She took off and trilled all around him, and he fell back into the main melody in relief. Maybe that was what duets were all about.

“Maybe I love you,” she said. “Maybe that’s what I’ve been feeling these past few years. Maybe I just never knew what it was.”

“Maybe,” he said.

Did he mean that maybes don’t count, or that maybes are better than nothing?

“Slow movement of the Seventh,” he said, “if you don’t mind.” And he was off into another tune from their time under Mercury, one she had always enjoyed riffing on, it had so many possibilities. Sometimes they had gone on with it for hours, for half a day or more. Stately, solemn, elegiac; something like Wahram himself, pacing through the days. On the march. Someone you could rely on.

“Maybe,” she repeated. “It may be.”

They fell into the song as of old, as when they were in the crucible and everything depended on how they went forward. As now, even now, just floating in space waiting for rescue, having faith it would come.

Faith justified; for Pauline said, “Ship approaching.”

One white dot among the rest bloomed, and in a matter of seconds became another little space yacht, a hopper hovering there before them like a dream, bizarre and magical.

“Oh good,” Swan said.

Now they too were Peters. She had to remember that. They were only continuing by way of a rescue. As they puffed over to the little ship, Swan tried to fix what this had felt like—the floating, Andromeda, Wahram’s gaze, their duet. It could have been their last hours. She thought of Alex again. Our stories go on a while, some genes and words persist; then we go away. It was a hard thing to remember. And as the lock door closed and they were back inside, she once again forgot it.

KIRAN ON ICE

It was while Kiran was still being stared at by the eyes in the box that it occurred to him that he should not be seeing something like this, and one quick glance at the tall security guard made it clear that this thought had also occurred to the guard. As the guard started relocking the box Kiran considered what this meant, and before the guard had finished tapping the keypad Kiran was off and dashing back the way they had come. He turned into the first street available and sprinted hard to the next intersection and turned again, with a single glance back; the guard was not yet in view. Off he went at a slightly slower pace, thinking about his options. The train that ran between Vinmara and Cleopatra would certainly be watched, and there was only the one.

Much of the population of the town was still out celebrating the uneclipse and the end of the rain. And he knew where the gate was relative to his current position. He cut right yet again and so toward it. The streets of the seashell town were almost empty. Ahead the gate; none of his new work unit was visible, nor any security guards aside from the ordinary gatekeepers. He gave his original ID card to one of these as he came to the gate lock door, then went in the lock and checked to make sure his suit was secure.

Out onto the snowy hillsides of Venus. People were trooping back down from the hilltop overlooking the bay, and he looked away as he passed them and headed around to the west of town. When he had gotten past the edge of town he slipped over the hill and out of view of Vinmara, then took a broad wash south, toward the distant ocean.

They were still covering the frozen CO ₂down there, so he hoped he could catch a ride from one of the super-zambonis or foamed rock applicators. He wanted to get to Colette, but feared that the whole transportation system would be alerted to look for him. Now it was really hitting home what it meant to be a double agent or a mole or whatever it was he had turned into; it meant neither side would care about you, or care to defend you if problems arose. On the other hand, if he could get to Shukra, he had information Shukra had asked him to obtain. So getting to Colette was the obvious thing to try.

Vinmara was located just south of Onatah Corona. Onatah was the Iroquois corn goddess, his faceplate map told him; no doubt a much friendlier goddess than Lakshmi, who after all was Kali’s boss. Everything Kiran had heard about Lakshmi made him pretty sure that he might not survive her displeasure. At the thought he yelped and took the translation spectacles she had given him from his suit’s chest pocket. Reluctantly, with a final kiss in thanks for all they had done to improve his love life, he tossed them away. Really a shame he had not thought to do so back in the city, but there was no way he was going to return there now.

Since he had been able to see the big rock foamers on the skyline from Vinmara, he had assumed that they could not be too far away. Now, as he walked over the crunchy and sometimes slippery snow downhill toward the dry ice sea, he realized that the new town’s hillside perch might give it a view much farther away than he had reckoned. In fact it could be many kilometers.

This thought was beginning to oppress him when he came over a small ridge in the ice and saw a super-zamboni, not immediately near but just a couple of kilometers away, and lumbering along slowly in the usual manner. He broke into a trot and tried to pace himself for the run there. It was moving crossways to his approach, so he was going to be all right; no need to kill himself.

Nevertheless he was huffing and puffing by the time he reached the thing. Unfortunately if there was a person or persons inside it, they were not looking out the cabin windows, which were up at the top and front of the thing. There was nothing for Kiran to do except jog next to it and jump up onto its side where a ladder came almost to the ground. Climb the ladder, get on the roof of the thing, which was not only railed, but full of instrumentation to hold on to. Alas it was a bit of exposure to hang over the front and try to reach down to where the windows started, and there was nothing much to hold on to. Seemed as if the windows were in fact still out of reach, which was frustrating.

There was a hatch door, however, in the roof, and when he saw it he began to pound on it with his fists, then kick it with the heels of his boots. He was looking around to see if there was anything he could break off to hit the door with even harder when the behemoth shuddered to a halt, and soon after, he could hear voices below him, and the hatch door opened.

“Thanks!” he shouted. “I got lost out here!”

So two Venusians brought him inside, and he had a very difficult time making up a story for them that would explain his presence down there on the frozen ocean—it had to involve an admission of recreational drug use and even worse, geographical disorientation, so he squirmed his way through it, feeling lucky that embarrassment was the appropriate emotion for his cover story and its lame particulars. Happily the two minders listened to their translator saying it all in Chinese, and merely nodded as if they had often witnessed such foolishness before, and went back to their screen game. They were headed for a working camp under Ba’het Patera, they told him, and would be there in four hours. There was beer in the fridge if he was interested.

The working camp they came to was one of a whole series of them, Kiran saw on the map, running west along the northern shore of the new ocean and sheltering the people who were getting the last of the CO ₂sealed over. Kiran gave his original ID card to the people at the camp, but they only looked at it briefly and waved him over to the galley. He ate voraciously while he pored over the map on his tabletop screen. He had already seen that there were fast little snowmobiles out in the camp’s parking lot, and the map seemed to indicate that the camps dotting the shore were close enough together that a snowmobile could get from one to the next on one fuel load. Maybe that was even part of the plan.