“It was never not hard,” she said.

“True. This world is very mysterious to me. I mean, I hear what people say about the universe, but I don’t know how to put it to use. To me it sounds meaningless. So I agree with those who say we have to make our own meaning. The concept of the project I find useful. Something you do in the present, and can remember doing in the past, and expect to do in the future, in order to create something. A work of art which need not be in the arts per se, but something human worth doing.”

“That’s existentialism, yes?”

“Yes, I think that’s right. I don’t see how you can avoid it.”

“Hmm.” She thought about it. The light gleamed off her black hair in white streaks. “Tell me about your crèche. How did that work?”

“On Titan there would be groups of people around the same age, who were educated together and worked together. Smaller cohorts would band together out of these to raise children. Usually it was in groups of half a dozen or so. There were different ways to structure them. It depended on compatibilities. There was a feeling at the time that pair-bonds didn’t have enough people in them to endure over the long haul—that they succeeded less than half the time, and children needed more. So there would be some larger number. Almost everyone thought of it as a child-raising method and not a lifelong arrangement. Thus the name crèche. Eventually there were a lot of hurt feelings involved. But if you’re lucky, it can be good for a while, and you just have to take that and move on when the time comes. I still stay in touch with them; we’re even still a crèche. But the kids are grown, and we very rarely see each other.”

“I see.”

A long time of silent walking passed, and Wahram was feeling rather companionable, and not too sore.

Then Swan said vehemently, “I can’t standit in here. There’s nochance of changing. It’s like a prison, or a school.”

“Our submercurial life,” he said, just a little offended, as he had been enjoying himself. On the other hand, she was ill. “It will soon enough come to an end.”

“ Notsoon enough.” She shook her head gloomily.

They walked on, hour after hour. Everything stayed the same. Swan walked better than she had right after her collapse, but she was still slower than she had been before it. It didn’t matter to Wahram; he liked the slower pace, in fact. He was still quite sore in the mornings, but did not seem to be getting any worse; nor did he feel weak or nauseous, though he was on the lookout for the symptoms in an uncomfortable way. He felt queasy a lot. Swan had pulled off all the hair on her head, leaving a fair number of scabby patches.

“What about you?” he said at one point. “Tell me more about you. Did you really lie naked on blocks of ice for hours at a time? Did you cut orreries into your skin and make patterns of blood on you?”

She was walking ahead of him, and now she hesitated, then stopped and let him take the lead. “I don’t want to shout back at you,” she said as he passed her.

“And yes,” she said as they carried on, “I did do those things, and other kinds of abramovics. The body is very good material for art, I think. But that was mostly when I was in my fifties.”

“What about before?”

“I was born in Terminator, as I said. It was just being constructed, and I was a kid in the farm when they were still putting in the irrigation systems. It was a big deal when the soil arrived. It came out of big tubes, like wet cement, only black. I played in there with my mother while they were getting the first crops and the park plants started. It was a great place to be a kid. It’s hard to believe that it’ll all be dead when we come up. I’ll have to see it to believe it. Anyway that’s where I grew up.”

“The past is always gone,” Wahram said. “Whether the place is still there or not.”

“Maybe for you, oh sage one,” she said. “I never felt that way. Anyway, after that I lived on Venus for a while, working for Shukra. Then I designed terraria. Then I moved into making artworks, working with landscapes or bodies. Goldsworthies and abramovics, still very interesting to me, and how I make my living. So I’m out and about, following commissions. But I keep a room in Terminator. My parents both died, so my grandparents Alex and Mqaret were kind of like my parents. You couldn’t have made any critique of pair-bonding by looking at those two. Poor Mqaret.”

“No, I know,” he said. “It was child rearing I was talking about, that seems to take more than two people. You must have learned that too?”

She shot him a glance. “One of them is out there somewhere. The child I had with Zasha died.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Yes, well, she was old. I don’t want to talk about that right now.”

In fact she was slowing down, and seemed to him hunched over. He said, “Are you all right?”

“Feeling weaker.”

“Do you want to stop and rest?”

“No.”

On they struggled, in silence.

He helped her through one hour, supporting her as she walked with one of his arms around her back and under her far arm, pulling up. After the rests she struggled up and continued walking, and would brook no argument against it. When they got to the next station, he looked around in every cabinet and closet in the place, and in the last closet he checked (but it was always the last one, when you found something) there was a little four-wheeled pushcart with a bar on one end that rose to chest height; otherwise it was a flatbed set just above wheel height, the bed one meter by two, and the two swiveling wheels opposite the bar.

“Let’s put our backpacks on here and I’ll push them,” he suggested.

She gave him a look. “You think you can push me around.”

“It would be easier than carrying you, if it came to that.”

She dumped her backpack on the cart, and the next morning took off ahead of him. At first he had to hurry; then he caught up with her; then he slowed down as she did.

Hour after hour. Without discussing it, she would sometimes sit on the cart. Up on the surface over them passed the craters and scarps named after the great artists of Earth; they went under Ts’ao Chan, Philoxenus, R

m , Ives. He whistled “Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean,” which Ives had incorporated so memorably into one of his wild compositions. He thought of R m ’s “I Died as Mineral” and wished he had it memorized better. “I died as mineral and rose as a plant, I died as plant and was born an animal; when did I ever lose by dying?”

“Who is that?”

“R

m .”

More silence. Down the big curve of the tunnel. The walls here were cracked, and it looked like they had been heat-treated more than usual to fuse them to impermeability. Crazed glazes of black on black. Craquelure to infinity.

She groaned and stood up from the cart and walked back to the west. “One moment, I have to go again.”

“Oh dear. Good luck.”

After a long while he heard a distant groan, maybe even a forlorn “Help.” He went back down the tunnel, pulling the cart with him.

She had collapsed again with her suit down. Again he had to clean her up. She was a little more conscious this time, and looked away; even at one point batted weakly at him. In the middle of his work she looked at him blearily, resentfully. “This isn’t really me,” she said. “I’m not really here.”

“Well,” he said, a little offended. “I’m not either.”

She slumped back. After a while she said, “So nobody’s here.”