I smiled back, put on my suit, buckled my seatbelt, still according to the regulations, entered the descent data, pressed the lever and leaned against the backrest: from now on everything would be automated. And I had an unpleasant feeling that someone else was reading along with me from my memory that had become a kind of public library. I had oxygen for another five hours or so, but even if I’d had it for five days it would have been the same. Or Pierre?”
I began to think with the greatest speed I thought myself capable of was the shuttle pilot with the dislocated shoulder, trapped in a survival suit with only five hours of oxygen, hopelessly lost in an apocalyptic landscape of sharp, inhospitable rocks. It blinked for a few minutes, then disappeared. Don’t ask me more because I don’t know. No water.”
I hesitated a little, but swallowed my words because I didn’t really think a swear word would be well received, especially in Heaven. We didn’t have much to do so we ate and had sex almost continuously. I felt a light touch somewhere in my inner self and after only a moment I gave up: at the foot of each tree appeared a harp that seemed to be made of gold and whose strings moved gently, seemingly moved only
