"And do you know your son?" she asked, and pushed the child gently from her breast. She was as he had last seen her in that translucent water-filled room, lying upon the floor—completely nude, her majestic body serenely recumbent, her deep breasts forward as she rested on her elbow, watching the child, which now rolled from his back upon the floor, and smiling up into the screen began to crawl toward it.
O'Hara pressed his face into his palms. "How long have I been gone?"
"I do not know, O'Hara—perhaps two days, perhaps two months. There is no way of telling time in the cities of the Degraded. There is no sun and no moon, and no need for time, for time is a measure of accomplishment and nothing is accomplished here. We exist, and that is all."
The child sat up. He yawned.
"He must sleep now," said Nedra, and moved quickly to pick him up. "We must not talk, we would disturb him—"
"Nedra, this is not possible. We're speaking as if we were together in that exquisite little room, yet only hours ago—or days ago—I saw you drowning, and I unable to break through the yielding wall to save you from it. And only hours after that—or was it days or months?—you suddenly were back with me in that exquisite room, bringing the child, after those endless days and nights of solitude in which I did not know—"
"What troubles you?"
"Time troubles me. Time and the vagueness of what has happened in it. And you trouble me, Nedra! This is not the way you were, content to have a semblance of me showing on a screen."
"Ah, you see, O'Hara?" She smiled. "This is that dying process that I warned you of, this is what happens in the cities of the Degraded. Your mind is steeped in clouds. You are frantic now, but soon enough you will not care. You will not know it. And that will be much worse than that death which could have come easily for us upon the mountain. Remember now? Remember that you told me we could always die?"
"Yes, Nedra, I remember."