at a wooden pier sticking into what looked like a shallow lake. Whole neighborhoods sloped right down into water. The east side of North America had always been a drowned coastline, but now more than ever.
A walk up a rise under a violent sunset sky, which was tastelessly mashing orange and pink together. At times like these it was the eastern sky that really put on a show, subtler but more glorious. But no one looked that way.
Zasha’s place was a tiny squat next to a line of trees, as handmade and run-down as any favela or shantytown Swan had ever seen.
“What is this place?”
“Part of the Meadowlands.”
“And you’re free to make your own home here?”
“As if! Actually my rent is stupendous, but Mercury House gives me a little supplement to keep me out here away from them.”
“Hard to believe.”
“Anyway, it’s fine. I like my commute.”
Swan sat gratefully in a beat-up armchair and watched her old partner putter about in the gloom. It had been a long time since they had banged around the solar system, building terraria and raising Zephyr; it had even been a long time since Zephyr had died. And they had never gotten along very well, separating soon after Zephyr went off. Still, Swan recognized the way Zasha hovered over the stove, waiting for the teapot to boil, harboring a secretive knowing look she also recognized.
She said, “So did you work with Alex?”
“Well, sure,” Zasha replied, glancing at her briefly. “She was my boss. So you know how that goes.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean she loved you and took care of you, and you did exactly what she wanted you to.”
Swan had to laugh. “Well, yes.” She thought it over, ignoring the pain. “Somehow she conformed herself to what you needed. Helped you to get what you needed.”
“Uh-huh. I know what you mean.”
“But listen-now she’s gone, and she left me a message. Basically she used me as a courier to Wang, on Io, and also dumped something into Pauline. It was all in case something happened to her, she said.”
“What do you mean?”
Swan described the visitation from Alex’s ghost-the envelopes-her trip out to Jupiter, and the interloper on Io.
Zasha said, “I heard about that. I didn’t know you were there,” frowning at the teapot, face blue in the stove top glow.
“What were you and Alex working on?” Swan asked. “And why didn’t she tell me about it in this message she left? She-it’s like I was just a courier for her, and Pauline some kind of safe-deposit box.”
Zasha didn’t reply.
“Come on, tell me,” Swan said. “You can tell me. I can take it from you. I’m used to you telling me how bad I am.”
Zasha expelled a breath, poured two cups of tea. Steam in gloom, catching light from somewhere. Z handed her one, then sat down on a kitchen chair across from her. Swan warmed her hands on her cup.
“There’s stuff I can’t talk about-”
“Oh come on!”
“- and stuff I can. She got me involved in a group that is hunting down some odd qubes. That’s been interesting. But it was something she wanted kept confidential, along with some other things she had going. So, maybe she thought that you aren’t very good at keeping things confidential.”
“Why would she think that?”
But even Zasha knew of three or four examples of Swan’s being indiscreet, and Swan herself knew of several more.
“Those were accidents,” Swan finally added. “And not very big accidents either.”
Zasha sipped the tea cautiously. “Well, but maybe they seemed to be becoming more frequent. You are not the same person you used to be, you have to admit. You’ve stuffed your brain with augmentations-”
“I have not!”
“Well, four or five. I didn’t like it right from the beginning. When you grow the religious part of the temporal lobe, you can turn into a very different person, not to mention risking epilepsy. And that was only the start. Now you’ve got the animal stuff in there, you’ve got Pauline in there, recording everything you see-it is not insignificant. It can do damage. You end up being some kind of post-human thing. Or at least a different person.”
“Oh come on, Z. I’m the same as I always was. And everything you do can damage you! You can’t let that stop you. Every thing I’ve done to myself I consider part of being a human being. I mean, who wouldn’t do it if they could? I would be ashamed not to! It isn’t being post human, it’s being fully human. It would be stupid not to do the good things when you can, it would be anti human.”
“Well,” Zasha said, “you did those things and you immediately stopped designing terraria.”
“I was done! We were past the design phase anyway; they were just going to build more of the same. And a lot of what we did was stupid anyway. We shouldn’t have been making Ascensions at that point, we needed to get the traditional biomes past the extinction. We still need that! I don’t know what we were thinking, frankly.”
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
