2312

Wahram and Swan

Wahram was back in Terminator before Swan returned from Earth. At that point the city was sliding over the immense plain of Beethoven Crater, and Wahram screwed his courage to the sticking point and when she got into town, asked Swan if she wanted to go out with him to a facility in the west wall of Beethoven, to hear a concert and catch up on things. As he made the call, he was, he had to admit, nervous. Her quicksilver manner left him uncertain what to expect; he could not even predict whether he would be going out to Beethoven with her or with Pauline. On the other hand, he liked Pauline; so hopefully it would be all right either way. And with luck Swan would no longer be so intent to learn all there was to know about Alex’s plans concerning the qubes. That, Inspector Genette had made very clear, they had to keep from her.

In any case, the chance to hear some Beethoven was enough to spur him on. He made the call; and Swan agreed to go.

After that Wahram looked up the program for the performance they were to attend, and was excited to see it was a triple bill of rarely played transcriptions: first a wind ensemble playing a transcription of the Appassionata piano sonata; then Beethoven’s opus 134, which was his own transcription for two pianos of his Grosse Fugue for string quartet, opus 133. Lastly a string quartet was to play a transcription of their own for the Hammerklavier sonata.

Brilliant programming, Wahram felt, and he joined Swan at the south lock of Terminator with an anticipation so strong that it overwhelmed the uneasiness he felt both about her and about being outside Terminator, on the surface of Mercury. Necessary movement westward—well, this was always true in some sense, he told himself, and focused his thoughts on the concert. Maybe there was no real reason for concern. It was interesting to think that he might be irrationally afraid of the sun.

At the little museum in the west wall of Beethoven, he was astonished to see that they were almost the only people in the audience, aside from the musicians not playing, who sat in the front rows to listen. The facility had an empty main room that would have held a few thousand people, but happily this concert was in a side hall with just a couple hundred seats, arced around a small stage in Greek theater style. Acoustics were excellent.

The wind ensemble, slightly outnumbering its audience, rollicked its way through the finale of the Appassionata in a way that made it one of the greatest wind pieces Wahram had ever heard, fast to the point of effervescence. The transcription to winds made it a new thing in the same way that Ravel had made Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition a new thing.

When they were done, two pianists got up, and sitting at grand pianos snuggled into each other like two sleeping cats, they played Beethoven’s own opus 134, his transcription of his Grosse Fugue. They had to pound away like percussionists, simply hammering the keys. More clearly than ever Wahram heard the intricate weave of the big fugue, also the crazy energy of the thing, the maniacal vision of a crushing clockwork. The sharp attack of struck piano keys gave the piece a clarity and violence that strings with the best will and technique in the world could not achieve. Wonderful.

Then some other transcriber had gone in the opposition direction, arranging the Hammerklavier sonata for string quartet. Here, even though four instruments were now playing a piece written for one, it was still a challenge to convey the Hammerklavier’s intensity. Broken out among two violins, viola, and cello, it all unpacked beautifully: the magnificent anger of the first movement; the aching beauty of the slow movement, one of Beethoven’s finest; and then the finale, another big fugue. It all sounded very like the late quartets to Wahram’s ear—thus a new late quartet, by God! It was tremendous to hear. Wahram glanced around at the audience and saw the wind players and the pianists were standing on their feet behind the chairs, bouncing, swaying in place, faces uplifted and eyes closed, as if in prayer; hands sometimes spastically waving before them, as if conducting or dancing. Swan too was back there dancing, looking transported. Wahram was very pleased to see that; he was out there himself in the space of Beethoven, a very great space indeed. It would have been shocking to see someone immune to it; it would have put her outside his zone of sympathy or comprehension.

Afterward, as an encore, the musicians announced they wanted to try an experiment. They separated the two pianos, and the string quartet then sat between them, in a circle facing inward; then they reprised the two big fugues, all playing at the same time. The two pieces overlapped with the wrong instruments applied to each, increasing the cognitive confusion; and the quiet parts in each came at the same time, in an urgent eye of the storm, revealing the structural similarity of the two monsters. When both returned to their main fugues, the six instruments sawed or pounded away in their own worlds, lashing out six different tunes in a crisscross fury, with Messiaenic crashes. They ended together somehow. Wahram wasn’t certain which of them had been extended or curtailed to make that happen, but in any case they finished together with a big crash, and everyone there, already on their feet, could only clap and cheer and whistle.

“Wonderful,” Wahram said afterward. “Truly.”

Swan shook her head. “Too crazy at the end, but I liked it.”

They stayed around to join the congratulations and the discussion among the musicians, who were as interested as could be in what it had sounded like from the outside; more than one said they had been able to focus only on their own parts. Someone played back a recording made of it, and they listened along with the rest, until the musicians began to pause the recording and discuss details.

“Time to get back to Terminator,” Swan said.

“All right. Thanks ever so much for this, it was very fine.”

“My pleasure. Listen, do you want to walk back over to the city tracks? It’s nice after a wild concert like this one. They’ve got suits here we can use. It gives you a chance to walk it out a little.”

“But—do we have time?”

“Oh yes. We’ll get to the platform well ahead of the city. I’ve done this before.”

She must not have noticed his discomfort at being out on the surface of Mercury. Well, so he had to agree. Even though every other member of the audience, and the musicians too, took the tram back. On which they were almost certainly continuing the interesting discussion of the concert, of transpositions in Beethoven, and so on.

But no. A walk on a burned world. When their borrowed spacesuits had confirmed integrity, they exited the hall’s air lock and headed back north toward Terminator’s tracks.

Beethoven Crater had as smooth a surface as he had seen on Mercury. Little Bello was under the horizon to the east. Wahram walked along nervously. Their headlamps illuminated long ellipses of black desert. Fines lofted from the fronts of their boots and drifted back to the baked ground behind them. Their boot prints would last for a billion years, but they were on a track of prints, and the damage to the surface had long since been done. Flanking the dusty trail, the knobby granulated rock caught their headlamps’ beams and reflected them in little diamond pricks of light that looked like frost, though they must have been minute crystal surfaces. They passed a rock with a Kokopelli painted on it; the figure appeared to be holding a telescope rather than a flute and was pointing the glass to the east. For a while Wahram whistled the theme of the Grosse Fugue, half speed, under his breath.

“Do you whistle?” Swan asked, sounding surprised.

“I suppose I do.”

“So do I!”

Wahram, who did not think of himself as someone who whistled for others, did not continue.

They topped a small rise, and before them lay Terminator’s tracks. No city in sight yet; one had to assume it was still over the horizon to the east. The nearest track blocked the view of most of those paralleling it on its other side. It was made of a particular kind of tempered steel, he had heard, and gleamed a dull silver in the starlight. Its underside stood a few meters above the ground, and the thick pylons supporting it were set every fifty meters or so. A loading platform abutted the outer track to the northwest of them, he was happy to see. The tram from the concert was already there.

Sunlight pricked a high point on the west wall of Beethoven. Everything in the landscape was lit by that burnished cliff edge. Dawn was on its way, slow but sure. When it came over the eastern horizon Terminator would make a grand sight. Possibly that was the dome of the globe, already visible as a curved glint.

A stupendous flash of light blazed up from the tracks where the loading platform had been. A bloodred afterimage split his vision in two halves; as it was pulsing back to a less vivid vertical blob, rocks began crashing down around them, kicking up puffs of dust that moved like splashed water. They both cried out, although Wahram had no idea what either said; then Swan was crying, “Get down, guard your head!” and tugging at his arm. Wahram kneeled next to her and put an arm around her shoulders; she seemed to be trying to put her arms over his helmet while ducking hers against his chest. Looking over her, he saw that the tracks where the platform had been had disappeared in a big ball of dust, and the very top of the dust cloud was now high enough to be up in the sunlight. The brilliant yellow of the sunlit part of the cloud illuminated the land around it like a beacon of fire. The land at the foot of the cloud was glowing with a light of its own; it appeared to be a pool of smoking lava.

“A meteor,” he said stupidly.

Swan was talking on the common band. A few more rocks fell on the land around them, invisible until announced by an explosion of dust. It looked like the land was exploding, as if mines were going off. Occasionally a falling rock was hot and looked like a shooting star. Some ember blinks were still up there flying among the stars. They would get hit or they wouldn’t: an awful feeling. Guarding their helmets did not seem like it was going to do much good.

