2312

Zasha was surprised at this. “I like the Ascensions. They help genetic dispersion.”

“Too much so. Anyway that’s not the point. The point is I wanted to try different things, and I did.”

“You became an artist.”

“I was always an artist. I just changed media. And hardly even that. Just a focusing in. It was what I wanted. Come on, Zasha. I’m just living a human life. You refuse these opportunities, that doesn’t make you more human, it just makes you regressive. I don’t go anywhere near as far as some people. I don’t have a third eye and I don’t break my ribs when I have an orgasm. I just…”

“Just what?”

“I don’t know. Try things that sound good.”

“And have they all worked out for you?”

Swan sat there in the gloom, somewhere in New Jersey. Outside was the open air of Earth. “No.” Long pause. “In fact I’ve done worse things than what you know about, if you want to know the truth.”

Zasha stared at her. “I’m not sure I do.”

“Ha-ha. And Alex knew about it too, now that I think of it, because I told Mqaret about it.”

“He wouldn’t automatically tell her.”

“I didn’t ask him not to.”

“Well,” Zasha said. “So maybe she knew. Something worse than animal brains? Something worse than a qube in your skull? Never mind, I don’t want to know. But maybe Alex did, and maybe she had stuff that she…”

“That she didn’t trust me with.”

“That she needed to keep to herself. And here you are, kind of a mess.”

“I am not a mess!” Though her rib did hurt, squeezed by her indignation. And she was full of grief for Alex-and now a little angry at her too.

“Seems like you’re saying you are messed up,” Z observed. “You’ve had five or six or seven brain tweaks over the years, a qube in your head-in fact, whatever was fashionable at the time.”

“Yeah yeah.”

“Well think about it!”

Swan put her teacup on the table. “I think I’ll go out for a walk.”

“Good. Don’t get lost. I’ll cook up something while you’re out, say about forty-five minutes.”

Swan left the hut.

O utside the door she took her slippers off and stuffed them into her pocket, dug her toes into the dirt and wriggled them around. Leaned over from the waist like a dancer and dug her fingers in, put hands to face and breathed. Dirt, the ultimate ambrosia. Tasted like muddy mushrooms.

It was after sunset. There was an asphalt road running next to a marsh, green and yellow, the wind bouncing the reeds out there. She walked on the dirt by the side of the road and looked at the marsh and the sky. On the other side of the road some old buildings were nestled under a stand of trees. Rows of old apartment blocks beyond. Croak of frog. She sat on the edge of the marsh and saw the black dots half in and half out of the water under her. A chorus of frogs, croaking. She listened for a while, watching the marsh in the wind, and heard suddenly that they were performing a call-and-response. If one frog said “ribbit,” then all the others would repeat it for a while, up and down the road for as far as she could hear, until in a momentary pause one croaked “robot,” and they would all repeat that for a while. Then it changed to “limit,” and off the others went, as if speaking to her like some Greek chorus, transmogrified to frogs. So many limits! So many robots. The lump nearest her contributed only once in a while, puffing under his chin briefly, then croaking. Otherwise it was perfectly still, except for a little shift of the eyeballs she could see in the dusk, a liquid blink, always alert. “Romper!” it croaked in a pause, and Swan exclaimed, “Good for you!” and said it with them for a while.

October on the northern hemisphere of Earth, so glossy and full. All her body-planet interfaces humming. Suddenly life in space seemed a stark nightmare, an exile to the vacuum, everyone locked in sensory-deprivation tanks, separate, virtual, augmented. Here the real was real.

“Robber!”

“Robber robber robber robber…”

The moment itself, robbed from them as it happened. Here she was, passing through a space. Flit of the now. Dusk in a marsh in a transient universe, so strange, so mysterious. Why should anything be like this? The wind was cool, the clouds had a little twilight left in them. Looked like rain. The leaves of the thorny vine on the ground were as red as maple leaves. The marsh was like a person out there breathing. Crows flew over cawing, headed into the town and its heat islands. Swan knew a little of the crow language; they would say to each other, “Caw, caw, caw,” as now, just chatting, and then one would shout a word out so clearly that it had become an English word-“Hawk!”-and they would scatter. Of course the word crow also came from their language. In Sanskrit they had it as kaaga. Imported words from another language.