Finally he said, 'We should stop for the night.' 'Hour more,' she answered. 'No. We should stop now.'
He saw her lipless mouth tighten. She was a lizard woman who wanted her own way. She was imperious andunempathic.
Then she said, 'If you want.'
She pulled to the side of the road. She deactivated the pod, which sighed and settled. Its headglobes faded. A pure darkness arrived, alive with the rasp and chirping of insects.
'We can get rid of some of the soymilk and sleep in the back,' he said.
'Or house.'
She indicated with her small, ovoid head a row of houses on the road's far side, sharply gabled against the stars, like a child's drawing of a mountain range.
'Technically they're still private property,' he said.
She waggled her fingers in the air a Nadian gesture of dismissal, he supposed.
'Hey,' he said. 'We're criminals, right? What's a little breaking and entering?'
They got out of the pod. Simon stood for a moment on the weedy dirt, stretching his spine. They were in a vast black house-filled emptiness. An immensity of constellations hung overhead. This far from city lights, they were countless.
Nadia's sun was one of the stars just above the black roof silhouettes. That shitty little star over there.
He realized Catareen was standing beside him. They could move very quietly, these people. These lizards.
She said, 'Nadia.'
'Mm-hm.'
'We say Nourthea.'
'I know.'
The name 'Nadia' had always been an ironic approximation. One of the right-wing papers had started calling it Planet Nada, Spanish for 'nothing,' as its riches and wisdom kept failing to materialize. The name had stuck.
She said, 'You have go?'
'Me, personally? No. I'm new. I was manufactured about five years ago. I'm actually one of the very last ones they made.'
'Why not legal?'
'You mean, why do they bother chasing after a poor, harmless, old artificial like me?'
'Yes.'
'A couple of years ago the Council identified all artificials as stolen property, because the whole debate about natural versus engineered life just went on and on. We were monsters and abominations. Or we were the innocent victims of science, and deserved protection. There was talk of special preserves for us. Somebody in Texas invented and patented a soul-measuring apparatus, but the courts disallowed it. Finally the people who were most appalled by us came up with a solution. Because we were manufactured, simulos were declared the property of Biologe. And because we were walking around loose, we were stolen. We had essentially stolen ourselves. We were declared contraband. We were ordered to return ourselves. But Biologe was out of business by then. So, next best thing, we were to turn ourselves in to the authorities until our rightful owner came to claim us. Which of course was never going to happen. We would be held in a sort of escrow until that time, aka never. A few actually did it. As far as I know, they're sitting in cells to this day with tags clipped to their ears. The rest of us did our best to disappear. But as stolen property, we're inherently illegal. We break the law by continuing to possess ourselves.'
'And they hate?'
'Well, 'hate' may not be exactly the right word. You could say they think of us as a bad idea. A needless complication in the ongoing argument about the eternal soul. They just sort of want us not to be.'
'Nadians also.'
'Well. It's different. You're legal aliens. Being biological, your right to life is not in question. All your other rights are.'
'We live with no stroth.'
'Agonies are one of my changes of garments,' he said.
'Yes,' she answered.
The night hummed around them. Certain insects remained. The birds were probably gone forever.
Simon said, 'I know you don't like questions.' 'Some questions.'
'And I'm not going to ask you about your past or your family or any of those clearly forbidden subjects.'
'Thank.'
'But I would like to know. I mean, here we are. You had a job, you had a place to live. Granted, maybe not the greatest job, but given what's available to you'
'To one like me.'
'Sorry, I don't mean to offend. You know what I'm getting at, right? Why are you here? If we get to Denver, if by some miracle Lowell is actually there, what do you hope will happen for you?'
'Die in Denver.'
'That's a little melodramatic, don't you think?'
'No.'
Then she went stare-y and blank. Although he could not see her clearly he knew what her nostrils were doing. He was learning to feel these conditions when they arose in her. The air changed between them. A legible and almost audible absence announced itself.
'Why do you do this?' he asked. 'I mean, where do you go when you get like this?'
Softly, she exhaled the little Nadian song.
'I'm asking,' he said, 'because frankly it gets a little creepy for me when you zone out. I've pretty much come to understand that you tune back in eventually, but still. Would it be too hard for you to just, you know, hang in a little more? Would it be too un-Nadian?'
Nothing. The breathy song, soft in the darkness.
'Okay. Well, I'm glad we had this conversation. Let's go find a place to sleep, okay?'
'Yes,' she said. She said that, at least.
They crossed the road and went into the development. It was one of the villages Titan had tossed up for the soon-to-be-rich. Front porches, dormers, window boxes. There'd been rumors that these places were made of something that broke down over time and produced toxic fumes, though the high incidence of cancerous tumors among the soon-to-bes could just as easily have had its roots in the soil or water of their various native lands.
Catareen led him straight to the third house in the first row. It seemed briefly that she must have been here before, must have had some connection to this particular house, though that of course was extremely unlikely. It was probably a Nadian thing about always choosing the third in a lineup or making arbitrary choices with a ritual show of certainty. Or something. Who knew? Who wanted, at this late hour, to go to the trouble of asking?
The front door was locked. Most people had expected to come back. The windows were locked, too. Simon suggested that they try another house, but Catareen had settled on this one. They ended up breaking a window with a plastistone Krishna that stood silently blowing into a silent flute among a circle of long-dead marigolds on the front lawn. The plexi, when it shattered, produced a sharp and hopeless musical sound.
After they crawled in through the window, they found themselves in a living room that had been stripped of all that could be easily carried. What remained was a sofa and two low, hulking chairs covered in pinks and golds and peacock blues bright enough to show even in the darkness. There was a low, carved table and a giant vid and a lightglobe in the shape of a period chandelier.
'Let's see if there's any food,' Simon said.
They went into the kitchen, where they found old packets of curried this and pickled that. All of it needed water to reconstitute, however, and there was of course no water.
Catareen held a foil packet in her hands and turned it over and over, as if she hoped to discover some secret instructions for converting the husks within into food without the introduction of moisture. Watching her like that, Simon was filled with a sense of her unknown life scrabbling whatever crops she could from the sloggy, dead soil of Nadia, coming to Earth on one of the Promise Ships and arriving, at the end of the seventeen-year trip, in a post- meltdown world where an alien was lucky to get work in sanitation or child minding. Now she was here, in the abandoned kitchen of a relocated family, holding a packet of inedible food, on her way to a place where she had no
