He had hesitated at the brink of this idea for hours. He was afraid of it. If he allowed the thought into his head, if he spoke the words even to himself—would it affect the outcome? If he named death, would he summon it?
But in the end it was unavoidable, a contingency that demanded his attention. Beth might die. She might die even if he found a source of whole blood, even if he found a functional hospital… and those things seemed increasingly unlikely.
He should be ready for it.
After all, he had chosen to live in this world: a world where people not only might die but inevitably, unanimously, would die. The mortal world.
He remembered Contact. The memory came back easily in this desolate twilight. He could have chosen that other world, the world of mortality indefinitely postponed, the world of an immense knowledge… the Greater World, they had called it.
The world of no murder, no fatal fires, no aging, no evil. There was a poem Celeste had loved. Land of Heart’s Desire. He couldn’t remember who wrote it. Some sentimental Victorian. Matt gripped the steering wheel with bloody hands, and the memory of her reading it aloud took on a sudden tangibility, as if she were sitting beside him:
I would mould a world of fire and dew
With no one bitter, grave, or over wise,
And nothing marred or old to do you wrong…
He guessed that was what they had built out on this prairie: their curious round mountain, their world of fire and dew.
Where beauty has no ebb, decay no flood,
But joy is wisdom, Time an endless song…
It was tempting, Matt thought. It was the ancient human longing, a desire written in the genes. It was every dream anyone ever hated to wake up from.
But it was bloodless. Not joyless, nor sexless; the Contactees had preserved their pleasures. What they had given up was something more subtle.
It had taken Matt most of his life to learn to live in a world where everything he loved was liable to vanish—and he had never loved that vanishing. But he had learned to endure in spite of it. He had made a contract with it. You don’t stint your love even if the people you love grow old or grow apart. You save a life, when you can, even though everyone dies. There was nothing to be gained by holding back. Seize the day; there is no other reward.
But the price, Matt thought. Dear God, the price.
All our grief. All our pain. Pain inflicted by an indifferent universe: the cruelties of age and the cruelties of disease. Or pain inflicted, as often as not, by ourselves. Grief dropped from the open bays of bombers, grief inflicted by scared or sullen young men coaxed into military uniform. Grief delivered by knife in dark alleys or by electrode in the basements of government offices. Grief parceled out by the genuinely evil, the casually evil, or such walking moral vacuums as Colonel John Tyler.
So maybe they were right, Matt thought, the Travellers and Rachel and the majority of human souls: maybe we are irredeemable. Maybe the Greater World was better for its bloodlessness, its exemption from the wheel of birth and death.
Maybe he had made the wrong decision.
Maybe.
He came into Cheyenne at what he calculated was nightfall.
The streets were all but impassable. In this darkness, it was too easy to lose the road. He turned off 80 onto what he guessed was 16th Street and faced the necessity of stopping for the night.
But then, as he was ready to switch off the engine, he peered up at the sky and saw, by some unanticipated miracle, the stars.
A wind had come up from the north. It was a cold wind, brisk enough to stir these ashes into more dangerous, deeper drifts. But the ash itself had ceased falling. There was a little light, blue shadows on a gray landscape.
He took his hands off the steering wheel, an experiment. It didn’t hurt. He was beyond hurting. But he left some skin behind.
Much of the city had burned.
He passed ash-shrouded rubble, strange columns of brick like broken teeth, the shells of empty buildings.
Two hospitals were marked on the map. De Paul Hospitaclass="underline" a smoking ruin.
And the V. A. Medical Center, not far away. It hadn’t burned—but the earthquake had shaken it to the ground.
He checked on Beth and Kindle once more.
Kindle drifted up from sleep and nodded at him. Kindle was okay.
Beth, on the other hand—
Was not dead. But he couldn’t say why. Her pulse was impossibly tenuous. She wasn’t getting much oxygen; her lips were faintly blue. Her pupils were slow to dilate when he lifted her eyelids.
Still, she continued to breathe.
There was something awe-inspiring about each breath. For Beth, each breath had become a challenge, a kind of Everest, and it seemed to Matt that she met the challenge bravely and with a fierce resolve. But no single breath would meet the needs of her oxygen-starved body, and each breath must be followed by the next, a new mountain to scale.
She wasn’t dead, but she was plainly dying.
What city might have an intact medical center? He looked at the map. His eyes seemed reluctant to focus. Somewhere beyond the range of the ashfall. But what was beyond the range of the ashfall? Denver? No: He would have to travel too close to the caldera itself; the journey might be impossible and would surely be too long. North to Casper? He wasn’t sure what he might find in Casper; it was still a long distance away.
Everything was too far away.
She might not last another hour. Two hours would surprise him. “Sleep,” Kindle said. “I know how it is, Matthew. But you won’t gain anything by killing yourself. Get some sleep.”
“There isn’t time.”
“You’ve been looking at that map for a quarter hour. Looking for what, someplace to go? Someplace with a hospital? Not finding it, I bet. And you can’t drive in this.” He had pulled himself to a sitting position. “Looks like Armageddon out there.”
Matt folded the map meticulously and put it aside. “Beth is badly hurt.”
“I can see that. I can hear how she breathes.”
“I don’t have what I need to help her.”
“Matthew, I know.” Gently: “I’m not telling you to give up. Just we can’t work a miracle. And it does no good to beat yourself for it. Look at you. You’re a mess. Lucky you can walk.”
It was true that they couldn’t reach a hospital. He might as well admit it.
But something pushed forward in his mind, an idea he had not wanted to entertain.
“There’s another possibility,” he said.
He explained to Kindle, and listened to Kindle’s objections for a while, but grew impatient and fearful for Beth and hurried back to the cab of the vehicle and turned it around.
He glimpsed the new Artifact as it finished a quick eastward transit of the sky. But the sky was closing in again; most of the stars had disappeared; and it was not ash that began to fall but a brutally cold rain.
The ash on the ground absorbed the water and became a slick, intransigent mud. He was forced to drive even more slowly, and even so, the rear end of the camper fishtailed now and then on what seemed like a river of liquid clay.
But he didn’t have far to go.
He found the state capital building, or what was left of it, at the end of a broad avenue lined with ash-coated trees and fallen limbs. Three-quarters of the dome had collapsed. One section of it, like an immense splinter, remained in place, lit from below by fires still burning in the shell beneath. The broad space in front of the building was a field of ash, and the rain had given it a wet sheen, and the firelight was reflected there.