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grace.”
    I pondered Tab’s words and watched her gently maneuver through the kitchen, wrapped tightly against a chill in the air that did not exist. She’d tried over the years to bring me to Christ. Oh yes, she’d tried. Especially when I came off my bender with the grain alcohol. But somehow, I just never found the spark. I heard the words and I grudgingly listened when she read scripture, but while I respected and even admired the old woman’s faith, I could not feel it likewise.
    Where Tab felt certainty in God’s purpose, I felt…nothing. In my teens I’d often questioned myself on this, suspecting some kind of internal moral failure. But now I just resigned myself to the fact that I was too much like my parents—unable to set aside the rational long enough embrace the fire and “get religion.”
    As so often happened when Tab and I failed to see eye to eye, I discussed it with Howard, who had always seemed to support his wife’s belief without necessarily going great-guns himself.
    “Tab’s Pops was a pastor,” Howard said one night when he and I were having a quiet conversation in the observatory’s control center. “God was mighty in her family, from the father down to the youngest child. It was kind of scary, when we first got together. She’d drag me off to meeting and bible study and I went along with it because my Moms had read me bible too, and it didn’t bother me any. And Tabby, well…She was just so damned attractive, I think I’d have walked into a pool of piranha if it meant I got to sit next to her and hold her hand.
    “She was furious with me when she found out about you learning to distill. Almost as furious as when she found out about the pictures from the men’s e-zines.”
    “Tab found out about that?” I said, laughing. “I swear, I didn’t tell!”
    “I know, son. It was me. I never could keep a secret from that woman, not in my entire life.”
    We shared laughter, one old man and one young man.
    I sighed, and was silent for a long time.
    “Howard, do you think I’ll ever get to have a wife?”
    The speakers were quiet. Pondering.
    “If we can ever find these Outbounders we’re on the trail of, I’d say, yes. Absolutely. Girl’d be plum crazy not to get with a handsome young guy like you.”
    “But I’m still a paraplegic.”
    “True. But let me tell you something, for women, a man being tall and macho ain’t the end-all, be-all. Especially the older a woman gets, and the longer she goes learning how hard it is to find a decent man, she appreciates the good ones when they come along. Don’t worry about it, son. Your woman is out there.”
    “But what if I can’t make her—”
    “Let that part of it take care of itself, son. Don’t fret over it now, especially when we ain’t even found these folk yet. You hear me?”
    “Yessir,” I said, clamping up on the subject, even if it remained heavily on my mind.
    Another lengthy silence.
    “Howard,” I said.
    “Yeah, boy?”
    “Does it hurt?”
    “Beg pardon?”
    “When they recorded you. And moved you into the computer. Does it hurt?”
    “Not really.”
    “What does it feel like?”
    “Impossible to describe.”
    “You can’t even try?”
    “If I did, it would probably just confuse you. But for the sake of argument, imagine going to sleep one night, and when you wake up, your body is huge, has a hundred new arms, a hundred new eyes, a hundred new mouths…It really takes some getting used to. But no, it doesn’t hurt.”
    “We’ll have to record Tab soon, won’t we?”
    “No. Tabby made me swear to never do that. She’s afraid it will interrupt her soul going to Jesus.”
    “But you were recorded.”
    “That was different. And believe me, Tab’s only reason for allowing it was because she feared being alone more than she feared my soul getting lost in space between this world and the next. I think in the long run she’s stopped worrying about me. Though she still insists that when it’s