Connie Willis
American science fiction writer.
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Nobody deserves this. “Please,” she prayed, and wasn’t sure what she asked.
Whatever it was, it was not granted.
“The clerk is dying, Rosemund is dying, you’ve all been exposed. Why shouldn’t I give up hope?”
“God has not abandoned us utterly,” he said. “Agnes is safe in his arms.”
Safe, she thought bitterly. In the ground. In the cold. In the dark.
It’s the light, she thought. Everyone looks like a cutthroat by torchlight. No wonder they invented electricity.
“They’re absolutely necrotic, aren’t they?” Colin whispered behind his order of service.
“It’s late twentieth century atonal,” Dunworthy whispered back. “It’s supposed to sound dreadful.”
It doesn’t matter, she thought, and realized in spite of everything, horror after horror, Roche still believed in God. He had been going to the church to say matins when he found the steward, and if they all died, he would go on saying them and not find anything incongruous in his prayers.
I would never save her. I looked at the woman mopping up the tea, and it came to me that I could not save her either. Enola or the cat or any of them, lost here in the endless stairways and cul-de-sacs of time. They were already dead a hundred years, past saving. The past is beyond saving. Surely that was the lesson the history department sent me all this way to learn. Well, fine, I’ve learned it. Can I go home now?
Everyone else had the look of tired patience people always got when listening to a sermon, no matter what the century.
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