“But Minnesota is a long way from the sea,” I said.

“Well, I know that, but it can’t be helped. What’s worse is that everything is being” — she waved her trowel vaguely — “dispersed. All the history here. The culture.”

“History? Mom, you’re a newcomer here. You’re from England!”

“Yes, but so is everybody a newcomer but the Tequesta Indians. That’s part of the charm of the place. I think it’s important that we stay, you know. We old ones. Isn’t that what old people are, symbols of the past, of continuity? If we go then the place will just die. And what will happen to people then?… It does feel very strange to live in a place which has no future, I admit that.”

“Mom—”

“You know, it’s odd. In my lifetime they’ve taken away so many of the things that used to kill you when I was young. Cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer’s, heart disease, even schizophrenia — allof those chronic diseases turned out to be caused by infection, all of them preventable once we targeted the right virus or retrovirus. Who’d have thought it? So with nothing left to kill you, you just live on, and on. But then they took away the world instead.”

She wasn’t really talking to me, I saw. She continued with her patient gardening, digging and digging.

I found John out back. He was sweeping windblown sand off the porch.

He had a distracted expression. I wondered if he was getting news about Tom. But it turned out he was listening to his personal therapist. He grinned, touched my ear, and I heard a gentle male voice: “John, you’re overly perturbed about a situation you can’t control. You know you have to accept what can’t be changed. Take an hour off, then let me play you some stuff on cognitive feedback which…”

I pulled away.

“You should try one of these things,” John said. “It can even prescribe pharmaceuticals, you know. Spin-off from the space program. Would you like me to set you up?”

“No, thanks.”

He stepped toward me. Our closeness of last night had dissipated back into the usual rivalry; his blocky face, in the slanting morning light, looked ugly, coarse. “You never did accept any drug therapy after Morag, did you? You know, it is possible to block the formation of traumatic memories altogether. You just take the right pill in the hours immediately after the event — you target the formation of proteins, or some such — I guess that’s too late for you now with Morag, but—”

“I suppose you fed pills to your kids after Inge left, did you?”

He flinched at that, but he snapped back, “They didn’t need it. You, on the other hand—”

My anger, frustration, helplessness came boiling out. “You know the trouble with you, John, your whole fucking life? You deal with symptoms, not causes. You fix your kids so they’ll never be sad. You listen to a tin voice in your ear and you pop your damn pills so you don’t carry scars from anything bad, even from your wife dumping you. And your work is all about symptoms, too. The coasts are flooded? Fine, spread what’s left of the wealth around a little more. The Atlantic coast is hammered by a dozen hurricanes a season? Fine, add a couple of zeroes to your lawsuit against the Chinese. You don’t do squat about the root cause of it all, do you?”

“It’s not my job,” he said. His voice was mild, as if I were no more than an irate client, which maddened me even more. “Michael, I understand how you are feeling—”

“Oh, fuck off.” I turned on my heel and stalked off.

He called after me. “If I hear anything about Tom I’ll let you know. Keep your implant switched on…”

I wasn’t even gracious enough to acknowledge that. It was not one of my finer moments. I stomped around the house, trying to calm down.

In the yard, the kids were playing with their smart football again. Both of them wore masks, flimsy transparent things, presumably to guard them against the foul breeze from China. They welcomed me, and I joined in their game, volleying and heading. I was always lousy at football, and I always will be, but they were gallingly kind.

So I was spending time with them, with Sven and Claudia, John’s beautiful kids, my niece and nephew. But I felt uncomfortable.

At one point the ball rolled off the yard’s bare concrete floor and ended up in long scrubby dune grass. You could see it roll back and forth, trying to find its way back to the game, but its rudimentary sensorium was confused by the blades of grass that towered around it. After a time it started to sound its little alarm chime.

Sven and Claudia stooped over the thing as it rolled about. “Look,” Sven said. “When it sees us it comes toward us.”

“Get back out of its sight,” said Claudia. “Let’s see what it does.” They both stepped back out of the way.

The ball resumed its rolling, utterly baffled. There was a fragment of sentience in there, of genuine awareness. The ball could feel pain, the way a simple animal can, perhaps. Why, even the plaintive way it rang its stupid alarm chime was enough to break your heart. But those kids just stepped backward and forward, experimenting with it.

When I looked at Claudia, especially, I always felt a chill. It wasn’t so much what she did but what she didn’t do. There was nothing behind that pretty face, I thought, nothing but emptiness, like the endless black abyssal emptiness that lay between worlds. She made me feel cold, just looking at her.

In the end I picked up the ball myself and threw it back into the yard.

And John came running around the corner, wheezing. His assistant Feliz had called. It was news of Tom. My son was injured but alive.

On this planet the clouds were tall, rising in soft mounds around the equator and gathering in immense creamy swirls toward the poles.

To Alia this was a pretty view, but meaningless. She knew nothing about planets. She had never even visited one before. The only planet she had ever studied in detail was Earth, the root of all mankind, with its layers of archaic planetary defenses, its skim of ocean, its clustering city-covered continents.

But there were no continents here. When the flitter dipped into the atmosphere of this world there was nothing but an ocean, a crumpled silver-blue sheet that spread to the horizon. Above, the clouds were heaped up in a vast three-dimensional array of sculpture. This whole world was water, she thought, nothing but water, water below, water in the air. And under the clouds the prospect was oppressive, gloomy, illuminated only by shafts of sunlight cast through breaks in the cover.

She was here, under this dismal sky, because the Transcendence had willed it.

The Transcendence: the godlike assemblage of immortals at the heart of human society, from whom all political authority flowed. Truthfully, Alia knew little about it, save that it was, so the creepy scuttlebutt had it, a project of ancients, of undying. But what was the Transcendence itself? In her head she vaguely imagined something titanic, superhuman, beyond comprehension, perhaps like the muddled light of the Galaxy Core occluded by its interstellar clouds. Nobody talked about it much.

But now, it seemed, the Transcendence had taken an interest in her own small life. And it had already brought her far from home.

With Reath, agent of the Commonwealth, she had already traveled thousands of light-years. This water-world’s sun was on the fringe of a giant stellar nursery, a huge glowing cloud of roiling dust and ice that was spawning one hot young star after another. The nursery was on the inner edge of the Sagittarius Arm, one of the Galactic disc’s principal star-birthing regions, and the water-world itself was a moon of a massive gas giant. So the sky here was crowded and spectacular — but right now, through those clouds, she couldn’t see a trace of it, not even the primary giant.


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