The Harvest Cycle

by David Dunwoody

  Epilogue

  Imagine

  The lovers sat on a beach of blackened glass and watched the tide come in.

  “What will we do now?” West wondered aloud, propped in a wheelchair taken from the Citadel’s infirmary. Amanda waited for him to answer his own question, and he did. “Well, we have to reach the rest of the world with the news. Some will intuitively know that the Harvest Cycle is over - perhaps even the bots realize - but there are still people out there bent on harming one another.”

  “Always have been,” Amanda remarked, inhaling the salty breeze. West nodded. “And there have always been people like us.”

  DaVinci came walking down the shoreline. After they buried Hitch, he’d decided to stay behind a while and sit with him. Brushing granules of sand from his pants, DaVinci stood at the water’s edge and faced the sunset.

  “The new world’s going to need men like you, too,” West said. “What will you do, Jack? Come with us? I should be healed up before too long, if you can wait.”

  “I can wait,” DaVinci replied. It almost seemed like he was contemplating the colors on the horizon. Amanda wondered if he would ever regain what he’d lost. There had to be a way.

  As if reading her mind, West said, “We’ll try to help the undreamers. I refuse to believe that nothing can be done. It may take a long time - maybe longer than you and I have - but we’ll do it, Jack. Somehow.”

  “I know,” DaVinci said. He looked into his hand, at the nanoplasmic cortex nestled in blood, like a tiny egg. He raised his hand to his lips and lapped up the nodule with his tongue.

  Beginning to chew, he smiled and said, “We’ll think of something.”

  THE END