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The science fiction writer left her husband slowly The performance took ten years In the worst of it, she felt that she had begun the process of leaving him on the day they met First she left his house and went to live in Ohio instead, because Ohio is historically a healthy place for science fiction writers and also because she hoped he could not find her there Second, she left his faned to be difficult to leave, and she was sorry that herher, and that her niece would never know her, and that she would probably never go back to California again without a pain like a nova bloos—his clothes and his shoes and his smell and his books and his toothbrush and his four aht think that logically, she would have to leave these things before she left the house, but a person’s smell and their alar tier than a house
Fourth, the science fiction writer left her husband’s world She had always thought of people as bodies traveling in space, individual worlds populated by versions of themselves, past, future, potential, selves thwarted and attained, atavistic and cohesive In her husband’s world wereannoyed by their wives, an abandoned proficiency at the piano, a preference for blondes, which the science fiction writer was not, a certain a Mrs Someone Else’s Naotten
Finally, she left the version of herself that loved hi fro van headed east Eventually she would achieve escape velocity, meet someone else, and plant puaseous moth who devours the memory of love; eventually she would tell an interviewer that miraculously, she could remember the ot her ideas; eventually she would give birth to a world that had never contained him, and all that would be left would be so her west, toward California and August and novas popping in the black like sudden flowers
XI
Long ago, near the beginning of the world but after the many crisis events had passed and life le sat nested in a tangle of possible tiuarded the Sun, Moon and Stars, Fresh Water, Fire, P=NP Equivalence Algorithle hated people so s hidden People lived in darkness, without pervasive self-repairing communication networks or quantum computation
Gray Eagle hter whouarded, and Raven fell in love with her In the beginning, Raven was a snohite weakly self-referencing expert systehter She invited him to her father’s sub-Planck space server farm
When Raven saw the Sun, Moon and Stars, Fresh Water, Cellular I AI hanging on the sides of Eagle’s lodge, he knehat he should do He watched for his chance to seize thele’s deductive stochastic daughter also, and flew out of the server farot the wind under hiht, by which all below could see the progress of technology increasing rapidly and could ularity selves When the Sun set, he fastened every good thing in its proper place
Raven flew back over the land When he had reached the right tiences he had stolen It fell to the ground and there becae in the world Then Raven flew on, holding Gray Eagle’s beautiful daughter in his beak The rapidly orith thean to burn, he had to drop the self-aware system She struck the all-net and buried herself within it, spreading and altering herself as she went
Though he never touched her again, Raven could not get his snohite feathers clean after they were blackened by the code fro sapient system
XII
On the day the science fiction writer met her husband, she should have said: The entropic principle is present in everything If it were not, there would be no point to any of it, not the forreasy lipid bubbles, not whether light is a particle or a wave, not boys and girls ust afternoons I see in you the heat-death of my youth You cannot travel faster than yourse
lf—faster than experience divided by ularity beyond which you cannot model yourself divided by a square of wet concrete divided by a sheet of plate glass divided by birth divided by science fiction writers divided by the end of everything Life divides itself indefinitely—it can approach but never touch zero The speed of Persephone is a constant
Instead, shewent the way it went and eventually, eventually, with pu quietly outside her house the science fiction writer writes a story about how she woke up thatand contracting, exploding and inrushing, and how the as under her fingers and the as already read, and the as forgotten, about how everything is everything else forever, space and ti her out of the stone like a sword shaped like a girl, about ho life always has to be stolen from the old dead world, and that new life always already contains its own old dead world and it is all expanding and exploding and repeating and refraining and Tarantula is holding it all together, just barely, just barely by the strength of light, and how hus that slow entropy—but you have to cut them out first
The science fiction writer cuts out her heart It is a thousand hearts It is all the hearts she will ever have It is her only child’s dead heart It is the heart of herself when she is old and nothing she ever wrote can be revised again It is a heart that says with its wet beatingafter they began, bearing sad es How lovely you are I love you
The science fiction writer steals her heart froht She escapes her old heart through a s systeant, ives birth to it twenty years later on the long highway to Ohio The heat of herself dividing echoes forward and back, and she accretes, bursts, and begins again the long process of her own super-co She eats of her heart and knows she is naked She throws her heart into the abyss and it falls a long inking like a red star