“Anybody gonna help carry this stuff?” Mags yelled from the kitchen, with volume enough to be heard inside and out.

“Damn,” said Josh; then, loudly, “You betcha!” He thumped up the porch stairs, past me, and into the kitchen.

Paulo and I each had charge of a pie. Josh got the beanpot, swathed in toweling. We tramped across the lawn to the sawhorse tables, and put our contributions down next to everything else.

People smiled at me, and waved, and introduced themselves. It was like China Black’s and the Night Fair both. I couldn’t decide if it was the worst of both or not. The people who introduced themselves often told me how long they’d known Sherrea, or how they came to know her, or asked me how I had. Sher, it seemed, was universally acquainted around here. It was the first time I’d thought to wonder how she came to know about this place, and what it was to her. I was very polite to everyone.

I wandered toward the bonfire, wishing I knew how long I ought to stay. Then a flash of light on a face at the corner of my vision startled me, and I turned to look.

Theo was walking next to me, and the light had been glancing off his glasses. “Hey,” he said.

I stopped walking. I’d been talking to strangers all evening; I could do this. I had only to gather my much-tried manners and put them to work again. “Hello. How are they treating you?”

“Great. I think. Only there’s nothing to do. I keep thinking about whether Robby’s surviving without us.”

Ignore the strange feeling in the stomach; rely on the manners. “I expect so. And you’ll be able to go back soon, won’t you?”

“To what?” Theo asked. “Occupation under Tom Worecski?”

I frowned. “But that’s what it was before you came here.”

“It’s not — never mind. Look, I’m gonna ask somebody tomorrow if there’s anything electronic they want done around here. D’you want me to volunteer you, too?”

“No.” I almost turned and left, but I remembered: manners. “No, thank you. I’m not doing that anymore.” Then I left.

Tom Worecski had had the archives burned. That had damaged that part of me, but it hadn’t killed it. Something else had done that, something I couldn’t name, that had seared away the connection between who I was and what I knew. I still knew electronics, I still had languages and language, all the things I’d woken with out of that parody of birth fifteen years ago. But they didn’t belong to me. Nothing, I’d said to Sher. I owned nothing. My body was on lease from the past, a machine I’d rented and lost the paperwork for, and I had no idea where my mind had come from. All the things I knew might have been stolen from someone else.

I managed to stay in motion, and so avoid having to talk to anyone else. I saw Frances for a moment, at the opposite end of a table. What, I wondered, did all these nice people make of her? So well spoken; lovely person, actually, for a mass murderer. She returned my look with a grave, piercing one, and I moved on again.