He hugged himself, which I knew signified thinking. “We are simpler, I think. I feel especially close to the other members of the yellow family. But they are the only ones I can speak to plainly, in the language I was born with.”

“Is that the same with all Martians?” I knew the yellow ones had a reputation for being standoffish, but I hadn’t met any Martians except our two.

“Oh, no. Blues cooperate with everybody; they were the example Snowbird used, to explain agape to me. My family is less open than the others, but that’s appropriate to our function.”

“Impartial observers.”

“Yes.” He switched to Japanese and apologized for the intrusion, and backed out.

He was often abrupt like that. As if he had some internal timer.

I finished polishing the balalaika and admired its strangeness. From a distance, it was a pretty close copy. The “wood” was exactly right in color, but it had no grain, close up, and it had the cool smoothness of ceramic.

The strings were not easy to mount, my big fingers clumsy with the knots. I almost called Elza but didn’t want to interrupt her at her needlepoint, a fractal pattern that apparently required intense concentration. Finally, I got all three in place and taut, but the two nylon strings (both tuned to the same E note) kept relaxing out of tune. Then I remembered a young folksinger in Tel Aviv, replacing a string in the middle of a performance. He pulled it dangerously taut and released it with a snap, over and over, flattening the tone, then tuning it up. After a couple of minutes doing that on both nylon strings, they were remarkably stable.

I played a few simple tunes from memory, and scales in the four keys I used, then some arpeggios, working through the left- hand pain until my joints agreed to loosen up.

As sometimes happens, I felt my audience before I saw her. I turned, and there was Elza, leaning in the doorway behind me. She was holding two glasses, a wineglass with red in it and a cup of clear liquid with ice. I must have subliminally heard it clinking.

“It sounds good,” she said. “I’ve missed it.”

“I hope you didn’t hear it inside.”

She set the wine down next to me. “You buy the next.” She folded into a graceful lotus, not spilling a drop of her vodka. “No, Fly-in-Amber told me you were almost done with it. I went into the pantry for a drink and heard you. Peeked and saw you didn’t have anything.”

I sipped the wine. “Mind reader.”

“So what were you talking to Old Yeller about?”

“Old Yeller?”

“It’s a Texas thing. Thang.”

“Gossip and biology. He wondered about you ‘mating’ with Moonboy.”

“For a Martian, he has a very dirty mind.”