—To awaken here, on a timestone slope.
Arm broken, shooting pains in the legs.
No, he probably could not have done anything differently. Alas.
It was always comforting to think that but in dealing with mechs it was in fact true. They acted far more swiftly than beings based on muscle and nerves. But thinking this did him no good because it still sounded like an excuse.
He groaned and opened his eyes, the lids sticky. Lightning licked overhead, seeking a place to rest, on a quest of its own. He knew it was merely a horde of electrons seeking a path to discharge an electrostatic potential, but that did not quell the eerie sensation of watching strange spirits seek and probe and lash the air with their desire. He was watching the luminous lemony fingers play across the high roof of the esty when she came to him again.
You’ve changed.
“You haven’t.”
My kind never does.
He blinked but it made no difference. Alexandria, his first wife, stood a little to one side, looking out at the same slippery lightning that he was. In the sulphurous flashes he could see her classic high forehead and delicate cheekbones. They had been that way up until a few weeks before the disease had weathered her down, stealing flesh from her, sending her into a grave on a hillside in Pasadena, California.
“Alexandria, I . . .”
I do like it when you use my name.
“I always loved the sound of it.”
What did you used to say about it?
“That your name was perfect. That it was like you. Alexandria, Egypt, where the library burned. Lost knowledge. The unknowable.”
Oh yes. Most people mispronounced it. They thought it should be that ordinary name without the i.
“Where classical civilization hit the reef and sank, losing most of its cargo.”
Bad history, lover. The Greeks were long gone when that library burned.
“But not the civilization. That remains as long as it is remembered.”
And ours?
Nigel shrugged. “As long as we’re here, I suppose.”
As long as you are here. I don’t count. I am a ghost.
“Not to me. You’re the woman I loved.”
She turned slightly toward him, just enough to let him see the lilting curve of her eternal smile. It was always that way. He could never see her face, never know it entirely. Or be free of it, he saw now. She could visit him across the yawning centuries.
Past tense?
“Sorry. Love.”
Lost knowledge.
“Not really.”
Her lips curled in a soundless laugh. You’re so sure?
“I recall every hollow and delight.”
After so many years?
“Remember relativity. It’s been, oh, perhaps twenty-eight thousand years on Earth. But in here”—he tapped his skull—“there’s been very little going on. Dull, really. Time dilation, it’s called by the physicists.”
I never understood that sort of thing.
“I doubt anyone understands it fundamentally. It’s a flat fact of the universe.”
And you?
Nigel could not read her expression. “Me?”
Are you a fact of the universe, too?
“Ummm. An unimportant one, yes.”
You were important then and you are now.
“I’m a cockroach on the stage at Stratford. You might say, rather a serious case of undercasting.”
By who?