Home, she registered at UCLA. Midway through the fall semester she met a B. A. student named Vincent Connor who drove all thoughts of flight and recrimination from her mind. Vince was a farmboy, gauche and handsome. He came from Wyoming, his daddy was a sheep rancher there, but to Rosa’s glazed and grateful eye he was something out of the Broadway musical Oklahoma!: a sweet, big-boned blond man in a checkerboard cotton shirt. At any moment, Rosa thought, he might break into song.

She married him in the spring and became Rosa Perry Connor. Five of his cousins, brave about airplanes, flew in from Wyoming with his widowed father. The church was full. Her twin nieces, four years old, her brother’s girls, carried Rosa’s train. After the reception Vince began their honeymoon drive to San Francisco; they spent a night at a motel on Highway One where the sea fog came winding through the pines. They made love for the first time as man and wife, which seemed to inject a new vigor into the act. Rosa called him Cowboy, and he grinned.

After that—

Years later, she would wonder at how fast the time had passed. Vince took a series of jobs, one of them with her father’s electronics firm in Orange County. Briefly, Rosa was thrust into the garden-party and country-club circle she had despised as a girl. She wasn’t good at it. Vince was worse. He didn’t know how to dress. At parties, he told coarse jokes or refused to say anything at all. “He has ‘Wyoming’ stamped on his forehead,” a friend told Rosa, “and it’s fucking indelible.” Vince had dreams of opening his own business, but he couldn’t manage to save any money. He began to drink too much. So did Rosa. Her garden parties became haphazard affairs, at which she was liable to sit cross-legged on the patio steps indulging her old Fokker fantasy. Watch out, girls, it’s the Red Baroness. Airsick bags provided for your comfort on the seatback.

When his father died, Vincent drove her across the desert to Wyoming, which Rosa regarded as a hostile alien planet. To her horror, Vince had decided to take over the family ranch.

“You’ll get used to it,” he told her, not much interested in her objections. “It’s not so bad here.”

But it was. It was a huge, lonely land full of bellicose men and submissive women. Rosa did nothing but cook meals, keep house, and watch TV. Vince wasn’t keen on children, he said, and neither was Rosa—she thought about a pregnancy just to relieve the boredom, but never seriously enough to skip her pills. And yet, Rosa thought, for all the tedium, my God, how the years flew! Crackling cold winters, muddy springs, summers so dry her small garden plots inevitably failed before autumn. Seasons and seasons of network television. She drove into Cheyenne with Vince sometimes, but good lord, Cheyenne? The last refuge of the bolo tie?

Her life became eventless, as smooth as the eastern horizon, and worse… somehow, her life passed. It eroded. She grew old. Yes, old. She was forty in Wyoming, and how had that happened? Then forty-five. Then, oh, Christ, fifty. Fifty years old on a sheep ranch in Wyoming!

She was fifty-one when the Artifact appeared in the sky like an ivory moon.

Rosa wasn’t frightened of it, not even in the beginning. Vince thought it portended the end of the world. Maybe it did. Nevertheless, Rosa liked it. She liked its glide, smooth and effortless in the dark. It was flight as she had once imagined flight to be.

And didn’t that stir some old memories?

She was more earthbound now than ever, of course, chained to this vast acreage of prairie. Chained to Vince. And she had put on weight over the years, a considerable poundage: her girlish walk had become a waddle. The revenge of gravity, Rosa thought. What was weight but the measure of her bondage to the Earth?

Then, the next summer, like everyone else, she came down with Contact flu… and woke to the realization that her life had been only a prologue.

Vince submitted to Contact just as readily, which surprised her. Vince had seemed satisfied with his life in Wyoming. The ranch had prospered under his supervision, and he seemed happy enough. Vince, after all, had never wanted to fly.

But Vince was suddenly eager for the Golden Age to commence, happy to drop his stolid Marlboro Man exterior and plunge into the fluid deeps of the Greater World.

After Contact she felt closer to Vince but at the same time more distant. She was able to appreciate the shape of his life, the spikes of pride and canyons of ambition that had driven him to California and back. There was even a broad, pastel bump of affection that comprised his feelings for Rosa, a pleasant discovery.

But she could see, too, that their connection had been arbitrary and accidental. Their love had peaked in a motel on Highway One, and what persisted was fondness, at best; boredom, at worst.

She wasn’t surprised when Vince abandoned his skin. Winter was setting in, and Vince had never relished the bitter storms and cold Canadian air that came rolling each year from the north.

Rosa, however, had conceived a different plan for herself.

She had in mind a certain transformation, a dramatic farewell to the planet that had borne her.

It would take time. It would mean staying on the Earth longer than most. Therefore she began as soon as Vince was gone—his skin a delicate memory, carried off on a brisk autumn wind.

She retired to the bedroom of the ranch house, to the old double bed she had shared with him for so many years.

Then Rosa took off her clothes and looked at herself for the last time in the vanity mirror. She saw a bulging gray-haired woman whose expression was no longer perennially sad. Then she stretched out on the bed.

The neocytes in her body dimmed her awareness to make the time pass more speedily. Rosa was suddenly dreamy and afloat.

She weighed 237 pounds that day, a significant mass—enough for the neocytes to work with. Adipose tissue began to change its structure. Rosa’s pores exuded a gray fibrous substance. Within days, it covered her body. Her physical functions dropped to negligible levels. After a week, Rosa ceased to breathe; her heart ceased beating.

Inside her hardened chrysalis, she began to change.

The pale cocoon lay motionless on the bed all that winter.

Around it, the world evolved. The winter storms that year were particularly fierce. Not the hurricanes that had wreaked so much damage on the coast, but snowstorms that froze the water in the pipes and beveled the house with glittering blue dunes. The wind in January was so violent it broke a downstairs window. Rosa’s bedroom turned cold and a fine lace of frost formed on the mirror; but Rosa was protected from the cold and the wind.

Vince, before he left, had torn down his fences and put the sheep out on the grazing land to fend for themselves. But the sheep were stupid and most of them died that terrible winter.

Not very many miles from the ranch, south past the Colorado border, Traveller organisms had begun to construct the new Artifact. If Rosa had stood at her ice-clad window she would have seen it grow; would have felt the tremors in the bedrock as the Earth’s magma was tapped and channeled; would have seen a ghostly luminescence on starry winter nights.

That spring, as the snow melted and the ground softened, she would have seen Home dominate the southern horizon, a new mountain… would have seen it as A.W. Murdoch had seen it on the day he abandoned the flesh.

But Rosa Perry Connor slept on.

The days were warming when Rosa finally began to stir. The nights were cold, but the snow was long past.