What a day it was turning out to be. She wandered west along the city perimeter, abstracted and depressed. One hundred thirty years old. There were Abkhasians down in Georgia, on the Black Sea, who were reputed to have lived to such ages without the treatment. Presumably they were still doing without— the gerontological treatments had been only partially distributed on Earth, following the isobars of money and power, and the Abkhasians had always been poor. Happy but poor. She tried to remember what it had been like in Georgia, in the region where the Caucasus met the Black Sea. Sukhumi, the town was called. She felt she had visited it in her youth, her father had been Georgian. But she could call no image to mind, not a scrap. In fact she could scarcely remember anything of any part of Earth— Moscow, Baikonur, the view from Novy Mir— none of it. Her mother’s face across the kitchen table, laughing blackly as she ironed or cooked. Maya knew that had happened because she rehearsed the words of the memory from time to time, when she was feeling sad. But the actual images . . . Her mother had died only ten years before the treatment became available, or she might be alive yet. She would be 150, not at all unreasonable; the current age record was around 170, and rising all the time, with no sign that it would ever stop. Nothing but accidents and rare diseases and the occasional medical mistake were killing the treated these days. Those and murder. And suicide.

She came to the western rock gardens without having seen any of the neat narrow streets of Sabishii’s old quarter. That was how the old ended up not remembering recent events— by not seeing them in the first place. Memory lost before it ever came to be, because one was focusing so intently on the past.

Vlad and Ursula and Marina and Sax were seated on a park bench across from Sabishii’s original habitats, which were still in use, at least by geese and ducks. The pond and bridge, and banks of riprap and bamboo, were straight out of an old woodblock or silk painting: a cliché. Beyond the tent wall the great thermal cloud of the mohole billowed whitely, thicker than ever as the hole got deeper, and the atmosphere more humid.