The last question had to do with how they would proceed to convey their agreement to their partners, and Wahram said, “I am going to Mercury to propose marriage to Swan Er Hong. I hope we will take vows at the epithalamion on Olympus Mons. So we will be able to speak to the right people on Mars at that time.”

Ah, good, they all said. Congratulations. Some looked surprised; others nodded knowingly. That will make it all easier. You’ll make something like a Saturn-Mercury standing committee.

Yes, Wahram said.

SWAN

Swan left Earth feeling considerably pleased with herself for helping the qubical person light out for the territory, and pleased with Zasha too, which mattered to her much more than she had realized it would. She took the space elevator up from Quito and lived through the performance of Satyagrahayet again, and this time it was the peace of the final movement that struck her most, the scale rising in its simple octave over and over, like a meditation chant to lift you right off your feet; and dancing in the ever-lightening g near the end made it a very physical feeling, a kind of euphoria as they were lifted on wings of song.

She returned to Mercury in a terrarium called the Henry David. It was a classic New Englander, with a few small clapboard villages and some pasturage breaking up a hardwood and conifer mixed forest. It was October there, and the maples had gone red, so that there were trees violently yellow, orange, red, and green, all mixed and scattered together over the inside of the cylinder, such that when you looked up at it overhead, it appeared to be a speechless speech in some kind of round color language, trembling on the edge of meaning. Swan wandered through the forest on paths, went from one cleared hilltop to another. One day she took up leaves that had fallen and arranged them across a clearing so that they went from red to orange to yellow to yellow-green to green, in a smooth progression. This colored line on the land pleased her greatly, as did the wind that blew it away. Another day she spent hours following a black bear and her cub. In the afternoon they came to an abandoned apple orchard, where one ancient crippled tree had nevertheless produced a lot of apples, so many that some branches drooped to the ground. The bears ate a ton of them. There was an upright half barrel next to the tree that had filled with rainwater, and the cub climbed into it and took a bath, its glossy fur going black and pointing in wet tips.

Back on Mercury she settled into her life in Terminator. She woke out on her balcony, breakfasted in the morning cool, did her stretches to the sun, bowing uneasily to Sol Invictus. Looked over the city, registering all the familiar landmarks that had been rebuilt, and the new trees and shrubs, looking a little bigger every day, a little more in place. She had taken a postcard that Alex had had couriered to her long before, and tacked it to the wall over her kitchen sink, where Alex’s handwriting proclaimed daily:

O joy of my spirit—it is uncaged—it darts like lightning!

It is not enough to have this globe or a certain time,

I will have thousands of globes and all time.

It was autumn now in Terminator too, and the row of Japanese fire maples on the terrace two down from her balcony had gone an incandescent red. Dust had settled on the royal-blue roof tiles she could see below. The new weather program seemed to include more windy days than the old one had, and sometimes there were winds stronger than any she could remember. She liked that. Certain cold gusty winds would pull her loose from whatever she was doing and take her on long walks around the city. It was feeling very much bigger up front than before, the platform extended to provide more park and farm. There were new canals in the flat part of the city and the park. Bridges over canals, bike paths, broad boulevards and esplanades. Her town. Same but different. It occurred to her that the city could be expanded forward even farther into the night; in theory, as the decades and centuries passed they could cover the tracks westward all the way around the nightside of Mercury.

She spent most of her days out in the farm, working on the pond and wetlands. The new estuary was not thriving and there were questions about salinity levels, and a little hydraulic tide they had going. Arguments, really. And she was still trying to understand why the Gibraltar apes didn’t like the caves they had provided in a little hill with a west-facing cliff face. The apes were gorgeous, and usually they didn’t have problems the way people had problems. But there they were, hanging out on the flats under the caves, unwilling to go into them. At some point she might have to climb up there to take a look herself.

While she was out there watching the apes, she thought about her life. Here she was, 137 years old. Body much abused the whole time; it would not last forever, or even necessarily go on much longer. On the other hand, the treatments were doing new things even compared to a few years before, and people were still working at improving them. Mqaret was almost two hundred. So it had to be thought about.

Her close relationships were few, and perhaps no longer so close. She had everything she needed; her life was good. Her surviving child was out there somewhere, living her life in her own manner, not cratering to speak of. Occasionally in touch. Not the issue. Swan was closer to other people, and that was all right. Her young friend Kiran had stayed on Venus, had insisted on it, and was back in the thick of things there and sending her reports on a regular basis. It felt like more of a relationship than many she had, and there were more like that out there to come, no doubt; people were always grabbing her by the arm and pulling her into their lives, it seemed. Her farm crew was tight. She liked her work; she liked her play; she liked her art, the play that was work. So it was something else. Really the question became quite philosophical; how to be? What to care about? And how to become a little less solitary? Because now, with Alex gone, though she talked to many people, in the end she was missing someone to tell things to in the way she had always told Alex.

Oh I miss you Hettie Moore

But there’s no one here left to tell—

The world has gone black before my eyes.

In the farm by herself she sang the old ballad, and wondered what would make things right. Maybe nothing. There was a pruning of life by death. Parts died before the whole. When the people you loved died, part of you died. Some people by the time they went were like certain junipers she had seen, one live strip on a dead trunk. There was no way to counter that.

No happiness but in virtue. No, that wasn’t true. Each part of the triune brain had its own happiness. Lizard in the sun, mammal on the hunt, human doing something good. What’s good is what’s good for the land. So when you worked as if on the hunt, in light and warmth, at making a landscape—some place for people to live in for ages to come—then you were triunely happy. Surely that should be enough.

But then you wanted to share it. Just so there would be someone to be pleased together with. Alex had been pleased with her.

She had seen the traveling isolatoes, solitary old spacers who made their own way in the world, who were not partnered in any fashion with other people. That was her crowd; she had been one of them herself for more than half her life. Had they all been on the hunt? She recalled something she had heard people say: I want to meet somebody. Meet; they meant “mate.” I want to mate somebody. “Meet” was the future subjunctive of “mate,” in the mood of desire. And when you looked around, you saw it: pair-bonding kept coming back. It was a future conditional tense, a subjunctive verb: to mate somebody, and then meet them. It was an atavistic thing, as if they were swans, or some other creature with a genetic urge to pair off. “Swan is not a swan,” she told her baffled coworkers in the park. But how did she know?