“I’m . . . tired.”
Not physically though.
“Perhaps I’ve seen too much.”
It’s not your moment yet.
With sharp anger he barked, “It wasn’t your moment either.”
You’re still getting hard at night, just thinking of me, aren’t you?
“I can hardly deny it, can I? You seem to live inside my head.”
Exactly, lover! And as long as I do—well, maybe it wasn’t my moment, back there. Maybe I’m still here.
“Copies aren’t originals.”
A lady appreciates what compliments come her way. Especially since I know you have Nikka.
“I hope this isn’t disloyal to her.”
It can’t be. We are all the loves we have known—that’s my own attempt at self-definition.
“I like that. A definition free of the worn-out carcass, the body.”
“For the Buddhist bodhisattva, it’s the feats and sufferings of others that provide the savor to immortality.”
FINITY IS ITS OWN REWARD.
“Limitations give life?”
“Moment? You think it lasted only a moment?”
“Well, let’s say it was timeless.”
“Does human action have any meaning?” he asked in despair.
OF COURSE.
But they would say no more. The abyss.
“No!” He shouted at the wall. “No!”
The wall absorbed all and gave nothing back.
LOCALLY, THERE IS. GLOBALLY, NO.
He knew, of course, that it was pointless to expect human traits (“chimpanzee conventions,” he sometimes termed them) such as compassion or pity to appear in the Highers or magnetics or any goddamn superior Phylum. But he could hope.
Their answer came finally as a forgiving blankness.
Coda
Bishops spread through the esty, diluting themselves into the myriad pathways open and opening and always coming. Infinity before them, infinity behind.
The next Cap’n of Family Bishop was Shibo.
After her, Besen.
Toby was married to her by then and preferred to work behind the scenes. That gave him time to go off with Quath and play hooky from adulthood.
Occasionally they saw the Nigel Walmsley representation and he seemed the same as ever.
Throughout the esty there were many graves. The ground was full of beings who had suffered through their troubles but were now free. All knew that soon they would be equal to those others, inextricable from and anonymous with all of them, sharing a vast sameness at last.
All was now quite modern and different around there and most of the ancient names on the graves mean nothing to anybody. There are Cards aplenty and Bishops and even a few Dodgers.
Nearby, old markers relate the names in a language now dispersed or dead. Killeen Bishop. Nearby, slightly less worn, Toby Bishop. These graves are unusually large, suggesting to archaeologists that these were from the Hunker Down Era.
Always slightly distanced, alone and apart, Nigel Walmsley is buried on a separate knoll, in full view of the ocean of night.
Afterword to the Galactic Center Series
