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Liar.
    â€œThat’s so sad,” she says.
    â€œWhat about you?” I ask. “Before you were an ice ghoul . . . ?”
    â€œOh yes! I grew up in a troupe, I had lots of brothers and sisters and parents. We were primate fundamentalists, you know? It’s kind of embarrassing. But I still hear from some of the cousins now and then—we exchange insights once in a while.” She smiles wistfully. “When I was a ghoul, it was one of the few things that reminded me I had an alien side.”
    â€œBut did you, when you were a ghoul, did you have . . . ?”
    Her face freezes over: “No, I didn’t.” I look away, embarrassed for her. Why did I imagine I was the only liar at the table?
    â€œAbout that food idea,” I say, hastily changing the subject, “I’m still trying out some of the eateries around here. I mean, getting to know what’s good and figuring out who hangs out where. I was thinking about going for a meal and maybe seeing if a few acquaintances are around afterward, Linn and Vhora. Do you know them? They’re in rehab, too, only they’ve been out a bit longer than us. Linn’s doing craft therapy, ad hoc environmental patching, while Vhora’s learning to play the musette.”
    â€œDid you have anywhere in particular in mind to go and eat?” She unfreezes fast once we’re off the sensitive subject.
    â€œI was thinking a pavement cafe in the Green Maze that hangs off the back of the Reich Wing looked like a possibility. It’s run by a couple of human cooks who design historically inauthentic Indonesian tapas in public. It’s strictly recreational, a performance thing: They don’t actually expect you to eat their prototypes—not unless you want to.” I raise a finger. “If that doesn’t interest you, there’s a fusion shed, also in the Green Maze, that I cached yesterday. They do a decent pan-fried calzone, only they call it something like a dizer or dozer. And there’s always sushi.”
    Kay nods thoughtfully. “Plausible,” she agrees. Then she smiles. “I like the sound of your tapas. Shall we go and see how much we can eat? Then let’s meet these friends of yours.”
    They’re not friends so much as nodding acquaintances, but I don’t tell her that. Instead, I pay up with a wave at the billpoint, and we head for the back door, out onto the beautiful silvery beach that the rehab club backs on to, then over to a rustic-looking door that conceals the gate to the green maze. Along the way, Kay pulls a pair of batik harem pants and a formally cut black-lace jacket out of her waist pouch, which is an artfully concealed gate opening on a personal storage space. Both of us are barefoot, for although there is a breeze and bright sunlight on our skin, we are fundamentally as deep indoors as it is possible for humans to get, cocooned in a network of carefully insulated habitats floating at intervals of light kiloseconds throughout a broad reach of the big black.
    The Green Maze is one of those rectilinear manifolds that was all the fashion about four gigasecs ago, right after the postwar fragmentation bottomed out. The framework consists of green corridors, all straight, all intersecting at ninety-degree angles and held together by a bewildering number of T-gates. Actually, it’s a sparse network, so you can go through a doorway on one side of the maze and find yourself on the far side, or several levels up, or even two twists, a hop, and a jump behind the back of your own head. Lots of apartment suites hang off it, including the back entrance to my own, along with an even more startling range of cubist-themed public spaces, entertainment nooks, eateries, resteries, entertainment venues, and a few real formal hedge mazes built in a style several tens of teraseconds older.
    Needless to say, nobody knows their way around the Green Maze by memory or dead