“You saw us fight?”
“I saw you; I see everything, Nicholas.”
“This is the worst place,” Nicholas said; he was talking to his lap.
“What do you mean by that?”
“I’ve been in bad places before—places where they hit you or squirted big hoses of ice water that knocked you down. But not where they would let someone else—”
“Another patient?” asked a wheeling gull.
“—do it.”
“You were lucky, Nicholas. Ignacio is homicidal.”
“You could have stopped him.”
“No, I could not. All this world is my eye, Nicholas, my ear, and my tongue, but I have no hands.”
“I thought you did all this.”
“Men did all this.”
“I mean, I thought you kept it going.”
“It keeps itself going, and you—all the people here—direct it.”
Nicholas looked at the water. “What makes the waves?”
“The wind and the tide.”
“Are we on Earth?”
“Would you feel more comfortable on Earth?”
“I’ve never been there; I’d like to know.”
“I am more like Earth than Earth now is, Nicholas. If you were to take the best of all the best beaches of Earth, and clear them of all the poisons and all the dirt of the last three centuries, you would have me.”
“But this isn’t Earth?”
There was no answer. Nicholas walked around the ashes of the fire until he found Ignacio’s footprints. Nicholas was no tracker, but the depressions in the soft beach sand required none; he followed them, his head swaying from side to side as he walked, like the sensor of a mine detector.
For several kilometers Ignacio’s trail kept to the beach; then, abruptly, the footprints swerved, wandered among the coconut palms, and at last were lost on the firmer soil inland. Nicholas lifted his head and shouted, “Ignacio? Ignacio!” After a moment he heard a stick snap, and the sound of someone pushing aside leafy branches. He waited.
“Mum?”
A girl was coming toward him, stepping out of the thicker growth of the interior. She was pretty, though too thin, and appeared to be about nineteen; her hair was blond where it had been most exposed to sunlight, darker elsewhere. “You’ve scratched yourself,” Nicholas said. “You’re bleeding.”
“I thought you were my mother,” the girl said. She was a head taller than Nicholas. “Been fighting, haven’t you. Have you come to get me?”
Nicholas had been in similar conversations before and normally would have preferred to ignore the remark, but he was lonely now. He said, “Do you want to go home?”
“Well, I think I should, you know.”
“But do you want to?”
“My mum always says if you’ve got something on the stove you don’t want to burn—She’s quite a good cook. She really is. Do you like cabbage with bacon?”
“Have you got anything to eat?”
“Not now. I had a thing a while ago.”
“What kind of thing?”
“A bird.” The girl made a vague little gesture, not looking at Nicholas. “I’m a memory that has swallowed a bird.”
“Do you want to walk down by the water?” They were moving in the direction of the beach already.
“I was just going to get a drink. You’re a nice tot.”
Nicholas did not like being called a tot. He said, “I set fire to places.”
“You won’t set fire to this place; it’s been nice the last couple of days, but when everyone is sad, it rains.”
Nicholas was silent for a time. When they reached the sea, the girl dropped to her knees and bent forward to drink, her long hair falling over her face until the ends trailed in the water, her nipples, then half of each breast, in the water. “Not there,” Nicholas said. “It’s sandy, because it washes the beach so close. Come on out here.” He waded out into the sea until the lapping waves nearly reached his armpits, then bent his head and drank.
“I never thought of that,” the girl said. “Mum says I’m stupid. So does Dad. Do you think I’m stupid?”
Nicholas shook his head.
“What’s your name?”
