Amco-pak suffered a sudden, unexplainably massive breakdown, or else the breakdown is his own and he is dead.
If this is death, Itubi is in hell. His isolation is complete and the hallucinations and bardo visions begin at once, his conscious mind continuing its logical and reassuring dialogue in spite of the waves of insanity rising out of the dark ocean of his subconsciousness. Beckoning lights and luminescent cogwheels whirl in the darkness. A panoply of lesser demons writhe and grimace. The terrible faces of his accusers are encrusted with precious jewels, the cold ruby eyes aflame with cruelty. Moment by moment, the calm island of his logic is submerging, the wild visionary tide rises and Itubi knows he is lost, the forces too strong. Soon he will be one with his madness.
After her first visit, Vera stays away from the house for a week, suspicious and afraid. Of what, she isn’t sure. A trap perhaps, with all those inviting memories for its bait. But curiosity is too strong, her afternoon rides seem to lead always to the house and soon Chi-Chi knows the way even when she drops the reins.
One afternoon she stays past sunset, looking through a box full of snapshots, and it is dark by the time she rises to leave. Vera spends the night on the couch downstairs, sleeping only fitfully as the old house creaks and sighs and numbers of bats slide with a silken flutter from under the tin roof. The coming of daylight calms her; she falls asleep at dawn, waking only when the noon heat turns the shuttered room into an oven.
That same afternoon she rides to the beach shelter and stuffs a pillowcase with her clothes and cosmetics. Yesterday seems years in the past. She finds it hard to believe that she’d ever lived in such a cramped bamboo hovel. Even a restless night on the couch is more comfortable than sleeping on a damp sandy floor. No, this isn’t Vera’s style; she can’t have been happy here. The idea is preposterous, as is the notion that she ever loved someone with the absurd name of Skeets. It was all a joke.
Vera leaves the shelter laughing, the pillowcase bundled in her arms. She mounts Chi-Chi and rides off between the sea-grape trees, never once looking back.
The air is acrid and hazy inside the domed Surface Installation. Squads of maintenance vans bulldoze the debris into smoldering mounds. A Mark V cuts a mangled I-beam into scrap. Gregor asks the machine who is in charge. Pointing the brilliant torch, the van directs them to a Unistat Administrator Exec Series: eight stationary oblong computers, interconnected slabs of steel and glass, arranged like a precision-made Stonehenge in an approximate circle around the ruined turntable.
Swann leaves the men and climbs over the rubble obstructing the smoking entrance of the hatchery. Gregor and Skiri watch until she is gone from sight before approaching the Unistat Administrator, carrying the litter in their hands, like sedan-chair porters. They are greeted by the first of the towering consoles and quickly instructed to proceed in a clockwise direction to Unit Five, where the Sentinel’s broadcast is being monitored. Console Unit Five starts speaking before either man has a chance to say a word. An obviously prerecorded speech: torrents of rhetoric praising the men, followed by the mundane unreeling of facts and details patiently recorded. The men set the litter on the floor and hunker down, only half listening as they trace idle patterns on the dust-covered plastic.
Swann returns moments after the Mark VIIs come lumbering in with the wreck in tow. “It was terrible,” she says. “Rooms full of bodies, torn, bleeding, most of them dismembered. Like a battlefield… . And the vans were cleaning up, shoveling the bodies like garbage. I made them stop. They’re transporting all human remains to the edge of the clearing for cremation.”
“Grim news here as well,” Skiri says, rising to his feet. “All communication channels to Center Control are dead. Only
If this is death, Itubi is in hell. His isolation is complete and the hallucinations and bardo visions begin at once, his conscious mind continuing its logical and reassuring dialogue in spite of the waves of insanity rising out of the dark ocean of his subconsciousness. Beckoning lights and luminescent cogwheels whirl in the darkness. A panoply of lesser demons writhe and grimace. The terrible faces of his accusers are encrusted with precious jewels, the cold ruby eyes aflame with cruelty. Moment by moment, the calm island of his logic is submerging, the wild visionary tide rises and Itubi knows he is lost, the forces too strong. Soon he will be one with his madness.
After her first visit, Vera stays away from the house for a week, suspicious and afraid. Of what, she isn’t sure. A trap perhaps, with all those inviting memories for its bait. But curiosity is too strong, her afternoon rides seem to lead always to the house and soon Chi-Chi knows the way even when she drops the reins.
One afternoon she stays past sunset, looking through a box full of snapshots, and it is dark by the time she rises to leave. Vera spends the night on the couch downstairs, sleeping only fitfully as the old house creaks and sighs and numbers of bats slide with a silken flutter from under the tin roof. The coming of daylight calms her; she falls asleep at dawn, waking only when the noon heat turns the shuttered room into an oven.
That same afternoon she rides to the beach shelter and stuffs a pillowcase with her clothes and cosmetics. Yesterday seems years in the past. She finds it hard to believe that she’d ever lived in such a cramped bamboo hovel. Even a restless night on the couch is more comfortable than sleeping on a damp sandy floor. No, this isn’t Vera’s style; she can’t have been happy here. The idea is preposterous, as is the notion that she ever loved someone with the absurd name of Skeets. It was all a joke.
Vera leaves the shelter laughing, the pillowcase bundled in her arms. She mounts Chi-Chi and rides off between the sea-grape trees, never once looking back.
The air is acrid and hazy inside the domed Surface Installation. Squads of maintenance vans bulldoze the debris into smoldering mounds. A Mark V cuts a mangled I-beam into scrap. Gregor asks the machine who is in charge. Pointing the brilliant torch, the van directs them to a Unistat Administrator Exec Series: eight stationary oblong computers, interconnected slabs of steel and glass, arranged like a precision-made Stonehenge in an approximate circle around the ruined turntable.
Swann leaves the men and climbs over the rubble obstructing the smoking entrance of the hatchery. Gregor and Skiri watch until she is gone from sight before approaching the Unistat Administrator, carrying the litter in their hands, like sedan-chair porters. They are greeted by the first of the towering consoles and quickly instructed to proceed in a clockwise direction to Unit Five, where the Sentinel’s broadcast is being monitored. Console Unit Five starts speaking before either man has a chance to say a word. An obviously prerecorded speech: torrents of rhetoric praising the men, followed by the mundane unreeling of facts and details patiently recorded. The men set the litter on the floor and hunker down, only half listening as they trace idle patterns on the dust-covered plastic.
Swann returns moments after the Mark VIIs come lumbering in with the wreck in tow. “It was terrible,” she says. “Rooms full of bodies, torn, bleeding, most of them dismembered. Like a battlefield… . And the vans were cleaning up, shoveling the bodies like garbage. I made them stop. They’re transporting all human remains to the edge of the clearing for cremation.”
“Grim news here as well,” Skiri says, rising to his feet. “All communication channels to Center Control are dead. Only
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