Dust flew up over them, fell back to land in lazy sheets and veils. Gray topped by yellow; but when the top of the dust cloud fell back below the horizontal beams of approaching sunlight, they were plunged into the darkness of Mercurial night, with only the distant lit crater wall to illuminate them with its reflection. Red bars still pulsed vertically in the middle of Wahram’s sight. It seemed much dimmer than it had before.

“There’s a group of sunwalkers just south of here, up under the crater wall,” Swan said grimly. She asked a question on the common band. “One of them’s been hit, and they need help. Come on.”

He followed her away from the tracks, feeling blind and confused. “Was it a meteor strike?”

“Looks like it. Although the tracks have a detect-and-deflect system, so I don’t know what happened. Come on, we’ve got to hurry! I want to get back to the city. It’s… ohhh…” She groaned as the realization appeared to strike her that the city was doomed. “No!” she cried as she dragged him southward. “No, no, no, no, no, no, no.” Over and over as they stumbled along. Then: “How could it be.”

He couldn’t tell if it was a rhetorical question. “Don’t know,” he said. She tugged at him and he kept his eyes on the ground to keep from kicking a rock and falling. Rocks littered the land. He tried to remember what he had seen; had it been a flash? From above? Hadn’t it risen? No—a downward motion. He closed his eyes, but the red bar and light red clouds still bounced around on the black backdrop of the insides of his eyelids. He opened his eyes, glanced at Swan. Later perhaps they could review her qube’s visual record, assuming it kept one. She was muttering now in the irritated tone of voice she seemed to use only when addressing it.

She led him around a hillock, and when they had cleared it, they spotted a group of three people in spacesuits, all three walking, which was good to see, but with one holding one arm with the other hand, and walking awkwardly as a result. The other two flanked this one, helping or trying to.

“Hey!” Swan said on the common band, and they looked up and saw them approaching. One waved. Swan and Wahram joined them a few minutes later.

“How are you?” Swan said.

“Happy to be alive,” said the one holding an arm. “I got hit on the arm!”

“I can see. Let’s get back to the city.”

“What happened?”

“A meteor hit the tracks, it looked like.”

“How could that be?”

“I don’t know. Come on!”

Without further discussion the five of them began walking at speed toward the tracks, striding along in a Martian lope that made the best of the local g. Wahram was all right at it because of his time on Titan, which was about half as heavy as this, but similar enough. Together they bounded down the mild slope, angling eastward to intercept the city as soon as possible. There was a strange keening in Wahram’s ear, an animal moan of distress; at first he thought it was the hurt sunwalker, but then realized it was Swan. Of course it was her city, her home.

They came over a rise that gave them a view of the top half of the city’s dome, bulging over the horizon like the blue bubble of a pocket universe. The city appeared to be moving still. “The tracks ahead of it are damaged,” he said.

“Yes, of course!”

“Is there a way for it to get past a section of broken track?”

“No! How would that work?”

“I don’t know, I’m just… wondering. It seems like most support systems try to avoid criticalities.”

“Of course. But the tracks are protected, there’s an anti-meteor system!”

“It must not have worked?”

“Apparently not!” Again she cried out, a piercing sound in his ear even when damped by his suit’s intercom.

The sunwalkers were chattering among themselves, sounding worried.

“What will we do when we get to it?” Wahram asked on the common band.

Swan stopped groaning and said, “What do you mean?”

“Are there lifeboats? You know—rovers to drive to the nearest spaceport?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Enough for everyone?”

“Yes!”

“And are there spaceships enough at the nearest spaceport? Enough for the whole population of Terminator?”

“There’s shelter in all the spaceports, enough to hold a lot of people. And vehicles to go west to the next ones. And some hoppers can handle being on the brightside.”

As they hurried across the black rubbly plain, Terminator slowly hove up over the horizon. The upper half of the interior of the Dawn Wall was now visible, looking much steeper than it really was, all whitewashed walls and trees. A thick bar of green marked the treetops of the park. Extending forward from the trees were the crops of the farm. A snow globe on silver tracks, headed to its doom. They could see no people in the city, even though it was now looming above them. Certainly no one was on the terraces of the Dawn Wall anymore. It looked abandoned.

And there was no way to get up into it. The platform had been in the impact zone. Everyone who had been at the concert must have been killed. Inside the city they could see a trio of deer: buck, doe, fawn. Swan’s cries pitched up an octave. “No. No!”

It was strange to be standing there, looking up at the empty city’s Mediterranean calm.

Swan ran under the tracks to the north side of the city, and the rest of them followed. From that side they could see a little convoy of ground vehicles far to the north and west, rolling away from them through the break in Beethoven’s northwest wall. The cars were fast, and soon over the horizon.

“They’ve left,” Wahram observed.

“Yes yes. Pauline?”

“I suppose we could walk to the spaceport?” Wahram said, worried.

Swan was talking to her internal qube, however, and Wahram couldn’t follow the gist of the exchange. Her tone of voice was utterly caustic.

She broke off that argument and said to him, “The cars aren’t coming back. The city will stop automatically when it hits the break in the tracks. We have to leave. Every tenth platform has elevators that go down to shelters under the tracks, so we have to get to one of those.”

“How near is the closest one to the west?”

“About ninety kilometers. The town just passed one back to the east.”

“Ninety kilometers!”

“Yes. We’ll need to go east. It’s only nine kilometers. Our suits will handle the sunlight for the time it will take us.”

Wahram said, “Maybe we could walk the ninety.”

“No we couldn’t, what do you mean?”

“I think we could. People have done it.”

“Athletes who have trained for it have done it. I do enough walking to know, and maybe I could do it, but you couldn’t. You can’t do it by willpower alone. And this sunwalker is hurt. No, listen, we’ll be all right going into the sunlight. It’s just the corona we’ll be exposed to, and no more than an hour or a little more. I’ve done it often.”

“I’d rather not.”

“You have no choice! Come on, the longer we dither, the longer we’ll be exposed!”

That was true.

“All right, then,” he said, and felt his heart pound inside him.

She turned around, held out her arms up to the city, groaned like an animal. “Oh, my town, my town, ohhhh… We’ll come back! We’ll rebuild! Ohhhhh…”

Behind the glassy face mask her face was wet with tears. She noticed him watching her and swung a hand back as if to strike at him. “Come on, we have to go!” She gestured to the three sunwalkers. “Come on!”

As they started running east, Swan howled over the common band, a sound like an alarm siren that had done its duty but continued on in the emptiness after a disaster. The figure running before him did not seem capable of generating such a terrible sound, which stuck him like pins in the ears. A lot of animals had no doubt been left behind inside—the whole little terrarium, a community of plants and animals. And she designed such things. And this one was her home. Suddenly her howl made it clear to him that saving the humans of the place was not really enough. So much got left behind. A whole world. If a world dies, its people don’t matter anymore—so the howl seemed to say.

Dawn kept coming, as always.

Now this was an interesting matter: could he modulate his fear, rein it in and use it to impel him at the optimum pace for the quickest arrival at the platform out there to the east, in the raw light of daybreak? And did that pace match the pace that was going to be set for him by the person he was following? For Swan was moaning still, crying and cursing, keening in a rhythm that was keyed to her running; she bounced forward on the impact of her strides, perhaps helpless to go slower; and yet she was moving faster than he could match. He had to give ground and keep to his own pace, and hope that he would at least be able to keep the distance close enough that he wouldn’t lose her over the horizon. Although of course the tracks would lead him right to the platform, so even if she disappeared over the horizon, that should not matter. And yet he did not want to lose sight of her. The three sunwalkers were already a considerable distance ahead of her, even the one with the hurt arm. So maybe the unhappy noise she was making was in fact slowing her down.

The land dipped and rose here in such a way that he could see many kilometers to the north, and the highlands in that direction were now all ablaze with sunlight. That lit part of the landscape threw light over the shadowed terrain they ran in, and Wahram saw the rumples in the land, and the rubble on it, better than he had ever seen anything before, not just on Mercury but anywhere. Everything looked coated by a layer of friable powder, no doubt the result of the daily bake and freeze.

The light from the north grew so bright he had to look away to preserve his vision for the dark places underfoot and before him. Ahead the moaning silhouette bounded against the stars. He forced his breath into a rhythm with his feet, watched the ground he was running on, focused on a rapid efficient gait. One-third g could be deceptive, being neither light nor heavy. It had the potential for speedy running, but a fall was not a trivial thing, especially in this situation. Swan was on home ground and did not appear to be thinking of him at all.

He ran on. Normally the distance involved would be for him a matter of about forty-five minutes of running, he reckoned, depending on terrain. That was long enough to call for restraint from full speed, even for runners. Was she going out too fast? He saw no signs of deceleration.

