Anne-Solenne was still stuck on We’re breathing him. “I never thought of it like that,” she said, “but I guess the scanning process would generate—I don’t know—”

“Exhaust,” Sophia said. “Water, carbon dioxide, nitrogen, calcium. Theoretically you could capture the solids and hand it to the family in a baggie, but why?”

“So they just—”

“Blow it out a pipe into the sky,” Sophia confirmed. “Given that it was Seattle, it was probably mixed with rain five minutes later, running through the storm sewers into Puget Sound.”

“Which is no different from cremation,” Julian hastened to add, in his ponderous East Coast way. “Crematoria have smokestacks. We just prefer not to think about the implications.”

This venture into the New Eschatology was cut short by their arrival in the small northwest Iowa town that the Forthrasts came from. And for people accustomed to the gradual penetration of vast cities, from the airport inward, arriving in that sort of town was jarringly abrupt. Suddenly they were just there—as there as they were ever going to get. The town had a central square: a single block planted in grass, with a vaguely medieval stone tower rising from the middle, and, flanking it, a statue each for veterans of the Civil and the Great Wars. A couple of huge deciduous trees cast shade over roughly circular areas, but the scattering of moms who had convened here to let their kids run around preferred to hang out under a shelter where they could sit at picnic tables. Across the street on one side was a courthouse and police station in rustic Victorian sandstone, with a broken clock in its central tower. Two sides formed an L-shaped district of indolent businesses. The fourth side was residential. Thirty seconds earlier they had been driving through cornfields, and if Sophia hadn’t piloted the Land Cruiser into one of the angle-parking spaces along the square, they’d have been back in the corn thirty seconds later. “Leg stretch,” she announced, “and I’m gonna turn off my cloaking device just so these people know what to make of us.”