Nadia was already out there, lying down on one of the mattresses. Sax pulled down another one from the wall; his old mattress, yes. And then Maya was there, and then all the rest of them, pulling along the reluctant and one had to say fearful Desmond, sitting him on a mattress in the middle, gathering around him, some in their old spots, others who had slept in other trailers filling the empty mattresses, the ones that had been occupied by people now gone. A single trailer now housed them all quite easily. And sometime in the depth of the night they all lay down, and slid down the slow uneven glide into sleep. All around the room, people falling to sleep in their beds— and that too was a memory, drowsy and warm, this was how it had always felt, to drift off in a bath of one’s friends, weary with the day’s work, the oh-so-interesting work of building a town and a world. Sleep, memory, sleep, body; fall thankfully into the moment, and dream.

7

They sailed out of the Florentine on a windy cloudless day, Ann at the rudder and Sax up in the starboard bow of the sleek new catamaran, making sure the anchor cat had secured the anchor; which reeked of anaerobic bottom mud, so much so that Sax got distracted and spent some time hanging over the rail looking at samples of the mud through his wristpad magnifying lens: a great quantity of dead algae and other bottom organisms. An interesting question whether or not this was typical of the North Sea’s bottom, or was restricted for some reason to the Chryse Gulf environs, or to the Florentine, or shallows more generally—

“Sax, get back here,” Ann called. “You’re the one who knows how to sail.”

“So I am.”

Though in truth the boat’s AI would do everything at the most general command; he could say for instance “Go to Rhodos,” and there would be nothing more to be done for the rest of the week. But he had grown fond of the feeling of a tiller under his hand. So he abandoned the anchor’s muck to another time, and made his way to the wide shallow cockpit suspended between the two narrow hulls.

“Da Vinci is about to go under the horizon, look.”

“So it is.”