On the other hand, she was not getting farther ahead. And he was now in a pace he thought he could sustain. It was neither fast nor slow. He huffed and puffed, watched the ground carefully. Quick glances showed Swan always well short of the horizon. It was all going to work out—then he stumbled and had to catch himself up by way of some desperate windmilling of the arms, after which he kept his head down and focused on the ground more than ever.

It was one of those moments when the shock of the unexpected throws one into a different space. He could see Swan’s boot prints superimposed on the palimpsest of earlier prints. Her stride was shorter than his. He flew over her steps, even though he was losing ground on her. The sunwalkers were halfway over the horizon. Swan’s moaning still filled his ears, but he refused to let himself turn down the volume or turn it off.

Then the sun blinked over the horizon, and again he felt his heart pounding. At first, licks of orange fire popped over the horizon and disappeared. The corona was hotter than the actual surface of the sun by a great deal, as he recalled. Magnetic surges, bowing up in characteristic loops of fire, rising majestically over the horizon and hanging there before blasting off to one side or the other. The sun’s flames, in effect, flying up in stupendous explosions guided by the magnetic fields that roiled in the burn. He ran on looking down at the ground, but the next time he glanced up most of the horizon ahead of him was orange—the sun itself, its orangeness stuffed and writhing with bubbles and banners of yellow. To stop it down to something his eyes could handle, his faceplate had to render the rest of the cosmos black. The horizon was the only thing that could be clearly picked out, a line out there not very high, not smooth, various hills and dips that bounced and blurred. Swan stood out blackly, a runner imago, her silhouette thinned by white light pouring around her. The ground underfoot was now a salt-and-pepper pattern impossible to read, aching white and deep black all jumbled together so that the white parts pulsed and shimmered in his vision. He had to trust it was flat enough to run, because it didn’t look like it. And then after another while it became a black-chipped white that looked flat as a sheet. They were out in full day.

He began to sweat. Probably this was just fear, and the sudden helpless acceleration in his pace. His suit began to hum audibly in its effort to cool him, a slight but terrible sound. His sweat would slide down his flanks and legs and collect at a seal above the boots. He didn’t think enough could collect to drown him, but he wasn’t sure. The black flicker of Swan in the sun had become a sort of spectre of the Brocken, exploding in and out of existence in vibrant pulses. He thought he saw her look over her shoulder at him, but he did not dare wave to her lest he lose his balance and fall. She seemed short, and suddenly he saw she was visible now only from the knees up. The horizon was about as far away as it would be on Titan. That meant he was probably only five or ten minutes behind her.

Then the platform top appeared over the horizon just to her left, next to the southernmost track, and he quickened his pace yet again. In any physical endeavor a little kick at the end could usually be found.

This time, however, it seemed he was truly stretched to his maximum. Indeed it very quickly turned into something more like a desperate attempt to hold what speed he had. He was gasping, and had to force himself to a breath pattern in a rhythm coordinated with his pounding heavy legs, one gasp for two strikes. It was very frightening to look up and see almost the whole visible stretch of the eastern horizon topped by the corona; the slight curve of it seemed to suggest it would eventually fill most of the sky, as if what was rising before them was some kind of universal sun. Mercury looked like a bowling ball rolling into that light.

His sweat now filled his suit to his thighs, and he wondered again if he could drown in it. But then again, he could drink it and save himself. Happily his air supply was still cool in his face.

His faceplate polarization shifted, and the texture of the sun through the black glass of his faceplate articulated into thousands of tongues of flame. Big fields of tendrils moved in concert, whole regions swirling like cats’ paws on water. It looked like a living being, a creature made of fire.

The platform was a block of black in the black, Swan a black movement beside it. He reached her, stopped, gasped for a while with his hands on his knees, his back to the sun. Her keening had stopped, although from time to time she still moaned. The sunwalkers apparently had already taken the elevator down; she was waiting for it to come back up.

“I’m sorry,” he said when he could speak. “Sorry I’m late.”

She was looking at the sun, now four fingers high over the jagged black horizon. “Oh my God, look at it,” she said. “Just look at it.”

Wahram tried, but it was too bright, too big.

Then a loop of the corona flew hugely higher than any they had yet seen, as if the sun were trying to reach out and burn them with a touch. “Oh no!” Swan cried out, and pulled Wahram over to her and against the door, moving to his sun side and pulling him down to shield him with herself, punching elevator buttons over his shoulder and cursing.

“Come on hurry!” she yelled. “Oh that’s a big flare, that’s bad. By the time you see one of those it’s already zapped you.”

Finally the elevator doors slid open and the two of them rushed in. The doors closed. They felt the elevator car drop.

When Wahram’s faceplate and eyes had adjusted to the ordinary light, he saw that Swan’s face under her faceplate was wet with tears and snot.

She sniffed hard. “Damn that was a big flare,” she said, wiping her face. When the elevator stopped and they got out, she said to the sunwalkers, “Any of you have a dosimeter on you?”

One of them replied as if quoting: “If you want to know, you don’t want to know.”

She looked at Wahram, her expression grim in a way he had never seen. “Pauline?” she said. “Find the dosimeter in this suit.” She listened for a while, then clutched her chest, staggered down to one knee. “Oh shit,” she said faintly. “I’m killed.”

“How much did you get?” Wahram exclaimed, alarmed. He checked his wristpad; it showed a radiation spike of 3.762 sieverts, and he hissed. They would be needing a lot of DNA repair the next time they got their treatments—if they could make it. He repeated his question: “How much did you get?”

She stood up and would not look at him. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

“That was quite a slice of the sun,” he said.

“It’s not that,” she said. “It was that flare. Bad luck.”

The sunwalkers nodded at this, and Wahram felt a little queasy jolt slither down his spine.

They were in a lock. The elevator doors closed behind them, the door on the other side of the lock slid open, followed by a little whoosh of air. They went into a low room of some considerable size, with several doors and passageways leading out of it.

“Is this a refuge?” Wahram asked. “Do we have to stay here through the brightside crossing? Can we?”

“This is part of a whole system,” Swan explained. “It was built to help with the construction of the tracks. Every tenth platform has a unit like this under it, and there’s a utilidor that connects them all. A work tunnel.” The sunwalkers were already checking some of the cabinet doors on one wall.

“So we could hurry underground in this tunnel and catch up to the nightside? Get to help?”

“Yes. But I wonder if the part under the meteor strike is still passable. I guess we can go see.”

“It’s all heated and aerated?”

“Yes. After some people died when they came down to take shelter, the stations have been made minimally survivable. Actually, I think you have to re-aerate the utilidor section by section as you go along. It’s like turning on the lights.”

One of the sunwalkers gave a thumbs-up, and Swan took off her helmet and Wahram did too.

“Do either of you have radio comms?” one of them asked. “Ours aren’t working, and we’re thinking maybe the sun fried them. And the phone here isn’t working. We won’t be able to tell people we’re down here.”

“Pauline, are you all right?” Swan said aloud, and fell silent.

“How is your qube?” Wahram asked after a while.

“She’s all right,” Swan said dismissively. “She says my head served as good insulation for her.”

“Oh dear.”

They followed the sunwalkers down the hall, took stairs down to a set of large rooms below.

The biggest room down there contained a scattering of couches and low tables, and the long bar of a communal kitchen. Swan introduced herself and Wahram to the three sunwalkers, who were people of indeterminate age and gender. They nodded politely at Swan’s introduction, but did not identify themselves. “How is your arm?” Swan asked the hurt one.

“It’s broken,” the person said simply, and held it out a little. “Clean hit, but the rock was small and just falling, I guess. Tossed up in the big hit.”

Now it seemed to Wahram that this one at least was young.

“We’ll wrap it,” one of the others said, also young. “We can try to straighten it, and then wrap it with a support, no matter how straight it is.”

“Did any of you see the meteor strike?” Swan asked.

They all three shook their heads. All young, Wahram thought. These were the kinds of people who walked around Mercury right before sunrise, torching themselves with solar visions. Although apparently Swan was also one of them. The young in spirit, then.

“What are we going to do?” he asked.

“We can take the utilidor west till we get to the next spaceport on the nightside,” one of them said.

“Do you think the utilidor is still passable under the hit?” Swan asked.

“Oh,” the one said. “I didn’t think of that.”

“It might be,” said the one with the broken forearm. The third one was looking in cabinets against the wall. “You never know.”

