Zula had actually tried many of those cool new forms of exercise, and was likely to try more, for social reasons if nothing else. Csongor played in a hockey league that appeared to supply 90 percent of his needs in the way of both exercise and companionship. Zula too had gardened her social life by signing up for new exercise programs with female friends. But she had never stuck with any of them. Her only consistent form of exercise was walking to and from work, which she did alone, almost every day.

Walking this gantlet of physical fitness options often got her musing. These clean, affluent, well-informed techies certainly knew how to enjoy having bodies. At work they lived in their heads. Their free time was spent in the pleasures of exertion, of a hot shower after, of eating and drinking, and of going home to have sex, or at least a good night’s sleep, on firm mattresses covered in clean high-quality linens. There was nothing exactly wrong with it. But Zula had spent her early years in a refugee camp where sources of physical pleasure, or even comfort, had been few and far between. And somewhat later in her life she had spent a few weeks traveling against her will in the company of jihadists who had either come from, or made a choice to migrate to, some of the most hard-bitten places in the world. She abhorred everything about them. Yet she couldn’t help seeing all of this through their eyes. Jihadists, who were obsessed with a particular kind of religion, would see the gyms and the restaurants as temples to a false god, where people went to distract themselves from the reality that they were all sooner or later going to get sick and die. After which, if you believed what they believed, you’d meet your maker and be duly punished for having spent so much of your life reveling in pleasure.

None of which was particularly original—every sentient person had to fulfill a certain minimum quota of ruminating about this stuff—but in Zula’s case it was all turned around and upside down because of what had happened with Uncle Richard seventeen years ago. This had become her career.

It had taken her several of those years simply to understand and accept that her identity—the holograph that she was writing every day of her life—had been altered by it. Not so much the death itself as the ensuing legal and financial complications. The dispute over Dodge’s will meant nothing as far as its practical effect on her life was concerned; either way, she was rich, and her offspring would never want for anything material. But in monetary terms the difference was quite large. And, when they got that big, sums of money took on wills of their own. Which maybe explained why the document at the root of the matter was called a “will.”