Sunrise over Daedalus
by Philip J. Lees
Jack
The lunar sunrise, thought Pascal Broughton, was not for the impatient. At the precisely predictable moment the faint spark had made itself known against the far edge of the almost-blackness that was the night moonscape. At first barely distinguishable from a star, the point of light had grown until now a good imagination could perceive it as a crescent, a fingernail sliver that seemed to shimmer, to dance from side to side, as the fatigued muscles of the watcher's eye tried to keep it in focus.
That much had taken over an hour. Pascal screwed up his eyes and massaged the bridge of his nose with the thumb and forefinger of his right hand. His left still lay in the loose, flaccid grasp of the man who was propped up against the pillows in the hospital bed beside which he sat, the two of them waiting for what would be Jack Broughton's last lunar dawn.
There was no sound except for the hum of the recyclers and his grandfather's labored breathing. This time was different, Pascal thought. On his previous visits the air in the room had had the antiseptic odor of hospitals everywhere--more an absence than a presence--but today that was overlaid with another, musty smell, not unpleasant but still somehow ominous. It clogged his nostrils like the first premonition of a cold. Pascal had caught a cold once, during a trip to Earth, and never wanted to repeat the experience.
It was fitting that the two Broughtons, grandfather and grandson, should be here together, at this time, to observe the testament to the labors of three generations, the work that Jack Broughton had started many years ago, and that Pascal had still to finish. That in itself did not matter--Jack had never expected to see the completion of his dream, had never expected to come this close to it.
Of course, if Jack had been willing to upload, he could have stayed around forever, seen the whole thing, but that had never been his desire. Pascal remembered talking to his grandfather about it after his mother's funeral service, when, for the first time, he found himself confronting the reality of death. He had just turned fifteen.
"One life is enough for me," Jack said. "I don't want to spend eternity down here. I want to spend it out there." He smiled and swung his arm across the sky, the gesture taking in the entire infinity of space that lay over them. Pascal, Luna-born, his spindly frame topping his grandfather by a head and half a chest, nevertheless felt small in that moment, as if he had suggested something shameful. As Jack got older and more frail, Pascal considered raising the matter again on several occasions, but each time he seemed to see that same quiet smile on Jack's face and something made him hold his peace--perhaps the right time would come. It never had.
So now Pascal sat, cramped, on the small, hard chair next to his grandfather's deathbed. Like most chairs, it felt like a piece of children's furniture that he had to fold himself up to fit, his knees and elbows sticking out on all sides. His own discomfort was not important, though. Jack had announced his intention of surviving the long night and dying when daylight came--and throughout his life Jack had always done everything he intended.
It was definitely getting lighter now, outside on the surface. In here the lighting had been turned down below the level permitted by regulations until it was little more than a glow, oozing through the rectangular crack where walls met ceiling. Gradually the balance shifted from light inside, dark outside, to the opposite--though nobody could have said exactly when that moment came.
Pascal was aware of movement to his left, felt the pressure of a squeeze around his hand.
"Soon," Jack sighed. "Not long now."
Pascal nodded, unable to speak. He risked a glance to the side, saw Jack's eyes shining as he stared at the spectacle that was slowly being revealed before them.
The panel that filled most of the wall in front of them was not actually a window--the hospital was close to the center of the settlement and the room in which they sat was closed off on all sides--but the flat screen rendered the image from the sunward facing camera with such fidelity it was hard to believe that the view was not real.
Still little more than a shadow, the silhouette of a building began to stand out against the rocky, gray backdrop. A circlet of slender spires arced out from a central fluted dome, their tips gleaming as they snatched at the first rays of sun and sprinkled them here and there, like impossibly fragile fingers plucking energy from the void. Slowly, the light spread down along their length, until it splashed back against the cross that topped the dome, the cross that suddenly, shockingly, flashed bright, a jewel in a crown of thorns. From there the light washed down the dome's curved circumference, illuminating the support ribs and buttresses in a way that made them appear not as spokes in a constructed wheel, but as veins coursing through and around the body of something alive.
Between one moment and the next, the edifice took on an identity. The cathedral, the first and only one built on the Moon, was fully visible and recognizable for what it was. Jack had conceived it, drawn up the designs, lobbied for permission to start the building, long before Pascal was born. Jack's daughter Marie, Pascal's mother, had continued the work, and now it was left to Pascal to take care of the countless final details.
