Chapter 46 chapter eight

Saul and Sarai waved goodbye to Rachel and Merio at the da Vinci teleporter multipurpose port after Rachel arrived eighth standard weeks before teleporting back home in Barna's Realm. "I don't think she should have been discharged," Sarai complained to herself on the evening flight back to Clover.The continent below is patchworked with rectangular fields waiting to be harvested. "Wife," said Saul, stroking her knee, "there is a place where the doctor may keep her in perpetual care. But they only do it out of their own existing curiosity. They have done all they can to help her... It's useless. She has a life of her own."

"But why go with . . . with him?" Sarai said. "She barely knows him." Saul sighed, leaning back on the cushions of his chair. "She won't remember him at all in two weeks," he said, "at least not about their current relationship. Think about it from her side, mate. She's trying to fit herself into this crazy world every day. .She's only twenty-five and in love. Let her live happily ever after." Sarai turned to look out the window, and together in the silence they watched the red sun float like a balloon tethered to the surface at the edge of evening.

Saul's second-semester class was well underway when Rachel called.It was a one-way message, sent over the long-distance transmission cables of Liberty Island, and the daughter's image was projected on the ancient holographic well, like a familiar wandering spirit. "Hi Mom. Hi Dad. I'm so sorry I haven't written or called in the past few weeks. I guess you know I'm out of school. It's with Merio. It's a pain to work on a new senior project. I Tuesday completely forgot what was discussed on Monday. Not even the floppy disks and comlog reminders. I think I should reapply for undergrad... of course I remember everything! Just kidding.

"It was painful with Merio, too. At least that's what my notes said. It wasn't his fault, I'm sure. He was gentle and patient and loving, and loyal to me. Just kind of...uh, You can't recreate a relationship every day. Our apartment is filled with pictures of us, notes I wrote to myself about the two of us, our holograms on Hyperion, but... you know. In the morning he was a total stranger again. In the afternoon I began to believe in everything we had, even though I couldn't remember it. At night I would cry in his arms... and then, around the same time, I'm going to bed. That's fine."

The image of Rachel pauses, turns, as if to cut the connection, but then stabilizes again.She smiled at them. "Anyway, I've been away from school for a while, anyway. Liberty Island Medical Center wants me to be here 24/7, but then they'll have to take care of me all the time... The Whale Institute offered me a Offer, hard to refuse. They offered me...I think they said 'research honorarium'...that was more than what I paid for four years at Naittenheisel plus all tuition at Imperial Nah. "But I declined. I would still go there as an outpatient, and the RNA transplant series always left me bruised and depressed. Of course, it's normal to be depressed because I can't remember those things every morning. How did the bruise come about? Haha.

"Anyway, I'll be with Tanya for a while and then maybe... I think I might go home for a while. February is my birthday... I'm going to be twenty-two again. Weird, yeah Right? It's always easier to live with people you know anyway, and I met Tanya when I first moved here, when I was twenty-two... I think you get the idea. "So... is my old room still there, Mom? You always threatened me to turn it into a mahjong hall, did you do that? Write to me, or give me a call. Next This time I'll pay a little more for a two-way phone so we can talk face to face. I just... I think I..."

Rachel waved her hand. "I have to go. See you later, Swiftlet. I love you all." With Rachel's birthday a week away, Saul flew to Barsad City to go to the city's only public teleportation terminal and take her home.He saw Rachel first, who was standing near the flower clock, carrying her luggage.She looked young, but she hadn't changed much from when they said goodbye in Restoration Arrow.No, Thor realized, the confidence in her posture lacked the forefoot.Shaking his head to shake himself off those thoughts, he called out to her and ran to hug her. The look of shock on Rachel's face when he let go of it stuck in his mind. "What's the matter, dear? What's the matter?"

Except this time, Saul had rarely seen his daughter completely incoherent. "I...you...I forgot," she stammered.She shook her head, how familiar it was, and eventually she burst into tears and laughter at the same time, "I just think you look a little different, Dad. I remember, I left here on...to be exact...yesterday ...that's when I saw... your hair..." Rachel covered her mouth. Thor reached out and scratched his scalp. "Ah, yes," he said, suddenly seeming to laugh and cry himself. "It's been no less than eleven years since you graduated, including the travel time. I'm old. I'm bald." He opened his arms again. "Welcome back, baby."

