Part 28 (2/2)
Arkalion grinned back at him. ”What do you want me to do, young man?
I've forsaken my people. This is now my body. Tell you what, I promise to be always on a different continent. Earth isn't so small that I'll get in your hair.”
Temple sat up, felt the bandages on his jaw. He smiled at Stephanie, told her he loved her and meant it. It was exactly as if she had returned from the grave and in his first exultation he hadn't even thought of Sophia, who had perished all alone in the depths of s.p.a.ce that a world might live....
He turned to Arkalion. ”Sophia?”
”We found her dead, Kit. But smiling, as if everything was worth it.”
”It should have been me.”
”Whoever Sophia was,” said Stephanie, ”she must have been a wonderful woman, because when you got up, when you came to, her name was....”
”Forget it,” said Temple. ”Sophia and I have a very strange relations.h.i.+p and....”
”All right, you said forget it. Forget it.” Stephanie smiled down at him.
”I love you so much there isn't even room for jealousy.... Ummm....
Kit....”
”Break up that clinch,” ordered Arkalion. ”We're making one more stop at Nowhere to pick up anyone who wants to return to Earth. Some of 'em probably won't but those who do are welcome....”
”Jason will stay,” Temple predicted. ”He'll be a leader out among the stars.”
”Then he'll have to climb over my back,” Alaric III predicted happily, his eyes on the viewport hungrily.
Temple's jaw throbbed. He was tired and sleepy. But satisfied. Sophia had died and for that he was sad, but there would always be a place deep in his heart for the memory of her: delicious, somehow exotic, not a love the way Stephanie was, not as tender, not as sure ... but a feeling for Sophia that was completely unique. And whenever the strangeness of the far-future Earth frightened Temple, whenever he felt a situation might get the better of him, whenever doubt clouded judgment, he would remember the tall lithe girl who had walked to her death that a world might have the freedom she barely had tasted. And together with Stephanie he would be able to do anything.
Unless, he thought dreamily as he drifted off to sleep, his head pillowed again on Stephanie's lap, he'd wind up with a b.u.m jaw the rest of his life.
THE END
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