Weissenbaum's Eye - Stetten - Chapter 43
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    CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

    Now I sail by myself. I am a prisoner of survival. The Culminate has passed through the loophole. Mara is dead. Don Andrews is also dead, and Judy, chasing the Culminate, was too near its terrible last flash to have survived. All this I have seen without a simultron. Peter is not dead, but might as well be. Only Sand and Tarni, and myself, still survive.
    There is nothing left for me to write about. I will burn the notebooks. No one remains to read them. The whales and their strange passenger, the spindly legged jewel, come no more, and I do miss their company. For the world impinges on the whales in many places. Theirs is the richest medium of all.
    My words are just dry wisps of wind. I repeat and slowly modify the hundred sentences within my mind. The mood I seek is hidden in the mouthings of my present memory, forever changing. But how lonely it would be, to be a Culminate. If their sentences are truly perfect, then their thoughts must be complete. A Culminate must never listen, for fear of picking up a word or two.
    What would I not give to have companionship today? I am not a Culminate. Winter is almost here, and still I must sail north, for there is nothing left behind. My mind is like an ocean where I taste but one small spoonful at a time, and even that is blown into salt spray, before these winds as empty as a seagull's cry.
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