That Thursday night, when she reached the Golden Gate Bridge, no fog enshrouded that magnificent structure. The vast sea lay in blackness to the right, but for the lights of ships in transit from ports half a world away, and the lights of Berkeley and Oakland lay far to the east, beyond the storied bay, the illuminated hills like some fairyland. In that moment, Jane found it difficult to believe that there were those who despised the works of humanity and even humanity itself—not just the Arcadians but so many others—who in their misanthropy longed to undo all that had been built through the millennia of human struggle and striving, and even some who thought the world would be a better place if humankind had never existed.
If one such had been with her now, she might have said, Damn it, there is no world if there is not a human eye to see it, no world of any purpose or meaning, no world of more importance than is any barren planet now circling a burnt-out sun. The world can’t see itself and marvel at its wonders. The mystery of consciousness makes reality, and there is no reality without a fully conscious species to apprehend it. You think the world precious because you’re here to see it. We are the world and the world is us, and neither can be but a dream of no importance without the other.
And then again, she might say no such thing, for life seemed to be teaching her that she was not meant to move the world with words, that she was meant to act, to fight, as long as she remembered for what she was fighting.
She thought of Luther and Jolie, of Dougal Trahern, of Ancel and Clare, of Nadine and Leland Sacket; she thought of the children of Iron Furnace, of Bernie Riggowitz and the photo of Miriam that she now carried on her; she thought of Sandra Termindale and her daughters, Holly and Lauren, in their motor home; and she knew why she should keep going and why, in fact, there was no other option short of death.
Later, she pulled into a truck stop south of Salinas, the center of such rich farmland that the town called itself the “Salad Bowl of the World.” She parked in a far corner of that big roadside complex, away from most of its bright lights, so that she could see the stars. She got out of the Explorer. She used a disposable phone to call Jessica and Gavin Washington, guardians of her sweet child, to tell them that, having slept part of the day, she was driving all night to get there.
After she switched off the cellphone, she stood gazing at the stars, the light of uncountable suns around some of which orbited worlds unknowable, fourteen billion years of expansion from the big bang, the perimeter of the universe moving ever outward into a void the mind could not fully comprehend, all those trillions of stars so distant that none could ever be visited except in fantasy. Yet here she stood, one small life in all the immensity of the cosmos, one creature who thought and loved and needed to be loved, who could be destroyed but not defeated. She could die only because she was first alive, and therefore death, too, was a gift. She got back into the Explorer and drove south to her son, to her life and whatever it might bring.