When they got back to the village she patted him on the head. “That was fun. I’ll talk to your friend.”

“Thanks.”

• • •

A few days later she gave Ann Clayborne a call. The face that appeared on the screen was as forbidding as a skull.

“Hi, I’m Zoya Boone.”

“Yes?”

“It’s my name,” Zo said. “That’s how I introduce myself to strangers.”

“Boone?”

“Jackie’s daughter.”

“Ah.”

Clearly she didn’t like Jackie. A common reaction; Jackie was so wonderful that a lot of people hated her.

“I’m also a friend of Sax Russell’s.”

“Ah.”

Impossible to read what she meant by that one.

“I was telling him that I’m on my way out to the Uranian system, and he said you might be interested in joining me.”

“He did?”

“He did. So I called. I’m going to Jupiter and then Uranus, with two weeks on Miranda.”

“Miranda!” she said. “Who are you again?”

“I’m Zo Boone! What are you, senile?”

“Miranda, you said?”

“Yes. Two weeks, maybe more if I like it.”

“If you like it?”

“Yes. I don’t stay places I don’t like.”

Clayborne nodded as if that were only sensible, and so Zo added mock solemnly, as if to a child, “There’s a lot of rock there.”

“Yes yes.”

A long pause. Zo studied the face on the screen. Gaunt and wrinkled, like Russell, only in her case almost all the wrinkles were vertical. A face hacked out of wood. Finally she said, “I’ll think about it.”

“You’re supposed to be trying new things,” Zo reminded her.

“What?”

“You heard me.”

“Sax told you that?”

“No— I asked Jackie about you.”

“I’ll think about it,” she said again, and cut the connection.

So much for that, Zo thought. Still she had tried, and therefore felt virtuous, a disagreeable sensation. These issei had a way of pulling one into their realities; and they were all mad.

And unpredictable as well; the next day Clayborne called back, and said she would go.

4

In person Ann Clayborne proved to be indeed as withered and sun-dried as Russell, but even more silent and strange— waspish, laconic, prone to brief ill-tempered outbursts. She showed up at the last minute with a single backpack and a slim black wristpad, one of the latest models. Her skin was a nut brown, and marked by wens and warts and scars where skin disorders had been removed. A long life spent outdoors, and in the early days too, when UV bombardment had been intense; in short, she was fried. A bakehead, as they said in Echus. Her eyes were gray, her mouth a lizard slash, the lines from the corners of her mouth to her nostrils like deep hatchet chops. Nothing could be more severe than that face.