They were old friends, of course. They grew up together. And she knew he was interested, as though he saw her in a new light now, and not as the girl he knew when they were children. She didn’t know how she felt about that. Her life was so full of people, wherever she went, and she didn’t know that she could make room in her life for one more presence. She longed for silence, solitude, the peace of an empty bed.

She took a drag on the Ubiq and for a moment her mind filled with sharp images of neoclassical paintings, a thousand of them all bursting like fireworks at once.

She drew a shuddering breath and waited for the rush to abate.

He was nice, she thought. She liked Nasir.

But liking him just complicated things.

She watched the ferry from Egypt come in across the sea. Seagulls cried overhead. She took another drag of Ubiq and a thousand flowers bloomed with Latin names. She tossed the stub on the ground and crushed it with her foot. It was littering. Nasir could give her a ticket for that. But Nasir wasn’t there.

She thought about the robot. The robot seemed lonely to her. An angry longing inside it. The air felt hot and still, yet charged. Sooner or later something would give. She vowed she’d see it to the end. She watched the ship from Egypt dock.

A boy and a jackal came off the ferry, the boy carrying a bag. The jackal turned its head and stared her way across the water from the pier, as though it could scent her.

One didn’t see too many jackals anymore, though she remembered her father telling her stories of the ones along the desert road to Cairo, who hung around the rest stops, chatting to the drivers, trying to trade found loot for bits of food. Mariam looked up at the sky. The trail of light of a transport ship high above, and a habitat overhead that wasn’t Gateway but one of the smaller satellite cities that had sprung up in orbit. She had never been and yet space was only a hundred miles up or so.

She would have left, she thought. She would have gone to Mars, probably. Mariam could always find work. She was willing to do what work there was. She would have gone but her mother was here, the only family she had still, tethering her to the Earth.

The robot had been to space. She knew that. Then it came back. It had gone far, she thought, so why return? The solar system was so large, and teeming with humanity and digitals. It existed in a state of relative peace. There were always small wars, of course. But the system was too large, the distances too great to make them more than skirmishes.