I love the balcony. We can sit and stare out over the lake, our private sea. Intellectually, I know that the horizon is only fifty kilometers away. It feels more distant than the stars and nebulae that wheeled beneath my feet in Uchūden.

Charlee was a little nervous about the wide-open spaces. She took one look over the balcony and ran back into the bedroom, where I found her with a pillow over her head, laughing and crying. She agreed it was silly and came back out, but for an hour I had to hold on to her while she stared and sweated and giggled.

I left the clarinet in orbit, for the time being, but did bring down Sam’s harp. I’ve been experimenting with bluesy tunings and settled on an A minor that seems to use the instrument’s range best. You have to pluck rather than strum, since six pairs of strings are adjacent half tones. I remember Mercy Flying Dove and, lacking electronics, tune with heart and head, keeping the wolves away.

When the harpsichord comes down, there will be a kind of closure. It was built in London by Burkat Shudi in A.D. 1728. I think it will be the oldest human artifact to come from Earth (we do have a dinosaur bone).

I’ve wondered about that name. He was Swiss, and that’s all we know, but Burkat Shudi doesn’t sound European. It sounds Moslem. I picture him as a dark old man with long flowing white hair, working with endless patience on these woods brought from oriental forests on the backs of slaves, on sailing ships, finally on a creaking horse-drawn wagon down a muddy London street. To tell him that his handiwork would wind up here would be more fantastic than saying it would wind up in the Garden of Irem, less believable to him. I don’t think they knew, in 1728, how far away the stars actually are.

(I asked Prime and got a HOLD FOR OPEN DATA CHANNEL message—that’s a first.) No. Prime says 1837.

Chul’ Hermosa survived the thaw, and will be coming down with the harpsichord. He loves to teach; that will be a kind of closure, too.

We’re up on stilts both for food protection and to keep pests away. The crawlies, which is what they call these seven-legged ones the size of your little fingernail, get everywhere and they bite, leaving an itchy red knot that lasts half a day. They’re inquisitive and totally unafraid of humans, so far, but they do have an aversion to water. So each of our four supporting poles is equipped with a metal collar that holds several centimeters of water, and three children share the job of making sure they don’t go dry. Then so long as we remember not to leave the ladder down, we won’t have the things sneaking into bed with us.