Babylon's Ashes

She took the hand of the arm she was lying across in hers, drew it gently around her like he was a blanket. He had asked her that every few days since the war ended. How was she doing? It sounded like an innocuous question, but it carried more than its own weight. She’d killed her old lover, her old friends. She wished with a longing as powerful as thirst that there had been a way to save her son. Jim wasn’t asking if she was all right so much as how bad was it. There was no good answer for that. I will carry this guilt and sadness for the rest of my life was just as true as I lost my son years ago. Her comfort was that she was still alive. That Jim was. And Amos and Alex. Bobbie and Clarissa.

She was as much a monster as Clarissa or Amos had ever been. She was someone who’d found a way to save her little chosen family when everything seemed lost. The two didn’t balance, but they existed together. Pain and relief. Sorrow and contentment. The evil and the redeeming could sit together in her heart, live together, and neither one take the edge off the other.

And Jim knew that. He didn’t ask because he needed an answer. He asked because he needed her to know the answer mattered to him. That was all.

“I’m all right,” she said. The way she always did. Jim reached out his other hand and dimmed the lights. Naomi closed her eyes. They felt very comfortable that way. She could hear from Jim’s breath that he wasn’t asleep. That he was thinking about something.

She kept herself awake, just a little. Waited for him. Little flickers of dream danced in at the edge of her mind, and she lost track of her body every now and again.

“Do you think we should go out to the colonies?” he said. “It seems like maybe we ought to. I mean, we’ve been to Ilus. And if we can sort of blaze the trail? Make it normal? Maybe it’ll be easier for Pa to get more Belt ships to take the risk.”

“Maybe,” she said.

“Because the other thing we could do is stay here. There’s just a lot of work that’s going to need to happen here. Rebuilding. Beefing up Medina for when Duarte comes back. Because you know whatever he’s doing is going to be a problem eventually. I don’t know where we should go next.”

Naomi nodded. Jim rolled in closer to her. The warmth of his body and the smell of his skin were consoling.

“Let’s just stay here for a minute,” she said.

Epilogue: Anna

As with astronomy the difficulty of recognizing the motion of the earth lay in abandoning the immediate sensation of the earth’s fixity and of the motion of the planets, so in history the difficulty of recognizing the subjection of personality to the laws of space, time, and cause lies in renouncing the direct feeling of the independence of one’s own personality. But as in astronomy the new view said: “It is true that we do not feel the movement of the earth, but by admitting its immobility we arrive at absurdity, while by admitting its motion (which we do not feel) we arrive at laws,” so also in history the new view says: “It is true that we are not conscious of our dependence, but by admitting our free will we arrive at absurdity, while by admitting our dependence on the external world, on time, and on cause, we arrive at laws.”

In the first case it was necessary to renounce the consciousness of an unreal immobility in space and to recognize a motion we did not feel; in the present case it is similarly necessary to renounce a freedom that does not exist, and to recognize a dependence of which we are not conscious.

Anna savored the moment, then closed the text window and made the same, small sound that she always did when she finished the book. Anna loved the Bible and felt comforted and lifted up by what she found in it, but Tolstoy was uncontested for second place.