What does matter much is that life is sweet. It has a lovely texture, like a rich cloth or fur, or the petals of flowers, the fire’s crackling glow, still more the smooth arc we carve in rushing air—exquisite. Life itself.

s

RACHEL

I’m damn well done with the aftermath of our wormring flight. Done with state receptions thronged with men in penguin suits and ladies eyeing each other’s gowns. They show the latest fashion in stacked sausage-curl hairdos, their broad semihostile smiles, their thumbs-uppy spirit, their shallow disputes over What This Means—all like a bag of confused cats. Serious talk full of polite tiptoeing that you’d have to dissect with an electron microscope to figure out what’s really being said.

So I escaped with Fraq and Catkejen. Better venues beckoned—with the vibrant chorus of the Ythri.

We were honored to attend the Flock celebration, the only humans. They flew and sang in tribute to a fundamental act, seen by all. Think—to mate in midair, even to give birth in flight!

Still, fame and a bit of fortune bring duties. Soon I’ll have to deal with good ol’ Erma. She’s now a rather sad Self, as AIs are now called, facing age discrimination from newer models. Maybe I can find a patch-in that doesn’t undermine her authority. Without losing her snarky humor, too. Plus, the oh-so-concerned helpers. Emotional-support square-dance experts wanted to Set Her Straight. Exobio folk wanted to do deep psych tests. Mostly, I think, they want interstellar gossip.

F’instance, I learned that Fraq had a lifemate, children—all true. But mate dead, children older and distant, so… over. Much over. Distant, by light-years, or maybe a few Worm-scape flips, zooms, and whirls. But scientists can’t really weigh all this on a scale with any precision. Life is a messy thing that doesn’t want to be quantified. Me too!

I have learned that, compared to Fraq, I’m an emotional virgin. The Shadow of the Wind, their sacred song, swept me away into a wondrous world of soft alien hymn. I had an orgasm listening to it! Take that, J. S. Bach.

But I am able to learn, yes.

So as I’m writing this…

Fraq leaned over, his crimson feathers rustling, and whispered in his singsong way,

“Ah, love, let us be true

To one another! for the world, which seems

To lie before us like a land of dreams,

So various, so beautiful, so new.”

“Damn, you have been dipping into our culture! Those lines, I can barely recall them—centuries back.”

“Is so….”

I snuggled against his feathery self. “I like that, ‘a land of dreams’ ”—I said this phrase, inserted so that my inboards could find the text, then feed it to me—“but… ‘we are here as on a darkling plain swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, where ignorant armies clash by night.’ ”

He barked the high skree-cry the Yth had for hard laughter. “Good description of the twisting, stressed, Worm-scape we so attempt to voyage, as well.”