But those concerned the interior. The outside, the superstructure, had been formed from Jack's imagination into a three-dimensional plan in the computer's memory, whence it found expression in lightweight, super-strong materials that thrust against a feeble gravity and need resist no ravages of climate--all this had happened before Pascal was more than a small child. It was at the end of one of the outlying arms of the radio astronomy station in crater Daedalus, on the 'dark' side of the Moon, the side that never saw earthlight. Not really dark, of course, because for half of its orbital cycle it was exposed to the harsh, unfiltered radiation of the sun. The remaining time it saw only stars, but in between those extremes was the transition the two of them were witnessing, the transformation that showed the purpose behind its design. Pascal had seen it for the first time on his eighth birthday, which by a stroke of fortune fell on the right day, and he still remembered the feeling of awe as his jaw dropped open inside the helmet of the pressure suit.
"Beautiful." Jack's voice was so soft it was barely audible. Pascal just nodded. Other times this sight had made him feel like singing for joy, but now he did not trust himself to speak. He held onto his grandfather's hand as if he were drowning and only Jack could save him. Tears welled in his eyes and he blinked them away.
Pascal heard himself counting inside his head, one to a hundred, for no reason, over and over, as fast as he could. Then there was a long sigh, so long it seemed he could never count his way to the end of it. Then suddenly it was gone. Furiously, Pascal finished his count--ninety-nine, a hundred--then in an agony of effort he forced his head around.
Jack's eyes were still shining and that smile was on his face, the smile of someone who has just seen perfection. Pascal wept, the tears coursing down his cheeks unhindered, chill salt taste in the corners of his mouth. He wept for Jack's life, now over, for his mother's life, over years before, for his own life, which for the first time he must face uncertain and alone.
Some time later he closed Jack's eyes and went away.
Pascal
What Marie enjoyed most about resisting temptation was the anticipation of eventually giving in to it. By postponing her eventual, inevitable capitulation she could savor the feeling of naughtiness while remaining free of any guilt. So when Pascal pushed away his crème caramel half eaten and put on his sulky face, she did not reach for the dessert immediately, but just frowned at her son and repeated the edict that had provoked his response.
"Study first, then flyball," she stated firmly.
"But Mohan's only free until fifteen hundred. He's got some relatives coming on the shuttle." Pascal hunched himself up and scowled even more. She could see his lips moving in a rapid count as he glared down at the table. It was something he had taught himself to do, a way of holding in his tension, rather than throwing a tantrum the way some children did. She envied him sometimes. Neither she nor her father were particularly good at dealing with stress and their relationship was at times a stormy one.
Sitting like this on the commissary bench, his shoulders slumped forward, his knees in the air, Pascal looked like some kind of alien grasshopper. Marie imagined antennae sprouting from his forehead and felt a sudden urge to giggle, which she sternly repressed. All right then, she thought, that was long enough. She reached out a finger and slid the crŠme caramel over to her side of the table.
"Finished with this?" Not waiting for an answer she sliced off a good dollop and sucked it from the spoon. Yum! Well, perhaps a compromise was in order. She looked up at the clock over the door: 12:50.
"Half an hour study first, then. That will leave you a good hour for flyball and you can finish your assignments afterwards. Okay?"
His face brightened as soon as he heard the 'half an hour', and before she had finished speaking he was unfolding himself from the bench and bouncing away from their table.
"Okay," he called over his shoulder. Then he was ducking through the door and gone.
If only he wasn't so ungainly, Marie thought. She loved her son, she really did. It was just that she had never expected to have any children--so few people did nowadays--and even after more than fourteen years every time she looked at Pascal it was like a fresh surprise.
Over the last couple of years he had sprouted in all directions, or so it seemed, and now he looked so ... out of proportion. His outsize, skinny limbs made him into a human pantograph, on top of which his long, pale, tow-haired face, blooming in patches with pink traces of acne, swayed at the end of his neck like some kind of drooping flower. Incongruous, that was the word. Everything about Pascal was incongruous, as if he had been put together from parts taken from different species. Marie had never been able to see anything of herself in him, nor of her father, who was a swarthy, stocky terrier of a man, nor even of Pascal's father, the man who had taken so little time to bequeath her this unsought gift and had then gone on his way, never to be heard from again.
He might have resembled his grandmother, but there was no way to determine the truth of that because Marie had no recollection of what her own mother looked like and Jack flatly refused to talk about it. She could ask Roberta directly, of course, whether Pascal took after her. But somehow Marie never felt sufficiently at ease with Roberta. Perhaps it was because Jack had shut her out of his life so completely. He felt betrayed, he said. Betrayed because Roberta hadn't been able to believe in the dream that Jack had created for all of them before Marie was born, because his idea of immortality was not enough for her.
