This one was wearing a white smock, scuffed with gray. When she spoke she “faced” the person she was speaking to, though there was nothing like an actual face. Just a mouth, with fat black teeth. The potato eyes were really eyes, bundles of something like optical fiber. They looked in all directions at once and saw mostly in infrared.

“You’re Snowbird?” my wife asked.

She faced her. “I am.”

“So you’ll be dying with us.”

“I suppose. More than likely.”

“How do you feel about that?”

A human might sit down or lean against something. Snowbird stood still, and was silent for a long moment. “Death is not the same for us. Not as important. We die as completely, but will be replaced—as you are. But we’re more closely replicated.”

“A white dies and a white is born,” I said.

“Yes, but more than that. The new one has a kind of memory of the old. Actual, not metaphorical.”

“Even if you die twenty-four light-years away?” Meryl asked.

“We’ve talked about that, Fly-in-Amber and I. It will be an interesting experiment.”

They don’t reproduce at all like humans. It’s sort of like a wrestling match, with several of them rolling around together, their sweat containing genetic material. The one who wins the match gets to be the mother, breaking out in pods over the next few days. One for each of the recent dead, so the population of each family remains approximately constant.

“You weren’t on the Space Elevator roster,” Carmen said, “and we didn’t expect you until the message just before you got here. Is that a spook thing?”

All human eyes were on me, and probably a few Martian ones. “Yes, but not so much with Elza and Dustin. We all have ties to the intelligence community, but I’m the only one who’s supposed to move in secret. Of course, when we’re traveling together, they stay invisible, too.”

“The secrecy,” Snowbird said. “That’s because you’re an Israeli? A Jew?”

I nodded to her. Difficult to look someone in the eye when there are so many. “I was born in Israel,” I said, as always trying to keep emotion out of my voice. “I have no religion.”

That caused a predictable awkward silence, which Carmen eventually broke.

“A friend of mine’s parents knew you in Israel, after Gehenna. Elspeth Feldman.”

It took me a moment. “The Feldmans, yes, Americans. Life sciences. Max and . . . A-something.”

“Akhila. You approved them for Israeli citizenship,” she said.

“Them and a thousand others, mostly involved in the cleanup. The country had a real population shortage.” I turned back to Snowbird. “You know about Gehenna.”

“I know,” she said. “Which is not the same as understanding. How did you survive it?”

“I was in New York all of 2060, a junior attaché at the UN. That’s when the first part of the poison went into the water supply at Tel Aviv and Hefa.”

“Anyone who drank it died,” Carmen said.

“If they were in Tel Aviv or Hefa a year later,” I said, “when car bombs released the second part of the poison. An aerosol.