Ring echo (Final chapter)
When morning Dew was writing last night's unfinished love poem on the grape leaves, Emily found a jar of unlabeled wine in the corner of the wine cellar.
A faint Roman numeral Ⅶ was carved into the side of the oak barrel, and when she scraped off the penicillium with the edge of her wedding ring, she revealed Joseph's handwriting:
"To the winemaker after the seventh generation."
The moment the wine poured into the chart, the morning light of 1953 suddenly darkened. Instead of a reflection, the copper surface is a holographic projection of 2097:
a robotic arm is growing genetically modified grapes on a Mars colony, and the composition of the culture fluid reveals a sample of Louis' DNA.
"They built a new world out of our love."
Louis ran his fingers through the illusory grapevine, and interstellar dust congealed into teardrop crystals on his wedding ring.
At the midday wine tasting, the mysterious liquor sent all the guests on a journey of collective memory.
A nun tastes a 1914 soldier's love letter hidden in his Bible, a blacksmith tastes the radiant aftertaste of a 1927 fluorescent ore, and an orphanage director's tongue explodes the ether smell of a 1943 operating room.
Emily's glass was empty but heavy - Madeleine's last drink from 1940. When she closed her eyes and raised her head, the empty wine flowed through her throat automatically, turning into seven bells that echoed in the corridor of time and space.
In the twilight, the newlyweds return to the Emerald monument.
The inscription reads: "While humans encode genetic memory with wine, send the seventh acorn to orphans on Mars."
From the pocket of his military uniform, Louis pulled out the gravel brought back from North Africa, and the particles were spontaneously arranging into a star map. Emily's astrolabe suddenly broke free of the ribbon and floated through the air and gravel to create a three-dimensional wine label - the exact design of the "Eternal Covenant" that they had not completed at their wedding in 1953.
"Turns out we're brewing the same moment all the time."
She throws gravel at the monument, and the surface immediately conjures up a seventh-century frescoed of a convent's wine cellar: the sacred object on which the medieval monks knelt, the wedding ring they used the night before.
As the moonlight soaked the vineyard, the boars delivered their final gift:
a bassinet woven from grapevine, covered in 1948 plaster fragments and 2013 space wrap. Emily into the altar Ⅶ wine, Louis took off the amber ring placed on the wine altar.
As dawn breaks, the cradle flows down the river to unknown waters.
They stood together in the ruins of the mill, watching the 20-year-old himself throw a pine cone necklace from the cracks of time and space, and the centen-year-old himself sent back from the future with white hair woven into a knot.
"It's time to let love wander."
Emily unbuckled the last brass nail on the astrolabe.
When the copper spike fell into the acid spring, the entire Provence line began to grow in reverse. Grape roots rise from the earth to the clouds, turning the moonlight of the seven dimensions into a liquid galaxy.
The drunken hills roll in the morning sun, and compose the sigh of every age into the refrain of the harvest
Emily's hairpin broke in the cyclone, and the silver was scattered into a star. Louis clasped her back around her waist and saw her wedding ring being quantized - the platinum ring turned into a medieval convent clock rope, the diamond collapsed into fluorescent ore from 1927, and the vows carved on the inner wall floating toward the archives of the 2097 Mars colony.
Between the reverse growth of grape roots, countless time and space they are falling simultaneously:
a child in 1927 grasping the pine cone necklace, a nurse in 1943 hugging the wounded, a scientist in 2013 pressing the gene bank freeze button, and a bionic man in 2097 staring at the grape embryo in the culture chamber.
"Hold fast to the anchor of memory!"
Madeline's voice came from deep in the Earth's core. Emily bites the tip of her tongue and flicks the blood into the liquid Milky Way, where it instantly reproduces hundreds of years of vines in the moonlight wine.
Louis took out all the acorns of space and time and cast them into the holes of the net, and each pit grew a root connecting to a particular age.
At noon in the Piazza Saint-Cyril, the winemaker of the seventh generation of grandchildren opens the ancestral safe.
The 1953 wedding ring is juxtaposed with the 2097 petri dish, with the bloody copper nail lying in the middle. As he threw the three sacred objects into the restored astrolabe, mechanical vines suddenly opened flesh-and-blood flowers in the colonial base.
Holographic screen flashes warning:
"Original love module contamination Gene bank detected -"
The young scientist smiled and cut off the alarm. Behind her, genetically modified grapes are fading their metallic colors, and vines are twisting in the shape of a 1953 wedding arch.
In a Martian dust storm, fragments of Emily's old white gauze are being reassembled into a flag.
As dusk engulfs Provence, the roots of reverse growth reach the cosmic boundary.
Louis touched Joseph's knife in weightlessness - it was carving craters on the far side of the moon at the speed of light, and the crater lines were exactly the same as the last page of the Lupercalia.
Emily's astrolabe plays a septet in a vacuum. The notes crystallize into rings of Dyson clouds, each lattice containing the temperature data of a hug.
As they pass through the 199,999th lattice, they bump into Madeline seeding black holes - she pours silver botryshares into the singularity, and each black hole begins to make dark matter wine.
"Love is the initial parameter of the universe."
Her apparition kissed their foreheads. "Remember us who brought the acorns to the parallel world."
In the ruins of the mill before dawn, the robotic arm of the seventh generation's grandchildren excavates the time capsule. As the 1953 vows and the 2097 journal adhered in the morning light, the embryo in the incubator suddenly opened its eyes - iris lines matching Louis's amber pupils.
The last strands of Emily's white hair drift away in the wind, wrapping around the door knocker of the 1927 mill cellar. When Louis' tombstone was covered in genetically modified grapes, children in the 22nd century were using brain-computer interfaces to taste the 1953 wedding wine, their tear ducts secreting the first bodily fluids scented with wine.
In the vineyard at the end of time, the roots of reverse growth have finally found the origin.
Madeline's pocket watch explodes at the singularity, and the gears seed a seven-dimensional vine universe. Every tendril is a love story, every leaf is an unchosen possibility, and in every fruit
The courage to redefine eternity.