With Jack, everything came down to a question of faith.
Marie finished the last mouthful of dessert and went to meet her father for the afternoon's work session. She made her way through the arched corridors, a leisurely glide in which she did little more than tap her feet against the carpeting in the manner of locomotion favored by the more sedate Lunans. Pascal, now, just barreled along, bouncing off floor, walls, even the ceiling sometimes in his rush to get wherever he was going, but Marie had spent too much of her life in Earth's gravity and couldn't let herself go like that. She still sometimes worried that Pascal would hurt himself in his exuberance, but somehow he managed to get away with only minor scrapes and bruises.
It was a good thing, though, that there were never too many people about, or Pascal might have gotten into more trouble. Daedalus Station had been designed to house a community of five thousand, but with so few children being born the population had shrunk to barely a third of that.
Anyway, those were minor matters. Marie had something more important to worry about now, something she believed was vital for Pascal's future. And the next half hour or so wasn't going to be easy.
She found Jack in the room they called the studio. It lay to one side of the cathedral's entrance and was a large, oval hall that had originally been intended as a theater cum social club. Jack had requisitioned it at an early stage of the project and had met no opposition. The far end was a badly-lit clutter of model buildings of various sizes, now thrown together, good and bad, complete and incomplete, approved and rejected, all piled topsy-turvy like something out of a city planner's nightmare.
The part of the room nearer the door, in contrast, was the epitome of neatness. A vast, rectangular table provided a base for blueprints and block diagrams. Deep pigeon holes below the top held neatly rolled scrolls of paper and stacks of card. A rack screwed to the side contained a series of drawing tools, ranging from coarse to fine and grouped carefully by color. The bright whiteness that poured onto the tabletop from the array of spotlights suspended above it left the floor around in relative shadow.
A bank of computers filled the wall to the left and it was there that Jack was working, left hand on a large trackball, the other punching numbers into a keyboard. He turned when he heard Marie enter.
"The back vaulting should be ready to go in next week," he said. "Have you finished the fitting diagrams?"
"They'll be ready," Marie said. "But right now we need to talk."
"Can't it wait?" He saw her expression. "Okay. Just a minute."
He turned back to the computer panel, rattled the keys for a few seconds more, then punched a button on another pad. A printer at the far end of the console whined into action. Marie had sat herself down on one of the swivel chairs by the drafting table and Jack came and took the other.
"What is it, then?"
"It's Pascal. It's time he went to Earth."
"I thought we'd been through this," Jack said.
Marie saw that certain look in his eyes and knew it wasn't going to be easy. This time, though, she was determined not to give up.
"He needs it," she said. "His education ..."
"He can learn anything he needs to know here."
"That's not the point. He should be with other young people."
"He has friends here, doesn't he?"
"There are only three other children close to his age in the whole station. He doesn't get on with two of them. That leaves Mohan. You know all this."
Jack sniffed.
"Maybe he should learn not to be so fussy."
"Fussy!" Marie raised her voice in spite of herself. "You of all people call that fussy?"
"Calm down, Mimi." His pet name for her when she was small. He had done it to her again, Marie realized, made her lose control. She forced herself to take a deep breath.
"Listen," she said. "One. Pascal needs the chance to make new friends. Two. His body needs to get acclimatized to Earth's gravity, at least for a time. If he doesn't do it now, while he's still growing, it'll be much harder for him to leave here later on if he decides to. I want him to have that choice. Three. It's not for us to say what he needs to learn and what he doesn't. He should be starting to make those decisions for himself."
"There aren't so many children down on Earth any more," Jack said.
"I know that. But he can go to a college with hundreds of students, not just four in a class."
"Hmmph! Can you imagine Pascal coping with a full gee? The lad's built like a giraffe."
"And giraffes do very well in one gee. He'll manage. He'll adjust. It'll just take a little time."
"Anyway, he's still too young to decide his own future. It's up to us to steer him in the right direction, stop him making mistakes."
"And the right direction, naturally, is for him to work on the cathedral. To take over where you leave off. The grand family mission. Nothing else would be nearly as good for him. Is that it?"
"Don't you get sarcastic with me, young lady. I still know a thing or two you don't, and don't you forget it."
Marie sighed. Deep inside she had known it would come to this. Time to play the card she hoped she could keep firmly concealed in her sleeve.
