Stephen Wright

“There is an ocean of dreams,” Maryse was explaining, “that our sleeping heads dip back into late at night. The tides go in and out, cleansing the shore. Who we are is whatever silhouettes against that great sea. It is deep and vast and strong, and even in the clearest moment of the brightest day something is leaking in, a permanent trickle in the plumbing. Sometimes, in some of us, things collapse, but now the moment is approaching when the wave will break to carry us all away. This will happen. Consider the signs. Learn how to float.”

“But what’s all this got to do with UFOs?” asked Beale.

“They’re the openings the dreams come through.”

Gwen stared into a field of glittering stars no larger than pinheads. “Which one?’

“The big one. Right in the middle.”

“Jupiter?”

Dash moved in for another look. “M31,” he said as though pronouncing the classified name of the ultimate weapon. “Home.”

“That miniscule point,” Trinity explained, “is an entire spiral galaxy in the constellation Andromeda.”

“Where we all came from,” said Dash.

“And where we’re all going back to,” added Maryse. “As soon as they bring us the thermium for The Object.”

There were zones, he was saying, one should flee to in the Zero Time, his voice penetrating memory, sound and cadence evoking a time before her own father departed into a private zone of his own. She looked up at the impervious masquerade of his face, strange lips forming strange words in familiar ways. She produced a vague smile of interest when he looked at her, nodded intelligently when he paused. She knew nothing about this man.