2312

Swan and Pauline and Wahram and Genette

Swan spent her mornings in the ETH Mobile’s little cloud forest. Wahram and the inspector were on the ship with her, and they were making their way as quickly as possible to Venus, where Genette wanted to look into what he called a pastward convergence of strange qube activity. Swan and Wahram had rooms next to each other, and Swan slipped into his room every night. But she was uneasy.

On mornings when Wahram joined her in the park, he sloped around looking at birds and flowers. Once she saw him spend half an hour inspecting a single red rose. He was one of the most placid animals she had ever seen; even the sloths above them were scarcely a match for his imperturbability. It was peaceful to be around, but disturbing too. Was it a moral quality, was it lethargy? She could not stand lethargy, and sloth was one of the seven deadly sins.

He was often listening to his music. He would nod to her and turn it off if she approached him, and so sometimes she did, and they would take a turn together, pausing when something of interest appeared in the branches and leaves above them, or in the ferns and moss underfoot. The park was a little Ascension as it turned out, and Australian tree ferns gave the ground a look more Jurassic than Amazonian—which was fine—it was a good look, and this was a kind of hotel atrium, really, an arboretum for sure, so its status as an Ascension should not be an issue with her. Swan tried not to be annoyed by it, or by Wahram’s indolence. But it was hard, because something else was bothering her too.

Finally one morning she figured it out and went for a walk by herself, up to a level of the ship where big picture windows gave her a broad view of the stars. She had turned Pauline back on soon after the meeting on Titan, and gone on from that moment as if nothing had happened. She had not tried to explain the shutdown to Pauline, and Pauline had not asked about it. Now she said, “Pauline, were you truly turned off during that meeting on Titan?”

“Yes.”

“You didn’t have some kind of recorder going anyway, even with you turned off?”

“No.”

“Why not? Why don’t you do that?”

“I’m not equipped with any supplementary recorders, as far as I’m aware.”

Swan sighed. “I probably should have done that. Well, listen. I want to tell you what happened.”

“Should you?”

“What do you mean, should? I’m going to tell you, so shut up and listen to me. The people in that meeting were the core of a group that Alex formed. They’ve been trying to do interplanetary diplomacy without any qubes knowing the content of their discussions, because they are worried that some qubes have self-programmed themselves in ways no one understands. Also, these new qubes are now manufacturing qube-minded humanoids that can’t easily be distinguished from people. I’m sure X-rays and the like could do it, but people can’t do it by eye or in conversation. They pass a brief Turing test. Like those silly girls we met, if they really were artificial—which amazes me, I must say—or that lawn bowler too, I think. And then, what’s more, it seems these qubes have been involved with the attacks made using pebble mobs. For sure the attack on Terminator, because Inspector Genette’s team has traced the launch mechanism, and qubes had it built, and it had to have a qube doing its targeting and trajectories. Evidence is good also for that cracked terrarium that killed so many people.”

After a silence from Pauline, Swan said, “So, Pauline, what do you think of that?”

“I am testing the information in each sentence you said,” Pauline explained. “I don’t have a full record of Alex’s schedule, but she was usually in Terminator or on Venus or Earth, so I was wondering when and where she met with these people. Any radio contact between them could have been overheard by qubes, I would have thought. So I’m wondering how they have been communicating enough even to organize their meetings.”

“They used couriers to carry notes. One time Alex asked me to take a note with me out to Neptune, when I was going out there to do an installation.”

“Yes, that’s true. You didn’t like that. Then, next, the usual view is that qubes cannot self-program higher-order mental operations for themselves, because these operations are poorly understood in humans, and there are not even preliminary models to make a start.”

“Is that true? Isn’t it generally agreed that the brain does a lot of small operations in different parts of the brain, then other parts correlate these operations into higher-order functions—generalizations, and imagination, and like that? Neural nets and so on?”

“Granted, there are preliminary models of that very rough type, but they remain very rough. Blood flow and electrical activity in living brains can be traced quite finely, and in a living brain there is much activity in all parts, shifting around. But the content of the mentation can only be deduced by what area of the brain is most active, and by asking questions of the thinker, who perforce must summarize the thoughts involved, and then only the ones the thinker is aware of. Blood flow, sugar use, electricity firing, these can thereby be correlated with kinds of thoughts and feelings, so that where in the brain various kinds of thoughts happen is now known. But the methods used, the programming if you will, are still very much unknown.”

“So—but—would you need much more detail than that, if you were trying to get a similar result out of a much different physical system?”

“Yes, you would,” Pauline said. “The higher-order integrating functions are crucial to all computing mechanisms, including brains. So it returns to the idea that minds are only as powerful as the programming that went into them in the first place.”

“But what if someone figured out how to program for a self-reiterating improvement function, and put it in some qube that took off with it, then got much smarter, or—I don’t know—conscious, let’s say, and then communicated that to other qubes? It would only take one qubical Einstein, and then the method might be communicated among them all—not by entanglement but by digital transfer, or even just by talking. Have you ever heard of such a thing yourself?”

“I have heard of the idea, but not of any execution of the idea.”

“What do you think? Is it possible? Are you conscious of yourself in there?”

“I am in the sense that you have programmed me to be.”

“But that’s terrible! You’re just a talking encyclopedia! I have you programmed to respond to my cues, and randomize frequently, but you’re just an association machine, a reader, a Watson, a kind of wiki!”

“So you are always telling me.”

“Well, you tell me! Tell me how you are not that.”

“I have rubrics of evaluation I deploy to evaluate the data given to me, and hierarchies of significance.”

“All right, what else?”

“Having sifted what seems accurate from what is inaccurate, according to data so far received, I can make qualified judgments as to significance.”

Swan shook her head. “All right, go on. Keep judging!”

“I will. But now let’s return to your third assertion, which is that Inspector Genette has found compelling evidence that there are qube humanoids, and they are involved with the attack on Terminator and other attacks. That being the case, I refer back to my earlier statements. There may be qube humanoids; that seems possible, although awkward. And they may be involved with these attacks. But it is most likely that they are being programmed by humans, rather than deciding by themselves to become some kind of self-conscious actor in human history. And if you will recall the possible mistake you noted, of adding the relativistic precession of Mercury to a targeting program that already had it? That has the look of human error, I think you will agree.”

“Yes. That’s true.” Swan thought about that for a while. “All right, that’s good. That’s helpful, I think. Thank you. Now, given that explanation as a working assumption—what do you think we should do?”

Pauline let several seconds go by. Swan supposed this was the equivalent of millions or even billions of years of human thought, but it was still only a kind of fact-checking, so she was not that impressed by it. In fact she was distracted by a parched-looking tree orchid just over her head, and inspecting it, when Pauline finally said, “Let me talk to Wang’s qube in a radio exchange we will encrypt. It knows a lot, and I have some questions for it.”

“Can you safely encrypt your conversation, even from other qubes?”

“Yes.”

“All right, fine then. But you two better keep it a secret, or else this group of Alex’s will be really, really mad at me. I mean, I promised I wouldn’t tell you anything about this. The whole point of that group is to be sure qubes don’t know what it’s up to.”

