As they barged farther south the southern autumn put a chill in the air. Hardwood trees began to appear on the once-again-basalt banks, their leaves flaring red and yellow; and one morning there was a skim of ice sheeting the smooth water against the shores. When they stood on the top of the western bank, the volcanoes Tyrrhena Patera and Hadriaca Patera loomed on the horizon like flattened Fujis, Hadriaca displaying the banded maypole of white glaciers on black rock which Maya had first seen from the other side, coming up out of Dao Vallis when she had made her tour of the flooding Hellas Basin, so long ago. With that young girl, what was her name? A relative of someone she knew.

The canal cut through the dragonback mounds of the Hesperia Dorsa. The canalside towns grew less equatorial, more austere, more highland. Volga river towns, New England fishing villages, but with names like Astapus, Aeria, Uchronia, Apis, Eunostos, Agathadaemon, Kaiko … on and on the broad band of water led them, south by west, as straight as a compass bearing for day after day, until it was hard to remember that this was the only one, that such canals were not webbed everywhere, as on the maps of the ancient dream. Oh there was one other big canal, at Boone’s Neck, but it was short and very wide, and getting wider every year, as draglines and the eastward current tore at it; no longer a canal, really, but rather an artificial strait. No, the dream of the canals had been enacted only here, in all the world; and while here, cruising tranquilly over the water, one’s view of everything else cut off by the high banks, there was a sense of romance in the air, a sense that their political and personal squabbles had a kind of Barsoomian grandeur.

Or so it felt, strolling in the nip of an evening under the pastel neons of a canalside town. In one, called Anteus, Maya was strolling the canalside promenade, looking down into boats large and small, onto beautiful big young people drinking and chatting lazily, sometimes cooking meat on braziers clamped to the railings and hung out over the water. On a wide dock extending into the canal, there was an open-air cafe, from which came the plaintive singing of a gypsy violin; she turned into the cafe instinctively, and only at the last minute saw Jackie and Athos, sitting at a canalside table alone, leaning over until their foreheads almost touched. Maya certainly did not want to interrupt such a promising scene, but the very abruptness of her halt caught Jackie’s eye, so that she looked up, then started. Maya turned to leave, but saw Jackie was getting up to come over.

Another scene, Maya thought, only partly unhappy at the prospect. But Jackie was smiling, and Athos was coming with her, at her side, watching it all with wide-eyed innocence; either he had no idea of their history, or else he had a good control of his expressions. Maya guessed the latter, simply because of the look in his eye, just that bit too innocent to be real. An actor.

“It’s beautiful this canal, don’t you think?” Jackie was saying.

“A tourist trap,” Maya said. “But a pretty one. And it keeps the tourists nicely bunched.”

“Oh come now,” Jackie said, laughing. She took Athos’s arm. “Where’s your sense of romance?”

“What sense of romance,” Maya said, pleased at this public display of affection. The old Jackie would not have done it. Indeed it was a shock to see that she was no longer young; stupid of Maya not to have thought of that, but her sense of time was such a mishmash that her own face in the mirror was a perpetual shock to her — every morning she woke up in the wrong century, so seeing Jackie looking matronly with Athos on her arm was only more of the same — an impossibility — this was the fresh dangerous girl of Zygote, the young goddess of Dorsa Brevia!

“Everyone has a sense of romance,” Jackie said. The years were not making her any wiser. Another chronological discontinuity. Perhaps taking the longevity treatment so often had clogged her brain. Curious that after such assiduous use of the treatments there should be any signs of aging left at all; in the absence of cell-division error, where exactly was it coming from? There were no wrinkles on Jackie’s face, in some ways she could be mistaken for twenty-five; and the look of happy Boonean confidence was as entrenched as ever, the only way really she resembled John — glowing like the neon scrim of the cafe overhead. But despite all that she looked her years, somehow — in her eyes, or in some gestalt at work despite all the medical manipulation.

And then one of Jackie’s many assistants was there among them, panting, gasping, pulling Jackie’s arm away from Athos, crying “Jackie, I’m so sorry, so sorry, she’s killed, she’s killed — ” — shivering —

“Who?” Jackie said sharply, like a slap.

The young woman (but she was aging) said miserably, “Zo.”

“Zo?”

“A flying accident. She fell into the sea.”

This ought to slow her down, Maya thought.

“Of course,” Jackie said.

“But the birdsuits,” Athos protested. He was aging too. “Didn’t they…”

“I don’t know about that.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Jackie said, shutting them up. Later Maya heard an eyewitness account of the accident, and the image stayed etched in her mind forever — the two fliers struggling in the waves like wet dragonflies, staying afloat so that they would have been okay, until one of the North Sea’s big swells picked them up and slammed them into the base of a seastack. After which they had drifted in the foam.

Now Jackie was withdrawn, remote, thinking things over. She and Zo had not been close, Maya had heard; some said they hated each other. But one’s child. You were not supposed to survive your children, that was something even childless Maya felt instinctively. But they had abrogated all the laws, biology meant nothing to them anymore; and here they were. If Ann had lost Peter on the falling cable; if Nadia and Art ever lost Nikki… even Jackie, as foolish as she was, had to feel it.

And she did. She was thinking hard, trying to find the way out. But she wasn’t going to; and then she would be a different person. Aging — it had nothing to do with time, nothing. “Oh Jackie,” Maya said, and put a hand forward. Jackie flinched, and Maya pulled the hand back. “I’m sorry.”

But just when people most need help is when their isolation is the most extreme. Maya had learned that on the night of Hiroko’s disappearance, when she had tried to comfort Michel. Nothing could be done.

Maya almost cuffed the sniffling young aide, restrained herself: “Why don’t you escort Ms. Boone back to your ship. And then keep people away for a while.”

Jackie was still lost in her thoughts. Her flinch away from Maya had been instinct only, she was stunned — disbelieving — and the disbelief absorbed all her effort. All just as one would expect, from any human being. Maybe it was even worse if you hadn’t gotten along with the child — worse than if you loved them, ah, God — “Go,” Maya said to the aide, and with a look commanded Athos to help. He would certainly make an impression on her, one way or the other. They led her off. She still had the most beautiful back in the world, and held herself like a queen. That would change when the news sank in.

Later Maya found herself down at the southern edge of town, where the lights left off and the starry sheen of the canal was banked by black berms of slag. It looked like the scroll of a life, someone’s world line: bright neon squiggles, moving across a landscape to the black horizon. Stars overhead and underfoot. A black piste over which they glided soundlessly.

She walked back to their boat. Stumped down the gangplank. It was distressing to feel this way for an enemy, to lose an enemy to this kind of disaster. “Who am I going to hate now?” she cried to Michel.

“Well,” Michel said, shocked. Then, in a comforting tone: “I’m sure you’ll think of someone.”