Then Luciente showed her half a dozen other weeds she could eat, all of which she took as samples obediently but without enthusiasm. As dusk thickened, so did the cloud of mosquitoes settling over her. They left Luciente alone. “They know I’m not real,” she said. “I hope it wasn’t a bad idea to bring Dawn through. Dawn is a little bent to personal heroics. I should’ve consulted my corns … .

“It’s twilight. Do you think we could risk a small fire?”

“Anything. Look at my arms and legs!” Her body was lumpy with bites. The bugs were settling on her in colonies, like rows of oil derricks pumping away. She and Luciente moved a distance from the spring, back among the pines, but the mosquitoes followed them. Finally she tore western New York from the map and together with dry fallen branches and twigs, they set a fire that caught on the fourth match. “You can roast your potatoes.”

“I forgot them.” She settled against a tree. “Maybe they’ve stopped looking for me. If I was them, I’d watch Dolly’s. After all, I have to go to her for money.”

“This money complicates your lives.”

“But you have those credits.”

Luciente settled down cross‑legged across the fire. “Luxuries are scarce. There is only so much Bordeaux, so much caviar, so much Altiplano gray cheese. Necessities are not scarce. We grow enough food. But there are things no one needs that people enjoy. We try to spread them around. In our region we each get a fixed number of luxury credits. We can spend them all on some really rare luxury–a bottle of great old wine like a 2098 vintage Port for my birthday–or we can have many little treats. We can even save them up for two years. In Parra’s region, Tejas del Sur, they do it by productivity. They have a fixed number of credits for the region, and villages are allotted points by how much above their quota they produce. We think they’ll get tired of that system. It creates rivalry.”

“I think I’d spend my credits on clothes.”

“But that makes no sense, Connie. The costumes circulate. You take them out as you want them. The flimsies anybody can design. A flimsy is as good as you can imagine it to be.”

“But aren’t some clothes better than others?”

“We all have warm coats and good rain gear. Work clothes that wear well. The costumes are labors of love people give to the community when they want to make something pretty. Sometimes I want to dress up beautiful. Other times I want to be funny. Sometimes I want to body a fantasy, an idea, a dream. Sometimes I want to recall an ancestor, or express a truth about myself–that, say, I am a stubborn goat in character.” Luciente laughed.

“What do you use your credits for, then? Those carved drums I saw you carrying?”

“No, no! Those were made for me by Otter for my birthday. Me, I like Port. And I love the sweet German wine, especially Mosels and Saars and Ruwers. And I like to give presents. Mostly I make them, which is twice a gift, as we say. But sometimes I like to give something pretty and exotic. I can always think of more things to spend credits on than I have credits.”

“Don’t you wish you could have more?”

“As we become more productive, worldwide, as we put less energy into repairing past damages, then we’ll put more energy into producing the unnecessary–the delightful, the pleasing. It will happen.”

Connie smiled, poking the fire idly with a stick that charred at the end. “I ask you about I and you answer me about We.”

“Connie, we are born screaming Ow and I! The gift is in growing to care, to connect, to cooperate. Everything we learn aims to make us feel strong in ourselves, connected to all living. At home.”

“I’m at home here only because you helped me.”

“But this too is a human landscape. Look, someone planted these white pines. Regularly spaced. Look closely at the ground. Beneath the needles you can see marks of old furrows. Plowed ground. As long before you as I am living after you, crops grew here. The earth lives, if it isn’t murdered.”

“Tonight I have to move on. I can’t stay here.”

“Where will you go?”

“Down the highway, there’s a good‑sized town in maybe ten miles. I’m not sure how far I’ve come. There has to be a bus station there. I’ll walk through the night and then in the morning go to the bus station. Then I’ll go as far as I can on five dollars. I’ll use what I have left for food and some clothes from a thrift shop. A dress, some secondhand shoes, and a purse. Once I get to New York I figure I’m safe.”

Luciente required definitions of thrift shop, ticket, purse, and still she looked dubious. “Soaking the sumac in water will give us a poultice for your feet.”

When Luciente prepared the sticky mess, she pressed it on her soles. Then Luciente kissed her, wished her success, and left. The baked potatoes were mealy and almost inedible without salt, but she ate them anyhow, slowly. A potato without salt roasted in freedom can taste wonderful. Then she lay on her smock, but she did not sleep. Her brain would not quite shut down. Instead she half dreamed. The fire had burned out to dim coals that still gave off some smoke, some warmth.

The embryos in the brooder swam and sang to her, a fish song that did not bubble but vibrated directly into her body, into her midriff; they were bobbing and schooling and serenading her. All were promising to be her little baby, they would be her baby tonight, tomorrow, maybe on Sunday. She would be co‑mother, she would have a baby again of her own to suckle at her breast, to carry, to rock to sleep. Her robbed body twisted to seize one.

She was watching a birth. The three mothers were ritually bathed in a sauna‑sweat house and, dressed in red, they were brought in a procession of family and friends to the brooder. One of the mothers was Sojourner, the old person from Luciente’s family with eyes of coal chips, one of the mothers was Jackrabbit, and the third was her. They held each other’s hands and she walked in the middle. The robes were heavy, encrusted with embroidery. On hers were doves and eggs. Everyone was carrying bouquets of late summer flowers, asters and phlox and white lilies streaked with crimson and wide as plates that lay down a heavy scent, bouquets of marigold and nasturtium.

Some were dmmming, and toward the back of the procession a child was playing one of those flutes that sounded poignant and sad to her, although the melody was gay enough. Her heart felt too large under the robe. She gripped the hands of her comothers tight, tight, till Sojourner gently asked her not to squeeze so much, while Jackrabbit gave her grip for grip. Just behind them Luciente beat on her carved drums a syncopated galloping march. Bee nodded to her, carrying a sheaf of yellow and red and bronze bold‑faced sunflowers.

As they came to the brooder, everyone fell back except the three of them, who entered. They stood under the sterilizer, helping each other out of the robes and hanging them on hooks to the side. Naked they went into the center chamber, where Barbarossa, the birther, was waiting for them. Dressed in his brooder uniform of yellow and blue, he embraced each. As she looked down at herself, she felt her breasts, swollen from the shots, already dribbling colostrum. She and Jackrabbit were to breast‑feed. Sojourner explained she had decided not to try it.

“I didn’t have my first child till I was fifty‑five,” she said. “I fought in the battle of Space Platform Alpha. And in the battle of Arlington and Fort Bragg. Long, long before we had brooders, I had myself sterilized so that I wouldn’t be tempted to turn aside from the struggle. I thought I had left my sex behind me. Now I am seventy‑four and my family does me the honor of believing there’s enough life in me to make a mother a second time.”

Now all three knelt, the old woman getting down slowly but stubbornly on her gnarled knees. Barbarossa stood before them like a priest officiating at Mass. “Do you, Sojourner, desire this baby to be born?”