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do. I always do,” she’d answered, but of course the insult was lost on her mother.

    Her father had comforted her. He had called her Violet.

    Once she declared herself as a Jane her vague interest in art became a true avocation. Let others delve deeply into the cold minds of machines, letothers unravel the secrets of the double helix; she would learn the timeless truths to be found in art. It was a perfectly useless thing to learn, according to her mother. It would never earn her a dime, never get her a place in a competitive university. It would never make her rich.

    And yet, now, as Miss Violet Blake gazed out over the landscape below the shuttle, she alone understood what it represented.

    The young man named Mo’Steel was descending, hand over hand, one powerful leg wrapped around the thin cable. He landed on the back wall of the shuttle’s cargo bay. Then, still holding the wire, he tightrope-walked out along the declining edge of the tail and finally hopped to the ground.

    He stood almost directly on the impossible dividing line between the gray canyon and the brilliant meadow.

    The canyon was unmistakable to Violet. It was an Ansel Adams. A photograph, not a painting.

    The meadow, with the frenetic river cutting through it, was more difficult. Not a Cézanne, the colors were too bold. Van Gogh? Perhaps. Monet? Yes, possibly. But, if she’d had to pick one answer on a multiple-choice test she’d have said Bonnard. Pierre Bonnard.

    Mo’Steel was kicking his way through impossible plants that seemed to have been assembled out of swatches of lavender and emerald, apricot and gold.

    “Careful, Miss Blake, don’t lean out too far,” Jobs said. He was at her elbow.

    Violet drew back. “I suppose you’re right.” She glanced over her shoulder. She kept expecting her mother to come striding up, ready to take charge and begin rapping out orders. But Wylson Lefkowitz-Blake was only in the earliest stages of revival. Two others had assumed complete consciousness, their awakening perhaps accelerated by the horrific event that had resulted in the doctor’s death. In any case, all three had been in berths close to that tragedy.

    Mo’Steel walked a little distance out into the colorful meadow. He looked up and waved, his face a broad, slightly deranged grin. “Come on down. It is deeply weird down here.”

    The girl 2Face yelled down, “Okay, Mo, stay close, okay?” Then, in an aside to Jobs and Errol, said, “Weird doesn’t begin to describe it. One or the other, maybe, but two totally different environments divided so sharply?”

    It occurred to Violet that there was irony here. 2Face, a girl whose own face encompassed twoentirely opposed concepts, the lovely and the hideous, found this bifurcation disturbing.

    “It has to be artificial,” Errol said, not for the first time. “You’d almost think it was man-made.”

    “If I may . . .” Violet Blake began.

    Olga Gonzalez came up the stairs and an-nounced, “We found some water!”

    She carried a translucent plastic gallon jug, three-quarters full. “We were able to bleed it off the hibernation machinery.” She was in one of her more manic moods. Violet had seen these moods turn to despair within a moment’s time.

    “You think it’s safe to drink?” 2Face asked.

    Olga shrugged. “We have the equipment from the storage lockers. The chemical testing strips are all long gone, of course. But the microscope still works and at least I don’t see any obvious microorganisms. It’s as clean as distilled water. Which is not to say there aren’t other contaminants. I gave it a taste. No alkali taste. Nothing obvious. I won’t bore you with a list of colorless, tasteless, odorless pathogens that might be present in fatal concentrations.”

    2Face took the bottle and raised it to her lips. She had to use a finger to keep the liquid from dribbling out the disfigured side of her mouth.

    She handed the jug to Errol. The water made its