Of course, that must mean her too ... especially her, if she was here on a government invitation. From then on his thoughts were even more alien and apart. What was there, then, to talk to her about, tell her about, ask her support for, her sympathy in, her opinion of?

It was the most important thing that had happened to him since he had known her; and Sam’s crazed paranoia had put it outside conversational bounds.

Wooden chair legs and bench cleats scraped the planks; diggers got up to go. Bron followed the Spike to the porch, wondering what he would say.

Sam was still inside, still talking, still eating, still explaining—just like in the co-op.

The door closed behind them. Bron said:

“I just can’t get over the coincidence: running into you like this! What are there, now? Three billion people on Earth? I mean to have just met you in Te-thys and then, on the other side of the Solar System, just on a side trip to—where are we? Mongolia! To run into you ... just like that! The chances must be billions to one!”

The Spike breathed deeply, looked around the square, at the mountains beyond the housetops, at the cloud-smeared sky that, by day, was infinitely higher than the night’s star-pocked roof.

“I mean,” he said, “it could be a million billion to one! A billion billion!”

She started down the porch steps, glanced at him. “Look, you’re supposed to be something of a mathematician.” She smiled a faint smile, with faintly furrowed brows. “With the war, there’re only a dozen—no, nine, actually—places on Earth a moonie can officially go—unless you’re on one of those inane political missions you’re always reading about in subversive flyers and never hearing mentioned on the channels. All of those nine places are as out of the way as this one, at least five hundred miles from any major population center. Our company’s part of an exchange program between warring—or, in Triton’s case, nearly warring—worlds so that all cultural contact isn’t cut off: The first place they suggested we go was a cunning little village just on the south side of Drake’s Passage—mean annual temperature minus seventeen degrees centigrade. Frankly, I doubt if more than three of the specified areas are even livable at any given time of Earth’s year. None of the nine has a population of more than fifteen hundred. And in a town of fifteen hundred, it’s hard for two strangers who come into it not to learn of each other’s presence inside of six hours! Given the fact that both of us are on Earth at the same time, and that both of us are moonies of our particular temperament and type, I’d say the chances of our running into one another were—what? Fifty-fifty? Perhaps slightly higher?”

He wanted to say: But I’m on one of those political missions! And I have been taken prisoner, questioned, beaten, abused—

“What are you doing here, anyway?” she asked.

“Oh, I ...” Confusion rose as he remembered Sam’s injunction. “Well, I’m here ... with Sam.” More diggers came down the steps.

“What’s Sam here for?”

“Well, he’s ... I ...” He was oppressed with the thousand secrets he was not even sure he held, revelation of any of which might send worlds and moons toppling together in some disasterous, cosmic pinball. “Well, Sam’s sort of ...” What could he say about Sam that would not return them to the forbidden subject? Sam is a friend? A woman who’s had a sex change? A liaison executive in the Outer Satellite Intelligence Department—

“—with the government?” the Spike suggested. “Well, then, I won’t go prying around anymore into that! Every time you ask a question on this world—about anything—there’s always someone at your elbow to point out politely that, really, for your own good, you’d rather not know. There’s even part of Brian’s work that’s apparently not supposed to pollute delicate little moonie minds. And from what I can gather, it’s nothing more insidious than that, a million years ago, all this was under the edge of an inland sea. I like my first supposition better—that you followed me across the Solar System because you simply couldn’t bare to be without me. That’s certainly more flattering than that you’re an official agent sent to keep tabs. The nicest one, of course, is just that it really is a coincidence. I’ll accept that.”

Bron walked beside her, his head huge with phantom data, smiling and unhappy. “Well, whether it’s a billion to one or one to a billion, I’m glad we met.”

The Spike nodded. “I guess I am too. It is nice to see a familiar face. How long have you been here?”

“Here? Just since last night. On Earth? I guess a few days. It’s not ... well, a very friendly place.”

She hunched her shoulders. “You’ve noticed? They all seem to be trying so hard. To be friendly, I mean. But they just can’t seem to figure out how.” She sighed. “Or maybe it’s just that, coming from where we do, we recognize and respond to different emblems of friendship. Do you think that could be it?” But she was talking about something different from what he meant: black and red uniforms, furnitureless cells, small machines with fangs ...

“Perhaps,” he said.

“We’ve been here two days. We leave in a few days for Mars. Will I run into you there, perhaps?”

“I ...” He frowned. “I don’t think we’re going to Mars.”

“Oh. You’re from Bellona originally, aren’t you?”

He nodded.

“What a shame. You could have shown us around for an evening—though the clear areas are as out of the way on Mars as they are here. We probably won’t be allowed within seven leagues of Bellona, or any place like it.”

“Bellona’s the only place on Mars I really know,” he said. “When I was growing up, I don’t think I got out of it more than a dozen times.”

She mumbled something conciliatory.

“But Mars is friendlier than Earth. At least it was when I left.”

“That’s understandable. I mean, even if the government’s closer to Earth’s, the texture of life, just day to day, would have to be closer to life on the Satellites. The whole ratio, and type, of girl-made object to landscape must be nearer to what it is out on the moons.” She laughed. “With all that space they have here getting in between people every time you turn around—you’re going to be in for a small adventure when you try and find your friend again, by the way—I guess it’s understandable why people don’t know how to relate to other people here. Well, Earth’s the place we all came from. Remember that. Remember that, I keep telling myself. Remember that. A few times, at home, I’ve met earthies, even become pretty friendly with a few, especially before the war: they always struck me as a little strange. But I racked it up to the fact that they were in a strange and unfamiliar place. I think the oddest thing I’ve noticed, in the two days I’ve been here, is that they’re all so much like all the earthies I’ve known before! They pick up an object, and somehow they never seem to really touch it. They say something, and their words never completely wrap around their ideas. Do you know what I mean?”

He mumbled back appropriate m’s.

The Spike laughed. “I suppose this isn’t the best way to promote interplanetary understanding and good will, is it? Maybe if everything comes out of the sea and the ground and the air as easily as it’s supposed to here you just don’t ever really have to think. How do you like life under an open sky? Do you feel you’ve come home, returned at last to the old racial spawning grounds? Or are you as anxious to get home as I am?”

“I guess I am pretty anxious.” They turned a corner. “When will you be returning?”

She drew a breath. It was a comfortable, relaxed breath: He drew one too. All the tiny smells, he thought; if you like them, you probably liked life under the open sky. If you didn’t, you couldn’t. He doubted it was more complicated than that.