This was bliss. This was the human man improved and connected completely to the cluster. The ship may as well have been part of him, living and breathing as his skin, just one more organ but one that they now occupied. The corridors and rooms spread out all around him at all times, a map with a trillion spying eyes. And Mother felt that it was better for the man, that this human Piero had achieved a kind of grateful resolution.

Like going home. Like running to Mamma’s arms. She was always so warm and soft, and smelled like Bottega Veneta Eau de Velours, vintage, a precious bottle passed down and down, rationed like wartime essentials, just a dab behind her ear but oh how it delighted the senses! Oak and jasmine, but rosemary, too, from her hands and the bread she made on Sundays. Mamma hugged him tight and lifted him from the floor and swung him around. They would have to go soon, to the new colonies. The tides were rising, swallowing their town like they swallowed Venice whole. The water was coming for them, terrible, inexorable, with a hunger that could not be negotiated or stopped.

And there, as he hugged her and buried his face in her neck, he smelled a heavy men’s cologne, overpowering and foreign, and there was the lipstick smudge on her collar, transferred from that same strange man’s fingers. From her lips to his skin to her blouse and now to his cheek, an indirect kiss that soured his stomach in an instant. Stay, Mamma, he had pleaded, stay and make bread again, don’t go give your lipstick away to strangers.

That was how Mother got in. The hate was there, just waiting, a box redolent with mold, hiding in the very back corner of the cupboard. The wound had ripped off the lid and let the hate spill out, hate Mother found and swam up like a poisonous river running swiftly to the core of him. Piero.

Stay, Mamma. Stay!

She hadn’t, of course, which Mother reminded him in a bombardment that came not by the second but by the nanosecond, then constantly.

When she finally did stay, it was only to take him away from everything he knew. Mamma swept him up into her arms once more and said it was time to go to their new home, far away, across the stars to a place called Io.

But all my friends are here, he screamed as she carried him into their simple house.

You will make friends on Io, too, my heart, you’ll see.

No! he had screamed and screamed, beating his fists against her breast. He was already large for a child and he felt her wince, but she kept on carrying him anyway.

What about my friends? What about the old men playing dice? Who will take them? Or the stray dogs? Will the water swallow them all up?