They came to a cliffside gallery that looked like a natural cave, no straighter than the nearly Euclidean lines of the canyon below. There were mosaics inlaid into the back wall, made of bits of colored stone, polished and set against each other without gaps, forming abstract patterns that seemed almost to represent something, if only he could focus properly on them. The floor was a stone parquet of onyx and alabaster, serpentine and bloodstone. The gallery went on and on— big, dusty— the whole complex somewhat disused, perhaps. Reds preferred their rovers, and places like this no doubt had been seen as unfortunate necessities. Hidden refuge; with windows shuttered, one could have walked down the canyons right past the place and not known it was there; and Sax felt that this was not just to avoid the notice of the UNTA, but also to be unobtrusive before the land itself, to melt into it.

As Ann seemed to be trying to do, there in a stone window seat. Sax stopped abruptly; lost in his thoughts, he had almost run into her, just as an ignorant traveler might have run into the shelter. A chunk of rock, sitting there. He looked at her closely. She looked ill. One didn’t see that much anymore, and the longer Sax looked at her, the more alarmed he became. She had told him, once, that she was no longer taking the longevity treatment. That had been some years before. And during the revolution she had burned like a flame. Now, with the Red rebellion quelled, she was ash. Gray flesh. It was an awful sight. She was somewhere around 150 years old, like all the First Hundred left alive, and without the treatments . . . she would soon die.

Well. Strictly speaking, she was at the physiological equivalent of being seventy or so, depending on when she had last had the treatments. So not that bad. Perhaps Peter would know. But the longer one went between treatments, he had heard, the more problems cropped up, statistically speaking. It made sense. It was only wise to be prudent.

But he couldn’t say that to her. In fact, it was hard to think what he could say to her.

Eventually her gaze lifted. She recognized him and shuddered, her lip lifting like a trapped animal’s. Then she looked away from him, grim, stone-faced. Beyond anger, beyond hope.

“I wanted to show you some of the Tyrrhena massif,” he said lamely.

She got up like a statue rising, and left the room.

Sax, feeling his joints creak with the pseudo-arthritic pain that so often accompanied his dealings with Ann, followed her.

He was trailed in his turn by the two stern-looking young women. “I don’t think she wants to talk to you,” the taller one informed him.

“Very astute of you,” Sax said.