فصل 45

CHAPTER FORTY FIVE

Memories

Since there was no more use for them, the hotel rooms disappeared back into the mind of their creator. Only the bed remained, on which David Bowman lay. He did not wake; he did not dream. Something entered his mind, and he moved into a type of consciousness that no man had ever experienced before. At first it seemed that Time was running backwards, but then he understood.

His memory was being examined. He was reliving his past, one experience at a time. There was the living-room with its coffee table and telephone - there the vehicle - there the burning red sun - there the black hole he had fallen so far down.

Now he was on Discovery again, and the rings of Saturn filled the sky. Before that he was talking to Hal, talking to Frank Poole, talking to Earth.

He was travelling back down the passages of time. All his knowledge and experience was leaving him as he moved back to his childhood. But nothing was being lost; everything that he had ever been, at every moment of his life, was being moved to a safer place. As one David Bowman died, another would continue to live.

And in an empty room, in the fires of a star twenty-thousand light years from Earth, a baby opened its eyes and began to cry.