Yes, I’ve been reading about that. Loss of affectual function, anomie, apathy. They’ve been treating it as they would catatonia, or schizophrenia— giving them a serotonin dopamine complex, limbic stimulants . . .a big cocktail, as you can imagine. Brain chemistry . . .I’ve been dosing her with everything I can think of, I must admit, keeping journals, running tests, sometimes with her cooperation, sometimes without her knowing much about it. I’ve been doing what I can, I swear I have.

I’m sure you have.

But it isn’t working. She’s losing it. Oh Sax—

He stopped, held on to his friend’s shoulder.

I can’t bear it if she goes. She was always such an airy spirit. We are earth and water, fire and air. And Maya was always in flight. Such an airy spirit, flying on her own gales up above us. I can’t stand to see her falling like this!

Ah well.

They walked on.

It’s nice to have Phobos back again.

Yes. That was a good idea of yours.

It was your idea, actually. You suggested it to me.

Did I? I don’t remember that.

You did.

Below them the sea crunched faintly on rocks.

These four elements. Earth, water, fire, and air. One of your semantic rectangles?

It’s from the Greeks.

Like the four temperaments?

Yes. Thales made the hypothesis. The first scientist.

But there were always scientists, you told me. All the way back to the savanna.

Yes, that’s true.

And the Greeks— all honor to them, they were obviously great minds— but they were only part of a continuum of scientists, you know. There has been some work done since.

Yes I know.

Yes. And some of that subsequent work might be of use to you, in these conceptual schemata of yours. In mapping the world for us. So that you might be given new ways of seeing things that might help you, even with problems like Maya’s. Because there are more than four elements. A hundred and twenty, more or less. Maybe there are more than four temperaments as well. Maybe a hundred and twenty of them, eh? And the nature of these elements— well— things have gotten strange since the Greeks. You know subatomic particles have an attribute called spin, that comes only in multiples of one half? And you know how an object in our visible world, it spins three hundred and sixty degrees, and is back to its original position? Well, a particle with a spin designated one half, like a proton or a neutron— it has to rotate through seven hundred and twenty degrees to get back to its original configuration.

What’s that?

It has to go through a double rotation relative to ordinary objects, to come back to its starting state.

You’re kidding.