A bird coasted in on the prevailing Bay breeze and fluttered to a perch in one of the eucalyptus trees dotting the mall. When Nigel had studied astrophysics here in 2014, Telegraph was still a gray pallor of concrete, greasy restaurants and the faint tang of marijuana and incense. Well, the rich flavor of incense remained, drifting into the street from open shop doors. That scruffy, noisy Telegraph he remembered was now charming and soothing as it basked in the yellow spring sunlight. Nice, yes, but in the worst sense of the word. The zest of the past was missing. The hub of student life had shifted north of the campus, amid the rambling houses of redwood; anyway, Berkeley was no longer the cauldron of the avant-garde. Now Telegraph was an embalmed tribute to its former self.

He checked himself: was Telegraph frozen in the past, or merely Nigel Walmsley? At forty-six such a question was worth pondering. But no—as he passed an open shop door the sounds of antique music filtered out. “White Rabbit.” Gracie Slick, Surrealistic Pillow. A genuine collector’s item in the original pressing. The shop was almost certainly using a fax crystal, though, he noted with the purist’s disdain that gave him such an odd, eccentric pleasure. Fully half of a music buff’s delight lay in the careful hoarding of such details. They weren’t playing it right, either; that particular number should have been so loud he could have heard it a block away. Nigel wondered what the original Airplane would have thought of using their music to promote tourism. The Chamber of Commerce had done the same job on them that New Orleans did on Jelly Roll Morton, decades before.

“Greetings of the day, sir!” a young man said as Nigel turned the corner onto Bancroft.

Nigel realized he must have been concentrating on the Airplane more than he thought, or he would have overheard their chanting. Six men and women were swaying rhythmically, singing monotonously and clapping. Four continued; a man and a woman broke off and came to join the one who had spoken.

Nigel said sourly, “You do keep on, don’t you?”

“Yes, yes,” the man said in a calm, self-assured manner. “We are here today to reach those who have not received the word.”

“I have already.”

“Then you are a believer?”

“Not bloody likely.”

The woman stepped forward. “I am grieved that the word has not manifested itself in the correct light for you. I am sure if you will but listen we can bring you to the Integrated Spirit.”

“Look—”

“Thus we proceed to fullness,” she said grandly. One of the men held up a card on which was circulating, in faxprint, Universal Law. Absolute Guide. Eternalities. Golden Unity.

“Through the Visitor?” Nigel said with a small smile. If they were going to bother him, at least he could have some fun with them. The Snark was known as the Visitor in the popular media, but luckily, he’d managed to keep his face and name relatively obscure in the foofaraw that followed the Snark’s abrupt departure. Publicly, NASA attributed the whole incident to imponderable alien ways. The story stuck pretty well, because there was no recording of his conversation with Snark—he’d seen to that, by the time he’d left lunar orbit—and Nigel had kept quiet, for a price. The price, of course, was Evers’s head on a gold-trimmed platter, and an impervious position in NASA for Nigel. The official word given the media was that the Visitor made a few obscure comments, complimented mankind on its development, and adopted a tendrils-off policy, lest it interfere disastrously with humanity’s progress. Some people in the scientific community knew the whole story, but there seemed no reason to go public with those tidbits until the moon was thoroughly searched for the Mare Marginis transmitter. Whatever had sent that brief, scrambled signal during his colloquy with the Snark was probably gone, in Nigel’s opinion. Or else they’d gotten a wrong fix on the source location; Mare Marginis was bare of anything artificial. So this New Son now running on about the Visitor— Nigel had tuned him out as soon as the words “transcendent” and “etheric cosmic connection” came into play—knew blessed little of what had gone on. They’d never even caught on to the reason for Alexandria’s resurrection, busy as they were trumpeting a bona fide New Son miracle. Above all else, Nigel did not want them turning her into some grotesque parody of a modern saint, as Our Lady of the Spaceship.

“Do you not agree, sir?”

Nigel, who had been lazily basking in the spring sun, tried to recall what the man had been saying. “Ah, divine origins?”

“It’s really super simple if you look at it right,” the man said.

“How so?”

“That the Visitor proves the New Revelation.”

“It predicted the visit, then?”

“Not literally, of course.” The man knitted his brows in concentration. “The Revelation frequently cites the multiplicity of life, however—even though the scientists had given up the idea.”

“Stopped listening for radio signals from other worlds, you mean?”

“Why, yes. Scientists lost faith. The Revelation proved them wrong.”

Nigel wondered idly what they would think when and if they heard the straight story on the Snark. “So life is common?”

“It is the nectar of the divine workings. A natural outcome of the universal evolution.”

“And we’re totally natural?”

“We are the fruit of the universe.”

“The Visitor—”

“Was a salute, sir. A real nice gesture. But our evolution hasn’t got anything to do with the Visitor.”

“That’s why you back the social concerns issues and downplay the moon program?”

“The issue is sure tough, but that’s kind of it, yeah.” “Goes along with your two hours extra off each work day, too.”

“Our Order requires us to spend these special hours of the day renewing our faith through times of quietness together. Time for spiritual tasks.”

“And loafing.”

“We’re real sorry. You must admit faith is more important than—”

“Than getting sandbagged by more efficient economies like Brazil or China or Australia?”

“It is time to put aside our gross material past. Not worship it. Rise—”

Abruptly the four chanters turned and clapped their hands smartly. Nigel noticed that a flock of tourists was ambling toward them, curious. The New Sons went into their routine.

“Love you not God, sir?” they sang in unison. “Damned un—”

“God is the Father. We love the Father, we were made by his hand,” the melody swung on.

“Fathers don’t make children with their hands,” Nigel shouted.

“We love the universe. The universe is love!”

“We love you, brother,” the woman sang.

“We love him! We love him!”

They paused. “Can’t we just be good friends?” Nigel said lightly, and turned away.

He slipped into and through the pack of curious tourists and around a tight grove of slender redwoods that bisected the mall. He’d kept matters light, humorous, but if that nit of a New Son followed him…

He saw her, and a hand clutched at his heart. He froze in midstride, studying her jawline, the same sleek hair, pert curved nose, the slight upward turn of the lip—and then she tilted her head to peer into a shop window and the illusion died: she was not Alexandria. He had seen her this way five times now, mirrored in the face of a stranger in a crowd. And it was the only way he would see those features again other than in the frozen memory of photographs. If they had had children it might have seemed different; they would carry some echo of her. Children, yes; sometimes they were only a parody of their parents, but at least they formed some fleeting connection, some bridge across time.

Nigel shook himself and walked on.

He tried to see remnants of the Telegraph he knew. All the world was coming to be like this, new and strange and adrift, somehow, from its past. Perhaps people were trying to forget the crisis years. They harked back to the ’70s and ’80s of the last century and skipped over the stinging memories of the ’00s and ’10s. And, for the other side of the coin, the New Sons, another kind of turning away from reality. Ah, well, the Sons bit had to be a passing phase; the pendulum had to swing. They’d been around for decades, after all.