Rachel flung herself into his embrace, into safety. For a few months, it was business as usual.Surrounded by familiar people and things, Rachel felt more at ease, while Sarai's heartbreak over her daughter's illness was temporarily offset by her joy at coming home. Rachel gets up early every day to watch her private "guiding show", and Saul knows that the images of him and Sarai contained in it are more than ten years older than the faces she remembers.He tried to imagine what it would have been like for Rachel: waking up in her own bed, twenty-two, with brand new memories, at home celebrating her pre-college vacation at the Web, only to find her parents had died overnight. The room is much older, the houses and towns have changed a hundred times, the news is completely different... years of history have slipped past her.

Saul couldn't continue imagining it. The first mistake they made was to let Rachel get her wish and invite her old friends to her twenty-second birthday party: it happened to be the same people who celebrated her birthday last time-Nicky, who couldn't control her emotions, Don?Stewart and his friends Howard, Casey?Oberg, and Marta?Ting, her best friend Li Na?Mikkel—they'd both just come back from college and had shed their cocoons of infancy and started a new life. In fact, Rachel has seen them since her return.But when she woke up... she forgot all about it.Only this time, Sol and Sarai forgot that she would lose her memory.

Nikki was thirty-four years old, with two children of her own—still full of energy, still out of control, but still old by Rachel's standards.Don and Howard chat about their investments, their kids' athletic accomplishments, and their upcoming vacation.Confused, Kathy only spoke to Rachel twice before feeling like she was talking to someone else impersonating Rachel.Marta made it clear that she was jealous of Rachel's youth.Li Na, who has become a fanatical Zen disciple for many years, cried bitterly and left early. After they'd all left, Rachel sat in the messy after-party living room, staring at her half-eaten cake.She didn't cry.Before going upstairs, she hugged her mother and whispered to her father, "Dad, please don't let me go through this again." Then she went upstairs to sleep. That spring, Saul had the same dream again.He was lost in a vast, dark realm, where only two red orbs glowed.When that monotonous voice sounded, Saul no longer felt absurd: "Saul. Take your daughter, your only daughter Rachel, your beloved daughter, to a planet called Hyperion, where I will guide you, and sacrifice her as a burnt offering." So Thor screamed into the darkness: "You already have her, you bastard! How am I going to get her back? Tell me! Tell me, you goddammit!" Saul Winterberg awoke sweating, tears in his eyes, and resentment in his heart.He could feel his daughter sleeping in the other room, the giant worm devouring her bit by bit. Over the next few months, Thor became obsessed with gathering information about Hyperion, the Time Tombs, and the Shrike.As a researcher by training, he was surprised that there was so little hard data on such a controversial topic.Of course, there is also the Shrike Church--though there are no Shrike Church temples in the Barna region, there are many throughout the Web-but he soon found that looking for hard-faced information in the Shrike Church literature is like Trying to draw a map of Sarnath by visiting a Buddhist monastery is purely wishful thinking.The teachings of the Shrike Church do mention time, but only on a superficial level, only mentioning that the Shrike is "'... the angel of punishment beyond time', passed away from the old earth, and the four centuries since then have become errors. The time that man has had has long since come to an end." From the harvest he got from various places, he found that it, like most religions, used some vague words, discussing nonsense issues similar to the accumulation of navel dirt .Still, he plans to visit a Shrike church temple once the research has progressed enough. Another expedition to Hyperion was initiated by Melio Arundez, still sponsored by Imperial University, but this time with the express purpose of intercepting and figuring out the time tides that caused Rachel to contract Merlin's disease Phenomenon.There was an important progress this time. The overlord protection body decided to send a long-distance transmission transmitter with this expedition, and installed it in the Keats consulate.Even so, by the time the expedition reached Hyperion, three years had passed since the time of the Ring.Saul's first instinct was to accompany Rachel to follow Aron Dezie and his team - which was only natural, as the protagonists of all holographic movies will return to the shooting scene.But Saul shook off the urge of this intuition within minutes.He is a historian, a philosopher; the contribution he can make to the success of scientific research is minimal, at best, a drop in the ocean.Rachel still retains the interest and skills of a well-trained undergraduate archaeologist, but her skills are dwindling every day, and Saul doesn't think returning to the scene of the incident will help her in any way.Every day would be a shock to her, waking up on a strange planet, working a job she didn't know what to do.Sarai would not allow such a thing to happen.