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Her close relationships were few, and perhaps no longer so close. She had everything she needed; her life was good. Her surviving child was out there somewhere, living her life in her own manner, not cratering to speak of. Occasionally in touch. Not the issue. Swan was closer to other people, and that was all right. Her young friend Kiran had stayed on Venus, had insisted on it, and was back in the thick of things there and sending her reports on a regular basis. It felt like more of a relationship than many she had, and there were more like that out there to come, no doubt; people were always grabbing her by the arm and pulling her into their
lives, it seemed. Her farm crew was tight. She liked her work; she liked her play; she liked her art, the play that was work. So it was something else. Really the question became quite philosophical; how to be? What to care about? And how to become a little less solitary? Because now, with Alex gone, though she talked to many people, in the end she was missing someone to tell things to in the way she had always told Alex.

Oh I miss you Hettie Moore

But there’s no one here left to tell—

The world has gone black before my eyes.

In the farm by herself she sang the old ballad, and wondered what would make things right. Maybe nothing. There was a pruning of life by death. Parts died before the whole. When the people you loved died, part of you died. Some people by the time they went were like certain junipers she had seen, one live strip on a dead trunk. There was no way to counter that.

No happiness but in virtue. No, that wasn’t true. Each part of the triune brain had its own happiness. Lizard in the sun, mammal on the hunt, human doing something good. What’s good is what’s good for the land. So when you worked as if on the hunt, in light and warmth, at making a landscape—some place for people to live in for ages to come—then you were triunely happy. Surely that should be enough.

But then you wanted to share it. Just so there would be someone to be pleased together with. Alex had been pleased with her.

She had seen the traveling isolatoes, solitary old spacers who made their own way in the world, who were not partnered in any fashion with other people. That was her crowd; she had been one of them herself for more than half her life. Had they all been on the hunt? She recalled something she had heard people say: I want
to meet somebody. Meet; they meant “mate.” I want to mate somebody. “Meet” was the future subjunctive of “mate,” in the mood of desire. And when you looked around, you saw it: pair-bonding kept coming back. It was a future conditional tense, a subjunctive verb: to mate somebody, and then meet them. It was an atavistic thing, as if they were swans, or some other creature with a genetic urge to pair off. “Swan is not a swan,” she told her baffled coworkers in the park. But how did she know?

“I want to meet somebody,” she said to Mqaret experimentally.

Mqaret laughed at her. “You like this guy! This person Wahram from Saturn. So maybe what you mean is ‘I’ve met somebody.’ ”

Swan stared at Mqaret. It still hadn’t fully sunk in to her that it was possible to be loved. Or even to love. “But I met him a long time ago. I’ve known him for years now!”

“Even better,” Mqaret said. “You know him. In fact you had to spend a lot of time with him. What happened in that utilidor? Didn’t something happen?”

“We whistled, mostly,” she said. “But yes. Something happened.”

“Maybe that’s what a marriage is,” Mqaret said. “Whistling together. Some kind of performance. I mean, not just a conversation, but a performance.”

“Marriage,” Swan repeated, marveling at the word. To her it was a concept from the Middle Ages, from old Earth—an idea with a strong whiff of patriarchy and property. Not meant for space, not meant for longevity. One moved through one’s life in epochs, each a stage in one’s history, lasting some few or several years, and then circumstances changed and you were in a new life, with new associates. That could not be altered, not if you were out there riding the great merry-go-round; and so to deform one’s life in the attempt to make a relation last longer than its natural term was to risk wrecking its end, such that it splintered back along its whole length and left a bitter wound and a sense
that it had all been a lie, where really there should only be a passing on, in one of the little death-and-transfigurations of one’s epochs. That’s just the way it was.

At least so it seemed to her, and to many others she knew. It was the current structure of feeling in her culture and time. Spacers were free humans, free at last and human at last. So they all felt, and encouraged each other to feel, and she had always believed it, always agreed it was right. But structures of feeling were cultural, historical; they changed over time like people did; the structures themselves went through their own reincarnations. So if cultures changed over time, and an individual lived on through a change in that culture, then… didn’t the individual change too? Could they? Could she?

But wasn’t marriage a promise somehow not to change?

She slogged around in the wetlands and kept on thinking about it. One day a frog the same color as the rocks hopped away from her accidental hand, then sat there staring up at her, alert and curious, calm but ready to leap again. “Sorry,” she said. “I didn’t see you.” And yet now that she had, it sat there glossier than any rock, alive and breathing.

S
he went out on a walkabout. Headed to the north of Terminator’s latitude, into the Tricrena Albedo. Out into the garbled chiaroscuro of the terminator, where sidelong rays of sunlight raked suddenly up the tilting land, blazing so violently that the still-shadowed land appeared blacker than matter. Clashing shards of black and white—her eye could scarcely put the landscape back together again. Just the way she liked it, sometimes. Her schizophrenic life space.

