2312

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.

T hey 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?”