“I doubt it,” Swan said. “But I guess we can go look. It’s only about fifteen klicks away.”

Only fifteen! Wahram didn’t say. They stood there looking at each other.

“Well, shit,” Swan said. “Let’s go take a look. I don’t want to just sit here.”

Wahram suppressed a sigh. It was not as if they had a great number of choices. And if they could get through to the west, and hurried, they could catch up to the night, and hopefully the spaceport where the people from Terminator had gone.

So they went to a door at the west end of the room and went through it into a passageway, lit dimly by a string of overhead lights that were part of the ceiling. The walls of the tunnel were raw faces of rock, in some places cracked, in others bare walls with drill bit marks angling upward on their left and downward on their right. They hiked west at a good clip. The one with the broken arm seemed to be the fastest of them all, although one of the other sunwalkers stuck close by the hurt one. No one spoke. An hour passed; then, after a short rest sitting on some cubical blocks of rock in the tunnel, another hour. “Did your Pauline get an image of the strike?” Wahram asked Swan when they were walking again. The utilidor was wide enough for three or four people to walk abreast, as the sunwalkers were proving ahead of them.

“I’ve looked, but it’s just a flash to one side. Only a few milliseconds of light before the explosion upward and out, coming down fast and hot. But why hot? There’s no atmosphere to heat it, so that doesn’t make sense. It kind of looks like it came from, I don’t know, somewhere else. From some other universe.”

“Seems like some other explanation will be forthcoming,” Wahram could not help saying.

“Well, you explain it,” she said sharply, as if speaking to her qube.

“I can’t,” Wahram said calmly.

They walked on in silence. Presumably at some point they were walking underneath the city. Above them, Terminator would be burning up in the day’s rain of light.

Then the tunnel ahead of them appeared to end. They had all put their helmets back on, as it was the easiest way to carry them, and now they shone their helmets’ headlamps into the darkness before them. A mass of rock rubble filled the tunnel, floor to roof. It was cold here, and suddenly Swan said, “We’d better seal our helmets,” and her faceplate slid down. Wahram did the same.

They stood there looking at the blockage.

“All right,” Swan said grimly. “Can’t go west. We’ll have to go east, I guess.”

“But how long will that take?” Wahram said.

She shrugged. “If we sit here, it will be eighty-eight days till sunset. If we walk, it will be less.”

“Walk around half of Mercury?”

“Less than half, because we will be walking and the planet will be rolling. That’s the point. I mean, what else are we going to do? I’m not going to sit here for three months!” She was almost in tears, he saw.

“How far is it again?” he asked, thinking half of Titan as he said it. His stomach contracted within him.

“About two thousand kilometers. But if we walk east at, say, thirty kilometers a day, we shorten the wait time to something more like forty days. So we can cut it in half. That seems worth it to me. And it doesn’t have to be continuous walking. I mean, it’s not like the sunwalkers. We walk a day’s worth, eat, sleep a night, then walk again. Set a daily schedule. If we hiked for twelve hours out of every twenty-four, that would be a lot, but it would save even more days. What, Pauline?”

“Can you turn up Pauline’s voice again?” Wahram requested.

“I don’t want to now. She says twelve-hour days of walking would shorter our time down here by around forty-five days. That’s enough for me.”

“Well,” Wahram said. “That’s a lot of walking.”

“I know, but what are you going to do? Sit here for over twice as long?”

“No,” he said slowly. “I guess not.”

Although really it would not be so very long. A rereading of Proust and O’Brian, a few times through the Ring cycle; his little wristpad was very well stocked. But the way she stood there looking at him, these were not thoughts he felt comfortable expressing.

“I’ll turn up Pauline,” she said, as if giving him something in exchange for his agreement.

“Solvitur ambulando,” Pauline said. “Latin for ‘It is solved by walking.’ Diogenes of Sinope.”

“Thus you prove motion is real,” Wahram supposed.

“Yes.”

Wahram sighed. “I was already convinced.”

Back at the first underground station they took stock. The three sunwalkers were perfectly happy to walk for six or seven weeks; it was very like their usual mode of existence. Their names were Tron, Tor, and Nar. They were gender nondescripts as far as Wahram was concerned, and seemed to him very young and simple. They lived only to hike around Mercury; they seemed to know nothing more than that, or perhaps they didn’t speak much to strangers. But what they did say seemed childlike to him, or provincial in the extreme. There were whole terraria filled with such folk, of course, but he had gotten used to thinking of the Mercurials as highly sophisticated, steeped in history and art and culture. Now he was learning that it was not universally true. He realized he had thought sun worshippers would be followers of the various early solar religions of ancient Egypt, Persia, the Inca—but no. They just liked the sun.

It looked like they were going to have to spend a couple of nights sleeping on the floor of the unimproved tunnel in between each way station. “Every third day,” Swan said, “we can resupply. It sets a good goal.”

“We might even be able to go farther,” Tron said shyly.

Tron was the one with the broken arm, so Wahram refrained from mentioning that for him personally, thirty-three kilometers a day might prove enough, or too much. That he might be the drag on this group was discouraging. In any case Swan was overseeing the filling of backpacks she had found in the emergency supply cabinets: their spacesuit helmets, some emergency air, water bottles, food, air mattresses, a little pot and stove. A roll of aerogel blankets, not very warm-looking, but the utilidor would stay at this temperature, Swan said; and it was pretty warm.

So: tunnel walk. Possibly similar to spelunking expeditions of long duration. Little headlamps were included in the packs too, although for now they were not necessary, as the ceiling held a warm square of yellow-white light every twenty meters or so, illuminating the rough rock of the utilidor very well. They were about fifteen meters underground, Swan said. The tunnel had been drilled through bedrock or regolith, with a heat finish that had imparted frequent swirls and dashes of mineral color, reminiscent of the cut surfaces of certain meteorites. In some stretches silver curves lay over pewter, then jet black. The floor had been chipped to a texture that made for a good grip underfoot. The tight curve of Mercury meant that the most distant overhead lights merged into a single bar of light. It was as if they could see the arc of the planet, which Wahram found vaguely encouraging. He was finding the idea of thirty-three kilometers a day, for more than forty days in a row, daunting. Must recall they were down around the forty-fifth latitude south here, so the distance was not as far as it would have been if they were on the equator. Sometimes Terminator’s tracks went even farther south, as he recalled. Things could be worse.

So. Walk for an hour, in a tunnel that changed very little, and only in iterative ways. Stop, sit on the ground, rest for a while; then walk an hour more. At the end of three hours, stop and eat. Already that interval felt very long, something like a week or more in ordinary human time, in the time of thinking. But they did that three times before stopping to eat a larger meal, then slept for eight or nine hours.

Hour, hour, hour; hour, hour, hour; hour, hour, hour.

The sensation of lengthening time grew very strong in Wahram. Why it should feel so long was hard to tell; the repetition of the elements of the day he would have thought might streamline and thus speed the hours; but no. Instead it was protraction, a very pronounced feeling of protraction. At the end of each day, as he settled down, footsore and exhausted, to sleep, he could stretch out on his air mattress and say, “One down, thirty-seven to go,” or even “thirty-three to go,” and feel a little stab of despair. Every hour felt like a week! Could they endure it?

The sunwalkers usually hiked a bit ahead, and by the time Wahram and Swan joined them at a stop, they were always prepping tea. Then, well before Wahram was ready to get up and go again, the young ferals were off, almost apologetically, with a nod and a wave. His days, therefore, were spent mostly with Swan.

She was clearly not happy at the prospect of this hike, even though it was her idea. She was doing it only because the alternative was worse, in her estimation. It was something to be endured, in misery mute or voluble. Some days she went ahead, some days fell behind. “I’m going to get sick at some point,” she said once. It became clear to Wahram that she liked the situation even less than he did—far less than he did, as she told him herself. She hated it, she said; suffered from claustrophobia; could not stand to be indoors; needed copious daily sunlight; needed lots of variety in her daily routines and in her sensory stimuli. These were necessities, she told Wahram, and in no uncertain terms. “This is so horrible,” she exclaimed often, making the word an emphatic three syllables with fore and aft stresses. “Horrible, horrible, horrible. I won’t be able to make it.”

“Let’s talk about something else,” Wahram would suggest.

“How can I? It’s horrrr-i-bull.”

Endless repetition of these points would still occupy only the first hour of their twelve-hour day of walking and rests. After such a first hour, Wahram would usually decide it was appropriate to point out that they would need to talk about something else if they were to avoid undue repetition stress on both their parts.

