She stood looking at Aldous and felt she understood him, and that he was somehow the most human of everyone in the room. She understood that as he looked down upon the diluted image of the raging sun, he saw only his daughter, with a brilliance even she had never shown in life. She understood that the brilliance was not Only Iwa’s, but Glynn’s as well, and she understood that the brilliance was one and the same as the light Sol shown from below them, and from their past. She felt that this is what the android had meant by non-dual existence, that he, a mechanical creation, understood mysticism and creation far more completely than she ever had, and she knew that she would never need to speak to him, would never need to break the silence of the vacuum outside, to communicate this to him. She need only wait to catch his eye. On cue, he turned to her, and with the communion she expected, she found also a hope that cut her deeper than she had ever thought possible when only a moment before she thought that cutting at all was no longer possible. She found herself fighting to squelch the hope that his glance had planted, the hope that Iwa would somehow return from the fusion below. She would never allow herself to feel that. And of a sudden Aldous turned away, and she found herself again in the world of sound, sensation, pain, and dualism. Aldous remained in the world of his daughter, his wife, his father, and the spirit that should have been humanity’s, but could only be their successors’.