"Anyway," she said. "When you say it's 'up to us', that doesn't just mean you and me, does it?"
"What are you talking about?" Of course, he knew quite well.
"I'm Pascal's mother. The main responsibility is mine. I listen to you because you're his grandfather and it's right that you should have a say."
"Stop this!" Jack rose from his chair, almost overbalancing in his haste.
"Don't walk away from me now!" Something in her voice kept him by the table, but he was scowling.
"His grandmother should have a say, too," Marie said. "I've talked to Roberta and she agrees with me."
Jack's face was red, his fists clenched and unclenched by his sides.
"Grandmother?" he erupted. "That ... thing is not anybody's grandmother. It is an abomination."
"Jack," Marie said hopelessly, "I know you feel that way. I'm sorry you feel that way. I can't imagine what it must do to you whenever you think of her, if you ever do. But I have to put Pascal first, before you, before myself. I believe that Roberta cares about him and wants the best for him. She agrees with me. Pascal must go to Earth." The tears were swelling in her eyes now, whether from her own pain or his she couldn't be sure, but she plunged on regardless, desperate to get it over.
"I was hoping to have your support, Jack, I really was. But with or without it, Pascal will go to Earth." She took a deep breath, then delivered what she knew would be a painful final blow.
"Jack," she said, "you're outvoted."
Then she turned and left before her pity for him could start to get the best of her.
Marie
Perhaps it would have been better to die, Roberta thought. Just as Jack had insisted, the tears rolling down his face. Just die, let go of it all, let your soul depart the mortal coil leaving pain and grief behind.
But she had never had Jack's faith, his passion, or his conviction, and those nagging doubts wouldn't let her go. It wasn't for herself, she insisted, it was for the baby, their daughter, who would surely need a mother's guidance. When she saw the expression on Jack's face she began to cry herself.
That was before. For Roberta, the space-time continuum was neatly divided into 'before' and 'after'. It was a line as clear and definite as the one that separated nightside from dayside, except that Roberta's line was fixed immovably at one point in her past, and having once crossed it she could never go back.
'Before', she was a living, breathing, loving, laughing, crying human being. Also, she was a dying human being. Now it was 'after' and she didn't cry any more--the electronic eyes through which she viewed the world had no tear ducts. She could laugh, but it was just a noise, lacking the physical sensation of release. She still felt things--joy, irritation, sadness, anger, love--and the feelings were recognizably the same ones she had always felt before she uploaded. They were just ... not weaker, exactly, nor less clear ... just somehow further away, as if they didn't belong entirely to her but were partly borrowed from somebody else.
Jack refused to see her. He said she had no soul any more--he couldn't bear to see her like that. He would pray for her, he said. But talk to her? No way. Did she still have a soul? Roberta sometimes wondered. She wasn't sure. But then, she hadn't been sure 'before', either, so what was the difference?
At least she got to watch her daughter grow. She could move her perceptive center anywhere in the Station purely through an act of will. Any videophone, any computer workstation, could serve as her eyes and ears. Through the Station authorities and over Jack's objections she had obtained the right to observe Marie whenever she liked, though not to attempt to communicate with her. That in itself was quite an achievement--being the only grandfather on the Moon gave Jack a certain standing in a community where children were few and far between--so Roberta complied with this restriction, thankful for what she had, and tried to maintain a presence for as many of Marie's waking hours as she could manage. Jack behaved throughout as if she wasn't there, though he must surely have known otherwise. She never tried to speak to him.
As for the rest of the time, she had made good friends who didn't share Jack's prejudice and were happy to keep up the relationship, albeit on a different footing. She had a regular bridge game and found that her card memory was considerably better than 'before'--it no longer took a conscious effort to count trumps. She had the Station's entire computer archive at her disposal for study. There were another dozen or so uploaded individuals with whom she gradually established a new kind of communication that was almost disturbing in its intimacy. (There were also the 'dark ones', whose uploads had gone wrong somewhere, but nobody talked much about them.) Time passed. If it began to weigh heavy, she could 'sleep', a suppression of her perceptual inputs and outputs that turned her new consciousness back in on itself for as long as she chose. There were even dreams of a kind, strange images swirling out of inchoate shadows and dissolving back into formlessness, leaving behind nothing but impressions of vague uneasiness and anxiety.