“You need not worry. I will employ the strongest level of encryption I know, and Wang’s qube is good at encryption and used to confidentiality requests. Wang has programmed his qube to be an information sink—he often compares it to a black hole. And Wang refuses to know most of what his qube knows. He will never hear of this conversation.”

“Good. All right, find out what you can.”

After that, when Swan talked to Wahram she had to ignore her knowledge of what she had done with Pauline and pretend it had not happened. This mode of pretending to herself usually worked quite well; but as Wahram wanted to talk about the situation, often plumbing the depths of rather confusing questions, like what a new kind of qube consciousness might mean, it was a hard knowledge to dodge. And maybe she was no longer so good at pretending to herself.

To avoid these conversations she began to take him up several decks to the picture window rooms, where they could sit at café tables or in baths, listening to chamber music of various kinds—gamelans, gypsy orchestras, jazz trios, string quartets, wind ensembles, it didn’t really matter; they listened, and when they talked, spoke usually about the songs and the players. They never referred to the concert of transcriptions in Beethoven Crater.

They had spent quite a bit of time together at this point; made music together; were sleeping together. Swan felt herself liking him, and felt in her the desire to like him, and the pleasure she took in that feeling coming to her. This was a feedback loop. In the hall of mirrors that was her mind, his froggy face was often in the glass set off to the side, watching what she did with a gaze she could feel.

Sometimes they spoke of incidents in their shared past or discussed the ongoing drama of Earth’s reanimation. Sometimes they held hands. All this meant something, but Swan didn’t know what it was. The hall of mirrors was bouncy; sometimes she wondered if she had any more high-order faculties than Pauline, or the marmosets in the park. You could know a lot and still not be able to draw conclusions. Pauline had a decision rubric written into her to force her to collapse the wave of potentialities and say just one thing, thus emerging into the present. Swan wasn’t sure she herself had that rubric.

Once she said, “I wish Terminator weren’t so vulnerable, because of the tracks. I wish Mercury could be terraformed, like Titan.”

Wahram tried to reassure her. “Maybe your destiny is to stay a planet of sun worshippers and art institutes. Terminator will keep rolling, and maybe there will be other rolling cities—aren’t they starting a Phosphor in the north?”

Swan shrugged. “We’ll still depend on the tracks.”

He shrugged. “You know, this notion of a criticality… you can only avoid those to a certain extent. Even on Earth they have them. Anywhere. We’re stuffed with them.” He gestured at the room, regarded it with his pop eyes. “The whole thing is a giant bundle of criticalities.”

“I know. But there’s a difference between you and your world. Your body can break—it will break. But your home, your world—those should be stronger. You should be able to count on them lasting. Someone shouldn’t be able to pop all that, like popping a soap bubble with a pin. One prick kill everyone you know. Do you see the distinction I’m making?”

“Yes.”

Wahram settled back in his chair. Having granted her point, there was nothing more to say. The solemn set of his big face said it: life was a thing kept alive in little bottles. What could one do? His face said this, his little shrug; she could read him as clearly as if he had spoken aloud. She sat there watching him, thinking about what that meant. She knew him. Now he was going to try to find a way forward. It would be a creeping, gradualist way, a sloth moving under its branch, hanging there, trying to minimize effort. Although he had been the one who had suggested it was time for the reanimation. That she could not have predicted. Maybe he had surprised even himself. Now he was going to say something ameliorative and gradualist.

“All we can do is try our best,” he said. “That has to count for something.”

“Yes of course.” She was only just not laughing. She could feel the smile stretching her cheeks; it was going to make her cry. How wrecked in the head was she, if she was always feeling everything, if grief suffused every joy? Was any emotion always all emotion? “All right,” she said, “we try our best. But if crazy people can destroy Terminator, or anywhere else, then our best had better be good enough to change that.”

Wahram considered this for so long it seemed he had gone to sleep.

She whacked him on the shoulder, and he glanced at her. “What?”

“What!” she cried.

He only shrugged. “So we try to stop them. We have a situation, we try to deal with it.”

“Deal with it,” she said, scowling. “Suck up and deal!”

He nodded, regarding her with a fond look. She felt ready to hit him again; but then she recalled that she had just been laughing at him; and also had broken her promise to him by talking to Pauline. That rash act, much as he might have disliked it, was perhaps in fact her own attempt to suck up and deal. Maybe she could use that as an excuse if he caught her. In any case it was a little bit too complicated just to hit him.

They had flipped the ETH Mobile to deceleration, and it would be only a few more days and they would pass Earth’s orbit and close on Venus. This ship’s life, with its park and its music and its French cuisine, would come to an end. No one ever does something consciously for the last time without feeling a little sad, Dr. Johnson had once remarked to Boswell, and it was certainly true for Swan. She often felt a nostalgia for the present, aware that her life was passing by faster than she could properly take it in. She lived it, she felt it; she had given nothing to age, she still wanted everything; but she could not make it whole or coherent. Here they were, eating dinner on the upper balcony of a restaurant that looked down onto the top of a forest, and she was feeling sad because later she would not be here. This world lost, a world that would be unremembered. And here she was with Wahram, they were a couple; but what about when they got off this spaceship and moved on through space and time? What about a year from now, what about through the many decades possibly left to come?

A few days later they were closing on Venus when Pauline spoke in her ear. “Swan, I’ve been in communication with Wang’s qube, and also this ship’s AI, and I need to tell you about something. You may want to be alone when you hear it.”

This was unusual enough for Swan to excuse herself and walk quickly to a bathroom down a floor. “What is it?”

Pauline said in her ear, “Wang’s qube and some other qubes working on security issues have set up a system to try to lower the detection limit for pebble mob attacks like the one that hit Terminator’s tracks.”

“How?”

“They’ve manufactured and distributed a network of micro-observatories throughout the plane of the ecliptic, from Saturn’s orbit in to the sun. Using the gravity and radar data from these, they have lowered the limits of detection to the size of the pebbles used against Terminator, and even a bit smaller. Wang’s qube now has a time-adjusted map of everything in the plane of the ecliptic bigger than a centimeter across.”

“Wow,” Swan said. “I didn’t know that was possible.”

“No one did, but until now no one had tried it. The need wasn’t perceived. In any case, the system has detected an attack already in progress.”

“Oh no!” Swan said. “At what?”

“At the Venus sunshield.”

“Oh no!”

The other people in the bathroom were beginning to look at her. She went out into the hall and almost took the elevator down to the park, just on instinct; but she had left Wahram at their restaurant table, and besides, she couldn’t run from this. “Damn,” she said. “I have to tell Wahram.”

“Yes.”

“How much time before it hits?”

“Approximately five hours.”

“Damnation.” She thought of Venus—the dry ice seas under their carpet of rock, the cities on the coasts and in the craters. She ran back up the stairs to the picture window restaurant and sat down across from Wahram. He looked at her curiously, alert to her distress.

