The windshield wipers were going so it must have been raining. It came to me that everything was provisional. Or perhaps the better word was temporary. All the heroic actions of the past are destined to be unmade, the small memories carefully preserved must inevitably come to be forgotten, and everything we are and do and care about will in time be undone. You can save someone's life, but it's not permanent.
We are, all of us, involuntary passengers on fragile ships, visible from the shore for the briefest of moments and then forever gone. No one can say why. Perhaps we were sent here as punishment. Perhaps we were never here in the first place.
Soon enough, there will be no witnesses to prove otherwise.
- Michael Swanwick, the closing lines of "Ghost Ships," pp.52-53 in The Universe Box
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