Koontz, Dean - Dark Rivers of the Heart
Page 63
"Jesus," he whispered, and he gazed down thoughtfully at his folded hands on the table.
Jean looked at her son as the boy happily petted and scratched Killer, then glanced at Ellie's swollen stomach. "Bob, this is where we belong. This is our future. It's right. These people have hope, and we need hope badly." She turned to Ellie. "When's the baby due?"
"Two months."
"Boy or girl?"
"We're having a little girl."
"You picked a name for her yet?"
"Jennifer Corrine."
"That's pretty," Jean said.
Ellie smiled. "For Phil's mother and mine."
To Bob Padrakian, Phil said, "We do have hope. More than enough hope to have children and to get on with life even in the resistance. Because modern technology has its good side too. You know that. You love high technology as much as we do. The benefits to humanity far outweigh the problems. But there are always would-be Hitlers. So it's fallen to us to fight a new kind of war, one that more often uses knowledge than guns to fight battles."
"Though guns," Ron said, "sometimes have their place."
Bob considered Ellie's swollen belly, then turned to his wife. "You're sure?"
"They have hope," Jean said simply.
Her husband nodded. "Then this is the future."
* * *
Later, on the brink of twilight, Phil and Ellie and Killer went for a walk on the beach.
The sun was huge, low, and red. It quickly sank out of sight beyond the western horizon.
To the east, over the Atlantic, the sky became deep and vast and purple-black, and the stars came out to allow sailors to chart courses on the otherwise strange sea.
Phil and Ellie talked of Jennifer Corrine and of all the hopes that they had for her, of shoes and ships and sealing wax, of cabbages and kings. They took turns throwing a ball, but Killer allowed no one to take turns chasing it.
Phil, who once had been Michael and the son of evil, who once had been Spencer and for so long imprisoned in one moment of a July night, put his arm around his wife's shoulders. Staring at the ever-shining stars, he knew that human lives were free of the chains of fate except in one regard: It was the human destiny to be free.
It darkles, (tinct, tint) all this our funanimal world
—James Joyce, Finnegans Wake