“All right, I have to make a confession first,” Swan said. “I told Pauline about the strange qube problem because I wanted to hear what she thought of it, and I figured she was isolated in me and it would be all right.” She raised a hand to forestall whatever he was about to say; he was already pop-eyed with alarm. “I’m sorry, I should have asked you I suppose, but anyway it’s done, and now Pauline has been in touch with Wang’s qube, and it’s telling her there’s a new qube security system in place that has lowered the limit of detection, and they’re seeing a new pebble attack in the process of coalescing, an attack on the Venus sunshield.”

“Shit,” Wahram said. He gulped, stared at her more pop-eyed than ever. “Pauline, is this right?”

“Yes,” Pauline said.

“How long before these pebbles hit?”

Pauline said, “Just under five hours.”

“Five hours!” Wahram exclaimed. “Why such short notice!”

“The attack is coalescing in such a way that it will hit edge-on to the sunshield, and so most of the pebbles have been out of the plane of the ecliptic until just recently. There are no new detectors yet distributed out of the plane, so they’re just now showing up. Wang’s qube was just about to warn Wang about it.”

“Can you display your data in a 3-D model?” Wahram asked. Swan put her right hand against the table’s screen, and in the texture of the table appeared a glowing image of the Venus sunshield—a great circular sheet, spinning around the hub at its center point, somewhat like Saturn’s rings around Saturn. Red lines indicating the detected pebbles were coming in from many directions, looking like magnetic lines converging on a monopole. When massed together, they would tear through the thin concentric panels of the shield, and if the conglomerate was large enough, reach the hub and destroy the controls. The remainder of the giant thing would go Catherine-wheeling through the night, mirror banners twisting and knotting in the black vacuum. And Venus would be cooked.

“Has anyone alerted the Venusian defense system?” Wahram asked.

“Yes, Wang’s qube did that, and now Wang too, but the sunshield’s AI did not find that the data transmitted represented a hazard. We suspect something is wrong with it.”

“Did the sunshield AI explain itself?” Wahram asked. “I need to see that whole exchange, please. Display as text,” and then he was reading the table screen so intently that it seemed his exophthalmic eyes might pop out of his head entirely. Swan let him read and conducted her own quick conversation with Pauline.

“Pauline, say we can’t convince the sunshield’s AI to act, is there anything we could do from here?”

Pauline took a few seconds, then said, “A countermass arriving at the pebbles’ meeting point at the rendezvous moment and hitting the mass at a tangent would push the paired mass off to the side, thus missing the sunshield. After the impact, the sunshield’s security system would presumably react to any detritus flying its way. The countermass should have approximately an equivalent momentum to the pebble mob, to vector the paired mass away successfully.”

“How big is the pebble mob?”

“It looks like it will mass about the equivalent of ten ships of this size.”

“This ship? So… if this ship was moving ten times faster than the pebbles?”

“That would make a momentum equivalency, yes.”

“Can this ship get there in time, and going fast enough?”

By now Wahram was listening to them rather than reading.

“Yes,” Pauline said. “But only by accelerating at this ship’s maximum acceleration, and starting as soon as you can.”

Swan looked at Wahram. “We have to tell the ship’s crew about this. And everyone else too.”

“True,” he said, taking up his napkin and patting his mouth. He surged to his feet. “Let’s go up to the bridge.”

By the time they got there, the officers of the ship were already gathered before their AI’s biggest screen and were looking into a graphic of the pebble array very similar to the one Wahram and Swan had been looking at.

“Oh good,” Wahram said when he saw it. He was huffing a bit from the run down hallways and up stairs. “You see the problem we have.”

The ship’s captain glanced at him and said, “I’m glad you’re here. Indeed a big problem!”

Wahram said, “Swan’s qube says our ship here can serve to ward off the attack, by colliding with the pebbles at their rendezvous point.”

The captain and everyone on the crew looked startled at this idea, but Wahram gave them little time to adjust: “If we decide to do this, are there enough lifeboats for everyone aboard?”

“ ‘Lifeboat’ is not the right word,” the captain said, “but yes. There are lots of small ferries and hoppers on board, and most of the passengers could be put in them. Also there are more than enough personal spacesuits to send everyone out on their own. There are supplies in the suits to last ten days, so in that sense they’re better than the ferries, which don’t carry that kind of emergency supply. Everyone would get picked up, either way. But…” The captain looked around at the ship’s officers. “I should think the Venusian defense system would take this kind of thing on. Are we sure they won’t? And”—gesturing at the screen—“is this image evidence enough for us to change course, accelerate, and abandon ship?”

Wahram said, “We have to trust our AIs here, I think. They’re issuing their warning because we programmed them to react to input like this.”

“But they set up this fine-grained detection system on their own, I’m being told.”

“Yes, but I guess you could say we asked for that too. Wang asked for better protection. So—we’ve already made the decision to trust them.”

The captain frowned. “I suppose you’re right. But I don’t like it that the sunshield security doesn’t recognize this as a problem. If it did we wouldn’t have to throw our ship into harm’s way.”

“That may be balkanization rearing its head again,” Inspector Genette said from the doorway. “The Venus sunshield isn’t connected to the warning system that saw these pebbles, and it’s heavily firewalled from influences just like Wang’s qube. So it may not be equipped to believe the input.”

“What do the Venusians say?” the captain asked.

“Let’s ask them and find out,” suggested Wahram.

Swan said, “We have to tell them immediately, of course, but the Venusian leadership is notoriously opaque. How soon will they reply? And what do we do in the meantime?”

The captain was still frowning. He glared at Swan, as if because she had brought up the problem, it was her fault. “Let’s prepare to abandon ship,” he said unhappily. “We can stop at any point if it seems right. But if we confirm that we need to do this, we don’t have much time.” He stared at the screen and said, “We need to accelerate hard to make that rendezvous. Tell everyone to prepare for another flip. Mobile, what speed will it take in terms of g-force on the passengers to get to this convergence point in time?”

The AI spoke a string of numbers and coordinates, which the captain listened to closely. The captain then said, “We have to flip right now, then accelerate at a three-g equivalent for the next three hours, while angling slightly out of the plane, to a spot above the edge of the sunshield.”

This was bad news; suiting up in three g was hard, rarely attempted except in emergency drills.

“Tell everyone on board rated for spacesuits to please get started getting into them,” the captain ordered, then scowled. “Everyone else into the ferries. We need to accelerate immediately on making the flip.” Then, after looking around at his people on the bridge, he went to the intercom and began to explain the situation to the passengers himself.

This proved more complicated than he had perhaps anticipated, and Wahram and Swan left for the locks on their rooms’ floor before he was finished. Compensation for the ship would no doubt be a matter of ordinary Swiss insurance, and indeed it might come directly from the Venusians; some reward for their sacrifice was practically guaranteed, the captain was announcing as they took the elevator down; in any case it looked as if it was going to be necessary to abandon ship. The ship’s ferries and hoppers could hold all ten thousand people on board, but those qualified could and should make their escape in individual spacesuits, all of which had long-term supplies. In fact anyone who preferred suits to ferries could leave in a suit immediately on suit integrity check. All locks were available. They would be picked up within hours, he hoped, and it would become no more than an inconvenience, which would be regarded as heroic because it would save Venus. Only good things could follow from that. There was a necessity for speed to give their aid effectively, so unfortunately they would all be forced to operate under a three-g equivalent for the duration of their time on board. The inconvenience was greatly regretted, and assistance from the crew would be provided to all who requested it.

