“Or to the Teramind?” Aleka jeered. The apex, the ultimate intelligence of the cybercosm—in an earlier era, she thought momentarily, she would have said “God.”
She slumped. “No. I’m sorry, seftores. You do mean well, by your lights, and you’re quite right, I have no further business here. If you’ll excuse me, I’ll go home.”
They made polite, reply and escorted her back topside, these civilized men whose presence she could no longer stand. She used the informant on her wrist to call the boat to her. “Adi6s,” she said—not “aloha”—and sprang down into the cockpit. Ka’eo accompanied her as she drew away.
The rainstorm afar had passed with subtropical swiftness. Ahead of her the sun was descending. Gold shivered across waves that swung deep blue and violet. They lullabied, they rocked her. The air was cooling; green odors off the range fell aft and she breathed a subHminally fine salt mist. In limitless heights, sunset glowed off the wings of an albatross. For this while, she was free.
She did yearn homeward—her cottage, jasmine and hibiscus fragrant along the porch, palms murmurous overhead, gravel and bamboo and beautiful stones around the longhouse, the sweep of its roofbeams challenging Paniau’s peak in heaven, lanes and gardens where folk strolled easily and talked softly and someone plucked strings or blew into a flute—shops and ships by the docks, worksteads closing at day’s end and machines that never rested, the cenotaph to those lost at sea, for a measure of daring went with being of the Lahui—but first she wanted a time alone with her ocean and the silent nearness of her oath-brother.
There was no haste. She had instruments for night. Besides, a Moon not much past the full would presently rise. She stopped the motor and touched a command. Mast, boom, and centerboard extended, mainsail and jib deployed, rudder and helm came forth. The wind was fair for Niihau. She wasn’t particularly hungry or thirsty; Delgado^ad been hospitable in his stiff fashion. However, she took a water bottle and a food bar from the cabin locker before she settled down to steer.
Bound on its own course, the submersible dropped below the eastern horizon. Ka’eo was hardly more than a roiling in the water, several meters to starboard. Often he went under for minutes at a time, while she refrained from wondering what he snatched for himself. Now and then an aircraft glimmered across the sky, no more than a spark afloat. She was free to seek peace. ,
It did not come easily. No loosening of muscles, no mantra was of great help. She set about understanding this past day as part of an entirety. Nothing really new had happened. It was only that things were coming to a head, which she had known they would. That • knowledge grew in her throughout her life, with roots that went back in time to before she was born and in space to the ends of the Solar System. But she had seen, she had felt, for herself.
She searched out memories, less from here than from abroad, Russia, Yuri, the Lyudovite passion against the cyberneticized world that still smoldered deep down in her, missions to mainland America and the underground web of metamorphs that she touched upon, Luna and the cold Lunarian anger, the machines, everywhere the machines, and the sophotects in their multitudes and their oneness …
History had become the next phase of evolution. No use railing against it, any more than protesting the doom of Alpha Centauri’s Demeter. At least, on Earth, when the dinosaurs perished the mammals came into their glory; and a dinosaur lineage lived on in the birds. Might likewise a doomed people somehow find their way to some rescuing transfiguration?
She found no clear answer, but thought, perspective, together with wind and sea and the tiller athrill beneath her hand, granted a certain calm.
The sun sank, the quick night fell, stars glittered forth. Not everything was downfall. Had she lived in the early years of the Lahui, she would never have seen such a sky. Technology moved forward, global population diminished, global greenhouse came under control and there were fewer obscuring clouds, light pollution lessened. Of course, a haze of it remained. She did not behold the splendor her ancestors knew, those of them who took their canoes from end to end of this ocean or those whom Yankee ships brought afterward from across the same reaches, east and west But then, she had stood on the Moon, on Farside where no Earth dazzled, and looked up into naked space.