As her wireless comes on the glyphs press in but she flinches away and won’t let them come into focus, quite, as she calls up an email client and writes, “New terms—give us five more fabs in the next twelve hours and we’ll cure Kubota’s.” She sends the message off to Cromwell and there’s a new restlessness in the shifting masses of form surrounding her, and she’s just decided it’s time to bail when she sees something rushing toward her like a glassy black wave and there’s time to think, This too is memory, before impact and all in a tumult she’s torn away to—
Rain falling on the temple’s snow, pitting and eroding the white sweep of the rooftop, rivulets forming, braiding, falling away. She stands beneath the temple’s eaves, cold water plashing on her face, inside her collar. The cold is like an ache but there is peace, there, in the thin light of the sun. The thaw is coming, she thinks, as snow sloughs off to reveal the red imbricated roof, one tile laid over another, rising up and up, and lifting her eyes she sees that the pagoda rises vertiginously and forever … The temple shatters, then, a flurry of broken tiles and wind-borne snow dissolving into the dark and—
Shallow, restless sleep twined around the drone of engines. She wakes slowly, blinks, wonders how long it’s been since she’s had a shower, and how many more hours in the flight. She tries to turn on the seat-back computer but the screen shows only a pale purple glow. She taps it with a fingernail, futilely, then opens the window blind, revealing an airy gulf of scintillant blue. It could be ocean below, but there’s no boundary between sea and sky, and never a cloud—just light. Her phone has no signal. Worried, she rises into the aisle, sees that the flight is empty, or nearly—one person sits alone in the back. A boy, maybe eighteen, slouched in his seat, eyes closed but probably awake.
“Excuse me,” she says. “Do you know how long till this flight gets in?”
“No way to tell,” he says, in lightly accented English. His clothes are expensive and his hair good but something about him says quant-with-money.
“Could you remind me where we’re going?” she asks with a little laugh, fighting down the first twinge of panic.
“It’s difficult to give an answer that isn’t mantic, since where we are going does not, in some strong sense, exist until we get there.” His smile is bright and empty, and his eyes, open now, are the blue of the gulf of sky.
Violent turbulence hits the plane then, and she’s flung to the floor. Wetness on her face; her hand comes away bloody. He’s kneeling beside her, saying, “I’m sorry for the difficulty of this transition.”