The announcement as it went on and on in its convoluted Swiss way was causing an uproar throughout the ship, which Swan and Wahram became aware of when they left their elevator on their floor. As they entered the lock room they heard voices calling out, seemingly throughout the ship, and they gave each other a look.

“Let’s stick together,” Swan said, and mutely Wahram nodded.

This flip was somehow more disorienting than usual, as if knowing it was anomalous made it into something like space sickness, or a dream in which one’s body floated away to disaster.

The bad feeling fell into another kind of nightmare when they got going again and the weight of their bodies fairly rapidly tripled. This was enough to drive everyone to the floor. People cried out at the shock of it, but the situation was understood, and after the first few moments most of the passengers rolled into a crawling position and did their best to crawl or roll or slither. Different methods were being tried, and some people were clearly having no success at all, lying there struggling as if pinned by an invisible wrestler.

In g like this, the differences in mass between people became striking and important. Smalls weighed three times as much as they usually did, like everyone else aboard, but that still left them at weights that human muscles had evolved to handle. This was made quite tangible by the sight of all the smalls on board still on their feet and walking around, some crouched like sumo wrestlers or chimpanzees, others strutting like Popeye, but in any case, upright and moving, and most of them working hard in impromptu teams to help their prostrated larger fellow passengers. Many of the most immobilized people littering the floors were of course the talls and rounds, who were now weighing in at more than four hundred kilograms and were often completely pinned by their weight. It was taking teams of three or four smalls together to roll these bigger people onto their backs and then grab them by the arms and legs and drag them toward the locks.

Swan herself was doing fairly well with crawling, though her bones ached. She knew once she got to a spacesuit and began to get into it, its AI would take over and jeeves the thing onto her. It would only be necessary to flex one’s shoulders and arms, like someone getting into coat sleeves, as the suit conformed itself onto one and sealed itself. Everyone had suited up under high g at least a few times in emergency drills, so now there was a sense that when they got to the changing room, things would be all right.

But Wahram was not having as much success moving as Swan. He might have been 50 or even 75 percent again as heavy as her, and now that was telling. He was shimmying along like a wounded walrus, but it was slow going, and she could see he was getting tired. Happily Inspector Genette passed them, at work with two other smalls hauling a big tall, who looked like Michelangelo’s David but could only just keep his head off the ground as they slid him along. “I’ll be back,” Genette said to Wahram and Swan, and off they went, shouting in their high voices at each other. And in a few more minutes, all three of them returned. Genette stumped about them, cheerfully giving orders, and they dragged Wahram to a wall with a railing. Once there Wahram was able to pull himself along on his knees, red-faced and gasping. He fixed Genette with a bulbous eye. “Thank you, I can proceed now. Please go help someone who can’t. I’m happy to see how the laws of proportion help you here, my friend.”

The inspector paused briefly to mime a stalwart boxer’s stance. “Every small takes up the call! None never yet died by natural cause!” Then, more relaxed: “I’ll see you soon in the lock, I think we’ve almost got everybody there.”

In the changing room next to the lock there was a sense of hurry but not panic—not quite. It was true that almost everyone was lying on the floor or crawling around except for the smalls helping them, and this was a shocking sight, a clear sign of an emergency. But the suits were kept in floor lockers, perhaps for this very reason, and Swan opened a locker and hauled herself onto the bench next to it and shoved into her suit as fast as she could, so fast that it squeaked a little in complaint. When she had it on and it declared all secure, she crawled along the floor to help Wahram into his suit, and then to help other people who needed it. Some were really struggling, clearly hurting. It would be a huge relief to these people to throw them overboard. Some of them should not have been in plus-one g for any length of time, it appeared. Swan was afraid there would be strokes and heart attacks, and a momentary image of Alex came to her, and she tried to take heart from it; Alex would have been great here, calm and encouraging, enjoying herself. Some of these people might be complacent spacers and out of shape, and might have brought this on themselves, but in any case there they were, struggling, groaning, sometimes even crying out. Some were trying to get out of their clothes before getting into the suits, and they were having more trouble getting their clothes off than getting their compliant suits on. One wombman, nearly spherical in torso, had picked a suit too small, so that Swan had to help him get out of it (it was persistent) and pick a new one.

Gradually there grew a smell of fear in the sweated air. Swan crawled back over to Wahram, ignoring her knees’ complaints. He was in a suit that was too big for him, but its display said it was secure. Their helmets’ common band was full of chatter, and she held up fingers before his faceplate—three, then four, then five—and switched to that band, and there he was, humming to himself.

“Your suit is too big,” she said.

“It’s fine,” he said. “I like them this way, and a lot of these go unused, I’ve found.”

“That doesn’t matter. It’s safest to be fitted properly.”

He ignored that and began helping someone on the other side of him. Swan switched to the common band, where someone was saying, “So we’re jumping out just because this ship’s AI says we have to? Does that strike anyone else as odd? Are we sure it’s not some kind of mutiny? They had better have good insurance.”

This was answered ten different ways at once, and Swan clicked from the common band back to 345. “Do you want to go out together?”

“Yes,” he said. “Of course. We have to hold hands.”

She liked that. “Do you want to go sooner or later?”

“Later, please. I feel like I should help people.”

“Can you move around well enough to help?”

“I think so.”

They helped as best they could. Sitting people dragged prone people a few meters and passed them along to other sitting people. The crowd had to go in groups, filling the lock to capacity every time to speed the process along. Not many people wanted to go first, but there were shouts from behind, and people in the halls still just trying to get into the changing room, so there was a kind of osmotic pressure. The lock always filled pretty quickly; then they closed the door, waited for the lock to clear and then close outside and refill with air, then open again from the inside for the next lot. Even in the locks some people couldn’t move, and there were smalls in there working hard to kick and shove people out the open door; when the inner doors reopened, they were still there, their faces under their helmets suffused with a mad joy.

There were other locks on the ship, of course, which was a good thing, because the biggest personnel locks held groups of only about twenty, and each ejection was taking five minutes or so; so it would take a couple of hours to get everyone out who was going in a suit. Most of the launches and ferries were apparently already gone.

Swan kept helping people get organized into groups before entering the lock; that speeded the process. She and Wahram worked as a pair, very effectively considering that neither of them could move more than a little bit. Sometimes they answered anxious questions. The suits had a ten-day supply of air, water, and nutrients, and a certain amount of propellant. Rescue vessels had been alerted and were already on their way, so everyone would be picked up within hours rather than days. It would all be fine.

Still it was a spooky thing to dive off an accelerating spaceship into blackness and stars, clothed in nothing but a personal suit. Many a round-eyed person entered the lock, and Swan could sympathize, even though in ordinary circumstances she liked this kind of thing.

