"Yes, sir," Jesse said. Harry nodded. I wheezed.

"Get your friend looked after," Tagore said to Jesse. "He looks like he just got the shit kicked out of him." He walked out.

"Christ, John," Jesse said, taking a napkin and cleaning off my head wound. "What did you do?"

"I sent her a wedding photo," I said.

"That's subtle," Harry said, and looked around. "Where's your cane?"

"I think it's over by the wall she slammed me into," I said. Harry left to go get it.

"Are you okay?" Jesse said to me.

"I think I busted a rib," I said. "That's not what I meant," she said. "I know what you meant," I said. "And as far as that goes, I think something else is busted, too."

Jesse cupped my face with her hand. Harry came back with my cane. We limped back to the hospital. Dr. Fiorina was extremely displeased with me.

Someone nudged me awake. When I saw who it was, I tried to speak. She clapped a hand over my mouth.

"Quiet," Jane said. "I'm not supposed to be here."

I nodded. She took her hand away. "Talk low," she said.

"We could use BrainPals," I said.

"No," she said. "I want to hear your voice. Just keep it down."

"Okay," I said.

"I'm sorry about today," she said. "It was just unexpected. I don't know how to react to something like that."

"It's all right," I said. "I shouldn't have broken it to you that way."

"Are you hurt?" she asked.

"You cracked a rib," I said.

"Sorry about that," she said.

"Already healed," I said.

She studied my face, eyes flicking back and forth. "Look, I'm not your wife," she said suddenly. "I don't know who you think I am or what I am, but I was never your wife. I didn't know she existed until you showed me the picture today."

"You had to know about where you came from," I said.

"Why?" she said hotly. "We know we've been made from someone else's genes, but they don't tell us who they were. What would be the point? That person's not us. We're not even clones—I've got things in my DNA that aren't even from Earth. We're the CDF guinea pigs, haven't you heard?"

"I heard," I said.

"So I'm not your wife. That's what I've come here to say. I'm sorry, but I'm not."

"All right," I said.

"Okay," she said. "Good. I'm going now. Sorry about throwing you across the room."

"How old are you?" I asked.

"What? Why?" she asked.

"I'm just curious," I said. "And I don't want you to go yet."

"I don't know what my age has got to do with anything," she said.

"Kathy's been dead for nine years now," I said. "I want to know how long they bothered to wait before mining her genes to make you."

"I'm six years old," she said.

"I hope you don't mind if I say you don't look like most six-year-olds that I've met," I said.

"I'm advanced for my age," she said. Then, "That was a joke."

"I know," I said.

"People don't get that sometimes," she said. "It's because most of the people I know are around the same age."

"How does it work?" I said. "I mean, what's it like? Being six. Not having a past."

Jane shrugged. "I woke up one day and I didn't know where I was or what was going on. But I was already in this body, and I already knew things. How to speak. How to move. How to think and fight. I was told I was in Special Forces, and that it was time to start training, and my name was Jane Sagan."

"Nice name," I said.

"It was randomly selected," she said. "Our first names are common names, our last names are mostly from scientists and philosophers. There's a Ted Einstein and a Julie Pasteur in my squad. At first you don't know that, of course. About the names. Later you learn a little bit about how you were made, after they've let you develop your own sense of who you are. No one you know has many memories. It's not until you meet realborn that you know that anything's really different about you. And we don't meet them very often. We don't really mix."

"'Realborn'?" I asked.

"It's what we call the rest of you," she said.

"If you don't mix, what were you doing at the commissary?" I said.

"I wanted a burger," she said. "It's not that we can't, mostly. It's that we don't."

"Did you ever wonder about who you were made from?" I asked.

"Sometimes," Jane said. "But we can't know. They don't tell us about our progies—the people we're made from. Some of us are made from more than one, you know. But they're all dead anyway. Have to be or they wouldn't use them to make us. And we don't know who knew them, and if the people who knew them get in the service, it's not like they'd find us most of the time. And you realborn die pretty damn fast out here. I don't know anyone else who's ever met a progie's relative. Or a husband."

"Did you show your lieutenant the picture?" I asked.

"No," she said. "He asked about it. I told him you sent me a picture of yourself, and that I trashed it. And I did, so the action would register if he looked. I haven't told anyone about what we said. Can I have it again? The picture?"

"Of course," I said. "I have others, too, if you want them. If you want to know about Kathy, I can tell you about her as well."

Jane stared at me in the dim room; in the low light she looked more like Kathy than ever. I ached just a little to look at her. "I don't know," she said, finally. "I don't know what I want to know. Let me think about it. Give me that one picture for now. Please."

"I'm sending it now," I said.

"I have to go," she said. "Listen, I wasn't here. And if you see me anywhere else, don't let on that we've met."

"Why not?" I asked.

"It's important for now," she said.

"All right," I said.

"Let me see your wedding ring," Jane asked.

"Sure," I said, and slipped it off to let her look at it. She held it gingerly, and peered through it.

"It says something," she said.

"'My Love is Eternal—Kathy,'" I said. "She had it inscribed before she gave it to me."

"How long were you married?" she asked.

"Forty-two years," I said.

"How much did you love her?" Jane asked. "Your wife. Kathy. When people are married for a long time, maybe they stay together out of habit."

"Sometimes they do," I said. "But I loved her very much. All the time we were married. I love her now."

Jane stood up, looked at me again, gave me back my ring, and left without saying good-bye.

"Tachyons," said Harry as he approached my and Jesse's breakfast table.

"Bless you," said Jesse.

"Very funny," he said, sitting down. "Tachyons may be the answer to how the Rraey knew we were coming."

"That's great," I said. "Now if only Jesse and I knew what tachyons were, we'd be a lot more excited about them."

"They're exotic subatomic particles," Harry said. "They travel faster than light and backward through time. So far they've just been a theory, because after all it's difficult to track something that is both faster than light and going backward in time. But the physics of skip drive theory allows for the presence of tachyons at any skip—just as our matter and energy translates into a different universe, tachyons from the destination universe travel back into the universe being left behind. There's a specific tachyon pattern a skip drive makes at a translation event. If you can spot tachyons forming that pattern, you'd know a ship with a skip drive was coming in—and when."

"Where do you hear this stuff?" I said.

"Unlike the two of you, I don't spend my days lounging about," Harry said. "I've made friends in interesting places."

"If we knew about this tachyon pattern or whatever it is, why didn't we do something about it before?" Jesse asked. "What you're saying is that we've been vulnerable all this time, and just been lucky so far."

"Well, remember what I said about tachyons being theoretical to this point," Harry said. "That's sort of an understatement. They're less than real—they're mathematical abstractions at best. They have no relation to the real universes in which we exist and move. No race of intelligence that we know of has ever used them for anything. They have no practical application."