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their living room by working together as equals. The men have no time for warfare. They sometimes fight duels, but hardly ever to the death. Many couples live as husband and wife and think of earthmen as lazy lecherous belligerent primitives. I agreed with them but I couldnae stand the enclosed spaces they lived in. Anyway, for me the satellites were just stepping-stones to the universe where immortals are making new worlds — and I hated that universe most of all. I could hardly face the deserts of dead rock and frozen stoor between the domed craters. The stars are fearsome out there, white, steady, and intense. Look at any two of them and if, like me, you’re cursed with good sight, you soon see a hundred between. Look hard at any two of those and the same thing happens no matter how close they seem. I lost all sense of darkness between them. It was not the vast darkness but the endless lights, the millions of starlights that made me feel less than a grain of stoor myself — I felt like zero. I trudged across one of thesedeserts with Groombridge who was testing my fitness for immortality. He said immortality would madden me unless I had a good reason for it and the only good reason was in the grains of dirt under our boots, the millions of stars over our helmets. He said the silence of these spaces did not appal minds in the network conspiring to bring them to life, but generations of mortals would die and be forgotten before Mars, Venus and the moons of Jupiter and Saturn had the ground and air to support freely evolving plants and intelligences. This was why people who chose immortality must prepare to live almost completely in the future. The main difference between neo-sapience and proto-sapience (that is what immortals call themselves and us) is, that the longer neo-sapiences live the more they know of their future, the longer we live the more we know of our past. Groombridge said mortals cling harder to the past as they age, so our lives have a tragic sweetness neo-sapience lacks, a painful sweetness got from memories of lost childhood, lost love, lost friends, lost opportunities, lost beauty et cetera — lost life , in other words. He said, ‘Our rejuvenation treatment still retains an embarrassing wealth of early memories but in two or three centuries we’ll overcome that. Ifyou become immortal, Mr. Dryhope, by your five thousandth year the first fifty will have been erased by more recent, more urgent, more useful experiences, most of them gained through a virtual keyboard and scanner or their future equivalent. By your five thousandth year it is possible — and by your five millionth inevitable — that you will work in another galaxy in a body whose form we cannot now predict. By then, of course, the planet of your origin, like a myriad other worlds you’ve helped reshape, will have ceased to be even a cipher in your calculations. Perhaps I repel you, Mr. Dryhope?’ Yes, he scunnered me like a creature I once saw in an aquarium. It was harmless but I couldnae watch it because it breathed, ate and ejaculated through holes which, to my mind, were in the wrong places. From feeling zero he had made me feel minus, an absence with an ache inside. I had to return to things as bonny and temporary as you and those.”
    He pointed to the green hilltop and the bird on the branch, then began biting his nails. She stopped that by putting down the plate and kissing him.
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    Later she washed, dried and dressed him in clean garments saying, “Don’t play the helpless wean too much with Annie, she’s had none ofher own. Your hands will soon heal if you work the fingers.”
    He said, “Nan, is there a kind, experienced body in Craig Douglas who would visit my brother Joe who’s short of an arm and leg? Three of his other limbs are in working order — four if you count the tongue.”
    Nan said she would consider this.
    â€œAnd Nan,” he muttered,