Chapter Six
Sarah woke slowly the next morning, inordinately comfortable, exquisitely happy. She lay there for a long moment, eyes closed in the soft warm glow of a bright summer morning. From the seething heart of the life-giving sun burbled up the energy that sent the slippery photons slicing across the eight-minute gap to the fecund Earth, and beyond. Those indefinable wavicles— sometimes quantum packets of particulate energy, sometimes undulating waves—cascaded from the high interplanetary spaces down thickening mile after mile of nitrogen-oxygen, bouncing, refracting, careening, until they lit the unseen room and filtered finally through the thin skin of her eyelids.
That rosy morning glow was cheery, inviting, the only impetus that could have roused Sarah from her
