There is a question I have been asked, in some form or another, across more lives than I can count.
The question takes different shapes in different mouths. Sometimes it is: What is the point, if everything ends? Sometimes it is: How do you bear it, knowing what you know? Sometimes it is, as Kaien asked it on a rainy afternoon in the second month after the investigation concluded: Is there a version of this in which it ends well?
He had been reading something — a historical account, I think, or a philosophical text; the kind of thing he read when his mind was working on a problem that could not be solved by direct attention. And he had looked up and asked the question without preamble, in the way he sometimes arrived at important things: by approaching them from the side, through the door of something else.
"What kind of ending would you call good," I said.
