* * * *
When Sabrina saw herself back in the Pioneer Saloon, her pregnancy seemed to have advanced at least eight months.
Yet it didn’t feel like December, much less as if she’d undergone two-thirds of a year asleep.
At least I’m alive. She looked around the room, disoriented. The androids were gone, but the Mindscape and its connectors remained, with the latter still on her head. She got up to turn off the device before severing its ties to her, lest she die a cruelly anticlimactic death, but it was already deactivated.
Had she spent the majority of this time in some dead limbo, only to be awakened by an anonymous savior? The alternatives failed to account for her little tenant’s incredible growth, unless Marshall hadn’t died in there and was just now freeing her in time for the birth.
If someone else had pulled the plug, they hadn’t bothered to give her clothes more suitable for this altered figure. She had to steady herself on the tables, bars, and stools on her way to the door, feeling just about ready to retch as she did so.
Sabrina stopped, remembering what she was up against, and turned back to the bed. Marshall had been one step ahead of her – there was no blanket, as Uriah had had. So her mind was totally vulnerable. She turned the rusty knob.
Just her luck. It was pitch black outside, with no vehicles in sight. Not that she could expect any better from a ghost town, but this cast doubt on the “Prince Charming waking Sleeping Homely” hypothesis. Uriah had mentioned robots around here, but even if they weren’t locked, they were likely absent if she was to trust the story of the robot round-up. But then, you weren’t going to put your life in the hands of those ticking techno-bombs anyway, were you?
She had to find Uriah. It was possible he had an EM gun with him, and even barring that, as much as she hated to admit it, a “young” woman in her third trimester of pregnancy could be a lot more comfortable with a Transhuman to defend her.
No.
A part of Sabrina told her, as she staggered down the dusty trail toward one of the exits out of Goodsprings, that this wasn’t about her comfort. It never had been. It was about God, a lord she’d only recently learned of, but to whose providence her whole past seemed to attest. That providence was taking her towards something, and unless there had been some fatal flaw in her reasoning or her intuitions, that something could not be reached on the silicon train.
But how to know with reasonable certainty that the “sacrifice” she’d made was, or would prove, a truly noble one? What if it was just foolhardiness, seeing a motive in Marshall’s deeds that wasn’t there? God regrets a coward as much as he does a promoter of technological materialism, and was her rationalization of what was at heart just giving up so brave?
There was more than one life she was risking, after all.
Less than a mile later, Sabrina sat for a rest. Who am I kidding? There’s only one brave option for me, and that’s to keep going.
She turned her eyes to the moon. A waxing gibbous. “Wait …” she muttered aloud. She knew her moon phases, and in light of the spring-like atmosphere, this was too great a coincidence.
Sabrina looked back. Yes, it seemed plausible. Nothing she’d seen in the past couple dozen minutes could not have been a fabrication from her memory. Why should she have expected otherwise?
The real Sabrina had never left the saloon.