There were a few more children in the Station then, and when Marie became old enough to attend kindergarten and play with the others Roberta decided it was time she took a more active interest. Jack was involved in two things and two things only: his cathedral, whose construction was now well under way, and, a long way second, his daughter. He loved Marie, but he loved his vision more, Roberta believed. Jack's obsession would accompany him to his grave--somehow she could sense that. She didn't want the same thing to happen to Marie. She talked to people, pulled strings, until one day her daughter spoke to her. Marie was six years old.
"Mommy? Mommy, are you there?"
Roberta felt a sensation she had never felt before, a constricting, asphyxiating feeling that was at the same time somehow liberating. She tried to capture some part of it and put it into her voice as she replied.
"Yes, honey. Mommy's here."
They were in the classroom. Marie had stayed behind after school and their voices echoed oddly now that the room was no longer filled with children.
"Why can't I see you?"
"Because I'm inside the computer."
"Inside 'puter?"
"That's right, hon. But I can see you, and you're so, so pretty. Mommy's beautiful girl."
They talked regularly after that. Roberta was worried what might happen when Jack found out, but it turned out to be a non-problem--he simply ignored it.
"Daddy, I talked to Mommy today."
"I've told you before, your Mommy's dead. She died when you were born. Eat your vegetables."
Marie ate her vegetables and never mentioned it again. It was fortunate that she appeared to have inherited her mother's good sense, rather than her father's stubbornness, Roberta thought. She took a perverse pleasure in teaching her daughter things that Jack must realize did not come from her regular school--certain Latin phrases, for instance, that nobody used any more. Roberta had learned Latin for her own amusement, during the first year 'after', and wished she could chuckle out loud the first time she heard Marie ask her father for a quid pro quo.
The cathedral's dome was completed and pressurized for the first time when Marie was nearly ten. She had been taking an increasing interest in its construction recently and Jack, of course, liked nothing better than to spend time explaining it to her.
"It's an inspiration, you see," Jack told her, as Roberta watched and listened from the computer console in the studio. "It's to celebrate the glory of God first of all, but it's for us, too. It's something for the future. We've lost that. That's why people don't have families any more."
The same old arguments, Roberta thought. And who knows? Perhaps he's right after all. Maybe we've all become too short-sighted, too engrossed in our own, petty existence. That's what Jack would say.
"What's a family?" How sad that a child should ask that question.
"We're a family. Me and you."
"And Mommy?"
"Mommy's dead. Now look how that buttress touches the curve of the dome, instead of just sticking out. That's called a tangent."
I've got to get her out of here, Roberta thought. As soon as possible, Marie must go to Earth.
It happened when Marie was fifteen. Marie's teachers praised her academic abilities, organised her university place, her planned course of study--fine arts and architecture--an obvious compromise. Jack raised no objections--in fact he encouraged it. Roberta suspected that somewhere inside Jack was as eager to remove Marie from her influence as she was to free their daughter from his.
Not counting vacation visits, Marie was away for four years. At the end of that time she came back with a Master's degree, a new set of attitudes all her own, and an as yet unsuspected new life growing inside her.
Roberta
He was going to be a father! A father! The word went round and around in his head as Jack rhythmically, almost mechanically, completed sketching the outline on the plan that covered half the surface of the drafting table.
The fact in itself was remarkable enough, but that alone did not explain Jack's elation. In his mind, Roberta's pregnancy was the vindication of a theory, the reward for a leap of faith, a blessing, certainly, but one that had been earned.
On Earth during the last twenty years deaths had outstripped births by twelve to one. On the Moon it was a little better, but not much. Numerous theories had been presented to explain this, from dietary deficiencies to psychosomatic syndromes, to the end of the natural lifespan of the human species as a whole.
Others claimed that, with the advent of personality uploading into the vast, boundless regions of cyberspace, what was happening was simply a step in the evolution of humankind, akin to the move from sea to land eons before, to the descent from the trees to the open plains, to the move from equatorial Africa to less hospitable environments.
Jack didn't believe any of it. As far as he was concerned the explanation was obvious: it was a divine punishment for a global loss of faith. He prayed, he communed within himself, he asked over and over again for a solution--until one day it came to him.
"We've lost touch with the future," he explained to Roberta. "In past times people built for future generations, not just themselves. We don't do that any more. Everything is temporary, expedient, disposable. No future means no children. It's as simple as that."
This was before they were married. Roberta did not seem totally convinced, but her presence inspired him, nevertheless.
"It's time we started again," he said. The excitement burned like fire in his veins. "We must build a monument, show that we believe in the future. It'll be a tribute to God, but also to our belief in ourselves."
