“What do you mean?”

Swan described the visitation from Alex’s ghost—the envelopes—her trip out to Jupiter, and the interloper on Io.

Zasha said, “I heard about that. I didn’t know you were there,” frowning at the teapot, face blue in the stove top glow.

“What were you and Alex working on?” Swan asked. “And why didn’t she tell me about it in this message she left? She—it’s like I was just a courier for her, and Pauline some kind of safe-deposit box.”

Zasha didn’t reply.

“Come on, tell me,” Swan said. “You can tell me. I can take it from you. I’m used to you telling me how bad I am.”

Zasha expelled a breath, poured two cups of tea. Steam in gloom, catching light from somewhere. Z handed her one, then sat down on a kitchen chair across from her. Swan warmed her hands on her cup.

“There’s stuff I can’t talk about—”

“Oh come on!”

“— andstuff I can. She got me involved in a group that is hunting down some odd qubes. That’s been interesting. But it was something she wanted kept confidential, along with some other things she had going. So, maybe she thought that you aren’t very good at keeping things confidential.”

“Why would she think that?”

But even Zasha knew of three or four examples of Swan’s being indiscreet, and Swan herself knew of several more.

“Those were accidents,” Swan finally added. “And not very big accidents either.”

Zasha sipped the tea cautiously. “Well, but maybe they seemed to be becoming more frequent. You are not the same person you used to be, you have to admit. You’ve stuffed your brain with augmentations—”

“I have not!”

“Well, four or five. I didn’t like it right from the beginning. When you grow the religious part of the temporal lobe, you can turn into a very different person, not to mention risking epilepsy. And that was only the start. Now you’ve got the animal stuff in there, you’ve got Pauline in there, recording everything you see—it is not insignificant. It can do damage. You end up being some kind of post-human thing. Or at least a different person.”

“Oh come on, Z. I’m the same as I always was. And everything you do can damage you! You can’t let that stop you. Every thing I’ve done to myself I consider part of being a human being. I mean, who wouldn’t do it if they could? I would be ashamed not to! It isn’t being posthuman, it’s being fullyhuman. It would be stupid not to do the good things when you can, it would be antihuman.”

“Well,” Zasha said, “you did those things and you immediately stopped designing terraria.”

“I was done! We were past the design phase anyway; they were just going to build more of the same. And a lot of what we did was stupid anyway. We shouldn’t have been making Ascensions at that point, we needed to get the traditional biomes past the extinction. We still need that! I don’t know what we were thinking, frankly.”

Zasha was surprised at this. “I like the Ascensions. They help genetic dispersion.”

“Too much so. Anyway that’s not the point. The point is I wanted to try different things, and I did.”

“You became an artist.”

“I was always an artist. I just changed media. And hardly even that. Just a focusing in. It was what I wanted. Come on, Zasha. I’m just living a human life. You refuse these opportunities, that doesn’t make you more human, it just makes you regressive. I don’t go anywhere near as far as some people. I don’t have a third eye and I don’t break my ribs when I have an orgasm. I just…”

“Just what?”

“I don’t know. Try things that sound good.”

“And have they all worked out for you?”

Swan sat there in the gloom, somewhere in New Jersey. Outside was the open air of Earth. “No.” Long pause. “In fact I’ve done worse things than what you know about, if you want to know the truth.”

Zasha stared at her. “I’m not sure I do.”

“Ha-ha. And Alex knew about it too, now that I think of it, because I told Mqaret about it.”

“He wouldn’t automatically tell her.”

“I didn’t ask him not to.”

“Well,” Zasha said. “So maybe she knew. Something worse than animal brains? Something worse than a qube in your skull? Never mind, I don’twant to know. But maybe Alex did, and maybe she had stuff that she…”

“That she didn’t trust me with.”

“That she needed to keep to herself. And here you are, kind of a mess.”

“I am not a mess!” Though her rib did hurt, squeezed by her indignation. And she was full of grief for Alex—and now a little angry at her too.

“Seems like you’re saying you are messed up,” Z observed. “You’ve had five or six or seven brain tweaks over the years, a qube in your head—in fact, whatever was fashionable at the time.”

“Yeah yeah.”

“Well think about it!”

Swan put her teacup on the table. “I think I’ll go out for a walk.”

“Good. Don’t get lost. I’ll cook up something while you’re out, say about forty-five minutes.”

Swan left the hut.

Outside the door she took her slippers off and stuffed them into her pocket, dug her toes into the dirt and wriggled them around. Leaned over from the waist like a dancer and dug her fingers in, put hands to face and breathed. Dirt, the ultimate ambrosia. Tasted like muddy mushrooms.

It was after sunset. There was an asphalt road running next to a marsh, green and yellow, the wind bouncing the reeds out there. She walked on the dirt by the side of the road and looked at the marsh and the sky. On the other side of the road some old buildings were nestled under a stand of trees. Rows of old apartment blocks beyond. Croak of frog. She sat on the edge of the marsh and saw the black dots half in and half out of the water under her. A chorus of frogs, croaking. She listened for a while, watching the marsh in the wind, and heard suddenly that they were performing a call-and-response. If one frog said “ribbit,” then all the others would repeat it for a while, up and down the road for as far as she could hear, until in a momentary pause one croaked “robot,” and they would all repeat that for a while. Then it changed to “limit,” and off the others went, as if speaking to her like some Greek chorus, transmogrified to frogs. So many limits! So many robots. The lump nearest her contributed only once in a while, puffing under his chin briefly, then croaking. Otherwise it was perfectly still, except for a little shift of the eyeballs she could see in the dusk, a liquid blink, always alert. “Romper!” it croaked in a pause, and Swan exclaimed, “Good for you!” and said it with them for a while.

October on the northern hemisphere of Earth, so glossy and full. All her body-planet interfaces humming. Suddenly life in space seemed a stark nightmare, an exile to the vacuum, everyone locked in sensory-deprivation tanks, separate, virtual, augmented. Here the real was real.

“Robber!”

“Robber robber robber robber…”

The moment itself, robbed from them as it happened. Here she was, passing through a space. Flit of the now. Dusk in a marsh in a transient universe, so strange, so mysterious. Why should anything be like this? The wind was cool, the clouds had a little twilight left in them. Looked like rain. The leaves of the thorny vine on the ground were as red as maple leaves. The marsh was like a person out there breathing. Crows flew over cawing, headed into the town and its heat islands. Swan knew a little of the crow language; they would say to each other, “Caw, caw, caw,” as now, just chatting, and then one would shout a word out so clearly that it had become an English word—“Hawk!”—and they would scatter. Of course the word crowalso came from their language. In Sanskrit they had it as kaaga. Imported words from another language.

There were some people, standing by the buildings next to the trees. They were small somehow. Weighted down. Could this be so close to the great city? Was it indeed part of the city, part of what made it work, not just the wetlands but the legions of poor marginal people, living in the half-drowned ruins? The weight of the planet began to drag her down. Those people over there were like figures out of Brueghel, people from the sixteenth century, bowed down with time. Maybe these were the people living a real life, and what she did in space nothing more than the dilettantism of a gaga aristos. Maybe what she really needed to do was to live here and build things, maybe houses, little but functional, a different kind of goldsworthy. Under the sky, in the full light of the sun—the utter luxury of the real. The only real world. Earth, heaven and hell both—natural heaven, human hell. How could they have done such a thing, how could they have not tried harder?