There was truth in this. But O'Hara could not see that they were really worse off than before. "Let me coin a phrase or two," he said ironically. "While there's life, there's hope, and we can only die once."
"Those are the worst of lies," Nedra answered, her chin set stubbornly. "You can die a thousand times, each time more horribly than the times before, and while there is life it sometimes happens that it's only life to die again. Are you afraid to die, O'Hara?"
"Not afraid, but reluctant."
"Why? Are better nights coming in our lives than those we passed together in our cavern?"
"Not better, Nedra—but as interesting, perhaps, and certainly I would not wish to cancel out that possibility. A man who is dying of thirst in the middle of the desert does not seek death because the water that he may reach will not be sweeter than the water that he once had drunk. But it's more than that—more than the carrot dangled always just beyond the donkey's nose. In my world, beyond the Curtain, we cling to the belief that life itself is sacred and that always, finally, we may achieve redemption."
"What is redemption?"
"Life after death—a finer life than we have lived."
"You think only of yourselves," said Nedra, "and thinking only of yourselves, that notion may be true. But what of the clan? Have you forgotten, O'Hara, what the sickness does? We have got it now, you and I, as the Degraded have always had it—and what it has made of them it will make of the child that I am carrying."
"That you—?" he said, and gave it up, for there was no answer. None at all in logic, and Nedra had no concept of religion. Instead, he touched his lips against her face, a quick caress before she spoke again.
For the horde was separated at last, and those who were to go into the mountain valleys were already clambering back across the endless colored coiling of the photosynthetron, while the second of the Sons, his atom gun held cautiously, was now approaching them.