Now Roberta's beautiful brown eyes were fixed on his, as if to soak up his enthusiasm more directly. He leaned over the table, took her hands in his and in that moment he felt such love for her he thought he would burst.
"We can do it together," he said, his voice hoarse with effort. "Will you?"
She smiled. She nodded.
"Yes," she said. "I will."
They were married a week later, in the small chapel that Jack himself had instituted, the chapel where they had met for the first time. Afterwards, Jack threw himself into his cathedral project in his every free moment. He was a physicist, he knew nothing about architecture, but he could learn. Roberta had a natural artistic eye that helped turn his crude early drawings into something approaching the ideas he was trying to crystallize out of his mind.
"It must be perfect," he said again and again. At last, they came up with something that came close to satisfying him. It was not perfect, but it would do as a preliminary plan. He spent three days drawing lines and curves, the top plan first, then the side elevation, the front face, the entrance. He had the computer generate three-dimensional views from his drawings, lit from different angles with different intensities, then he picked the best of the lot, printed it out in high resolution, full color, on poster-sized paper, and took it to the Station Manager's office.
When he came out half an hour later he felt as if it was all he could do to keep his feet on the ground. More than once he lost his balance in mid stride and had to roll back onto his feet as if he was a gamboling kid again. He could feel a ridiculous smile plastered across his face.
Roberta was waiting for him in their spacious quarters. There was no shortage of living space in Daedalus Station.
"We've got it!" he exclaimed, before he was even through the door. "We can start."
He hugged Roberta and lifted her off the ground so vigorously that for a second the two of them were waltzing in midair. He kissed her, and only then did he notice the expression on her face.
"What is it?" he asked. Her eyes were sparkling.
"That's not all we've got," she said softly. Then she blushed, as if something had embarrassed her. She was so slim and petite that Jack always felt like a clumsy oaf when he was close to her. Suddenly he realized what she must mean and in a moment of panic worried that his high spirits might have led him to hurt her.
She noticed his change of expression and nodded.
"I just saw the doctor," she said. "It's going to be a girl."
#
The foundation stone, Jack decided, would be laid on the day his daughter was born. It was only fitting. Not literally a stone, of course, but something similar, something symbolic to mark the inauguration ceremony. In the meantime he had plenty to keep him occupied. Everything had to be planned in advance. Everything must be perfect.
The problems began in the seventh month. Twice, Roberta nearly lost the baby but the doctors managed to terminate the premature labor. Roberta was anemic, she had no strength, she became listless, depressed. Jack refused to let it get him down. Everything would turn out all right, he was sure of it.
"She's too frail," the doctors told him. "She can't deliver naturally. It's too dangerous."
Jack rejected all their warnings. It was all a question of faith.
When Roberta told him what she had decided, what she had instructed the doctors to do if something went wrong, he couldn't believe it, didn't know what to say.
"It's against everything we've worked for," he said, aghast. "You can't just give up now."
"I'm not giving up," she said softly. "I just have this feeling. And I don't want to leave you and Marie alone."
He tried to persuade her, but she was adamant. Though he didn't want to lose her, the alternative she was contemplating was sacrilege, it could destroy all their hopes. He talked to the doctors. They nodded wisely and said it was a sensible precaution. Nobody would understand, nobody would listen.
When the day came, he waited outside the theater all morning. Eventually, a nurse came out and put a small bundle into his arms and he looked down at the crinkled, purple, snub-nosed face of his daughter. The doctor was talking to him, telling him something, but he didn't understand the words, didn't want to understand them. Roberta was dead. He knew that much. Dead and gone. But he was alive, Marie was alive. They would carry on, they had a future to believe in, a monument to build. And maybe, one day, Marie in her turn would have a child to carry on his legacy.
That afternoon, Jack stood before what would be the entrance to the cathedral. There wasn't much to see, just a stand with his artist's impression of the building. Finally, he had told nobody else. This would be just for him and the daughter that lay sniffling in his arms. The words sounded inside his head--not the speech he had written for the occasion, but other words that sprang spontaneously into his mind.
He made a mark on the wall with a thick marker pen, traced a circle, then a cross. It was simple, but it would do. To hope, he thought. To love, to the triumph of the spirit, and above all, to Thy divine mercy.
He looked down at his infant daughter and made a silent promise. Now it begins, Jack thought. Now it really begins.
- End -
© Copyright Philip J. Lees 2004