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.
There were some people, standing by the buildings next to the trees. They were small somehow. Weighted down. Could this be so close to the great city? Was it indeed part of the city, part of what made it work, not just the wetlands but the legions of poor marginal people, living in the half-drowned ruins? The weight of the planet began to drag her down. Those people over there were like figures out of Brueghel, people from the sixteenth century, bowed down with time. Maybe these were the people living a real life, and what she did in space nothing more than the dilettantism of a gaga aristos. Maybe what she really needed to do was to live here and build things, maybe houses, little but functional, a different kind of goldsworthy. Under the sky, in the full light of the sun-the utter luxury of the real. The only real world. Earth, heaven and hell both-natural heaven, human hell. How could they have done such a thing, how could they have not tried harder?
Maybe they had. Maybe the trying included the flight to space, as some kind of desperate hope. Cast from Earth as if in a seed pod, out to where one was sure to freeze and rot and turn back into soil. This dirt by the side of the road. She lay on it, avoiding the thorny vine; squirmed around as if to burrow into it. A spacer fucking the dirt-they must see that all the time, not be impressed anymore. Those poor lost people, they must think. Because there was nothing like this in space, not really-not the wind and the big sky over her, almost night now, with moisture that was not yet cloud-Oh how could they have left! Space was a vacuum, a nothingness. They had inhabited it only by deploying little rooms, little bubbles; the city and the stars, sure, but it wasn’t enough! There needed to be a world in between! This was what city people forgot. And indeed off in space they had better forget, or they would go mad. Here one could remember and yet not go mad-not exactly.
But how sad it was. Grubby, tawdry, beaten down. Pitiful. Sad to distraction, to a stabbing despair. That they had let it come to this. That she had done what she had done to herself. Even Zasha thought she had gone too far, and Z was a very tolerant person. Would have stayed with her, maybe, if she hadn’t gone off. And now she was no longer the person Zasha had parented a child with, she could feel that, even though she didn’t know exactly what had changed. Unless it was the Enceladan bugs in her… In any case a strange person. A person for whom the only place that made her truly happy also made her deeply sad. How was she to reconcile this, what did it mean?
S he sat up. Sat there on the dirt, feeling it lumpy under her.
She saw a motion from the corner of her eye and tried to leap to her feet, misjudged the g and crashed back down. She peered into the gloom:
A face. Two faces: mother and daughter. Here it was such a clear thing; it looked like parthenogenesis. Moonlight just now breaking over the skyglow of the city.
The younger stepped toward Swan. Said something in a language Swan didn’t recognize.
“What is it?” Swan said. “Don’t you speak English?”
The woman shook her head, said something more. She looked around her, called quietly behind her.
Two more figures appeared next to her, taller than her and broader. Two young men. They leaned over and muttered to the daughter.
“You have antibiotics?” one of them said. “My coz is sick.”
“No,” Swan said, “I don’t carry those on me.” Although possibly her belt had something, she wasn’t even sure.
They took a step closer. “Who are you?” one said. “What are you?”
“I’m visiting friends,” Swan said. “I can call them.”
The young men approached her, shaking their heads. “You’re a spacer,” the first speaker said, and the other added, “What you doing here?”
“I have to go,” Swan said, and started for the road-but the two of them grabbed her by the arms. Their grips were so strong that she didn’t even try to jerk free. “Hey!” she said sharply.
The first speaker called out toward the dark behind the two women: “Kiran! Kiran!”
Soon another figure appeared out of the dark-another young man, the tallest yet, but willowy. The two holding Swan had grips that felt to her like something they had done before.
The new young man was startled at the sight of Swan and said something sharp to the two holding her, in a language she didn’t recognize. A quick urgent conversation passed between them; this Kiran was not pleased.
Finally he looked at Swan. “They want to keep you for money. Give me a second here.”
More urgent talk in their tongue. Kiran appeared to be making them nervous or defensive; then he approached and took Swan by the upper arm, squeezing once as if to send a message, and gestured the others away with a flick of his head. He was telling them what to do. The other two finally nodded, and the one who had spoken first said to her, “Back soon.” Then the first two slipped away into the night.
Swan looked Kiran in the eye, and he grimaced and let go of her arm. “Those are my cousins,” he said. “They had a bad idea.”
“A stupid idea,” Swan said. “They could have just asked me for help. So what did you tell them?”
“That I would keep you here while they got their mother’s car. So now I think you should get out of here.”
“Come walk me back,” Swan said. “I want you along, in case they come back.”
His eyebrows shot up his forehead, and he regarded her closely. After a while he said, “All right.”
They walked quickly on the road. “Will you get in trouble for this?” Swan asked at one point.
“Yes,” he said gloomily.
“What will they do?”
“They’ll try to beat on me. And tell the old guys.”
Her arms were still burning where they had been gripped, and her cheeks were hot. She regarded the gloomy youth walking next to her. He looked good. And he had without a moment’s hesitation removed her from a bad situation. She recalled how sharp his voice had been when he’d spoken to his cousins. “Do you want to leave?”
“What do you mean?”
“Do you want to go into space?”
After a pause he said, “Can you do that?”
“Yes,” she said.
They stopped outside Zasha’s, and Swan looked him over. She liked the look of him. He looked at her with an expression curious, wondering-eager. She felt a shiver run down her.
“My friend who lives here is a diplomat for Mercury. So… come in if you want. We can get you up there if you want,” she said, looking skyward briefly.
He hesitated. “You won’t… get me in trouble?”
“I will get you in trouble. Trouble in space.”
