The apartment -- at first, inconceivably large, almost uninhabitable -- slowly lost its strangeness. On the tenth morning, she finally woke expecting the sight of the bedroom exactly as she found it; if not at peace with her situation, at least unsurprised to be exactly where she was.

She phoned Durham and said, "I want to join the expedition."

+ + +

The Contact Group occupied one story of a tower in the southeast quadrant. Maria, uninterested in teleporting, made the journey on foot, crossing from building to building by walkway, ignoring the puppets and admiring the view. It was faster than traveling at street level, and she was gradually conquering her fear of heights. Bridges here did not collapse from unanticipated vibrations. Perspex tubes did not hurtle to the ground, spilling corpses onto the pavement. It made no difference whether or not Malcolm Carter had known the first thing about structural engineering; the City was hardly going to bother laboriously modeling stresses and loads just to discover whether or not parts of itself should fail, for the sake of realism. Everything was perfectly safe, by decree.

Durham was waiting for her in the foyer. Inside, he introduced her to Dominic Repetto and Alisa Zemansky, the project's other leaders. Maria hadn't known what to expect from her first contact with later-generation Elysians, but they presented as neatly dressed humans, male and female, both "in their late thirties," wearing clothes which would not have looked wildly out of place in any office in twenty-first century Sydney. Out of deference to her? She hoped not -- unless the accepted thing to do, in their subculture, was to show a different form to everyone, expressly designed to put them at ease. Repetto, in fact, was so strikingly handsome that she almost recoiled at the thought that he -- or his parent -- had deliberately chosen such a face. But what did codes of vanity from the age of cosmetic surgery and gene splicing mean, now? Zemansky was stunning too, with dark-flecked violet eyes and spiked blonde hair. Durham appeared -- to her, at least -- almost unchanged from the man she'd met in 2050. Maria began to wonder how she looked to the young Elysians. Like something recently disinterred, probably.

Repetto shook her hand over and over. "It's a great, great honor to meet you. I can't tell you how much you've inspired us all." His face shone; he seemed to be sincere. Maria felt her cheeks flush, and tried to imagine herself in some analogous situation, shaking hands with . . . who? Max Lambert? John von Neumann? Alan Turing? Charles Babbage? Ada Lovelace? She knew she'd done nothing compared to any of those pioneers -- but she'd had seven thousand years for her reputation to be embellished. And three billion for her work to bear fruit.

The floor was divided into open-plan offices, but nobody else seemed to be about. Durham saw her peering around the partitions and said cryptically, "There are other workers, but they come and go."

Zemansky led the way into a small conference room. She said to Maria, "We can move to a VR representation of Planet Lambert, if you like -- but I should warn you that it can be disorienting: being visually immersed but intangible, walking through vegetation, and so on. And moving at the kinds of speeds necessary to keep track of the Lambertians can induce motion sickness. Of course, there are neural changes which counteract both those problems --"

Maria wasn't ready to start tampering with her brain -- or to step onto the surface of an alien planet. She said, "Viewing screens sound easier. I'd be happier with that. Do you mind?" Zemansky looked relieved.

Repetto stood at the end of the table and addressed the three of them, although Maria knew this was all for her benefit.

"So much has been happening on Lambert, lately, that we've slowed it right down compared to Standard Time so we can keep up with developments." An elliptical map of the planet's surface appeared on the wall behind him. "Most recently, dozens of independent teams of chemists have begun looking for a simpler, more unified model underlying the current atomic theory." Markers appeared, scattered across the map. "It's been three hundred years since the standard model -- thirty-two atoms with a regular pattern of masses, valencies and mutual affinities -- became widely accepted. The Lambertian equivalent of Mendeleev's Periodic Table." He flashed a smile at Maria, as if she might have been a contemporary of Mendeleev -- or perhaps because he was proud of his arcane knowledge of the history of a science which was no longer true. "At the time, atoms were accepted as fundamental entities: structureless, indivisible, requiring no further explanation. Over the last twenty years, that view has finally begun to break down."

Maria was already confused. From the hurried reading she'd done in the past few days, she knew that the Lambertians only modified an established theory when a new phenomenon was discovered which the theory failed to explain. Repetto must have noticed her expression, because he paused expectantly.

She said, "Autoverse atoms are indivisible. There are no components you can separate out, no smaller stable entities. Smash them together at any energy you like, and all they'll do is bounce -- and the Lambertians are in no position to smash them together at any energy at all. So . . . surely there's nothing in their experience that the current theory can't account for perfectly."

"Nothing in their immediate environment, certainly. But the problem is cosmology. They've been refining the models of the history of their star system, and now they're looking for an explanation for the composition of the primordial cloud."

"They accepted the thirty-two atoms and their properties as given -- but they can't bring themselves to do the same with the arbitrary amounts of each one in the cloud?"

"That's right. It's difficult to translate the motivation exactly, but they have a very precise aesthetic which dictates what they'll accept as a theory -- and it's almost physically impossible for them to contradict it. If they try to dance a theory which fails to resonate with the neural system which assesses its simplicity, the dance falls apart." He thought for a second, then pointed to the screen behind him; a swarm of Lambertians appeared. "Here's an example -- going back awhile. This is a team of astronomers -- all fully aware of the motions of the planets in the sky, relative to the sun -- testing out a theory which attempts to explain those observations by assuming that Planet Lambert is fixed, and everything else orbits around it."

Maria watched the creatures intently. She would have been hard-pressed to identify the rhythms in their elaborate weaving motions -- but when the swarm began to drift apart, the collapse of order was obvious.

"Now here's the heliocentric version, from a few years later."

The dance, again, was too complex to analyze -- although it did seem to be more harmonious -- and after a while, almost hypnotic. The black specks shifting back and forth against the white sky left trails on her retinas. Below, the ubiquitous grassland seemed an odd setting for astronomical theorizing. The Lambertians apparently accepted their condition -- in which herding mites represented the greatest control they exerted over nature -- as if it constituted as much of a Utopia as the Elysian's total freedom. They still faced predators. Many still died young from disease. Food was always plentiful, though; they'd modeled their own population cycles, and learned to damp the oscillations, at a very early stage. And, nature lovers or not, there'd been no "ideological" struggles over "birth control"; once the population model had spread, the same remedies had been adopted by communities right across the planet. Lambertian cultural diversity was limited; far more behavior was genetically determined than was the case in humans -- the young being born self-sufficient, with far less neural plasticity than a human infant -- and there was relatively little variation in the relevant genes.