Another scene, Maya thought, only partly unhappy at the prospect. But Jackie was smiling, and Athos was coming with her, at her side, watching it all with wide-eyed innocence; either he had no idea of their history, or else he had a good control of his expressions. Maya guessed the latter, simply because of the look in his eye, just that bit too innocent to be real. An actor.

“It’s beautiful this canal, don’t you think?” Jackie was saying.

“A tourist trap,” Maya said. “But a pretty one. And it keeps the tourists nicely bunched.”

“Oh come now,” Jackie said, laughing. She took Athos’s arm. “Where’s your sense of romance?”

“What sense of romance,” Maya said, pleased at this public display of affection. The old Jackie would not have done it. Indeed it was a shock to see that she was no longer young; stupid of Maya not to have thought of that, but her sense of time was such a mishmash that her own face in the mirror was a perpetual shock to her— every morning she woke up in the wrong century, so seeing Jackie looking matronly with Athos on her arm was only more of the same— an impossibility— this was the fresh dangerous girl of Zygote, the young goddess of Dorsa Brevia!

“Everyone has a sense of romance,” Jackie said. The years were not making her any wiser. Another chronological discontinuity. Perhaps taking the longevity treatment so often had clogged her brain. Curious that after such assiduous use of the treatments there should be any signs of aging left at all; in the absence of cell-division error, where exactly was it coming from? There were no wrinkles on Jackie’s face, in some ways she could be mistaken for twenty-five; and the look of happy Boonean confidence was as entrenched as ever, the only way really she resembled John— glowing like the neon scrim of the café overhead. But despite all that she looked her years, somehow— in her eyes, or in some gestalt at work despite all the medical manipulation.

And then one of Jackie’s many assistants was there among them, panting, gasping, pulling Jackie’s arm away from Athos, crying “Jackie, I’m so sorry, so sorry, she’s killed, she’s killed—”— shivering—

“Who?” Jackie said sharply, like a slap.

The young woman (but she was aging) said miserably, “Zo.”

“Zo?”

“A flying accident. She fell into the sea.”

This ought to slow her down, Maya thought.

“Of course,” Jackie said.

“But the birdsuits,” Athos protested. He was aging too. “Didn’t they. . . .”

“I don’t know about that.”