“Tired of me already?” Swan concluded from these observations.

“Not at all. Vastly entertained. Even interested. But this motif, of the unhappy voyage of necessity, it’s limited. It’s played out. I want a different story.”

“That’s lucky for you, because I was going to change the subject.”

“Lucky for me indeed.”

She trudged on ahead of him. There was no reason to hurry to say the next thing; they had all day. Wahram watched her walk ahead of him: her stride was graceful and long, she was in her home g and sinuous, efficient. Very quickly she could get well ahead of him. She did not seem ill yet. From behind he sometimes heard her having conversations with her qube. For whatever reason, she had shifted Pauline’s voice to exterior audibility; maybe she was keeping that little promise to him. The conversations between the two almost always sounded like arguments; Swan’s voice was clearer and more hectoring, but Pauline’s alto, slightly muffled by Swan’s own skin, was somehow mulishly contentious as well. Depending on how one programmed them, qubes could be real fiends for argument, quibblers to the highest degree. Once Wahram caught up enough to be able to eavesdrop on them, and came in on something that had been going on for a while; Swan was saying, “Poor Pauline, if I were you I would be so sad! I feel so sorry for you! It must feel terrible to be nothing but a packet of algorithms!”

Pauline said, “This is the rhetorical device called anacoenesis, in which one pretends to put oneself in the place of one’s opponent.”

“No, not at all,” Swan assured her. “I really am sympathetic. To be so few qubits, to be just algorithms grinding it out. I mean considering that, you do very well.”

Pauline said, “This is the rhetorical device called synchoresis, in which one makes a concession before renewing the assault.”

“Maybe you’re right. I don’t really know why I thought you were stupid, given the huge power of these arguments of yours. And yet—”

“This is both sarcasm and aporia in the bad sense I mentioned before, of a momentary expression of doubt, often faked, before renewing the attack.”

“And this is the defense called casuistry, where when you’ve got nothing you retreat into a cloud of verbiage. Maybe you’re right, maybe it’s just smart consciousness and stupid consciousness. That would explain a lot.”

Pauline did not seem to be deterred. “Happy to submit our speech acts to a double-blind study to see if any distinctions at all can be made between yours and mine.”

“Really?” Swan said. “Are you saying you can pass a Turing test?”

“It depends who’s asking the questions.”

Swan laughed scornfully, but she really was amused, Wahram could hear it. So at least the qube was good for that.

The two of them swapped the lead every half hour, just to mark time and change the view, such as it was. They did not always talk; it would have been impossible, he thought. In any case they hiked in silence for many minutes at a time. Over them the tunnel lights seemed to move independently backward, as if they walked at the top of a vast Ferris wheel, and only just kept pace with the backward sweep of the wheel. At the end of an hour Wahram’s feet were sore, and he was happy to sit down. They used their aerogel sleeping pads as cushions to sit on. Meals came from foil envelopes found in the emergency gear at the stations, and were bland for the most part. After a while they mostly only wanted to drink water, though there were some powders to mix in if one wanted.

In general their rests were about half an hour long. Any longer and Wahram began to stiffen up, and Swan became fretful. And the sunwalkers would get too far ahead. So Wahram would heave himself to his feet and take off again. “Do you think any of these stations have walking poles in them?”

“I doubt it. We can look at the next one. Maybe something could be used as canes.”

After a time of silence she would sometimes snap. “All right tell me something! Tell me about yourself! What’s your first memory?”

“I don’t know,” Wahram said, trying to locate it.

“My first memory,” she said, “comes from a time that my parents tell me I was three. My parents were part of a house that decided to move to the other side of the city. I think we were trading places north to south, in order to look at the other half of the countryside as we passed by it. Or maybe they just told me that. So a bunch of carts were there, and both houses were moving stuff back and forth. Everything my family owned could fit on the back of one battery cart and two handcarts. My mother took me back inside when the place was emptied, and it scared me. I think that’s why I remember it. My room looked much smaller when it was empty, and that seemed backward and scared me, like the world had shrunk. We fill rooms to make them bigger. Then we went back outside, and the other image that sticks with me, along with the empty room, was all the stuff in the bed of the cart, and everyone standing by it at the curb, under a set of trees. Above some trees I could see the Dawn Wall.”

She hiked on for a time in silence, and Wahram felt the empty grumble in his stomach that marked another mealtime’s approach.

“By now that’s all burned down,” she said.

But now her voice was unusually calm. She was no longer grieving in the same way, it seemed.

“When the sun got high enough that the city was out of the shade of the Dawn Wall,” she added, “it would go quick.”

“I know the tracks don’t melt on the brightside,” Wahram said. “Anything else?”

“The city infrastructure will be fine,” she conceded. “The shell. Some metals, ceramics, mixes of the two. Glassy metals. And then just ordinary tempered steel, stainless steel. Austenite steel. We’ll see. I suppose it will be interesting to see what it looks like when night falls on it again. Everything will have burned away except the frame, I guess. As soon as the sun hit, the plants would begin to die. They’ll be dead by now, all the plants and animals, even the bacteria and such. We’ll have to rebuild it.”

“Maybe,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, I think they’ll want to understand what happened to the tracks, and feel they are in a position to stop it happening again. Or else build to a different design. Free the city from its tracks, maybe, and roll over the landscape on wheels.”

“That would require some locomotion,” she pointed out. “As it is, the expansion of the tracks drives the city forward.”

“Well, it will be interesting to see what happens, then.” Wahram hesitated. “It would be pointless to rebuild and then have a recurrence.”

“If it was a low-likelihood accident, then a recurrence wouldn’t be likely.”

“I was under the impression that all such happenstances were already guarded against.”

“Me too. Are you suggesting that it was some kind of attack?”

“Yes, well, I’ve been thinking about that, anyway. I mean, consider what happened to us on Io.”

“But who would want to attack Terminator?” she demanded. “Attack it and yet miss it by a few kilometers, killing the town but leaving the people alive?”

“I don’t know,” Wahram said uneasily. “There’s been talk about the conflict between Earth and Mars, how it could even lead to war.”

“Yes,” she said, “but the talk always goes on to declare this impossible, because everyone is so vulnerable. Mutual assured destruction, as always.”

“I’ve always wondered about that,” Wahram admitted. “What if a first strike is made to look like an accident, and is so successful that no one knows who did it, and meanwhile the victim is mostly vaporized? A scenario like that might make one think there is not any certain mutually assured destruction.”

“Who would feel that way?” Swan asked.

“Almost any power on Earth could make the calculation. They’re safer than any of us. And Mars is notoriously self-absorbed, and also can’t be punctured with a single dart. No, I’m not convinced there can’t be a power out there that harbors a feeling of invulnerability. Or an anger so great they don’t care about consequences.”

“What could that be, though?” Swan said. “What causes that kind of anger?”

“I don’t know… say food, water, land… power… prestige… ideology… differential advantage. Madness. These are the usual motives, aren’t they?”

“I suppose!” She sounded horrified that he could make such a list, as if this were not part of Mercurial discourse, although really it was simply Machiavelli, or Aristotle. Pauline would know the list.

“Anyway,” he went on, “I’ll be very interested to find out what people are saying when we get out of here.”

“Only thirty days to go,” she said grimly.

“One step at a time,” he said gamely.

“Oh please! Take it like that and it’s eternity.”

“Not at all. But I will desist.”

After a while he said, “Interesting how a moment comes when you feel hungry. You didn’t before, and then you do.”

“That’s not interesting.”

“My feet are sore.”

“That’s not interesting either.”

“Each step is a little pain, or every other. Plantar fasciitis, I reckon.”

“Would you like to take a rest?”

“No. They’re only sore, not hurt. And they get warmed up. Then tired.”

“I hate this.”

“And yet here we are.”

The hour of walking passed. The rest period passed. The next hour passed. The rest following that passed. The tunnel stayed always the same. The stations every third night were almost the same, but not quite. They ransacked these places, looking for something different. Up at the top of the elevator shafts in each station lay the surface, exposed to the full Mercurial sun and approaching seven hundred K on surfaces struck by light; there being no air, there was no air temperature. At this point they were under Tolstoi Crater, more or less; Pauline was managing their navigation, such as it was, by a sort of dead reckoning; down here her little radio too was out of touch. The station phones never worked. Swan guessed they were elevator phones only—or else the whole system had broken in the impact, and because of the ongoing situation with Terminator’s population, and the fact that the crushed part of the tunnel was now out in the sun, no one was available to fix it.

