“No, that’s right. But it is conveyed in bodily fluids. I mean, it has to get into your blood, I think. Although I drank mine. Maybe it only has to get into the gut; that’s right. That’s why people worry. So…”

“I’ll be all right,” Wahram said. He carried her for a while, aware that she was inspecting his face. Judging by what he saw in the mirror when he shaved, he did not think there would be much to see.

Without intending to, he said, “You’ve done some strange things to yourself.”

She made a face and looked away. “Moral condemnation of other people is always rather rude, don’t you think?”

“Yes, I do. Of course. Though I notice we do it all the time. But I was speaking of strangeness only. No condemnation implied.”

“Oh sure. Strangeness is so good.”

“Well, isn’t it? We’re all strange.”

She turned her head to look at him again. “I am, I know that. In lots of ways. You saw another way, I suppose.” Glancing at her lap.

“Yes,” Wahram said. “Although that’s not what makes you strange.”

She laughed weakly.

“You’ve fathered children?” he asked.

“Yes. I suppose you think that’s strange too.”

“Yes,” he said seriously. “Though I am an androgyn, myself, and once gave birth to a child. So, you know—it strikes me as a very strange experience, no matter which way it happens.”

She pulled her head back to inspect him, clearly surprised. “I didn’t know that.”

“It wasn’t really relevant to one’s actions in the present,” Wahram said. “Part of one’s past, you know. And anyway, it seems to me most spacers of a certain age have tried almost everything, don’t you think?”

“I guess so. How old are you?”

“I’m a hundred and eleven, thank you. What about you?”

“A hundred and thirty-five.”

“Very nice.”

She shifted in his arms, lifting a fist in a mime of threatening him. By way of a riposte he said, “Do you think you can walk now?”

“Maybe. Let me try.”

He put her feet down, pulled her upright. She leaned against him. She hobbled along for a bit holding his arm, then stood straight and proceeded on her own, slowly.

“We don’t have to walk, you know,” he said. “I mean, we can get to the next station and wait there.”

“Let’s see how I feel. We can decide when we get there.”

Wahram said, “Do you think it was the sun that made you sick? Because I must say, for being in M g, I’m feeling very sore in my joints.”

She shrugged. “We took a shot big enough to kill our comms. Pauline says I took ten sieverts.”

“Wow.” The LD 50 was about thirty, he thought. “My wristpad would have flagged it if I’d taken that much. I checked and it was only up three. But you covered me while we were waiting for the elevator.”

“Well, there was no reason both of us should take a full hit.”

“I suppose. But we could have taken turns.”

“You didn’t know about the flare. What’s your lifetime total?”

“I’m at around two hundred,” he said. They all relied on the DNA repair component of the longevity treatment to stay in space as much as they did.

“Not bad,” she said. “I’m at five.” She sighed. “This could be it. Or maybe it just killed the bacteria in my gut. I think that’s what’s happened. I hope. Although my hair is falling out too.”

“My joints are probably just sore from all the walking,” Wahram said.

“Could be. What do you do for aerobics?”

“I walk.”

“That’s not much of a test of your aerobic system.”

“I huff and I puff as I walk and I talk.” Trying to distract her.

“Another quote?”

“I think I made that up. One of my mantras for the daily routine.”

“Daily routine.”

“I like routine.”

“No wonder you’re happy in here.”

“It’s true that there is a routine here.”

They trudged down the tunnel in silence for a long time. When they got to the next station, they declared it a day and settled in to rest a few extra hours, as well as sleep through their night. Once Swan walked back down the tunnel to do something, then returned, and she fell asleep and seemed to sleep well, without purring. The next morning she wanted to carry on walking, declaring she would go slow and be careful. So off they went.

The lights kept appearing ahead out of the distant floor, then up and over them in their long arc. The effect was as if they were always about to walk downhill. Wahram tried to keep sight of one particular light, but could not be sure he had kept track of it from its first appearance to overhead. It could be some kind of unit: the view to horizon; multiplied how many times, he was not quite sure. “Can you ask Pauline to calculate our view distance to the horizon?” he asked at one point.

“I know it,” Swan said shortly. “It’s three kilometers.”

“I see.”

Suddenly it didn’t seem to make much difference.

Shall we whistle?” Wahram asked after they had walked in silence for half an hour.

“No,” she said. “I’m all whistled out. Tell me a story. Tell me your story, I want to hear more things that I don’t know about you.”

“Easy enough, to be sure.” Although suddenly he could not think exactly how to start. “Well, I was born a hundred and eleven years ago, on Titan. My mother was a wombman who came originally from Callisto, a third-generation Jovian, and my father was an androgyn from Mars, exiled in one of their political conflicts. I grew up mostly on Titan, but it was very constrained in those days, a matter of stations and just a few small domes. So I also lived in Herschel for some years as I went to school, then also on Phoebe, and one of the polar orbiters, and then, recently, Iapetus. Almost everyone in the Saturn system moves around to get a sense of the whole, especially if you’re involved with the civil service.”

“Do many people do that?”

“Everyone has to do the basic training, and give a certain amount of time to Saturn, as they say, and they may also get drafted in the lottery for some position in the government. Some get drafted and grow to like it and then do more. That’s what I did. One of my last mandatories was on Hyperion, and it was very small, but I really grew fond of that place, it was so strange.”

“There’s that word again.”

“Well, life is strange, or so it seems to me.” He sang, “People are strange, when you’re a stranger,” and then cut it short. “Hyperion is truly strange. It’s apparently the remnant of a collision between two moons of about equal size. What’s left looks like the side of a honeycomb, and the ridges bracketing the holes are white, while the powder filling every hole about halfway is black. So when you walk the ridges, or float over that side of the moon, it is very like some supremely bold work of art.”

“A big old goldsworthy,” she said.

“Sort of. And it’s an easy place to disturb by one’s presence. So it’s been a question how to set up a station, even whether to set one up, and how it should be run if one is put there permanently. Having helped with that, I have the sense of being a curator or something.”

“Interesting.”

“I thought so. So, I went back to Iapetus, which is also a superb place to live; it’s kind of a pulling back, and at an angle, to give you a better view of the whole system, and of why it should evoke such feeling. There I studied terraforming governance, and the diplomatic arts, such as they are—”

“The honest man sent by his country to lie for it?”

“Oh, I would hope that is not an accurate description of a diplomat. It’s not mine, and I hope not yours.”

“I don’t think we get to choose what words mean.”

“No? I think we do.”

“Only within very tight limits,” she said. “But go on.”

“Well, after that I went back to Titan and worked on the terraforming there. In those years I had my children.”

“With partners?”

“Yes, my crèche had six parents and eight children. I see them all from time to time. It’s almost always a pleasure. I try not to worry about them. I love the kids; I remember parts of their lives they don’t remember themselves. I think that’s of more interest to me than to them. That’s all right. Memory is a haunting. You remember times you liked, and you want something like them. But you can only get new things. So I try to want what I get. It isn’t obvious how to do it. You get into your second century and it gets hard, I think.”