Great North Road

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Great North Road Page 113

by Peter F. Hamilton


  ‘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

  an imprint of Pan Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited

  Pan Macmillan, 20 New Wharf Road, London N1 9RR

  Basingstoke and Oxford

  Associated companies throughout the world

  www.panmacmillan.com

  ISBN 978-0-230-75005-0 EPUB

  Copyright © Peter F. Hamilton 2012

  The right of Peter F. Hamilton to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  The Macmillan Group has no responsibility for the information provided by any author websites whose address you obtain from this book (‘author websites’). The inclusion of author website addresses in this book does not constitute an endorsement by or association with us of such sites or the content, products, advertising or other materials presented on such sites.

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  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

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