10 skip part
Wake up girl, I whispered, as Elma buzzed her simulated sleep. Her modified solar panel soaked up the starlightin the perpetual blue of the abyss. Wake up girl - It’s what I said, but I wouldn’t have woken her for all the world.
I love to watch her sleep, to watch both of them sleep. Guards are let down completely in the totality of sleep, faces look concerned or relaxed but never present in any real way.
Rat and Susan Carol were asleep too: they had promised to take me to the train. Though that hardly captures its shape or form. It had carriages of course, but they were like forests uprooted and placed on ice sheets to glide around the abyss like fifty self contained worlds.
The tickets were pricy and there were no stops to speak of. One simply ran along side for as long as it took to scurry aboard.
I sat at length thinking about the beauty of such a thing - the idea of worlds caught in walls moving in lines that were as defined as lives. Would I find it there, not in the hotel, in the yard, in the thousand jewels of possibility but in the segmented worlds of moving life?
As that thought slowly crept into my huddle body, a chill ran down my spine. The undefined, expanse of the abyss had been a kind of catharsis - could I go back to the walls of life that I had left. Could find myself mean losing my freedom to seek.
Does the discovery negate - completely preclude - the journey itself.
I head a distant engine - the sound of burring … the very ground shook as I looked up to see…