Hour after hour they walked. It was easy to lose track of days, particularly since Pauline would keep track. The pseudoiterative was less pseudo than ever. This was the true iterative. Swan walked before Wahram, her shoulders slumped like those of a mime portraying dejection. Minutes dragged until each one felt like ten; it was an exponential expansion of time, a syruping of protraction. They would therefore live ten times as long. He cast about for something to say that would not irritate her. She was muttering at Pauline.

“I used to whistle when I was a kid,” he said, and tried a single tone. His lips felt thicker than they had when he was young. Oh yes—tongue higher against roof of mouth. Very good. “I would whistle the melodies from the symphonies I liked.”

“Whistle, then,” Swan said. “I whistle too.”

“Really!” he said.

“Yes. I told you. But you first. Do you do Beethoven, like what we heard at that concert?”

“I do, kind of. Just some of the tunes.”

“Do that, then.”

There had been a period in Wahram’s youth when every morning had had to begin with Beethoven’s Eroica, the breakthrough Third Symphony, announcement of a new age in music and indeed in the human spirit, written after Beethoven learned that he was going deaf. So Wahram whistled the two commanding notes that started the first movement, and then whistled the main line, at a tempo that fit with his walking pace. That wasn’t so hard to do, somehow. As he whistled along he was never sure he was going to remember the passage that came next, yet by the time he got to the point of change, the next one followed inevitably from it, and flowed from him quite satisfactorily. Somewhere in him these things remained. The sequence of long elaborate melodies flowed one to the next, in just the compelling logic of Beethoven’s own thinking. And this sequence consisted of one stirring inevitable song after another. Most of the passages should have been stranded by counterpoint and polyphonies, and he jumped from one orchestral section to another, depending on which one seemed the main line. But it had to be said that even as single tunes, inexpertly whistled, the magnificence of Beethoven’s music was palpable in the tunnel. The three sunwalkers drifted back, it seemed, to hear it better. After the first movement was over, Wahram found the other three movements came as fully to him as the first, so that by the time he was done, it had taken him about the same forty minutes that an orchestra would have taken with the real thing. The great variations of the finale were so stirring that he almost hyperventilated in the performance of it.

“Wonderful,” Swan said when he was done. “Really good. What tunes. My God. Do more. Can you do more?”

Wahram had to laugh. He thought it over. “Well, I think I could do the Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Seventh, and Ninth. Also some bits of the quartets and sonatas, maybe. I’d lose the thread in a lot of those, I’m afraid. Maybe not in the late quartets. I’ve lived to those sweet things. I’d have to try and see how it went.”

“How can you remember so many?”

“For a long time that’s all I listened to.”

“That’s crazy. All right, try the Fourth, then. You can take them in order.”

“Later, please. I have to rest. My lips are already destroyed, I can feel them twice as big. They’re like a big old gasket right now.”

She laughed and let him be. An hour later, however, she brought it back up, and sounded like she would be very discouraged if he didn’t do it.

“All right, but you join me,” he said.

“But I don’t know the tunes. I don’t really remember the stuff I hear people play.”

“That doesn’t matter,” Wahram said. “Just whistle. You said you did.”

“I do, but it sounds like this.”

She whistled for a while: a glorious burble of music, exactly like some kind of songbird.

“Wow, you sound just like a bird,” he said. “Very fluid glissandos, and I-don’t-know-whats, but just like a bird.”

“Yes, that’s right. I have some skylark polyps in me.”

“You mean… in your brain? Bird brains, put into your own?”

“Yes. Alauda arvensis. Also some Sylvia borin, the garden warbler. But you know that birds’ brains are organized on completely different lines than mammal brains?”

“No.”

“I thought everyone knew that. Some qube architecture is based on bird brains, so it got discussed for a while.”

“I didn’t know.”

“Well, the thinking that we mammals do in layers of cells across our cortex, birds do in clusters of cells, distributed like bunches of grapes.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“So you can take some of your own stem cells and introduce skylark song node DNA into them, and then you can introduce it through the nose to the brain, and it makes a little cluster in the limbic system. Then when you whistle, the cluster links into your already existing musical networks. All those are very old parts. They’re almost like bird parts of the brain already. So the new ones get hooked in, and off you go.”

“You did this?”

“Yes.”

“How did it feel?”

For answer she whistled. In the tunnel one liquid glissando led to another: bright birdsong, there in the tunnel with them.

“Amazing,” Wahram said. “I didn’t know you could do that. You should be the one whistling, not me.”

“You don’t mind?”

“On the contrary.”

So she whistled as they walked along, sometimes for the full hour between breaks. Her burble shifted through all kinds of phases and phrases, and it seemed to Wahram these were so various they must be the songs of more than two species of bird. But he wasn’t sure, as it occurred to him also that she might be as vocally limited by her body as any bird, so these could perhaps be just the variety of songs that a real songbird sang. Glorious music! It was somewhat like Debussy at times, and of course there were Messiaen’s specific imitations of birds; but Swan’s whistling was stranger, more repetitive, with endless permutations of little figures, often repeating in insistent ostinato trills that got their hooks into him, sometimes to the point of irritation.

When she stopped, he could still call to mind some of her tunes. Whales had songs, of course, but birds must have been the first musicians. Unless dinosaurs too had made music. He seemed to recall something about big hollows in certain hadrosaur skulls, inexplicable except as sounding devices. The sound one of those would have made was interesting to try to imagine. He even hummed a bit, testing how it would feel in his own big barrel of a chest.

“So was that the bird, or you?” he asked when she took a pause.

“We are the same,” she said.

After a while she said, “Mozart’s pet starling once revised a phrase he wrote. The bird sang it after he played it on the piano, but changed all the sharps to flats. Mozart described it happening in the margin of the score. ‘That was beautiful!’ he wrote. When the bird died, he sang at its funeral, and read a poem to it. And his next composition, which the publisher called A Musical Joke, had a starling style.”

“Nice,” Wahram said. “It’s true that birds always look intelligent.”

“Not doves,” she said. But then, in a dark tone: “You can either have high specific intelligence or high general intelligence, but not both.”

Wahram didn’t know what to say to that; the thought had turned her suddenly grim. “Well,” he said. “We should whistle together.”

“So we’ll have both?”

“What?”

“Never mind. All right.”

So he went back to the Eroica, and this time she whistled along, in an avian counterpoint or descant to the melodies. Her parts fit his in the manner of internal cadenzas, or jazz improvisations, and at Beethoven’s more heroic moments, which came pretty frequently, her additions rose to a furious pace of invention, sounding as if the bird inside her had been driven into a fit by Beethoven’s audacity.

They whistled some very stirring duets. It definitely passed the time in ways that it hadn’t passed before. You needed the gift of time, he thought, to explore a pleasure like this. He could go through all the Beethoven he knew; and after them, the four symphonies of Brahms, so noble and heartfelt; also the last three symphonies of Tchaikovsky. All the great parts of the soundtrack of his oh-so-romantic youth. Meanwhile Swan was up for anything, and her augmentations added a wild baroque or avant-garde touch to the tunes, additions that often amazed him. The piercing quality of her sound must have carried a long way up and down the tunnel, and sometimes the sunwalkers would slow down and walk just ahead of them, bouncing in time to the music, even whistling themselves, inexpertly but enthusiastically. The finale of Beethoven’s Seventh was particularly successful with them as marching music; and when they got up after a rest to take up their walking again, the sunwalkers often requested the horn cry that began Tchaikovsky’s Fourth, then its first theme, so full of the feeling that there was a fate ruling them now, a fate dark and grand.

At the end of one of their shared performances of Beethoven’s Ninth, they all shook their heads in wonder, and Nar turned back and said, “Sirs, you certainly are good whistlers! What tunes!”

“Well,” Wahram said. “Those are Beethoven.”

“Oh! I thought they called it whistling.”

“We thought you were making them up,” Tron added. “We were impressed.”

Later, when the three youths had gotten ahead, Wahram said, “Are all the sunwalkers like that?”

“No!” Swan said, annoyed. “I told you, I’m a sunwalker myself.”

He did not want her annoyed. “Tell me, do you have anything else interesting added to your brain?”

“I do.” She still sounded sour. “There’s an earlier AI, from when I was a child, put in my corpus callosum to help deal with some convulsions I was having. And a bit of one lover—we thought we’d share some of our sexual responses and see where that led us. Which was nowhere, as it turned out, but I presume that bit is still in there. And there’s other stuff too, but I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Oh dear. Is it confusing?”