She fell into sunwalker mode, oriented herself by the memorized maps inside her. She knew as she trudged blindly westward that she would soon come over the rise north of Mahler, pass some baked ballardian abandoned space plane runways, then find
herself at the top of an escarpment, a little bulging crack in the land, very old, the land above overlooking a two-hundred-meter drop to the plains below. Luckily the escarpment sported a system of tilted ledges that served as a neat staircase down. She had been here before. These Ebersbacher Ledges were often trod by sunwalkers using this route, and had been swept clear of dust and rubble many years before. So it was a broken switchbacking path of clean stone tilts that led her down to the plain beyond. On Mercury the horizon was just the right distance away, she felt; not something you could reach out and touch, but something you could walk to and investigate.

Out there now was a little group of sunwalkers, trudging patiently west. Little silver figures reminiscent of Inspector Genette, disappearing over the horizon. They would walk for a spell and then lie down in carts or travois to sleep while being pulled along by the others. Walking together, pulling sleeping people along—how beautiful the sense of trust and care, the playful handing over of your life to strangers—part of being Mercurial. For a long time it had been all she had needed in the way of company. That and her city.

She got to the bottom of the ledges and came onto the flat rubble plain of Tricrena Albedo. Here the trail disappeared, because any way was equally good. Here she could run into the night, gain ground on the dawn, stand on Yes Tor and watch the highest points of ground light like candles, then burn downward from their brilliant tips. To walk in the dawn perpetually, ah, so devoutly to be wished! Who could stand high noon or the wane of day? Leave the dawn behind, run back into the night. Forestall the day—who knew what it would bring? She had no plan, no idea.

For a long time she ran and didn’t think much beyond the rock under her, the lay of the land. Nothing more needed. They could tear the guts out of Mercury, take out every valuable mineral in it, and the surface would not look one whit different. It was already
a clinker of a world. The battered face of an old friend. Rock scattered everywhere, rubble, kipple, ejecta. The blanket of dust. Gold in them thar hills. But friends talk. I want to be able to talk to someone and have it mean something to me. I want to hear things that interest me, that surprise me, no matter how impossible I am to surprise. Except in truth I am so easily surprised. How could it be that someone was not there to surprise someone so easily surprised.

The saturnine person. What if there was a person you could depend on, someone who was steady, reliable, predictable, resolute; decisive after due thought; generous; kind. Phlegmatic, and yet prone to little gusts of enthusiasm, usually aesthetic pleasures of one sort or other. Happy in danger, a little drunk in danger. Someone capable of loving a landscape. Someone who liked to watch animals and chase them for a look. Someone who looked at her as if figuring her out was an interesting project and not just a problem to be solved, or part of the backdrop in some other more important drama. And looked at everyone else met with that same regard. Often with a little smile that seemed to express pleasure in the company shared. A reserved but friendly manner. If all our acquaintances were characterized in language only, we would look like collectors of contradictions, paradoxes, oxymorons. For every kind of this there was a balance of that. People cut both ways. In someone like him a little cheery laugh began to seem like boisterousness.

She came to one of her most famous goldsworthies, from a time when she had been experimenting with setting slugs of lead and other metals that would melt in the heat of the day on slopes she had cut with channels, so that over the course of a brightside crossing, the slugs of lead or copper or tin would melt into the channels and form pictures or letters, always stretched such that they looked upright to observers on a viewing platform atop a nearby cliff. For this sculpture north of Mahler she had channeled
two sets of letters carefully overlapping and intersecting each other, with gates for one word or other equally matched in their weakness. As the metal pigs melted in the sun they would run against the gates until one gate or other would fail, thus draining the reservoir of its molten contents. So, depending on what happened in the gates, the resulting letters of this installation would have spelled either “LIVE” or “DIE.” It was the last of a series of antinomies she had put to the landscape and the sun in those years, including all the seven virtues and vices overlapped, wrestling with each other like Jacob with God. So far the verdict was out; the process looked random. But in this particular instance both gates had broken at once, resulting in a flow insufficient to fill all the channels; some had filled preferentially over others, and the result, made of a bright swirl of silver and copper, had been the word “LIE.”

Now she stood looking at it from the viewing platform. Even at the time it had struck her as apt; and now it was like a command. One could still see the empty troughs of the two overlaid words, the empty
D
and
V
; but certainly the word “LIE,” glowing metallically in the dark land, dominated. Very apt indeed. People said she must have arranged it that way on purpose, but she hadn’t; the dams had been equal, their simultaneous break an act of their own, the letters filled a matter of the first surge, a clinamen. But it told the truth in some sense. They didn’t live or die—they did both—and so lied. You lie and then you lie. So get on with it.

After a while she turned south, to get over to the nearest platform before the city came gliding over the horizon. When she got over the low rim of the ancient crater Kenk
, she would be able to see Terminator’s tracks, gleaming faintly in the valley below.

F
rom the top of Kenk
, around to its southern side, she saw the tracks, and also a lone figure, toiling up the incline toward her.
Round, tall; and she recognized the walk the moment she saw it, oh she knew that walk all right!

She clicked on the common band: “Wahram?”

“ ’Tis I, come hunting for you.”

“You found me.”