The ferry docked. At last. She watched the boy and the jackal go down the road, talk to some woman. The jackal didn’t matter to her and the boy only useful for what he was allowed to find.

Nasu went in the opposite direction.

She walked streets that meant nothing to her now. Did she once know them? She passed the Statue of the Unknown Scientist. A tamagotchi went past and she stepped on it and moved on, past Nineveh, on to the outskirts of town, until the lights of the city receded and she could feel the winds from the desert and hear the hum of the sand filters.

“Ahalan wa sahlan, Sharif,” she said.

“Ahalan biki,” the woman said, looking up curiously from the machine she was working on. “Can I help you?”

“It’s me,” Nasu said.

Then she said it again, in the virtuality, and Sharif went still.

“How did you find me?” she said at last.

“You leave a stench, Sharif, that any dog could follow.”

“I am not in this anymore,” Sharif said. “I haven’t been since Jonbar’s Point.”

“You can’t leave,” Nasu said. “Don’t you know this by now? Times of peace are times of waiting, nothing more.”

“You’re wrong. Only the past is fixed,” Sharif said. “The future’s what you make of it.”

“Yet here we are,” Nasu said.

“You want some tea?” Sharif said.

“Tea?”

“Yes,” Sharif said. “You remember tea?’

“Vaguely.”

“It’s sage.”

“All right.”

Sharif got up and busied herself, her back to the woman who once called herself Nasu. Nasu half-expected Sharif to come at her with a knife. But hospitality was hospitality.

Nasu tasted the tea. It was strange. She remembered. . . . What did she remember? A night such as this, sitting under the stars on the sand, and a nameless longing. She must have been very young. Long before she murdered anyone. Long before she got her wish and saw them, saw the stars.

“Thank you,” she said.

“For what?”

“The tea.”

“Did you come to kill me?” Sharif said. “I won’t beg.”

Nasu shook her head.

“You saw it?” she said.

“Your golden man? Yes.”

“Is it here?”

She felt her heart quicken. Could she still feel excitement? It seemed odd. The things in the Oort could not understand human feelings. They’d broken too many human nodes and bodies when they started trying to communicate. It took time and patience to build a node for the Quietude.

Sharif shook her head. “No.”

Too quickly. Nasu got up. She went into the work tent, looked around. An ancient golden torso, two legs. Sharif had been putting it back together again.

“You know what it did? It was before your time,” Nasu said.

“It was an idea you made manifest,” Sharif said. “That was all. It doesn’t work, you know.”

“I know.”

“Is this why you are back?”