Nirgal shrugged, looked down at the small clear windows, like portholes. Once he had floated in there, dreaming and kicking. . . . It was hard to imagine the past, hard to believe in it. For billions of years he had not existed, and then one day, inside this little black box . . . a sudden appearance, green in the white, white in the green.

“It’s so cold here,” Art remarked when they went back outside. He was wearing a big borrowed fiberfill coat, with the hood over his head.

“We have to keep a water ice layer coating the dry ice, so the air stays good. So it’s always a little under freezing, but not much. I like it myself. It strikes me as the best temperature of all.”

“Childhood.”

“Yeah.”

• • •

They visited Sax every day, and he would croak “Hello” or “Good-bye” in greeting, and try his best to talk. Michel was spending several hours a day working with him. “It’s definitely aphasia,” he told them. “Vlad and Ursula did a scan, and the damage is in the left anterior speech center. Nonfluent aphasia, sometimes called Broca’s aphasia. He has trouble finding the word, and sometimes he thinks he’s got it, but what comes out will be synonyms, or antonyms, or taboo words. You should hear the way he can say Bad results. It’s frustrating for him, but improvement from this particular injury is often good. Slow, however. Essentially, other parts of the brain have to learn to take over the functions of the damaged part. So— we work on it. It’s nice when it goes well. And it could be worse, obviously.”

Sax, who had been staring at them through this, nodded quizzically. He said, “I want to teach. To speech.”

• • •

Of all the people in Gamete to whom Nirgal introduced Art, the one Art hit it off with best was Nadia. They were drawn to each other instantly, to Nirgal’s surprise. But it pleased him to see it, and he watched his old teacher fondly as she made her own kind of confession in response to Art’s question barrage, her face looking very ancient except for her startling light brown eyes, with the green flecks around the pupil— eyes that radiated friendly interest and intelligence, and amusement at Art’s interrogation.

The three of them ended up spending hours together in Nirgal’s room talking, looking down at the village, or out the other window to the lake. Art walked around the little cylinder from window to door to window, fingering the cuts in the glossy green wood. “Do you call it wood?” he asked, looking at the bamboo. Nadia laughed. “I call it wood,” she said. “It’s Hiroko’s idea to live in these things. And a good one; good insulation, incredible strength, no carpentry but door and window installation . . .”

“I guess you wish you had these bamboo in Underhill, eh?”