Saleh wanted to tell her about the explosion, about his father still caught in that slow bubble of time; about how he felt both felled and free; how guilt and relief mixed inside him. He wanted to tell her about the stars and where he wanted to go and what he wanted to do.

“Hush,” the fortune teller said. “You think so loudly and it’s all jumbled up. Everyone feels guilty for something. And everyone wants to be free. I’d say, don’t be so trite, only you’re young. You’ll either grow up to accept it or it will eat you inside—I’ll bet on the second, it’s what people usually end up doing. Now, what is this?” She shook the canister of the old time-dilation bomb. “It’s empty, the poor thing. That was a hack job, you know, back in Dahab, just a copy-cat of Rohini’s better work. But all artists begin by imitating others. It is nothing to be ashamed of.” She put the canister to her ear and listened to it.

“Yes, yes, the poor thing,” she said. “It needs to sing again.”

She took it with her to another side of the room and started going through stuff on the tables like a shopper in a bazaar.

“Where did I put it?” she said. “You know, Saleh, back in—well, whenever it was, it was a long time ago—I went to the Up and Out too, I had had enough of Earth and also, to be truthful, I was what you’d call a fugitive, and I needed to fake my death and vanish for a while—a few centuries, at least, or that was what I figured then. The old gang is mostly gone now. ‘Mad’ Rucker, who wasn’t really mad, and Rohini and the others. One of them made the Silentude out in the Oort. I think. I went as far as Jettisoned and I learned all kinds of things but then I came back. The world is much the same as when I’d left it. A little too peaceful for my liking, maybe. But we can change that. The past is all around us, as you well know. And it is far too easy to call it back to life. Ah, here. Listen. How beautifully it sings!”

She held something in her hands. Saleh couldn’t make out what it was. The fortune teller did something to the bomb canister. She put it to her ear again.

“It hums,” she said. She put it back in Saleh’s bag.

“It will be more valuable now,” she told him. “Much more valuable. You’ll see.