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changed attitude, like ailerons, so that segments of it bristled or lay smooth, in recognizable patterns. Meanwhile, the sensors, through remote pickups, fed blooms of data into a digital console, where my sister sat dangling her short legs from an ergonomic stool. In the artificial twilight, Evie’s white lab coat was an eerie noncolor that reached behind my eyes. Wielding an automatic pipette, she squirted ingredients through a filtering lid into a large glass retort filled with nutrient slurry.
    â€œEvie,” I declared, “I have an apology to make, and an explanation.”
    â€œOh?” said Evie. “Shoot.” While I had my say (sounding much like an inflight announcement of unavoidable delays) she completed her mixture, discarded the filter, screwed the lid tighter on the retort, and set it on a magnetic stirrer. The slurry began to form a sluggish vortex, and the magnet at the retort’s bottom, unseen, made repetitive whacking sounds. After I’d finished talking, Evie turned to me with a bright smile of affection.
    â€œNo problem, I’m glad you told me all this. You’re sweet.”
    For a few moments, I watched my sister’s precisemovements as she checked the output of dials and LED displays. Then I asked, “What are you going to do with the information I just gave you?” (The question had a distinct soap-opera tone.)
    â€œNothing,” Evie said.
    My thoughts were, to put it mildly, in disarray. I should have been relieved that the first impulse of Evie, and through her, science, was not to spring with full force upon the Keen-Ears . . . Yet, riffling mentally through the images that had driven me to lie—slain Keen-Ears roped to hunters’ trucks, caged Keen-Ears in military labs, their bees scattered in dying colonies—I felt, instead of relief, shock; and as it passed, hopelessness. Ironically enough, my life was premised on the belief that science would someday take over the study of invisible animals. I’d always assumed that this transition would happen, in a vague green future. It had to happen, that was the premise. Someday, somehow, nations would be wiser, and invisible animals would be studied. But if Evie thought nothing of my information— nothing —where did that leave my work and the meaning of my life?
    â€œBut,” I said, in a tone so strange that my sister stopped her activities and drew her sandy brows together.
    â€œBut what.” Evie’s emotions were simple, like four colored stripes: warmth, self-regard, impatience, and curiosity. Right now I was seeing the middle two in her eyes, like half a plaid.
    â€œI gave you the key to researching invisible animals,” Isaid. “It doesn’t seem to have registered. Do you think I’m telling fairy tales?”
    â€œOh, come on .” One stripe, impatience, glinting. “I don’t deserve this. When did I call ever them ‘fairy tales’? When did I ever not make time to talk with you and give you information?”
    I rubbed my face, in a sad muddle. Evie was right—whether from our family tradition of tolerance toward the invisible-beast spotter, or sisterly affection, or both, she had always given me her best professional guesses about invisible beasts. She spoke sincerely, I knew, because in her coat pocket’s corner, beside a pair of latex gloves, hung four Truth Bats who must have felt exactly like balls of lint. I apologized again, this time for having doubted her open-mindedness, and my sister—the gold stripe of warmth flashing from her hazel eyes—told me to forget it, shaking her bangs (impatiently) as I made to rise.
    â€œSit down, sit! I never see you, Soph. You could be invisible yourself.” I obeyed. My sister tore the wrapper from a sterile nozzle, twisted it into the retort’s lid, popped the nozzle into the pump that supplied the Worm, and began pouring in nutrient slurry. Her students had