Almost dark now, the last daylight washing up this windy road, this folded coast. Tall pines and mountain shadows and a sky as broad and clean as the ringing of a bell. It was strange, she thought. Not just this place, but everything. You try to lead a decent life, maybe make the world a little better. And then you find out how powerful all the bad things are, how weak you are in the face of that. And so you think you’re doomed to do it all over again, make the same mistakes everybody made for the last hundred thousand years… you live with that, admitting it or not, but with that defeat inside you, a black kernel of unhappiness.
But maybe—and here was this new thought again —maybe it wasn’t true. Maybe if it was true she wouldn’t be here. Maybe the wheel does roll uphill.
Cool air along this mountainous ocean road. She pulled her sweater close around her. Laura was sleeping now; the bus was quiet. Karen thought about her natural parents, who had died at Walker’s hands. They had escaped the narrow cells of the Novus Ordo and found a town called Burleigh; Laura had discovered Turquoise Beach… and Michael had found this place, this quilted, radiant frontier world. A door, she thought, that hope had opened out of fear, imagination out of failure. And maybe that was the only door that really mattered.
The road veered to the right, a gentle rocking, and Karen looked out across the western ocean, which was still called the Pacific, and closed her eyes; and slept at last dreamlessly as the bus rolled down the angles of the night into the morning.
Robert Charles Wilson, Gypsies
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