Bright of the Sky by Kay Kenyon Read Free Book Online Page A

comprehension—as few things were to Helice Maki.
    Stefan smiled, enjoying her reaction. “Maybe God plays in more than one realm.”
    Along with every other member of the board, Helice stared at the bent-over blades of grass. She murmured, “Yes, but which god?”
    She intended to find out.

CHAPTER FOUR
    T HEY CALLED SUCH THINGS OUT-OF-BODY EXPERIENCES . From Quinn’s research, he knew them to be illusions. An OBE was the impression of being detached from one’s body and seeing it from above, now proved—to the scientifically minded, at least—to be the result of body-related processing in the medial temporal lobe of the brain.
    His body was giving him such an illusion now.
    He lay on his couch, having fallen asleep there well after midnight, and now awoke to the OBE. A man stood below him, standing on the edge of a platform, looking down. By scrunching forward a bit, Quinn could look over the man’s shoulder. His stomach convulsed at the sight of the thirty-thousand-foot plunge to the planet below. Beyond the man’s shoulders and fluttering hair, Quinn could see a vast ocean, a gaping maw into which the man might step at any moment. The man was thinking of jumping; the ocean beckoned with silvery indifference.
    It was always the same OBE. Quinn knew the next thing he would do was look up. He fought this inclination.
    The man below him was himself. Neither of them spoke, by mutual consent or by the rules and vows of this illusory place.
    Then he did look up. There, in all its wrongful horror, stretched a river of fire as broad as the world. It must not be there. It must not be silent and stable. But it was. It had eaten the Sun. It was the Sun.
    Quinn turned away, facing down—almost as bad. He descended, becoming one with the man standing on the platform. No longer the superior, knowing, separate mind, he now had truly become Titus Quinn, indivisible. And he so wished not to be.
    The scene faded, as it always did, leaving him feeling light-headed and disturbed. Was this the phenomenon known as OBE, or had he actually been dreaming? Of far more interest: was this a memory? Two years ago he’d known the answer. He’d been someplace, a place that had kept him a long time. He had snippets of memory that amounted to little more than dream scape images. He didn’t know what happened to his wife and daughter. For a few months after he had regained consciousness on Lyra, a settled planet on the rim of known space, he had strongly believed that he’d been in an alternate world. Gradually he’d come to doubt his experience, his shattered memories, though there was no explanation for how he had come to be on Lyra. Ignoring his claims, Minerva treated him like a disoriented survivor of a terrible event, the ship’s explosion and the death of its passengers and crew.
    Thus it was of the utmost importance whether the vision of the man on the platform between bright ocean and flaming sky was a memory or not. Because if it was a memory, then that was the other place.
    He heard noises outside. In an instant he realized it was what had kicked him out of his dream. There were sounds outside, in the yard.
    Now fully awake, he sat up, throwing off the coverlet. From the next room, through the kitchen window, he spied one of his defensive lights strobing. Another light caught his eye through the window near the dining room hutch. His feet found his shoes in the dark, a knack carried over from the old days when he had often been summoned to the flight deck in the middle of a sleep shift. He was instantly awake, also a carryover, all senses on alert. As he passed the laser gun propped up against the bookcase, he grabbed it and made for the back door, already fully dressed, having fallen asleep that way.
    Outside, the fog dumped a load of moisture onto his warm body, quickly leveling the heat gradient between him and the Pacific Northwest air. He crouched near the door and listened. It was Christmas Eve. A soggy, dangerous one.
    The