“Let’s talk,” Suli Ram Kikura suggested, turning off her collar pictor and folding up in a chair behind Olmy. He stood by her apartment window—a real window, looking through the Axis Euclid’s interior wall at the cylindrical space that had once surrounded the Way’s central singularity. Now it revealed swimming aeronauts with gauzy, bat-like wings, floating amusement parks, citizens tracting on causeways formed by faint purple fields—and a small arc of darkness to the left, near-Earth space visible beyond the interior wall.

The colors and activity reminded him of a French painting from the early twentieth century, a park scene suddenly bereft of gravity, strolling couples and children of orthodox Naderites scattered crazily every which way. The view changed constantly as the axis’s body rotated around the hollow at its center, a streaming display of Hexamon life and society, of which Olmy no longer seemed a part.

“I’m listening,” he said, though he did not look at her.

“You haven’t visited Tapi in months.” Tapi was their son, created from their mixed mysteries in Euclid’s city memory. Such conception had only returned to favor the past ten years; before that, when orthodox Naderites had dominated Euclid’s precinct government, natural births and ex utero births had been the order of the day, and the hell with centuries of Hexamon tradition. Hence, the children playing in the Flaw Park beyond Ram Kikura’s window.

Olmy blinked, guilty about avoiding his son. The point was always quickly reached with Suli Ram Kikura. “He’s doing fine.”

“He needs us both. A partial on demand is no replacement for a father. He’s up for his incorporation tests in a few months and he needs—”

“Yes, yes.” Olmy almost wished they had never had Tapi. The weight of responsibility now, with his researches also heavy on him, was too much. He simply did not have time.

“I don’t know whether to be mad at you or not,” she said. “You’re facing something difficult. I suppose a few years ago I could have guessed what it is…” Her voice was rich and even, well-controlled, but she could not hide concern mixed with irritation at his quiet obtuseness. “I value you enough to ask what’s bothering you.”

Value. They had been primary lovers for more decades than he cared to count. (seventy-four years, his implant memory stores reminded him, unbidden), and they had lived through—and taken part in—some of the Hexamon’s most turbulent and spectacular history. He had never seriously courted any woman but Ram Kikura; he had always known that wherever he went, whomever else he established a brief liaison with, he would always return to her. She was his match—a homorph, neither Naderite nor Geshel in her politics, lifelong advocate, one-time senior corprep for Earth in the Nexus, champion of the unfortunate, the ignored and the ignorant. With no other would he have made a Tapi.