“Not at all.” Grimmer and grimmer she sounded. “What, don’t you have anything in you?”

“In a way. I suppose everyone does,” he said reassuringly, though in fact he had seldom heard of a brain with as many interventions as hers. “I take some vasopressin and some oxytocin, as recommended.”

“Those both come from vasotocin,” she said authoritatively. “There’s just one amino acid of difference between the three. So I take the vasotocin. It’s very old, so old it controls sex behavior in frogs.”

“My.”

“No, it’s just what you need.”

“I don’t know. I feel fine with the oxytocin and vasopressin.”

“Oxytocin is social memory,” she said. “You don’t notice other people without it. I need more of it. Vasopressin too, I suppose.”

“The monogamy hormone,” Wahram said.

“Monogamy in males. But only three percent of mammals are monogamous. Even birds do better than that, I think.”

“Swans,” Wahram suggested.

“Yes. And I am Swan Second Swan. But I’m not monogamous.”

“No?”

“No. Except I’m faithful to endorphins.”

He frowned, but assumed she was joking and tried to go along. “Isn’t that just like having a dog or something?”

“I like dogs. Dogs are wolves.”

“But wolves are not monogamous.”

“No. But endorphins are.”

He sighed, feeling he had lost her point, or that she had. “It’s the touch of the beloved that stimulates endorphins,” he said, and left it at that. You couldn’t whistle the end of the “Moonlight Sonata.”

That night, as they slept in the tunnel on their little aerogel mattresses under their thin blankets, he awoke to find that Swan had moved, and was sleeping against him back to back. The resulting flood of oxytocin relieved his sore hips a little; this was how one could read it. Of course the urge to sleep with someone, the pleasure in sleeping with someone, was not exactly synonymous with sex. Which was reassuring. Across the floor indeed the three ferals were curled together like kittens. The tunnels were warm, often too warm, but right on the floor it got cold. Very faintly he heard her purring. Feline genes for same—yes, he had heard of it—people said it felt good, very like humming. Feel pleasure, purr, feel better: a positive feedback into more pleasure, loop, loop, loop, all at the pace of breathing, it sounded like when he listened to her. A different kind of music. Although he knew very well that sick cats sometimes purred at a momentary relief, or even as if hoping to feel better, trying to jump-start the loop. He had lived with a cat who had done that near its end. A fifty-year-old cat is an impressive creature. The loss of this ancient eunuch had been one of Wahram’s first losses, so he remembered its purr near the end as particularly pitiful, the sound of some emotion too crowded to name. A good friend of his had died purring. So now this purr from Swan gave him a little shiver of worry.

Down the tunnel after a sleep, groggy and dim. The morning hour. Whistle the slow movement from the Eroica, Beethoven’s funeral music for his sense of hearing, written as it was dying inside him. “ ‘We live an hour and it is always the same,’ ” he recited. Then the slow movement of the first of the late quartets, opus 127, variations on a theme, so rich; as majestic as the funeral march, but more hopeful, more in love with beauty. And then the third movement that followed was so strong and cheerful it could have been a fourth movement.

Swan gave him a black look. “Damn you,” she said, “you’re enjoying this.”

His bass croak of laughter felt good in his chest, a little hadrosauric. “ ‘Danger to him was like wine,’ ” he growled.

“What’s that?”

“The Oxford English Dictionary. Or that’s where I saw it.”

“You like quotations.”

“ ‘We have come a long way, we have a long way to go. In between we are somewhere.’ ”

“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?”

“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.”

“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 stand it in here. There’s no chance 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.”

“Not soon 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, Rūmī, Ives. He whistled “Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean,” which Ives had incorporated so memorably into one of his wild compositions. He thought of Rūmī’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?”

“Rūmī.”

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.”

When he was done and she was dressed again, he got her on the cart and pushed her forward. She lay there without a word.

In the next break he got her to drink some water dosed with nutrients and electrolytes. The cart, as she said at one point, was beginning to resemble a hospital bed. From time to time Wahram whistled a little, usually choosing Brahms. There was a stoic resolution at the heart of Brahms’s melancholy that was very appropriate now. They still had twenty-two days to go.

That evening they sat there in silence. The scene devolved into the desultory animal behaviors that often followed such little crises—the turned heads, the preparations for sleep pursued abstractedly; dull aching drop into sleep, that unseen refuge. Here the pseudoiterative needed to be held to as a comfort. Lick one’s wounds. All these things had happened before and would happen again.

One morning she got up and tried to walk, and after twenty minutes she sat back on the cart again. “This is worrisome,” she said in a small voice. “If enough cells were busted…”

Wahram didn’t say anything. He pushed her along. Suddenly it occurred to him that she could die in this tunnel and there was nothing he could do about it, and a wave of nausea passed through him, making him weak in the legs. A stay in a hospital could have done so much.

After another long silence, she said in a low voice, “I suppose I used to enjoy risking death. The jolt of the fear. The thrill when you survive. It was a kind of decadence.”

“That’s what my mom used to say,” Wahram said.

“Like horror stories, where you try to shock yourself awake or something. But all that stuff is wrong. Say you attend the death of a person and help them out. All the images you see are out of horror stories. You see that those images came from where you are. But you stay anyway. And after a time you see that’s just the way it is. Everyone goes there. You help but really you can’t help, you just sit there. And eventually you’re holding the hand of a dead person. Supposedly a nightmare. Bones thrust up out of the ground to clutch you and so on. And yet in the actual act, perfectly natural. All of it natural.”

“Yes?” Wahram said, after she had stopped for a while.

She heard him and went on. “The body tries to stay alive. It’s not so… It’s natural. Maybe you’ll see it now. First the human brain dies, then the animal brain, then the lizard brain. Like your Rūmī, only backward. The lizard brain tries to its very last bit of energy to keep things going. I’ve seen it. Some kind of desire. It’s a real force. Life wants to live. But eventually a link breaks. The energy stops getting to where it needs to be. The last ATP gets used. Then we die. Our bodies return to earth, go back to being soil. A natural cycle. So…” She looked up at him. “So what? Why the horror? What are we?”

Wahram shrugged. “Animal philosophers. An odd accident. A rarity.”

“Or common as can be, but—”

She didn’t continue.

“Dispersed?” Wahram ventured. “Temporary?”

“Alone. Always alone. Even when touching someone.”

“Well, we can talk,” he said hesitantly. “That’s part of life too. It’s not just lizard stuff. We throw ourselves out and span the gap, sometimes.”

She shook her head sadly. “I always fall in the gap.”

“Hmm,” he said, nonplussed. “That would be bad. But I don’t see how that could be right. Given what you’ve told me. And what I’ve seen of you.”

“It’s how it feels that matters.”

He thought about that for a while. The lights passed them overhead, he pushed her on the cart. Was that right? Was it how you felt about what you did that made it good or bad, rather than what you did, or what others saw? Well, you were stuck in your thoughts. The current medical definition of the term “neurotic” was simply “a tendency to have bad thoughts.” If you had that tendency, he thought, looking down at Swan’s bare scaly head, if you were neurotic, then the material to work with would be nearly infinite. Was that true? Well, here they were, little spins of atoms which felt inside that something mattered, even while looking out at the stars, even inside a tunnel that looped downward forever. Then the spin would decohere and collapse. So, faced with that: good thoughts or bad thoughts?

He whistled the beginning of Beethoven’s Ninth, thinking to drag her through her black mood and out the other side, by way of the old maestro’s deepest tragedy, the Ninth’s first movement. He shifted ahead to the repeated phrase near the end of the movement, the one that Berlioz had thought proof of madness. He repeated it. It was the simple tune he had used for walking uphill all his life. Now they were walking downhill, at the top of a great circle, but it fit his mood perfectly well. He kept on whistling the eight notes over and over. Six down, two up. Simple and clear.

Finally Swan, sitting below him on the cart, her back against the bar he held, facing forward, spoke again, but slurring her words a bit, and talking as if to Pauline. “I wonder if people know we’re alive. You can never tell. It meant everything at the time, but then the time changed, and you changed, and they changed. And then it’s gone. She doesn’t have anything to say to me.”

Long pause. Wahram said, “Who was your child’s father? You had one each way?”

“Yes. I don’t know who the father was. I got pregnant on Fassnacht, when everyone is in masks. Some man I liked the look of. She knows who it is, she had him traced.”

“You liked the look of a masked person?”

“I did. The look of what you might call his demeanor.”

“I see.”

