons. They were benevolent but clumsy giants; and the human polis, alone in orbit, began to tinker with certain changes the Travellers had made.
In the oceans, the population of Traveller phytoplankton dropped to a fraction of its earlier numbers. The work continued—there was still much excess C02 to be bound into the sea—but it needn’t be done in a season, and it needn’t inject so much violent energy into the atmosphere.
Nor was it necessary to maintain power and water in every city on the Earth. That had been the Travellers’ fumbling reaction to the phenomenon of human obstinacy: the puzzling willingness of so many people to accept their own mortality.
The human polis fashioned better and more compact alternatives: in Ohio, in Ukraine, in Hunan and Kenya and a dozen other places.
And outside those boundaries was simply the wild Earth, for those who wanted it.
Home divided itself into two entities: one to journey outward into an awakening galaxy; one to cherish its own past, its birthplace and its parent species.
After a harsh and stormy winter, the spring of the year was mild—oceans calm, skies blue.
Kindle stopped at the Iowa border and refused to go any farther.
He was away from camp for a day and when he came back he was riding a gaunt saddle horse that had survived the winter but was not entirely wild. Over the course of a dry season, Kindle said, most of the gas might evaporate from all these abandoned automobiles, or the hoses rot or the oil thicken or the pistons seize—or some damn thing. A good riding horse was a better bet, over the long run.
“You going west?” Matt asked.
Kindle said he was.
“Wind River? Whiskey Mountain?”
Somewhere through there, Kindle said.
Beth, watching the two men shake hands, thought there was something similar in the way they looked at each other. Something more than friendship, more than sadness.
Each one seemed to look at the other and see what he might have been—what he could have been or maybe should have been—but would never be.
Two roads parted here, and they would not run together again; both men seemed to know it.
Kindle rode off down the ragged highway in the hot part of the afternoon.
Matt stood a long time watching.
She was with him that night when the Artifact passed overhead.
It was almost two things now, a massive figure eight on the verge of separation: two parts of humanity.
She warmed her hands at a fire that seemed lonely without Tom Kindle. She hadn’t wanted him to go. But things change whether you want them to or not.
“Things change,” she said, needing to communicate the thought but daunted by the lonely sound the words made on this vacant plain. Wasn’t that what everyone was afraid of? Things change. The past drifts off until it’s irrecoverable and strange. And the future is a mystery. And nothing stands still. Not for us, not for those people in the sky. Nothing is solid. Not even trees or mountains or planets or stars. Look long enough and they all boil away, boil away. She had seen it as long ago as Contact. She had seen it in her mind’s eye. “It’s a dance,” she said. You can’t cling to what you love because it’s all a dance, love and friendship and men and molecules, all dancing in a brief light.
She looked helplessly at Matt. Did he understand?
But he seemed to. She thought perhaps he had known it all along.
She looked east, where the stars were rising in a dark sky. “It’s been getting greener as we go,” Beth said. “And warmer.”
These nights weren’t as cold as they had been. Matt said, “Maybe it’ll be a gentle summer.”
Gentler in Ohio? Greener, warmer?
“I think so,” Matt said.
“I would like that,” Beth said, wanting to cry for no particular reason. “I think that would be good.”