16 A Dream of Futures
I AM WALKING THROUGH woods so dark that I can barely see the shapes of the trees about me in the far infrared range. At the same time, I know that I am walking through the darkened corridors of the world ship Desolation, my steps echoing in a ship empty of all life but me.
My left foot falls on a dark wooded path; my right foot falls on a softly echoing and shadowed metal deck. The darkness obscures both spaces as I walk. Now in the distance there comes a flash of white light that washes out the forest I dimly see in my left eye and turns black to white, and white to black in the negative palette of the deck I now see with my right eye.
All returns to darkness, and then I see a flash of Cretaceous landscape, and the view of mount Fiji with snow, then a flash of rai