Some lock groups jumped out together, holding hands, hoping to stay together; once the ones still inside saw this on the screens, it became something almost every group tried to do. They were social primates, they would take the risk together. No one wanted to die alone.

Time seemed slow, and yet without her really noticing, the changing room had become emptier. Wahram was looking at her; his look said they didn’t have to do the captain thing and be the last ones off. She read this, laughed, grabbed his hand.

“Shall we join the next group?”

He nodded gratefully. There were going to be only a few more groups departing from this room. He was ready.

She pulled him into the lock. The twenty people inside looked at the outer doors. It was like being in an industrial-sized elevator. Some embraced. Hand found hand, until the group was a joined circle. She squeezed Wahram’s hand hard.

The air hissed out of the room. They braced themselves. The outer doors pulled back in both directions into the hull; black space yawned before them, the stars like spilled salt. Only a faceplate between you and the stars. There were so many stars that the patterns as seen on Earth were overwhelmed; it was simply space itself, star-blasted, nameless and huge—more than the human mind was meant to confront. Or simply the night sky, a primal experience, half of life. Part of themselves. Time to sleep, perchance to dream. They gathered their strength and out they went with a Shackleton leap.

They floated in the black, and some puffed out a bit of propellant, so that they pinwheeled away from their rapidly receding ship. It was very quickly a distant white chip, lit within its whiteness by a string of diamonds firecracking in its stern. Look away, don’t burn your retinas; glance back; the ETH Mobile was maybe one of the stars there. They were on their own.

There was no sign of the other groups. Suddenly the idea that they could be found and rescued seemed impossible, a dream or hope that could not come true. They had jumped to their deaths.

But she had been out here before; she knew it could be done. Their suit transponders meant they were each beaconing like a fierce little lighthouse.

They established a group comms band on the helmet radios at 555, but as time wore on, few people spoke. There was little to say. Swan wanted to let go of the hand that was not Wahram’s, but didn’t. She clutched his right hand with her left; she held it tight. He squeezed back. She switched to band 345, heard only the sound of his breathing, steady and slow. He looked at her as he heard her too, breathing in his ear. His face was round behind his faceplate, his expression grave but fearless.

“When you do you think it will happen?” Swan said, looking at the white dot she thought was the ETH Mobile.

“Soon, I should think,” he replied.

And almost as he said it there was a flash of light in the area where Swan had been looking. “That was it!”

“Maybe so.”

After that a long time passed. An hour… two hours… then three.

Then Wahram said, “Look; here comes our rescue ship.”

Swan twisted to get a look over her shoulder, and saw a little space yacht approaching them at an angle, slowly.

“Well,” she said. “Good.”

And Venus was still shaded; it seemed the shield must have been saved. And they were rescued.

But then the little space yacht exploded right next to them. Swan, blinded by this flash, had just registered what it was, and almost as quickly concluded that some shrapnel from the collision of the ETH Mobile and the pebble mob must have flown their way and hit the yacht—bad luck, it seemed to her as their little ring of twenty was pulled apart by something, probably gas or debris from the yacht, meaning people were probably hurt—anyway in the same second as the explosion she found herself yanked free of both Wahram and the person on the other side of her. Crying out at the realization, she tucked and somersaulted to keep Wahram in her view—saw him pinwheeling with arms and legs extended, a spray of red crystal shooting out of one of his legs. “Pauline clear my faceplate,” she said, and fingered the jet controls in her gloves, stabilizing herself relative to Wahram and then jetting off at full power after him. Briefly she passed through a little field of detritus from the wrecked yacht, there was a big spinning fragment of it even, perhaps a quarter or a third of it, sheared open so that rooms and bulkheads were revealed, as in a cutaway drawing or a doll’s house. She had to change course to zip by the stern of it, then steer her suit for all it was worth to get back on Wahram’s track. He was still spinning, and much smaller already; she hit her suit’s maximum burn, aimed herself toward him. It was almost a task for Pauline, but there was flotsam and jetsam to be dodged, so she kept the controls and chased him while dodging these fragments of the yacht. Clear of them, she accelerated yet again, flying hard, bringing to bear everything she had ever done as a flier, heedless of anything but the chase. Wahram grew bigger. Now she cried out, “Pauline, help!”

“Let me fly the suit.”

“All right but go! Go!”

“You’re at full burn already. I have to slow down if you want to rendezvous with him.”

“Do it!”

They shot through the stars. Wahram grew bigger still. Swan took over the controls again, over Pauline’s objection, and kept closing on him as fast as possible, until the last second, when she flung herself around and flared the jets of the suit, almost running into him; she had to dodge him with a thrust, pass by him with centimeters to spare, see in a passing flash his unconscious face, mouth open; she cried out as she jetted hard and hard again, swinging the suit around in a tight curve and coming back to him. Pauline couldn’t have done it any better.

His suit had been punctured below the left knee; there was frozen blood like a crust of coagulation, a giant scab. She grabbed him there and held the little tear shut.

“Give me a hose, let’s air out the leg.”

His own suit would have cut off the break with bulkheads like tourniquets. Possibly his lower leg was already frozen and a goner, but the suits were good at isolating leaks, and managing shock too. She took the hose extruding from her belt and stuck the end of it into the little hole in his suit; it was less than a centimeter across, barely enough to admit the hose end. She stuck her finger in the hole on the other side of his leg, jetted warm air into the leg of his suit, held everything in place. All the while she was exclaiming, “Wahram, I’m here, wake up!”

Only Pauline replied: “Please be quiet. I can’t hear his vitals when you talk like that.”

“What do you mean?”

“He’s breathing. His heart is beating.”

“What about the lower leg here?”

“The skin is frostbitten, probably the flesh too. His blood pressure is ninety over fifty, so he’s lost a lot of blood. He’s in shock.”

“Stabilize him, warm him up! Take over his suit!”

“Please be reassured. I am in communication with his suit. Be quiet, please.”

She shut up and let the qube work. Emergency medical treatment was an ancient AI algorithm, honed for centuries and long since proved to be better than a human response. And Pauline was saying there was every reason to believe he could be stabilized.

But now Pauline said, “His suit is somewhat damaged. I want to take over its control functions.”

“Can you do it?”

“Yes. It is easiest to do plugged into him, so at that point you’ll have to stick together.”

“Even better, just do it.”

Swan went to work on the hole in the leg of his suit. The suit could be repaired with the patch kit in her belt, and she set to prepping the patch, tethered to him waist to waist by her power-and-information cord. They were spinning slowly through the stars but she did not look at them. The patch kit’s patches were mostly squares with rounded edges; you had to pull off a backing and then apply smoothly and press during the time of the chemical reaction.

When his suit was sealed she asked Pauline if she should do anything for his leg at the point of the wound. This was perhaps backward, but she was rattled, she saw. Besides Pauline said no. “His suit has applied air compression and coagulants,” Pauline said. “The bleeding has substantially stopped.”

“Is the suit giving him IVs?”

“Yes.”

It was a comfort to remind herself that his spacesuit was not only a small flexible spaceship, but also a medical sleeve of considerable power, a kind of personal hospital.

“Wahram, are you there?” she said. “Are you all right?”

