Sole Survivor

with medical problems are brought to a level of health they never expected to enjoy again. A select few politicians and military figures-and members of their families-suffering from life-threatening illnesses, are brought secretly to the child to be healed. There are those in Project 99 who believe that 21-21 is their greatest asset-although others find 89-58, in spite of the considerable control problems that he poses, to be the most interesting and most valuable property in the long run.
        Now, look here, come forward in time to one rainy day in August, fifteen months after the restoration of the injured sparrow. A staff geneticist named Amos has been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, one of the deadliest forms of the disease. While healing Amos with only a soft and lingering touch, the girl detects an illness in addition to the malignancy, this one not of a physical nature but nonetheless debilitating. Perhaps because of what he has seen at Project 99, perhaps for numerous other reasons that have accumulated throughout his fifty years, Amos has decided that life is without purpose or meaning, that we have no destiny but the void, that we are only dust in the wind. This darkness in him is blacker than the cancer, and the girl heals this, as well, by the simple expediency of showing Amos the light of God and the strange dimensional lattices of realms beyond our own.
        Once shown these things, Amos is so overcome with joy and awe that he cycles between laughter and weeping, and to the eyes of the others in the room-a researcher named Janice, another named Vincent-he seems to be seized by an alarming hysteria. When Amos urges the girl to bring Janice into the same light that she has shown to him, she gives the gift again.
        Janice, however, reacts differently from Amos. Humbled and frightened, she collapses in remorse. She claws at herself in regret for the way she has lived her life and in grief for those she has betrayed and harmed, and her anguish is frightening.
        Tumult.
        Rose is summoned. Janice and Amos are isolated for observation and evaluation. What has the girl done? What Amos tells them seems like the happy babbling of a harmlessly deranged man, but babbling nonetheless, and from one who was but a few minutes ago a scientist of serious-if not brooding-disposition.
        Baffled and concerned by the strikingly different reactions of Amos and Janice, the girl withdraws and becomes uncommunicative. Rose works in private with 21-21 for more than two hours before she finally begins to pry the astounding explanation from her. The child cannot understand why the revelation that she's brought to Amos and Janice would overwhelm them so completely or why Janice's reaction is a mix of euphoria and self-flagellation. Having been born with a full awareness of her place and purpose in the universe, with an understanding of the ladder of destinies that she will climb through infinity, with the certain knowledge of life everlasting carried in her genes, she cannot ever fully grasp the shattering power of this revelation when she brings it to those who have spent their lives in the mud of doubt and the dust of despair.
        Expecting nothing more than that she is going to experience the psychic equivalent of a magic-lantern show, a tour of a child's sweet fantasy of God, Rose asks to be shown. And is shown. And is forever changed. Because at the touch of the child's hand, she is opened to the fullness of existence. What she experiences is beyond her powers to describe, and even as torrents of joy surge through her and wash away all the countless grieves and miseries of her life heretofore, she is flooded, as well, with terror, for she is aware not only of the promise of a bright eternity but of expectations that she must strive to fulfill in all the days of life ahead of her in this world and in the worlds to come, expectations that frighten her because she is unsure that she can ever meet them. Like Janice, she is acutely aware of every mean act and unkindness and lie and betrayal of which she has ever been guilty, and she recognizes that she still has the capacity for selfishness, pettiness, and cruelty; she yearns to transcend her past even as she quakes at the fortitude required to do so.
        When the vision passes and she finds herself in the girl's room as before, she harbours no doubt that what she saw was real, truth in its purest form, and not merely the child's