His mother ran yipping at the front of the pack, the Dreamtime Bitch herself, first and fiercest as always, her bright dingo eyes glaring, her hairy dingo jaws open to swallow him down into her horrible red insides. Behind her came the Sulaweyo bitch with her sharp spear, as well as the whores Martine and Polly who had somehow grown together into one stone-eyed, blind, remorseless thing. And behind them, through the spreading smoke, hurried all the others—the hungry pack of mopaditi, the nameless, almost faceless dead. But they did not need faces. The dead women had terrible claws and jagged teeth, and legs that could run forever without growing tired.
They had hunted him, hour after hour, day after day, week after week. They would always hunt him.
Weeping like a nightmare-plagued child, whimpering with exhaustion and pain and terror, Johnny Wulgaru ran naked across the dry lands of the Dreamtime, searching desperately for a hiding place that did not exist.
She pulled him into a little park across from the hospital, although she wasn't sure why. The late afternoon light was slanting between the buildings and the thought of taking a taxi back to the rooming house with the harsh light in her eyes depressed her. She wanted to sleep, but she also wanted to talk. The truth was she didn't know what she wanted anymore.
They sat on a bench beside the path, next to a small but surprisingly well-tended flower bed. A group of children were playing atop a bench on the other side of the park, laughing, pushing each other off. One tumbled onto the cement path, but even as Renie leaned forward in reflexive fear the little girl sprang up again and clambered back onto the bench, determined to regain her place.
"He looked better today, didn't he?" Renie asked !Xabbu. "I mean, the way he smiled—that was a real Stephen-smile."
"He does seem better." !Xabbu watched the children for a moment, nodding. "One day, I would like you to see the place I grew up," he said. "Not just the delta, but the desert, too. It can be very beautiful."
Renie was still worrying about Stephen; it took her a second to catch up. "But I've been there!" she said. "The one you built, anyway. That was a beautiful place."
He looked at her carefully. "You seem full of worry, Renie."
"Me? Just thinking about Stephen, I guess." She settled back against the bench. The children had now scrambled down to the ground and were running in a circle on the dusty, cracked cement at the middle of the park, using a solitary palm tree as their center pole. "Do you wonder sometimes what it all means?" she asked suddenly. "I mean now . . . now that we know."
He looked at her again, then back to the shrieking children. "What it all means. . . ?"
"I mean, well, you saw those creatures. Those . . . information people. If they're what comes next, then what about us?"
"I don't understand, Renie."
"What about us? What . . . purpose is there for us? All of us. Everyone on Earth, still living, breeding, dying. Making things. Having arguments. But those information creatures are what comes next, and they've gone on without us."
He nodded slowly. "And parents, when their children are born, do they need to die? Are their lives ended?"
"Well, no—but this is different. Parents take care of their children. They raise them. They help them." She sighed. "Sorry, I'm just . . . I don't know, sad. I don't know why."
He took her hand.
"I just wonder what it all means now," she said, laughing a little. "I suppose it's just that so many things have happened. The world almost came to an end. We're getting a place together. We have money! But I'm still not certain I want to accept it."
"Stephen will need a wheelchair and a special bed," !Xabbu said gently. "For a while, anyway. And you liked that house in the hills."
"Yes, but I'm not sure I belong in that house." She laughed again, shook her head. "Sorry. I'm just being difficult."
He smiled, a small, secret smile. "Besides, I have something I wish to spend some of my share of the money on. In fact, I have already done it."
"What? You look very mysterious."
"I have bought some land. In the Okavango Delta. One of the treaties lapsed and it was being sold."
"That's where you grew up. What . . . what are you going to do with it?"
"Spend some time there." He saw her expression and his eyes widened. "Not by myself! With you, I hope. And with Stephen, when he is strong enough, and perhaps even someday with children that you and I might have. Just because they will live in the city world should not mean they never know anything else."
She settled back, her sense of alarm fading. "For a moment there I thought you'd changed your mind . . . about us." She couldn't help frowning. "You could have told me, you know. I wouldn't have tried to stop you."
"I am telling you. I had to make the decision very quickly on the way to meet you at the hospital." He smiled again. "You see what your city life is doing to me? I promise not to hurry again for a year."
She smiled back, a little wearily, and squeezed his hand. "I really am sorry I'm such bad company. All these things to think about, everything is so big and important and . . . and for some reason I'm still wondering if any of it matters."
He looked at her for a moment. "So because the new people took my people's stories on some strange voyage we cannot imagine, does that mean that my people themselves no longer matter?"
"Does it. . . ? Of course not!"
"And because you have seen a version of my desert world—one that I built from my own particular memory—does that mean there would be nothing to gain from seeing its true shape and color? Nothing to gain from taking Stephen and our children there to sleep under the real and living stars?"
"No."
He let go of her hand and reached down beside the bench. When he straightened up he held a small red blossom in his hand. "Do you remember the flower I made for you? The first day you showed me how your virtual world worked?"
"Of course." She could not help staring at the petals, slightly ragged along one edge where something small had chewed them, at their rich, red, velvety color, even at the golden pollen smudged against !Xabbu's brown wrist. "It was very nice."
"I did not make this one," he said. "It is real and it will die. But we can still look at it together, in this moment. That is something, is it not?"
He handed it to her. She raised it to her nose and sniffed it.
"You're right." She took his hand again. Something within her that had been pinched and confined since she had stepped out of the tank at last began to open—to unfurl its wings inside her heart. "Yes. Oh, yes. That is definitely something."
The streetlights were coming on, but across the park the children played on as night fell, oblivious.
Afterword
Even the sounds of the battle had almost vanished now, the pounding roar of the German heavy guns reduced to bass notes that throbbed but no longer had the power to inspire terror. He was swimming up through something, caught and carried toward a light like a dawning sky, and as he rose he could hear her voice again, the dream-voice that had spoken to him for so long.
"Paul! Don't leave us!"
But there was something different about it now—something different about everything. He had heard her so many times, felt her, almost, a presence with wings, with pleading eyes, but now in the confusion and the growing light he saw her whole. She floated before him, her arms spread. Her wings, he realized, were a network of cracks that radiated light. Her face was sad, infinitely sad, but somehow not quite real, like an icon that had been painted and repainted until the original face was almost gone.