Lost Convoy, Part XXVI: World Enough and Time

Tabitha asked for a manifest of the frigate as soon as she hard the news. She was looking for someone, hoping they had somehow survived. She found instead that she concentrated on a few names, ones she didn't even recognize, but which were attached to biographies that sounded as if they had come out of her songbook.

Ray Patch. This one was the pilot. Unlike her ship, this would be a fairly significant position over there. She could only imagine what kind of responsibility he was now feeling.

Jim Brewer. There were very few older passengers on her frigate, and so Jim's age alone was interesting. She began to consider him something of a father figure, something she hadn't really thought of in years. She'd written so many songs about it, she now realized, but the idea of it had been so elusive...What was Jim like in person?

Kim Jones. Like the pilot, Ray Patch, Kim no doubt had it far more rough on that frigate. There were many flight attendants on hers, as many, it almost seemed, as passengers. And yet Kim seemed to be completely alone.

Clive Lockwood. Clive Lockwood...She should have felt much the same way about him as she did Jim Brewer, just as Kim and Ray were something of a match, and yet Clive intrigued her in a different way entirely. He read so mysteriously, a retired priest, no scandals in his past, and not so old that he would have been infirm at the time of the event. Something had to have happened to him, something must have shaken him, this man of God. She believed it had everything to do with the event. She would seek this one out personally.

She had so much time. There only seemed to be time, and time seemed so incredibly meaningless. Time was now humanity's world, she mused, a new reality, but somehow familiar, comforting. Something predictable. And while she waited, she became curious. She asked if she could call the other frigate, and as it turned out, that was no problem at all. She spoke with a man named Gabriel Martinez, and James Ward intercepted some of her time, but she ended up getting exactly what she wanted, and she had no idea how it happened, and really, didn't care.

That was the way the world now worked. That was what time was, a matter of opportunity. She said to Clive Lockwood, "I've been meaning to talk with you."