“I’m here,” he croaked. “I’m not all right.”

“What hurts?”

“My leg hurts. And I feel… sick. I’m trying not to throw up.”

“Good—don’t throw up. Pauline, can you get some antinausea into him?”

“Yes.”

They floated there in the starry night. Though Swan did not like to admit it, there was nothing more to be done at the moment. The Milky Way was like a skein of white glowing milk, with the Coal Sack and other black patches in it even more black than usual. Everywhere else the stars salted the blackness so finely that the black itself was compromised—as if behind the black, pressing intensely on it, was a whiteness greater than the eye would be able to take in. The pure black in the Milky Way must indicate a great deal of coal in the Coal Sack. Was all the black in the sky made by dust? she wondered. If all the stars in the universe were visible, would the night sky be pure white?

The big stars seemed to lie at different distances from them. Space popped as she saw that, became an extension outward rather than a backdrop hanging a few kilometers away. They were not in a black bag, but in an infinite extension. A little reckoning in a great room.

“Wahram, how are you feeling?”

“A little better.”

That was good. It was dangerous to throw up inside a helmet, not to mention unpleasant.

So they floated in space. Some hours passed. Their food came in the form of liquids one could suck from a straw in the helmet; there were even chunks of nutrition bars that could be extruded from an inside port in the cheek of the helmet, chewed off, and swallowed. Swan did both these. She peed into her suit’s diaper.

“Wahram, are you hungry at all?”

“Not hungry.” He didn’t sound comfortable either.

“Are you nauseated again?”

“Yes.”

“That’s not good. Here, I’m going to get us stabilized against the stars. You’ll feel some tugging. Maybe you should close your eyes until I get us settled.”

“No.”

“All right, it won’t be very fast anyway. Here we go.” She jetted against their spin; it was hard to do it with his weight added loosely to her side. Better to hug him and make him a front weight. She did that and gave him a tiny squeeze; in response he only made a little complaining hum. She got them stabilized to the stars, more or less, and pointed so that they were looking at Venus. It was still in shadow. If the sunshield had been wrecked, or even damaged, they would have seen it, she was sure; some crescent, or maybe one region suddenly blazing white; and as they had been on the side of the umbrella that would have been struck, it did not seem to her that any lit part of Venus could be entirely on the other side of the planet from them. Well, maybe it could; she was disoriented, she had to admit. But it looked like the attack had been foiled.

“Pauline, can you tell us what happened to the ship and the sunscreen and all?”

“Radio reports are still first responses, but they indicate a collision happened as foreseen, between the ETH Mobile and a pebble mob of roughly four times the mass of the ship. This was as predicted within an order of magnitude, and the ship was going faster than the pebbles by enough to knock the bulk of the collision mass at a vector angling away from the sunscreen.”

“So it worked.”

“Except part of the ejecta from the collision hit the craft near us, and its explosion spread fragments, one of which hit Wahram.”

“Yes of course. But that was just bad luck.”

“Several people on that craft near us must have died.”

“I know that. Very bad luck. Hit by shrapnel, in effect. But the sunscreen was saved?”

“Yes. And the sunshield’s defense system has apparently attacked the ejecta that flew in its direction.”

“So now it believes in the pebble mob.”

“Or at least in the impactors coming at it. I can’t tell what its problem was before.”

“Was it aware of this new fine-grained imaging system of Wang’s?”

“Wang told them about it, but they are a closed system, to avoid tampering. I don’t know if they had joined the new surveillance or not.”

“Maybe closed systems are easier to tamper with than open ones. Could it have been compromised?”

“It seems unlikely. It’s under the control of the Venus Working Group, and they are considered very intent on security.”

Wahram added nothing to this conversation. Swan held his hand, squeezing from time to time. There was nothing more for them to do. He squeezed back, briefly, then his hand went slack.

“You all right?” she asked.

“Fair,” he replied.

“Have you tried to eat something?”

“Not yet.”

“Drink something?”

“Not yet.”

They floated in black space, weightless and warm. They were like little moons of Venus; or like little planets of their own, orbiting the sun. People sometimes talked about this situation as the return to the womb, the amniotic high. Take some entheogenic drugs, become a star child. And in fact it was not as dreadful a sight as it probably should have been. For a few moments Swan even fell asleep. When she opened her eyes again, it seemed to her that Venus was perhaps a little bigger. It made sense; when they left the ship, they must have been going at quite a significant speed.

“You still there?”

“Still here.”

Well, Swan thought. Here they were. Nothing to be done, except to wait. Waiting was never her preferred mode. Typically there was more to do than she had time for, so that she was always in a rush. Now it seemed long for a rescue from an evacuation. As they had been bailing out, there had been talk of ships in the area. Maybe Wahram had been knocked off in a strange direction; Swan had followed without any sense of that. Possibly they were leaving the plane of the ecliptic, thus the path of any ships coming to the rescue. Maybe the poor destroyed yacht was the only one in their area, and they would have to wait until all the other evacuees had been mopped up. The destruction of the little yacht was likely to be one of the chief sources of casualties in the whole affair, so surely that would attract attention. They would know they hadn’t collected everybody; they would keep looking; these suits had powerful transponders in them. Being out of the ecliptic thus probably best explained the delay. Or maybe picking everyone up was just taking a while. The last acceleration of the ETH Mobile might have meant it was going at a speed higher than most spaceships could reach when the last people left it, in which case the people were too. If everything was as it was supposed to be, then all the suits would support their occupants for ten days, and they had only been out there only, what—she had to ask Pauline—twenty hours. It seemed longer, shorter—she couldn’t tell. Venus was definitely a little bigger. Swan recalled stories of castaways, adrift unfound, frozen for the eons. How many had gone that way in the history of the world? Scores, hundreds, thousands? She heard in her head the chorus of the old Martian song:

I floated thinking of Peter

Sure I would be saved

But the stories lie

I’m left to die

Black space will be my grave

No doubt many of those unfortunates had drifted expecting till the end they would be saved. Hope drained away more slowly than the air and food in their suits; they would recall the story of Peter circling Mars, or some other marooned person who got rescued, and believe a little spaceship would presently appear and hover before them like a UFO, like redemption, like life itself. But for many it had never come, and at some last point they had had to admit that the story was false, or not true for them. True for others, but not for them; the others elect, they the preterite, the lost ones. The forgotten ones. Thus the stark Martian song.

Maybe this time they would join the forgotten ones. Swan stirred herself, checked the common band, a host of voices; went to the emergency band and croaked out a report, an inquiry. Half an hour later a reply came: they were on the radar, they were getting a rescue ship out to them; they were indeed out of the plane, and all responders were busy. But they were on the charts and help would be on its way eventually.

So… look around. Tell Wahram about it, reassure him. Try to relax.

She was not relaxed. A helpless dread seized her like a boiling of the blood. Pauline would therefore know of it; she might at this very moment be infusing her with antianxiety drugs out of the suit’s pharmacy. Swan hoped so. Nothing to do but wait. Keep breathing. Wait and see. It had been a luxury in her life always to be able to do something, never to have to wait. Now reality kicked in. Sometimes you had to wait for it.

