They followed the cat out. The rose on the hut was in full bloom, its scent spicing the air. The roses were luscious semi‑double white cups marked on the skirts with dark crimson. “Your rose is beautiful.”

“Let me cut you one.” Luciente used a clippers from a knife with many parts. “For your hair.”

“My hair. I’m embarrassed. I hate it this way.”

“Why not change it, then?”

“I used to dye it along the part where it turned white. But in the hospital I can’t fix it.”

“When we wish to change our hair color, we change the proteins. It doesn’t grow out as it was.” Luciente was urging her along, arm around her shoulders. In a summer sleeveless shirt of a muted gold, her body was obviously female. Connie smiled to herself. Perhaps it was the lighter clothing, perhaps it was a matter of expectations–anyhow, Luciente now looked like a woman. Luciente’s face and voice and body now seemed female if not at all feminine; too confident, too unself‑conscious, too aggressive and sure and graceful in the wrong kind of totally coordinated way to be a woman: yet a woman.

“I wish I could help you with your hair,” Luciente said. “Myself, I never alter my appearance except for dressing up at festivals. But many of us play with appearance.”

“Tell me about this making faces at animals. You do it with puppy dogs and mice and termites too?”

“We have a holiday, Washoe Day, when we celebrate our new community, named for a heroine of your time–a chimpanzee who was the first animal to learn to sign between species. Now we have rudimentary sign languages with many mammals. Some, like apes, use sign language with each other. Most, like cats and dogs, have other ways of communing and only sign to us.”

“Tell me–what do you say to a cow you’re about to eat?”

“Exactly. It’s changed our diet. So has the decision to feed everyone well. For each region we try to be ownfed and until the former colonies are equal in production, mammal meat is inefficient use of grains. Some regions raise cattle on grasses–”

“You never eat meat? It must be like living on welfare.”

“We do on holidays, and we have a lot of them. As a way of culling the herd. We say what we’re doing. They know it. In the same spirit, in November we hunt for a short period. That is, our village does. We’re Wamponaug Indians. We need some experience with free‑living animals as prey and predator, to body the past of our tribe fully … . Though I confess I never hunt. Some of us would just as soon lapse that custom, but we lack the votes to do it.”

“You’re what? Blond Indians? Indians with red beards?”

“Barbarossa dyes per beard, in truth. Isn’t it pretty? It was brown before.”

“You! You look like me. My ancestors were Mayans, but they were hardly Wamponaugs! That’s no more alike than … Italians and Swedes!”

“We’re all a mixed bag of genes,” Luciente said. “Now I know where we’ll go.” She diddled with her kenner. “G’light, it’s me, Luciente. Can you meet us at the brooder? I’m with Connie, the person from the past. Get White Oak to fill for you. We’ll work running hard later.” She turned back to Connie. “I asked Bee to meet us at the brooder. That’s the yellow just‑grew on the east. So much to glide over!” Luciente broke into a jog, saw that she was leaving Connie behind, and waited. “You set the pace.”

“Bee is your boyfriend just out of the army? Was he drafted?”

“Grafted? Everybody takes turns. We can all use arms, we’re all trained in fighting hand to hand, we can all manage facets of more complicated operations. I can shoot a jizer.”

“Women too? Did you have to go?”

“Fasure I’ve gone. Twice, Once at seventeen and once when we had a big mobe. I fought both times.”

“Fought? And you won’t go hunting?”

Luciente paused, her eyes clouding over. “A contradict. I’ve gone through a worming on it, yet it stays. Grasp, you never know whether you’re fighting people or machines–they use mostly robots or cybernauts. You never know … . Still I’d go again. At some point after naming, you decide you’re ready to go.”

“Ha! I bet lots of people decide never to go. Or does someone decide for you?”

“How could they? It’s like being a mother. Some never mother, some never go to defend.” Luciente frowned, tugging her hand through her thick black hair. “On defense your life can hang on somebody. If person didn’t want to be there, person might be careless and you might suffer. If person didn’t want to mother and you were a baby, you might not be loved enough to grow up loving and strong. Person must not do what person cannot do.”

“Ever hear of being lazy? Suppose I just don’t want to get up in the morning.”

“Then I must do your work on top of my own if I’m in your base. Or in your family, I must do your defense or your child‑care. I’ll come to mind that. Who wants to be resented? Such people are asked to leave and they may wander from village to village sourer and more self‑pitying as they go. We sadden at it.” Luciente shrugged. “Sometimes a healer like my old friend Diana can help. Diana the rose. A healer can go back with you and help you grow again. It’s going down and then climbing a hard path. But many heal well. Like you, Diana catches.”

The yellow building was odd, like a lemon mushroom pushing out of the ground. Decorated with sculpted tree shapes, it was windowless and faintly hummed. She realized that except for the creaking of windmills, this was the first sound of machinery she had heard here. Indeed, the door sensed them and opened, admitting them to an antechamber, then sliding shut to trap them between inner and outer doors in a blue light.

“What is all this?” She shifted nervously.

“Disinfecting. This is the brooder, where our genetic material is stored. Where the embryos grow.”

The inner doors zipped open, but into space that looked more like a big aquarium than a lab. The floor was carpeted in a blue print and music was playing, strange to her ears but not unpleasant. A big black man leaning comfortably on a tank painted over with eels and water lilies waved to them. “I’m Bee. Be guest! Be guest to what I comprend was a nightmare of your age.”

“Bottle babies!”

“No bottles involved. But fasure we’re all born from here.”

“And are you a Wamponaug Indian too?”

Bee smiled. He was a big‑boned, well‑muscled man with some fat around his midriff, and he moved more slowly than Luciente, with the majesty and calm of a big ship. He steered placidly among the strange apparatus, the tanks and machines and closed compartments, something that beat slowly against the wall like a great heart, the padded benches stuck here and there. Either Bee was bald or he shaved his head, and the sleeves of his rose work shirt were rolled up to reveal on each bicep a tattoo–though the colors were more subtle and the drawing finer than any she had seen. On his left arm he had, not the cartoon of a bee, but a Japanese‑looking drawing of a honeybee in flight. On his right he wore a shape something like a breaking wave. “Here embryos are growing almost ready to birth. We do that at ninemonth plus two or three weeks. Sometimes we wait tenmonth. We find that extra time gives us stronger babies.” He pressed a panel and a door slid aside, revealing seven human babies joggling slowly upside down, each in a sac of its own inside a larger fluid receptacle.

Connie gaped, her stomach also turning slowly upside down. All in a sluggish row, babies bobbed. Mother the machine. Like fish in the aquarium at Coney Island. Their eyes were closed. One very dark female was kicking. Another, a pink male, she could see clearly from the oversize penis, was crying. Languidly they drifted in a blind school. Bee pressed something and motioned her to listen near the port. The heartbeat, voices speaking.

“That can’t be the babies talking!”

“No!” Bee laughed. “Though they make noise enough. Music, voices, the heartbeat, all these sounds they can hear.”