“My dear love,” she said flippantly. “In the world’s eyes we make one hell of a funny pair. The thing is, no one ever thinks they’ll really grow old. It always comes as a surprise, and the world sort of hates you for it. Growing old, gracefully or not, just isn’t the polite or tasteful thing to do. And you can’t blame the young either, because when we were young we felt the same way. Too bad, because in one way I feel freer than I ever did before—”

“You look ten years younger than you are,” he said.

“Don’t be trite. Telling a woman that she looks sixty-three instead of seventy-three isn’t likely to win her favor. You’d be smarter to say nothing. For some reason that I’ve never understood, growing old is considered bad enough for a man, but an unforgivable crime for a woman. But best I don’t get on that subject.”

She took another sip of her drink. “It’s true, I suppose, in good light and if I bothered to wear makeup, I could look near your age—maybe. But as it is I look like a scrawny boy grown suddenly old, with white hair and gaunt face and quite incredulous about how it all happened. As I am, of course. Yet what I am, I am. I can’t see dying my hair, for example. In a way it’s pretty damn lucky to be seventy-three years old, and get white, to begin with.”

He was silent. Then he said: “If the doctors are right, and my heart does go suddenly—”

“Then I’ll follow our plan,” she said. “For that matter, I don’t know how long I’ll hold out. I’m quite aware that the first stages of my … condition have already come upon me. My memory should be all right, generally, for a while, though. But you can never tell. If not, then you follow our plan. When I can’t recite my own poetry right, then I suppose I’ll know that something’s wrong.”

And suddenly it seemed really funny, beautifully hilarious to each of them. He said, “We’ll beat their hospitals, their rest homes and final asylums.” Exuberance flashed through his thin nervous frame.

She laughed with him, then stopped. “My electric pencil sharpener,” she said. “I just remembered. I dreamed of my old eighth-grade classroom. Only my electric pencil sharpener was in it, which is ridiculous, of course. They didn’t have them then. Now I wonder what that means?”

“A bleed-through from one dream state to another,” Oversoul Seven said to Cyprus. They were suspended in two green leaves that rustled in the wind outside the windows.

“You heard what she said about the pencil sharpener? That was the error you missed,” Cyprus said, and Seven grinned.