swimming in circles and would never find her way back, her link began faintly to respond. Though its connection was too feeble for any useful information, its return encouraged her to continue.
The link grew stronger.
All at once she burst from the fog into clear skies, clear sea. As if the mist defined the limits of the interference, the link returned full force. The north shore lay a hundred meters away. She recognized a headland a kilometer east of her cabin.
She was afraid she could not cover the distance without a rest, but she was also afraid to stop. She forced herself onward.
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She fetched up on the gravelly shore, gasping for breath like a drowning victim, and dragged herself beyond the wa-teriine. tf she passed out with the tide coming in, she might wake up in the sea again.
She never quite lost consciousness, though a long time passed before she wanted to move. Exposed to dry air, the artificial lung shrank against her back. All she could do was feel sorry for it.
Warm hands held and rubbed her cold fingers. A soft crooning noise, a double-noted hum, surrounded her.
Zev crouched beside her. He stopped humming, but kept hold of her hand. Even his swimming webs felt warm.
'J.D., J.D., I am sorry. We did not think when we let you leave by yourself. We forgot about the interference and we forgot that you cannot hear the seafloor. We thought only that you wished to be left alone. Then I remembered! How did you find your way?'
'Beats the hell out of me,' J.D. said. She could barely speak. Her mouth was dry. This struck her as funny.
'Oh, you would make such a good diver,' he said.
J.D. freed her hands from his grasp, pushed herself to her feet, and wobbled back to the water. The idea of diving again nauseated her. She peeled off the lung and immersed it. Its unhealthy drying dark red color bloomed to deep pink.
'Zev, would you do me a favor?'
'Yes.'
She looked at him askance. He agreed without hesitation or question, still trusting her despite everything.
'I'm going to walk home,' J.D. said. 'I'd appreciate it if you'd put the lung in its place underneath the floating dock.'
'That is easy,' he said, sounding downcast. 'Would you not like to swim? We could help you.' He gestured: offshore, several of the orcas circled, waiting. 'They would even let you ride.'
'No. I wouldn't like to swim. Tell them thank you.' The orcas did not enjoy letting human beings ride them.
Zev walked down the beach.
'Zev . . . goodbye.'
He faced her. ' 'Goodbye* means for a long time.'
'Yes.'
'But you could come with us! Then we'd all be safe''
54 vonda N. Mdntyre
'It isn't that easy. You're free out here, but I have connections to the land worid, and they could make me come back.
Then ... I might not be able to help putting you all in more danger than I've already done.'
'But where will you go?**
'To the starship. If they'll still have me.'
'What if they will not?'
'Then . . . I'll have to wing it.'*
He looked at her. 'I did not know you could fly, too:'
J.D. laughed.
'I will miss you.'
'I'll miss you, too, Zev.'
'Come wade in the water.'
'Why?'
'So that I can hug you when I say goodbye.'
It was too complicated to try to explain why she had told him not to touch her yesterday, but why it would have been all right for him to hug her now. She walked with him into the water until they were knee-deep, and then she hugged him and stroked his curly hair. He spread his fingers against her back, and she felt the silky swimming webs against her skin.
'Goodbye.' His breath whispered warm on her breast.
Zev took the lung and slid beneath the surface. J.D. did not see him again.
Floris Brown rested in the soft grip of a zero-g lounge, held gently against it with elastic straps. At first, weightlessness had disoriented her, but by the time the spaceplane docked with the transport she had begun to find it welcome and comforting. It eased the pains of eighty years of fighting gravity, and even the bruises of seven minutes of crushing acceleration.
The braided strands of her hair floated in weightlessness.
She let three patches grow long, but shaved the rest of her hair to a soft short fuzz. The shells and beads strung into the braids clinked and rattled softly- The end of the longest braid drifted in the comer of her vision. It was completely white.
The central patch was streaked with bright pink, the right-
hand strands were green. But she always kept the leftmost
long patch the natural color of her hair. She also left her eyes
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their natural blue, but wore heavy black eye makeup on her upper and lower eyelids and her eyelashes.
She gazed out the wide bubble window. It provided an unending source of interest. ,
As the transport powered gently out of low earth orbit, it passed within sight of the deserted Soviet space station. To the unaided eye it looked like any other satellite, moving from sunlight to shadow. With binoculars it looked old.
Though the vacuum of space protected it from rust or other deterioration, cables dangled and twisted eerily; and the antennae all hung motionless, aimed at nothing.
Floris remembered the vigor and assurance of the Soviet space program, as it outdistanced that of her own country when she was very young. All its promise had been lost, its lunar base abandoned and its Mars expedition never begun, when the Mideast Sweep gained power and eliminated the space program as useless, extravagant, an insult to the face of god, a tool of Satan. It made Floris sad to look at the old space station, drifting dead in its orbit, kept as a monument to the past.
Once they left low earth orbit, her nostalgia dissipated. The transport pilot, showing off the sights, oriented the observation window first toward earth, then toward the moon, then toward the stars. Undimmed by earth's atmosphere, the constellations stunned her. She could imagine the sky a hundred or a thousand or a million years ago, the air free of the pollution of human activities, the galaxy sweeping in a brilliant path from one horizon to the other. Back on earth she had seen the Milky Way as a fuzzy patch of light across the middle sixty degrees of the sky. Out here she knew that if she could see all the way around her, she would see the entire disk of the Milky Way. For the first time she understood why prehistoric people—and even some modern people who ought to know better—could believe that the stars contained esoteric meaning.
Occasionally one or another of the passengers came by and greeted her. She was a curiosity: not the oldest person ever
to travel into space, but the oldest to make a first trip, the first member of the Grandparents in Space program.
One of the benefits of her years was that her lifelong difficulty remembering names and faces could not be
