It isn’t yet time to touch her, but Enzian reaches out gives a friendly chin-up tap on the back of her hand, a military now-see-here. “There are things to hold to. None of it may look real, but some of it is. Really.”

“Really.” They both start laughing. Hers is weary-European, slow, head-shaking. Once she would have been asessing as she laughed, speaking of edges, deeps, profit and loss, H-hours and points of no return—she would have been laughing politically, in response to a power-predicament, because there might be nothing else to do. But now she’s only laughing. As she once laughed with Slothrop, back at the Casino Hermann Goering.

So she’s only been talking with Enzian about a common friend. Is this how the Vacuum feels?

“Slothrop and I” didn’t work too well. Should she have said “Blicero and I”? What would that have got her into with the African?

“Blicero and I,” he begins softly, watching her over burnished cheekbones, cigarette smoldering in his curled right hand, “we were only close in certain ways. There were doors I did not open. Could not. Around here, I play an omniscient. I’d say don’t give me away, but it wouldn’t matter. Their minds are made up. I am the Berlin Snoot supreme, Oberhauptberlinerschnauze Enzian. I know it all, and they don’t trust me. They gossip in a general way about me and Blicero, as yarns to be spun—the truth wouldn’t change either their distrust or my Unlimited Access. They’d only be passing a story along, another story. But the truth must mean something to you.

“The Blicero I loved was a very young man, in love with empire, poetry, his own arrogance. Those all must have been important to me once. What I am now grew from that. A former self is a fool, an insufferable ass, but he’s still human, you’d no more turn him out than you’d turn out any other kind of cripple, would you?”

He seems to be asking her for real advice. Are these the sorts of problems that occupy his time? What about the Rocket, the Empty Ones, the perilous infancy of his nation?

“What can Blicero matter to you?” is what she finally asks.

He doesn’t have to think for long. He has often imagined the coming of a Questioner. “At this point, I would take you to a balcony. An observation deck. I would show you the Raketen-Stadt. Plexiglass maps of the webs we maintain across the Zone. Underground schools, systems for distributing food and medicine… . We would gaze down on staff-rooms, communications centers, laboratories, clinics. I would say—”

“All this will I give you, if you will but—”

“Negative. Wrong story. I would say: This is what I have become. An estranged figure at a certain elevation and distance…” who looks out over the Raketen-Stadt in the amber evenings, with washed and darkening cloud sheets behind him—“who has lost everything else but this vantage. There is no heart, anywhere now, no human heart left in which I exist. Do you know what that feels like?”