Free The Red Queen by Isobelle Carmody Page B

the Great White ended the Beforetime.
    I ought to have guessed it at once when Analivia described her Beforetime dream of two women who could only be Hannah and Cassy, gazing at images of devastation on the vision screen of a computermachine. How else should they have been looking at images of destruction wrought by the Great White if they had not survived it? And how could they be together if they had not been together when it happened?
    If I had needed proof, Jacob’s journal offered it. He had scribed that Hannah was far from the Land when the Great White occurred. My most recent Beforetime vision offered even more compelling proof, for the man Ishmael had spoken to Cassy of Hannah being at the Inva complex where the Beforetime Misfits had been held at the very moment when the Great White had begun. He had said that she must have foreseen what was about to happen, which suggested she had not foreseen it before, or at least not exactly when it would occur. According to the teknoguilders, Beforetime people had occasionally experienced visions of the future, but for the most part they dismissed or ignored them. Hannah had been an exception, seeing both forward and backward in time, like futuretellers.
    As to how she and the others could have survived the Great White, that was my third realisation. They had taken refuge in the human-sized cryosleep pods Doktaruth had mentioned being installed at the Inva complex. Ishmael had told Cassy that Hannah dreamed of a way they could survive and I knew from other past-dreams that animals inside cryosleep pods had no need of food or air or water beyond what the cryopod could supply. I was sure I had dreamed of her waking in what I now understood to be a cryopod and it was all too easy to imagine Cassy releasing the flame bird then racing back to Hannah who would propose they close themselves into cryosleep pods in Doktaruth’s chambers. Had all of the Beforetime Misfits done as Hannah suggested? It was hard to imagine the tough, hard-eyed Violet submitting herself to an endless sleep, moreover a sleep at what had been the very centre of destruction, if I was right about the original experimental Sentinel being the cause of the Great White. Of course I had no idea how Hannah would have managed to operate the cryopod mechanisms. The obvious answer seemed to be that she had left it in the hands of a machine. Certainly I could imagine Ines calmly and efficiently obeying the order to close Hannah and Cassy and the Beforetime Misfits into cryopods and to wake them when the earth and air were clean again, yet how terrifying to give control of your life to a machine.
    But had not the people of the Beforetime done exactly this when they developed Sentinel?
    The only reassuring thing in all of this was that, following a long period in a cryopod, Cassy and Hannah had presumably recovered, even as Ana and the others assured me I would recover.
    Abandoning yet another fruitless attempt to move, I tried to picture those final hours of the Beforetime, Hannah meeting the Misfits for the first time since they had been taken from the original Reichler Clinic. Ironic to think their kidnapping and imprisonment by govamen had probably saved them, for otherwise they would surely have perished with the millions said to have died during the Great White or in its dreadful aftermath. But what had Ishmael meant by saying to Cassy that Hannah had got something wrong? Presumably it was something important – maybe that the end was nigh and that she was not at Obernewtyn. There must have been some time, though, for Hannah had contacted Jacob and they had spoken long enough to spare him the terrible fate of their friends, leaving him to live out his life alone at Obernewtyn, until one day he decided to leave.
    To come here, I thought, where I had come countless years later . . .
    But where did Analivia’s vision of Cassy and Hannah looking at scenes of destruction on a computermachine screen fit in? The words