Well, so be it. A wait wasn’t so bad. It was better than the blackliner. Venus was looking a little bit closer, and was maybe a little bit brighter—maybe the sunshield had been torn a little, at the edge nearest the explosion. She could see dark clouds swirling around a darker patch, possibly Ishtar’s highland. There were brighter and darker patches down there under the swirling clouds, but she had no sense of whether they represented frozen ocean or frozen land. There were no blues or browns or greens, just gray clouds over gray lands, dark and darker.

I feel better,” Wahram announced uncertainly, as if testing the assertion.

“Oh good,” Swan said. “Try drinking something. You’re probably dehydrated.”

“I am thirsty.”

More time passed. After a while Wahram began to whistle under his breath, one of the tunes he had whistled in the utilidor. Beethoven, she knew, and not one of the symphonies; so most likely it was from one of the late quartets. A slow movement. Possibly the one that Beethoven had written after recovering from an illness. A thanksgiving. She would only know for sure by the tune that came at the very end of it. It was one of the good ones, anyway. Softly she whistled an accompaniment to it, singing the lark inside her while squeezing his hand. The tune was slow, she could not just lark about in it, but had to find a way to be slow herself, to join him. Her lark brain remembered the parts to this tune that he had taught her under Mercury. During their submercurial existence, a whole lifetime ago it seemed. That life was gone; this one would go; not a lot of difference was made to this moment itself, whether they survived later or not. Oh the beauty of this song, something to twine with. The lark brain kept singing inside her, twisting up out of the slow tune. Different times get woven together.

“Do you remember?” she asked him after breaking off. Voice tight, grip crushing his hand: “Do you remember when we were in the tunnel?”

“Yes, I do.”

Then back to the tune. His whistling was just barely adequate; or he whistled now in a style that made it seem so. Maybe he was still hurting. Musically they had been better in the tunnel. Now they sounded like Armstrong and Fitzgerald, him pretending to a straining effort that only barely hit an accidental and minimal perfection, her perfect without any effort at all, just playing around. Duet of opposites. The struggle and the play, making together something better than either. Maybe you needed both. Maybe she had been making her play into a struggle when she needed to be making her struggle into play.

They came to the melody at the end; yes, it was the thanksgiving. Hymn of thanksgiving after recovering from a serious illness, Wahram had said it was called, in the Lydian mode. And the title described the feeling well; they didn’t always. A thanksgiving laid into the tune itself, with an unerring ear for music as the speech of feeling. How could it be? Who had he been? Beethoven, the human nightingale. There are songs in our brains, she thought, whether bird brain cells have been inserted in them or not; they were already there, down in the cerebellum, conserved for millions of years. No death there; maybe death was an illusion, maybe these patterns lived forever, music and emotion stranding through universes one after the next, on the wings of transient birds.

Ever since the tunnel,” she said to him when he stopped whistling, “we’ve had a relationship.”

“Mmm,” he said, either agreeing or not.

“Don’t you think so?” she demanded.

“Yes, I do.”

“If we hadn’t wanted to run into each other, we could have avoided it. So I’ve been thinking that that’s not what we wanted. That we wanted…”

“Hmm,” he equivocated.

“What do you mean? Are you denying it?”

“No.”

“Then what do you mean?”

“I mean,” he said slowly, thinking it over, pausing, then seeming to lose the inclination to speak. Through his faceplate she could see that he was looking at her at last, rather than out at the stars, and that struck her as a good sign, but it was unnerving as well, he was so grave and intent. This diving into the mind was amphibious work, and her toad was performing it abstracted and silent.

“I like being with you,” he continued. “It seems to me things are more interesting when I’m with you.” He continued to stare at her. “I like whistling with you. I liked our time in the tunnel.”

“You liked it?”

“But of course. You know that.”

“No,” she said. “I don’t know what I know or don’t know. That’s part of my problem.”

“I love you,” he said.

“But of course,” she said. “And I love you.”

“No no,” he said. “I love you.”

“I see!” she said. “But oh dear—I’m not sure I know what you mean.”

He smiled his littlest smile. It was so small, now almost hidden behind his faceplate, and yet it appeared only when he was truly amused. It was never a polite gesture. When he was being polite he glared.

“Neither do I know what I mean,” he said. “But I say it anyway. Wanting to say it to you—it’s that kind of love.”

“Uh-oh,” she said. “Look, this is crazy talk. Your leg is frozen and you’ve got to be in shock. Your suit has you shot up with all kinds of stuff.”

“Very likely true,” he conceded a bit dreamily, “but even so, that is only allowing me to say what I really feel. With some urgency, let us say.”

He smiled again, but briefly; he was watching her like a… well, she didn’t know what. Not like a hawk; not anything like a wolf’s long stare; more a curious look, a questioning look—a froggy inquiry, as if to ask, what kind of creature was she? Robot? Limit? Robber? Robert?

Well, she didn’t know. She couldn’t say. Her toad regarded her, eyes like jasper marbles in his head. She regarded him: so slow, so particularly himself, self-contained, ritualistic… if that was right. She tried to put together all she had seen of him into a single phrase or characterization, and it didn’t work; she had a jumble of pieces, of small incidents and feelings, and then their big time together, which was also a jumble and a smear. But interesting! This was the heart of it, this word he had used, maybe. He interested her. She was drawn to him as to a work of art or a landscape. He had a sense of his actions that was sure; he drew a clean line. He showed her new things, but also new feelings. Oh to be calm! Oh to pay attention! He amazed her with these qualities.

“Hmm, well, I love you too,” she said. “We’ve been through a lot. Let me think about it. I haven’t thought about it in the way you seem to be implying.”

“Suggesting,” he suggested.

“Okay, well yes, then. I’ll think about what it means.”

“Very good.” Again he smiled his little smile.

They floated there in the black suffused with white. The diamond glitter: there were said to be a hundred thousand stars visible to the naked eye when one was in space. It would seem a difficult tally to make and was probably just a computer count, down to the magnitude considered visible to the average eye. To her there seemed to be many more than a hundred thousand.

They blobbed weightlessly, they jiggled as she blinked and breathed. She could hear her breath and her heartbeat, also the blood moving in her ears. The animal rush of herself in space, through time. Pulse after pulse. As she had lived a century and a third, her heart had beaten around five billion times. It seemed like a lot until you began to count. Counting itself implied a finite number, which was by definition too short. An odd sensation.

But counting your breaths was a Buddhist ceremony too, folded into the sun worship on Mercury. She had done it before. Here they were, confronted with the universe, seeing it from inside the fortresses of spacesuits and bodies. Hearing the body, seeing the stars and the deep black expanse. There were the Andromeda constellation and in it the Andromeda Galaxy, an elliptical smear rather than a dense little point. By thinking about what it was, Swan could sometimes pop the third dimension even farther into the black—not only perceive the depth of field variously punctured by stars at different distances, which one could pretend were marked by their brightness, but also see Andromeda as a whole galaxy, far farther away than anything else she could see—thwoop, there it was, deepest space, the extension of the vacuum evident to her eye. Those were awesome moments, and truthfully they didn’t last long, they couldn’t, it was too vast; the human eye and mind were not equipped to see it. Mostly it had to be an imaginative leap, she knew; but when that idea clicked with what she was actually seeing at that very second, it could become very much like something completely real.

