2.
 "It's still possible, you know. In a different way, of course." She added after a moment: "My name is Bridget. I'm sorry that you lost your wife and daughter."
He took a deep breath. That was with him every day, especially at night going to sleep. Boating on Miramair III where they'd had a cabin on a lake, he and Lana and Lanalana. A sudden rain, a wind, had turned the boat over. Eon had somehow gotten tangled in the rigging while his two women had vanished under the glassy green water. He'd awakened to find himself tangled upright against the overturned hull. Golden sunshine silence had returned after the sudden squall, but the lake surface was opaque. Cutting himself free, he'd dived and dived for nothing. The bodies only bobbed up a day later, pale, relaxed, as though asleep. It had been quick for them, was his only comfort. He'd sat by the lake for hours, which turned into days. And dark tortured nights. He might have starved to death sitting there, an easier fate than his subsequent life. But he'd gone out of his mind. Wandered the roads, the cities, finally striking out on the Galactic Bridge. More wandering; but there was really only one last fate for a broken man: finally, this P67 pylon. "Go away, Bridget. I have to sleep,"
"I want you to take me away from here, Eon."
"Go away, I want to sleep. It' s like being dead and enjoying it."
"Very well, Eon. But for your information I'm not the cause of your unrest. There is a man under all that pain trying to get out. I only take a few seconds of your sleep away each night, and I've been doing it for many nights. I'11 be back, Eon." The scent of pines faded, replaced by the stink of steamy bodies. There was a constant rustle of strangled snores amid steel girders in the smoky half-light of the thousand-bed barracks.
The maggner's lot: You staggered on glassy surfaces, carrying the heavy maggning coil which you wrapped around stray l!ght beams to tug them back into alignment while pistons pounded and other maggners' voices chopped ragged messages among tons of gloomy steel machinery.
You wandered home each night, letting the artificial air rake dry your sweaty overalls. You thought of little else but getting into your bunk after sucking up the swill in the corporate mess. Once in a while you dawdled over an obscene holo, for there were hardly any women on P67, and even a maggner had a faint need, little more than a reflex, like the urge to urinate. Or you gazed in passing display windows late at night, when all the stores were closed but still half lit. You let the cash pile up in your cred account because you could never figure anything you wanted to buy and take back to your personal area which consisted of a bunk and a tall, narrow locker. Why buy anything? What did it matter? That was the mind of a maggner. Still, you lingered, you looked, your fingertips might touch the glass, because you were human.
"Do you like me?"
The pine forest again, and the huffy moon. She looked crisp and tall as she stood in a provocative pose on high heels. She held her arms out and rotated slowly.
"What is that you're wearing?"
"Stewardess. Aer Lingus. 2020 A.D. An eon, Eon." She giggled.
"I don't understand what that means," he said. But she filled it into his mind, much as possible. Aerojets, silver, crossing cloud-dappled star-spangled night under that puffy moon. He shook his head. "But that's so long ago."
A whisper again: "Yes."
He felt a little sad for her but said matter of factly because he was dead and she was still alive: "Surely you have been dead ten thousand years now, haven't you? "
Her voice, in his mind, was matter-of-fact, reciting an oft-told tale. "We were on a night launch from Kennedy to Shannon when the aft barser dimmed. I was just getting ready trays of dim sum and let long for the sleepy passengers, when the jolt threw me down the aisle. I had been dawdling over a port window looking at the Manhattan skyline, or the crash would have killed me like it did the other folks down midsection. I should have been dead, Eon, but they saved a little of me."
"Oh no."
Again, the whisper: "Yes."
"Was there an Earth? Is any of that true?"
"Yes."
He paused to consider. "You're one of those."
She stamped her feet, fine naked calves flexing, on the soft pine needles under the full-moon sky. She laughed defiantly. "Yes, I'm one—a brainbox, and I'm still here. Well, not an iota of carbo life left of me, but what got saved is truly me and migrated onto biosynth and here I am!" She twirled and ended with a half-kneeling flourish. "Ta-dah!"
"And I'm supposed to be thrilled?"
"Eon, don't be selfish. Think, is your depression a matter of self-indulgence? Look at me, I've put my troubles behind me."
"It's pretty sad," he agreed, yawning.
"We'll talk again," she said.
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Copyright © 2018 by Jean-Thomas Cullen, Clocktower Books. All Rights Reserved.
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