‘Why aren’t you a princess any more?’ Octavio asked insistently.
‘I grew up, darling. Everybody grew up.’
Which wasn’t true, she knew. So many of those faces that danced and laughed for eternity in her mind had gone. She let them brush against her, those dizzy ghosts, Shasta, Matiff, Housden . . . such beautiful people ruled by their spent, empty existence. Some redeemed, saved, others lost. And more, those desperately intense souls that shone so bright as they traversed spacetime in their own determined fashion: dear sweet Elston, Ravi, Coniff, Karizma, lovely Paresh, even wonderful old Sid . . . everybody she’d slowly lost down the centuries, flittering past unseen yet smiling as she held her arms wide and twirled like a fey dancer. Happy in their own way now. Angela wished them all well wherever they were. This was the one place where it was fitting for her to say goodbye to them, to cast off any lingering sorrows.
‘Come along,’ she said with a radiant smile, pleased to have shown off the place where it all began to the lovely scamps she was proud to have as descendants. ‘We’d better get back, or we’ll be in big trouble.’
The Nuii-Zanth conglobate awaited them in geosync orbit, a geode of quantum-three-state matter over a hundred miles across, home to eighty thousand entities who were about to adventure into the galactic core for the first time. Captain Lulu MacNamara had indulged Angela’s sentimental diversion for old times’ sake, but she was keen for their grand voyage to begin. It didn’t do to keep her waiting.
[THE END]
By Peter F. Hamilton
The Greg Mandel series
Mindstar Rising
A Quantum Murder
The Nano Flower
The Night’s Dawn trilogy
The Reality Dysfunction
The Neutronium Alchemist
The Naked God
The Confederation Handbook
(a vital guide to the Night’s Dawn trilogy)
Fallen Dragon
Misspent Youth
Great North Road
The Commonwealth Saga
Pandora’s Star
Judas Unchained
The Void trilogy
The Dreaming Void
The Temporal Void
The Evolutionary Void
Short Story Collections
A Second Chance at Eden
Manhattan in Reverse
First published 2012 by Macmillan
This electronic edition published 2012 by Macmillan
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ISBN 978-0-230-75005-0 EPUB
Copyright © Peter F. Hamilton 2012
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Great North Road Page 113