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couldn’t eat properly and they wouldn’t take the food we offered. So the people talked and talked about what to do—it’s wicked to let guests go hungry. While we were talking, the djanada began to eat the children. Our elders said, They’re travelers, they’re guests—we have to feed them, but we’ll make rules. You must not eat just anyone, we told the djanada. You must eat only the old people who are no good anymore. That’s how we tamed the djanada. Now all the good children are safe and only old, tired, sick people are taken away."
    Sofia twisted around to look up at him. "Someone thinks: this is a pretty story for children, so they will sleep well and not make fiernos when the cullers come." He lifted his chin and began again to comb out her hair. "Sipaj, Kanchay, someone is small, but not a child who must be shielded from truth. The djanada kill the very old and the sick and the imperfect. Do they also kill the ones who make trouble?" she demanded. "Sipaj, Kanchay, why do you let them? What gives them the right?"
    His hands stilled momentarily as he said with prosaic acceptance, "If we refuse to go with the cullers when it’s time, others must take our places." Before she could reply, he reached down to stroke her belly as he would have his own wife’s. "Sipaj, Fia, surely this baby is ripe by now!"
    The subject was officially changed. "No," she said, "not yet. Perhaps sixty nights more."
    "So long! Someone thinks you will pop like a datinsa pod."
    "Sipaj, Kanchay," she said, with a nervous laugh, "maybe so."
    Fear and hope, fear and hope, fear and hope, circling endlessly. Why am I so afraid? I am Mendes, she thought. Nothing is beyond me.
    But she had also been—however briefly—joyously Quinn: happy for a single summer of nights and days, the unlikely wife of an absurdly tall and comically homely and wondrously loving Irish Catholic astronomer. And now, Jimmy was dead, killed by the djanada—
    Feeling Kanchay’s fingers working through her hair once more, she leaned back against him and looked across the clearing to the others of his kind: talking, cooking, laughing, tending babies. It could be worse, she thought then, remembering Jimmy’s habitual good-natured response to crisis, and gasping at his baby’s kick. I am Sofia Mendes Quinn, and things could be worse.

3
Naples
September 2060
    SOMETIMES IF HE KEPT STILL, PEOPLE WOULD GO AWAY.
    A lay chauffeur had lived here once. The room over the garage was only a few hundred meters from the retreat house, but that was distance enough most of the time, and Emilio Sandoz claimed it for his own with a fierce possessiveness that surprised him. He had added very little to the apartment—photonics, sound equipment, a desk—but it was his. Exposed rafters and plain white walls. Two chairs, a table, a narrow bed; a little kitchen; a shower stall and toilet behind a folding screen.
    He accepted that there were things he could not control. The nightmares. The devastating spells of neuralgia, the damaged nerves of his hands sending strobelike bolts of pain up his arms. He’d stopped fighting the crying jags that came without warning; Ed Behr was right, it only made the headaches worse. Here, alone, he could try to roll with the punches— absorb the blows as they came, rest when things eased up. If everyone would just leave him alone—let him handle things at his own pace on his own terms—he’d be all right.
    Eyes closed, hunched and rocking over his hands, he waited, straining to hear footsteps retreat from his door. The knocking came again. "Emilio!" It was the Father General’s voice and there was a smile in it. "We have an unexpected visitor. Someone has come to meet you."
    "Oh, Christ," Sandoz whispered, getting to his feet and tucking his hands under his armpits. He went down the creaking stairs to the side door below and stopped to gather himself, pulling in a ragged breath and letting it out slowly. With a short, sharp movement of his elbow, he