“Deal,” he said. The waiter set the beer before him. He drank half the glass and sighed and said that that was so good. “You wouldn’t believe how long it took me to learn to eat, to sit and stand upright, and to walk, to see. I had to learn how to see all over again. My brain didn’t come equipped with any knowledge. We don’t know how the Bravennans equipped minds with knowledge. My brain is just a made-up thing, made from cells taken from Kapetria’s hands. She figured it out, if she never severed the hand, but took the biopsies from it while it was still connected to her, then no new life would be created that would have to be killed. And she built my brain from the cells in her hands, and some from the cells in Derek’s hands, too.” He shrugged. “I could explain it to you, but it would take years. Anyway, I had to learn how to see, to walk, to talk!”

“It’s only been four months,” I said. But I was shocked by the implications of what he was telling me, shocked by the genius of Kapetria and the living proof of that genius in him.

“Seems like forever.” He sat back in the little woven tub chair and gazed up at the awning. His wavy red hair fell down in his eyes but he didn’t seem to care. Dark eyebrows, precise eyebrows, and lashes. She had constructed all of this.

Horrible possibilities occurred to me as they had before—of beings grown or manufactured and gaining ascendency on an unsuspecting planet if Kapetria and her tribe could do this. And what of the dead, the earthbound dead who might come back through such marvelous bodies? What could they do for Magnus, and for Memnoch?

“What are you going to do?” I asked. “Have you any great plan?”

“I don’t know.” He shrugged. He picked up another small jelly pastry and swallowed it, and then broke off a bit of the lemon tart. “I have no idea,” he said. “There’s so much I have to learn. I thought I knew everything, that inside you, I’d grasped the entire tenor of the age!” He laughed at himself and shook his head. “So stupid, so blind. Every day now I’m shocked by some new discovery. I read of the things human beings have done to one another in war. I read of carnage on the planet now. I’m paralyzed by much of what I read, what I see in television news, in films. Yet I must continue to study, that before anything, study and travel. And I want to figure where Atalantaya was, where she sank. I need to know that, I need to know where my city died. I need to know where everything I’d created and envisioned and planned for this mighty world died!”