“It doesn’t matter,” Jackie said, shutting them up. Later Maya heard an eyewitness account of the accident, and the image stayed etched in her mind forever— the two fliers struggling in the waves like wet dragonflies, staying afloat so that they would have been okay, until one of the North Sea’s big swells picked them up and slammed them into the base of a seastack. After which they had drifted in the foam.

Now Jackie was withdrawn, remote, thinking things over. She and Zo had not been close, Maya had heard; some said they hated each other. But one’s child. You were not supposed to survive your children, that was something even childless Maya felt instinctively. But they had abrogated all the laws, biology meant nothing to them anymore; and here they were. If Ann had lost Peter on the falling cable; if Nadia and Art ever lost Nikki . . . even Jackie, as foolish as she was, had to feel it.

And she did. She was thinking hard, trying to find the way out. But she wasn’t going to; and then she would be a different person. Aging— it had nothing to do with time, nothing. “Oh Jackie,” Maya said, and put a hand forward. Jackie flinched, and Maya pulled the hand back. “I’m sorry.”

But just when people most need help is when their isolation is the most extreme. Maya had learned that on the night of Hiroko’s disappearance, when she had tried to comfort Michel. Nothing could be done.

Maya almost cuffed the sniffling young aide, restrained herself: “Why don’t you escort Ms. Boone back to your ship. And then keep people away for a while.”

Jackie was still lost in her thoughts. Her flinch away from Maya had been instinct only, she was stunned— disbelieving— and the disbelief absorbed all her effort. All just as one would expect, from any human being. Maybe it was even worse if you hadn’t gotten along with the child— worse than if you loved them, ah, God—”Go,” Maya said to the aide, and with a look commanded Athos to help. He would certainly make an impression on her, one way or the other. They led her off. She still had the most beautiful back in the world, and held herself like a queen. That would change when the news sank in.

Later Maya found herself down at the southern edge of town, where the lights left off and the starry sheen of the canal was banked by black berms of slag. It looked like the scroll of a life, someone’s world line: bright neon squiggles, moving across a landscape to the black horizon. Stars over-head and underfoot. A black piste over which they glided soundlessly.