Of exactly whatit was that bound us I was unsure. It wasn’t grief in any ordinary sense of the word, and it may have been something for which New Humans had not yet invented a word. Immediately after the tragedy my co-parents had seemed to outside observers to be exaggeratedly calm and philosophical, almost as if the loss of three spouses was simply a minor glitch in the infinitely unfolding pattern of their lives, but I knew that even if they did not know how best to express it, the effect of the deaths upon them had been profound. They had all grown accustomed to their own emortality, almost to the extent that they had ceased to think about death at all, and the simultaneous loss of three co-spouses had introduced a strange and almost unaccountable rift into the pattern of their affairs. They were not the same afterward, any more than I had been the same after losing Grizel to the Kwarra.

I was less affected than any of them, not merely because I had gone through it before but because I was a man who had lived for centuries in the most intimate contact with the idea of death. The shock of our mutual loss was not nearly as strange to me as it was to them, nor did it seem unaccountable. I often found myself attempting to persuade my ex-spouses that the tragedy had had its positive, life-enhancing side, repeating with approval what Lua had said about wanting to conserve the bad feeling and pontificating about the role played by death in defining experiences as important and worthwhile.

Mica understood, I think—but Tricia never did. We had been close once, but Samuel Wheatstone’s foolery drove us apart irrevocably, and she ended up thinking of me as a traitor to her personal cause as well as an opponent of her philosophical cause.

When that cause went the same way as all fashionable movements Samuel Wheatstone went with it. He dropped out of public view, although the memory of his remarkable mask was not easily put away—perhaps not as easily as the mask itself. I doubt that he ever replaced his artificial eyes with tissue-cultured replicas of those with which he had been born, but I doubt that he kept the more exotic embellishments with which he had decorated his skull. Most of those had been purely for show. Such cyborg modifications as did become briefly popular among the Earthbound were mostly of the same kind—essentially cosmetic even when they did have ostensible functions. Tricia’s were entirely cosmetic, but they always seemed to me to be rather tasteless. Francesca might have made a much better model for the wilder excesses of ET fanaticism, had she lived.

Given that natural selection had adapted the human body very carefully to the requirements of life at the Earth’s surface, it is hardly surprising that its conventional form met most people’s needs and desires. Although suitskins designed for Earthly use had become much cleverer over time, they remained relatively meek and unobtrusive passengers on the human body. The inhabitants of the outer system, on the other hand, had very different needs and desires, and theirsuitskins had become so inventive that it was easy to argue that all the human beings who did not live on the Earth’s surface were heavily cyborgized simply by virtue of the clothing they wore.

Off-world examples had prompted the Cyborganization fad but from the point of view of most off-worlders the wayward tides of Earthly fashion were the whims of the irredeemably decadent. The highkickers were seriousabout the possibilities of cyborgization, and there were many among them who felt that if cyborgization was the price they would have to pay to establish authentic Utopias in the ice-palace cities that awaited them on Titan and the Uranian moons, then it was a price well worth paying. There were not quite so many who felt that the work of galactic exploration ought to be the province of cyborgized humans rather than silver-piloted probes, but there were enough of them to force the progress of human-machine hybridization into ever-more-adventurous channels.

Every message I received from Emily Marchant in the thirtieth century seemed to come from a different person. Before 2900 even the high-kickers had been careful to retain their own faces, but Samuel Wheatstone’s extravagant reconstruction of his own appearance had accurately reflected the demise of that particular taboo. Emily was never one to support ornamental cyborgization, but she lost her former inhibitions about letting her artificial augmentations show. Her first set of artificial eyes was carefully designed to resemble the ones they replaced, but her second wasn’t, and the parts of her suitskin overlaying the flesh of her face gradually abandoned their attempts to reproduce the appearance that had once lain “beneath” them.

I asked Emily many questions about her metamorphosis, but she rarely thought them worth answering, and the long time delay between exchanges made it easy for her to ignore them. Her transmissions were always full of her own news, her own hopes, and her own fears—among which the fear of robotization and the fear of losing her identity did not seem to figure at all.

I found all this rather disturbing, but Emily seemed to find my own priorities equally strange and became increasingly insistent that the entire population of the Earthbound had become dangerously insensitive to the situations developing outside the system.

“It’s as if the hard-core Hardinists have washed their hands of the whole affair,” she complained in one message, delivered from the heart of one of her finest virtual ice-palaces. “Having despaired of exercising any control over the terraformation of Maya they seem to have decided that Earth is their only concern. I know they don’t censor the news, but they do exert an enormous influence on its agenda, and Earth’s casters seem to have followed their lead in dismissing almost all of the information-flow from outside the system as irrelevant and uninteresting. It’s notirrelevant, Morty. It’s infinitely more important than 99 percent of what happens on the Earth’s surface.

“No one on Earth seems to be in the least troubled by the attrition rate of the kalpa probes. People down there seem to think that because so many of the old Arks went missing it’s not surprising that so many of the kalpas have lost contact, but the cases aren’t similar at all. Something’s happening out there, Morty, and it has consequences for all of us. The Fermi paradox has been around so long that it’s lost its power to amaze or frighten the Earthbound, but we can still feel its urgency. Given Earth, Ararat, and Maya, the galaxy ought to be full of mature civilizations broadcasting away like crazy, but it’s not—and the search for possible Type-2 civilizations has drawn a complete blank. The discovery of Ararat and Maya tells us that we can’tbe alone, but it’s no longer a question of wherethe hell are they. The question we ought to be asking—all of us, Morty, not just the highkickers—is whatthe hell are they?

“Whoever’s out there is much less like us than we’ve been prepared to assume, and the one thing we can be sure of is that contact is just around the corner, even if it hasn’t been made already. We’re beginning to believe that most of the missing Arks and nearly all the missing kalpas have made contact with something, but we can’t begin to guess what it is—and the Earthbound don’t even seem to care. We’re worried that while we’re renewing ourselves constantly the population of Earth is growing contentedly old, relaxing into a lotus-eater existence. Nobody out here uses robotizationas a term of abuse any more, but we think that something like what we used to mean by that term has already happened to the Earthbound. They’ve become insular, self-satisfied, and lazy. They’ve lost their progressive impetus to the extent that they can’t even seem to realize that something is badly wrongin the inner reaches of the galaxy, and that it matters”