29

HORTON knelt beside the Pond and lowered the jug into the liquid. The liquid gurgled as it flowed into the jug. Displaced air made bubbles on the surface.

When the jug was filled he rose and tucked it underneath his arm.

“Good-bye, Pond,” he said, feeling silly as he said it, for it was not good-bye. Pond was going with him.

That was one of the advantages to a thing like Pond, he thought. Pond could go many places, yet never leave where it had been to start with. As if, he thought, he could have gone with Elayne and could as well have gone with Ship— and, come to think of it, have stayed on Earth and been dead these many centuries.

“Pond,” he asked, “what do you know of death? Do you die? Will you ever die?” And that was silly, too, he thought, for everything must die. Someday, perhaps, the universe would die when the last flicker of energy had been expended and, when that happened, time would be left alone to brood over the ashes of a phenomenon that might never come again.

Futile, he wondered. Was it all futility?

He shook his head. He could not bring himself to think so.

Perhaps the god-hour had an answer. Perhaps that great blue planet knew. Someday, perhaps millennia from now, Ship, in the black reaches of some distant sector of the galaxy, would be told or would ferret out the answer. Perhaps-somewhere in the context of that answer there might be an explanation of the purpose of life, that feeble lichen which clung, sometimes despairingly, to the tiny flecks of matter floating in an inexplicable immensity that did not know nor care that there was such a thing as life.