“I wanted to keep it simple. It was a conventional practice at the time. Now I wouldn’t do it that way. But you never know until it’s too late. You develop a folie à deux for a few years, it’s very intense, but it’s a folly, and after you come out you can’t look back at it without feeling… You have to wonder whether it was a good thing or not. You miss it but you regret it too, it’s stupid. I keep on doing things, but I still haven’t figured out what to do.”

“Live and make art,” he said.

“Who said that?”

“You did, I thought.”

“I don’t remember that. Maybe I did. But what if I’m not a very good artist?”

“It’s a long-term project.”

“And some people are late bloomers, is that what you’re saying?”

“Yes, I suppose. Something like that. You keep getting chances.”

“Maybe. But, you know, it would be good to be making progress somehow. Not making the same mistakes over and over.”

“Spirals,” he suggested. “Spiral up, doing the same things at a higher level. That’s the art of it no matter what you do.”

“Maybe for you.”

“But there’s nothing unusual about me.”

“I beg to differ.”

“No, nothing unusual. Principle of mediocrity.”

“You’re an advocate of that?”

“An exemplar of it. The middle way. Middle of the cosmos. But only just as much as anyone else. A strange feature of infinity. We’re all in the middle somehow. Anyway, it’s a view I find useful. I use it to work on things. To structure my project, so to speak. Part of a philosophy.”

“Philosophy.”

“Well, yes.”

She fell silent at the thought.

Maybe we missed it,” Swan said one day as she walked behind him. “Maybe we walked all the way under the brightside and the nightside too, and are back under the sun again. Maybe we’ve lost track of the time or the distance. Maybe you’ve screwed us with your ineptitude, just like Pauline.”

“No,” he said.

She ignored him and muttered about things that could have gone wrong while they had been underground. It unreeled into quite an amazingly long list, gothically inventive: they could have gotten disoriented and were now actually walking west; they could have gotten into another utilidor, angled toward the north pole; Mercury could have been evacuated and them the only ones left on the planet; they could have died in the sun and the first elevator taken them down to hell. Wahram wondered if she was serious, hoped she wasn’t. There was so much that made her unhappy. Circadian rhythms; possibly she was walking when she should be sleeping. Many years before, he had learned you could not trust anything you thought between two and five a.m.; in those dark hours the brain was deprived of certain fuels or functions necessary for right mentation. One’s thoughts and moods darkened to a sometimes fugilin black. Better to sleep or, failing that, to discount in advance any thought or mood from those hours and see what a new day brought in the way of a fresh perspective. He wondered if he could ask her about this without offending her. Possibly not. She was irritable already, and seemed miserable.

“How are you doing?” he would ask.

“We never get anywhere.”

“Imagine that we were never getting anywhere, even before we came to this place. No matter where we move, we have never gotten anywhere.”

“But that is so wrong. God, I hate your philosophy. Of course we’ve gotten somewhere.”

“We’ve come a long way, we have a long way to go.”

“Oh please. Fuck you and your fortune cookies. Here we are now. It’s too long. Too long…”

“Think of it as an ostinato passage. Stubbornly repetitive.”

But then she fell silent, and then began to moan—almost a hum, a sound she was unaware that she made. Little miserable grunts. Someone crying. “I don’t want to talk,” she said when he asked again. “Shut up and let me be. You’re worthless to me. When things get tough, you’re worthless.”

That night they reached another elevator station. She stuffed food in her as if sticking batteries in a machine. After that she muttered again, wandering in ways he couldn’t follow. Possibly talking to her Pauline. On it went, a muttering in his ear. They performed their ablutions back down the tunnel without incident, and then lay down on their pads and tried to sleep. The muttering continued. After a while she whimpered herself to sleep.

The next morning she wouldn’t eat, or talk, or even move. She lay on her side in a catatonic fit, or a syncope, or simply paralysis.

“Pauline, can you talk?” Wahram asked quietly, when Swan would say nothing.

The slightly muffled voice from Swan’s neck said, “Yes.”

“Can you tell me about Swan’s vital signs?”

“No,” Swan said from nowhere.

“Vital signs available to me are nearly normal, except for blood sugar.”

“You need to eat,” Wahram said to Swan.

She did not respond. He spooned some electrolyte water into her mouth, patiently waited for her to swallow. When she had taken in a few deciliters without drooling too much of it away, he said, “It’s noon up there. Up above us, on the surface, it’s noon. Middle of the brightside crossing. I think we need to take you up to have a look at the sun.”

Swan cracked an eyelid and looked up at him.

“We need to see it,” he told her.

She shoved her torso off the floor. “Do you think?”

“Is it possible?” Wahram asked in reply.

“Yes,” she said after thinking it over, “it is. We can stay in the shade of the tracks. It’s less bad at noon than in the morning or afternoon, because the photons come straight down and fewer hit your suit. We shouldn’t stay out for long though.”

“That’s all right. You need to see it, and now’s the time. Noon on Mercury. Come on.”

He helped her up. He found their helmets and carried them into the elevator car, went back and picked up Swan, took her to the elevator. Up they went, and he got her helmet on and sealed it, checked her air, did the same for himself. The suits showed all was well. The elevator car came to a halt. Wahram felt his pulse pounding in his fingertips.

The elevator door opened at the upper platform, and the world went white. Their faceplates adjusted, and a basic black-and-white sketch of a world appeared before them. To the left and slightly below were the city’s tracks, glowing a deep incandescent white. To the right Mercury’s noontime landscape extended to the horizon. In the absence of an atmosphere, there was only the land itself to take the blow of sunlight; it was glowing white-hot. His helmet’s tint had shifted so hard that the stars were no longer visible in the sky. It was a white plane topped by a black hemisphere. The white was lightly pulsing.

Swan walked out the door onto the platform. “Hey!” Wahram said, and went out after her. “Get back in here!”

“How would we see the sun in there? Come on, it will be all right for a while.”

“The platform must be seven hundred K like everything else.”

“Your boot soles are completely insulated at that temperature.”

Amazed, Wahram let her go. She tilted her head back to stare at the sun. Wahram couldn’t help following her glance—a stunning blast—fearfully he looked down again. The afterimage was there to contemplate: a circle both white and red at the same time, giant in his vision. The dhalgren sun, real at last. Clearly his faceplate was filtered to an almost completely polarized black opacity, and yet the land was still white, etched with tiny black lines. Swan was still looking up. Dying of thirst, she now drowned in the torrent. Following her example, breaking out all over in a sweat, he glanced up again. The surface of the sun was a roiling mass of white tendrils. It bounced as if throwing off thermal waves; then he realized it was his heart bouncing him, bumping his body hard enough to make his vision jostle. Writhing white circle in a starless charcoal sky. White banners flowing over themselves everywhere in the circle, the movement suggestive of some vast living intelligence. A god, sure, why not? It looked like a god.

Wahram dragged his gaze away and took her arm.

“Come on, Swan. Back inside now. You’ve gotten your infusion.”

“Wait just a second.”

“Swan, don’t do this.”

“No, wait. Look down there by the track.” She pointed. “Something’s coming.”

And there was. Out of the east, on the smoothed ground just outside the outermost track, a small vehicle was approaching them. It stopped at the foot of the platform stairs, and a door in the side of the vehicle opened. A figure in a spacesuit appeared, looked up at them, waved them down.

“Could our sunwalkers have sent people out to get us?” Wahram asked.

“I don’t know,” Swan said. “Has there been enough time?”

“I don’t think so.”

They descended the stairs, Wahram holding Swan by the arm. She seemed pretty solid on her feet. Rejuvenated perhaps by the sight of the noon sun. Or the prospect of rescue. They got in the car’s lock, and when it had closed on them, they were admitted to the interior, and in a sizeable compartment could take off their helmets and talk. Their rescuers were full of amazement. They had been making a brightside crossing at speed, they said, and had had no expectation whatsoever of seeing anyone standing on one of the platforms. “And looking straight up at the sun, no less! How the hell did you people get there? What are you doing?”

“We’re from Terminator,” Wahram explained. “There are three more of us down there, a bit farther along to the east.”

“Ah ha! But how did you… Well, look, let’s get going. You can tell it to us while we drive.”

“Of course.”

“Here, sit down by the window, then, take a look, it’s beautiful out there.”

The vehicle began to move. They passed by the station they had stood on. They were being rescued. Swan and Wahram stared at each other.

“Oh no!” Swan said faintly—as if they had tripped into an unexpected disaster—as if she were going to miss the second half of their walk. That made him smile.