Astern—if the word “astern” can have any meaning in ten spatial and four temporal dimensions—the explosion was still dying away as a kind of hard after-image in the eye of the vacuum itself. The entire engagement had played itself out in four hundred and fifty nanoseconds. No one in the human quarters had noticed anything, although they seemed surprised that she had stopped talking to them so suddenly.

In a second, or completing, lobe of her dream, Seria Mau was in the garden again:

Weeks after the bonfire, the house was still full of it. The smoke seeped everywhere. Everything was tainted. All those old things the father had burned just came back as their own smoke, and descended on the shelves, the furniture and the windowsills. They came back as a smell. The two children stood in their coats and scarves by the circle of ashes, which was like a black pool in the garden. They crept their toes up to its exact edge, and looked down at them there. They looked at each other in a kind of solemn surprise, while the father paced about in the house behind them. How could he have done that? How could he have made a mistake that big? They wondered what would happen next.

The girl wouldn’t eat. She refused to eat or drink. The father looked down at her seriously. He held her hands so that she had to look into his eyes. His eyes were a brown so light it verged on orange. People would call those eyes appealing. They were full of an appeal.

“You will have to be the mother now,” he said. “Can you help us? Can you be the mother?”

The girl ran to the end of the garden and cried. She didn’t want to be anyone’s mother. She wanted someone to be hers. If this event was part of a life, she didn’t like it. She didn’t trust a life like that. It would all come to nothing. She ran up and down the garden with her arms out to the sides making loud noises until her brother laughed and joined in, and the father came out and made her look into his sad brown eyes and asked her again if she would be the mother. She looked away from him as hard as she could. She knew how big a mistake he had made: if it’s hard to get away from a photograph, it’s harder still to get away from a smell.

“We could have her back,” she suggested. “We could have her back as a cultivar. It’s easy. It would be easy.”

The father shook his head. He explained why he wouldn’t want that. “Then I won’t be her,” the little girl said. “I’ll be something better.”