by Dan Simmons
Somewhere, very, very distantly, there is a countdown again—five, four, three, two, one…in Russian and English…now people are singing and crying and laughing. Roth hears music. It is the New Year.
He opens his arms and is almost ready to let the solar wind carry him farther away, higher, deeper into the singing cosmos, forever beyond the gravity of Earth, but he has something he has to do.
“Breathe, Norman. Norman!”
He shakes the voice out of his ears again, but reaches back, under his pillow. The three folded slips of paper are still there. He chooses one. He raises his clenched fist, opens his fingers.
To read it, he has to open his eyes. He weeps, eyes clenched shut, at the thought of no longer seeing this glory of the receding Earth, of feeling the fatherly embrace of the rising sun, of touching the cool orb of moon, of hearing and understanding the chorus of the blazing stars singing in their X-ray frequencies.
But he has to know which future he has chosen.
Norman Roth opens his eyes.