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place she wanted to show me. I said sure, and I went with her. We went out into the hall. The shouting from the examination room was more distant. We walked for a ways through some tubes and so on. People floated by automatically on gurneys.
    She walked in front of me. Her slippers went
fitik, fitik, sliss, fitik
on the floors. They were soft sounds, like the sounds mouths make when they open and close. I watched her from behind. When we stopped to wait for an uptube, she lifted her ankle so her heel came out of the slipper, and with her toes she slid it back and forth on the tiles without thinking about it. She massaged the floor. When the uptube was free, she settled her foot back in, and walked,
fitik, fitik, sliss, fitik,
right on in.
    She took me up to a huge window. We stood in front of it. Outside the window, there had been a garden, like, I guess you could call it a courtyard or terrarium? But a long time ago the glass ceiling over the terrarium had cracked, and so everything was dead, and there was moon dust all over everything out there. Everything was gray.
    Also, something was leaking air and heat out in the garden, lots of waste air, and the air was rocketing off into space through the hole, so all of the dead vines in the garden were standing straight up, slapping back and forth, pulled toward the crack in the ceiling where we could see the stars.
    “Whoa,” I said.
    “Isn’t it beautiful?”
    “It’s like . . . ,” I said. “It’s like a squid in love with the sky.”
    She was only looking at me, which was nice. I hadn’t felt anything like that for a long time.
    She rubbed my head, and she went, “You’re the only one of them that uses metaphor.”
    She was staring at me, and I was staring at her, and I moved toward her, and we kissed. The vines beat against each other out in the gray, dead garden, they were all writhing against the spine of the Milky Way on its edge, and for the first time, I felt her spine, too, each knuckle of it, with my fingers, while the air leaked and the plants whacked each other near the silent stars.

We were watching Marty invent a game called Struggle of the Dying Warrior. It involved him being tied with all of his limbs, like his arms and his legs, onto the frame of his bed with the rubber tubing. Then he tried to get up and walk. He was not getting very far.
    Violet and I were sitting on a bunk, swinging our legs in rhythm. We were talking about our families. I told her that I had a little brother. She said I hadn’t mentioned him. I said he was a lot younger and a real pain.
    Violet asked me about my mom and dad. I told her that my dad did some kind of banking thing, and my mom was in design. I didn’t understand what my dad did exactly. Whatever it was, he was off doing it on the moon until tomorrow, when they were going to tell us about our feeds.
    When I asked her what her dad did, she said, “He’s a college professor. He teaches the dead languages.”
    “People study that?”
    She shrugged. “I guess.”
    “Okay. So what are the dead languages?”
    “They’re languages that were once important but that nobody uses anymore. They haven’t been used for a long time, except by historians.”
    “Like what languages?”
    “You know, FORTRAN. BASIC. ”
    “What does one sound like?”
    She slid off the bunk, and went to get her bag. She opened it and pulled out something, which was a pen. She also had paper.
    I looked at her funny. “You write?” I said. “With a pen?”
    “Sure,” she said, a little embarrassed. She wrote something down. She put the pad of paper on my lap.
    She asked me, “Do you know how to read?”
    I nodded. “I can read. A little. I kind of protested it in School™. On the grounds that the silent ‘E’ is stupid.”
    “This is the language called BASIC ,” she said.
    On the paper, it said:
    002110 Goto 013500
    013500 Peek 16388, 236
    013510 Poke 16389, 236
    She read it to me. I could tell the numbers fine.
    “So what does