In time, Dirk would come as close to happiness as his adoptive father—but from the other side. His encounter with the unknowable left him starved for the strange. All his past bitterness became puny beside the stature of his curiosity. What had really happened to him and the others during their three days with the arc? That question guided him back to school and eventually to the quests of science and the elusive dream animals of mathematics. One day he would even write down Insideout’s story, wanting to touch again, however obliquely, the supernal knowing that had once possessed him. He could remember, but he would never again know more than any of us know about the enduring mystery of our lives or the spell of our departure. That wouldn’t matter. Knowledge became for him the good faith that understanding is possible—even as answers return to their questions and what is explained remains concealed.
And what of Reena, the only one of the four who could not be complete in the earned world? Insideout kept its promise. The last act of its titanohematite brain before collapsing into the perpetual rending and rapture of the pith was to use the energy of the vacuum field to rebuild Reena’s body from her waveform. Molecule by molecule, it amended the distortions in her brain and released her on the far side of the sky, on another Earth. Wherever she woke, her life would at last be whole enough to brim with her own dreams.
Dirk correctly figured out all the details: The arc, he theorized, had conserved its inertia and the cosmos’ total quark-number by using its hypertubes to draw enough energy from the vacuum field to equal Reena’s mass. If that energy had been released simply as energy, much of Hawai’i would have been vaporized. Instead, Insideout condensed most of the 4.86 x 1025 ergs of Reena’s mass-energy to atoms and fused those atoms to a molecular lace of naphthol ethers, oleo-resins, and cinnamic acid—several hundred cubic liters of a harmless gas. Reena had disappeared in a puff of colorless smoke.
In the lava kettle where the arc had come and gone, autumn’s substance lingered. Wind frisked over the basin, and the smell of exhausted leaves wafted across ash slag, pumice beds, and tar fields. By the time the sky wore away west to night, the fragrance from the edge of the universe had dispersed. Most of it simply washed away in the rivers of air that endlessly circle the Earth. But some of it, like some of us, the heat of the Earth lifted above the night into the emptiness of space, where the dark holds everything and the galaxies wander deeper into their loneliness.
Table of Contents
Arc of the Dream
Foreword to the Second Edition
When the Dead Cry
In an Alien Way
Window in the Blood
Arc of the Dream
Epilog
Arc of the Dream Page 29