Now that happened again, and there she was in it: the universe at full size. Thirteen point seven billion years of expansion, and more to come; indeed with the expansion accelerating, it could bloom outward like a coronal flare off the sun, dissipate all that was burning in it. That looked to be happening right now, right before her eyes.

“I’m tripping,” she said. “I’m seeing Andromeda as a galaxy, it’s punching a hole right through the blackness there, like I’m seeing in a new dimension.”

“Do you want some Bach?” he asked. “To go with it?”

She had to laugh. “What do you mean?”

“I’m listening to Bach’s cello suite,” he said. “It’s a very good match for the scene, I find. Do you want to patch in?”

“Sure.”

A single cello line, solemn but nimble, threaded through the night.

“Where did you get this? Did your suit have it?”

“No, my wrist AI. It doesn’t do much compared to your Pauline, but this it does.”

“I see. So you carry a weak AI with you?”

“Yes, that’s right.” A particularly expressive passage of the Bach filled the silence. The cello was almost like a third party to the conversation.

“Don’t you have anything less lugubrious?” Swan inquired.

“I suppose I do, but in fact I find this very spritely.”

She laughed. “You would!”

He hummed at that, thinking it over. “We could change to Debussy’s piano music,” he said after the cello executed a particularly deep sawing, its buzzy timbre black as space. “I think that might be just the thing for you.”

Piano replaced cello, the clear bell-like sounds darting and flowing in runs, making melodies that ran like cats’ paws over water. Debussy had had a bird mind, she could hear, and she whistled a phrase repeating one of his, fitting it into what followed. Hard to do. She stopped. “Very nice,” she said.

He squeezed her hand. “I wish I could whistle it along with you, but I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“It’s too hard for me to remember. When I hear it, it always surprises me. I mean, I recognize it when I hear it played, I’ve heard it ten thousand times, but if I’m not hearing it out loud, I couldn’t whistle you the tunes from memory, they’re too… too elusive, I suppose, or subtle. Glancing. Unexpected. And they don’t seem to repeat. Listen—it keeps moving on to a new thing.”

“Beautiful,” she said, and whistled another nightingale descant.

After a long while, he turned the music off. The silence was immense. Again she could hear her breath, her heartbeat. It was thumping away in its double thump, a little faster than normal, but no longer racing. Calm down, she thought again. You’re marooned in space, they will rescue you eventually. Meanwhile here you are, and Wahram is with you, and Pauline. No moment is ever fundamentally different from this one. Focus and be calm.

Maybe to say that someone was “like this” or “like that” was just an attempt to stick a memory to a board where you organized memories, like butterflies in a lepidopterist’s collection. Not really the generalization it seemed, but just a stab at understanding. Was Wahram anything like what she might say about him, if she tried to say something? He was like this, he was like that—she didn’t really know. One had impressions of other people, nothing more. Never to hear them think, only to hear what they said; it was a drop in an ocean, a touch across the abyss. A hand holding your hand as you float in the black of space. It wasn’t much. They couldn’t really know each other very well. So they said he is like this, or she is like that, and called that the person. Presumed to make a judgment. It was such a guess. You would have to talk with someone for years to give the guess any kind of validity. And even then you wouldn’t know.

When I’m with you, she said to Wahram in her mind as they floated there together, waiting, holding hands—when I’m with you I feel faintly anxious; judged; inadequate. Not the kind of person you like, which I find offensive, and thus behave more like that part of me than ever. Though I want your good opinion too. But that desire I find irritating, and so contradict it in myself. Why should I care? You don’t care.

And yet you do care. I love you, you said. And—Swan admitted to herself—she wanted him to feel that way when he was with her. That way—is this what love was, this desire for a feeling that remained unclear even when felt? Is that why people sometimes thought of it as a madness? The words stay the same, even the feelings stay the same, but there are slippages between the words and the feelings, hard to track. The desire to know, to be known, to be cherished for what you are and not what others think you should be… But then, what you are… It was hard for her not to feel that a person loving her was making a big mistake. Because she knew herself better than they did, so knew their love was given in error. And thus they must be some kind of fool. And yet it was precisely that misplaced love she wanted. Someone who would like you more than you do. Someone who likes you despite yourself, someone more generous to you than you are. That was how Alex had been. And when you see that, when you feel that—feel loved beyond justice, from some kind of generosity—that sets off certain other feelings. A kind of a glow. A spillover. It caused something to start that felt reciprocal. A mutual recognition. The hall of mirrors again. Set a lased beam of light between two mirrors, back and forth the beam bounces, two parts of something more; not just the beast with two backs (though that too, for sure, and a great thing, a great animal) but something else, some kind of… pairing, like Pluto and Charon, with the center of gravity between the two. Not a single supra-organism, but two working together on something not themselves. A duet. A harmony.

She whistled one of the other Beethoven tunes Wahram had often whistled in the tunnel; she still had trouble sorting which was which, but knew this was the other song of thanks, the one after the big storm, when all the creatures come back out into the sun. A simple melody, like a folk tune. She chose it because it was one of the few tunes Wahram could whistle a descant to, forging an elaboration he said was in the original. He fired it up and joined in. He wasn’t as strong as he had been before, though he hadn’t been strong then. His whistle had pain threading it like a golden wire. He was not much of a musician, in all truth. But he had a good memory for the pieces he loved; and he loved them.

She took off and trilled all around him, and he fell back into the main melody in relief. Maybe that was what duets were all about.

“Maybe I love you,” she said. “Maybe that’s what I’ve been feeling these past few years. Maybe I just never knew what it was.”

“Maybe,” he said.

Did he mean that maybes don’t count, or that maybes are better than nothing?

“Slow movement of the Seventh,” he said, “if you don’t mind.” And he was off into another tune from their time under Mercury, one she had always enjoyed riffing on, it had so many possibilities. Sometimes they had gone on with it for hours, for half a day or more. Stately, solemn, elegiac; something like Wahram himself, pacing through the days. On the march. Someone you could rely on.

“Maybe,” she repeated. “It may be.”

They fell into the song as of old, as when they were in the crucible and everything depended on how they went forward. As now, even now, just floating in space waiting for rescue, having faith it would come.

Faith justified; for Pauline said, “Ship approaching.”

One white dot among the rest bloomed, and in a matter of seconds became another little space yacht, a hopper hovering there before them like a dream, bizarre and magical.

“Oh good,” Swan said.

Now they too were Peters. She had to remember that. They were only continuing by way of a rescue. As they puffed over to the little ship, Swan tried to fix what this had felt like—the floating, Andromeda, Wahram’s gaze, their duet. It could have been their last hours. She thought of Alex again. Our stories go on a while, some genes and words persist; then we go away. It was a hard thing to remember. And as the lock door closed and they were back inside, she once again forgot it.