“I want your mission to be completely successful. Then I want to get on a starship with you, one of the faster-than-light ones, and go to Garden and get one of those facemasks for myself.”

“You do see how ugly and inhuman it makes me,” said Noxon.

“Have you seen my face? I want eyes, Rigg Noxon. Even if they’re too far apart and one of them sags a little down onto my cheek. I want real eyes instead of something that plugs into my brain and gives me a digital raster image.”

“You don’t look so bad right now,” said Noxon. “They did good work with you. I’ve seen burn scars and you don’t look like that.”

“Noxon,” said Deborah, “that is a complete load of horse pucky.”

“It’s true.”

“I saw your face when you first looked at me at the door. It was as if you were looking at a train wreck.”

“I was trying to figure out what happened, that’s all,” said Noxon.

“I’m sure that’s what everybody thinks they’re doing. From my side, though, it looks like horrified staring. Because that’s what it is.”

“I know,” said Noxon, “because I get the same looks. Followed by pity when Ram tells them about my tropical parasite.”

“So my choice isn’t to be pretty or not,” said Deborah. “My choice is to have eyes or not. And I want the eyes.”

“I don’t know if I’m going back,” said Noxon.

“Why wouldn’t you? Is Earth so charming that you can’t bear to part with it?”

“I have a starship buried under the ice of Antarctica. It’s been there for a hundred thousand years. There are some sentient mice in a box in Peru. I have responsibilities.”

“So you have a ship already,” she said.

“One that splits into twenty pieces when it leaps through the fold.”

“That’s something to think about,” said Deborah.

“You can’t tell anyone about us, you know.”

Deborah laughed aloud. “Now you think of that? You don’t swear me to secrecy, you just blurt it all out, you give me a demonstration, and now you warn me not to tell? Rigg Noxon, I’m already strange. I don’t have to add crazy to the list. I can’t tell this to anybody.”

“I know,” said Noxon, feeling foolish. “I just . . . I’m not completely used to this either, you know. The things I can do. And Father taught me—the expendable Ramex taught me never to tell, and that’s still nagging at the back of my mind.”

“What I’m trying to figure out is why my father is taking so long to give Ram Odin an answer. Of course he’ll say yes.”

“There’s no ‘of course’ about it,” said Noxon. “Ram might be recognized. I’m kind of unforgettable. People might wonder, they might investigate.”