"Of Christ?"
"Of a child, following the catastrophe in which all became barren. A method was discovered whereby —"
"There you have the answer! We are not even from the same millennium. Nonetheless," Miss Ming linked an arm through hers before she could react, and held it tight, "it needn't stop friendship. How delicate you are. How exquisite. Almost," insinuatingly, "a child yourself."
Dafnish pulled free. "Snuffles." She began to dab at his face with her wetted glove. The little boy turned resigned eyes upward and watched the circling machines and beasts. The crowd sighed and swayed, and they were jostled.
"You are married?" implacably continued Miss Ming. "In your own Age?"
"To a cousin of the Armatuce, yes." Dafnish's manner became more distant as she tried to move on, but Miss Ming's warm hand slipped again into the crook of her elbow. The fingers pressed into her flesh. She was chilled.
Three white bats swooped by, performing acrobatics in unison, their twenty-foot wings making the air hiss. A trumpet sounded. There was applause.
"I was divorced, before my journey." Miss Ming paused, perhaps in the hope of some morbid revelation from her new friend, then continued, girl-to-girl: "His name was Donny Stevens. He was well thought of as a scientist — a popular and powerful family too — very old — in Iowa. Rich. But he was like all men. You know. They think they're doing you a favour if they can get to your cubicle once a month, and if it's once a week, they're Casanova! No thanks! Someone said — Betty Stern, I think — that he had that quality of aggressive stupidity which so many women find attractive in a man: they think it's strength of character and, once they've committed themselves to that judgement, maintain it against all the evidence. Betty said dozens of the happiest marriages are based on it. (I idolized Betty). Unfortunately, I realized my mistake. If I hadn't, I wouldn't be here, though. I joined an all-woman team — know what I mean? — anyway we got the first big breakthrough and made those dogs look sick when they saw what the bitches could do. And this Age suits me now. Anything goes, if you know what I mean — I mean, really! Wow! What kind of guys do you like, honey?"
She did not want Miss Ming's attentions. Again she cast about for Jagged and, as a rent appeared for a second in the ranks, saw him talking to a small, serious-faced yellow man, clad in discreet denim (the first sensible costume she had observed thus far). Hampered both by reluctant, sleepy son and clinging Ming, she pushed her way through posturing gallants and sparkling frillocks, to home slowly on Jagged, who saw her and smiled, bending to murmur a word or two to his companion. Then, as she closed: "Li Pao, this is Dafnish Armatuce of the Armatuce. Dafnish, I introduce Li Pao from the 27th century."
"She won't know what you're talking about!" crowed the unshakeable Miss Ming. "Her dates go from something she calls the First Birth. 1922. I was baffled myself."
Lord Jagged's eyes became hooded.
Li Pao bowed a neat bow. "I gather you find this Age disturbing, Comrade Armatuce?"
Her expression confirmed his assumption.
Li Pao's small mouth moved with soft, sardonic deliberation. "I, too, found it so, upon arrival. But there is little need to feel afraid, for, as you will discover, the rich are never malevolent, unless their security is threatened, and here there is no such threat. If they seem to waste their days, do not judge them too harshly; they know no better. They are without hungers or frustrations. Nature has long since been conquered by Art. Their resources are limitless, for they feed upon the whole universe (what remains of it). These cities suck power from any available part of the galaxy and transfer it to them so that they may play. Stars die so that on old Earth someone might change the colour of his robe." There was irony in his tone, but he spoke without censure.
Snuffles cried out as something vast and metallic appeared to drop upon the throng, but it stopped a few feet up, hovered, then drifted away, and the crowd became noisy again.
"The First Birth period?" Lord Jagged made a calculation. "That would place you in the year 9,478 A.D. We find the Dawn Age reckoning most convenient here. I understand your dismay. You are reconstituting your entire planet, are you not? From the core, virtually, outward, eh?"
She was grateful for his erudition. Now he and Li Pao seemed allies in this fearful world. She was able to steady her heart and recover something of her self-possession. "It has been hard work, Lord Jagged. The Armatuce have been fortunate in winning respect for their several sacrifices."
"Sacrifice!" Li Pao was nostalgic. "A joy impossible to experience here, where the gift of the self to the common cause would go unremarked. They would not know."
"Then they are, indeed, unfortunate," she said. "There is a price they pay for their pleasure, after all."
"You find our conceits shallow, then?" Lord Jagged wished to know.
"I do. I grieve. Everywhere is waste and decay — the last stages of the Romantic disease whose symptoms are a wild, mindless seeking after superficial sensation for its own sake, effect piled upon effect, until mind and body disintegrate completely, whose cure is nothing else but death. Here, all is display — your fantasies appear the harmless play of children, but they disguise the emptiness of your lives. You colour corpses and think yourselves creative. But I am not deceived."
"Well," he replied equably enough, "visions vary. To one who cannot conceive of such things, another's terrors and appetites, his day-to-day phantasms, are, indeed, poor conceits, intended merely to display their possessor's originality and to dismay his fellows. But some of us have our joys, even our profundities, you know, and we cherish them."
She felt a little shame. She had offended him, perhaps, with her candour. She lowered
