“Come on, what’s that? A fortune cookie?”

“Reinhold Messner, I believe.”

He really was kind of enjoying it, he had to admit. Only twenty-five more days, more or less; it wasn’t such a big number. He could endure. It was the most iterative pseudoiterative he would ever live, thus interesting, as a kind of limit case of what he supposedly wanted. A reductio ad absurdum. And the tunnel was not so much a matter of sensory deprivation as it was sensory overload, but in very few elements: the walls of the tunnel, the lights running along its ceiling fore and aft for as far as they could see.

But Swan was not enjoying it. This particular day seemed worse than any before, in fact. She even slowed down, something he had never seen before, to the point where he had to slow down a bit to keep from getting well ahead of her.

“Are you all right?” he asked after waiting for her to catch up.

“No. I feel like crap. I guess it’s happening. Do you feel anything?”

In fact Wahram was sore in his hips, knees, and feet. His ankles were all right. His back was all right once he got walking. “I’m sore,” he admitted.

“I’m worried about that last solar flare we saw. By the time you see one of those, there’s faster radiation that’s come off the snap. I’m afraid we might have gotten cooked. I feel shitty.”

“I’m just sore. But then, you covered me at the elevator.”

“It probably hit us differently. I hope so. Let’s ask the ferals how they feel.”

They did at the next stop, where, by the looks on their faces, the sunwalkers had waited long enough to be concerned. Tron said, “How goes it?”

“I’m feeling sick,” Swan said. “How are you three feeling?”

They looked at each other. “All right,” Tron said.

“No nausea or diarrhea? No headaches or muscle soreness? No hair coming out?”

The three sunwalkers looked at each other, shrugged. They had gone down the elevator earlier.

“I’m not very hungry,” Tron said, “but the food isn’t very good.”

“My arm is still sore,” Nar offered.

Swan looked resentfully at them. They were sunwalkers, young and strong; they were doing what they did all the time, except underground and widdershins. She looked at Wahram. “What about you?”

Wahram said, “I’m sore. I can’t go much faster than I already am, or longer, or something will break.”

Swan nodded. “Same for me. I may even have to slow down. I feel bad. So I wonder if the three of you should hurry on ahead, and when you get to the sunset, or run into people, you can tell them about us.”

The sunwalkers nodded. “How will we know when we’re there?” Tron asked.

“In a couple of weeks, when you come to stations, you can go up in the elevator and have a look.”

“All right.” Tron looked at Tor and Nar, and they all nodded. “We’ll go get help.”

“That’s right. Don’t go out so fast you hurt yourselves.”

After that Wahram and Swan walked on their own. An hour walking, a half hour sitting, over and over for nine times; then a long meal and a sleep. An hour was a long time; nine of them, with their rests, felt like a couple of weeks. They whistled from time to time, but Swan was not feeling well, and Wahram did not want to do it on his own, unless she asked him to. She stopped and fell back in the tunnel from time to time to relieve herself; “I’ve got the runs,” she said at one point, “I’ve got to empty my suit.” After that she only would say, “Wait a minute,” and then, after five or ten minutes, catch up to him again, and on they would go. She looked desiccated. She became irritable and often spoke viciously to Pauline, and sometimes to Wahram too. Querulous, disagreeable, unpleasant. Wahram would get annoyed with how unfair she was, how pointless the unpleasantness she created out of nothing, and he would hike along speechlessly, whistling dark little fragments under his breath. In these moments he struggled to remember a lesson from his crèche, which was that with moody people you had to discount the low points in their cycle, or it would not work at all. His crèche had numbered six, and one had been moody to the point of bipolarity, and in the end this had been what caused the group to semi-disband, Wahram believed; he himself had been one of those least able to see that person in their whole amplitude. Six people had thirty relationships in it, and hex wisdom had it that all but one or two of these had to be good for a crèche to endure. They hadn’t even come close to that, but later Wahram had realized that the moody one in the upper half of his cycle was one of the people he most missed out of the group. Had to recall that and learn from it.

Then a time came when ten minutes passed with Swan back down the hall, and she didn’t return; and then he thought he heard a groan.

So he went back and found her sprawled on the floor, semiconscious at best, with her spacesuit down her to ankles and her excretion obviously interrupted midcourse. And she was indeed groaning.

“Oh no!” he said, and crouched by her side. She had her long-sleeved shirt still on, but under it her flesh was blue with cold on the side that had been on the ground. “Swan, can you hear me? Are you hurt?”

He held up her head; her eyes were swimming a little. “Damn,” he said. He didn’t want to pull her spacesuit up over the mess between her legs. “Here,” he said, “I’m going to clean you up.” Like anyone he had done his share of diaper changes, on both babies and elders, and knew the drill. And one pocket of his suit had his toilet tissues; he himself had had to deploy them in a hurry a few times recently, which now worried him more than it had. And he had water, and even some moist pads in foil packets, courtesy of his suit. So he got them out and shifted her legs around and cleaned her up. Even with his eyes averted he could not help seeing in the tangle of her pubic hair a small penis and testicles, about where her clitoris might have been, or just above. A gynandromorph; it did not surprise him. He finished cleaning her up, trying to be meticulous but fast, and then he pulled her arms over his shoulders and lifted her—she was heavier than he would have thought—and pulled up her spacesuit, and got the top part around her waist and sat her back down on the ground. Got the arms of the suit onto her. Happily a suit’s AI worked Jeeveslike to help the occupant into it. He considered her little backpack, there on the ground; it had to be taken. He decided to put it back on her. With all that arranged, he lifted her up and carried her before him in his arms. Her head lolled back too far for his liking and he stopped.

“Swan, can you hear me?”

She groaned, blinked. He got his arm behind her neck and head and hefted her up again. “What?” she said.

“You passed out,” he said. “While you were having the runs.”

“Oh,” she said. She pulled her head upright, put her arms around his neck. He started walking again. She was not that heavy, now that he had her help in holding her. “I could feel a vasovagal coming on,” she said. “Am I getting my period again?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“It feels like it, I’m cramping. But I don’t think I have enough body fat to do it.”

“Maybe not.”

Suddenly she jerked in his arms, pulled away to look at him face to face. “Oh my. Hey look—some people don’t like to touch me. I have to tell you. You know those people who ingest some of the aliens from Enceladus?”

“Ingest?”

“Yes. An infusion of that bacterial suite. They eat some of the Enceladans; it’s supposed to be good for you. I did that. A long time ago. So, well, some people don’t like the idea. Don’t even like to be in contact with a person who’s done it.”

Wahram gulped uneasily, felt a jolt of queasiness. Was that the alien bug, or just the thought of the bug? No way to tell. What was done was done, he could not change it. “As I recall,” he said, “the Enceladan life suite is not regarded as being particularly infectious?”