“Oh, of course. Alone. A bit sidelined. Anyone would. But you know, we had our day, Ed, and it was a good one!” She looked up at him animatedly. “I wish you could have seen us. We looked just like this, only if anything we had more ribbons.” She laughed. “I won’t show you what’s under the coat.”

“Hey,” Ed said, “I bet you look fine.”

“I’m not exactly Neena Vesicle down there.” She thought about this, perhaps for longer than she had intended. “What was I saying?” she asked Ed.

“That you had your day,” Ed reminded her.

“Oh we did, Ed, we did! Life went as well for us as it does for you, maybe even better. One moment as dignified as a tea-dance in paradise; the next, fast, hallucinatory, last-chance, realtime. Oh, you know: absolute hell. We ate a few lunches. And you should have seen the achievements we did, Ed! We moved stuff about with the best of them. We had the code licked. We got all the answers you people want—”

She stopped. Indicated the sky.

“Then we came up against this. To tell you the absolute truth Ed, it stopped us as dead as the rest. It was old when we got here. The people who had been here before us, well they were old when we were nothing. We stole their ideas as fast as we could, the way you’re doing now. We had our try at that thing—” the Shrander seemed to shrug “—and it failed. Wow, Ed,” she said, “but you should have seen us. By then we had some control of things. It was an exciting time. But it all comes to nothing, all the pushing and the shoving.” She tilted back her head a moment and pointed her great bone beak at the Tract. Then she looked back down at her own feet in the dust. “Oh,” she said, “I’m not complaining. Even that was fine. I mean, it was an adventure, it was our adventure. It was part of being what we were.

“And that’s the thing, Ed. Being here. Being up to your neck in what you are.”

“You feel you lost that,” Ed said.

The Shrander sighed. “I do,” she said.

She said: “We got off-base with ourselves. That’s what happens with this thing. You fall back from it. You break yourself on it. You lose heart. It beat us: it beat our intelligence, our capacity to understand. In the end, we didn’t have the juice.” There was a pause in which they both contemplated the idea of limits, which was a comfortable one for Ed, since he had spent his life pushing them. When he felt it had gone on long enough, he said:

“So. What happened then?”